I don’t do these often because they take a lot of time (to read and write), and often I think they’re quite boring. But I figured it would be a good day to do one since Khalil (@sehnaoui) is here, and he will have his perspective on the day, so here goes.
“Day in the life” October 24, 2014
Woke up and worked out. I hate yoga. My least favorite p90x routine because I’m flexible like brick.
I got an android phone out of inventory (Thanks, Steve!) for Henry’s to use for his android development class. Made an equipment disbursement form and headed to the keep.
Saw Declan off to school and watched a leather working video from Ian Atkinson in the background while I caught up on email. Since we have a donor bringing a stitching machine we can move on to bigger leather items like bags. I want to be ready.
Jennica, a gracious volunteer, has offered to handle leather fulfillment for us in the U.S. I shipped journals from Atlanta and now that she has them we are coordinating how to get them online for sale in our etsy shop.
I tried to get our Etsy shop up and running for her. I changed our name to NgoziCreations and hit a roadblock. Etsy only allows one login per account, and having someone do fulfillment is against the rules, as far as I can tell. Tweeted the problem. Lots of solutions, most too complex. Square shop looks good and may allow multiple roles. Waiting on Sam to set it up.
Jen forced me to go to the doctor. Con flu, thanks. Steroids, more antibiotics. Yay.
Met with our head guard, Emma. It turns out one of our day guards is missing. Make some calls, work on that. He turns up for lunch every now and then.
Oh, yeah. Breakfast. It’s almost noon. Oops. Khalil is still sleeping.
Back at the house, I pulled out the Vostro 1000 laptop form the CTC I’ve been working on. These are circa-2008 machines that we had donated, and they’ve seen a lot of action. They were put into a school, then pulled out when the school didn’t maintain them. They were reimaged and have been in the CTC for almost three years now. But now, they’re wearing out. Deep Freeze gave way, and the machines are wracked with viruses and don’t have sufficient memory. The CTC staff did a decent job of trying to get Windows 7 on them, but they were pirated copies and with 1GB or less of memory, the machines were dogged. So after Derby I started a new master build with clean licenses, and took our DVD-based Adobe Total Training content and started copying it to the ample 500gb drive. Then I had to leave for Hacker Halted. Now, I returned from Atlanta with a couple of much-needed memory chips for the laptop (2GBx2) DDR2 667MHz (PC2-5300) CL5 SODIMM 200-Pin) and crossed my fingers that it would work. It didn’t. MY 64-bit Windows7 Ultimate (and indeed the BIOS) only saw 2GB total. Crap.
I took a break and woke up Khalil. I figured he wanted lunch.
He stumbled out of bed, and immediately handed me a copy of the Red Team Field Manual. Woah. The he asked what I was up to, and I told him about the memory. He told me to remove a chip. I did. The system saw 2GB. Good. Then he told me to put the second chip in. I did. It saw 4gb. What?!? Khalil was awake fifteen minutes and saved me a ton of work with his ÜberVoodoo.
Khalil and I met with Henry, who will be running the hackerspace. This is the first time we’ve met since Derby because of his relocation to Jinja and my travel. Turned over an Android phone (thanks, Steve!) and we talked about his roles and responsibilities, his hopes and goals, and came up with a strategy. Basically, we will have Josh in the village doing paper-based CS training, and we’ll bring the top kids center for the “Hour of Code”. The top kids from this program will do the full CODE.org program, and the top kids from there will do a robotics course at the hackerspace. Even though we haven’t settled in the space yet, we’re moving forward with this. It was a good meeting.
While we were meeting, some folks came in with a phone problem. They had gone to the local Orange shop and they were referred to me. I got them sorted and chatted for a while.
Khalil started badmouthing the Keep’s Internet, and asked why his phone’s Internet with a local SIM card was so fast in comparison. I had to explain that there are two basic packages: unlimited data/slow and limited data/fast. So at the Keep, and at our BnB, we have unlimited slow because no matter what happens, or how much is downloaded, we pay like $100 and we have Internet for the month. What Khalil did was buy 10GB, and his speeds are fast, but of course when it’s gone it’s gone. So Khalil’s 10GB “bundle” is great for him, but not for public use.
So he asked why we don’t sell “bundles” at the Keep and give people fast Internet. I tried to convince him of the technical limitations. He wouldn’t have any of it. In the span of an hour, we came up with a solution. By next week we may be selling Jinja’s fastest internet again and offering a killer service to those working here.
This is the power of collaboration (and yes, a testament to Khalil’s brilliance and most importantly his willingness to help). I miss this. See, I can’t tell the world about every little problem I have, so I can’t even really ask for help most of the time. It’s too complicated to explain the cultural and technical details. I really, really missed this and I realize this lack of collaboration is really holding us back. This was a four-year problem banged out in an hour.
Back home, I continued to load the (now 4GB) Vostro, and started building and burning SD RACHEL and Village build Chromebook Cards. I have a meeting tomorrow with a guy who we’ve helped deploy Chromebooks in Kampala and I want to donate a pair of cards for him to use.
Declan came home and I jammed with Declan for about thirty minutes on our home-grown Minecraft server, and then our dinner guests arrived. (Sara, the Keep manager and her friend Charles).
I multitasked, and checked on the cards during dinner. Oops. Sorry, guys.
After dinner, our guests wanted to hang out and play with Declan, which was fun, and Khalil Jen and I talked. Later, I started working on an old Mac Mini A1176 that was donated because I want to put the Leap Motion that Khalil donated in the hackerspace. Our students need to see “what’s possible” with programming and this is a great example. However, I forgot the password and no pre-boot options are working (Option, “c”, Option-S, Option-R, NOTHING). There went two hours of my life.
I fell into bed exhausted. One 14-hour day down.
