If you want to get a head...

WARNING: Disturbing image alert!

There was a note in the staffroom today informing us that there was more caribou meat in the community freezer along with a number of geese; whether any of these geese were carrying memory sticks was not made clear, so I took it upon myself to find out.

After school I visited the freezer, and to my disappointment there were no geese to be seen - perhaps the information they had been carrying was of too sensitive a nature to be left out in public for any length of time. There was indeed plenty of fresh caribou though, and whilst I was surveying the carnage I noticed a second door in the freezer room; perhaps the geese were to be found in here?

No.....just heads.

Dozens of caribou heads.

At least that's my Halloween costume sorted out now.

Pigeon post

On more than one occasion I have bemoaned the (lack of) speed of the internet connection that we get up here, but a story from South Africa this week made me think that perhaps things aren't actually too bad after all. A company in Durban, disgruntled with its ISP's download speeds, attached a 4GB memory stick to a carrier pigeon and got the bird to fly 60 miles to its other office building; whilst Winston (for that was the pigeon's name) was flying, the same 4GB of data was uploaded to the other office via the internet.

Winston took just over an hour to fly the 60 miles, and it then took a further hour to download the data from the memory stick, giving a total time of around two hours to deliver the data. During that two hours, guess how much of the data had been sent via the internet?

Just 4%.

So, maybe I shouldn't be so critical of Tamaani after all. I guess on the days that things get really slow we could follow the South African example, but as there are no pigeons up here I suppose we'd have to use geese instead. However, they'd probably get shot and eaten before they could deliver the goods, so maybe it's not such a good idea after all.

Brings a whole new meaning to the term 'mega-bite.'