UGN InfoManager

As the officers at the American Embassy in Kampala, Uganda corrected me: "it's not a '3rd world' it's 'a developing country.'" Nonetheless, against road warrior preachings, I went totally unprepared. So, one of my first stops had to be Elite Computers in the Crowne House of downtown Kampala.

Elite is not an official Apple store but rather the African branch of Elite Computers in Paris. To my knowledge it's the only Apple support in East Africa. Mobin and the staff there was very knowledgeable and helped me get going with power adapters and tips for computing in Uganda's less than desirable computing environment.

The refurbished TiBook came along as my computer while in Africa, then was left behind with my daughter who's PowerBook was stolen in January. Once set up to deal with Kampala's fluctuating power, frequent outages and surges, computing was fairly normal on the Mac. Getting online however is another adventure altogether. Most hotels and quite a few "cafes" offer either dial-up or wireless hot-spots, but they all seemed much slower than normal dial-up in the U.S. Between the hotels and resorts where we stayed, internet was easy so access.

Unfortunately retrieving email was a challenge, particularly at bloated email providers like Mac.com, AOL and MSN.

Before leaving I had set up a dot-Mac account for family email thinking that if anyone would have well programmed servers, Apple would. Boy, was I wrong. The speed of the connection didn't seem to make much difference in load times. My email accounts at graphic-design.com, spamcop.net and user-groups.net all loaded within seconds. The longest wait on SpamCop was almost a minute because some 1,800 spams had accumulated after two days. But all three accounts loaded and I was able to handle email chores in the usual fashion.

Switching to Mac.com and AOL for other family members in the group became an exercise in frustration. Mac.com was the worst. After a 7-second load time for SpamCop, no one could understand why Mac.com took well over a minute (in some cases over two minutes) to merely load the log-in screen. Typical email sessions on Mac.com experienced as many as 11 minutes before reading actual mail. Apple loads so much gratuitous code, some sessions took nearly a half hour to read two or three emails. At an internet cafe, using Mac.com, costs range from 5,000 to 20,000 shillings -- more than a full day's salary for most Ugandans.

Others in the travel party had AOL, MSN and Yahoo mail, all three much slower than my dedicated email servers, yet not nearly as bad as Mac.com. AOL was the worst of that trio, with three to five minute load times. Yahoo was the best with only one to three minute load times. (We discovered after a while that not loading graphics made the sessions go much faster.)

While Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania are all dominated by windows, Macs can get along quite well. An interesting aspect of computing in developing countries is that they keep everything running. I saw ancient computers and CRT screens in daily use -- including the old monochrome variety. In most business places the computers were so used and caked with dust and dirt it was remarkable that they even worked at all. I did see a few other PowerBooks, but not a single desktop Mac. I chatted briefly with a journalist at the Speke Resort using an Ice iBook who shared similar experiences. He reported Google mail as the fastest in his trial and error search for a good email provider. He too knew of Elite Computers, and we laughed that this was probably the most important address to the Mac user in all of Africa.

Advice for computing in developing countries:
1. Spare no expense purchasing the proper and most compact surge protection and adapters.
2. In advance, research locations for help in the countries you'll be visiting.
3. If you plan to depend on email, avoid Mac.com and other "bloated" providers. Nothing's more frustrating than losing access to your email. I can highly recommend Spamcop.net email.

Next? I'm looking forward to South Africa, Dubai and Beijing.

Thanks for reading...

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