Adapted to an incredibly comfortable Newari lifestyle: boiled eggs and homemade jam on hot roti for breakfast (with a fresh guava from the tree), excellent family for company, a great pair of dogs to fight with, and a rich and varied feast for dinner every night.

Trekked to remote Rara lake with a highly amusing bunch of people.

Got photographed with my post-trek novelty musketeer mustache (what else to do with 10 days' growth?) and our friends at the department of education.

Did a ferocious Haka at the hash and followed it up with a fairly unhinged expat party.

Took laptops to a school and saw real live kids actually enjoying doing schoolwork! It's SO satisfying to get out of the office and have fun with the kids and teachers.

The whole project is pretty intense: I flow smoothly up to crests (My God this will be fantastic!) and down through troughs (My God this will never work we're doing it all wrong!) and on the whole I love it. This is exactly the kind of hard and miserable fun that I'd missed from startup life. :-)

Next week we've lured the illustrious Bert Freudenberg to visit us and show off some Squeak hacking tricks. We'll also be teaching a one-day workshop of 30 people (programmers, teachers, students, kids) how to develop educational software with Etoys.

Haven't been taking photos!

In the few days since I landed I've done productive work at the newly-forming OLE Nepal, explored Thamel, been introduced to the nightlife (good), Hashed around the edge of Kathmandu valley, and now I'm having a relaxing sunday breakfast with good coffee and wifi at the Himalayan Java Cafe.

Kathmandu is great value. You can find a clean room in Thamel for $2/night and a good all-you-can-eat meal of Dahl Baht for about $0.50. Best of all is that you can eat with your hands. :-)

There was one day of productive work so far: I was introduced to Christine the teacher-trainer and found out how she'd like to computerise a couple of simple maths/english textbooks that she wrote. I tried prototyping the first bit (a grade #1 adding exercise) with Etoys and this was really pleasant. Just by dragging and dropping some stock objects and pictures from the internet I easily made a simple authoring environment for creating a book of adding exercises. There're only three lines of drag'n'drop code to indicate whether the answer is correct, see screenshot!

A little polish is needed and then it'll be fun to see how it's received. I'm glad there's productive work to be done from day one.