Frank in Africa ‘08

soooo, lets finally write down the full story about what happened to my laptop.

As I wrote before the hard drive crashed because I killed a mosquito that had landed on my laptop, I hit it pretty hard which resulted in the head of the HDD skipping or breaking or something.

So after getting a new HDD (thanks Grrr) and a leopard copy (both these items were in Blaxtars bag that was missing for 8 days) I tried to fix my laptop for the first time. After opening the laptop case and putting in the new HDD without a problem I tried to install leopard… here’s where the trouble started…

1: my superdrive (CD/DVD player/burner) is broken so I had to use another computer to do it, which is fine, I had done this before and didn’t expect trouble, I tried 1 of the powerbooks and quickly realised the copy we got seemed to be Intel only or something, so I tried Beers Macbook pro, which also failed horribly with kernel panics and other fun stuff,

which led to point 2: basically the copy of the disk we got from college wasn’t burned the right way (as 1 could expect from the IT guys at college), after reading some forums about how the problem had to do with the DVD header being set wrong, we attempted to reburn it the right way, the problem was that a dual layer DVD was needed, and since this is africa, it was nowhere to be found, after 6 computer stores, Jeroen actually found an apple store that refused to help because they were doing inventory, but in the end we found a store that had the needed DVDs, so after burning, it didn’t work, so I got an external harddrive for 130 euros, and tried to use that as a boot disk, which also didn’t work, this all cost me about 2 days…

so I gave up for a while and waited for the teacher from college to get here and bring an original Leopard DVD, after receiving that yesterday, it was as easy as 4 click and 1 hour of waiting for it to complete the installation… I now once again have a laptop…it is a great thing.

Nina named it for me, since she felt like it’s such a personal extension of your life that it should have a name. His name is “mr Nilsson” atleast that’s what she said, my laptop isn’t the complaining type…

Tags: Namibia by Frank
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So here I am, my laptop is fixed (finally!), I’m sitting on my bed feeling like crap, I just caught a bad cold, we all know how it starts, you get this weird dry feeling in the top of your mouth, and before you know it the slime is everywhere. funny thing is that a cold is also 1 of the symtomes of malaria, but I’m not worried.

Now how did I get this you might wonder… well… a teacher from college arrived yesterday, he had a cold, and since my immune system is probably pretty weak from the malaria pills my guess is a handshake was enough to make me feel this bad. We’ve all heard the stories before about westerners introducing bad virusses to tribes wiping them out completely, guess this is not simular but it still sucks…

what else, uhmm, think we’re gonna have a “Braai” today (basically a BBQ) with the german students who are also staying at the lodge. there will be lots of meat which is always good, especially since I had vegetarian food yesterday (some of the people in our crew are vegetarians). I don’t know how much I’ll eat though since I’m not feeling that well.

I finished the webisode today, and it should be online tomorrow for you all to see at www.virusfreegeneration.eu/hiphoptour/

Tags: Namibia by Frank
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hey hey,

so I’m in Windhoek Namibia right now, it’s not what I expected it to be, its well, a modern city, large shopping malls, clean new buildings, good roads, lots of white people etc. I can’t say it really feels like Africa, Malawi was africa because life was basic, Tanzania was Afrika because of the mess and bad smells, this place is more modern than Tilburg is, more stores, restaurants and better roads. 

But here’s the thing, we’re staying in the white part of town, we drove through the other neighborhoods and they’re much more what I expected, poor people who have nothing to do but drink all day, really small houses made of all sorts of left over materials (which seems really efficient). I guess Namibia is a country with large contrasts, and its really clear that the white people still have all the power here. they’re the bosses of every store, and the black people seem to do as they say.

we’re staying at a place called “Paccini Lodge” which is run by a german lady, she’s very strict and there are signs with rules everywhere, there isn’t that much allowed, but according to her thats what keeps this place safe. I dunno if I agree with that…

After being in Windhoek a few days we moved to Keetmanshoop (a 6 hour drive, at night, with 10 people in a small van) which is a smaller town, more primitive in ways, but still pretty modern for an african city I’d say, we stayed at a place called the “Central lodge” which was of course also ran by Germans, it was a nice place with good food and a large swimming pool.

on a Saturday we were there we went to an internet cafe to see how fast it was, they advertise their internet as  “ADSL”, but its not what they have, if you find a connection over 5kb/sec you’re very lucky. while we were waiting for our stuff to upload I stepped outside and realized that there was nobody there, the streets were empty and I wondered why, it felt like a ghost town almost, just a clean ghost town with perfect concrete roads (germans), the supervisor at the lodge told us that its normal and its like that every day, stores close at noon and people go inside to sleep, later I heard from the guy who’s driving us around that its because of this thing called “payday” people all get paid on the last friday of the month, and then go on a shopping spree, but the store employers also get paid on that day so the stores close and everybody ends up getting totally drunk at the townships. on Monday everything was back to normal and the stores were open 9 to 5.

A concert was held at a small soccer stadium, a ot of kids showed up (they don’t have any other form of entertainment) and it seemed to be a succes, Nanibia is home to the Namas, names somewhat look like a mix between black and asian, people have really pretty faces it seems. and are all very slender. the Namas are genetically proven the oldest race on earth. We again had problems with the audio equipment overheating at the concert, and the amp died a few times, but nobody really seemed to mind.

the day after the concert we drove back to Windhoek, which is a 6 hour drive through the desert, since its the rain season, it was really green and looked amazing. we’ve been back in Windhoek a few days right now, we got to hang out with some german students which was a nice change of things, spending 35 days with the same people all the time sorta gets to you at times.

it’s 8:30 am right now, the battery is about to die, and today I might actually get to repair my macbook pro (I’ll write about all that later)

only 31 more days to go I think,

you guys better comment!!!!

Tags: Namibia by Frank
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yes I’m still alive and doing well, but with all the traveling there isn’t much time to write blog posts, stay tuned!

Tags: Namibia by Frank
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