About
About my trip...
It's been a dream of mine to do the backpacker thing in South East Asia for several months for nearly two years. Having been to Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Vietnam various times on various trips, it seems like a great way to explore a part of the world I truly enjoy. Last spring, by the grace of His Noodleness, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I was laid off from my third dot-bomb job in eight years. RAmen! After a summer of last minute European travel, pretending to get a job and a two week holiday in Iceland, it is now my time.
An important aspect of the trip is to do more than travel around aimlessly, a noble but potentially pointless experience for my self. Rather, I wanted to 'do something'. So, I've committed to several weeks of programming work with an NGO in Chiang Mai called Child's Dream and a further ten-ish days with another NGO on Koh Payam called Animal Care Payam, where I'll help round up stray dogs so that they can be immunized and spayed/neutered. Much of my motivation for working with these charities can be traced back to the friends I have in the UK who've spent years in Nigeria working with VSO. The rest comes from my increasingly severe reaction to working for lying, greedy, thieving, manipulative 'entrepreneurs'. It is time to demand a refund from the proverbial devil for my proverbial soul.
But that is only about two months of the planned five month trip. I've got three other goals. The first personal goal for the trip is to earn higher PADI ratings. Open Water Advanced for sure, probably Rescue Diver, and maybe even Dive Master. We'll see. The second and more lofty goal is academic: packed in my bags will be some GRE:CS books, which are intended to be studied in preparation for an eventual exam sitting next year. And lastly, I need to figure out what to do with my life...and deciede if this dot-com, start-up, high-risk, slaving away for nothing life style is still for me. Again, we'll see!
Oh, and of course I'll travel all over the place, meet new and exciting people, and generally enjoy myself!
About the charities...
Child's Dream is a Swiss-founded charity whose primary objective is to selectively support projects that provide relief and aid to orphans or children living in poverty in the Mekong Sub-Region.
Animal Care Payam is also a Swiss-founded charity. ACP promotes the protection of animals on Koh Payam in animal home-like institutions that are financially supported or run by ACM, to set up animal refuges on Koh Payam, to promote educational work, and to minimize animal suffering.
About this site...
It's running on my own web server next to my desk in my flat; Fedora Core 4, Apache 2, PHP5, and Helix 11b are the interesting bits. This blog has been implemented with Movable Type 3.2, and the photo gallery with Gallery2.
About me...
Well, I'm a currently unemployed computer geek living in Zurich, Switzerland. Although originally from America (Hawaii, California and Michigan if you must know), I have been living in Europe for the past eight years. Other interesting bits:
- Born on July 4th!
- Vegetarian-Ova Lacto Vegetarian who will eat potato chips and Cod Liver pills
- Hardcore anti-Bush kind of politics
- No pets, lots of plants
- A cat person (as opposed to dog)
- An ocean person (as opposed to pool)
- No driver's license for the past ten years (a good thing)
- Single, lonely and looking for love
