Africa: Day 71 (Update on Doc, and Google Stuff)

Well, we're at 71 days in-country and I'm still alive. I wanted to take a minute and share some new with you guys that might not have heard yet, and to share some stuff from Libya. The internet connection here is getting slower and slower each day, so uploading pictures is not even a possibility at this point. We're bringing hundreds and hundreds of new users onto the same internet connection and the speed decreases with each building we bring online. Unfortunately, I don't have the contract to upgrade their level of service, so they'll have to handle that on their own. There is only one internet option in this country and it's government owned.

I'll give you an idea of how lucky you have it at home. At my home in Greenville, I have a 10 megagit connection to the internet. That's BLAZINGLY fast even for US standards. For that service, I pay approximately $43.00 per month. Now I have a dynamic IP connection, so I'm not paying for static IP service, but if I was it would only bring my bill to around $60.00 per month. Now, in Libya, one of the companies we have here HAS purchased a private Static IP address, which means they don't have to share their internet with all the people in the local area surrounding them. Their speed is only 512 KB( or one-half a megabit). So, my personal internet at home is 20 times faster than the fastest commercial leased line available in this country. Those of you at home who have the cheapest DSL packages available might be paying $19.95 for this service if you have it. Over here, that company pays $20,000 per month LYD (that's fifteen-thousand US Dollars a month for their internet connection.) Now you see why no one has internet here. There's no competition in a dictatorial market... the government says there is only one company that can offer service, so that's it. You have no other option.

Since I can't easily share photos from here at this time, I thought I'd share some more interesting information. I have uploaded a google earth map of where we are and where we've been since I got here. If this proves to be interesting to you, I'll update it often and share it with you. To open this file, you're going to need google earth. If you haven't already tried it out at home I'll be surprised. It's a neat program from Google that allows you to view satellite imagery of any location on earth. So first, go to http://earth.google.com and download the Free version of Google Earth. Its very very easy to use and you don't need to pay for anything. It's fairly small and won't occupy a lot of your hard drive space.

If you've already done that, you can right click on the link below, choose "Save Target As" (depending on your browser) and save this file to your computer. It's a very very small file, that will only take about 1 second to download. From there, you should be able to double-click the file and it will open up my list of locations in your Google Earth program. You'll have to wait a second for the satellite imagery to download, so play with the zoom features and see how detailed you can get. It's really neat.

CLICK HERE FOR THE FILE
(for those of you who know what you're doing, the file is located at http://carolinaregion.com/mysites.kmz )

Well, that's about it for the news from Libya.

The other news I have is from Doc. I spoke to him a few days ago. I'm in Libya and he's in Samarra, near Iraq. How strange to think of both of us on such different parts of the globe at the same time. I'm just not used to it yet I suppose. Anyway, he's doing fine. He's going to be there for over a year at least, but exactly how long is a mystery still at this time, and will likely remain so until the last moment. He's a little sad I think that he's not heard from the gang as much as he had hoped, although you know he'll never admit as much openly. Anyway, I have his address and I'll post it below this message. His mission this time is fairly public and more political than covert, so he won't mind if I post his address here for you I don't think. Just in case he does, be sure to write it down in case I need to remove it later.

He has spoken to some local iraqis who have hooked up an internet connection at his room, so he has intermittent internet access, but I can imagine that the connection speed is going to be slow. My suggestion would be to send him messages and a few pictures, but don't send anything too BIG all in the same email or it will take him hours to download.

He's setting up a netzero voip account so he'll be able to call us back in the states a little more often and I'll post more about that when I know more. For now, here's what I have. His mailing address is:

SFC Clayton D. Holliday
HHC 2/505 PIR, 3 BDE, 82d ABN DIV
FOB Brassfield-Mora
APO AE 09393

You'll need all four lines of the address to make sure he gets it, so make sure you get it all.

The only other information you might need is his email, if you don't already have it. This is something I'm going to remove after a few days, so save it now if you don't already have it. I don't want search-engine programs grabbing his email off the page and spamming him, which happens a lot. His email address is cdholliday42@yahoo.com .

That's about all for now. I miss you and live you all and Clayton does too. I know we (both) want to see you all again soon.

PS: Sassenach, it's about time to start a gift-box when I get back. You in?

Love,

ME