“Told you so.”

Hours: 7

I could have sworn I heard someone playing the piano last night.

We finished up the last of the individual issues at ESBAO today, but of course, we ran into a few complications. Once we had all the computers in the room, on the right tables and configured as they needed to be, we decided to run through, plug everything in and make sure it worked. Needless to say, several of the computers had issues… mostly that someone working on them yesterday put single sticks of RAM that needed to be doubled up (SDRAM, etc) so we were getting many parity errors. Out of the 30 there, 4 got pegged to be reexamined. I don’t see how they didn’t pick this up yesterday when they were turning them all on before we brought them into the room. Only 1 had an odd, unfixable thing. (or rather, we it was easier to switch it out than replace the motherboard). Once we got them all in place, we decided to check them all out again. When half the computers were turned on, the breaker tripped. (Yesterday, Taylor and I suspected this would happen but Neito swore up and down it would be ok…if he would have been there we would have given him such a hard time). There was not much we could do, they are going to bring an electrician out to split the lines and fix it. We’re due back there next week when the internet should be hooked up and the electricity more constant.

Neito was finishing a deal between the city and Motorola to pull internet up the mountain to some of the smaller villages via wireless access points. They began finalizing everything today and it should come to fruition in the coming months. Yay, they’ve been working on this for quite some time.

The thing is, this project (in general) is hard to describe since it’s always changing, maturing, developing and evolving. The contract mentioned above has been in the works for awhile and is a vital component to the next intended portion of the project, “telemedicine”. The plan is to bring in teleconferencing equipment with several special camera attachments designed to magnify and intensify. The equipment would be used to connect people in rural, secluded areas to doctors in other more populace areas of Mexico or the United States. The hope is to give a means for people to access medical advice using the schools as centers for the connection. With any luck, it will be a success; there will be a meeting later in the week to finalize and announce the deal.

Dinner was a little different. Taylor's sister, Dulce (her name means sweet or candy) wanted to take us out to meet some of her friends over dinner. So, she, Taylor and one of her friends came to pick me up. We drove to another of her friends house to meet up with everyone else. She hopped out the car and started to talk to them, said it would only be a minute. Needles to say it wasn't. So Taylor and I started talking to the boy driving us. His name neither of us could pronounce so he said, “call me Cunshon”. So we did. Taylor, being a student of Spanish, started talking. She mentioned I didn't speak very much Spanish but knew a more Latin and even more German. His eyes lit up and he started rattling off in the basic German introduction and first meeting questions. Of course I answered, thinking the situation quite hilarious. This is by far, the last place in the world I would expect to use my little German skills. When asked what he liked to do, he answered “anything... with Dulce...” This part of the story comes in handy later. When Dulce had finished talking, she jumped into the car in front of us with more of her friends, more specifically holding the hand of a boy. Cunshon was upset but shrugged it off. We picked up his brothers from a very large party at a very large house then Cunshon brought us to meet the others at a local higher end sports bar. He drove in a fun, rather insane manner akin to how Stephanie Chustz (Taylor's sister) or Don drive. The first question Dulce asked us was “Was he [Cunshon] mad when I got in the other car?” Taylor and I looked at each other and laughed... (Later, Taylor taught Dulce the word “playa”.) We met all of her friends. Taylor and I spent a good deal of the time talking with Luis in part because he had impeccable English skills and wanted to ask us a few things about the States. Namely, how the electoral system was set up, who we were for and which colleges could he play tennis for and study to be a chemical engineer. It was a very nice evening, gave us a chance to work on our Spanish some too.


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