So, yesterday did a walking tour with my aunt of sorts Elizabeth. Central park, Broadway, Times Square, Statton Island Ferry, Ground Zero, etc. Finished up with dinner with Elizabeth and her son, who heads up horticulture for some of the parks in the area.
Well, hopefully anyway.
Yesterday was a pretty down day health wise, my sleep schedule was way off (mostly fell asleep too early). Today, though, my goal was to wake up at 7:30am and get a good start, it is 7:24am now.
Arrived at JFK last night.
1 bag was lost, but seems someone may have picked it up and then eventually put it back on the track as it came around while I was sitting talking to the KLM person, about 15 minutes after the last bag came down.
Met a woman who works at IBM from Milan on the plane, the two of us navigated the subway for a bit. Nice to have someone else around in an unfamiliar place, even if they have no better idea where you are going. She had a map though.
Visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art today. Quite the experience. I love art, but generally not a huge museum fan. I could spend weeks there though. Going again tomorrow, I think.
Chauncey (my uncle) just popped his head in the door (I’m actually loosely gone to bed at this point, jetlagged still, even after sleeping 12 hours last night) to say that DST ended tonight… so I should try to stay awake a bit longer, I guess.
Started playing Dragon Warrior (the original, so Dragon Warrior I) in Tanzania, I’m at the last guy, probably will work on that a bit, marry the princess, etc.
Nothing overly exciting this trip through Amsterdam, did run into a couple people from another ministry heading off somewhere to do something. They seemed very excited, but I kinda missed what they were doing right at that moment.
Got all of the photos of kids converted to jpeg and transfered to Godwin.
No internet connection at the gate.
Some interesting highlights that I think I’ve failed to post.
Couple of days ago we were really behind on the schedule because of a traffic accident on a bridge heading into Arusha. Word was passed back to everyone waiting that there was enough room for smaller vehicles to pass, so cars and the like started to move into the right (keep in mind this is NOT the US) lane to get around the large trucks at the front of the line.
We also, eventually, got into this line and came up alongside a Leopard Tours landrover. From the vehicle a blonde british woman declared something or other about how we were supposed to be queueing. The brits and their queues… Anyway, ran into her again in the Pasteierre yesterday using the computers. Bit of a small world.
Certainly been a whirlwind trip. Seems like I just got here, I can’t actually remember anything we did, and now it’s time to leave again (plane leans in about 12 hours from when I write this, but no power to post).
So, July 2007, who’s coming with me?
7:30am on the 25th here, been kinda busy and lacking in blog posts. Sorry.
Had lunch yesterday, authentic food. Plate of bar-b-que or so beef with some fried bananas with salt and a chili sauce for dipping. All eaten with fingers and more than the 4 of us could eat. 2 rounds of soft drinks. 1 car (Landrover Defender 110) wash. $10.
New phone service is working fairly well, bit of a delay though that is longer than it should be. Need to work on that.
OK, well, just sorta.
Not free calling, but we’ve lowered the calling costs. Yay and what not.
7:26am
Still no power, very very foggy. Think it’s church today so I’m dressed up a bit, well, dressed to what is normal clothing for me. It feels good.
Water is brown today, probably in some way related to the continued power outage.
Nothing major on the docket yet, get some photos of the buildings for my survey if it clears up.
Day 4 comes to a close, very little was accomplished except rain. Lots of rain. Power was off most of the day.
Standing
around waiting for the power to come back Godwin and I came up with a
new scheme.
Crunching some numbers, we found that we could provide US toll-free
numbers to Tanzania. We are getting this
setup as fast as possible and may demo the system to a hotel before we
leave. After that, all setup would be on the US side.
As I know of no one else doing this, I see it as the potential to be a lucrative business opportunity.
This
also raises another interesting point, Brighton (not sure if I spelled
that right) suggested yesterday that need to move here and start a
business. At the time, I dismissed it out of hand. But, now that
there’s something of a business plan available… I dunno. [note here,
ben will be horrified that I just squashed a gnat against the screen].
Crunched more numbers and found that it would actually be possible.
Patricia came over this evening and the there of us enjoyed an american meal of potato chips, beef jerky, and grape koolaid with ICE!
I hadn’t gotten the koolaid stirred well enough, but it was still good.
Manik Sikka, a guy we met at the Amsterdam airport sent an e-mail saying hi today, included some photos we took of each other. I’ll post them when the power comes back.
I have also put together a multi-page list of needed items, primarily for the networking project next summer, possibly July? Done up some visual representations of what I think it will look like, but want to get hard specs by the end of november, for phones in the IEO office, power in the IEO office, and phones, power, and computers in the elementary school.
The other goal for pretty soon will be distiributing phones to all of IEO members that need to talk to each other on the IEO-US branch of the HyakDev phone system. Going to need to write new CDR code to deal with that going large scale.
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