Lagos Calling

I'm back in Lagos after a 5 month Hiatus.

I'm planning to stay for just a couple of weeks, I'll be trying to secure our data in our offices for the Christmas break and also recover receipts I need for the Tax man in the UK.

I arrived yesterday morning and spent the rest of the day resting. I only got a little sleep on the plane, despite taking some herbal tablets to aid sleep.

There was a man on my flight who was being deported, he was in the middle section of the back row accompanied by several security agents who were there because he refused to go quietly himself. He was making a great deal of noise about being sent to his death, and complaining about his hand cuffs. After take off he was much quieter, so I guess he either realised he couldn't change anyones mind now, or the security agents found a way to keep him quiet. We were gently reassured that despite his screams and shouts he wasn't being harmed in any way.

Eventually after arriving and waiting a long time for my luggage I eventually got outside where Nanayah was there to greet me. Bello, my driver, met me outside the gates to the arrivals area.

At the house I met Dad, who was already up, as by this time it was around 8:30am. I also met the New Parrot called Freddie, due to being captured the day England won the Ashes. All I heard was a tuneful whistling, which made me think Mike was there but it turned out to be Freddie. Apparently he knows various swear words already.

All I did for the rest of the day was take a shower, have a nap and unpack my luggage.

Today I attended a meeting at our clients office in response to the draft Final Report, which was issued just after I left in June. Today was the first chance since then for us to sit down and discuss the report with the client. Various typo's and clarifications were identified and noted so that the final report can be finally published.

We discovered in the meeting that bills have been issued using the data we have handed over and they have recieved a great deal of complaints. This surprised us and we have asked for more details but it seems from our own probing questions that bills have been issued to Everybody whether they are customers or not... Not surprising that there's complaints!

We've got a new internet connection that's a little bit faster than standard dial up, but so far it's been quite unreliable for me, but it has apparently been working better prior to my arrival in Lagos.

I put on the server when I was at the project office, to update the debian sarge installation, and it seems that the hard disk has crashed. I'm a little suspicious that somebody has tampered with it since the keyboard cable was trapped underneath the case, and it would have been free when I last used it. I will investigate that tonight.

I've used the Power Supply tester I bought, on some of the computer power supplies I was suspicious had been damaged in a power surge. The tests seem to show that the power supplies were in good working order shich suggests to me that the problems I am continuing to get with one of the systems here is caused by a motherboard fault.

My mobile phone has been causing me problems, All the buttons seem to be malfunctioning. I suspect it's the humidity but it's the first time I've had a problem like this with any phone. I'm hoping it will recover after a while. In fact the buttons seem to work a bit more reliably now than they did this morning, so I'm quite hopeful everything will be ok.

I'll be trying to get my skype phone working soon. Linux has stopped recognising my USB skype phone, probably because I disabled OSS sound in favour of ALSA and skype doesn't work with ALSA. Skype promise a new version of their software soon that will support it.

I'm eagerly awaiting a new version of Gaim that will support the voice protocol in Google Talk. I'll probably switch to this instead of skype when I can get it.