Blogging By Candlelight

So a few nights ago I got carried away with the running water in my house and I splashed a bit on the wall, which dripped down into the outlet and blew a fuse in my house.  So now I have no lights or fans, which means for three nights now I’ve had to rely on candles while I wait for the electrician.  It’s annoying, but also kind of nice and romantic.

A few of you have asked me how Lamu was, and the answer is, I haven’t gone yet.  The solar computer lab is apparently a few steps away from the part where I come in, so in the meantime I’ve been frantically testing different programs to put on the twenty-or-so old iBooks that have been donated.  They’re pre-Intel Macs, so it’s a little more complicated to get all the Linux stuff working, and to be honest, I haven’t actually installed Linux onto a real system since about 1999, when I helped set up a dedicated Red Hat server for my high school’s web site!  I’ve tried really hard to get Sugar to work, so give the kids in Lamu a One-Laptop-Per-Child experience, but it’s a 1000-step process that I don’t have time for, and even after those steps, it’s buggy on old PowerPC Macs.  I did get it working, but by the end I was cranky and exhausted and impatient with each of the quirks that came up, so I’m scratching it.  Oh, well.  We’ll see what else I can come up with.

Me and my super-Linux-savvy friend setting up a web server in my room, 1999

The video yearbook project is moving along— we’ve shot video for classes 3-8, which leaves 1-2 and the three kindergarten classes.  The lower classes will be the hardest, since the younger the kids, the less likely they are to know how to spell their names for the camera.  So far so good, though.

A still image from the video yearbook-in progress:
 

Lastly, my top secret Nairobi project may have been canceled… it’s definitely not looking good.  In fact everyone seems pretty sure that it’s cancelled, but I remain optimistic, mostly because I’m not really in the loop.  Stay tuned.