I woke up this morning with nasty stomach cramps. Declan (our 6-year old) was in bed with us and I didn’t want to wake him up with my panzy whimpering, so I headed out to the living room and whimpered by myself in the pre-dawn glow of an impending African sunrise. I read a bit (“This Present Darkness, Frank Peretti) and after 30 minutes my cell phone started blowing up.

I answered and it was none other then Hon. Migereko. For those of you that haven’t been keeping up, this is like getting a call from the Vice President. This gentleman gets things done in Uganda, and because of his zeal, he’s one of the President’s most trusted associates.

Back in May of last year, I offered to try to build him a computer classroom at St. John’s in Bugembe. Since then, the school has been eagerly anticipating their new computer room. The room has been built, the power has been run, security has been installed (iron, not silicon) and the senior students have been walking 5+km to a nearby community center to learn basic computer skills.

But the classroom never came together. No corporations swooped in to fund the project, and I had no idea where exactly I would get the machines or the money to do what Hon. Migereko wanted done. But I knew it was something I had to do.So I made it a priority this year. While in UGanda I was going to figure out how to build classrooms for the Minister.

Thanks to some monster donations by “Dean” (49 corporately-depreciated Compaq N610C P4 laptops) and shipping services donated by Chris Duke at Navis Shipping (http://www.gonavis.com/nc1030) we had the machines for the classroom.

Things were looking good for the students at St John’s and for the deal for the Minister, but then he called, asking how things were going and I realized that this project has been on hold for far too long. I had slipped past the “thanks for the favor” phase right into the “where’s our stuff?” phase. The clock was ticking. If this classroom was to have the added benefit of being a relationship builder, I needed to move.

But this morning I had two distinct problems. The first was that I only received 23 power supplies for the 30 machines I committed to St. John’s. They weren’t lost in transit; Dean just didn’t have enough. My first thought was to install 30 laptops with 23 power supplies and have the teachers alternate power to the machines, running a few off battery every other class, but this just feels wrong. I want to make a good impression on our fledgeling classroom for the Minister, and this ghetto solution doesn’t quite fit the bill.

We have another shipment that’s waiting for us at Entebbe airport from Keith Parsons over at impnet.org consisting of 30 Compaq M300 laptops and a TON of networking gear, which is another huge donation. While these aren’t the performers of the  N610’s, I understand there are 30 power supplies in along with the laptops, which seems like a sign that these are destined for St. John’s. Or maybe ten of them will go along with 20 of the N601’s, but whatever the solution, I had to move.

So I’ve been building the student master and teacher master machines over the past few days. The basic build is:

  • Windows XP SP2
  • Office 2003
  • AVG Anti-Virus
  • Net Support School trial (to allow the teacher to take over stuent workstations… negates the need for a projector)
  • Deep Freeze (trial version to freeze the student builds to keep kids frm messing up the systems by doing something… kid-like.)
  • Foxit PDF Reader
  • Firefox

With the builds in place, I was all set to start leisurely imaging the machines when Hon. Migereko called. That put a fire under me and I realized that between trips back and forth to the airport to secure our second shipment and everything else I was juggling, I was hard-pressed to image the 30+ machines. I needed manpower.

My wife suggested I call Fred to help with imaging. I thought it was a great idea. So I spent the day showing Fred how the systems were set up and we tried our hand at imaging the final master builds. Unfortunatly the Imaging softare I ‘m using (Acronis) is failing to read my flash and USB drives and even DVD’s (it hangs browsing for backup images on external drives) and I burned two hours trying to get a standard Linux imaging system to fly (dd is my friend). But the dd solution was dumb and bloated (Free space can be skipped, dd, kthx bye) and in the end it failed to successfully re-image back to a laptop (dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda1/tmp/student.dd; dd if=/dev/sda1/tmp/student.dd). (Big inhale).

So at the end of a long day, I am faced with having to manually build the student machines (I hate this option.. too many variables), I’ve got a shipment stuck in Entebbe being valuated which may or may not contain laptops we will use for the Minister, and I have said Minister wondering about things, which makes me nervous that I’ve gotten off on the wrong foot already. I feel like I’m in WAY over my head here.

But tomorrow’s a new day. I’m picking up Fred at 8:30, heading over to St John’s to talk to the staff and scout and measure the room, and I’m hopeful that I’ll hear from Ronnie (my cargo agent in Entebbe) that he (or Hon. Migereko) worked some magic on the taxes and we’re clear to pick them up. If that shipment clears, we’ll have more options and annoying things like failed imaging solutions will matter less.

Days like this make me miss Tim and Dwight. Things really cruise when a team of fellow geeks is in country jamming on problems ith me. Anyone up for coming in November? October? September? Next week? Emails me. Puh-leeeeeaze?

Gotta sleep. Long day ahead. More tomorrow.

The problem is that because there are computer peripherals and support gear in this shipment, we’re supposed to pay tax. (Systems are exempt, but not parts). Tax valuation takes time, and the packages only arrived a few short days ago.