h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Even your early one shows much more artistry than I'm capable of. I thought you might be interested in the following process since you do water colours.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17321199


Anyway, please keep you lovely portraits of animals coming and sharing them with us.

Another nice one, Willem.

yes, do keep them coming

Rod

Hello Elektra and Rod! Don't worry, I'm not going to stop. Elektra ... sorry but again that link brings me to a video that doesn't work with my internet - it says I have insufficient bandwidth. I'd like to see it though ...

Sorry, that you can't see it Willem. I'll remembernot to send you any more of those from the BBC then. It is annoying. One advantage to moving to an urban area might be that you'll have access to more bandwidth with a different ISP (Internet Service Provider).

Hi Elektra! Internet Service Providers here operate nationally, so there shouldn't be a difference. I'm using the main South African telecommunications company (it's a private company) which is after many other trials still the best ISP I've come across. My sister lives in the big city, Pretoria, and her internet is *worse* than mine ...

Anyways Polokwane is a city these days, one of the most rapidly growing in the country.

Bummer! It doesn't sound like the situation would improve. That is a shame. I am suprrised the business people don't insist on a better set of protocols. I certainly wouldn't want to do any sort of business on it with that being the case.

I'm actually extremely happy that most things on the internet do actually work! UNLIKE other stuff in 'real life'. Honestly, over here, essential services ... I mean things that are way, WAY more important than watching vids on the 'net. There are towns where the water coming from the taps are acidic and poisoned with heavy metals. And some people have only that to drink, and they do, and they get very, very sick. And then the hospitals where they go for treatment ...

My sis for instance works at the Steve Biko hospital, where the machines they use to treat certain forms of cancer are on the fritz and they can't get people to come and repair them or get the proper parts for them because of the hospital owing companies money and people come in for their cancer treatment and get told they can't get treated, and because of the lapse in the treatments the cancers start growing faster than before and consequently people DIE when if things had worked properly they may have had a few more weeks or months or who knows, even years.

This is a common feature here. Things just don't work the way they're supposed to. The obvious stuff, the basics, the absolutely vital things upon which everything else depends, get completely messed up.

You wouldn't believe how things go at some of our universities. My father wanted to write a short story about that ... he never got to, but he always told me he didn't think people would believe it.

Believe me, if stuff worked as well in general in South Africa as my internet works, in general, it would be fantastically great.

Really, Elektra, I spend way too much time every day on the internet ... to me, it is Utopia.

I don't know if I'd call it utopia, but I know I spent way too much time on the internet. I've been on here for 10 hours and counting. (But I've been working.)

Heh heh! I guess I spend two to three hours a day on the 'net, usually in the evening after the day's work is done. But anyways, when I'm online, most of the time I get along fine. (Hmmm ... I think there might be a song there ...)

But Elektra, you're right, actually what would be ideal is if the folks figured out protocols that worked everywhere. If sites have videos that don't work then they lose viewers and in the end businesses lose money. I wish all businesses started understanding that it just works better if everything *worked*. Society as a whole is a huge mess of interconnected and interdependent systems. Breakdowns in any system negatively affect others, and ultimately everything. Thinking of our societies systemically and figuring out the ways that these systems could be improved is a huge challenge. The internet is one such system. It is already very important and might become more important. As a channel for global communication I consider it vital. But anyways, the 'net has improved a lot over here over the years. For one thing, the amount of data I've been able to access each month has steadily been climbing. Some things are still a bit slow, but it's tolerable. I'm just happy that *most* things do work. There's just a few things that don't ... these latest videos didn't work, but there are millions of videos that *do* work. And all other sites you've given me links to up till now, Elektra, have actually worked just fine, which I still think is wonderful.