Finally, after years of waiting my new lovely asus 1215n arrived here to me in the gambia. For those of you caught unawares my old lap top decided to pull it’s own card and stop powering on. I’ve wanted to post some pictures but i haven’t been able to because of this. Most computers in the country are pretty infected so I didn’t really want to go sticking my little(big) usb stick in places it didn’t belong… So. Thanks people who made this thing appear to me. Soon, i’ll post about halloween and do fun pictures. Oh Joy!
As far as updates in “work” go I’m starting to newish projects. One or both obviously may not go anywhere but they are both something i’ve been wanting to try. I’m working with a couple of gambians to create a proposal to the university to finish up networking the campus. We have a couple of networks with their own internet connection, some 3g sticks and various other ways to access the net but the IT staff here isn’t really able to offer things like printing services and student informations systems because it might not be available at any given computer at any given time. There are some pretty talented networking guys here and I think we have the resources so it might just be a matter of putting all the costs together and giving it a push.
For those interested in slightly more detail ( no one) we have a fairly spread out campus with a few offices per building. Currently, the plan is to sort of hop around with switches and run cabling on the outside of the wall in conduit of some kind. The walls are concrete so no going inside… In many places the options seems either to be running several long cables from a switch or plopping down a switch and running like 5 shorter cables. I’m not sure what’s best though… right now we are planning on more switches and less cables…. Input? Hopefully this thing will be finished by the end of the month and we can forward on to more stake holders and get input then send it over for finalish approval….
The other thing I’m working on is trying to get more books and learning resources for the students. Right now as teachers we can’t really tell people to read the book because it doesn’t exist. Sometimes there are PDF copies of books floating around but that leads to certain ethical issues and they normally aren’t really textbooks anyway. I’ve even seen students taking pictures of pages of books so they can turn them into pdf and study them lady. Do’h! I’m talking to one of the big book publishers about various pricing and ebook options for the gambia and they seem to be really receptive. Someone from UTG has already been talking to them as well so I hope to jump in on that band wagon.
Ok. So thats projects for now…