Laptop Failure

The network card on my laptop broke down yesterday. Just like that. I turned on my computer as usual, but the network connection wasn't there. The operating system just didn't find the network card anymore. We have since then tried everything with the CIS-officer: booting, reinstalling the driver, different network cable, different port on the router - to no avail. I will ask our ADP-officer to give it one final try when he returns from leave (he is quite skilled with computers), but I have no high hopes for it to suddenly start working again. This is something of a setback for the blog. I will have to write my posts from one of the three internet computers in common usage. The circumstances in the areas where these common network computers are located will probably discourage me from writing very long posts. Inserting pictures into the blog will certainly be much more complicated in the future. As I see it at the moment, I will probably not be posting every day anymore. We'll have to wait and see how this turns out.

On a more positive note, I will probably spend less time surfing on the internet, which means that there will be more time left over for reading books, sleeping or physical exercise.

Yesterday I didn't post anything, because my computer had no network connection. I thought that is was just another bad connection, since we've had quite a few of those. But today, as I still had no network connection on my laptop, and it turned out that the network card is out of order, I felt oblidged to write a post. Yesterday I visited the OCCP in the morning with the OCCP mentoring team. In the afternoon we had a meeting with the chief of NDS. The report got be quite long, almost four pages, and it took me until 2230 to write.

Today I skipped breakfast, and went to the gym instead. I exercised for two hours, first on the excercise bike and then on the cross-trainer. After lunch we went to look at the place were our garbage is dumped and burned, and should be buried, too. The place was a disaster, just like it was the last time we were there. The garbage was still not properly burned, it was spread all over the area by animals and the wind, and none of it had been buried. Last time I gave the garbage man a second and final warning: If he did not bury the garbage, I would have to change to a different contractor for garbage disposal. This seems to leave me with little choice. I will either terminate his contract in accordance with the warning I issued to him the last time, or, I will have to show him how to bury garbage and what we mean by a tidy garbage disposal. The case might very well be, that the Afghans' view of a garbage-free environment differs very much from that of ours.

From the place-where-shit-burns, we went to see the chief of police. He had just returned from MeS, where he had met the regional police commander, general Patang - after having visited the wedding of the provincial governor's son. The commander had bloodshot eyes and he seemed even more tired and uninterested than usual. The weather felt much cooler today - in fact it was only 38 degrees.