17 January 2006

Presentations at the Department of Natural Sciences

Clinton and I arrived at UNZA for our second set of presentations, this time for the department of natural sciences. Once again, we arrived an hour early to have extra preparation time. The lecture theatre where we presented was a bit less accommodating than the one we used yesterday. There was a giant rectangular blackboard (green in color) in the center of the room. We tried projecting our presentations onto it, but it was really hard to see anything. Since there was a flat white panel of wall right above the blackboard we decided to try and project onto there, except that didn’t work out as well as intended. Perhaps simply because of the big angle, the presentation was even harder to see with the projected area resembling a skewed trapezoid. Luckily, we had the head technician from the physics department with us who soon arrived with a dry erase board that we mounted on top of the blackboard using metal wires. We still had the problem of a very small projection onto the board but once again, the technician came to the rescue. He brought us an extension cord so that we could move the projector out to the second row of desks thereby greatly increasing the size of the projected images. We tried to remedy the angle problem by propping the projector on erasers but that didn’t have the desired effect. For the third time, the technician found a solution (this guy is really impressive). He brought a little jack (similar to the one that is used to lift up a car except this one looked like it couldn’t support as much weight) which we used to lift the projector to the right height, completely getting around the problem of moving the projector to just the right angle. It was almost 10 a.m. by the time we finished so Clinton and I were both glad we had given ourselves all of the extra time for set up.

We started the presentations around 10:15 a.m. with initially about 4 or so people in attendance. Once again, over the next several minutes more faculty (and this time students as well) began arriving. Clinton said that at one point in time he counted a total of 17 people in the room, of whom at least half were students. Today’s OCW questions included how come computer science is not one of the most frequently accessed courses and what will the url of the local OCW site be. As for iLabs, the faculty and students asked if the students had remote control over physical laboratory equipment, how easy is it for educators to upload the labs onto iLabs, would there be a dynamic signal analysis lab, would there be bandwidth limitations, wasn’t the entire process slow because it was run using Java, and would there be live demonstrations at some point in time? We spoke with a few of the faculty right after the presentation and decided that we would hold a demonstration for OCW and iLabs on Thursday morning (we couldn’t do it that day because the internet was down). The new OCW hard drive still hadn’t arrived but we agreed that even if we didn’t have it by Thursday, we would still do a demonstration using the MIT OCW site.

Surprise Lunch Visit

Before heading back to Kepa, Clinton and I stopped at the server room to check up on iLabs, change the local iLabs url, limit the access to OCW (to UNZA IP addresses) and go through email. When we got back to our apartment compound, Clinton said he was going to go off to Arcades (the shopping complex in town) for lunch and to look around. I decided to prepare lunch before catching up on some work. This was the second day I was going to eat the peanut butter and banana double decker sandwich (you should try it if you haven’t yet). As I was preparing my lunch, Raja made a surprise visit and brought Will (a friend from MIT who had just arrived in Zambia) with him. I ended up leaving my beloved sandwich in the fridge and going out with them for lunch at a really good, but equally expensive restaurant (I had assumed that Clinton was in town, but later learned that he had watched with a bit of disbelief and confusion as we drove away in Raja’s car, leaving him behind).

Even though I love peanut butter and banana, the sandwich didn’t compare to how good the Indian food was. I think what I ate was called chicken korma. In either case, the food wasn’t spicy at all and the sauce had coconut (which I love) in it. It was delicious. After dinner we all had masala tea (I think it’s traditional Indian tea with milk and spices. It was my first time having it and I must say it’s quite tasty).

More Indian Food for Dinner

The rest of the day passed rather quickly. Raja stopped by again later on in the day to drop off the hard drive and tell us that the new OCW hard drive had arrived but was delayed in customs. This worried him a little bit since customs may ultimately require 48% of the cost of the hard drive in order to let it pass through and he wasn’t sure if he wasn’t going to be able to be of much help (especially since he was leaving for the states on Thursday). For now, all we can do is wait and see what happens.

After Raja left, everyone from last night’s home cooked meal (except Kennedy) headed out to Muskaan for dinner. The original plan was to get Croatian pizza at the Black Night Café but the café was already closed by the time we got there. The 6 of us all ordered different dishes to share. Mine of course, was rather spicy (although I had asked the waiter to make sure my dish was as mild as possible). I think Clinton was in the same boat and neither he nor I could finish our dishes (I wouldn’t even try his, trusting his assessment of it being very hot and additionally, my tongue was already numb from having bitten into a chili pepper). Once we got back to the guesthouse I went right to sleep while Lia and the guys made some tea and the rest of the company stayed up for a while talking.