With only about 6 weeks to go, it’s all starting to seem very real. I’ve just got to the point of having enough free time to start my charity fundraising.
Building this blog to help with fundraising and publicity has taken a lot of my free time.
I haven’t been doing enough training by along way, so it’s going to be hard when I get to Africa. I’ve still got lots of things to sort out for the trip. More bike spares, a video camera, either a solar charger or a dynamo and some means of comfortably carrying 3 litres of water.
Just when you think you’ve seen it all and know how terribly cruel human beings can be, you stumble across something so disgusting that it really makes you sick.
Today, I found out that in China, 2 million animals are SKINNED ALIVE each year for their fur. Yes, that’s right, they skin the animals alive (because they say, it’s easier than skinning them dead) and use the fur to make “realistic” toys for children, amongst other things. Even worse than that, once they have skinned the animal they throw it still alive onto a pile of other skinned animals to die slowly and in agony.
I wouldn’t believe it, if it wasn’t for watching the video which shows the true callous horror that humans are capable of. Sadly, I suspect this isn’t the worst of it by any means.
Please watch the video, available here www.animalsaviors.org and sign the petition to help force the chinese government to do something about this disgraceful practice.
Having spent the last few and a bit years working for Immediacy I’ve decided I need to do something completely different. I like cycling, obviously. I also like challenging myself and I wanted to see Africa, so when I read about the Tour d’Afrique I knew what had to be done.
I will be starting the Tour d’Afrique in Cairo in January 2009 and cycling to Capetown by May 2009. The ride features 96 cycling days or stages, averaging 123 km (77 miles) each, broken up by 22 rest days and 2 days of travel for a total of 120 days in Africa.
I’m also hoping to use this trip to raise awareness and funds for the following charities.
The Tour d’Afrique Foundation provides bicycles for AIDS / HIV
workers throughout Africa. The bicycles enable medical staff
to treat many more AIDS/HIV sufferers than would be possible
without bicycles.
AVIF is a small charity organization which organizes volunteers
to help provide education and support in rural Kenya. Even a small
amount of fund raising will make a big difference to the amount of
work AVIF can do in Kenya.
Randy Pausch is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and is presenting this video about “Achieving your childhood dreams”. Anyone who has had dreams of success should watch. It’s a long (1:16hr) but an incredible story. Randy has since died of pancreatic cancer which is a significant loss to the world.
This video is quite long (1hr) but it will (should) change how you think about source code management.
Linus developed a source code control package called Git because all other version control systems were doing it (badly) wrong. I was sceptical, but having watched the video, I’m convinced there is compelling power in distributed source code management.
If you replace the term source code management with content management and use a bit of imagination then distrbuted source code systems look very similar to what I believe the next generation of Enterprise Content Management systems should look like. (ie source code management and content management are very similar concepts)
Strathclyde Police are trialing a