“How is a Windows Domain like a cult?”, Kevin asked me far to late in the night for him to still be awake (midday for me!).

“Oh dear…”, I muttered in reply.

“If you join one you loose your identity, and if you try to leave you’re screwed.”

If you got that joke, or even still care, kudos to you. Otherwise, abandon all hope at the door.

In a gregarious act of ignorance, truely the source of most of my computer problems, I removed a computer from a network domain without reseting the password for the local computer’s non-domain admin account. Ugg.

Sort of funny – I am the one who is supposed to know everything, and what do I do? In a coun try without any resources, no reliable internet connection, not even a Windows CD to rebuild the machine with, I lock myself in a digital room and throw away the key. To make matters worse, I did this all in the few seconds it took while leaning over an engineers shoulder. He got a long lunch.

Windows has tight security, and everything I found to break password was either hundreds of dollars, or non-existant. And then:

http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/

It is a linux based boot disk that will fork into the user accounts on a Windows computer and let you change anything. Got to love that windows security. Take that Kevin!

“Problem refers to a situation, condition, or issue that is unresolved or undesired.” – Wikipedia

There is that common question that I keep having to field: “How is it?” The hot answer has gotten cold, and so I find myself commenting on technology. Work is not going well, and while I have done my best to be deferential to a culture to which I am a guest, I finally snapped.

Simply put, the Internet does not work. We moved the offices to this house in Seeduwa because it was the only reasonable place in which we could get broadband internet access. But the access is shaky, and I have yet to be able to transfer all of the files I need from the U.S. As you can see, the wiring leaves much to be desired. (This particular example is how our phone is connected to the splicer.)

Ignoring the modem/router unit which is giving me error messages in French, and enough configuration options to hang myself with, very frequently the problem is simply that a connection can not be established with the ISP. When a connection does come through, it lasts for 5 minutes before crashing into a never ending cycle of failed connection attempts. While I am sure this is boring to read, it is even worse to experience. I have spent more time trying to get a network connection than any other task. The bulk of my time has been spent trying to get the internet connection to stabilize, while realizing that it is completely out of my control. This morning I came unglued when not only had the internet connection gone down, but it had rippled back into the office network, preventing the computers from connecting to each other.

(more…)

“This is about the only place in the house,” Kara said the first night I arrived, placing my cup on a shelf in the kitchen, “that isn’t infested with cockroaches.”

Lovely… Welcome to Sri Lanka!

I can deal with a lot, but I have had some surprising reactions, and some fantastic discoveries over the past couple of weeks. There are the obvious notables, such as cats and dogs running around with no one treating them as pets (Anjuna seemed annoyed and confused at the idea, although he was familiar with it). There are a surprsing number of cats, a good number of which are kittens, near the house.

For the benifit of the breed aware, half of them look like a tabby/bengal mix, while the others look like calicos, with a strong emphasis on the white and orange. All of them look scrawny. Anjuna was suprised when I told him I had a cat (“Blue?“), but was quick to tell me that a friend of his had 6 dogs. I got the impression that Anjuna didn’t make house calls very often.

There are bugs, of course. I was glad to usher a spider out of my bed a few night back, and was grateful that this unexpected beauty to the right didn’t put me into a hospital bed when I almost walk straight into his web while getting out of a trishaw in Negumbo last weekend.

While in America I do my best to live in karmatic harmony with all the little creatures loved by Mother Earth. Here it is war. Mosquitoes are the worst. Dengue fever is hitting a lot of local ex-pats (at least from what Kara says), and I am not taking any chances. The first time I went after a mosquito I barely nicked it before it exploded all over my shorts. I was caught somewhere between the horror of having killed the bug and the horror of now having to wash my shorts as the morbid delight, akin to a 12-year-old boy with a magnifying glass, took hold.

And then there is Ted. Ted is a gecko. He lives behind the oven. He is my friend.

Okay, he scares me to death. Something about the way he moves. It doesn’t help that he is always moving while in the corner of your eye. It doesn’t help that he snakes his way in unpredictable patterns across the wall, with you never knowing if his next move might be to leap at your head and suck out your eye ball.

The other night he was in my shower (A.K.A. the pipe in my ceiling — Kristi, think Bulgaria, minus the curtain). It was time for us to talk. It turns out he had first dibs, so I went and talked to Grant on I.M.

“There is a gecko in my shower.”
“Coolio,” Grant replied. “Have you named him?”
I didn’t miss a beat. “Ted.”

I don’t know why his name is Ted, it just is. That was the first name that came to my mind. Grant didn’t like this logic, but Kara and I couldn’t help but laugh the next day when I relayed the story. Our boss’s name is Ted.

Brent, Ralph – I am completely serious. I met Jay’s Sri Lankan brother.

While running around Colombo yesterday, Kara and I dropped by Majestic City to buy a new cell phone and look for housewares. We were asking people for “silverware”, a concept that doesn’t translate so well. A sales man in one store took us both by surprise when out of his mouth came perfect English. Kara later said, for reasons beyond her, that I seemed mesmerized by this man.

He had a long face and doned wire framed glasses. He teased Kara when I encouraged her to buy a spatula. “Oh, he wants you to cook him a good meal,” he teased.

In our counter chovanism, Kara and I both hopped at the chance to inform him that I would be cooking with the new spatula. He was delighted, telling me that cooking is a hobby of his as well. “In America, many men cook,” and having met her gender equality quota for the day, she continued shopping as I chatted with our new friend.

His hair was bushy, and just a little on the wild side — unusual for Sri Lankan hair. There was a familiar quality to the glint in his eyes. It was as if he was both absent, yet completly aware. And as he continued telling me about his recent adventures with sushi, each of us sharing horror stories with wasabi, and his run in with bad cockney accents in England, I found myself a bit startled as the connection began to form in my mind.

I miss you Jay, and I wish you well.

“Rain” might have been an understatement.

Against my better expectations, I now find myself… well, “acclimated” is the word that Kara uses. Apathy might be a better choice.

The heat still rolls on, as does the sweat, but the only deficit I can complain about is any heat induced decrease of productivity. So much for kissing corporate American goodbye. It is so hard to get anything done. Like a creature suffering from reverse-cold bold, I find myself most afternoons laying on the couch, leg over the arm, laptop in tow, pretending I’m effective.

It was about the time I thought the heat might not be a deterrent from living here that the engineers told me that these are the cool months.

These engineers, Amitha (ah-mee-tah) and Anjuna (an-june-ah) have, to put is accurately, taken curiosity at me. I think they like me, but I don’t think I can say for sure. They are, however, enjoying my delight at the daily cultural spatterings they toss in my direction. I, in turn, am teaching them slang. (We started with “geek.”)

Sri Lanka, much like India, is known for their spicy foods. The have such a broad range of food options, sweet to spicy, that it is an absolute delight for the taste buds, provided you have the pallet. Kara (may she not suffocate me at night), does not. One day the boys (as Kara refers to them) returned with lunch packets. With the boys’ permission, Kara encouraged me to try this mixture of meats, vegetables, rice and spices, all wrapped up in a thin piece of plastic, twisted at the top, and like everything else here, packaged in newspaper.

Sri Lankans have an interesting way of eating. Kara and I have had a hard time finding silverware for the house because no one here uses it. Instead, a common meal is based on rice, which is eaten with the hand. You will pick out some curry mixture, or spice, or whatever is on your plate, and mix it into the rice with your hand, always the right (you don’t want to know why). I have been informed that locals are constantly mixing their rice, balling it up to create perfect little bites with precise portions of their favorite flavors. The food is then grabbed into the fingers of a cupped hand, with the thumb curled and held at the back. One opens his mouth very wide, sticks his fingers in and then pushes the food into his mouth with his thumb. Confusing? I am a pretty messy eater.

I think Kara expected me to gringo-out in response to the lunch packets, and what she expected to be unmanageable heat. Sure, they were spicy, but a good spicy. Turning her trick back on her, and winning points with the boys, I teased her for her taste buds.

This has become an interesting game with the boys, as they both seek out increasingly spicy local dishes. Today they returned from an afternoon break with what I think they called wavee. These little rolls with a local green pepper cooked inside are traditionally served with a chili mash inside, and of course, wrapped in newspaper. They offered me a chili-free version before I took the spicier option.

Trying to recover from the boys’ disappointment at not having found something to best me, I asked, on a scale of one to ten, how hot this was for them. “Seven”, Amitha said. We all decided that Kara needed to try these as well.

At the end of the day I walked out with the boys to the wavee stand, across the street from the Buddha shrine. I paid for the food and the boys said good night, making me promise a full report of Kara’s reaction to the chili paste. As I started back down the road to home, I took a bite into my spicy local haven and for the first time since I arrived, it began to rain.

Want to see where I live? (AVI, ~34MB)

A quick note from Carly, tuning me on to A Softer World.

The timing is funny. I have been bonding with Kara, a brilliantly open-minded Mormon who was terrified that I was going to hate her simply because of her religion. Granted, there is plenty of reason. But who am I to demand that she be open to me while I am not to her? Apparently this fairly simple concept has yet to reach the populous. “It’s refreshing,” she said.

At any rate, this is a really fun and tweaky site, and a wonderful follow up to Carly and I’s discovery of Frank Warren and his book PostSecret (and similarly titled blog) while in D.C. — Enjoy!

Or so says Lonely Planet.

Apparently 74% of the population here on the island is Sinhalese, while the Tamils constitute about 18% of the population. Each group has their own language, but apparently everyone uses English to talk to each other. That, however, is a bit optimistic. Yesterday we sent time running around Colombo running errands. Interviewees didn’t show up, computer equipment was a challenge to locate, and through it all trying to talk to people was tricky.

No one who has spent any time abroad will be surprised, but it was the people at McDonald’s who were the easiest to talk with. We were supposed to meet a programmer there for an interview. It seemed the most obviously American place that we could produce on the fly. Without much surprise, he didn’t show. A text “Sorry, I’ll be late. Can you email me the details instead?”

This from the programmer who was supposed to show up a week earlier, never called, but apparently was in the hospital. We later found out that his father shares the same name, and it was him who was incapacitated.

So, we called people tonight to set up interviews. Talking on the phone is impossible, and reading resumes is more of an artistic experience. You know that objective portion that is on every Microsoft Word resume template? The one that we hate to fill out in fear of being so ego-maniacal? Well, throw 3rd world and bad English in there and you get something like this:

“Becoming a professional with multi disciplinary specialization and contributing through knowledge to create humanitarian society by setting examples in leadership, interpersonal relationships and good conduct.”

Say what?

(By the way, on the stats portion this applicant was quick to include “Skin Tone: Fair.”)

It is hot. If every post while in Sri Lanka included this fact, it would remain an understatement. It is 10PM and we just got back from an action packed day in Colombo attempting (with varied success) to buy office and computer equipment.The trip out of Colombo was horrific. While it took us 25-30 minutes on a bus to get in, the end of day traffic made that trip easily 2 hours. Such inconsistency is everywhere. Used monitors are cheap, but surge protectors are $40 USD. Women are treated with a lot of respect, but I am expected to sit on a bus before Kara does.

Rather than suffer from the culture shock it seems best to just sit back and watch the idiosyncrasies roll on by. For example, when Kara and her husband moved into this new house (apparently just days before I arrived), she asked the landlord what the policy was with trash. This is an “upscale” neighboring city and one of the few places that you can get “reliable” DSL. Upscale or not, our landlord was apparently confused at the question.

“What should we do with our trash?”, Kara repeated. “Are there trash men?”

“Oh, no no no.”, the landlord replied. “Just throw it over the fence.”