Kids’ Doc in Jos

We had a security incident Friday night that turned out ok but was rather upsetting to the family involved. Combined with the serious incident some weeks ago, it means I’ve been spending a lot of time on security issues, either with the mission security committee or with Evangel compound issues. One thing that has come out of it all is that we (the six missionary families here) have bought a real siren, the tornado warning kind I think, though I haven’t heard it tested yet. As it will be mounted on a tower in our yard (ex-ham-radio tower), I don’t think we’re going to have any problem hearing it!

I’ve really been enjoying listening to sermons by John Piper during my morning walks. I don’t remember who gave us the CD a couple years ago, but now I’m finally listening and getting a lot out of his teaching. I plan to look into his books while we’re on furlough.

We still haven’t found anyone to take care of Luke while we’re gone, though his tutor says he’s willing to stay with Luke in our house and be his caretaker. I think it would be too stressful for one person to be parent and teacher, so we are really hoping and praying to find someone else.

It’s great having around Saralynn, new baby Timothy and, when he has time, David. Some day we’ll look back and think how special and amazing it was that we had this special time so close together.

We’re booked to leave Nigeria on December 4, just 3 1/2 weeks away. We have a lot of cleaning up to do.

It’s frustrating working on the Internet these days, since we have extremely poor performance much of the day. The “good” time has shrunk to the 10pm to 8am slot. I probably need to practice walking away from the computer during those times rather than wasting a lot of time waiting, but then, the alternative is staying up later at night.

A useless story about a computer problem

A funny thing has happened twice now with the “server” computer we use our gateway to the Internet. This laptop computer is six years old and has had a broken screen since it fell out of an overhead airline compartment when it was new. About 20% of the screen is readable. Since it’s just running as a server, we don’t bother with a monitor. Anyway, that’s all irrelevant to this story.

The funny thing that happened twice is that it refuses to boot. OK, seems that should be fairly simple, either the motherboard or the hard drive is bad. (Sometimes batteries do this, too, but this computer long since lost its battery). Since the boot sequence was hanging up before even displaying the BIOS checks, it’s probably the motherboard, right?

Now, both times I have removed the hard drive, tested it or simply used it to boot another computer, and replaced it, and the computer runs normally. What’s going on–any ideas? Just a coincidence? Does removing the drive stretch the board a little and reconnect a broken trace? Anyway, I suppose I had better have an alternate computer ready to replace this one.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 11:25 pm and is filed under Mike's jottings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.