What a week.
First, the training center. I found that the Ncomputing machines were not a good fit. Most of the training we have is on DVD and with the nComputing setup, only one machine has a DVD drive. So we replaced that table with the machines sent from Whitewolf. Unfortunately, we blew three of the power supplies. The first was because I’m a bonehead and the power supply was set to 115V. The second was because the switch was broken on the supply, and even though it said it was set to “230v”, internally it was still set to “115v”. Guh. The third was because one of our helpers plugged the monitor power cord into the computer (which was set to “230v” so it shouldn’t have mattered). So now, that table has to be set to 110 completely (monitors included) so we have no more mistakes. We did manage to get one of the power supplies fixed in Kampala, and one is toast. The jury’s still out on the third.
The center’s doing well though. We have some customers and we’ve shifted the hours because no one was coming in the morning and lots more people were coming at 4:30 when we were about to close. We’re open from 11:00am – 7:00pm Mon-Fri, and part of the day on Saturday. The DVD-only content is going to be a problem, especially if more than one person wants to train on the same course at the same time, but I’m going to email TotalTraining to see if they will allow us to use more than one copy of their training. We have a staff, though!
We have Gerald and Josh working most days, and Henry and Teo volunteering their time in the center in exchange for training. I’m excited to have Ugandans working in the center. The prospect of running day-to-day operations in the center was overwhelming, considering everything else I’m doing.
That brings me to the topic of the cafe. There are times when I have my doubts. We’ve been led every step of the way with this thing, but it’s a ton of work. We don’t know the first thing about running a restaurant, but all the pieces are in place. We picked up some restaurant management books while we were in the US, and thankfully, Jen is reading them and running with her new knowledge. Now that the Training Center is at least functional, I need to jump in to the work at the cafe. That’s funding everything, so it’s important.
I had a gig scheduled in Quebec but thanks to the VAV (Volcanic Ash Victory) my flight was canceled. We really (really) needed the money from that gig, and I was looking forward to the conference. The organizers and attendees were great the last time I was there, and the hotel was fantastic. But they offered an alternative, and will accept a video copy of the preso. So yesterday I filmed No-Tech Hacking in my back yard. It was a family event. We set up a podium, set up the video and wireless mic (thanks, Syngress, for the gear from that Stealing The Network video shoot) and recorded the talk. I was up until 3:30am compiling the video, let it render until 8:30, then started the upload process. The video is about 450MB which is MASSIVE for the bandwidth we have. But it’s doable, as long as FTP cooperates, which it didn’t. For some reason I’m getting a 500 I won’t open a connection to 172.17.1.130 (only to 196.x.x.x) when I try to upload to my web server. This can only be bypassed with quote pasv and passive run from the command line, but I need a graphical FTP client so I can resume if (when) the power goes out or the Internet goes down. SSH was too slow (don’t get that really) insisting that the upload would take anywhere from 12 to 16 hours. The connection kept dropping, and after a bit of rsync to resume, my approximate upload time jumped to days, not hours. I don’t have that kind of time. If the video isn’t in their hands by tomorrow, I don’t get paid. I honestly thought about Amazon S3, but I don’t have the time to muck with that right now. So MobileME came to the rescue, and that’s plugging along nicely, telling me I’ve got about 6 hours to go. Fingers crossed.
If this works, I might see if anyone’s interested in playing the video at their con. It’s cheaper than flying me over. =)
Gotta go. I have a ton of email to get through, and I have to rescue our front age before May 1. Thanks so much, sproutbuilder. Wix, here I come. Can’t somebody build us a decent web site? Sheesh. =D
First off: http://fireftp.mozdev.org/ graphical FTP client, for Firefox. I use it, I love it, and it’s created by a guy who spends his summers doing volunteer work. Secondly, I know a decent amount of PHP and SQL, and I’m sure you have plenty of hackers who are better at it than me. If you asked you would have a flood of us who would build you a site, and you know that.