I spent all day yesterday working on the disks we purchased from TotalTraining. I created backup ISO’s and copied the data to our servers for use in our center. That doesn’t sound like much but it was an 8-hour affair.

I wasn’t really sitting in front of the computer all that time. In true African style, it was not a point A to point B exercise.

First, there was the plumber at the door to fix the sewage smell in our bathroom and fix the shower head we bought at (thank you God for) Wal-Mart (in Maryland… There’s no Wal-Mart on this continent. A real bummer, that. I miss Wal-Mart. I understand now why our Ugandan friends asked to be dropped off at Wal-Mart and why they spend endless hours there poking through the clearance sections. Just about everything in Wal-Mart is amazing after spending any real time in Africa. Even the boring stuff that we’ve seen a bajillion times took on new life. “Wow, look at all the energy bars and vitamins,” I remember thinking in awe. “Oh, look at all the bread choices,” I remember thinking in amazement. “Wow, look at all the cheap DVD’s,” I remember thinking in an I-don’t-really-need-that-but-I’m-turning-back-into-a-slave-to-the-lie-that-is-consumerism-that-eventually-makes-you-a-slave-to-your-stuff kind of way. And there we have what is becoming a trademark of mine: an entire paragraph in parenthesis. (The only thing missing is the (multiple nested) parenthesis. I feel better now, here in my grammatical comfort zone.)

Then, there was the electrician. Thanks to our recent adventures with thieves, we’re cracking down on security at the Long castle. We’re lighting the property, tightening up night security and doing lots of really interesting high-tech and no-tech stuff that would be silly to list here since Jinja thieves can most likely read and surf the web.Come to think of it, I’ve kinda buggered myself by writing that No-Tech hacking book. Now I have to make sure none of that stuff works against my own junk. “Junk” of course not being a euphemism for naughty bits. Where in the world are all those oddball British terms coming from? I worked “naughty bits” and “buggered” into the same paragraph. Blimey. Guh. There I go again.

Then I had a long meeting with Geoffrey, our head of security and with our night guards. There was also the myriad phone calls now that people know we’re back. We’re appreciative of most of them.

I also spent several hours yesterday rewriting our community center page. That’s because I’ve had a really long moral / ethical struggle with some donated training content and I’m seriously thinking of registering the tagline “Charity Pirate” and “I pirate for charity”. That page will certainly cause some discussion, but I’m not officially announcing it yet. I haven’t officially decided what I’m going to do. But then again, I think I just announced the page, but only to people bored enough to have read this far. So I don’t have to worry to much about you people. Wait. What am I saying? Not worrying about bored hackers? I must be losing it.