Rain and blackouts…

You have'nt experienced rain until you have experienced the rain in Lae. (I hear that Lae gets between 6 and 7 meters of rain a year).

It has been raining solidly now for days and does not look like letting up anytime soon. I heard that some schools cancelled their classes today as there could be a problem getting the kids home at the end of the day. The ground seems to soak up whatever the sky dishes out but I suppose there is a limit to this too. I've been told that Lae floods once in every 7 years or so and there have'nt been any bad floods for over 10 years. The last time a bad flood happened the bridge between UNITECH and town was washed out. So, we are due for a flood. Will it be this year? Have never had to swim to work before. 1st time for everything.

On another note let me take a minute and a couple of lines to mention the blackouts. The blackouts on campus are a shocker and some days there can be as many as 6 or 8 blackouts. Some lasting for a few minutes and others for hours. The last few weeks we have had power outages on a daily basis. Most computer and electrical equipment oin campus is not connected to any form of UPS. You can just imagine the impact this has on general teaching and work productivity. The Electronic Services Unit (ESU) are forever fixing PC's with burnt out motherboards or other damaged components.

A number of years ago JICA (the japanese equivalent of AVI) donated around 14 large capacity UPS's (Uninterruptible Power Supply) to UNITECH. These were installed and assisted campus nicely in maintaining continuity of power supply. But guess what? It appears that these UPS's were not maintained and therefore one by one, slowly but surely they began to die. They all sit in there original locations but none actually work !!

Anyway, I am getting to something here…

The following email was circulated yesterday by the IT Support department :

Dear All,

Due to frequent power blackout on campus UOT-Public server is having problems with backups. You might lose some of your files if we continue to have intermittent power everyday.

Given these circumstances, we strongly suggest that every staff who have files on our server to atleast make a backup now.

Backups can be done using the following:

1. For those with cd writer, use cds to do backup.

2. USB flash drives

3. using their PC to backup files from UOT-Public

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

If in doubt we will be too happy to assist. Call us on 4212 and log your request through our support team.

ITS SUPPORT

And another email arrived this morning on problems with water supply:

All Staff are to take note of this. The main water pipe from the treatment plant, WestTaraka mountain is broken due to the heavy flood at Bumbu Bridge.

This might take some time and Water Board doesn't know when it will be fix, which means it is until further notice. They have adviced us to store much water as we can from the heavy down pour of rain.

For those who have water drums to store water may just be blessed.

Cheers

My challenge through all of this is to maintain a positive attitude. Shit happens no matter where you live. I am now a lot closer to understanding what the people back at home were telling me before I left for PNG : “Once you have lived in PNG for a period of time, the small things will no longer bother you”.

I'm working on the acceptance bit !

Got to run!

I must start that marking I have been putting off.