Alright, alright .. I
know I wasn't going to post everyday, but this is special. I got a
room with a fridge !!!!!
When the cleaners are
doing the rooms they leave the doors open to air them. Off in the
corner I spied a lot bigger room with a little fridge. I asked this
morning if there would be any price difference and I would say
because I haven't yet committed to staying the whole time here yet,
they let me move in for the same cost. Unfortunately the power point
is in a bad spot and I'm going to have to do some rearranging, but
minor details. I've now bought some milk, tea bags, a cup and
organised for hot water to be delivered each morning. Way to go
......
Wine is now cooling, I
wont say chilling because for some reason even the fridges here don't
really make things cold, but I am over the moon at this little bonus.
I also popped in and
saw the wireless internet people. The 'sales person' that I spoke to
was not a technical person and had no idea what I was on about and
couldn't quite grasp the fact that I wanted to know if I could link
into their base station. I know this is a rather unusual request and
with the language barrier as well, I had her totally confused. Poor
thing, I'm pretty good at confusing people who should understand me,
so imagine her plight ... the upshot is, she needs to speak to the
manager tomorrow and will get back to me. I did ask her to actually
get one of the technical people to speak to me, but not sure if that
got through. If this doesn't come off, they do a dial up service as
well, so either way I should have sorted some type of connection by
tomorrow.
This country really has
the most incredible contradictions. Technology wise, there is
wireless broadband, a thriving free wireless community in the
mountains to serve villages that have one computer, POS systems,
cable tv everywhere contrasted against poverty, dirt, disease, lack
of refrigeration, clean water, reliable power (the power dropped out
about 5 times today) and so many other things we take for granted.
Speaking of things we
take for granted, I mentioned that on Friday I was shown around the
new main building for Tewa and one of the first things I noticed was
the total difference in safety standards. When I was looking there
was a power saw with the lead sitting in water (amongst other things
) and seeing as I am here as a guest and to learn, not to try and
push my standards and beliefs, I don't feel that it is my place to
comment on these differences . Turns out that on the weekend someone
( not meant to be there ) on the building site died from
electrocution. So the next time you are stuck in a safety meeting and
thinking how boring it is, be glad that we do have safety standards.
I finally got the
camera out today too, so will start putting up some of the pics. I
need to get a shot of the roadside vegetation / weeds. I know that a
few people out there are just going to drool .....
Had a great day at work
today, every Monday and Friday we have a meeting ( sitting on the
floor on big cushions with a cup of tea ) and each person takes turns
to present something interesting and/or inspiring. Today we played a
game like pin the tail on the donkey but the donkey was a woman on
the whiteboard and you had to put the spot in the middle of the
forehead. Blindfolds, spinning around and all, it was such a laugh ..
I managed to put the spot on the eye, which wasn't too bad for me. It
looks like I have more than enough work here to keep me busy for a
while including putting a system together to manage donations and
grants, looking at their current hardware and software and
recommending some strategies to minimise maintenance and give them
some measure of future proofing, review the current network &
dial up setup ( the current dialup connection is lucky to stay up for
10 minutes at a time .. ), review the current web site and put
something in place to make it easy for people to keep the information
up to date which will probably also involve some training .. I did
say I was only staying for 3 months didn't I ??