Incoming!

Thanks to Chris Duke (for shipping the gear), Keith Parsons (for donating the sound gear, screen and projector), “SpiritInBlk” (for doing all the legwork to get the PC’s donated) and the HFC shipping team (for hours of hard labour and moving equipment), and some heroic maneuvering at Entebbe airport, we are now in possession of a pretty sweet shipment.

This is just the thing I needed to give me a bit of a kick in the butt. It cost us about $1250 in clearing and taxes, and may cost us more if we need to cover shipping costs, but the fact of the matter is that we needed an influx of equipment.

Our “music nights” at The Keep have been a real hit. They have attracted lots of new customers and provided a stage for local artists who might not otherwise have had a platform. But we’ve been getting by with borrowed and beaten equipment, and the sound has been rather mediocre. This is a big deal because most of the customers we have in are from developed countries and know bad sound when they hear it. It wasn’t fair to the artists, and on some nights it wasn’t kind to our guests.

I was just on the brink of buying new equipment when Keith’s gear showed up. When I opened the package I was blown away. The Bose Pro 440 speakers are not only slim, but they have amazing sound and they are outdoor speakers, designed to withstand wind, rain, sleet, dirt and dust. They should do very well in the dusty conditions here.

Keith also sent an amazing mixer with lots of power and six channels. We had been limping by with four before this mixer showed up, and I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out how to run all the mics and instruments our artists require.

But that wasn’t all. Keith also sent a massive 10-foot DA-LITE projection screen and a DLP projector which we hope to use for community music nights. (I’m also considering running some IT conferences here in Uganda because we have everything we would need to have a track of talks, presentations, the whole works.)

The massive stack of PC’s was another great pick-me-up. So many people worked so hard to get these machines (legally) liberated from a certain company, and it was really rough work. It required manually labour, a bunch of driving and storage, and the all-too-common nudging that corporations seem to need to donate old gear to an org with the word “Hacker” in it. The GX260’s are missing hard drives and memory, but we hope to use these as RACHEL boxes for schools and villages in the area.

I’m so blessed by the support of everyone that worked so hard (physically and financially) to pull this together. Thank you all so much!

In the back you can see the stack of 37 DELL GX 220’s. On the bottom left you can see the (dusty) outer cases of the Bose speakers in their travel casses. The cases make the speakers practically indestructible. The SAMSON mixer box can be seen right behind the speakers.

The DA-LITE screen was so massive that it barely fit in the main room at The Keep. It’s designed for conferences and is big enough for a keyote talk in even the largest rooms. The Bose speakers are on either side of the screen.

Another shot of the amazing Bose speakers.

I’m in love with the Bose stealth black goodness.