Computers

This week!

Once again the computers in the mission office started an uprising. I wasnt there when it started, but apparently they kept shouting "ANDERSON, ANDERSON, ANDERSON." The Elders in the office tried to negotiate, but the computers had taken the entire mission database hostage. Not willing to budge in either direction, my week in Ping Dong started to look like a week in Kaohsiung at the Mission Office. On Tuesday night i was called and told that first thing in the morning i was to report to the mission office for a day of headaches and frustration.

I awoke the next morning and dragged my companion the 1 hour rain ride to the mission office. I switched places with an elder from the office and my companion and Elder Zhuang headed back down to Ping Dong to continue to work. Once they left to go continue back to proselyting i knew that, this was not going to be a short stay.

As i began to try and talk these electronic pieces of junk (the office computers) down from their insane little fritz that they had gone on. I soon realized that there were some serious problems going on. The hopes of me returning to Ping Dong anytime soon quickly faded, when the computers refused to recognize the chinese character scripts in our mission database. my head throbbed and i went from computer to computer, assessing and rebuilding. there were only 7 computers, but i tell you what, they were the most onnery 7 computers i have ever met. From Wednesday morning till Friday night, i tried to figure the mess out. Finally, in the wee hours of Friday night, everything started to come back together and the computers decided to stop their strike and start working again. I was so thankfully to get out of there. it was so hard. and it wont happen again. i set it up so that everything should work in harmony.

I had to backup everything on all the computers, delete everything and then reinstall everything. One of the computers was put together by some missionaries a couple years ago and i basically had to rebuild the insides of that computer which took most of thursday. On thursday night i went and got the final part for that computer and poof it started working again. whoever put it together used a dremel and a hot glue gun, i am not kidding! i will send you the pictures. after i fixed this disaster, president Hsu had me write a backup program for the entire office. that took a good chunk of friday, now to backup their computers, all they have to do is click one button and everything in the office gets backed up. finally i networked them all back together so that they can share files and databases without any hassle. it should work really well for them. hahaha. but i wasnt in my prosyleting area very much this week. I was happy though that i could help out there. i am glad that i can use one of my talents to help the lords work here in a more abstract way.

Well apart from that everything else is going good. I am excited for this next week. i will be sure to send you some pictures soon. Probably not next week, but the week after. i am really excited, i love ping dong and this will probably be my last move here.

well i love you all,

Elder Craig Anderson

o ya, i know i change my future plans almost everyday, but i am pretty sure that i am going to major in computers. it seems that it was meant to be.

i forgot to tell you. last night for some reason our district leader didnt call us and then at 11:15 he started screaming and bangin on our door. i about freaked out because i was praying and then all of the sudden there is a crazy man banging and screaming at our door. once i realized he was speaking english i knew it was our leader.

so i guess something was wrong with our phone and they couldnt get a hold of us so they rode like 20 minutes to make sure we wer okay. they were all scared that we were hurt or something. Well we came to find out later they were calling the wrong number. oopss hahah... they should trying calling the right number next time before they bike all the way acrossed town to hunt us down.

peace