Conspiracy

Sometimes in Nigeria, and I suppose many other parts of Africa, it can seem that people and events conspire to frustrate and prevent you from performing your job properly. From Monday ~8am until this evening we have been without a Mains electricity supply from PHCN. So we had to rely on Generators, of which we have two. Both of them failed on Monday night, leaving me to sleep in a quiet but very hot bedroom. In the morning I had to wait until the Generator repair man could come to take a look. Eventually he came and got one of the Generators up and running. This was about 1pm I guess because I had already read half of a Jeremy Clarkson book by the time it was up and running.

So finally I got some A/C and started up our computer systems, so I could check my email and start work. The PC we use to connect through our ISP refused to start. Windows XP Bah!

Eventually I traced the problem to a dozen or so corrupt files in Windows System folder and the only option was to run the repair function of the Windows XP install CD. This I'm happy to report, actually worked and all the corrupted files were replaced. I believe I may need to fetch some Updates again now.

The hard disk it turns out had a few bad clusters so I decided to replace it rather than take a chance that it will not get worse. So I used Knoppix to mirror the disk onto a new hard disk (I like keeping a stock for this reason) and then removed the old drive altogether.

As you can see I'm back online and everything is back on track. Today I was able to finish the work I was supposed to have ready yesterday.

These things seem to happen far too often here, There's always a spanner waiting to fall in to the gears and stop progress.