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Why do I ask for Donations?

I don’t have a job. I literally am in full time education. Yes, it involves working for free and helping people but charity is what you do when you do it for the sake of others. I have the ulterior benefit of learning the art of medicine.

Basically? Things I brought with me from the UK are falling apart. My camera has crapped out (I used to be an avid photographer, my camera unfortunately got caught in one of the many accidents that India is infamous for), my laptop is on its last legs and I am still a fair way short of my travel expenses. I spend whatever money I get on food and books (medical).

I will hold my hand up. These are luxuries, luxuries I would like. It’s nice to take photographs. Both professionally (Medical photography is an art unto itself) and for fun, but it is not essential to me. It’s nice to have a laptop that doesn’t require wishful thinking and prayer to run. Or indeed a laptop that doesn’t require a constant power supply and the finest of shenanigans Windows Vista can achieve. Not necessary but nice. I can still study out here without one, but the lack of one does mean that I am on stolen time with regards to the blog.

It’s also nice to fly directly home and not travel by train to Mumbai or Delhi. Cattle Class India often means literal cattle class and an extra day or so of travel. I also figure that the laptop and camera will help with blogging. So any help is appreciated.

Thanks to all who help out. The Paypal link is on the right of the page.

[Edit]

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 a 30 minutes) 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.

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.

 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