Monday 20th July

Photos of Civic Centre planting. right beside the main road.

Friday 17th July
I’m constantly amazed at some of the thought processes that go in some of the peoples heads here. We fired one of the security night watch today for theft. He sold 5 tyres we had been keeping for the big truck, to a friend with a bus, who promptly reneged on paying, so Tome ended up without the tyres, and the money, and now no job either. His excuses got more and more bizarre when we were asking about what happened, until the final story was he sold them $500, but the other person only gave him $200, so he took the tyres back and burnt them. About $4,000 worth of tyres. And he felt that he’d done nothing wrong. The tyres were there, he sold them, what is the problem?
Still, with the Parliament trying to put a Bill through expempting any MP from criminal charges, and also a Bill giving the spouses of MPs a lump sum payment of $50,000 at the end of every Government term, you can see where everyone thinks it is perfectly permissable to acquire whatever they can.
The Solomon Star is full of letters and editorial content about both, well worth reading www.solomonstarnews.com
The town is looking decidely scruffier in a week, since we stopped cleaning the gardens and side areas. It’s really noticeable when I walk in, the NPF Plaza, Civic Centre gardens are full of rubbish, outside the Council offices by the ANZ roundabout is just an open rubbish tip now. Honiara has never been a tidy city for a long time, since the first coup in 1998, and I found a report from the South Pacific Forum where Honiara was described as the grubbiest city in the Pacific early this year. Not exactly a commendation you’d want when you are trying to encourage tourism, investors and business.
But, the bouganvillea are all in flower now through the town, and the Hibiscus are all in bud or flower as well. I stopped the crew pruning both about 2 months ago, to let the flowers come out. Until now, they have been pruning and trimming mercilessly, once we stopped everything has had a chance to come into flower. Now I’ve got to come up with some way of training the bouganvillea so it gets a chance to really grow and flower. With the dry weather, the bouganvillea and Hibiscus are the only plants that are looking good. The Duranta and Allamanda are wilting, even the Rowea are sufferring.
I found out today that Telekom here decided that Skype would be too much competition for phone calls, so they have slowed the bandwidth to prevent people using Skype for phone calls and VOIP, which also explains the incredible slowness of broadband here. I’m lucky to get up to 0.11mbps download, and 0.03mbps upload. And I used to feel hard done by in Ireland with 6.00mbps.

Sunday 19th July
Absolutely boring weekend, well, I cleaned the house up, went shopping yesterday, got some pics of Civic Centre walkway with the rubbish, did the washing, read a few books, walked around Honiara for a bit yesterday morning, still no truck, promised for Monday now.
Thunder, lightning and a bit of rain this afternoon, but nothing spectacular.
I’ve been spending more time playing with some of the editing programmes finally, even digging into the Word programme and the Win Works stuff. Some of them are pretty dated, mind you I’ve only got Word 2000, I only updated it once from 98, it had everything I needed then so I just used what I wanted without going into all the publishing programmes and stuff.
I’m pleased with the laptop, apart from some quirks it has, like dropping programmes unexpectedly, and losing drivers every couple of months. I had to reload my Nikon Editor again today, and it’s always losing the drivers for the sound and audio. And spell check is just a nightmare, parts of this it checks in English Ireland, other parts with English Australia, and some with English NZ, when it can find the directories that is. I’ve climbed all through the settings trying to get it to be consistent, but to no avail so far. Even with the Word 2000 discs it won’t repair, I’d like to do a complete uninstall and re-install, but I’m always worried about losing everything if I play too much with it all.
I’ve had John Mayall on for most of the day, I should have copied my Peter Green cd’s before I left as well, I’ve had Supernatural from the Bluesbreakers album on high repeat all day, brilliant guitarist, even after he dropped out of Fleetwood Mac and spent 20 years having a nervous breakdown. I’ve got 3 of his later cd’s from the 90’s back in NZ, if I get there at Christmas I’m ripping them onto a thumbdrive.

Monday

I've just spent since 7am trying to get the internet connection to work, nearly 4 hours, with several phone calls to Telekom, They came out, replaced the adsl box, and the inline connector, then ahd to go and get another adsl box because the one they installed wasn't working anyway.

I'm not holding my breath over how long this will last.