IHS

Geek Christmas

When Keith Parsons over at the Institute for Network Professionals (www.inpnet.org) emailed me asking if I’d be interested in a “bunch of Compaq M300 laptops” I was absolutely thrilled. Laptops here are WICKED expensive and even the “new” ones aren’t new. We have such a small budget as an organization that it’s nearly impossible for us to buy the equipment we need to outfit the schools and community centers we’re planning to stand up. Thirty laptops would go a REALLY long way, as long as they were capable of running XP (for the schools) or Linux (for the community center).

But I was skeptical of the whole thing. Not of Keith or the laptops, but of the shipping process. I liked the idea of 30 or so laptops showing up “on my doorstep” but the way was fraught with all sorts of variables and perils. First was the transport logistics: there was stateside shipping, then cargo shipping, then transport from the airport to our place. During any of these legs, the precious cargo could be damaged, stolen, pilfered, mugged, assaulted, absconded with or taunted. Then there were the fees. I know cargo shipping is expensive, but in addition to that there are import taxes (don’t know how that works) and handling fees (I know how that works thanks to our friend I affectionately call “Ronnieobert”, see http://www.hackersforcharity.org/344/the-eagle-has-landed/) and all the other mysterious fees that creep in. Would this shipment make it? Would it even be worth it after everything was paid? Was Keith just saying stuff or was he serious about testing, packing, shipping and everything else to even get it to our shipper? (I get lots of people saying lots of nice things, but then not much comes of it. I guess I have that kind of magnetic personality that makes people want to say nice things but never follow up. Either that or my SLOW email habits scare them away, or whatever, but I digress at least once every blog post.)

Chris Duke over at Navis Pack and Ship (http://www.gonavis.com) packed up our shipment, ran logistics and DONATED the shipping expenses so this shipment could get here.

And it did!

The shipment arrived at Entebbe,and we packed up the HFC truck and rolled out for the three-hour drive to Entebbe. We got in a fender bender (a taxi took off our bumper in town… an inevitability seeing how they drive… thank God it wasn’t worse) but we made good time.

Let me show you the result of a day’s labor:

See those GORGEOUS CASES? The black ones are honest to goodness Pelican cases!!! Super tough, padded, locking, wheeled Pelicans! And that blue case is some kind of rock band case. Super-tough padded, oh man… I must be a real geek, because I’m like giddy over the cases. Keith threw them in. But I didn’t open them at the airport, so I had no clue what was inside.

But at the airport I was met with a mountain of fees. The first was taxes, which we’ll eventually get waived. But because I didn’t know to tell Keith or Chris to write down the value of the used equipment, we were charged taxes on the peripherals, but not on the laptops, which are already tax exempt.

That’s right. Peripherals.

There’s peripherals in them cases! Are you ready for the money shot? Christmas in August in Africa. *drooool*

There’s enough wireless gear in here to give Roamer a chubby. Wireless cameras, hubs, routers, KVM’s, VOIP gear, training DVD’s, and a LEATHERMAN Skeletool CX. Remember that? See http://www.hackersforcharity.org/123/bike-leatherman This was so much more that 30 (very cool, working, clean, amazing) laptops. Keith went way overboard and launched our work over here in Uganda. We paid some money: $100 for taxes on peripherals, $45 cargo agent fee, $10 to the loaders, $20 to the guards at our rest stop, $100 in fuel, etc but the fees were minimal considering all we got in exchange.

Thank you Chris and Keith for your amazing support! I’m thrilled by your kindness and support! You’ve breathed life into our work here! THANK YOU!

P.S. We’re accepting more donations of used equipment, but the clock may be ticking for this luxury. The government has just passed a moratorium on used equipment. Beginning in January, 2010, all used equipment will be “heavily taxed”. I don’t know the details on this, and there may be loopholes… (educational equipment waived? Tax is based on value, can the declared value be lowered to lower taxes… finding items on ebay, company equipment at accounting end of life having LOW book value, etc?)

I’m waiting on Chris to see if he’s still willing to ship for us (if we pay him) and I’ll need a team of volunteers near Greensboro, NC to be the ship-to location and the staging team for shipments (including testing, prep, valuating, etc). Let me know if you’re interested!!!

Thanks everyone!

PayPal makes good

• 4:20 – (all times GMT+3) I received an email from the PayPal Executive office, apologizing for the problems, and clearly outlining what needed to be done to get our account straight. They said I needed to detatch my personal account (via return direct email) and confirm my business account (also via direct email) with a scan of an HFC business account statement.
• 6:07 – (Uganda telecom is < 5Kbsec earlier than this) I reply to the email with the authorization and the bank scan
• 6:13 – The first of many subscriptions attached to the personal account (support for our subscription software, sprout for our widgets, etc) begin to cancel, indicating that the account was removed from PayPal.
• 6:18 – The email arrives indicating that we’re back in action.

I want to thank everyone in the community that RT’d, emailed, called offered (prayer, financial, moral, humorous, haranguing) support and generally stood in the gap for us. You guys made this happen.

Some highlights of the day:

• offers for wire transfers
• Tweeting @CNN, @oprah, @msnbc, @paypal, @wsj, etc
• Tweeting the phone number of PayPal’s PR firm
• Emailing  journalists
• Emailing various people inside PayPal including security, risk management folks and the CEO(!)
• Bans of PayPal
• Google Hacking PayPal (ironic)

Now as to PayPal’s role in all this…They have every reason to suspect that something’s amiss with just about every business account that’s requested. They are not (as many people have mentioned) a bank. I understand their screening, and honestly I wouldn’t want the job of tightening / lubricating their screening process. It’s ugly in the world of e-commerce. So I get it.

I will remain a PayPal client, and HFC will as well. No hard feelings.

Besides, I made mistakes in this whole thing. Yes, I should have waited for the IRS paperwork to come back before clicking that 501c3 button, or revealing that donations are tax-deductible (which they are, retroactively before the paperwork comes back). I should have checked the right button on the PayPal form. These things are all true, and there are other things I’ve done wrong and I’ll continue to screw some things up. But I’m not sorry I charged ahead, following my passion, fueled by the prayers, support and money of the community. Why? Because we’ve done a LOT while waiting on papers and processes. (More on that during my BH/DEFCON talk.) Yes, it’s reckless and unplanned and seat-of-the pants sometimes, but it’s coming together. The gaps are filled in by faith.

This whole thing had gotten me pretty down, and I found myself wondering what, exactly I had gotten myself (and my family) into. At conferences and such it’s easy to see that people dig what we’re doing but as the days tick by here in Africa, it’s not as easy to gauge.

But today bolstered me for the year to come. I’m not a lone-ranger crackpot…well, I am, but I’m certainly not alone in this.

Let me quote my friend Simple Nomad (by permission) from a personal email:

Fortunately our industry seems to value skills over everything else, and so for the most part people of different races, religions, sexual orientations, and hat color can talk shop and improve the world a little bit at a time.

Time and again, our community has proven that we can do things that the society at large can not. We can unite across barriers that restrict the rest of the world. In this age of intolerance and hatred, we move ahead, pushing the envelope and making the impossible possible.

Edison, Murgas, Babbage, Atanasoff, Meucci and Bell existed before the term “hacker” existed, but if they could see it, they would be proud of our community.

I know I am.

Thank you everyone for the support.

Johnny

Gaining

rhythms

Welcome to Johnny 3.0!

Hello everyone, and welcome to the new site, and a new stage of my life, which I lovingly call “Johnny 3.0!”

This site took a lot a solid year of work that spanned nine months, two jobs, two trips to Africa, thousands of (personal) dollars of development, donated hardware and bandwidth and hundreds of hours of slinging code donated by myself and LOTS of volunteers.

We turned the site into a money-making machine. I had subscriptions to feed kids, subscriptions to support our family in Africa and lots of ads and a slick store to fund HFC. The most time-critical money maker was funding our trip to Africa. Because we leave June 15th. For a year, and I’m unemployed. In fact, we didn’t have a single penny raised for our trip. I NEEDED that subscription thing to fly, or we wouldn’t eat. So I cranked out hour after hour getting it to work. I neglected my family, relishing in my unemployment, and eventually I got it to work. In staging. When I flipped the switch and went live, everything crumbled. My server bogged down under the weigh of the FLASH-embedded, subscription-enabled, ad-aware beast I had created. Then the subscription service crapped out, and I threw up my hands. WTF? Then my wife chimed in for like the 13 MILLIONTH time: “Why don’t you just put up a donate button?” So naive. Didn’t she know that you can’t just ask people for money? Didn’t she realize that in the shark-infested waters of the Internet, you need to chum for dollars? You need to give people something for their money or they will blow you off. (I had forgotten that back in 2007, the Hacker community paid for our trip to Uganda).

Enough was enough. I pulled the plug and launched this TOTALLY stripped down version of the site, along with a handy-dandy “support us” button. Within the hour, we received our first donation of several hundred dollars from Rocky. And just like that, I realized my wife had been right all along, and I learned a valuable lesson in faith. I was trying to control our money situation, and I was failing. God had better plans which I could only see when I let go. So welcome. Here’s to letting go.

Johnny, IHS