New Book

Location: Nangi, Nepal
Local Time: Saturday, Dec 31, 2005

Well, I finished off the last page of my journal today. That would be the paper journal that I have been writing in since Delhi. I went back to take a look from the beginning. I spent a mere week in India and then left. I've been in Nepal ever since. I sort of knew that, but reading the few pages I wrote in Delhi makes me realize really how little of my time was in India.

I could get one of the cheap notebooks from the store to write in, the kind the students use for homework and exercises. It doesn't sound like a good idea to me. Fortunately, a better option exists. They make paper here in Nangi, and gave me several large sheets. I've folded them up. They are sitting under a pile of books right now getting creased, then I will sew the pages together and make my own journal. I think I'll just just a simple sewing and plan to resew the entire structure into something better when I get back to Canada.

Today, more experimenting with the SBC in an effort to make it talk to the smartBridge. This is pretty essential and we won't be travelling until it works. We need those radios so we can set up a connection to Tatopani. Mahabir plans to open an Internet cafe there, and the tourists can help pay for the Internet connection.

Someone who was over the whole Annapurna Circuit told me that there is satallite Internet near the pass, for about $1 CND / minute. And she said she used it, lots of people did.

I guess I'm not the only one with an Internet addiction.

Those Darn Mice

Location: Nangi, Nepal
Local Time: Friday, Dec 30, 2005 - 6:21pm

It is now a race. It is a half hour after dark, and the Internet could cut out at any time because of the solar powered relays on the mountain peaks. So, if I post this tomorrow, I lost the race. Otherwise, I'm still a fast typer and employable.

Get this. Over night the mice chewed through another cross over cable that goes through the wall. We just put the darn thing in yesterday, and today when I went to hook the SBC up to it, no signal. We could get power over the cable (Power over Ethernet = PoE), but there was no ethernet connection. Suspicious, as I so often am these days, I unhooked the cable, went outside and pulled it through the wall. They chewed through 3 inches of outer coating and a twisted pair of wires. The green and green-white wires, in case you were wondering.

Buddhists believe that all life is precious, and that a mouse, or a mosquito, are reincarnated souls that were once human and will be again.

So, I'm not suppose to want to fumagate the darn mice.

We have ... cables?

Location: Nangi, Nepal
Local Time: Tuesday, Dec 27, 2005 - 3:45pm

So, I'm back. Internet was out for the first half of the day, not sure why exactly. I'm now trying to get an SBC to talk wireless to an AirPoint radio. Trying to get a manual off the Internet at the moment.

Mahabir got back from Pokhara yesterday, with supplies. Including an extremely kind gift from Matt, the Australian volunteer who departed about a week and a half ago. I hope he made it to China in time to spend Christmas with his brother.

He purchased and sent back with Mahabir, a copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on DVD! How sweet is that? What a gentleman.

Some of you (the more naive ones who have not been to Asia) are thinking, but Harry Potter just came out in theatres. It's not on DVD.

It is in Nepal. Pretty good pirate copy too. No heads bobbing up and down blocking the view. Sound worked all the way through, only 2 skips. No subtitles, but you can't have everything.

Mahabir told us yesterday that because there is not as much moisture in Nepal as there should be for this time of year, Nepal power is having power shortages, so they are randomly turning people off. We will probably continue to experience power problems over the next while.

He also says that three days from now, we will go and work on the link from Histan to Tatopani. So, I'll be travelling again.

In order to hook the antenna up to the SBC, we needed some cables. Mahabir said he was bringing the cable with him from Pokhara. Great, no problem. He got here with 5 connectors and a roll of cable. We make our own cables. No one here has ever done it before, but no problem, away we go. We've got 2 Leathermans, one with needle nose pliers and one with a file, a roll of solder and a propane cooking stove. I guess we're set.

Okay, enough for now.

Cold...

Location: Nangi, Nepal
Local Time: Sunday, Dec 25, 2005 - 8:06am

Well, Sunday comes again. Another week begins.

You know, it is not that it is especially cold here. I don't have a thermometer so I'm guessing a little, but I would say 5 - 10 C during the day, maybe 0 or -1 at night. There is frost covering the grass every morning, and the sun chases it off each day. Water pipes, which are occasionally above ground, do not freeze over night.

No, it is not that it is especially cold. It is that it is always cold. There is no warm place to go to warm up. Fires are not used for heating in Nepali culture, only for cooking. That is not to say the Nepali won't huddle around a warm fire when it is available, but they don't light a fire to heat the room up.

A perfect example is the round house where I live. There is no fireplace at all because we have a gas stove for cooking. Naturally there would be no need of a fireplace.

The only time I am warm is after a couple hours in bed, when I've had a chance to warm the blankets up and circulation finally returns to my feet. The quilt they provided is thick, I have my sleeping bag, and I pile my extra cloths, sweaters and coats on top of that. Works great.

Until I have to get out of bed in the morning.

Flour and Water

Location: Nangi, Nepal
Local Time: Saturday, Dec 24, 2005 - 3:20pm

Yes, I know it is Christmas eve so this posting is nonsequitor, but it doesn't feel like Christmas eve here. No craziness over shopping, hardly any decorations, no looney Christmas carols playing endlessly. Kind of nice actually. Maybe I should hide in the Himalayas every Christmas.

Anyway, here it feels just like any other Sunday. Even though it is Saturday. The weekends here are Friday and Saturday, so today is the last day of the weekend, so it feels like Sunday.

Okay, got that nonsense out of the way. I just wanted to make a quick note about 3 flour and water recipies I know.

Dido
Culture: Nepali

Mix corn flour and boiling water. Stir until it thickens into a thick dough consistency. Serve in a glob to be eaten little bites at a time.

Sampa (Maybe Tsampa)
Culture: Tibetan

Mix barley flour with tea. Stir until it thickens into a thick porridge consistency. Serve in a bowl, eat as breakfast with a spoon.

Paste
Culture: North American, European

Mix flour with boiling water. Stir over heat until it achieves a slight transparency. Mixture should be fairly thin. Let it cool, strain out lumps and use for pasting books together.

Okay, time to go. Merry Christmas to all.

Network Admin in the Himalayas

Location: Nangi, Nepal
Local Time: Friday, Dec 23, 2005 - 9:00am

You know, I have never been a network admin before, so maybe this kind of repetative work is typical, but it seems to me there are particular challenges to keeping the network going up here.

Internet only lasts until a short time after dark, because some of the relays are solar powered with minimal battery power. Yesterday we got the Internet working again after 2 days without. During that time we knew (or at least I knew, people were questioning my judgement, but it was pretty clear to me which relay was out) the problem was in Pokhara. However, without the network connection to Pokhara, we could not contact them to ask them to look at the problem with the network, since the only phone in town runs over the network. So, we didn't even know if they knew about the problem.

It is a full day journey to get to Pokhara from here. At least 4 hours walking (if you go fast), a good 6 hour bus ride. Coming back is worse because the walking trip from Beni (where the bus stops) involves a good 3 hours up a 60 - 70 degree hill.

So, finally the Internet started working again. Pokhara phoned us moments later to tell us that the hub had gone down and they had to replace it.

This morning, I come over here at about 8am. No Internet connection again.

This time I can see there is a problem with our radio. We play with the power connection, and the connection to the switch, and then switch the cable between inside the building and outside the building where the radio is, pointing up the mountain at Relay station 1.

We figure out that, over night, for some reason, the cable from inside the building to outside the building has stopped passing signal. Maybe the mice chewed it, maybe alternating heat and cold (sub zero temperatures here each night) messed it up. Basically I'm just guessing though, because all I know for sure is last night it worked, today it doesn't.

Another situation, Leal was working on one of the IP phones this morning. He kept moving the power plug from one socket to another because for some reason the phone wouldn't power up. Just because a power socket worked last night, is no reason to assume it is working today, so he was trying different power sockets, trying to get the phone to power up.

Finally he noticed that a mouse had chewed about 2 inches of the power cable. Over night. That phone worked yesterday.

It seems that nearly every day, work is required just to keep basic Internet connectivity going. A cable stops working. In almost 7 years of professional programming, this has happened to me once that I know of. Here in the Himalayas, I've seen it several times in less than a month.

A radio turns off. Who knows why? Some times it seems that the voltage going to the radio is not enough so the radio gets in a wierd state where the power light is on, but there is not enough power for it to function. Everything looks okay, there is link light, but no response to a ping. Unplug the radio power for 10 seconds and plug back in to reset it. Bob's your uncle and away you go.

A cable connector gets loose. The connection can be fine one day, and no link the next.

As a programmer each time I see a problem with a running program, I think what can be changed so this doesn't happen again. Each time I spend a day figuring out that some strange message, or even a blank screen, means a line is missing from a config file, I work to make a meaningful error message, so that next time the problem occurs I get an error message on the screen that allows me to immediately fix the problem without spending 6 hours figuring out what the problem is.

However, that is not how it works here. Some thing can be working perfectly, and the next day a mouse chewed a cable, or cold weather affected the equipment, or a power surge at night cooked the hub. Power here is specified to be in the range of 100 - 240V, but it sometimes surges over 300. In only 1 month here, I've seen monitors and power adaptors suddenly start to smoke.

I don't know what you do to fix those problems forever. You just deal with each problem as it comes up. Each day you fix what happened and go on.

One of the reasons I came here to Nangi was I wanted to see a place that was using the Internet the way I think it should be used, for education and communication. If Nangi can do it, why not other places in the world. To me, education is the process of making you aware of choices. You've got to learn to read and write, and some basic math skills, but the details of what they teach you beyond that are mostly irrelevant. It is the process of learning, cracking your mind open, making it change shape, so that you have the ability to see possibilities, to know that things exist beyond the scope of your experience. That is the important thing.

The Internet is part of that. Or it should be. It is access to vast amounts of information. Consider the library resources necessary to research plants appropriate for a nitrogen rich environment, such as a urine bed. Alternatively, about 10 minutes of work with Google can get you some answers.

What I'm finding is that access is not cheap or easy, not as we take it for granted in Canada.

I think there are about a dozen villages sharing this Internet connection. There are few people who work on this network full time, and several others who contribute part time to keep it going every single day.

The link to the Internet is a 64kps link that costs 12,000Rs (~ $240CND) each month. ADSL (Telus High Speed Internet) in Canada gives 640kps in it's slowest direction, for $40CND each month. Most of us don't share that with anyone, certain not with 40 other computers.

The major problem of trying to supply something like Internet access to a remote village is sustainability. There is work to do every day. The village has to want the access, and be willing to put work into it.

Well, that's my ramble for the moment.

Binary Arithmatic

Location: Nangi, Nepal
Local Time: Thursday, Dec 22, 2005 - 1:40pm

Well, I'm in the restricted, teachers area of the computer lab. It is the part of the lab with a UPS, and an Internet connection, even when the other computers have no power nor working network connection. Half the other computers don't even have network cards.

Back in the other room Krishna is teaching grade 9 computer science. They are studying binary arithmatic today. Yes, binary arithmatic. Addition, subtraction, multiplication and division of binary numbers. Also hex numbers and octal numbers.

I didn't do this stuff until first year university.

Also on the government ciriculum is QBasic. Which runs in DOS mode in Windows. That computer language was big, with DOS 6.0 about 15 years ago. Grades 9 and 10 study QBasic, 11 and 12 study C/C++.

It's back ....

Location: Nangi, Nepal
Local Time: Thursday, Dec 22, 2005 - 12:40pm

We had a brief problem with the network. For two days we couldn't contact the station in Pokhara, which has the connection to the Internet. So, no Internet access.

I was having trouble sleeping, no appetite and I was starting to get these odd twitching movements in my head.

And to top it all off, I woke up at about 2am this morning to the sound of running water. I wandered into the kitchen to find that the facet was running at full blast. Now most of the time, full blast is only a trickle. About once a week, full blast is the sound of air gushing out. But today, full blast had some pressure shooting out. Also, because I'm so observant and stuff, I noticed that someone had tied a cloth rag around the facet handle. A bad sign. Yes, the facet had been broken after I went to bed the night before, and gushed water all night, until midmorning when they found someone to come fix it.

At about 11am, Leal headed off to a nearby village where they can contact Pokhara. Nangi has no phones or communication devices, except the wireless network, which wasn't working. So we didn't even know if Pokhara was aware of the problem yet. Sometimes it is something simple, like the plug has wiggled in the power bar and the radio isn't getting power.

A half hour after Leal left, all my symptoms fled as I observed this in the command window:

C:\WINDOWS\Desktop>ping 192.168.254.254

Pinging 192.168.254.254 with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 192.168.254.254: bytes=32 time=6ms TTL=127
Reply from 192.168.254.254: bytes=32 time=7ms TTL=127
Reply from 192.168.254.254: bytes=32 time=7ms TTL=127
Reply from 192.168.254.254: bytes=32 time=8ms TTL=127

Ping statistics for 192.168.254.254:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 6ms, Maximum = 8ms, Average = 7ms

C:\WINDOWS\Desktop>

I can ping the gateway once again. Connectivity resumes. Leal is spending the day walking the mountains for no reason at all. Poor guy.

Some might say I have an addiction, and there are support groups. Since my addiction is useful to society, my support groups are called companies, and they pay me.

They don't, however, try to cure me.

Calendar

Location: Nangi, Nepal
Local Time: Tuesday, Dec 20, 2005 - 8:51am

Nepal has another calendar. Nepali people seem to be able to switch back and forth, so sometimes they use the Western calendar, but every now and again they pop up and say, today is the 5th (instead of 20th).

The Nepali calendar seems to have 12 months, 7 days a week, but it has several months of 29 days, and months of 32 days.

Dec 16 2005 was the 1st of a new month.

Food In Nepal

Location: Nangi, Nepal
Local Time: Tuesday, Dec 20, 2005 - 7:55am

Give me a moment to wax eloquent about the food in Nepal.

As far as I can tell, there are four dishes. I will describe them in more or less random order.

Dhal Bhaat

Pronounced dal bot (more or less), this is the dish in the Nepali diet. All other dishes (the other 3) should be considered in the nature of either snacks or delicacies.

Dhal bhaat is heaps of white rice, a scoop of fried potatoes mixed with cabbage and curry (called tarkari), lentil soup in a bowl and, sometimes, about a teaspoon of chillies, crushed using a morter and pestle to form a spicy paste.

The potato dish is eaten as is. The lentil soup is normally poured over the rice, a little at a time so that the soup doesn't soak the rice and make it softer. Sometimes you drink the soup directly from the bowl, depending on your mood. The chilli paste is eaten a little at a time with the rice.

This dish is eaten for breakfast, and the evening meal, 7 days a week.

Dido

This is a bit of a delicacy. You boil water, then add lots of corn flour, or millet, and mix until all the water is absorbed and the resultant mass has the consistancy of thick cookie dough. Once this is cooked a little more, it is served.

To eat it, you take a handful and mold it into a kind of stick. Using the end of it, you dip it in crushed chillies then bite a little piece off. And swallow without chewing. Chewing dido is bad manners.

I have also seen dido dipped in milk instead of crushed chillies.

Noodles

Think Mr. Noodle in the plastic package and you've got it. These are boiled, powder from the package is added and they are served, sometimes for the noon meal, or sometimes as a snack to tide you over until the evening meal of dhal bhaat.

Popcorn

I have seen this as a noon meal, and as a morning snack. It seems to come it two varieties. One which we are familiar with in Canada where the kernels of corn are fully popped, nice and fluffy. It tasted very lightly buttered to me, as if the butter had been in the pan during popping.

The second variety is more or less half popped. Each kernel is cracked open, a little bit of white fluffs out, but it is mostly seed. Crunch, crunch.

There you go. These are all the types of food I have encounted in a Nepali village. All of them. And I've only seen the popcorn twice in a month. Dido is a delicacy and rare as well. Only twice in a month have I seen it. Noodles, like I say, only noon time, or maybe a snack. So, if you consider breakfast and evening meal, eating twice a day for 30 days, that is 60 meals of dhal bhaat.

Hot Shower

Location: Nangi, Nepal
Local Time: Monday, Dec 19, 2005 - 9:46am

We had internet troubles yesterday. They were gone this morning, so probably a problem with Relay 1 at the top of the mountain.

I had a hot shower 2 days ago. Nice. Boiled a big kettle of water, mixed it in a big bucket with enough cold water that I wouldn't burn myself and then poured it over me 1 cupful at a time, pausing to soap. What more could you ask for?

The Nursery

Location: Nangi, Nepal
Local Time: Dec 11, 2005

Moti took Tammy and I on a tour of the nursery today. There they raise a variety of seedlings including comfrey, orange trees, cherry trees, the plant they use to make paper and some medicinal plants I can't remember the names of.

Some seedlings are raised here, then sold. Some are transplanted into the fields not far off.

The cherry trees and the orange trees don't grow this high up in the mountains, so they are always sold to people at lower elevations.

They plant they use to make paper are a kind of a shrub, I think. Anyway, the entire plant is not harvested for paper, only mature branches are cut off, when they start to blacken slightly.

I really wish I could see the paper making process, but it is not the season.

Empty House

Location: Nangi, Nepal
Local Time: Wednesday, Dec 14, 2005 - 1:52pm

There are currently 5 volunteers here. 3 are leaving tomorrow morning. Tammy and Tim are going off to India to stay in an ashram for a few weeks. I'm not sure where Matt is going. Now it is just Milan and I.

I was sick all last night. Thankfully the bathroom is in the same building as my bedroom. Feeling somewhat better today. Trying to download a manual for a ZyXEL B-1000 wireless radio right now so I can figure out how to configure it.

Day Off

Location: Nangi, Nepal
Local Time: Tuesday, Dec 13, 2005 - 4:11pm

Well, today there was a fet (however you spell it) at the school here. That is like a little party. Well, in the afternoon there was a fet. In the morning the kids marched off into the jungle to carry back a bunch of planks.

The fet was organized by Tammy and Tim who designed and oversaw the construction of the compost toilet here. The theme of the fet was education on how to use and care for a composting toilet. You have to add organic material after each visit. There was a lecture, a drama/demonstration, a bit of acting about how the bad germs are beaten up by the good germs, there was even a few songs from Matt and Milan, on the guitar and harmonica.

Then games and trivia to reinforce the lessons. Then candies for everyone.

And the power is flakey right now, not on full force, so we can't run more than a couple computers at a time. So, I didn't do much today.

More Network Configuration

Location: Nangi, Nepal
Local Time: Friday, December 9, 2005 - 5:48pm

Well, another day, another hike. You know, Robert Service once said:

I've stood at the edge of some mightly mouthed hollow
that's plum full of hush to the brim
I've watched the big husky sun wallow,
in crimson and gold and grow dim
Till the moon set the perlly peaks gleaming,
and the stars tumbled out neck and crop
And I've thought that I surely was dreaming,
with peace of the world piled on top.

He might have been writing of the Yukon, but he was speaking of the Himalayas.

We walked from Nangi to Ramche, where there is a school and a clinic. We tried to configure wireless internet access in both the school (there is a single computer for grades 1-6) and the clinic (where they want to do telemedicine.) We couldn't get a connection. Mahabir thinks that the antenna at Relay Station 1 is pointing directly to Nangi, and doesn't cover a wide enough spread to get Ramche too. So, we left the equipment at the clinic pointing towards Nangi. Tommorrow we will configure another antenna from Nangi to point to Ramche (there is line of sight between the villages.)

Okay, got to go to the library for a novel. Later.

Another Day At The Office

Location: Nangi, Nepal
Local Time: Thursday, Dec 8, 2005 - 6:58pm

Well, I spent today, and yesterday, working to get connected to a Linksys wireless access point. I plug the cable in, run the config program, and nothing. Darn thing. I got the manual, and ran through it on how to reset to factory defaults hoping to use a cross over cable and connect to the web management utility. The manual says, push the hard reset button. There is even a helpful diagram showing the two ports on the back of the access point, and the reset button beside the two ports.

My access point has 3 ports on the back, and no reset button.

I guess there was an upgrade.

Since I don't know the currently configured IP address, I thought I'd just scan the IP range with nmap. So, I downloaded it. It crashes on my Windows 98 laptop. Did I mention I'm working with a cutting edge PII laptop running Windows 98?

So, I downloaded Python and wrote my own IP scanner. It is over there working right now. It is a LOT slower than nmap.

I'm going back to the Linksys site to check for older versions of docs and software for the access point.

Tomorrow, I'm off again. I'm going across the valley to a town called Ramche, or something like that. Should be about a 2 hour walk, so we plan to go in the morning, and be back in the evening. We are trying to connect the clinic in Ramche to the network for tele-medicine.

I'm telling you, the equipment here is ancient, but the things they want to do with it are cutting edge.

Laundry Day

Location: Nangi, Nepal
Local Time: Dec 6, 2005 - 12:31pm

I'm starting to loose track of the days here. Matt, one of the other volunteers, fixed an awesome pasta with mushrooms last night. Very nicely done.

I did some laundry today. All by hand of course. Wet the cloths (water is very cold, but warmer than glacier run off), scrub them with some soap, then scrub the cloths together to work the soap in, rinse and hang to dry.

I did 2 socks and my long underwear (which have been on me WAY too long) before my hands became so numb I couldn't feel them any more. This should have been my signal to continue to do laundry, since there was no more pain involved, but I wimped out. I'll boil some water and go back later. I just had a couple of really important items to hang up so they could start drying.

It doesn't actually snow here, but every morning there is more frost than the morning before. Some places I have seen that are in the shade all day long are frosted all day long. And one pond I saw that was half in the shade was frozen.

So, definately below 0 at night.

Hanging in Nangi

Location: Nangi, Nepal
Local Time: Monday, December 5, 2005 - 4:23pm

Well, I'm in Nangi for the second day in a row. What luxury!

Yesterday the power was out nearly all day, until almost dark.

We were going to Loprey today, to test the Internet connection, but the power inverter didn't work. There is no AC in Loprey, so we were going to haul some batteries there, use a power inverter to convert DC to AC so we could run the radio and laptop. (The batteries on the laptops here are toast, so they hold anywhere from 1 minute to 30 minutes of charge, so we needed a battery for the laptop too.)

However, the power inverter was dead, so the trip to Loprey was cancelled. Instead I copied some photos from some people was was travelling with over the last week, listened to a lecture to some visiting students from Kathmandu (half in Nepali so I only understood some of it) ate lunch, wrote emails and made this blog entry.

The porters carrying supplies from Beni finally arrived, after 2.5 days (it is only a 6-8 hour walk), so we have more supplies. There are plans for a nice dinner tonight.

Everyone take care.

What Goes Down Must Come Up

Location: Nangi, Nepal
Local Time: Sunday, Dec 4, 2005 - 3:23pm

Well, I'm back in Nangi again. Over 6 days of walking, and 5 nights of sleeping, I was in Nangi, Shitka, Kibang, Histan, Kibang, Paudwar, Kibang, Tatopani, Nancheng, Tatopani, Kibang, Shitka and Nangi.

I never slept in the same place twice. Working on computers in the Himalayas involves a lot of walking. Every step you take down a hillside, means a step you take up a hillside later on. You learn to really love the rare flat places.

I had dhal bhaat for breakfast and dinner nearly every day. For those who have not sampled this fine dish, it is a lot of rice, lentil soup, curried fried potatoes and a small amount of what seems to be pure crushed chilies. The lentil soup is normally poured over the rice and mixed up to give the rice flavor, and it works great. Makes the rice really edible. The chilies are also eaten with the rice, a little at a time. The potatoes are great all on their own.

In Paudwar I had dido. Dido is a dough, made of water and corn (or millet) flour cooked until it is thicker than cookie dough. Then you dip it in crushed chilies and bite a small piece off which you are suppose to swallow whole. No chewing. The cook was quite insistent on that point. She said there is a skill to eating dido and if I didn't know how I shouldn't have any, but I wanted to try it at least.

In Histan I had this fabulous tea brewed with some kind of extract from the local trees. Seems the tea has a different name in different parts of Nepal.

In Tatopani I soaked in the hot springs for an hour. Since I had been nearly a week without a shower of any kind, this was as close to heaven as you get on this earth. Tatopani is on the main tourist trail, so that night I ate very well. Not dhal bhat. Don't get me wrong, dhal bhat is great, but not breakfast and dinner every day.

I have been without Internet access for 4 days, and when I got back to Nangi, thinking FINALLY, I would get to check e-mail, the power was out. It has been out for over 24 hours now. No idea why or when it will be back. I think I'm running off of the local power right now to make this posting. Only 2 computers and the printer are going at the moment due to the power situation.

Tomorrow, I'm off to Lowprey to see about setting up Internet access there. They don't have power at all there, so we'll be taking batteries.

Later guys.