Saturday, March 29, 2008

China shoves the olympic torch right up Tibet's.........

I leave in a week for a trek in the Khumbu Region of Nepal.  We were originally scheduled to trek to Advanced Base Camp on the North Side of Mount Everest in Tibet.  After a year of planning and money spent we were recently told the following:

Days after receiving this letter, violence broke out in Tibet.  The demonstrations that led to the violence are the result of a half-century of brutal occupation, oppression and (if you look at the numbers) genocide.  The olympic torch will be run through Tibet and as part of the Beijing, China Olympics.  It doesn't take much imagination to see that this is a slap in the face for Tibetans and that by sanctioning these games we are in fact sanctioning this human rights violation.  The International Olympic Committee even had the vision to account for this and stated "if human rights are not acted upon to our satisfaction then we will act."  They have failed over and over to stand by their original statement.  As a result the IOC has Han Chinese blood, Tibetan blood and the blood of the military on their hands.  That is shatteringly unfortunate.  As a long time fan of the Olympics, I will never see them the same way.

I strongly urge the IOC to fulfil its pledge that it would ensure that China improved its human rights record in the run up to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games:

April 2002 the IOC said: the IOC is a responsible organisation and … if human rights are not acted upon to our satisfaction then we will act. But on April 25 2007, when pressed on issues of China's stance on human rights in Tibet, the IOC said: We are not in a position that we can give instructions to governments as to how they ought to behave.

* Despite previous promises, the staging of the Games in Beijing has not improved human rights in China and Tibet
* Free and unrestricted reporting from China and Tibet was a condition of the Games being awarded to China. Yet foreign journalists now need special permits to go to Tibet and are under surveillance there
* Without free reporting, China is given license to hide its systematic human rights abuses in Tibet

Time is running out for the IOC to act.

* I demand that the IOC forces China to drop its insistence on special permits to journalists and commit to remove any surveillance of journalists and their interviewees.  That is the least that we should expect from the Olympic Committee.

Despite the way this editorial might read to you, the Olympics have been a positive experience for me this year in that they have been key in highlighting an unethical regime's human violations and the funding of crimes against humanity.  They have also shown how our financial support and political malaise have contributed the the problem.  This could still turn out well.......

Thank you Spielberg and Sarkosy!

Adam Angel.

Monday, March 3, 2008

DROBO!

Some of you may know that I had a pretty major hard drive error earlier this year.  Low cost external hard drives are an economical solution UNLESS you have a drive failure.  Then you will pay big bucks to have the data recovered IF it can be recovered.  As a replacement solution I was looking into building two small servers, one at my home and and one at the studio.  I remembered reading about a system called DROBO, which is a small economic home style server with two to four hard drives.  Anyway, to make a long story short I bought two and am using them now.  They are incredible!  So here is the pitch, I am now a "Drobo Evengelist."

How would you like to have infinitely expandable data storage that is bone-dead simple to use and keeps your data protected even if a hard drive dies? If you're interested, you need to check out the Drobo storage robot (go to http://www.drobo.com).  Photographers, your digital archive is going to be HUGE eventually, plan ahead before you lose any of your valuable images.  Make sure to watch the demo video below!

They are offering a $25 rebate to friends and family. That’s an additional $25 off their already great price of $499.

If you are interested in buying one, go to http://www.drobostore.com and be sure to use this special code: EVANGEL so you get the $25 instant rebate. The $25 rebate expires on June 30th, 2008.