27 June 2014: Miscellany

I have been slipping in the frequency of my posts! I have not been idle, per se, but perhaps not doing things that merit blogging about. For the moment I will post some miscellaneous things, and some things I want to do in the near future:

Well, really just one miscellaneous thing. I was thinking about the cost of Internet here, and whether it was actually worth it for me to be using the modem I have, as opposed to going to an Internet café whenever I needed to get online. Internet cafés cost about Fr. 500 per hour, whereas the modem costs Fr. 800 per day plus an initial investment of Fr. 10,000. It’s classic middle-school algebra, which I haven’t done in several years! So to find the point at which it becomes overall cheaper to use the modem, we can make the following handy formula:

500 · h · d = 10000 + 800 · d

where h is the number of hours every day I will spend online, and d is the number of days I go on the Internet. (Functionally, d will also equal the number of days I am in Rwanda.) We can isolate the variables either of the following ways, depending on which direction we want to go:

h = (20 ÷ d) + 1.6
d = 20 ÷ (h − 1.6)

Since I will be here a total of 42 days, the second formula informs me that I must use the Internet for an average of just more than 2 hours per day to make the modem worthwhile. (I am pretty sure I am doing that!) The second tells me that, if I were to be online for 3 hours per day (which I might be), the modem is a good investment after two weeks (and a couple of hours).

Of course, there is also the convenience factor of not having to walk to the Internet café, and not being restricted by its hours of operation. For me, since I like to do things in the afternoon and then go online in the evening, that’s a pretty big point in its favor. Nevertheless, it is good to know that the math backs me up anyway!

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Things to Do Today (or Soon)

1. Send some postcards, and buy some more. (Today I will send my last family postcards, and then move on to friends.)
2. Do a little bit of foreign exchanging. South Africa has released banknotes newer than the ones in my collection, and I hear the Congo has some new ones this year, though the exchange bureaus tend not to stock those as consistently.
3. Refill my modem.
4. Check out Kimironko Market. I hear it’s impressive, with cool textile things, and I did not get over there last year.
5. Take a look at the Genocide-era documents I have been analyzing, and try to figure out where some of those things happened. Then take some time to go check them out, provided they are accessible.
6. Walk around town taking pictures of new developments. (Generally, also, take pictures, because the only photos on my camera’s memory card now are of bugs I have killed in my room!)
7. Go to the couple of bookstores I know, to see whether there is anything useful I did not see last year.
8. Plan some travel outside of Kigali. There are lots of places to go!