nepal

WARNING: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. THE COW BOG IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR DAMAGES.

Well, today was the second official meeting of the Nepalese Apple User Group (NAUG) at the Studio, and while turnout was low, interest was high. I wanted to get my iMac checked out by an expert, and we have an ex-Genius Bar dude living here and he is also the Pres. of the group as well, so lucky me. The problem has been an ever-growing anomaly on the 20" iMac screen (in the top corners) - looking a bit like a film of dirt or fungus growing outwards. The result is a darkening that annoys the crap outta me when i am designing. I goggled this and could not find anything like it:


So Mr. President brought some strange tools and performed an Apple authorized surgery, that I am not so sure is allowed to be made public. But here it is...

Step 1. Remove the glass from the iMac bezel wearing special apple anti-static surgical gloves and huge suction cups that I wish I could get for my shower mirror. I was amazed to learn the only thing holding the glass to the bezel are magnets, like the one that sucks the power cord into your macbook.


Step 2. Use a special Lint Roller on the glass. This is an Apple Lint Roller that could pull the nose hairs right outta Wozniak's bazoo, and not one you can get at Woolworth's. Oh, that's shut down u say. Okay, then CompUSA. Oh, that's gone too? No matter, you can only get this tool from Apple:


Step 3. Use that same roller (after cleaning it off on special Apple Fly Paper) to remove gunk from the surface of the LCD. This is done quickly as not to increase the chances of the ceiling emitting particles as it does often during earthquakes.


Step 4. Inspect the fly paper for collected dirt, or fly parts if you are into that sorta thing.


Step 5. Use Step 1 above, but rewind the video until the glass is safely back in the bezel.


Here was the result after the official cleaning: no change. Apparently this is a defect in the polarization of the glass, and it's being put in as a warranty replacement:


Well, hope that was as interesting to you as it was to me, and if you are in the hood on the second Saturday of any month, please feel free to stop by the Studio to attend one of the meetings of NAUG. Details here: www.phoenixstudios.com.np/naug

WARNING: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. THE COW BOG IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR DAMAGES.

Over a year ago we did something radical at our small family-run A/V studio here in Nepal: we decided to ditch all of our PCs and buy all new Macs. And I mean all of them, down to the last laptop. But no one here was an apple fanboy or girl (in fact most of the staff had never even seen one), and this represented a significant investment in a risky business (compared to a Momo shop say) and in a business with low margins in the first place. This is just a short report on the transition and the results.

We had been running Protools LE systems on PCs for almost 2 years and seemed constantly plagued with problems, from faulty firewire cards to contaminated software and files to complete system failures due to bad house wiring and an electrical grid that can re-animate dead flesh on a stormy nite.

When our Studio appeared in a local trade rag headlined as "Studio Shuts Down Due to Virus; Expect Delays" I had had enough. I went to the White Tower kneeling, and immediately placed my order with the only Apple dealer in town (Kathmandu has a population of over 1.75 million). I figured that the transition to new boxes and new software would take months, if not a year, and that we would still suffer new machine blues and learning curves thru the roof, as well delays from the Apple dealer if anything hardware-wise went wrong.

I was wrong. The transition took less then 30 days and we were back into production full swing. The boys in the Studio learned Leopard in a week (some did not even notice the change) and since we had Parallels Desktop installed on machines, any desire or need to go back to Windows XP was not a problem. As the IT lead, I installed TimeMachine and created a snapshot in Parallels right out of the chute.

I immediately noticed two things: we were no longer loosing files or entire machine set-ups due to IT incompetence (I'm sorry, I gotta say that musicians are not the most organized of folks) - or to viral infections, the most common problem. Before the transition, we were re-installing XP on boxes on average of once per month due to infection. And I can hear the security nerds out there screaming: Just protect yourself!…Just use Windows Update!…bla bla bla bla bla. Well, in Nepal, there is no secure way to protect your self and still run a business. It's a rat's nest, and you will get infected no matter what you do. In fact, for PC users here, it's just a way of life. Most folks have given up; even IT experts in large Nepali corps, working in hermetically sealed environments, have thrown up their hands in despair.

But having Macs installed instantly turned the rat's nest into a pristine palace. There has not been a single loss of a file since. In fact, our average down time went from days per month (for all problems) to hours or even to 1 hour per month. Here is the "how and why" of our dramatic reduction:

• Fast resolution of virus infections on the PC side using snapshots in Parallels desktop - and no infected files by keeping all data on HPFS drives and backed up in TimeMachine.
• Reduced downtime for internal hardrive or any software-related problems by Installing OSX & critical apps on all external drives; if the internal went down, users just booted up off the closest external and went back to work until the internal was fixed.
• Reduced downtime for complete system failures: for example, one new iMac went dead after just a few weeks of use. We pulled an MBP out of a box and used the TimeMachine backup from the iMac and installed that on the MBP. Within a few hours, we were back online like nothing happened. When the replacement came back from Apple a few weeks later, we reversed the process, and here again, it took just an hour or two to get back to production work.

In addition to downtime savings, the learning curve was much less then anticipated. Protools users on the PC side had no problem adjusting to Protools on the Mac side, even considering the incompatibility of some plugins. But in these cases, users just fired up Parallels with PC Protools installed and worked there with the required PC-only plugin.

One irritating note: There is a glitch in Parallels and VMWare – neither has firewire support! That means that if your using PC Protools LE or even something like PC Premiere with a firewire-attached camera, you have to go to BootCamp instead of working in a virtual environment, which I will no longer do!

Well, that's the current news from Lake WindowsBeGone, where: all the women are in sari, all the men have clean feet, and all the children are above average.

Best Wishes,
Jigs

A few years back my heart went out to my brethren New Yorkers, who in the midst of a blackout, panicked to the point of suicide and falling down stairs in the dark. I could not help thinking, why not light some candles? In Nepal, there is hardly any electricity during the dry season. For 8 months of the year, when there is no rainfall or snow melt from the mighty Himals, there is nothing to power the water turbines that supply the country with 240V, plus or minus. So all electricity must be bought from our neighbors in India, who have their own power problems, electric and political. The doled out juice from India trickles down to the Nepalese people 4 hours at a time, a few times a day, in a national practice called loadshedding. And we never know when it's coming.

The government used to publish a loadshedding schedule, where you could see on a chart that divides up the city of Kathmandu into zones, at what time you would have electricity but your neighbor not, however, that created an unworkable peak demand several times a day, as everyone within a powered zone would rush to charge and run their electrical equipment all at once: to recharge electric tuk-tuks and taxis, printing presses, web servers, arc welders, hair dryers, plasma TVs, desktops and laptops – the whole range of gizmos that are ubiquitous to all of us, each coming on at the same time to completely blow out the grid 6 times on the daily loadshedding schedule. So the government stopped publishing the schedule; now you never know when the power will be on, but when it does light up your life, everyone jumps to the switches to begin powering up the machine that feeds the beast, whichever machine may be.

For me, that's a small A/V studio that produces music and video, as well as graphic designs for web and print. We have about 6-8 staff and half dozen or so Macs of various shapes and colors. We run Protools LE on iMacs and video edit on laptops. We have a wired and wireless lan and the typical liveroom full of cables, gizmos, instruments and cameras. And we are open at least 8 hours a day or more with only 4 hours of electricity. How so you ask?

We don't have solar to speak off; PV material is not available on the market. But every house and business has panels on the roof – for hot water! Everyone has hot water…when there is water to be had. So we use truck batteries for power. Big ones. For example, these:



It takes 5 of these monster batteries and a small inverter (with additional charger) to power my "executive suite" on the top floor of my studio. I have a window seat, but no glass…not required here. The battery/inverter combo can supply up to 800 watts for about 4 hours, so I run my office on about 400 watts for 8 hours.

That means that when I am on battery power, I don't use an iMac, I use my MBP with low-watt external drives. I have a 4-watt low voltage bulb in the desk lamp and on some nights when the power is waning and even the router is using too many watts, I will have to make a conscious decisions like which flash drive to plug in and transfer my work over to a Macbook so I can continue working – old Apple Shuffles use more then a 4gig camera chip I've found out – or do I use the 65 watt power brick or the 85 watt one to power the laptop?

When minutes translate into watts, and watts is what brings in the rice, it gets real interesting during the work day making these kinds of choices…do I save power and use the Macbook, or indulge and do my work on the MBP in gorgeous high-resolution instead? These are not the typical choices a designer in NYC must ever make, but here in Nepal, that's just the way it is.

Which brings me to the point of this bog post. We can all do with less. In fact, we can do an amazing lot with just about nothing. And that's good news considering the downward spiral in the global economy and the threat of Conflicker looming. My pals in Cali tell me they may soon be designing on inverters and batteries as well, since the business climate there is in a tailspin, so I guess I am here to say - who needs lights anyway.

Greetings from Kathmandu Nepal! As most of you already know, Nepal is home to the great Himals (think Mt. Everest), dried-Yak Jerky, and Heli-Skiing - and Nepal is also home to some of the most creative "Creatives" I have ever met, with many of them still using powdered rock as paint and rolls of film instead of chips in cameras. But what many folks don't know is that within the bustling capital of Kathmandu, you can buy an unlocked iPhone or even a new unibody Macbook Pro at the local Apple Shop. (We don't call them Apple Stores 'cause to the Nepali on the street, an Apple Store is where you would buy fruit.) Kathmandu is really an Asian hub for filmmakers, artists, and photographers - and not just a hangout for deadbeat hippy backpackers of yesteryear (although I qualify on all counts).

So this is what I thought I would blog about on the COW, which in this nation is about as holy as it gets. Cows are gods and they roam free on the traffic-clogged roads, and in fact, there is big cow under my SOHO hut right now, bellowing like it's somehow caught it's foot inside of motorbike spokes. – Oh, it has. Ouch. So when I told my home office mate (my wife), that I would be having a "Cow Blog," she though I said "Cow Bog," as it is the start of monsoon season, and things are getting really soggy on the ground floor.

Let's see if what I post in the coming monsoon months is of general interest; I plan on highlighting how we use high-technology without lights, and how creative work can get done on say, truck batteries, and where complex technical problems need not expensive and complex solutions - but perhaps instead - some common sense and elbow grease, with an umbrella on hand if its raining. If this sounds interesting: technology work on a broken shoestring - let me know. I am also writing some tutorials that Tim says he will post here on the COW, and these will hopefully be easy to understand and useful in your everyday work. He says that I am smart and hilarious; I just see myself as pragmatic and patient. But perhaps we can be all things…
Cheers,
JiggyG