Long Journey To Africa « Hackers For Charity

Some random pics. Enjoy!

Here’s a photo of our sad little sounds setup at The Keep. Most of the equipment is borrowed and VERY Chinese (cheap). We can’t afford any sound equipment for our Friday night shows, but it sounds like some folks might have some sound gear they can donate. If you do, please let me know. We’re in desperate need of mics, amps, mixers (8 channels or more), mic stands, pickup mics, audio cables (of just about every kind) and even instruments (especially guitars).

Here’s me at the mixer. It kinda looks like I know what I’m doing. I really don’t. Sound Mixing for Dummies anyone? Our Friday show was PACKED. I was thrilled to have so many people show up for the performance. It really was quite amazing. I was "trapped" behind the mixer all night and didn’t get out much, but I was told that the owners of Flavours were in attendance. This is a big deal for us because their restaurant is a block away and people talk and create stories like we’re out to sabatoge them. The list of people talking includes our own staff, which we reprimand severely for such things. We have even fired staff for being involved in that kind of talk. We want our staff to be different and not be all caught up in the gossip and negativity. But the point is that there really is no animosity about Flavours. We do similar things (serve "real" coffee and food and offer Internet), but we are different in our goals and our missions. Anyhow, it was great hearing that they came and had a good time. I was in Flavours myself just two weeks ago meeting a friend, and I really enjoyed myself. I hope this help put the stupid rumors to rest. Ugandans, especially in Jinja can be so juvenile with their gossip and stories.

Here’s the room we used for the Internet cafe at The Keep.

Here you can see Gerald working on a laptop in the Internet cafe.

And here’s another shot of Fred and Gerald in the cafe. It’s a really small room. We had managed to get four stations in there. It’s just not enough. We’re getting more and more customers asking to use our REALLY FAST Internet, and lots of people come in with laptops and end up sitting at a table for eight, which causes seating problems for larger groups.

Yesterday, we decided to switch our rooms and put our coolers in this small room and use the front room for the Internet cafe. Everybody pitched in and the job took several hours. Here’s some of our kitchen staff helping to load the cools in the new space. This shot gives you an idea of how tiny that little room was… way too small for the Internet cafe room.

This is an under-construction shot of what we called "the tea room" at The Keep. This was where we kept the coolers and was pretty useless, as it was for staff only. I can’t believe I don’t have a newer picture.

This is a pre-construction shot of the inside of the room at The Keep.

And here is the fruit of our labours yesterday. We still have some cable to clean up, but you can see we have quite a bit more room. The server, printer, access point and three NComputing terminals are shown here.

Here’s another shot of the room with Trevor chilling out. We’ll have two more terminals on that table (one donated Mac Mini!) and the couch on the right is for people that want to hang out with laptops. We’ll have another table in here against the third wall for people that want to work at laptops. It was a big project, but I think it will be worth it. Now I just have to figure out how to throw the wireless from the WRT54G farther. The signal is not as good in the main restaurant with the access point here.

Oh, and I hung this nice tapestry yesterday too. Some of you may recognize this from my old office. It was a gift from my wife many years ago, and we brought it with us when we came back from the US in April. We had the metal hanging rod made locally.

Nairobi was pretty interesting. The conference boasted a whopping 16 attendees. But despite the very few people in attendance, I get the distinct sense that Nairobi is primed for some really decent training. After speaking with a few government representatives and with Evans, the conference sponsor I think I might be able to swing some decent, relatively high-tech training in Nairobi. They’re VERY interested in the idea of backtrack training, so I’ve broached the idea with Muts. We’ll see where that ends up. If this takes off, we might be able to support ourselves with fairly infrequent training gigs pretty close to home. I’ll keep you posted.

Today was fairly laid back. We had very few customers at The Keep. Jen opened up (because our day manager walked away from her job) and I followed with Declan around 10:00am. Breakfast consisted of spanish omelette, french toast and a Turkish coffee, my new staple. That looks really strange… my breakfast. A year and a half ago, breakfast was so different. Al the ingredients came from various places in the open-air market. Everything was prepared from scratch, and was extremely simple. Now, we’re eating like… an upgraded version of some former self. It’s surreal. Every time I think that The Keep is a curse, or we face some new struggle, I just have to focus on the fact that it was, and is a blessing in so many ways.

As for work, I upgraded iTunes on a Mac, installed Skype, OpenOffice and FoxIT on a PC, and worked on the intranet web server at The Keep. I needed a way to showcase the services we offer. It turns out we make really good money on “diversification” service like scanning, printing and downloading. Other big projects like nComputing installs and service contracts could really help us too, so everything is showcased on that landing page so people know about them.

I also cleaned up my laptop, which is running dangerously low on disk space and consolidated all my large downloads to put on the server at The Keep. We offer these local downloads to our customers to help soften the impact of our 10GB monthly download cap (the price we pay for cheaper but higher-speed 3G service).

Tomorrow is Friday, which is music night at The Keep. The means a late night and a really busy day. More later.

Some random pics

Pile of papers at the airport. I’m not posting the detailed view. These are all immigration documents. Passport info and such. We’ve got a lot of work to do in Nairobi. Could be lots of interesting training opportunities.

I… just couldn’t resist. Government building.

Nairobi Java House… like Starbucks. Not a bad place. Their machin isn’t as nice as ours though. They bought theirs. Ours was a miracle. =)

Heh. I bet.

It was a good weekend. Well, Friday was good (great music) and Saturday was mixed (a large party, but some frustration). I’ll write more about that later. Right now, I’m in Nairobi speaking at a security conference. It’s been a while, so it’s interesting. I’ll let you all know how that goes. Here’s a photo taken near where I’m staying. Nairobi is so much more advanced that Kampala. I’m in awe.

A few random pics. Enjoy!

Kyle Spencer (a good friend, fellow geek and all around nice guy) brought some equipment from the US for us. I had planned on using HFC money to pay for it because each item would eventually bring in money, but Tim Rosenberg surprised us and paid for it! Mery early Christmas from Tim! Pictured are two 3G routers (one that’s for a single connection and one that load balances multiple connections) and several 3G antennas. WE’re going to test these in the Internet Cafe at The KEep, and once we have it working, we’ll try to sell it as an Internet solution for NGO’s and organizations that are paying way too much for non-bundled Internet. We’re lookng to ties these with proxy servers and other Linux software to optimize the "Internet experience" (as Orange calls it). Thanks Tim and Kyle!

Here’s one f the 11db antennas temporarily mounted on a door frame. This boosted a local Seminary’s connection from two bars to five. This bad connectivity is one of the reasons the seminary doesn’t use 3G, which is faster and could save them money versus more expensive landline services.

This is the HFC work bench at The Keep. We take over one of the tables for repair work and maintenance.

This is Fred and Randy, a friend of ours that lives in Kampala. We’ve known him for a while now through our friend Jonah, who we miss something awful now that he’s in the US. Recently, Randy’s been hanging out in Jinja because his tech gig in Kampala is finishing and he’s thinking of moving to Jinja. Having him work with us this week has taken a real load off of me. I feel so much less stressed knowing that he can handle some of the work that only I can do. I’m trying to get him on board full time with HFC. Here he’s showing Fred how to do driver updates through Windows 7.

This week has been exhausting.

I focused on money-making projects this week. I feel like I head to the HFC “till” way too often, especially for staff salaries, security and expenses of the center. It’s costing us way too much money to run the training center, especially since The Keep is making no money whatsoever.

I’ve been running 12 and 15 hour days lately. I spent the majority of that time repairing laptops. Fred and I made like $80 fixing machines, all of which belonged to mzungus here in town. It seems there just aren’t many trustworthy, competent and inexpensive computer repair shops in this town, and it’s a niche we can fill. No one will touch a Mac other than a single repair shop in Kampala, which charges a literal fortune to work on a Mac (or so I hear). So we repaired about five laptops this week. Two were Windows machines that had “slowed down”. After a ton of searching, I found Glarys Utilities which was the only free tool I could find to properly clean out Windows gunk. We also ripped out Kaspersky, which had lost its battle with the African virus scene, and replaced it with AVG. Another machine was a brand-new super-sweet VAIO that had completely lost its mind and it’s hard drive. The owner had a new drive Fed-Exed and we rebuilt the machine. The Sony drivers took forever to download and cost us two bucks in bandwidth. I know this because I did the math and discovered that it costs us 13.33 shillings per megabyte to download stuff with our 3G connection. What a weird existence to even consider measuring such things.

The Mac repairs came as a surprise, and I think that will be a niche for us also. The one MacBook had slowed to a crawl. Nothing would run, but activity monitor showed normal everything. I dug around for my TechTools CD, but I think I left it in the US somewhere in storage. I tried to download the free version from Apple, but my AppleCare has expired. Feh. That left with really no choice. I headed for a torrent and pulled down the non-bootable version, which was decidedly smaller. I did every test I could via target mode from my laptop, and ran what I could from the actual machine, and everything came back green. (What I wouldn’t give for a bootable Mac diagnostic suite).

I Archived and Installed but at the last minute the machine hung. Something in the User profile creation hung and I had to enable root and copy all the stuff by hand after a reboot. A real mess, but the laptop survived, as did the user files, and no more beach ball.

I killed myself for a couple days for this eighty bucks because it pays a month’s salary for one of our employees in the center. I hope to get others on staff doing repair work full time so I can concentrate on other things. Like marketing.

This week I drafted some sales and marketing material and also some service contract templates. We have a really sweet NComputing solution that can save NGO’s a ton of cash. I hope to sell the solution. A single sale can save an NGO half on hardware costs and also float a staff member for five months. Five Months. As for service contracts, if we can get NGO’s on board, a service contract for repair, checkups, maintenance and updates can provide a valuable service and give us steady work that doesn’t fully rely on (the really tough) stream of one-off repairs. One service contract could fund an average of two employees for a month.

I know that on the scale of things it seems really odd to be knocking myself out for a couple hundred bucks. On my salary in the US I could easily have funded 20 Ugandan techs a month without really even missing the money. I know I could just write my check for $800 (yup, salary for 20 techs) and let someone else deal with the headaches.

(And there ARE so many headaches. This week we found out that one of our most trusted employees was caught in a web of lies that can’t be explained away. This employee walked away from his or her job and then the ugliness started to come to light. I caught real flack for letting him or her walk away. I extended him or her undeserved Grace–you know like the kind God grants us– and didn’t put Himorher in jail, which would have been justified. It was the real low point of our trip here. And there’s my patented paragraph in parenthesis).

If the speaking gigs hit, I could really do a lot more, but the only talk I have is what I’m doing here, and still it’s hard to point to the success. And talks without a happy ending don’t really carry well. (Unless you’re at DEFCON. Then, the talks with the most unhappy endings are the best.=)

But for whatever reason, I am here slogging away at this, and on those days when I slip ten bucks in my pocket because I fixed a laptop, and I have made a happy customer, I feel really blessed, and one of my guys gets paid for four more days. And it feels right, somehow.

I do need to get my life in balance because I’m spending zero quality time with my family, though. That is a Problem.

It’s two A.M.

It’s an 18-hour day, thanks to Live Music Night at The Keep.

Goodnight.

Street kids have been on my heart for a long time. The fact is that most NGO’s don’t really focus on street kids because there’s no family unit to help guide them or to manage the funds from sponsors. It’s a complex issue because some street kids aren’t “homeless”, rather their parents put them on the streets because it’s good money. Tourists (especially girls) have a soft spot for the kids, and buy them things and take them to lunch, so there’s a contingent of street kids who live large, bouncing from one tourist to the next. My idea of a recreation center is still valid because kids need skills, but running a center during school hours will cause another distraction for them when they really should be in school.

Like I said, a complex problem, and it’s all but halted our progress to help them. Then this Sunday we helped out with a small church service for street kids held by our friends, the Davis family. The kids were with this program called ASCO (African Street Children Organization) founded by older guys that were once street kids themselves. Jen helped organize some games for the kids and our small family youth group (missionary kids mostly) helped out.

It was a great experience, and it made me think. I felt drawn to the kids and started wondering what I could do to help. My first thought was computer training. I approached two of the leaders (who were once street kids themselves) and pitched the idea of free computer training. They were excited, and wanted to sign up immediately but confessed that most of the kids wouldn’t be able to hang with video courses because of their poor English. I thought about translating some of our courses (maybe.. lot of work… we’ll see) but I left there feeling pretty helpless.

The next day, two guys came into The Keep to use the Internet. One of the guys, Moses, had these cool dreads. I helped them with their account and Moses asked if we built web sites. I told him we did and quoted him a price of UGX100,000/= (about $50, our going rate). Then he showed me some pictures and I find out he’s the founder of ASCO. I told him then and there that we’d do the web site for free.

Moses was pretty excited, and I felt pretty good.. for like ten minutes. The fact was, something happened on Sunday at that little ragtag “church” service. It was like I was being reminded of what, exactly we are doing here. It’s not to run a madly successful business to make money to spend on some down-the-road community project. It was, quite, simply, to help the helpless. To take a step towards those with the greatest need.

Then I get an email from Glenn, and it’s rumored that somehow (miracle) we managed to get funding (miracle) through a particular organization that will remain nameless for a recreation center designed to help out street kids.

When I wrote the proposal, I had envisioned building something from scratch. But now, months later, I’m convinced that I shouldn’t be reinventing any wheels. I’m pretty sure I’ll be coming alongside a passionate, struggling organization that gets “it”. Vague, I know, but given the timing of the Sunday service, the meeting with Moses and the email from Glenn (a span of three days) I think we might just be doing something with the kids from ASCO.

Enjoy the video.

I’m so thrilled to announce our partnership with Hacker Halted 2011! Hacker Halted is October 9-15, 2010 in Miami Florida, and it’s looking better than ever. With a stellar lineup of speakers and great events, you don’t want to miss this con.

It’s also a great way to support the work of HFC. Half (50%!) of all the proceeds will go to HFC if you register with this code: IHACKPROMO – 2879!

Please head over to the Hacker Halted web site at www.hackerhalted.com for more information.

Thanks to the crew at Hacker Halted for this creative fundraiser!

We had a great time visiting with the team from our church in MD. It was such an encouragement and so uplifting. We have had it a bit rough lately and it was just what we needed. I’m sorry it was such a short visit. But the team was gracious enough to bring a suitcase full of goodies from our friends and family. These suitcases are so precious to us and they’re always filled with stuff that makes us so happy. Thanks to everyone that helped make this a month to remember!

It’s the little things, like Peppermint extract and Old Bay seasoning…

All of us get pretty excited about junk food especially beef jerky, slim jims, OREO cookies, Goldfish crackers and candy like Starbursts and Candy Corn. We can’t get stuff like this here.

For Makenna, it was crazy socks, shirts, crazy gloves and trail mix that really made her happy!

Even the cat’s liking it’s chops… probably for the beef jerky…

Jenny loves Hello Kitty ANYTHING.

Pokemon and LEGO ANYTHING (even books) are a huge hit!

I got some great books from my parents, along with my Dad’s famous snoopy drawing!

The HFC gear was so amazing! Jonathan sent a bunch of USB sticks and drives, each loaded with RACHEL downloads for our classrooms and WSUS updates! Tim sent us laptop batteries for our netbooks and Rob sent all sorts of swag from DEFCON. The IHC handmade bag is so cool and was filles with CISCO Aeronet PC cards for our laptops. Cool!

When Jenny came she brought real Korean ramen! What a treat!

It’s good to be missed and loved. =)

We’re running two failing businesses. The cafe and the training center are both fairly popular (the cafe is especially popular with the tourists and expats) but they’re both bleeding money. Every month, we pay for staff salaries out of our own money, and it’s running out. Donor support is still there, and that’s covering our living expenses, but it sucks to have to spend my gig money to keep these businesses afloat.

The Training Center is really struggling. We’re woefully short on customers and the customers we get are mostly “freebies”, members of the military or police force that we train for free. I’ve given a lot of thought to the idea of just training people for free since we’ve got a few months paid on the rent and the place is just sitting there, but I don’t know how to do that without spoiling all the equipment. It’s closer to our original goal for the center: training, not income, but I’m afraid that free walk-ins won’t respect the equipment. I thought about working with local churches and NGO’s to select candidates for free training and positioning them to manage and screen the students. This combined with our watchful staff might make things less risky. But even if I figured out how to make this beneficial to the people that need it the most, it still doesn’t solve the financial problem. We need to pay the bills. The answer lies in getting schools without computer labs to bring their students for computer training. Large groups could fill the gap. But despite marketing and advertising, it’s not happened.

Payday was last week, and we dug into the money left from my last gig and paid salaries, electric bills, plumbing bills and a host of other expenses. Two days ago I considered closing the center.I offered up a feeble prayer that something would happen, and set out to do what I do best: throw my own (insignificant) weight into the problem. I went to the center with an MTN USB 3G modem with the idea of offering Internet surfing at the cafe. People have been asking for it, so I caved and decided to give it a shot. I booted the system, slapped in the card, installed the built-in drivers and began to surf. Easy-cheesy. Things were looking up. Then I tried to share the Internet connection, which on Windows 2003 Server Web Edition (thanks to my MSDN gift from BlueHat 1!) is a royal pain in the grass. I poked at the Routing and Whatever thing in the Management Thingum and followed the convoluted rules and suggestions, but no dice. So I reflexively rebooted and things went bad quickly. All my network drivers fell out and explorer failed to run. No amount of recovery consoling would resolve the problem. Turns out that MTN thing isn’t compatible with 2003 Server. Yay.

Just like that the Center was down, hard. It was late, so I went home, even more convinced that the Center was finished.

Over night, I realized that I probably should have installed XP all along. I need Windows for the True Cafe software to run the cafe, but I needed 2003 Server to serve more than 10 web clients. I should have used XP with Apache. So yesterday I came to the center nice and early, prepared to reload the system. I sat down powered on the machine and pushed the CD eject button to put in the XP CD. The tray didn’t open. There was no power light. Then I remembered that we unplugged the CD and USB power to keep people from stealing our training. I bent over to open the case and saw our Analog Security System (below).

I asked Gerald (our manager) for the keys. He reached first into one pocket, and then into three others and then got That Look. An hour later, after turning the center upside down, he still hadn’t found the keys. I had backups at the house, but that wasn’t the point. Our center was completely exposed unless we replaced all the padlocks as well as the lock on the front door. Approximate cost: UGX 1,000,000/= or $500 or almost three months rent or four months salary for the entire staff. We just didn’t have the money to replace the locks, and every single piece of equipment was at risk with the keys missing. The only solution was to pull all the equipment from the center and close the doors. I packed up my gear and headed back to failing business number two for comfort in the form of a cheeseburger and a milkshake. I could definitely see myself drowning myself in milkshakes until we’re forced to close the doors there, too.

The hours passed by pretty slowly, and I was pulled back into my life at The Keep which is a story for another day. Depressed is hardly the word. It’s hard when something that seemed so right comes crashing down.

Gerald texted me a few hours later to tell me that the keys had been found. I was not relieved. Not only had I resigned myself to closing the center, but the work on the server had taken weeks and I knew that it would be no easy task to rebuild it.

I went back to the center and spent the next four hours rebuilding the server. In the end I decided it would be a Good Idea™ to install Deep Freeze to keep the system configuration locked down. I installed it. Then I realized that I would need Data Igloo to allow True Cafe to keep it’s logs and data, so I installed that, too, but realized I hadn’t set up another partition for dynamic data. I used partition magic to slice up the C: drive (which took an hour thanks to a necessary DEFRAG) and rebooted to install Data Igloo. That’s when things went south. Deep Freeze went into a perpetual frozen state, the tray icon went missing and nothing (I mean nothing) would unfreeze it. Another hour of web surfing later, and I realized I would have to start over. Repartitioning after installing Deep Freeze is a Horrible Idea™. As I packed up my gear I couldn’t help but wonder if I was really trying too hard to save the place. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to save it. Maybe I was wrong about this thing all along. “If only I could get some sign that I was supposed to keep going,” I remember thinking.

That’s when the messenger came from my friend Bobby from the Source Cafe and Kibo Group. He had a letter authorizing seven students to take classes at the center and offered a down payment of UGX 200,000/=. It would be the single largest group we’ve ever had at the center, and I took it as a sign that despite what’s going on, we should press on.

So today, I’m reloading the server at the center again. It’s not fun, but today’s reload seems different somehow.

I can’t help but remember that feeble prayer in the midst of the crap yesterday and the series of events that changed my mind about closing shop. “Slowly by slowly” (as the Ugandans say) I am realizing that there’s something here in Uganda that’s bigger than me and for whatever reason, God’s called us to be a part of it, especially when all the signs point to giving up

It’s just not coming together, and when payday came, we once again dug into our pockets and paid salaries.