November « 2011 « Hackers For Charity

Work has been a challenge for the past couple of weeks thanks to the pathetic power and REALLY spotty Internet connectivity, but I wanted to post some of the services we’ve provided here in Uganda for the past couple of weeks:

• Blackberry Unlock for Arise Africa (http://www.ariseafrica.org/index.html)
• Hard drive recovery for Nile River Explorers (http://raftafrica.com)
• iPhone 4 unlock for Nile River Explorers (http://raftafrica.com)
• System backup for Global Outreach International (http://www.globaloutreach.org)
• Software download and installation for Nile River Explorers (http://raftafrica.com)
• Software download and installation for Amani Baby Cottage (http://amanibabycottage.org)
• OS Security Update for Water Missions Uganda (http://www.watermissions.org)
• OS Security Update for The Boones In Africa (www.boonesinafrica.com)
• Email Migration for Global Outreach International (http://www.globaloutreach.org)

The power situation is worse than I’ve ever seen it. The local (only) power company, UMEME is doing what’s called “Load Shedding” which some places call “Rolling Brownouts”. Whatever you call it, it’s really annoying. There’s barely enough time to charge a laptop or a cell phone, then the power’s back off.

I was sitting in the UMEME office, complaining and the attendant walked away to talk to a supervisor. I couldn’t help but take a phew (sic) photos. This was one of my favorites:

It shows a CISCO IP phone and the new Dell PC used by the agent. Nice gear. Someone’s got money. Ironically, though that doesn’t trickle down to the customer. Some paying customers go three weeks without power. Some like us get it in 8-hour bursts every other day. We have enough hydroelectric power in Uganda thanks to the Nile dam(n)s to supply three East African countries, but we sell it to Kenya. So Kenya has great power and we get the dregs. But I’ve gotten into a rant. The point of the picture, and the thing that grabbed me was the UMEME desk calendar. It show a closeup of a technician’s belt with loads of brand-new, unused tools, and a torso shot of (I guess) a technician. The technician is tangled up in the cable and he looks concerned.. worried.. clueless. Either that or he looks like he’s about to get bitten by the cable. Either way it’s funny, to me anyhow. UMEME. It is supposedly the local word for “Power”. We, however, think it’s an acronym. Ugandans Mostly Expect Missing Power.

(on a personal note..)
11/11/11 .. Happy (150%?) Pepero day ..

The power has been out for way too long. I haven’t had a good stretch of power for a week, so I’m getting nothing done. The email is piling up, projects are slipping. I spent some time reading a few books and taking care of some odds and ends. I finished the Jobs biography, and found it to be a great read. I see a lot of Steve Jobs in me. I don’t mean that egotistically .. I’m not a genius or anything. I just mean that between his emotional extremes, laser focus and my too-often problem of not being able to put myself in other people’s shoes. Overall, I have a lot of respect for Steve, but moreso for the other players in the story, specifically Bill Gates for his philanthropic insistances and Woz for his heart, passion and principles. I found Woz’s story to be particularly fascinating and through the brief glimpses I had of him, I find that I relate to his philosophies in a lot of ways.

I’m engergized to DO SOMETHING with my life, make a difference, leave a legacy but I keep getting mired down by so many things. It’s a strange time. In a way, I’m almost happy we’re without power. It’s giving me time to think about what my life’s priorities are ..

I’m not a frequent Facebook, Twitter or G+ user. It seems I’m too much an 80′s kid to be down with anything much more social than blogging and email. Even that seems to be a bit much because I went an entire year not noticing I had comments on my blog. (My apologies to those stuck in the queue. It wasn’t personal.)

When I moved to Uganda and rolled johnny.ihackstuff.com to point to hackersforcharity.org I lost my personal blog. I tried posting personal stuff on here, but after the first year, it didn’t feel right. I felt like I should be posting more business-related stuff, especially since I was funded by donors.

I thought of using my Facebook or Twitter accounts for their intended purposes (personal minutia) but too many people were following them to get HFC updates, since I cross-posted there.

I thought about the idea of using another blog, but then I couldn’t figure out who would care, or where it should go, or what it would really be about and then it struck me that at least right now my life is inexplicably intertwined with HFC, so I might as well just post personal stuff here inline with work stuff. So, until I figure out how to separate my “existances” I guees I’ll just use a disclaimer when I post so people who don’t care can just skip my junk. Something like…

(On a personal note):

A few days off (thanks to no power) and I woke up prepared to get back to work. I should have known better when the power started flickering.

But that wasn’t the real sideliner: turns out one of our new German Shepherd puppies died in the night. This turned into a bunch of frantic calls to the vet, and several back-and-forth runs to the pharmacy for the other puppies who are anemic and losing weight because the mother isn’t producing milk for some reason. It’s been a long morning and now it’s already lunchtime and it appears the Internet won’t be cooperating, so I thought of just eating lunch and calling it a morning.

Then a second puppy went lethargic and a few hours later was forcing his last breaths. It was the saddest thing I’ve seen in a long time. There was nothing we could do. No, it’s 4:30 and I’m just too exhausted to do anything else but eat and chill for a bit. More later.

I’m in Uganda (obviously) and life was getting a bit rough here. I was just about to grumble a bit about how we’ve had like six hours of power in four days and whine a little but about the mosquito bites, lack of sleep, loss of Internet, kilos of ruined food, and my overall drop in productivity when I read the story about Brad. I’m not going to grumble about my circumstances any more because this serves as a stark reminder that when we think we’re up to our neck in crap, it’s guaranteed that someone we know is going through something infinitely tougher. I’m not talking about a stranger in a third world country, I’m talking about someone we know.

Brad is an amazing guy. No matter what I was dealing with, he always has a way of lifting me up. His smile is permanent. His laugh is contagious.

Despite his very serious situation, I refuse to write about him in the past tense because my earnest prayer is that he will pull through. I am praying that all his well-wishers will get many more opportunities to tell him in person that he is a light in the darkness and that his smile is appreciated. He is one in a million.

We’re working on a fundraiser to help with his family’s expenses but more than anything, please pray for Brad and his family.

http://www.social-engineer.org/brad-smith-updates

Day three without power at the house. That means no shower (no water pump) and no hot water (no hot water heater). Splash baths with cold water just leave me feeling greasy and disgusting. Yuck. This also means that there’s no Internet, no electronics charging and no real accomplishments to speak of today. This makes me realize that my life just may be far too digital, even here.

I began to pay the rent for the next six months at the Training Center, and I started going through the end-of-month students report. I’ll post the details here soon.

I really have to try to get these updates on the actual day they happen. But at least I have an excuse for yesterday-we had no power. After a terrific storm with hurricane-strength winds, black clouds and not a drop of rain, the power flickered and then died. Everyone else had power back within ten minutes, but not us. The crappy power is becoming more and more of a nuisance. On the other hand, there’s something kinda nice about candlelight and peace and quiet .. until the mosquitoes come out and the sinus-scorching mosquito coils start burning.

The storm did drop the temperature nicely for a few hours, so that was nice.

Anyhow, today I worked on two hard drive recoveries, one for  LightGivesHeat (which failed because of the click of death) and one for Busoga Trust Bank (which succeeded despite the rampant viruses). I also did some software installs for Ekisa. I worked with Emma (our HFC Uganda web-guy-in-training) to get him rolling with XAMPP and Joomla on his laptop as he prepares to put together a social networking / CMS site together for a local paper-based teen magazine.

I also cleaned my desk, a task that takes an hour every couple of days because I just don’t clean up after each job.

On a personal note, I started two new books, which is just suicidal because I read at the speed of a salted slug.

Full day yesterday. I spent about six hours unsuccessfully trying to restore Internet at The Keep. It will consume more time again today. In the process I nuked our intranet site and our wifi landing page so I had to recreate them.

I worked with the electrician a bit on the inverter at the Keep that I didn’t have the money for, but miraculously someone repaid a loan in the exact amount I needed.

I finally finished burning all the operating system update DVDs for the community, but few people seem to be coming in for them. That’s a bit of a downer considering the pitiful bandwidth available and hearing from so many people that it would be “wonderful” to have updates on DVD.

Slogged through about 100 pending comments that were queued up on the website. I didn’t know they were there. I found about two dozen volunteer offers that didn’t make it to the volunteer form (emailed them), discovered more than one extremely generous offers of assistance (emailed them) and discover three irate donors whose comments had been queued no less than six months (still working on how to best make amends there).

I also sent a long email to the designer thats working on our new volunteer engagement and mapping system that we are hoping to launch at Shmoocon.

We had a few visitors from all over (northern Uganda, Kampala, etc) and we watched a bit of Monday night football which we get a day late on ESPN/DStv.

All in all it was a really long day.