Hujambo!

I’ve been at my new job for almost a month. I’ve been pretty busy and the work is challenging. I’m a consultant, so the pressure is on to deliver results consistent with my terms of reference. I was lonely at first, but I’m slowly making friends now. For instance: I am investigating joining the running club. They go running at lunch time a few days a week. In related news, I’ve discovered there’s a gym at my apartment complex (complete with sauna). I’ve been going after work lately to work out, but it’s pretty lonely by myself, and you know I’m ADHD. It’d be great if I had people to work out with! I ran 5km tonight but I only have a pair of Converse, so it was far from optimal running conditions. I’ll look into buying a pair of running shoes this week.

I used to sit at this desk in the library, alone in a cubicle in the corner. I’ve since moved to a new desk which is in a warmer room. It was a good move, though I’m farther away from the server room, and that place was too cold anyways. I joined the coffee club at the old office for like 5 bucks for the month of August, but they only ever brought me tea. I would say I was swindled, but I kinda had a hunch it was too good to be true when they told me it was only 300 shillings per month. I am still trying to find a coffee pot for my house so I can drink coffee at home. My roommate has a coffee machine but the pot is broken, and Walmart hasn’t arrived in Kenya yet so spare pots are hard to come by. I guess that’s a lame excuse, because I could just put a cup under and push the spring, but then I’d need to buy coffee filters. Ugh!

I spend most of my time analyzing and documenting the ILRI Bioinformatics infrastructure. They use a lot of scientific applications to do various things with DNA (sequencing, searching, graphing, etc). The applications they use require massive amounts of computing power and storage space, so they use high performance computing clusters to break up the work load across multiple servers. We have 32 Linux-powered servers in this cluster, each with two CPUs. I’m not really sure how much storage there is, but it’s somewhere near a terabyte. It’s an aging system, so lots of things are broken in software and hardware. We’ll be upgrading the systems over the course of the next few months with the help of a new Kenyan we hired and a super computing expert from Sweden. And me of course. :)

A few pictures from inside the server room:

Possibly related posts (generated automagically):

1. The Running Club Tomorrow is my first day in the running club at...
2. Contains: Aqua I’ve been in Addis Ababa since this morning. The taxi...
3. A Californian Kenyan DJ? ILRI apparently has an international “theme night” once a month...
4. Running Club Day 1: Sijakufa bado! I haven’t died yet! Today was the first day of...
5. Reflections It’s hard to believe that five months ago I was...