A Quick Update

August 18th 2005, 1600B

I’m starting to get the idea that this blogging thing can become quite habit forming. To be honest I’m very surprised that I even got so far as to start the damn thing, never mind wanting to add to it all the time. I guess it’s because I’m hardly what you’d call busy & there’s not much to distract me, but then again if I was I might have something a little more interesting to talk about :P
We’ll see how things change when I go back to the capital next week.

It’s been pretty much the same old thing since I last typed anything up, other than fighting with the computer. The weather has changed somewhat though, and it looks like the rainy season is about to come down on us; we’ve had reasonable rain the last three days running, and every now & again I’ll hear a few spots hit the tent. Evidently the storms here are something to behold, and I’m looking forward to seeing a few. I’ve always loved lightning, & again I find myself sorry that I don’t have a tripod here with me, so I’m not going to be able to get any photos of the lightning – you need to set up the camera for a bulb exposure on a tripod or you can forget about it. I could always see if I can’t buy a tripod while I’m here or maybe have one sent up to me I guess, but I have an idea that I’ll get ripped on the price if I buy one here.

So far as fighting with the computer goes, it was the old story of entropy catching up compounded by PEBKAC. My Windows install was getting very slow & creaky, so yesterday I decided to try a re-install to sort things out. I made the mistake of trying to cut a corner though, & just re-installed over the existing version – I was hoping to avoid the hassle of backing up all my data to disc. This is never a good plan, as I well know. After the 3rd BSOD in as many hours I decided to do a proper job of it and re-format the damned hard drive first & then do a fresh install. I finished the backups last night, and I got started on the re-format & re-install first thing this morning. All went well till I was trying to restore my data, specifically the last set of photographs that I took, about 100 in all. Nothing special, but pictures I’d wanted to keep all the same. But could I get them off the dvd I’d burned? Not a damn. I’ve spent the last 4 hours getting nothing but bloody cyclic redundancy errors for that one directory & its files. At least there was nothing important there, mostly photos for other people actually, & I didn’t lose anything else – if my books had gone awol I’d have been really pissed – but it’s still annoying.
I’m having a few blank dvds sent up in the next few weeks, & from now on I’ll be keeping two backups of my important stuff, just in case one goes tits up like this last time. At least the notebook is running much better now.
One enjoyable aspect of this re-install is that I came across my MSN & YIM conversation logs while I was backing everything up, & I spent quite awhile last night reading through them, having a good laugh. It’s reinforced the fact that I’m really sorry that I don’t have the net access now that I did last year while I was in the Congo, & that I don’t really get to keep in touch with the people I want to, but I really enjoyed reading the logs all the same. I know that’s one of the main reasons I started this blog, so that I could keep in touch after a fashion, but I’d still rather have the net access :P

Otherwise there’s not much else to say. I’ve yet to hear from my boss about that money I was given the run around over earlier in the week, and unless I hear from him first thing in the morning I’m going to laugh it off. As I said before, it’s just not enough money to justify the hassle. I’ll be heading into Bujumbura for good either next week Tuesday, or more likely Wednesday, and that’s plenty soon enough for me. I’m really not looking forward to working in that town, so I’m going to see what I can do to stay with the UN mission, & carry on with the outside deployments instead – I have a feeling that my sanity & happy thoughts will be far better for it.
One thing that might make Bujumbura a more enjoyable experience is that we’ll be moving into a new base one of these days, once they’ve finished building the damn thing at least. There’s no telling when that will be, but with a little luck the facilities will be an improvement over what we have at the moment, and the accommodation will almost certainly be better. So far as I know we’ll be staying in WeatherHavens, the same as we did in the Congo, and that’ll be a big step up from the little 2 man “chopper tents” they’ve got us in at the moment. It may be a bit much to also hope for warm water in the showers, but I’ll keep my fingers crossed in any case :P
And if I’m really lucky, there’ll be a UN network point nearby that I can run a cable from again, or I’ll at least have better access to a pc with a net connection.

Anyway, the Lieutenant has just arrived & asked me help to with something on his computer – I just love being the unofficial IT guy :P - so I’ll be finishing this for now.

Till next time then ;)