First Post

This is my first post from my OLPC. Kind of. I actually wrote up an article earlier in a little bit of haste and was overly critical of a lot of things and so this post is half edit / half addition to that.

Saturday morning, when I finally woke up, I was siked to see hear that I had a package downstairs for me. All the emails that I had received about the OLPC said that I would I would get an email with the tracking number of my package when it shipped and so I was quite disappointed when it was a few days before my trip, and I still hadn’t heard anything.

But there it was, in was! Just in time!

I was convinced that the smaller keyboard wouldn’t bother me, since I was so used to pecking away on my Treo, so I was pretty surprised when I first tried to use it and had to resort 1/2 the time to the ‘hunt and peck’ method. After hacking around on it for a little bit here and there this weekend though, its not so bad. Sometimes it is difficult to hit all the keys on the membrain keyboard, often requiring you to press the key several times before the stroke takes (especially on the larger keys like the spacebar and back-space key), but we’ll see if that passes with time as well. And while we’re on the note of bashing the keyboard. It is most definitely cramped, some keys are missing (caplocks), and a few keys are in different places (I keep hitting the up arrow when I reach for the right shift key), but all and all, its pretty usable.

I had also read somewhere that the OLPC also didn’t come with support for WPA wireless signals which I was frustrated by, but I seemed to be able to join my wireless router with no troubles at all from the network screen.

So at first glace, I was unimpressed to say the least, but after using it for a short while, it definitely seems like it will be worth the money spent. I’d also say that I am most definitely not using this laptop for what it was designed for, and I really don’t see either of these issues being a problem for the intended audiance , and so I’d say the developers of the OLPC should feel as though they did a good job!

Choosing to Participate

A few weeks ago I joined Boston Cares, an organization that links up people that want to do volunteer work with charities that need them. Once a member, you can just log into the website and there is a list of activities you can volunteer to do, all after normal work hours or on the weekends. Projects are organized into different categories like education, helping the homeless, hoping the elderly, environmental, etc, so its easy to find a cause that you are interested in. Boston Cares is a part of the Hands On Network which a fairly large organization, and so there are actually lots of [Your City Name Here]cares.org organizations, so if your not from Boston and interested, there is probably one near you. Its pretty cool.

One of the things that they encourage you to do is to sign up for an event within the first month of your orientation class (which for me was two weeks ago). I forget the numbers they gave, but if you do this then your a substantially more likely to become an active participant. My schedule was starting to fill up so I made an effort to find something and ended up picking one of the ‘Conversation Cafe’ events. These are events that occur monthly that cause the attendees to engage in conversation about difficult situations.

This month’s Conversation Cafe took place at the Boston Public Library and was called Choosing to Participate. From their website: “The Choosing to Participate exhibition inspires visitors, young and old, to consider the consequences of their everyday choices—to discover how “little things are big”—and to make a difference in their own communities.”

As a group we went through 4 different exhibits on various topics. The first was about a family that had a window broken when they hung a picture of a Menorah in it, and how the community rallied by hanging hundreds of Menorah’s in windows across town, risking persecution and vandalism themselves for doing so.

The second was about the Little Rock Nine, in particular about Elizabeth Eckford and the white woman that came to her aid by sitting with and traveling home with her on the public bus when she showed up to the school by herself that first day of school only to find the National Guard and an angry mob in her way. Next Wednesday, March 5th, they will be having a special event where Elizabeth and Dr. Terrence Roberts (another one of the Little Rock Nine) will be speaking at the exhibit called: Choices in Little Rock: Choosing to Participate featuring Dr. Terrence Roberts and Elizabeth Eckford.

The other two exhibits were equally impressive. The third was a story of Jesus Colon entitled Little Things Are Big which touched on issues of sexual and racial prejudices we have and how the fear of being perceived these ways sometimes prevents us from doing the right thing.

The last exhibit, Everybody has a Story, was about a boy named Arn Chon and his struggle growing up in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and then his difficulties coping with the cultural ignorances of his class mates when he found his way to America. Since then Arn has become a public speaker, has given a talk to the United Nations, and travels between the US and Cambodia working to improve the civic lives of people there. I found this exhibit to be especially interesting and inspiring, in part because it reminded me a lot of what one of my friends from school has done and that I will be visiting this region in the near future. There was a lot of information presented that I didn’t know about and am looking forward to reading up on before my trip.

All and all I thought the exhibit was great. The production and quality of the exhibit was nothing short of professional. I found it fairly interesting and extremely timely to bring up so many topics about racism at an exhibit in Boston, a city I feel that thinks of itself as a very liberal place, but has many undertones of racism, which only seem to be bubbling to the surface recently with events such as Racist E-Mail Is Sent to 13 at Boston College [NY Times].

But don’t take my word for it. This exhibit is meant to cause real conversation. So you should find a friend and sign up for tour. Its free and you won’t be disappointed!

Philmont Here I Come!

Welp! I did it. Today I gave notice at my work. March 14th. That’s my last day! It’s taken a large dose of patients but I’ve finally got the next few months figured out.

Some back story: Things really got started back in October. Back then I was loosely planning on quitting my job and moving to Paris on a travel visa, and just do web design work as if I was living in the US. Then reality started to set in. I heard that some places required proof of employment or at least a work visa to rent a place (though I’m sure I could have found a slum to rent), and everywhere I read it seemed like people had trouble getting these papers, and even when they did, it was hard to get a job…

So this was still my plan but I since one of my good friends, Ditch, was going to be getting married this summer, I wasn’t going to make my move till after that to save on expensive transatlantic flights.

Then one of my co-workers from Belgium let me know that there were openings there and that I should try to apply for that. And so, I did. This actually seemed like it was going fairly smoothly. I talked to my boss about it, and Frank (the boss over there) and HR… it looked like it was going reasonably well…

This was all happening in mid to late November and I had a 3 week vacation to Peru coming up. At this point I thought things were probably about 70-80% sure that they would go through, and was actually more worried about them filling the positions before I got back from my trip than anything else. I called up Frank to let him know that I was 100% committed to this move and that if any decisions had to be made while I was gone that they could count me in for the move.

Now its three weeks later and I’m anxious to see if there’s any update when I return to work, and all I hear is rumor after rumor of lay offs and downsizing! That Thursday EMC laid off what supposedly amounts to roughly 15% of its employee’s! Uhg.

With that option out of the way, and after thinking about things a lot while in Peru, I decided that there were some more things that I wanted to do in life that I wouldn’t be able to do while working, and that when I did work that I wanted to try and give back or make a difference a bit more. And so I applied to Philmont.

Philmont is basically most Boy Scouts pinnacle achievement/memory of scouting. Its the largest high adventure scout camp in the US, located at the foot of the rockies in Cimarron, NM. I applied to be a Ranger, who’s job description is: ‘Responsible for welcoming crews to Philmont, assisting them with administrative processing, and preparing them for the trail in base camp and by accompanying them on the trail for the first three days. Provides instruction in camping and hiking techniques, wilderness ethics and procedures, and teamwork.’. I’m pretty stoked.

I got email confirmation that I got the job last night, and put in my notice to leave my current job today. I still don’t have any clue how much money I’ll be making, but it honestly doesn’t matter. I don’t think there could be an offer too low that I wouldn’t take it.

That start May 1st, and usually runs till August 17th or so, but I’ll be leaving in the first week of August so that I can hike the John Muir Trail with my friend Geoff. The JMT is basically a 230 mile section of the Pacific Crest Trail that runs from Yosemite National Park down to Mount Whitney (the tallest point in the continental 48 states). It also has one of the longest stretches of wilderness: 11 days with out places to pick up food. So it should be quite the hike!

After that I’ll be heading over to LA to spend some time with friend there before heading out on another bike trip with my friend, Noah, who I went to Peru with. We’re going to take a quick trip from LA up to San Fransisco.

That should take me up till about mid-September. After that I don’t have any firm plans yet, but there’s still plenty of time for that. I’m currently looking into different aid organizations. Ideally I’d like to find one where I don’t have to pay, and can get food, shelter, and (if possible) health insurance. But more importantly I’d like to work for an organization that I can morally support and can really justify its purpose. The idea of going to an impoverished country to do manual labor sounds fine, but those countries already have plenty of cheap labor, so I’ll have to find something else. (Suggestions welcome!) I’ve also started looking into things like the AmeriCorps, which could be a possibility.

And as if that may not be enough… I figured I really should give this year a kick off that it deserves! And so in late March I’m going to go with my friend Jason from school and tour South East Asia. We’ll meet up with my friend Sharon in Singapore, visit another friend, Judy, in Thialand, and then the three of us will probably go to India as well! There’s also talks of visiting my friend Thanh in Vietnam for his brother’s wedding, and seeing a few other countries as well, but those details are still to come!

I think that’s about it, at least for now. But I’ll be sure post back more as more detials emerge!

Stoked in ’08!
-POS