Tuesday 20th October

Happy Birthday Mel, Hope you had a good day.

The container finally arrived today at Ranandi, the 9.30am delivery time stretched to 1.30pm, but we’re all used to that now here. Adrian turned up to supervise, I held off strangling him again, but I’ve noticed I don’t get as riled with him lately, it’s more that I just don’t care what he does now, I’ll come along after and fix it up, but it’s not worth the stress trying to deal with him. I actually like him, but not to work with.





Tiffany and I are meant to be moving into the office at BJS agencies, but we are both thinking that once we are in there, any action on the Ranandi site will stop, and the chances of getting the container wired and set up as an office will be put on the far back burner, with the forever promise that once we have some spare money it will get done. I’ve got a meeting with Keithie for Tiffany and I this Friday morning, I’ve cut the agenda to the bare basics, Tiffany and the course at USP, done over with, move on, then a date to have the container wired up, and when have we got a meeting with Hasting-Deering about the land at the rear of the site. I already know the last one, Jason is back from Brisbane Monday, so hopefully by Wednesday we’ll have some form of lease on the property and can start getting it built up.
My mind has struck a huge blank space with the VSA report. I’ve filled it out and sent to Steve, but I know I have to write a whole new project proposal, with objectives, indicators etc. I’ll leave that till the weekend and my mind is clear of all the other crap we are dealing with at the moment.




Clement from Forestry that is working in the office with us now while we are shifting is fairly typical of most Solomon Island middle management. Nice guy, easy to get on with, but has no understanding of computers, and more importantly, internet. He had a 4gb thumbstick he was trying to open today, and said that his computer said it had a virus on it. What does that mean, and how can he open his files. I asked if he had any antivirus programme, and got a blank look, then if he had a firewall, same response.

Took his thumbdrive, plugged into the laptop and ran my Norton over it. It had 2 keylogger exe files, and a logstealer exe file on it. After explaining what they were, he decided the files on the thumbdrive weren’t needed anyway, I cleaned the exe files off, well Norton did, then opened the drive to check the files, but he said he had them on the main drive, so could I just reformat the drive.

Did that, then spent most of the afternoon installing AVG and trying to find his windows firewall and turn it on. He’s running some version of Windows I’ve never seen, it could be Millenium, and stuff is not where it should be. He has Norton installed, but Forestry have never paid for the subscription so it is about 5 years out of date.

It is fairly common here for puters to have viruses, Steve warned me before I arrived, even the 2 office computers we have, well, Tiffany uses, were full of crap when I arrived, popups all over the place, some strange stuff showing up, corrupted files etc. I’ve got AVG installed on both, plus Spybot search and Destroy, and put the Firewalls on to always on mode. People here just don’t realise that not everything on the internet is as honest as they are. Same with internet scams.

I found out last week Tiffany has been writing to a poor girl in a refugee camp in Liberia, whose father was killed by rebels and all her money (US$12.5 Million dollars) is being held by some bank that won’t let her get it without some foreign persons help. I had some fun with that, showed Tiffany Scamwarners, and 419eater, then showed her how to find headers in the emails so she could track where they were coming from. Then she said she had a Lawyer in the UK that was helping, so that lead to a website I’ll have to report for killing.

The ip’s in both cases were from Owerri in Nigeria, and Tiffany is having fun with the scam letters now, I don’t know if she’s replying, but I know she’s been busy this afternoon tracking where they are coming from. I kept hearing, “You faker, you’re in Nigeria/Ghana and Warren, where is Burkina Faso?”

I wrote up a long article a while back about internet scams that the Solomon Star published, and had a good response from that. It took up a full page in the viewpoint section so it would have reached everyone here.

I know I keep saying the food here agrees with me too much, but I had a pleasant surprise this morning when I found the scales at work, I’ve actually dropped 5 kilos since I’ve been here, I need to drop at least another 5 if not 10, to feel comfortable, but now I know I am getting it off slowly I’m happy. I’m 82 kilos now, I should be about 75kg or a bit less I think. Less rice and more fruit would probably help. And getting out into the Nursery more often as well, so hopefully the setting up at Ranandi will help.

Thank God I loaded all the music up, I know, I keep mentioning it, but it really is a good sanity aid. Gary Moore and Jonny Lang have been having a good workout, and I’ve got a couple of mixes done that just play for a couple of hours. Aretha Franklin, Judy Collins, that goes into Flogging Molly, the Young Dubliners, Jefferson Airplane, Van Morrison, Grace Jones and then about an hour of techno/trance from the Gathering New Year Party Cd’s