Important!
We have hit the target and then some! The current total is at 700. The current total is 740! Any money over the amount as I said will be given to charity! I shall divide it up between a social uplift charity and one for the disabled. I want to thank everyone who donated and everyone who showed their support. You have netted roughly Rs. 7000 for the empowerment of the disabled. If you wish to donate more to them then be my guest.I am absolutely astounded by the love shown here today and hope to repay you all through the work I do. I want to thank everyone who helped either by donating or by simply reading the blog and passing it on. Thank you.
I would also like a special mention to Justin and Jason (JT) who helped me create a Ubuntu boot up Pen Drive (Considering Technology isn’t much of my forte) allowing me to keep updating the blog until the laptop arrives. I would also like to thank the tiny Internet Cafe who basically gave up a massive amount of their bandwith to fix up a linux USB for me. Any money donated from now on will go to charity.
My laptop died last night, it died in ignominy.
It’s an old HP Pavillion, nothing new certainly and it’s pretty old (verging on its 7th year which I hear is like 300 years old in terms of laptop age) but this is where the problems start. There are effectively no parts that can fix it. The basic issue is that the hard drive is “super fucked” and I am currently facing the Sam Vimes theory of Economic Disparity. Trying to fix the laptop will cost me more money than the laptop is worth and at the moment I cannot afford to fix it anyways because the place that fixes things of this nature is “miles and miles away”. I know it’s a stop-gap. I knew I was on borrowed time, I just didn’t expect the laptop to crash in the middle of work.
My work is constantly saved to an external hard drive (I keep patient files! I need serious back ups). So I just have to redo a couple of hours of it. Not a big issue…
What I have lost are the few shows I have that I watch in my downtime, the ability to play my DVDs and the few games that distract me from work. What I lost are my photographs and the few art pieces that I have done. I have also lost my primary method of writing which complicates matters. You see, the income I was earning from the blog was being ploughed into (ironically) a new laptop. I had hoped that my Laptop would make it another year at least before I had to change it. I was wrong. The laptop is dead.
I won’t lie. I can (probably) manage without a laptop. But it’s not the kind of managing people back home consider as acceptable. It makes my education harder but I can just rely on physical media (AKA books) for that. I can travel (it’s around 30 minutes to get to this place but it costs money to sit here) to an Internet Cafe to use the net and can check my emails and even fire off a short one from my phone. I can even update the blog like that but it does mean that posting any serious articles is straight up out. Any article above a certain size simply cannot be done
I have been effectively hamstrung as a blogger. The best I can do is work on articles piecemeal over 2 or 3 days to get them out by beg/borrowing/stealing internet on PCs when I can. It’s not “ideal” but it is doable.
So I am asking for help. I need a new laptop. I need to basically raise 600 pounds for a half decent laptop that I can use for everything from work to blogging, to watching YouTube videos of cats and defeating the zerg. I have looked through laptops and the problem seems to be that everything that is relatively future proof at least for the next 3 years is in the 600 to 800 pound range. And even custom building a laptop (A cheaper option than many standard purchase laptops because for the same price you often get a better spec) shares the same problem where something relatively future resistant and capable of medical usage is around 700 pounds.
I have 200 pounds roughly from the blog income and from my savings towards a laptop. I require 600 pounds to make the grade for a laptop that does the job and a bit more. I am basically at 25%…
And what makes me worry was the treatment Greta Christina got for using such charity on something as important as shoes and feel odd to ask for the same for something as silly as a laptop. So I am asking for help. Help that I sorely need and it feels awkward asking because of pride and because normally I am the one being asked. So please help out. In any small way that you can. If we hit the target of 600 pounds, I will pledge any excess to a charity that is very close to my heart.
The Spastic Society of Tamil Nadu saved my family, my Uncle was injured severe in a car accident. He is partially paralysed when a truck hit his tiny car. He was a geologist and even helped find oil for a living before his accident. He spent 6 months paralysed in a bed on the edge of death, he then picked himself up. He taught himself to write with his other hand, he taught himself to speak again, to feed himself, to dress himself up.
There were no physiotherapists and no such luxuries as leg braces. My uncle refused a wheel chair, he instead rode a bicycle. A two wheeled bicycle. He is the most determined and bloody minded person I know off. And he works for the Spastic Society of India, a charity that is dedicated to a very Indian response to disability. It’s attitude can be described as “fuck all the naysayers you guys can do whatever you feel like. We shall train you.”. It’s given disabled people who often were thrown out onto the streets to beg a second lease of life. Any excess above the laptop mark will go to this charity. In addition I have heard what Justin Griffith does with his blog income and I agree that once I start earning a salary as a doctor I will do the same as him. The money generated by the blog and by donations will go to a medical charity or into a FTB disaster relief piggy bank to be broke open to throw money at natural disaster relief on behalf of atheists as a whole.
The donation link for the laptop is below.
Donation Link for Avicenna’s Laptop
In exchange for that?
A few people have wanted to know where I got the graphics for my blog. Honestly? They are my work. You may have seen some of them before as I was one of the contestants on Greta’s cover design contest (I actually have her book which probably cost her a fair bit to send).
So I will relinquish all rights to the cover graphics, since quite a few people have wanted to use it for various memes or if you want to simply want to cover up the blog title and use it a s a desktop wallpaper or whatever. It’s free for use. In addition any other graphics I produce from from now on will be provided on a full commons license for usage by the community as a whole.
The High Res Donation Link Graphic
You are free to borrow this for nefarious porpoises
Error!
Update – Jason and Justin have been helping me try and restore some function to my laptop by booting Linux from a pen drive. It means I can possibly have basic Internet to keep the blog ticking over. To everyone who donated I wish to thank you for everything you have done. I just finished making the pen drive with the help of the lovely people who own a Internet Cafe and am on my way home to see if it works.