Sunday, Sept 2nd
Day off!
Oops — slept in. Gladys, our most excellent cook, was a little miffed at our lateness. But the food was wonderful regardless.
I mentioned that I’m a computer geek by trade, and have been enlisted in helping a few people with their technical issues. So far, I’m 1 for 3. Simon, the Miombo lodge manager, has a brand new laptop that has given him nothing but problems. Currently, the system doesn’t recognize the modem as being installed (along with a few other key peripherals.) While we theoretically have internet access here, it’s near impossible to use.
I attempted to connect with my laptop last night, and did manage to get a connection! But it was so slow & the phone line quality is so awful that I couldn’t send enough data back & forth to actually get a website. Simon says he’s going to try taking me directly to the phone switch at a later date and hopefully we can get connected there. The goal is to get the right drivers for his modem, but honestly… given the number of issues he’s had with his laptop so far (the OS has been reinstalled about 4 times already and it’s STILL not working right) my guess would be “dud” and it should be sent back to Acer. I’m not nearly enough of a hardware expert to say what exactly the trouble is, but I’m pretty sure there’s something effed up.
Then today, Craig (here to teach the pathfinder course starting tomorrow. By his own definition, he’s a bushman. Official title is “Professional hunter/guide”.) asked for my help with trying to get his laptop to print to the ancient dot matrix printer in the main office. I haven’t even SEEN a dot matrix in about ten years…
Unfortunately, not having a driver is again the culprit. So, we got inventive: We used a usb key to move the file over to my laptop. I used my laptop to burn a CD with the file. Then we tried to get it onto the windows 98 machine in the office… but the only blank CD Craig had was so scratched that I’m impressed we could actually burn to it. The win98 machine couldn’t get the whole file off. Crap.
Tech support in the bush is bloody difficult.
I did have one success. Kim, one of my roommates, has had terrible luggage problems. First, both of her bags were missing. For 10 days, she was stuck wearing Nathan’s (volunteer manager) clothes. On the day I arrived, she finally got one of her bags. But, her spare memory card is in her other bag, and the one she had was starting to fill up. Alas, we didn’t have the right cables to get the files directly off her camera onto my laptop. However, I’m terribly inventive, and simply put the card into my camera and copied them off that way.
At least I’ve had ONE success. I don’t feel quite so pathetic now.