Thursday, November 11, 2010

There is power, power, wondering working power in the blood of the Lamb - but not on the lines today

Ten computers, Air Conditioner, and all the people chatting, breathing, and moving - versus the African heat, that was a battle that African power was not willing to fight. We rotated charging our laptops on a system, so that we could all continue working without power failure… well, at least while we had continuous power on this one power strip in the room. We had two outlets, and one power strip, and a whole assortment of plug converters to get from the British plug to American plug, then for some needed to get from the three prong to the two prong. It was a sight for sure.

Our system went into fail mode at times when we drew too much power and blew the circuit – but ah, we had an electrical engineer with us – yay! Dennis went faithfully to reset our power at least a dozen times today. We were playing around with it a bit to see if we could figure out a pattern of how much was too much, but in the end we still lost power unexpectedly throughout the day. The end all for the day was when power for the whole area went out around 4pm. Sunset here isn’t until 7 or 8pm, so we used up all the last juice in our laptops, and one by one switched gears into free time. A group walked down to the water hole to mingle with the locals, and then we settled back at the hotel and played a good game of cards. We were a bit concerned with meeting our deadline, as each hour on a 10 day design trip is worth a week in regular professional time, but we made the best of this dilemma, we are working in Africa after all!

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