Life and Times

I did it. I opened and made a box of sugar cookies. 2 dozen. In theory enough for all of the Americans here to get a couple of cookies. Well, there _were_ 2 dozen….

Was at the grocery store today, downtown, with the pair from Wyoming. Instead of big shelves of Kilimanjaro water (Coke’s local springwater) there was a huge display of Dasani. Now, don’t get me wrong, in the US if forced to drink bottled water I prefer Dasani, as a rule, but that just does seem a bit wrong here.

Not 100% sure how they knew I was here, or where to find me, but… well, as I was snoozing (I’m a bit sick) at about 11:45pm today some women from the nearby public school wandered by and Kisali woke me up. Turns out they had some computer problems.

Anyway, it’s a kilometer or so away and I headed there. The machines are antiquated, underpowered, and running XP.

First problem was a machine that windows was turning the display off on boot. F8 and VGA mode then redoing the graphics settings fixed it.

Second machine the mouse didn’t work… Well, that’s odd, even directly manipulating the rollers (yes, these are ball mice, remember those?) did nothing. Ah, there it is, the PS/2 cable is sideways and won’t go in easily. Bad Thing(tm). Now the computer won’t boot. Clearly the PS/2 plug had been knocked, did something short out? Someone fetched me a screwdriver (the headmaster was here by now, spoke English, and was quite helpful) and I figured out how the almost toolless case came apart. Everything looked fine visually so I started poking and the cage holding the heatsink and fan to the processor was loose… and came apart in my hands. After disassembly tape and scissors were called for and procured, the cage was reassembled, taped, attached and tensioned to the mainboard, and taped some more. I can’t guarantee it would hold, but the computer was booting now without crashing.

Third problem was that plugging in the wireless equipment caused the circuit breakers to trip. So, short in the line somewhere, I walked the cable and found a number of patches to it (lengthening it) that would never happen in the US, I would hope, but none of them I could get to were the problem. There was a patch of what looked like black electrical tape suspended in the air between the tower and the school, the wire that was holding the cabling up looks to have come undone at the tower and it seemed that the cables were self supported now, I would guess that this pulled the patch apart and caused the short. I had no ladder or other ability to easily get to it so did nothing. They will call the installers (Habari, (http://www.habari.co.tz) I believe)
in Arusha.

All in all, I was fairly happy to help out and have been invited back to see classes on Monday for ideas on a computer lab for the Sluys|Anderson Primary School (ours).

I’m still rather tired of the earthquakes (2 more while I was uploading these) but needed to share some photos.

Was working on selecting some photos to get printed for the Bishop’s office and found some that I thought were funny.

Some days I wonder why people consider me tall. Other days I know why.

Godwin has a tendency to make faces when photographed. So did Marissa.
Was just a good shot of Keith.

  No Comment.

Computers are computers wherever you are.

And kids are kids regardless of age.

Yes, I left a lot of people out. I was grabbing photos I considered funny.

  Medical team from Montana, here now.

Well, so much for my commentary on them being too small to actually matter. That one did some minor damage here. Nothing serious.

Montana Medical team is here working on organizing the clinic. I helped sort and clean glasses.

Which are wreaking havoc upon my equipment. I’m trying to have a nice conversation about photography and shake shake shake shake shake no connection. Guessing the ethernet cables come loose, Porom, on the roof that I am connecting to 200ish meters away, has a bad ring on the plastic apparatus that the cable goes in to. So, with PoE (Power over Ethernet) the power goes down along with the network. Great fun, hard to diagnose from here so just a guess.

That one was the strongest so far, at least twice as strong and twice as long as the 5.4 earlier today. I bet it did some damage in Arusha.

http://neic.usgs.gov/neis/bulletin/neic_evar_l.html

Had another series of earthquakes today. Biggest one was 5.4. I say another because I completely forgot to report to anyone who wasn’t on IM with me at the time that we had a series of earthquakes (biggest 4.5) yesterday.

(EDITED)

Well, apparently the satellite connection isn’t turned on…

Anyway, church today was pretty good, 4 people were baptized and I met an MP (Member of Parliament) of Tanzania. Didn’t have my camera for a good photo, but snapped one on my cell phone of just him. I’ll post it at some point when there’s network access again.
(EDIT)

OK, satellite connection was on, just not getting signal at the house quite as well now. The lens of the cell camera was messed up (I have cleaned it) so the photo really didn’t turn out. Anyway, I wasn’t in it. You’ll have to deal with the official mugshots from the Tanzania Parliament website. Honorable Capt. John Komba and Honorable Jeremiah Sumari. Sumari is the MP for this area, Komba is from Southern Tanzania.

Anyway, I don’t normally meet people that high up in government so it was something of a highlight of my day. I just wish I had been more awake and had had my camera with me.