Last weekend I arrived back in Mekelle after our training week in Addis. Only a few differences to note since I’ve been back, the new road (I’ve been watching League of Gentlemen again) still isn’t finished, a couple of new restaurants have opened and a few have closed. The price capping that was introduced a couple of months ago has affected the availability of some goods quite a lot. For example in one restaurant, because bottled soft drinks are price capped, they now only sell canned soft drinks. St Georges and Dashen beers are capped, but Castell isn’t, so some places now only sell Castell as they can charge what they like for it.
The thin client computer labs are returning to being open. The lab for Technology Institute has been closed since the break in a few weeks ago and has only just this week been passed back to Technology from Security. Some new lab attendants have started this week, so the labs should be running again properly next week. We also hope to get a second lab open and running before the end of next week, but just need to keep our fingers crossed that the switches needed will arrive in the next few days.
The internet connection, both the fiber access at the uni and the CDMA, have been very slow. Generally they are on, but almost so slow as to be unusable. Many people seem to think the change in management of Ethiopia Telecom means staff are uncertain about their jobs so the network isn’t well maintained. An alternative explanation is that they’ve sold too many CDMA sim cards and increased the bandwidth they claim to deliver far above the actual capacity of the network. Either way, it’s disappointing that the connections are now worse than they were less than a year ago.
During my week in Addis I met several people form IT companies who are interested in providing thin client support services, so it’s interesting to see the types of projects they’ve been working on and that cheaper, more reliable computing infrastructure is now becoming more widespread. There is also talk of some thin client devices being assembled here in Ethiopia – actually the device I’ve seen would run either standalone or as a thin client. This would make the thin clients more mainstream, much cheaper and as they could be paid for in local currency, buyers would be supporting the local economy.
This week we continue our elearning training at Mekelle University, we have the final workshops for two training programme we started in October and hope to start a new advanced group. Hoping that everyone is as active and engaged as the participants were in Addis last week.
Last night we went to watch Spain play Colombia at the Bernabeu. Quite different atmosphere to the rugby match we saw at the weekend. Seems there were as many (if not more) Colombian supporters than Spanish. The game itself was fairly dull, until around the last 10 minutes.
On Saturday we went out to see Spain v Russia in the B league of the Six Nations rugby. I was completely unaware there was a B league in the 6 Nations or that Spain and Russia actually played rugby. It was a fun day out and fantastic sunny day (a little bit of sunburn in February) - but as you can see from the crowd/stadium size in the photos, it's not quite as popular a sport here as it is in the UK...
Hoping to get to see Spain v Columbia (football) at the Bernabeu on Wednesday evening.
This weekend I went out to one of the theme parks on the edge of Madrid, I’ve not been on a rollercoaster for years and although it was very cold it was very quiet, so we could get on the rides with almost no queue – in fact, we had to wait for enough people to come for the ride to start. Abismo, the biggest and fastest ride there, was shut with technical problems for most of the day, but was fixed up just as we were about to leave, so we managed to get on the last run of the day. We did manage to get home with all our body parts ( photo taken on the Tarantula ride).
Photos:
Video of Abismo (not one that I took, though I was sat at the front, so this was the view I got…):
I’ve now added to my growing collection of mobile voice and internet sim cards, dongles and pay as you go (prepago in Spanish) accounts. Today, with a lot of help from my Spanish speaking colleague Jaime, I got myself sorted out with a local mobile internet sim card with dongle. Buying the sim card and dongle was no problem language-wise, but getting the information as to how to top up, where I can buy credit, getting the correct settings for Ubuntu etc needed a long phone call to their tech support helpline.
As I’ve mentioned before, not staying in the same place quite long enough (or not knowing how long I’ll be staying) doesn’t make it worthwhile getting a contract account (or broadband installed at home) so means I’m paying the top price for all the phone and data services. The cost of mobile broadband is far higher here in Spain than the UK. In UK I paid 15GBP (around 17EUR) for 3Gb to use within a month, which I thought was bad enough, but in Spain I’ll be paying 20EUR for 1Gb to use within a month. So more than 3 times as much. The small consolation I have is that after I’ve topped up 3 times, I get 2Gb free – so that’s 60EUR for 5Gb.
Hopefully though, whilst in the UK my mobile dongle was my only means of internet access, here I can use the office connection much of the time.
One slight quirk with my new internet account is that to find out how much data I have left for the month, I need to send an email with my phone no and ask for the data balance. When I asked what format the email needed to be in (assuming that it would be an automated response) I was told that the format doesn’t matter as it will be a real person looking up my balance and replying manually – possibly one of the reasons for the high cost.
Just moved into my 7th different house/flat for this year, so an average of less than 2 months per ‘home’. I’m now in a flat in Madrid, so hope to stay put for a few months at least.
Work has been relatively quiet this week, mainly due to Monday and Wednesday both being public holidays, which then also makes Tuesday almost a holiday too. We’ve been planning out what to focus on over the next few months – until summer next year – and also deciding what we should focus on when we apply for larger, longer term projects.
As far was I can tell the elearning in Mekelle is going well, the Moodle site is getting several thousand hits per day with students now taking part in the activities their teachers have produced.
I have a bit more to say on the social front… this week 6 of us went to see the Champions League game of Real Madrid vs Auxerre at the Bernabeu stadium. The result (Real won 4-0) was going to be irrelevant to both teams – but was good experience anyway. Then I’ve also been ice-skating (for the first time in about 5 years), had a night out in Madrid, where we must have found the only bar in Madrid that didn’t sell wine, then the only club which didn’t serve beer. Then yesterday a few of us went to see El Escorial and I forgot to take my camera.
Me, Araya and Gabi
My Spanish is improving very slowly – though now, with a bit of a commute, I have little excuse for not listening to the teach yourself Spanish mp3s. I’ve found a few places to do evening classes in central Madrid, so plan to start these in the New Year.
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