Joel Johnson Has Him a Blog

So much happened today I'm not quite sure where to begin. I'll take the easy way out.

I woke up covered in sweat, which is typical down here with no air conditioning. I'd covered myself twice in bug spray during the night, so I awoke relatively bite-free. I had missed the morning meeting, but actually listened to it from the next room where I was sleeping (I didn't want to walk in halfway through). There wasn't much for we tech guys to do without new equipment as far as planning went—especially while we're still waiting on equipment—so no harm.

She won't say it, but we have been running Malik's wife Sharon ragged. She's been cooking, cleaning up, fielding phone calls—everything—and having up to a half-dozen journalists in her kitchen, hunkered over laptops, was starting to get frustrating, I'm sure.

Fortunately (for us), the next door neighbor has decided to leave town, leaving Malik the key to his half of a duplex. Out of respect for his remaining stuff, we cleared out his front room and are trying to keep everything super clean. That does mean we can't sleep on his bed, sadly, but I'm working on calling him and offering him a bit of money for rent. To be able to sleep on a bed instead of the floor would be great.

On the plus side, this house got power today, which means we got central AC. I suppose the bills are still in this guy's name (and we'll have to work that out later), but for now it feels great.

But before we got our AC, I drove over to the medical center to see if they had any folding tables free. They didn't, however, which means I had actually use a Skill saw to cut wood. Not only that, I then used that wood to create something that isn't a dick joke. A couple of sheets of plywood and some two-by-fours later, I made us a couple of desks to use in the media center. Once we get all the computers online Wednesday (when a French org is dropping off 9 monitors to go with our AMD machines), I'll put up pictures. I will be very, very proud, and you will have to commend my resourcefulness in strange times and fearlessness in the face of manual labor.

This afternoon, right before a visit from Naomi Klein & crew, we lost our Verizon uplink. That sucked a lot—not only did we lose internet for ourselves and our immediate neighbors, we had another EVDO card coming in from another worker today that would be useless. Jake and I scrambled to find an alternate uplink before the curfew, but even though we had power back we couldn't dial up. I called a few people to see if they'd help me blog a few short things, but we resigned ourselves to going through the nearby affluent neighborhood to see if anyone would let us piggyback off their DSL or cable modems.

Fortunately, we regained connectivity just a couple of hours ago, so we're back in business. Tomorrow we can wire the medical center and begin helping the low-power FM station get online. I scavanged some materials from the street that I should be able to rig into an antenna tower for all our transmissions. I'm looking forward to building that tomorrow.

It's finally starting to come together and there's tons more work to be done. I'm sorry this isn't very interesting writing, but I'm just too brain dead to do more than journal our progress right now.

We're starting to get a little snippy with each other, but a lot of that was when the internet was down. Never get two geeks into a place with no internet.