AndyB

You can read my final thoughts at Final Thoughts from Andrew. Truly a fantastic thing to have done.

Everyday Life rickshaw, travel

This is a copy of the email I sent out to everyone about the Rickshaw Run.

Hi All,

As most of you know: in January myself and 5 friends will be driving an auto-rickshaw from Pokhara Nepal to Cochin India – a distance of roughly 3000km (equivilent of Sydney to Perth). If you don’t know, this is an auto-rickshaw (aka tuk tuk):

We have two ’shaws between the 6 of us. We have dubbed them:
The Bull-dosa; and
Daal-Lemma

An auto-rickshaw has an average cruising speed of 35km/h so this is going to take some time. And they are, erm, somewhat totally unsuitable for the trip we are taking them on. However we have supreme confidence in their ability to deliver adventure!

On a serious note: The organisers of this event ask teams to fundraise for a few charity/humanitarian causes. This time the total was 1000 pounds (~AU$1800). The charities are Maiti Nepal and MercyCorps in India.

Maiti Nepal exists to offer help, support, protection and rehabilitation to Nepali girls and women who are victims, or have been victims in the past of crimes such as domestic violence, trafficking for flesh trade, child prostitution, child labour and various forms of exploitation and torture.

MercyCorps is a team of 3700 professionals helping turn crisis into opportunity for millions around the world. MercyCorps exists to alleviate suffering, poverty and oppression by helping people build secure, productive and just communities.

If you feel like giving a bit please use the donation section of the website. Donations should be made by February 2010 so there is still plenty of time.

Now because everyone has better things to do than read email I’ll let you go.

Remember to checkout our website: http://andrewbevitt.com/rickshawrun/
And for information on the event: http://rickshawrun.theadventurists.com/

We’ll keep the site up-to-date with our progress.

Thank you for your comments of “you’re crazy”!

Andrew

Everyday Life rickshaw, travel

If you don’t already know I am 1/6 of a team of adventurers setting off in the Rickshaw Run 2010 Winter Edition. It’s going to be a crazy (my style crazy) trip and I can’t wait to get on that Rickshaw. We’ve put together a little bit of a team website at http://andrewbevitt.com/rickshawrun so that all the world can follow along in our shenanigans.

As I said. It’s a shamless plug.

Everyday Life adventure, rickshaw, travel

I’ve been a little lax in properly reading my RSS feeds of late. But this article on Australia being 11th in broadband penetration caught my eye before I used the magic mark all as read.

While I am entirely hesitant to truly believe what is said in this article: 1) because it seems deliberately vague; and 2) There are no references nor can I find another correlating story. If it is true then my initial response must be: being 11th doesn’t mean it’s good enough. But then one should look a little deeper at the top 10 results: South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan are very different, demographically and geographically, from Australia you’re really comparing apples and oranges which, we all know, just doesn’t work.

Compare two metro areas: Sydney and Seoul. I know that Sydney will have worse services at higher prices. Which obliterates the “is good enough” argument. I feel that access should be equivelent – it’s not like the technology doesn’t exist. And then to bring it home: Sydney vs Cobar; no points for guessing the outcome there.

All this got me thinking though: I just managed to crack the 3 digit friends size on Facebook (shameless linking). If all we’re generally using our broadband for is socialising: do we need 100Mbps or FTTH? No I don’t think so. And believe me I like my internet(s) to be fast.

That’s apathy though.

To Senator Minchin: it’s not a competition, it’s about having good service for reasonable price, and those stats to be globally equivelent. Let’s pick the technology we should have in place nation wide and implement it.

Everyday Life facebook, internet, nbn

Back in the good old days of being a full time student I was pretty geeky/nerdy (which ever you feel works). I had my fingers in all sorts of random projects + I had a room of computer hardware that I could use to build something fun, cool, useful or random. Once I started working it became hard to be as dedicated so most of that stuff went away …

Now I’m finding that work leads me to implement solutions that, can be bought off the shelf, but often are WAY beyond our budget (like 10 times beyond considerable). I’ve also found that I miss having my Huawei E960 to “hack” – just for fun and because it looks like someone might finally have a working toolchain, maybe.

Which brings everything in full circle: what I wonder is whether I should re-take up some involvment in open source projects, building custom hardware products, etc… I am not overly good at business marketing; I just don’t have the salesman gene. So there is limited fiscal reward. Work needs some of it: but there is danger in having an entirely custom built with no community support product. I believe in open source so contributing back is a good thing in my opinion (i.e. that’s a positive).

Where do I start? Hmmm that question is one that drives me to get out of the technology field all together. Which leaves me thinking that perhaps I need to find project or product that I’m truly passionate about and start on it as opposed to asking an open ended question.

And then sometimes it would be nice to simply preach the gospel and see where life goes.

Everyday Life random

It has been a little over two months now since I wrote anything of substance. A “busy” time. Or when not busy: complicated. You get that. It’s all good. So what do I mean by the subject? Well that’s relatively simple.

Actually no it’s not. Hmmm. This was meant to be an easy post before bed. Read more…

Everyday Life kokoda, prue, rickshaw

If you are using the Wordpress plugin Contact-Form-7 on a Webserver that is not configured as a mail server you will get an error.

By default the error is: Failed to send your message. Please try later or contact administrator by other way.

The only solution I have found is to install, on my Ubuntu Server(s), a sendmail provider (i.e. sendmail, exim, postfix, etc…). After which the error goes away.

Everyday Life email, php, wordpress