November 2 -- fever I'm ecstatic this morning that I am finally going to WORK today. After almost a week of traveling as a third wheel (which was fun, don't get me wrong) I am going into SALFA this morning, to try and help somebody. Momy picks me up, at seven, just as the Halls are leaving. Lanto is here as well, to see the Halls off. He has under his arms two vilinhas -- a musical instrument made here. Each is an ornate tube with tuned strings running the length of the tube, one for each note, spaced such that the whole tube is covered in strings. Doug has so wanted one, and they present him with two. There's much hugging all round. These are very gracious people, the Halls included. Momy drives me up, as Lanto drives the Halls to the airport. I'd rather be walking to Salfa, but I don't know the way perfectly. Tomorrow, I'll walk. At SALFA, after morning services, which I simply have to figure out a way to record -- the singing is amazing, I start with my secret, evil plan. I start by filling in Rivo and Anatole completely, pointing out the self-serving parts of my proposal. They go along happily. We cook up a Linux box with a spare drive and one of Doug's machines. It'll go back to being Windows once we're done with my evil plan. I help Rivo and Anatole set it up as a name server, a web server, and a DHCP server. I've picked these functions carefully. These are all things which will help, and provide a great learning opportunity for Rivo and Anatole, but, should the Linux server catch fire, or otherwise die, no one will be much inconvenienced. Tomorrow, we'll set it up as a caching proxy server for the web. The evil part of my plan is this: I copy all the data from my laptop to it, and I start making nightly transfers to copy 3 gigs of pictures to the US. To my closet actually. That's where my server is. It'll take up to 10 days. I'll schedule it to work for 10 hours each night, and we should get a good 400MB moved each night. It means I don't have to carry my laptop to SALFA every day, now. I feel much better. I lived in fear of it being stolen from me on the street. Once the copying is done, we'll pick a crappier computer, and Linux that, having Anatole and Rivo do all the work with me just helping them when they get stuck, then we'll put the Windows drive back into Doug's machine, and it'll get use as a Windows server, or go on someone's desk. That takes all day, what with English to French to Malagasy. Rivo walks me home. I can do it myself, now, but I have one more escort (tomorrow morning) and tomorrow night, I'm on my own -- thrills! Honorine serves me a great dinner -- just what I need. A sliced mango and some vegetables with zebu. Not too much, great tasting, and not loaded with the carbs I already got from lunch. I complement her heavily, as this is really perfect. Things are good. But there's a fly in the ointment. As I leave Honorine's I notice I'm a little dizzy. Fever. It's my first fever of the trip. I was hoping I could maintain my diarrhea for as long as it lasted (a few days, I hoped) and let the thing run it's course, but now, I'm worried I'll have to do the antibiotic bit. Doug's diagnosis that what he and I have is giardia rings in my ears. I would hate that. On the other hand, there's a one-day cure for giardia.