Easter Sunday

Happy Easter! The last few days have been technologically frustrating. I keep running all over town trying to find a good internet connection. According to Thanh Niên News (dot com),* hydro electric plants in Việt Nam are looking at their rapidly evaporating reservoirs and predicting rolling blackouts through the county's population centers: increasing demand meets with one-quarter output. I have two distinct reactions to this. One concerns the quixotic nobility of turning away from fossil fuels in a country that must abide half-year seasons without rain. The other is to the cruel archness of enduring a drought after much of central Vietnam set through the latest rainy season beneath record-breaking floods. Floods that, incidentally, disrupted the flow of electricity to the country's population centers. This makes for a year-long list of hardships for the whole country; and coming only at the very end of that list is my own minor hardship: that tenuous power situations disrupt my internet connection. Looking at the cables crisscrossing the city, I have no problem imagining a nearly infinite number of sectors and conduits coming and going from there to there. Which of these bring power to my apartment? Which take power to my ISP? To relay towers and routers and metering companies? Will some cables surging then short others out? Will some areas going black require surrounding areas to fade brown? Any single step can lower or disrupt bandwidth. Then I lose the internet and VONAGE. Sometimes I have to walk to three or four cafes before I find one with service. So, by way of justifying my ongoing inability to remain up-to-date here at the Update Column: until the rainy season begins, there will be rolling blackouts due to the current drought; afterwards, expect electrical problems due to too much rain. [Cavin]