Strategic Internet

I never have considered myself much of a computer person. Computers
never seemed to like me very much, and I was always pretty indifferent
about them. But recently there had been an uneasy truce. I've been
unemployed and had time to procrastinate with the internet instead of
study for the GREs. Scrabulous! However, in Ethiopia it has been a
whole different story.

There is an internet cafe very close to me, and it is very reasonably
priced, about 2 cents per minute. The guy running it is friendly and
helpful, etc. However there are a couple of issues. First it can be
very slow. Though the real problem is that the speed is very
unreliable, sometimes very very slow, sometimes quite adequate. So you
never know what you are going to get. I've taken to going after lunch
when no one else is there which seems to help. However, my best
strategy is my patented multi-tab approach. This tactic involves
opening up something I want to read first. Then, after it has loaded,
opening up something else I want to do in another tab, so that it can
load while I am reading the Times (or whatever). The trick is always
have something else loading so that you won't be left sitting there
staring at the screen. It gets tricky when writing an email, and you
mean it to be short, but your second page hasn't finished loading, so
you try to write some more. Or vice versa, and you have to cut it off
to keep everything moving (some of you may have noticed my reply
length can vary tremendously). However this is all expected, I am (as
the Ethiopian say) in Africa after all.

What is causing me to make offerings to the computer gods is when
particular pages or even email addresses decide to not work. Sometimes
I restart, sometimes I just give up. I have switched browsers five to
six times (do you all know about Opera?). This very blog is not a
favorite of the Ethiopian Computer Gods (ECGs). It won't work at all
unless I get my friendly internet cafe owner to set up a special
connection, and sometimes it doesn't work even then. (I hope you
realize the effort I am making to make this happen). The most
mystifying and supernatural (definitely not natural) example is when I
tried to email my good friend Max McMahon; no matter what I tried (I
tried every browser, four different computers, etc) I could not send
him and email. I could send other people emails from the same account.
I could do anything else on the internet. I couldn't send him an email
from either of my email accounts to either of his email accounts. It
was crazy. I must of offended the spirit of the ECGs that day, but I'm
not even sure what I did or how I can appease them.

I am really not having too many cultural communication problems,
except with the computer culture. Computers are magical and I am no
wizard.

I will update this blog as often as I can (and I mean as often as 'I can').