David does most of his internet surfing from about 11pm to 5am and then he sleeps till about 1pm. He said I could grab his cellular modem in the morning so he put it in a safe place where I could get it. This morning after 6am chai I grabbed it and started downloading podcasts. Oh, boy! I'm in heaven! Feeding my podcast addiction even though I'm here in the middle of rural India. Cool. Actually the major Indian cell companies know all about the many well-off westerners here at the ashram who would love to get internet access in their rooms. So the cell companies early on built cell towers close to the ashram and the westerners love it. They pay a relatively cheap price for slow but manageable internet service with a cellular modem card plugged into their laptops. David's cell card works great even though there's been nonstop rain for the past 3 days.
Today is Saturday which is one of my 'podcast fast' days so I'll have to wait till tomorrow before I can listen to them.
No one told me about the "eastern monsoon" here that starts after the regular monsoon season from June to Sept. Its been raining nonstop for 3 days. Yuch. Place is flooded 6 inches deep in places. Luckily the rain slowed down during composting this afternoon, otherwise it would have been pretty miserable work. Lots of rain means extra cold showers. Brrr!
File this under the "Word to the Wise" category": If you bring a laptop and/or a USB memory stick here to India keep in mind that (based on my direct experience) most computers and memory sticks I've encountered here are infected with viruses and malware. So if you use an unprotected USB memory stick here, plan on it getting infected with some bad viruses unless you are VERY careful and really know how to stay secure. I've got two very good anti-virus programs running and they have saved my butt a number of times. I use Microsoft Security Essentials and Blink Professional from eeye.com. Blink Pro is *highly* recommended. You can get USB sticks that have a "read-only" mode. This is recommended. My Ironkey USB stick has a read-only mode and that has saved me a few times from getting bad viruses.
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