A Youth Hostel Tale
Just got back from a trip in South America where I had the pleasure of staying in a couple of youth hostels for the first time since last fall’s Dreamforce in San Francisco. Tonight I was looking for my famous…
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Ethiopian Updates
This is a fine pickle, I must say. I’m spending the weekend at the Addis Regency Hotel, which is a kind of mid-level hotel somewhere in the city, because the power has been off altogether at Selamta all day, from…
That Sinking Feeling
It was the eve of my first post-Work-For-Da-Man trip. I’d spent two years in a kind of purgatory, required to bill 30 hours a week, haunted with ever-changing business processes and a persistent feeling that I wasn’t good enough, would…
Into the Real Place, Slowly
It’s always good to experience the real life of a place, even if you are not good at it.
I was looking at the load-shedding schedule for today: 6am – 11am, 4pm -8pm. Nine hours without electricity. My laptop is…
It was, after all, a gas!
I want to call this a near-death experience, but of course, it was nothing of the sort, in the end. I called it a kind of rehearsal. It was nothing short of the worst three hours I could ever remember…
International Work: Success story
OH! YES! I had a HUGE HUGE milestone yesterday! I’m at Hayden Hall, where I’ve built a medical records system for a group of paramedics working with pregnant women and mothers with kids under 5 years old to improve health…
Find 18-character Record Type IDs
Working on a tricky Salesforce problem today and all my MVP friends told me I needed to get the 18-character Record Type ID if I’m using Record Type as one of the criteria for my Process Builder workflow. Okay…
Ha!…
Salesforce for Global Nonprofits (redux)
Cloud for Good just posted an excellent piece on Salesforce for Global Nonprofits, and right at the top of the list of issues you may encounter is “Connectivity and Lack of Technical Infrastructure.” Let’s take a bit of a deep…
Work in Ethiopia
Evening comes –and Ethiopia is close enough to the equator so that it falls basically at the same time all year around– and there is a general move to head out the door led by the kids from the family…
Navigating the Cultural Waters
Today was my first day of non-jet-lagged brain waves here in Ethiopia. Though much of the country adheres to a very ancient form of Christianity, from our building we can hear the Muslim call to prayer starting at about 5:30…
Project: Selamta in Ethiopia- We’re OFF!
Leaving in a few minutes for the first airplane. In DC, I’ll be meeting Marisa Stam, Executive Director of the Selamta Family Project, the organization I’ll be working with for the next two weeks. This is a joint project of…
Punctuation
Dateline: New York City, Grad Student Apartment. Outside, 22 degrees F, -6 degrees C, with a wind chill factor that considerably reduces the effective temperature. In Kathmandu today, it was 50 degrees F. The deepest winter cold is over there.…