Very windy today, the sea was crashing against the road this afternoon with spray washing across, quite exciting!
Had my most successful day at work today, got to speak with the ministry and the government IT department about hosting the website I’m developing. It’s taken nearly 4 weeks to get to do it! I was expecting a long journey to the ministry as I was told we would need to drive, it turned out it was less than 500m from the DNG! I could see the building just down the road, less than two blocks away! It took longer to drive because of the one way system than it would to walk, I couldn’t believe it! The journey back from the university was even odder, I knew the quick way back but the guy I was with wanted to go to the bank first, so he directs me around Maputo for about 15 minutes, through traffic and down potholed roads etc. Eventually he asked to be dropped off, where were we? About 200m from the DNG building! Aaaaaarrrrrgggghhhh!
The ministry building was such a death trap, God help anyone in there if it ever catches fire, and with all the loose paper on the floor in the ‘offices’ it’s a real possibility. Anyone would struggle to escape, they have divided what was open plan space into narrow winding corridors and ‘offices’ using wooden partitions with windows in that nearly reach the ceiling, too high to climb over. The guy we went to see could see the door out of this space but to get there involved a walk along these narrow wooden corridors and about 6 rightangled bends!! If you got that far you then had the steepest oddest spiral staircase to descend, with broken steps to really help you on your way!
Anyway, we found out who the domain registrar is (boring IT stuff coming so switch off now). In the UK it is a five minute job to register a domain online, here we had to drive to the university and find the person who does it. He gave us a five page paper form to take away and fill in to return tomorrow! At least we should be able to get it done now. Quite expenisve compared to a .com as well, $100 for the first two years for a .gov.mz domain.
Did I mention I got stopped by the police AGAIN last night? This time three coppers were hiding in the bushes and leapt out with a very dim torch to check my papers which they said weren’t in order. They struggled to see the big UK on the licence and kept asking me where it was from. That cost me 300Mtn to ‘save me time as I’m a busy man’, it would have cost more but I said I wasn’t that busy and let’s go to the police station to sort it out. They wanted a quick resolution then that’s for sure!
