Kenya

The people here (in the hotel) are friendly, quick to smile and greet you. The porters have a slightly queer habit of leading people to their rooms by the hand.

There are some characteristic local dishes: one that turns up in the hotel buffets quite frequently is mostly shredded spinachy greens, lightly cooked - actually all the veg here is nicely crunchy. There's also a stodge that looks like mashed potato, but which is made from cornflour, and a green beany stodge. The meat is traditionally overcooked and badly butchered, and frequently goat.

Last Friday we went to a local eatery which did the local food in the local way, with local timing. We left the hotel at 20:00ish and ate at about 22:00ish... According to one of the African instructors, "the Europeans have the clocks but the Africans have the time." The meal there started with a fairly simple soup, which was described as "bone soup", i.e. it was essentially just stock. Later on I tried the goat. It was OK, compared to the beef and chicken.

Yesterday we went to a tourist trap called "Carnivore". The meal was almost entirely barbequeued meat. (I am consequently even more vegetarian than usual for the next few days...) I ate lamb, pork, beef, chicken, ostrich (which was the best by a long way), crocodile, and camel (nasty). They also served us a cocktail called "dawa" which is apparently Swahili for "medicine". It was lime, vodka, and honey, with ice - so not that different from the whiskey, lemon, and honey that we drink hot.

I still haven't seen very much of the place. However we are going out tomorrow morning at 06:30 for a quick safari, which I am looking forward to. I am currently having a wee dram with the other whisky drinkers before an early-ish bed.

AfNOG

This is the seventh AfNOG. The workshop side of it - a week of intensive teaching - seems to have grown out of the INET workshops that started back in the 1990s. It's also associated with the "network startup resource center" which grew from Randy Bush's efforts to get the Internet going in the third world. The funding is interesting: it comes from a variety of international development quangos, with a substantial chunk from the US NSF - ostensibly so that US scientists have better infrastructure to support their research abroad. A surprisingly large number of the protagonists work at the University of Oregon Computing Center.

The network held up relatively well, though when the ISP realised how much we were using it, the "nominal" 512kb/s link became strictly 512k, and the queueing delays rose into the seonds. I have also had some irritating problems with the wireless support on this laptop - possibly dodgy drivers in the slightly dodgy FreeBSD-5.3.

My Exim bit seemed to go quite well. We got through the material somewhat faster than I expected, based on what Philip Hazel told me, and the students mostly made swift work of the exercises. There were some good questions about how to deal with spam and viruses, and about how to put together larger email systems. I talked about the current "new" Hermes architecture, and my fellow instructor, Joel Jaeggli from the University of Oregon, talked about their email architecture, which is similar to the old Hermes system.

By the end of it I was pretty zonked, and my throat was slightly sore. I clearly need to learn how to project my voice properly...

I'm leaving tomorrow night, but AfNOG will continue with some half-day tutorials followed by a conference.