Now I'm starting to get a little nervous...

Some of my worries have ended as our Visas and Passports have finally arrived back from New York. I just registered with the State Department to let them know that I will be in Rwanda and everything seems to be in order for our trip.

Except for packing...

I've cut down on what I had planned to bring mostly because of what Martin said about how he will probably bring less than one weeks worth of clothing. I think I'll have at least about a weeks worth of T-shirts and about a weeks worth of boxers but pants will probably be one pair of cargo shorts, one pair of athletic shorts, one pair of jeans and one pair of nice khakis to meet any big wigs. I will be bringing some equipment for our deployments (wifi routers, flash drives, etc.) as well as two baseball gloves and a frisbee.

I got some new equipment for the trip including a watch (because I won't have a working cell phone) and an external hard drive to backup data and my pictures. I think I have everything covered and I just need to see how much I can stretch my weight limits of one 13 pound carry on and one 44 pound checked bag. The checked bag should be no problem but I will want to take as much as possible in my carry on.


I've posted up pictures from Meredith's pinning ceremony on my flickr account here. All of the pictures from the event are hosted here.

Black sand beach in Sao Tome

Ate lago!
-XO Mike

Less than two weeks!

Corey and I leave for Kigali two weeks from last Friday. Tomorrow several members of the team and I start a non-credited course at the University to jump start language learning. We will be in class two hours per day M-F with homework (wait, didn't I just finish the semester?!?!). I hope this will help prepare me to be able to better communicate with the locals. I don't expect to be fluent but I think they will be impressed and feel like we are trying to do more than drop off some computers if we can introduce ourselves and communicate a few basic phrases.

Tomorrow we should come close to our final budget and the money from OLPC should be in our account and we will begin purchasing equipment. Our equipment is dependent on the number of sites that we visit which will also be decided tomorrow. We are required to provide additional equipment we will need on site which will include Buffalo router/access points for each site. We chose this type because it features an internal amplifier and powerful antenna to hopefully broadcast beyond the schoolyard.

Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 - The wireless access point which we will use at each site.

Tomorrow should be a big decision day for our group as we select the sites, or at least how we will select the sites once we see the actual conditions. OLPC wants the saturation to be one laptop per child, whereas with our current plan it could be as many as one laptop per 5 children. We are thinking about giving each child a flash drive to allow them to save their work and share the computer to create it but the costs of the flash drive ($6.25 per drive) will likely prohibit this plan.

I'll update with any new details tomorrow.

-XO Mike

Extra Equipment

We are still planning away and have narrowed down our deployment to cover no more than 5 sites. We looked into adding printers for our deployment but have rejected the idea because the XO operating system does not offer print options such as "File>Print".

I was excited to hear about the new equipment we will be receiving in Kigali. We will be receiving an XS which is a server for the XO laptops.

The XS server. It is quite small, about the size of a piece of paper and two inches thick. It weighs only five pounds and uses the case as a heatsink to eliminate fans which can wear out and get dust in the system.

Another tool which we will be using during the trip is a Flip HD camera which OLPC will be providing on loan for the summer. The Flip HD camera is a micro camcorder which records 720p HD video onto digital memory and can be imported to the computer using the onboard USB plug.

The camera is really small but records good quality video. To get a perspective of scall, look at the USB plug in relation to the entire camera. It's a standard USB plug!

That's all for today. We had a meeting with our "boss" at OLPC yesterday and he also thinks we are on a path to success.

-XO Mike