Its always nice to see old friends and evening functions provide a perfect opportunity; given that parallel sessions may not promote "catching up".

It was time to catch up with Remmy Nweke and Brenda Zulu; we had a chance to remember the old times

We were all happy when they announced that food would be served before kick off; it was a better plan compared to waiting till half time or eating when the game was going on.

Then it was time for testing MTN knowledge and those who were good at it were rewarded

But not all were lucky; she could not believe that she got the answer wrong and missed the gift pack!

When Guy Berger was telling me about tweetdeck French translation, he probably did not know that it will be hard to even send an email, forget do the blog posts, podcasts and video.

He was right to make suggestions, given that last year, there was a projector showing all the twitter feeds and given the number of journalists that are here with lots of laptops, you can imagine the amount of social media that would have been in use; it would have been "churnalism".

An hour after Guy gave me the hint and I was busy sharing with the other, the system became slow; I thought it was because of the many internet users and maybe hardware issues.

Then it became bad and all journalists became grumpy because they could not get online; only those with local mobile phones could send tweets, which actually took out the fun.

It was hard to understand how Rhodes University could be down, given its an ISP and is very efficient; by lunch break, we were told that SEACOM was down, which was bad for us.

SEACOM is great, and am sure when the capacity is up, its great but it would have been nice to see who would have been tweeting more; the new media professors or the students or working journalists.

The funniest thing was that the MTN stand just outside was working well and they had public laptops, which as you can guess pulled many people. Love it or hate it, MTN saved the day for some of us.

The SEACOM social media team is very efficient, sent them a tweet asking about the downtimes and they confirmed they had a repeater problem somewhere between Mombasa and Mumbai.

My next question was why the capacity was not being routed through SAT 3 or TEAMS, I thought they had redundancy, given that TATA is all over. They confirmed that they had no redundancy, but why?

Anyway, I am sitting here whining but am lucky to have the modem, can you imagine having 600 journalists and the #ha2010 hashtag on twitter is virtually empty? Hard to imagine.

To answer my questions, today morning I received the following press release from SEACOM and as of lunch time there was no update on this, so take it as the latest.

"SEACOM has experienced a submarine cable failure resulting in service downtime between Mumbai and Mombasa. Current investigations indicate that a repeater has failed on segment 9 of the SEACOM cable, which is offshore to the north of Mombasa. This unexpected failure affects traffic towards both India and Europe. Traffic within Africa is not affected.

SEACOM has initiated emergency repair procedures to replace the repeater. Once mobilized, the repair ship is deployed to the location of the fault to pick up the cable. The cable is then brought on board to undergo the repair – the faulty element is replaced with a new repeater - before being put back in the water.

Whilst the repair process itself will only take a few hours, the overall process may last a minimum of 6-8 days. The actual duration is unpredictable due to external factors such as transit time of the ship, weather conditions and time to locate the cable. For these reasons, the estimated duration of this repair remains uncertain.

SEACOM in co-operation with its clients, is actively seeking alternatives to restore service whilst the repairs are undertaken. "

Elvira van Noort was very excited to see her former professors at the University of Eutrect; it was great they were here to witness how she has "grown up" and busy training citizen journalism in Grahamstown. I almost went to the table to say hello to the professors; given her excitement.

Elvira represents many journalists who are meeting at the same venue with their former lecturers attending the World Journalism Educators Congress, a parallel meeting with Highway Africa.

It is the first time that such a meeting is taking place; so when people complain about the standards of journalism, you can turn to the educators and find out whats going on; at the same time, educators can turn and question journalists on what happened to all the lessons and massive notes given in class.

For a conference that is usually held in September and had few scholarships given the world cup pricing of everything, Highway Africa is very attended and the interaction with the educators is likely to have positive effects.

The corporate sector also turned up as usual; MTN, Telkom and Multichoice are here with huge stands. One of the sessions had the corporates and Nozipho January-Bardill from MTN was asked about the stories she thinks journalists should be covered.

Her answers boiled down to the usual stuff of positive and detailed stories; she gave the example of a BBC documentary on Oliver Tambo and wonders why SABC had not done it. The upshot was that the reason people switch to international channels is mainly because of the depth of reportage.

For the next three days, there will be interactions and discussions on some of the challenges affecting journalism and the continent. There will be no shifting blame because the journalists, educators, public and private sector are there to defend or expound on the status quo.

Ends