Sunday, September 30th, 2007
One of the benefits of being the boss is that I get to make decisions. I get to decide, for example, not to get all draconian with the smart-aleck who thinks he’s so clever, creating innumerable new accounts in order to ’steal’ the 5 minutes of free validation time associated with each:
# Wrapped for LJ readability
if ($user_info['validation_grace_time_expired'] == 't') {
$errmsg = sprintf(_(
"Sorry, your %.0f minutes grace period to
retrieve your email and validate your account
has now expired. You will have to connect to the
internet and validate your account from another
location.
You could always just keep taking minutes by validating
again and again, but that's a little childish don't you think?
If you really, really NEED free Internet, for heaven's sake
just come and see us. Maybe we can help out. If you have
the money, then pay for your darn Internet. It's the
cheapest in town."
), $user_info['validation_grace_time']/60);
$retval = false;
}
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Friday, September 28th, 2007
This email arrived yesterday:
With the assistance of TVL, FM 107 in conjunction with the Fest Napuan management committee are hapi tumas to announce that Fest Napuan will be streamed
live in real time tonight – Friday and tomorrow night on out web stream.
If you already listen to our web stream, then you will pick up the live stream from around 6.00pm Vila time.
For members of the FM107 web site who haven’t tried our stream service yet, just follow the instructions on the home page of our web site.
http://www.fm107vanuatu.com/klab
TVL have allocated us a 1MB link from the concert back to the studio so if you are in range of our normal FM radio signal, the Fest Napuan will also be broadcast live on the radio.
FM107 hopes you enjoy the ’simulcast’ on radio and internet and are proud to be the first to web stream live such a significant cultural event.
Fest Napuan is the biggest popular music event in Vanuatu, and usually features some interesting acts. Performances start again this evening at 17:30 GMT +11.
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Thursday, September 27th, 2007
A few more things one takes for granted in Vanuatu, but which probably bear mentioning to outsiders:
- Shake out your clothes, your towel and your shoes (if they’re close-toed) before using them. You only need one centipede bite to learn this lesson.
- Don’t plan to walk the main roads during rush hour. The pollution from some of the vehicles makes the place feel dirtier than downtown Tokyo sometimes.
- Meet me at Café au Péché Mignon for lunch. Unless you have good reason, do not try to meet me anywhere else.
- ‘Afternoon’ means ‘evening’, specifically around sunset. When someone invites you to go somewhere in the afternoon, do not ask what time. If they mean anything other than between 5:00 and 6:00 p.m., they will specify.
- ‘Afternoon’ is as precise as anyone ever gets. If you request a meeting at, say, 3:25 or 4:15, people will wait till you’re gone and then laugh at you.
- People will continue wishing you a good morning until about 1:00 p.m. It’s not weird. The word actually means something slightly different from the English.
- Unless you’re Canadian, learn to say ‘Sorry’ when you interrupt, pass in front of someone, bump into a lamp post, get stung by a bee, see someone stumble on the other side of the road – you name it. (If you’re Canadian, you already do this.)
- Don’t pass in front of someone if you can avoid it. Never step between two people talking to one another unless there is no other option. (And waiting 20 minutes for them to finish talking is an option.) Say sorry and duck under their gaze if you reasonably can, even if it means bending double. (This does not apply in town. There are simply too many people there for it to be practical.)
- Conversely, get out of the way. That person standing 20 metres away, staring off into nothingness, is waiting for you to get out of the doorway so they can go inside.
- Make smiling your default reaction. You can’t smile too much. Really. It’s unnerving at first to see someone smile and laugh softly when they announce that their house has burned down or that a family member is dead, but… well, it happens.
- Re-read that last point. I’m not exaggerating.
- Just because nobody is talking doesn’t mean there’s no conversation going on. People can convey significant amounts of information with a simple wave of the hand. Learn how it’s done, because it’s fascinating and enlightening.
- People are going to hold your hand far longer than you’re comfortable with. Get used to it. It’s actually kind of fun.
- Learn the ‘finger snap’ handshake. It’s the coolest handshake in the world.
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Thursday, September 27th, 2007
For almost a month now, the Vanuatu IT Users Society has been conducting demonstrations of the One Laptop Per Child Project’s XO laptop. These demos have led to numerous conversations about computers, the Internet and access to information. What affect is this going to have on the Vanuatu way of life?
Most people assume that as a geek, I see technology as a Good Thing, one of the miracles of the modern age. That’s not always the case.
The professional life of an ICT professional is fraught with dangers. They’re not personal dangers, of course. There are few safer things to do than plunking down in front of a computer for several hours each day. The risks a geek faces are risks of responsibility. Every choice we make has implications, some of which can be quite serious, especially in places where resources are limited.
It’s easy to get lost in the technical details. It’s easy to forget that our work is about communications first, and technology second. We can express it any way we like, but nothing we do has any meaning until we remember that our job is helping people talk to people.
That said, computers are complex – the most complex apparatus ever designed for day-to-day use. They require nearly unimaginable hours of effort to render them usable to the average person, at work or at home. (People are pretty complex, too.)
To put things in perspective: If you put a mechanic into a garage full of all the components required to build a truck, she could build one herself. It might take some time, perhaps even months, but eventually a fully constructed vehicle would emerge. Depending on the mechanic’s skills, that truck could be expected to stay on the road for quite some time.
On the other hand, if you put a computer technician into a room with all the physical components required to build a computer, chances are the technician would never manage to make anything more than a simple adding machine, no matter how long you left them there. This is because computers are not machines – not in the traditional sense, anyway.
Computers are systems. And such systems are only possible when vast numbers of people cooperate, each one contributing his or her knowledge and skill to the collective goal of having a useful information sharing device. Engineers, programmers, technicians, administrators, friends and volunteers all have to give their time. Each one takes up the bits of information contributed by others and does a little bit more with them, tweaking this bit or that until the computer is more useful than it was before.
Truly, a computer is like a sand castle, built by countless people, each tossing a few grains here, moving a few grains there. What is miraculous about it is not that the grains are so tiny, but that the castle that we’ve built with them is so immense that we can live inside it, wandering through it almost endlessly. The complexity of computers and the information they process daily is already well beyond the comprehension of most people.
What happens when we take this immensely complicated machine and inject it into day-to-day life in Vanuatu? It’s tempting to say that the complexity of computers will clash with the simplicity of village life, but that’s not true. Oh, there’s sure to be a clash, but assuming that village life is simple is a dangerous mistake.
Vanuatu culture is a dense and richly woven fabric of dependencies, influences and counterweights. It’s doubtful whether any expat, this author included, correctly gauges its complexity.
The problem that technology poses, therefore, needs to be seen differently. The picture we often have is of an ocean of information washing over the ‘simple’ ni-Vanuatu villages in much the same way the King tides wash over the islands of Tuvalu every year. But that’s neither accurate nor useful. Vanuatu society is not a fixed point, immovable and subject only to erosion, salvageable only by the construction of an immense sea wall. It would be more useful to view it as a deep, slow current rising to touch the turbulence on the surface, each one affecting the other.
Every good mariner knows that a lifetime of study is required to be able to navigate the flow when tides converge. Riding this current requires skilled hands at the helm and an experienced eye on the water.
A captain entering such waters for the first time will make every effort to ensure that the charts are up to date, that the crew is alert and awake, and will even take on a pilot in particularly tricky spots. But there’s still no guarantee that the passage will be a safe one. Ultimately, it’s impossible to fight the ocean. You simply ride along, dodging this way or that when the opportunity presents itself.
ICT professionals are the chart-makers, the pilots and the helmsmen of the information world, but they are not usually the captains of any particular endeavour. Nor should they be, necessarily. They are the ones who sweat the details in order that the captain can negotiate a safe passage through dangerous waters.
Things don’t always go well. It’s often frustrating to see painstakingly detailed charts tossed aside by someone who sees only flat water. But the response to this is not necessarily to put more detail in the chart. Sometimes the right answer is to make sure the right person gets the chart in the first place. A good captain can survive a bad chart, but a bad captain won’t be better with a good one.
A bad captain will blame the chart because it didn’t tell him how the currents were going to behave. A good captain doesn’t try to predict what the water will do; rather he uses the charts to decide what to do when the tides take him.
The tide of global information is already in flood. It’s already mixing inextricably with the deep, dense current that is Vanuatu culture. It’s teasing at the edges, amplifying some parts and drowning others, muddying some parts that were once clear and clarifying others that were long obscured.
ICT professionals in Vanuatu face a real challenge. They’re plotting a course through waters that nobody’s seen before, there are too few of them to fully crew the ship and, as with all things, good captains are few and far between.
It’s not surprising that we’re ill-equipped for such a voyage. The same is true of most countries. Developed nations the world over have experienced immense turmoil as a result of the rise of information technology. But they’ve got one advantage: For better or for worse, they’ve been in turmoil long enough that they’ve come to accept it as the norm.
Few in the developed world question the cost of this rootless, fluid existence. Few here in Vanuatu would accept it, given the choice.
Those of us who work in technology – and that means all of us who work in development – need to lift our eyes from the numbers on the charts and ask ourselves: What is our destination, and what is the course? We can’t master the tide, because it has a life of its own. But we can try to be sure that, as each new surge and eddy catches us, we know which currents will pull us into the rocks and shoals and which will propel us toward our goal.
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Wednesday, September 26th, 2007
Here’s a quick list of things one takes for granted in Vanuatu, but which probably bear mentioning to outsiders. This is mostly for ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
damned_colonial’s sake, but might be of general interest.
- Roosters sleep from sundown till 9:00 at night, then start crowing again. One rooster will start it, waking up and fluffing out his feathers before letting loose. This sets wakes up the nearest neightbour, typically in the next yard, and he lets loose, a little more vehemently, in order to disabuse any nocturnal hens of the impression that Junior next door is worth the visit. This continues up and down the neighbourhood for an hour or so, then tapers off. It picks up again shortly before dawn.
- The roosters wake up the dogs, who follow more of less the same modus operandi, modulo the fluffing out of feathers.
- Puddles. Hardly a day goes by that we don’t see at least a few showers. Puddles, mud and wet walking trails are a fact of life once you get into the residential areas. Get used to dirty feet.
- Take of your shoes before you go inside, or onto someone’s porch.
- Lighting. There are two sources of light on most residential roads: the moon and/or your torch. Unless you don’t care about the puddles, make sure you either have good night vision or a torch.
- Slow down. No really. You’ll go crazy if you don’t. Walk slower. No, slower than that. Take your time.
- You might have to wait 60 seconds for someone to answer a question. It feels awkward at first, but just wait.
- Cars and trucks will slow down to chat with passing pedestrians, or just crawl along because… well, because. You’re not in a hurry (trust me – you’re really not, no matter what), so relax and enjoy the ride.
- People will stare. It’s okay, they stare at everyone and everything. Feel free to stare back. Just remember to smile and say hello when your eyes meet.
- People will talk about you in the third person when you’re standing right there. Don’t take offense; it’s a sign of respect, actually. They don’t want to start talking to you until you’ve made it clear that they’re welcome to do so. Allow someone else to speak on your behalf for the first few minutes.
- The first thing anyone will ask is whether you’re married and do you have children. If you’re with a friend of the opposite sex, the assumption will probably be that you two are at least shacked up, if not planning to marry in the near future.
- People will listen to everything you say, whether it’s directed at them or not. Fair is fair, though. You get to do the same. Be inquisitive. Don’t be afraid to ask silly questions to total strangers.
- People will assume that you are not capable of lifting anything heavier than a shell of kava, and will often interpose themselves physically if you try, for example, to carry your own backpack.
- Just because they’re not looking at you doesn’t mean they’re not paying attention. Believe me, they are. More attention than you or I might pay.
That’s it for now. I’ll post a few more of these over the next few weeks….
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