Many of my readers will be familiar with this – but I wanted to mention it for those to whom it’s new. McLeod Ganj (in upper Dharamsala) is an area where the old and the new meet. Tibetan refugees make up the bulk of the population in this small section of the larger city, and it’s way up on the hillside just below 6,000 feet elevation. Above it rise the foothills of the western Himalayas (more precisely the Dhaula Dahr – a spur of the Himalayan range) and those we can see, which still have significant snow on them, peak at maybe 12,000 feet, and are quite steep.
As is the case for most of India, electricity and communications are relatively modern. The electricity fails frequently, and on the day I arrived, the power had been out since morning and only returned at 5pm. It was a bit unusual, but very few people were bothered by it, and most of life continued without interruption. (One exception being the phones in the hotels, which depend on a PBX to power and connect their extensions.) Most people and businesses with electronic equipment have uninterruptable power supplies (UPSs) and these will at least power their computers for a few minutes during short interruptions. many have put together large banks of automobile batteries and inverters (that change DC from the batteries to the required AC to power electrical devices) in order to power their computers far longer. The UPSs also filter the incoming power to reduce voltage fluctuations, and anyone considering an expensive computer automatically figures they’ll need a UPS. [Read more…]
So I was at the registration booth on Temple Road, kind of squatting down holding my computer on my lap, and fully connected to the “mesh” network so I could pick up email and then create an up-to-date registration list, and felt someone tapping my shoulder. The tap was Jim Forster (see photo to the right), who has been a supporter of AirJaldi since day one. I had only met with Jim once in the San Francisco Bay Area, although we’ve been in constant touch by email, and of course here he is in McLeod Ganj the day before AirJaldi begins. We’ve faced a few last-minute challenges (such as obtaining the large projector for the big auditorium), which I helped a little bit in coordinating, Jim helped in funding, and Tim Kiely helped in “transportation.” 
I am crashing (an American expression from Hippie days meaning “unwanted occupation of”) the IT office at 
Four days before the opening session of AirJaldi. The (large) hall is empty except for the resounding echo of pop music that Yahel is using to test the sound system. The mixer board sits in the middle of the first row in the auditorium, and Yahel is “wildly mixing,” and muttering under his breath about getting rid of the 50 cycle hum. And concluding that the circuits are on different phases (you understand that, of course). And then plugging into a different plug and all of a sudden the hum disappears.