The AirJaldi 2006 Summit, held in Dharamsala, India, was a several-day sequence of presentations, panels and then a week of workshops, dealing with Wireless infrastructure and how these can be used to further the development of the world into a place where veryone can live a healthy, happy life. The meeting was attended by social activists of many sorts, all of whom had an interest in using communications technologies.

Here’s your action item for today: The Video page for Airjaldi I would recommend that you take a look at what’s available there.Here are two of my favorites:

Dr. Rodger Downer, keynote speaker, and President Emeritus of the University of Limerick (Ireland), A Global Perspective on Sustainability {28 minutes running time}

Dr. Richard Stallman, keynote speaker, On free software, human rights, development and GNU. {52 minutes running time IMPORTANT NOTE: the camera was not rolling until shortly after the talk was underway}

Everything else on that page is worth viewing! Just a reminder.

You can find all of my articles on AirJaldi here in my blog. I tried to blog the conference in real-time, since we had wi-fi available in the hall, but it was really a challenge. It’s hard to estimate how much bandwidth, and how many routers, to provide for so many tech-literate participants. So I ended up writing blog entries each evening, and then posting them during the day. This set off an inquiry into offline blogging tools (like MarsEdit and Ecto) which I use to this day. And an overview of blogging tools. And it continued my series I’m a Turtle about how I carry my “home” (computer) on my back(pack) everywhere I go (cyber-nomadics).

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I talked with Mikey Ginguld, who has just taken a full-time role as acting CEO/COO with AirJaldi, about how they’re doing it.

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Ryanne (above) and Jay have signed a deal with PodTech and will blog on sustainable culture

Ryanne and Jay, who I met in Dharamsala, India, in October this year, and whose “hearts of gold” were so obvious from the beginning (they just stepped up and volunteered to help our students learn how to shoot and share video without hardly being asked), have just “sold” the rights to their video podcasts to PodTech. You can see that there was definitely some discussion about the commercialism of selling to a “channel” that carries advertising, and all that…

You should view the video in which they discuss this event! Personally, I don’t mind commercialism too much at all if the side-effect is that people who has something to say about sustainable culture then get to spread that message. (Though I’m a total TiVo-ite and I have perfectly timed my fingers to get thru the ads without viewing them, and I don’t have enough experience to have much of an opinion on the pre-pended video ads that are now cropping up.)

See Jay’s blog.

See Ryanne’s blog.

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For those who do not know, Flickr is a web site where you can upload your photos and they’ll be available for other folks to view. Visitors to the AirJaldi Summit in Dharamsala, India, have been posting their photos to Flickr, and I needed a way to show those photos on the AirJaldi Resources site…

There are two methods of showing Flickr photo sets on your web site. The first is to embed some code that reads RSS feeds from Flickr and then shows the “n” most recent photos you’ve added to your account. A group called Eightface has a plug-in for WordPress that allows you to pick up the most recent photos from your Flickr account. But, that wasn’t for me because I needed access to a rather large number of photos, and this plug-in only allows access to as many as 10 recent photos. Too limited for me.

The second approach, which did work well for me, was to insert some code in my web page that embeds a Flickr slideshow constructed from the photos in my account. It uses what’s called an inline frame, and this makes it possible to drop the contents of an external web site into a page on your own web site. Paul Stamatiou has a page that describes how this is done, though I beat my head against a “bug” in the code that caused me no end of grief (honestly the bug is probably Flickr’s fault, but I had to modify Paul’s code to make things work). The slideshow require the Flash plug-in, version 7 or later, as we discovered when a friend tried to make it work (unsuccessfully) with Flash 6.5 on Win-XP.

First, here’s what the code does (see box below where my slideshow is running).

</p> <p>The “bug” in the code is that if you’re going to select from your own account and want to select only a certain tag, you have to use ‘tags’ and ‘tag_mode=all’ rather than just ‘tags’ – otherwise it selects all photos from all Flickr users that used that tag. Odd behavior. Only if you use ‘tag_mode’ does it select only from your photos.</p> <p>Anyway, I love the result, which is a neat professional slideshow of my photos.</p> <p>And here’s the code that embeds this frame (sorry, because of the way WordPress works I had to use “{” and “}” instead of “<” and “>” but you’ll get the idea):</p> <p>{iframe align=center xsrc=http://www.flickr.com/slideShow/index.gne?nsid=67871323@N00&#038;user_id=67871323@N00&#038;tags=airjaldi&#038;tag_mode=all frameBorder=0 width=500 scrolling=no height=500}{/iframe}</p> <p>Notice that I have added the ‘tag_mode=all’. That’s what it takes to make it work correctly and show only <i>my</i> photos.</p>

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For me, today’s tasks were all connected with what we are calling Project Happiness. Randy Taran’s work with high school students has now expanded to become a project where students in three countries are studying the same book and exchanging their thoughts about what happiness is, and how to behave in ways that promote happiness all around them.Three groups of students are participating: one of them is in California, at Mount Madonna School in Watsonville; another is in Jos, Nigeria; and the third at the Tibetan Children’s School in Dharamsala, India. California and India being iterally on opposite sides of the world.

The students are reading the book Ethics for the New Millennium, by the Dalai Lama, and are currently discussing the nature of happiness. I say “discussing” meaning they’re exchanging email messages in which they are conducting their discussion.

Today’s work, here in Dharamsala, involved some of the students in teacher Yeshi Khando’s class, and its purpose was to put resources in place so we can expand the discussion to include the exchange of video messages expressing the students’ thoughts and insights. Two AirJaldi partipants, Ryan Hodson and Jay Dedman (rightmost in the photo, and Yeshi is in pink) volunteered out of the goodness of their hearts to give a workshop specifically for the P-H kids and they took most of their day today to accomplish that. In the photo, Jay is demonstrating how the video camera works. (There’s a second video camera poking in from the left, which is a TV crew that we brought in to tape the whole process – kind of like a film-within-a-film.)

The students quickly took to video work – the first assignment Jay gave them was to go outside the school building and shoot some video of their day-to-day lives. They were disappointed that there were no cows around that they could tape, but obtained short interviews from other kids who were nearby (photo at left), and made a pretty nice experimental video.

My take was that they were surprised with how quickly they picked up the technique. And each student was given a chance with the camera, so they all got a little taste of the process.

Jay and Ryan then took the students into the computer lab where they hooked the camera to a computer and copied the video into iMovie where they could edit it and compress it down into a video capable of being played online. As a last step, they uploaded the video to blip.tv where you can view it.

All three of our campuses involved in Project Happiness should soon have cameras and be exchanging video messages, and I am hoping that we can extend this so it becomes a world-wide project quite quickly.

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Comfort Kazanka – Nigeria

I rejoined the workshop groups at the zone of peace for lunch and had a chance to shoot many photos of attendees. All of the luncheons had been catered by Milap’s restauranteurs, and a surprisingly broad variety of food had been presented over the course of the event. I was looking forward to lunch each day!

The planning on the part of the WSFII attendees for another WSFII in early 2007 is really heating up now, with serious discussions about exactly where, and how to increase participation from outside the US-European axis. I personally felt that what I learned about South Asia was important, and really value the opportunity that we’ve had to here in Dharamsala, and will do everything I can to support the next summit, which looks like it’ll be in Africa (the exact location still to be decided).

Mahabir Pun – Nepal Wireless

A major issue then, (as it seems to have been for this meeting) will be travel costs to get a world-wide range of attendees. Many of us have committed to working on this problem. (The photo on the right shows Mahabir Pun, of Nepal Wireless, who was a speaker, talking over lunch in the Zone of Peace, with other workshop participants.)

By Thursday afternoon the attendees had split into workshop groups – I joined Laura Drewitt’s group (Laura’s photo appears below) to discuss business plans, but had to leave early for an appointment way down the hill. I took a hair-raising ride down the hill several kilometers in a 3-wheeled taxi – the longest I have ever taken in one of those contraptions – and after two taxi wallahs (taxi men) pretty much had a knock-down fight over who was next in line to take a passenger.

Laura Drewitt – Workshop leader

Vic Hayes – 802.11 innovator

On Friday I have a very mixed schedule coming up, since a video team is arriving in the morning and we’re recording some senior school students at TCV for another project, and also I’m installing some hardware and software for continuing use at TCV. Jay Dedman and Ryanne Hodson are doing a video workshop, and we’re including a teacher and students from TCV in this work – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Ryan and Jay are donating time to TCV as well as to workshop participants.

An observer

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I have also volunteered to do a bunch of posting of AirJaldi resources – such as the videos from the sessions, presentations, and other resources. So it’s almost impossible for me to blog in real time now.

Later on I’ll post some links to, and discussion of, the keynotes and panel sessions – as new after-the-fact posts.

The AirJaldi Summit took place on the grounds of the Upper Tibetan Children’s Village, as I have previously described. So during the entire time we were meeting, there were big public events going on out on the sports ground behind the auditorium. Kids observed the events from all around the playing field, and particularly they clung to the precipitous hillsides on all sides. These kids are like mountain goats (like kids everywhere) playing at pushing each other off, and last-minute saves, and screaming and laughing the whole time.

There is not only a universal love demonstrated for these kids, but there’s also a pile o’ love shown for the dogs that inhabit the grounds. There are the little yappy dogs all over the place, asserting that they’re the boss and you’d better not come near their kids, and there are the big dogs. The bigger dogs visited the auditorium a number of times – sitting right down with us to listen to the panelists. During lunch, which was held up in the temple area or “zone of peace” above the auditorium, this one dog really amused me – apparently we were not peaceful enough, and he figured out how to cover his ear to avoid being annoyed by our presence. In fact it was easy enough to walk right up to him without his stirring a bit.

Many of the kids, particularly the younger ones, came right in to investigate and see what we were doing. And our laptop computers (and recorders) were a special focus of attention for many of them. (Just as the computer had been up at the Hindu temple on the hill.) I’ll have more to say about the recordings that were going on in a later post too.

Just to cover one bit of business, at the end of the day Wednesday, the director of TCV, Mr. Tsewang Yeshi, joined us and not only talked with us more about TCV but also presided over a ceremony in which traditional white scarves or katas are given as tokens of appreciation to those who made the AirJaldi event possible.

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Eric Brewer of the University of California, Berkeley, gave an interesting keynote presentation this morning, discussing wireless technology and a project supporting eye clinics that perform cataract operations in remote locations for approximately $10 per patient. The details will be available elsewhere online. One of the things Eric has done is to stretch the range of wi-fi greatly – currently tested to 60km, but they’re going to test at a range of 280km and there is no reason it shouldn’t work. This would be particularly important in India, where almost all people in the country reside within at least 80km of a network connection point – so if this could be bridged by wireless, it could be a big improvem ent in availability of access.

Today’s panels are focusing on wireless as a component of ICT4D (Information and Communication Technology for Development) and on business models for wireless in communities. The business aspects are particularly interesting to me, of course, because of my business background, but for community wireless to succeed it has to pay its own way – it cannot be provided thru grants and gifts from elsewhere. (Obviously many other factors are also important and are being discussed here.)

Of course the presentations were all very good, but I was particularly struck by Ashish Saboo’s description of the development of communication capabilities in India. Years ago, private phones were rare the the shared public phone, known as a PCO, was the model where a phone was available (like a phone booth in the US) within a few minutes’ walk of any resident. Private phones have grown in popularity, but the shared PCO still plays a large role here. Internet cafes, which generally do not serve coffee, became a way people could afford to use computers because computers cost up to 15 months of family income for many people. So the shared use of a privately-owned but publicly available facility became very important. Pay-as-you-go cellphones have similarly been a big success here, and although phone service is very inexpensive (it is my impression that) many residents may not be able to establish credit or pay large fees on an ongoing basis, so pay-as-you-go is a perfect model. Ashih points out that the appearance of “killer-apps” could help bring the technology further into the field – applications such as voice-over-IP where people can converse thru the Internet without having to read or write or type or even learn to use a computer (to any great extent).

The conference has a broad international base of attendees. More than once there has been a question raised of whether we could have more representation from younger ages and from some specific under-represented countries (and continents, such as Africa). This is a challenge that the group certainly should address – funding for travel would be the specific issue. Holding the meetings in countries which can benefit from the meeting is laudable, but even here in India we don’t quite have the preponderance of attendees from India that I would have wanted – it’s “good attendance” but not a majority.

[Answer to my question: Wireless tends to operate “around the edges” of the existing Internet infrastructure, solving the “last mile” problem; my blogging also operates “around the edges” watching what’s going on outside the main sessions because those are already well-attended and documented.]

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We had a noon lunch, served on leaves and eaten by hand – rather unusual for me – being a westerner, this was probably the first time I had eaten anything like rice and saucy Indian food by hand since I was two years old.

I made copius notes on the keynote speechs, including Rodger Dawson, Richard Stallman and Dave Hughes, and will have some comments later on, but I think that since the “slides” of each of the presenters will be available online later on, I will actually skip that for the moment.

It might be of more interest for you to follow the various blogs, vlogs and podcasts that are coming out of AirJaldi, and will probably (like mine) also continue and be updated following the close of the formal sessions. I put a sign-up sheet on the door and here is what it picked up:

• blog.absorb.it
• dharmatv.blogspot.com
• podtech.net/india
• cren.crew.c-base.org
• www.medienbronner.de
• ryanishungry.com (video)
• www.comon.dk
• shelm.com/blog
• (your blog here…)

Also see the main AirJaldi webcast (video using Windows Media Player) during the hours we’re live (9am to 5:30pm India time).

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When I travel to India, I actually filter my water using the same micropore filter that I used when camping in California’s Sierra mountain range. It’s quite effective and relieves me of the necessity of always finding and purchasing bottled water, which is what all visitors do. I can carry a litre of my special brew with me in my backpack at all times.

After a sumptuous lunch at Milap’s Ashoka Restaurant in Bhagsu, we went downstream to cross the river and then up several hundred metres in elevation to follow narrow trails to three antenna installations that are part of the Dharamsala wireless mesh. Our first stop was a cluster of houses inhabited by families way up on the hillside where three solar cells, an omni-directional antenna and wireless router were installed. They’re mounted on an abandoned BSNL tower that also sports a TV antenna. We had chai tea with milk while we got an explanation from Aurelien of the reasons the antenna are over here on the side of the valley opposite Dharamsala (so they can relay line-of-site, of course).

The highlight for me was a visit to a Hindu temple on the side of the hill where a mesh node had been installed. It’s a temple dedicated to the Japani Baba who has been in India for some years. And here they had a laptop computer which was hooked into the mesh (by connecting into the mesh node mounted on top of the temple). There were three kids there who were mesmerized by a simple slide show on the laptop computer. Here is technology truly reaching rural areas where it otherwise could not penetrate. We had chai here and rested a while before continuing down the very slippery slope (it had been raining lightly all day) to the end of our journey.
Resources:

Be sure to check Wireless Networks in the Developing World

Be sure to check the AirJaldi Summit web site

And the AirJaldi video stream online

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By 7:15 am I left the hotel and sauntered down the main street toward the taxi stand some distance away. The sun was struggling with the clouds, and barely winning. A few shopkeepers were beginning to raise their corrugated roll-up doors, but there was not much activity on the street yet. The few beggars were in their accustomed spots with cheerful faces and “good morning sir, how are you?” A couple of food shops and stands were opening. I reached the square and there was one three-wheeler taxi still there. What I thought was really cool was that every taxi driver without exception had a mouthful of toothpaste that he was scrubbing with a toothbrush and spitting out onto the street – simultaneously as if the urge had hit all of them at the same time. More than any other reaction I would just say that this amused me to no end – I almost broke out laughing – or perhaps I though it was a scene from a 1950’s musical where they were all about to break into song and dance!

I arrived at Upper TCV around 7:45 which I thought was far enough in advance of the 8:00am opening time for registration and was surprised to find almost nobody there. Three of us, to be exact. Sitting like lumps on the stone wall.

But, ten minutes later we discovered that registration was indeed taking place over in front of the auditorium and we quickly accomplished a change-of-venue, joining the rest of the group.

The 8:00am arrivals were at TCV because they were on “Tour number one” which was the “antenna-spotting trek.” It was a last-minute decision on my part because I didn’t know initially whether I would want to go there, having seen some of this same territory last year, but upon further thought it looked like it might be a good opportunity to meet some of the participants before the actual summit began (well, it begins tomorrow as I write this) and so I signed up a couple of weeks ago. And it was a good opportunity. My friend, Joy Tang (OneVillage Foundation), was there registering, as were a few tardy arrivals from late yesterday. (Here’s a puzzle for you to work out – her hands signal what she thinks of AirJaldi – what does it mean?) Because there was wi-fi available both inside and outside the auditorium, many of us were sneaking a few minutes of connected time to pick up mail, and I was entering my blog entries from the previous day’s notes, which I had created off-line.

Incidentally, the way I do my blog entries here is to create a full page entry in DreamWeaver with photos dropped in, and all of the formatting and links that I want, which lets me preview the look, and then when I can go online I scrape the text off the page and paste it into WordPress, and upload and then “position” each of the photos I’m going to use. These days there are even easier ways of creating blog pages offline and posting them , which I should use and then post my reactions and experience, shouldn’t I?

There’s a lot of on-the-spot journalism going on – I will make it Monday’s task to try to locate as many of these sources as possible so you can follow them too. Ryan Hodson and Jay Dedman of Node 101 were shooting a video interview of Yahel Ben-David, AirJaldi’s progenitor. Since Ryan was behind the camera most of the time, you’re not going to see her face just yet. And I’m sure you will see it soon. Mr. Yahel Ben-David will be on the platform tomorrow and we will catch him then on “film.”

During our trek on Sunday (see separate entry on the “trek” and his photo to the left) Aurelien Personnaz, from France, who came to intern and stayed to help TibTec, and who is an experienced wireless networking router configurator, trekked with us and explained the fine points of the mesh routers hanging way up high on towers, and on top of Hindu temples.

Resources:Be sure to check Wireless Networks in the Developing WorldBe sure to check the AirJaldi Summit web siteAnd the AirJaldi video stream online

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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.

Telephones work pretty well, but certain things are unheard of – for instance, the concept of having a single “main phone number” for a business, with additional lines to automatically handle overflow calls, seems completely foreign. Instead, every business or office has to advertise two, three, or more individual and unrelated phone numbers, and if you call and the first number is busy, then you have to hang up and call the second number. In other words, there is no “roll over” if a number is busy. And (I am told that) once in a while the phone company runs out of numbers for an area, so they’ll just add a digit to the numbers for a town, and they don’t announce this – it just happens one day and everyone has to figure out what happened.

Broadband Internet access, however, has finally penetrated this area of India and it is being welcomed. There are probably 30 Internet cafes in this small town and they’re frequently jammed with customers. They are the tourist’s primary means of picking up email, since other forms of access are unavailable.

The Tibetan Buddhist culture, which represents over 2,500 years of Buddhist thought, and over 1,100 years of Tibetan Buddhist tradition, lives and breathes alongside the developing technologies. In fact, if you look at some of the practices, you might get the impression the Buddhist monks were secretly engineers, creating “religious technologies” – for example, the prayer wheel (see photo) is a cylinder that spins on its axis – a Buddhist prayer is inscribed around the outside of the wheel, and passers-by will spin each wheel, which causes the words of the prayer to ascend to the heavens. A marvelous “technological” way to multiply the number of prayers that can be said!

The area where the AirJaldi summit is being held is high on a hillside, as is all of McLeod Ganj. Houses that appear to be one story high at street level continue down the hill on their backsides for many stories. Enter the “ground floor” from street level and you may find yourself 50 feet above the lowest level of the building. (San Francisco, my home, has lots of neighborhoods like this, but it’s not common many other places.) Taxis navigate narrow roads, which in many places are not wide enough for cars to pass. In spite of this, tour buses and trucks come up here and traverse these extremely narrow roads.

One of the major problems faced by these remote areas is that young people are leaving them to go to the cities where there are more jobs. Until recently, technology didn’t provide stable ways that the information technology revolution could be used to bring more service jobs to places like McLeod Ganj (because of unreliable electricity, unsophisticated phones, and lack of broadband). The situation has been improving greatly, just during the two years I’ve been coming here, and I hope to see it continue. This might give this population a much better chance of improving their economic conditions as they become more and more connected to the rest of the world. There is some significant movement in this direction, and I’ll try to report on some projects as they mature and begin to publicise their activities.

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Oh, that’s actually not what this post was about, was it? At the same time Laird Brown was there, wearing a cute (and warm) hat (photo to the left). Laird has been here for several months now, basically coordinating the press and public relations for the summit. Laird has a truly interesting past, and is quite knowledgeable about the technologies, but his strong point at the moment is helping companies (and AirJaldi in this case) with their strategic planning, and particularly their relations with the “outside” world. That’s how he makes a living – but his contribution to AirJaldi has been along the same lines. I will go back and dig up the various newspaper articles (and also some pivotal online coverage) that have highlighted AirJaldi. Most were spearheaded by Laird, though he also has contacts in the activist world that we have agreed not to expose here.

The registration “booth” is great. It sits on the front porch of the gift shop, but there’s a huge banner that I’ll grab a photo of later on. The AirJaldi staff is there each day signing people up, taking down information, taking the last-minute payments as necessary, and still scheduling a few people for Sunday’s tours. I’ll have more on the tours tomorrow! (Ranbir Rana and Tenzin Gompo are pictured in the photo at the registration “booth.”)

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What a great day. The rain storms have fizzled out, and although it’s pretty cloudy, every once in a while there’s a tiny attempt by the clouds to drop some water on us, but it is not really succeeding. I went over to Green Hotel this morning after breakfast, to set up connections with friends who are arriving later today, and ran into some of the AirJaldi organizers and then honored guests. What a trip!

Obviously, as we go along I will have more background on all of this (boom! today is Diwali and since it’s kinda like a combination of the US Fourth of July and Christmas, with fireworks and gift-giving both, every once in a while there are firecrackers going off!) Airjaldi crew. Arun Mehta (photo at right) is an Indian computer science engineer and professor, and his welcome to Dharamsala was so kind! He was the one having the more traditional Indian breakfast, which was a bit greasy for me to go after, so I continued with chai tea since I had a large breakfast with supporters of The Dalai Lama Foundation who I’ve been traveling with since Tuesday night.

The breakfast conversation was interesting – largely things that I am aware of, but just for the record I will note that Malcolm Matson was quite lucid about the fact that “free access to Internet connectivity” is, of course, running into uphill struggles against the existing communications infrastructures who would rather control the process (using political and legal approaches) so they can profit from it. And that these struggles will continue in the future, and be quite difficult. (Sorry, I don’t have Malcolm’s photo here at the moment, but we will catch up with him later.)

I continued down to the registration booth (remember that I registered on Thursday morning, and actually I was “guest registrant number one” at least on my badge. Such luck! And these guys know how to take a good photo, don’t they? The registration booth is on Temple Road at the Tibetan Children’s Village craft shop, out on the front porch. And such a racket because this is one of the major intersections in theMcLeod Ganj (upper Dharamsala) district and since Indian drivers use their horn A LOT, one sometimes is faced with having to plug ears while waiting a moment in order to continue the conversation with the staff who are registering new attendees. I have been helping pull together a spreadshset containing a list of registrants, fees paid, tours to be attended on Sunday, and workshop sessions, day-by-day which begin on Thursday this week. The workshops are part of WSFII, which follows the three-day AirJaldi, and is also going to be conducted at Tibetan Children’s Village (TCV).

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I am crashing (an American expression from Hippie days meaning “unwanted occupation of”) the IT office at Men-Tsee-Khang (the Tibetan medicine and astrological center) where Dawa Tsering (see photo) is giving me an internet connection. Men-Tsee-Khang is one of the NGOs that uses the Dharamsala Mesh, and Dawa says that their Internet connections have been reliable and fast ever since they connected to the mesh. Another testimonial to the power of communities working together!

Those of you who know about this will notice the green book on Dawa’s desk – Wireless Networking in the Developing World which you can obtain online in PDF format. And if you do not know about this, I invite you to visit their web site and download the PDF (or order the printed book) and read about all of the aspects of wireless networking under these conditions.

I have done my very small part for the morning and picked up the registration lists and put together the participant lists for the three “antenna-sighting” tours that will take place on Sunday ( they’re listed on the AirJaldi web site). At first I thought it was too geeky to go out antenna-spotting on a nice (upcoming) Sunday, but then I thought again and it seems to me that a hike in the Himalayan foothills is just what I need. Especially if it clears up after this rain! I have been up there a bit, but this will be more challenging as we will travel the far side of the valley to where some of the solar-powered mesh units operate.

And thanks again to Dawa for the loan of space in his office!

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