The Water Fall

In the summer I kept hearing the citizens of our lovely town talk about a waterfall, in a village far away. The journey to the waterfall was fairly arduous, Vince, one of our former finance people thought he was going to have a heart attack, so after he went there for the first time he started to work out a lot which made him a lot healthier and happier. Jordan, the Banner man, also said that it was a hard trek to the place.

Eventually, I decided to make time for a trip, the falls; from speaking to people I knew that we would need a four wheel drive vehicle, Mr Umar, the Transport Officer, said that I would assign me a driver who would take us there. I asked if I would have to speak to the driver but he said he would make those arrangements. To make it cheaper I invited about four people to come with me.



On the big day it turned when I called Umar about the truck and driver he told me to speak Mustapha. When I called Mustapha he told me it was his day off and he was going on a trip with his wife, and furthermore no one had told him about driving excursionists. When I heard this I complained to the TO about his broken promise which made him mad, since I did not want to get into a useless discussion of he said/he said I simply asked could me and Labaran pick up the truck? He agreed most readily to this so we picked up the truck and got the rest of our party. which consisted of;

• Your narrator
  
• Labaran the fixer
  
• Young Victor, the aspiring poet
  
• Charles "Indiana State of" Jones
  
• Jamal "X Shabazz"
  
• Melba the shrinker of heads.
  

After a long drive over dirt roads past villages, rice paddies, fields of 10 foot high millet, over streams we got to the village of the waterfall. The drive had reminded me of the time we drove my car through the Modoc National Forest so that we could get to the Rainbow Gathering. Just when I thought my lower back could not take it any more we arrived at Waterfall Village, this made me very happy since the truck was very crowded and uncomfortable in the back seat.


As usual whenever you go on excursions in Nigeria you will meet the villagers, spend some time with them, share kola, and give them a little something something. In return you will get a group of helpers who will carry your bag even if you don't want them to. going through all the protocols of Adamawa with the prominent elder we started the walk to our destination.



We walked past the flowering okra fields which Melba had never seen before and started to go up the highlands. The trip was okay for the first hour and then we came to the rough, steep part. Imagine if you will a path that is 1.5 metres from a sheer drop. At the end of this drop there is a rocky, rapid stream that has carved gullies in the valley. The path is overgrown with elephant grass, bushes, and other things, the path is also bisected by streams, in some sections its slippery because of the clays in the soil. and there can be a 40 degree incline in a few spots. While you are picturing all this imagine doing this on a humid day with temperature in the 40 centigrade range and you will have an idea of what the trip was like. Anyway, it was really hard for the 30 minutes it took to get over the hard part and my heart probably went up to 80 beats per minute during that half hour. But when I got done there was the waterfall in all its misty glory.

I took off my clothes stepped into the water and swam a little, let the water carry me down a couple of cataracts and had a great time. I even stepped under the waterfall and it was fucking cool. The force of the water wanted to push us away from the cataract, knock us down and carry us away. The only way me, Victor & Charles were able to stay under the fall was by holding on to each other..



After being there for an hour we all got dressed and went back. On the return I sat in the pickup's bed with Victor and it was a lot more comfortable though very un safe since there are no seatbelts there, though it was fun to watch the trees, roads and villages speeding away. It was also much cooler than the ride to the falls since the cool breeze made by the speeding vehicle was much more pleasant than the underpowered air-conditioner.

You've Got To Get Behind the Mule Every Morning and Plough

When this semester started there were a few things that I wanted to get done so that I will feel a sense of accomplishment. Those things were;

• Completing my rough draft of my Java textbook.
  
• Finishing my rough draft of my Operating Systems book.
  
• Writing an outline of our research project.
  
• Getting money for our project
  
• Training the swim team
  
• Improve my running and swimming performance
  
• Teaching my classes.
  
• Finding a good backup solution for our environment and circumstances.
  
• Getting automated installs working for our labs.
  
• Getting up a LDAP server for our school.
  
• Building a secondary Moodle server so that we can have failover.
  

All those things were very important, and I wanted to make some progress on every single one. Those that were work network related are very difficult since we have no budget, our equipment is failing and cobbled together. If I was not teaching instead of doing mainly teaching and some sysadmining I would have more time for that. Some of these tasks I am able to combine others have to be done in a certain order. I will be very happy when we get RT set up so that we can keep track of requests and IT projects that we are trying to finish we are also going to move a FC12 server to the data centre probably next week.

After thinking about it I found a backup solution that will work for our low tech network where I expect every device to fail and to not get replacements. It is related to the design I have come up with that will make our services more reliable. The main problem is the time to set it up now since we have been working on the issues that need to be fixed first such as automating deployments and figuring out what systems we have and what their states are. As to the swimming running & stretching that has been difficult but I have been running fairly regularly. I even did it in Washington.

On all the projects the has been some progress though it has been very slow, earlier I had even more stuff I wanted to get done but I thought it would be smart to scale back and wait till the summer to do stuff on data bases.

The one thing that I have tried to do is be pessimistic about what I can achieve so that I do not over schedule my self. The one thing that I have been doing is gettin behind the mule every morning and ploughing so that I make a little progress every day. As the song says I have been getting behind the mule everyday and ploughing.

The Mysterious Stranger

When I lived in Anchorage I relied on the kindness of strangers to get hundreds of public domain audiobooks. One of the first public domain audiobooks was Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories. As other people have said the title story is very existential, it looks at the flaws of humanity with a great deal of humour and clarity. In some ways its similar to Candide.

Anyhoo while paddling in the sea of interwebs I found a reference to angel called Satan which led me to a a clip in a TV show I had never heard of called The Adventures of Mark Twain. As you can see the we can enjoy the adventures of Satan. The readers for these istorirs are a credit to the whole Librivox community.

Nobody Expects Automated Expect!

While I was trying to fix some issues with an expect script that runs checks on a server I found out that instead of having to write the scripts or having workstudys learn about expect on top of everything else I want them to do we can use autoexpect to basically create a script for us. When autoexpect is run it enters all the commands that were typed into a script.

I am always glad to find software that works hard so I don't have to, maybe later I will play with Pyexpect

What is This Diversity of Which You Speak?

While I was at a house rave I ended up having a talk with an eager engineer about what is seen as good public policy, my conversationalist was not happy that the politicians were not able to sit down and do what is right for the country. I simply told the lady who was very proud of her engineering degree that there is disagreement about what people think is best for the nation so of course there will be debate, obstruction, gridlock and fighting because for one thing how do you define what is best for the country let alone on the means of achieving that end. This is a problem that I have noticed when folks about things like political parties in America, both the major parties talk about being democratic but they never have been. Foe example prior to the 1972 convention the democratic ticket was determined by machine politics that did not cater to the wishes of people who were racial minorities, women, nonchristian or nonheterosexual. By the 1972 convention people left out of the Democratic party's decision making process took over the organization and suppressed the ward heelers and machineites in the name of democracy. I guess that this problem occurred partly because both sides had different views of what a democratic process was. More recently when there was Michigan & Florida's democratic primaries were overturned there was a great deal of electrons loosed about how undemocratic that was. However having those primaries in the first place was undemocratic as well as the fact that most people never have a say in who their party's nominee is. But I only brought this up because the fact that so many people disagreed about what is a democratic process is similar to my question on what is diversity.

I first really thought about this when we went to a dinner in Homer, one of the things that makes Homer different from the rest of Alaska is that it is the only town in the state that the Republicans do not dominate in. Normally I would like such an accepting place except for the following problems. The first problem with Homer is that real estate is incredibly expensive a plot on a mountain 10 miles from town, with no amenities and a dirt track can sell for a million dollars, so a town that started out as a fishing village and a peninsula whrer hippies lived has now become a place where wealthy tourists come to live for three months. I met some of the wealthy Homerians, they are very nice, personable, and have good values and I really enjoyed their company. Despite how much I liked Homer's wealthy former hippies and salty fisherfolk Homer is one of the least ethnically diverse parts of Alaska, throughout the state there are lots of Alaskan Natives, Filipinos, Africans, African-Americans and others but I ran in to so few people of colour there. Though Homer is very welcoming to diverse lifestyles and different ways of thinking it is racially very homogeneous as well as being a place where most middle or working class folks will have to go outside of town to get work which is truly unfortunate.

In Anchorage there is a great deal of racial diversity but when it came to political diversity I did not run into that as much. I met a number of Alaskan Natives, Pacific Islanders, and Black folks who were all right wing. One example of a conservative person of colour was the President of Eklutna Inc, he had a plaque from a Republican party fund raiser. Even though I completely disagreed with these people about social policies, fiscal matters, and the role of government I was very happy to see that they were not of one mind as many left wing Caucasian people would assume about people of colour's political views. Most of the people that I met did not want restrictions put on fishing or hunting, were in favour of increasing the number of mining operations, and strongly against taxes and government oversight of industries. These views should not be surprising in a state that is as remote, rural, and conservative as Alaska, but one of the issues that it made me think about was what type of diversity do I value most? Would I prefer a place with more ethnic/racial diversity or somewhere that is racially/ethnically homogeneous but is culturally and politically heterogeneous.

After thinking about this for about a year I have come to the conclusion that neither situation is optimal for me, I wonder why can't we have both? I would prefer to live in a place that is diverse in diverse way, anything else will seem like a sham to me. Now that I am done with this post for now I will probably spend a year thinking about how Nigeria with its hundreds of languages and cultural norms which sometimes differ completely from each other there is no real diversity.

With Just The Right Bullets Tom Waits Will Drink Your Blood Like Milkshake!

For some strange reason I have started posting again, hopefully I can make an entry a day. As the blind man said to the deaf mute, "We shall see!" When I started this thing called blogging I would post a Tom Waits video every Thursday, I guess I was trying to be like Driftglass. If I can ever right as well as he does and as often I will be a happy man. I first hear this album in 2000, when I borrowed it from The Ames Public Library. At that time I did not really care for it. However, eight years later it became one of the albums that I listened to the most. I find that each time I listen to Tom Waits' work I find a new song to appreciate, even though I have heard most of his songs about a hundred times already.

I wish you all a wonderful Thursday and maybe next week I will be a Black rider again since that will make me happy, with fifteen silver wishes left.

Just Another Day Running Past Luka's Paradise

In the past I would use the treadmills at the university club, but, sometimes the machines would loose power in the middle of my run, or would not start at all. One of the most unpleasant things that you can experience is to have your workout come to a halt when your blood is up. These things happened so many times that I stopped running for five months and only swam. Though swimming 60metres is more tiring than running a 5K I was still not getting the best workout possible since I usually get bored with swimming after thirty minutes, and a better workout would involve 30 minutes swimming/ 30 minutes running, with me increasing the distance covered each week.

Anyway, after thinking about it this week I decided to run around Yola every morning to greet the sun, for added bonus points I would sing My Blue Sky continously, and reminisce about my favourite software commercials. This would be a difficult task since I do not know the lyrics to the aforementioned songs and tend to dislike software commercials. As a result of these problems I decided to make the task easy and only sing SwordFishTrombones during my half hour jog. So far it has been going well though the hamarttan dust, odour of burning plastic, smell of decomposing shit, partially burned petrol, get my allergies going at the rate of drunken cyclist who is pedalling on a foggy night. The actual running is not so hard, though I am trying to achieve a five minute mile, normally I run at a relaxed pace so I can do a 5K in 30 minutes, but to push myself and reach that higher level I am trying to do speed work each week.

At 6:30 am the water sellers are loading uo their carts and pushing them along. The wandering lunatics are psyching themselves up for a day full of rambling and ranting, The ackara lady is heating her wok full of oil while the little boy mixes the bean paste one last time. The early risers are on their way home from the mosque, street dogs are getting ready for a day of sleeping in the dusty, eroded road, and meanwhile the sun's shines on me. At seven I jog home with my lungs aching, my legs aching, my nose running and eyes bloodshot, like the day Steppin' Razor yelled "bumbaclot!".