What one man can do with motivation!

If you want to see one man's hell bent on getting computers, knowledge, experience and love of people, please go see Ken Starks. You'll see what he has been able to accomplish for the lower income and class of peope in the Austin Texas and surrounding areas.

He continues to amaze me with tenacity, broken limbs, health limitations and just about a heart of gold what one man can do with help from others to bring change to his community and to help his kids out with working machines.

There is a variety of posts, some political, some not and what he continually does on a very limited budget of personal donations to him of dollars and hardware and how he makes his non-profit linux can do with so little.

There is a former Free Geek non profit (www.freegeek.org) from Portland and EmpowerThy (http://www.upgradeyourcommunity.org) in Vancouver Washington that has a similar feel to Ken's zeal here in Vancouver. Executive Director from Both programs is Oso Martin. If you are from the Portland Metropolitan area, please check out both of these wonderful non-profits that are helping their communities with education, social action and many other wonderful community aspects.

Or may you have the shear tenacity to start a program of your own. Be sure to never over extend yourself or allow your location to become the local trash dump for electronics. Follow all of your local state, city and regional laws, seek area people who may have done this before to avoid making big mistakes and face BIG fines.

Basically what I am saying is find a local or regional leader (also known as a mentor and there are many different models to doing this type of work, so no one way is the right way unless you create a huge dump!) who has done this before, get involved in their operations, talk to them and find out what pitfalls they faced in starting up and learn from them.

What happens when the internet goes down?

After thinking about this for several months and reading a story from the Seattle Times, (link to Microsoft's new Office 365, an online version of Google Apps.) I began to wonder what would happen to those office workers and other people would do if the internet went down for several hours to several weeks?

With cloud computing becoming of a platform for Office applications, Email, BookMark Syncing and the list could go on?

What would happen? If your wireless router, business router, home router, link up the router food chain went out?

What would happen if your ISP went down and you had no connection to the internet. Or a Backbone provider kicked your ISP provider for failing to pay them for service and you were the customer of that ISP?

Even a natural disaster could take out communications for days, if not weeks, maybe months in a situation.

Maybe its time for the average home user starts thinking of backup solutions for this type of situation. And mobile platforms are not as secure as one thinks from this type of issue. Mobile phones could be kicked off for non-payment, overloading of phone circuits, bad tower connections or a natural disaster could knock them out completely. If this were to occur, I would think your LAST thought would be if your Cell phone, PDA, Iphone or connected tablet is your first issue!

If your business "depends" on the Internet access, even in the worst of times, what is your plan on having it? I know for the average person, they can wait until a phone, cable provider, internet service provider, local co-op or ? can come in with an installer, trouble-shooter and fix the average problem.

With more and more of our daily lives from Office Apps to Games to buying your average food, book or other online purchases through various providers, could you deal with no internet access? Do you have backup plans for no power or for an extended time without power?

There are a lot of questions that I have. May be someone out there has answers. I would love to hear them.