I’ve been back from vacation for a while. Then I was in Beijing speaking at a conference. Then I was back to Jinja to…life. Sorry I haven’t blogged in a while. Truth is, I was “lost” as the Ugandans like to say. I’d like to say I am “found” but all I can say is that I’m back. There’s work to be done, and at least I have my head on my shoulders well enough to get some work done.

Today was interesting. I was up at 3:45am to open The Keep for the NCAA BCS Championship game live on ESPN. I’ve never been a sports fan, but because of the fact that we run an “American” place and we have ESPN on DSTV Africa, customers are asking for American sports. So we’re showing the NFL playoffs, and the XGames, and the BCS Championship.

Because of the 8-hour time difference, we’re up pretty early to catch the live games and it’s been pretty fun. The game was amazing this morning (sorry, Oregon) but it was even more exciting because at halftime, power went out all over town. So I scrambled to get a UPS in place, and an hour later, we scrambled for a generator. I’m glad we went through the effort. The game had an amazing finish.

We watched the Seahawks upset a few nights ago and that was pretty intense also.

I know, it doesn’t sound like work, but I was the barista and the waitress and the hostess for the morning. I rather enjoyed being behind the espresso machine again. It’s been so long since I’ve done anything besides computer work at The Keep, and I realized I missed it.

I’ve been looking in from the outside for too long. This restaurant, along with the (dwindling) donations from the States and the far-too-sporatic speaking gig are our bread and butter… our livelihood. I’m trying to focus on it a bit more.

So I’ll open before dawn for football, pull shots, run the soundboard for our musicians and even slog through the decidedly non-glamorous laptop repair when I need to.

It’s still better than the 9-5 in the US. I’m still pretty sure about that.

Speaking of the US, I’ll be at Shmoocon in DC! SANS is flying me out and I’m not sure exactly what I’ll speak about, but I have twenty minutes. Should be interesting. I’m excited to see everyone again!