I'd pay her to not go
Stupid tourist types and climbers are wrecking Everest.
<-- Anything but Gore-tex
An IT bod has vowed to clamber up Everest to raise £20k for Blighty's National Museum of Computing and Bletchley Park Trust - and she wants sponsorship and people to tackle the trek with her. Astrid Byro, a tech consultant and publicity officer for the Association of C and C++ Users, is heading to the mountain's base camp, …
I've watched a few documentaries about climbing Everest, even 'tho there has been a silly number of people reach the summit on a single day now, there's also still an astounding number of people who die, the saddest/stupidest (you decide) was a guy who had just become a dad. I do understand the "because it's there" idea, however what is true is that the success (or otherwise) depends on (mainly) how lucky you are with the weather, how good the guides are and then personal fitness and fortitude, don't get me wrong, it's an acheievment and something that I'm not sure I'd be capable of (even at my fittest), but I've reached my capacity for being impressed by it now (a kind of "impressed fatigue"), which means (rather unfairly, I guess), sucess leaves me "meh" and failure/death just makes me think they're stupid for trying.
To be honest, genuine personal achevement (like David Walliams swimming the channel, or cycling to raise money for sports relief), still impresses me - I'm not that cynical, but I'd also pay for her not to go, perhaps we should start an alternative campaign?
1. I'm not trying to summit - just to Base Camp
2. I pay my own way, thanks. There is the option to do so and, ethically I can't imagine asking people to pay for my vacation.
3. I'll be 42 years old and I'm an almost lifelong smoker and I've done this before so I can assure you that I know this will not be a nice long stroll.
4. The ACCU have not yet been able to agree on what the acronym should mean these days. ::shrug:: What're ya gonna do?
5. No good deed goes unpunished
Bit concerned that the 'Join her' link implies that if you raise enough sponsorship then your travel and expenses costs for the exhibition are covered. Surely it would be better for people just to donate to the museum rather than paying for someone's holiday?
Hopefully I'm wrong and all the costs are being met elsewhere, but it would be good for that to be clarified.
Absolutely right. I like to carry a form with me, so that when someone asks me to 'sponsor' their cycling holiday in the Pyrenees, I can point out that I'm having a sponsored drink down the pub this Friday evening. Anyone want to sponsor me? For every pint drunk, at least 10p goes to a charity of your choice.
Yes, this insanely riles me also. A guy I know (hence the AC) and his wife wanted to raise bunch of money for Diabetes UK, and they climbed Mt Kilimanjaro. I think they were required to raise a minimum of £8k between them, actually raised about £12k between them, and I think no more than £4k went to the charity.
It's a fucking con. You want to climb something for charity, fine, you pay for it, give all the money raised to charity. These charitable 'alternative revenue generation' schemes that charities think up are bullshit, there are lots of people getting very rich off 'charity'.
If you look at the website then there are two options:
Charity "funded" or "self funded". If you pay £1650 then you could still try and get charity for it - the difference is that all money given to charity will actually go to charity rather than £1650 to the costs plus some other random amount to the arbitrators.
That's an old, old version of the name. ACCU has a far, far wider scope than that these days - the current banner line is: "ACCU is an organisation of programmers who care about professionalism in programming and are dedicated to raising the standard of programming."
http://accu.org
In other words it's an organisation aimed at the 20% (ref Atwood et all) of software devs who are passionate about what they do, and want to teach their teams and organisations how not to muck it up as much as far too many often (usually?) do.
ACCU holds a tech conference with around 400 attendees every April. The schedule/session descriptions for the last one at
http://accu.org/index.php/conferences/accu_conference_2012/accu2012_schedule should give you an idea of how varied and detailed the subject matter is.
If tech conferences are your thing, it's a heck of a brain fest and quite the party to boot.
I've never heard of Duff's device, so don't sing it. Sorry to fall short of your expectations (although we have been known to frequent pubs, I'm more partial to a decent beer and a game or three of pool than drunken singing).
I hate to be pedantic (OK that's a lie I enjoy it immensely) but the base camp is only part way up the mountain, the two base camps are at around 5800m altitude and the peak of the mountain is nearly 9000m, still a commendable effort from an IT bod but El Reg's article makes it sound far more impressive than it really is.
I suppose the article does reflect that it's only the base camp, so apologies on that score.
But I would argue with your definition of "right away".
Other than to say she's been to the base camp before, the article does not mention that's where she's going this time until half way through in a quote from the woman herself.
Can I have some pedantry points for that at least?
"The National Museum of Computing will use the money raised to buy laptops to teach youngsters programming. Bletchley Park Trust will spend the cash on laptops for hands-on code-breaking and cipher classes for the 8,000 schoolchildren who visit site every year as well as historical research sessions and collaborative university projects."
Laptops? I dare say they won't get many laptops for £20k... wouldn't they be better off buying Raspberry Pis?
Or better still, how about they dig out a few Speccys, C64's, CPCs and Beebs from the museum and teach kids programming on them? I vaguely remember a C tutorial in an old issue of Amstrad Action once, so it's not as if it's not available. Failing that a few Amigas and Atari STs running some sort of C programming language. :-)
Oh and I love the beer sponsorship idea... might try that :-)
Rob
Why all the negative comments? Astrid Byro has done more than anyone I know to raise money and awareness of Bletchley Park and also is responsible for the fantastic security conferences there for several years now. She deserves praise, not criticism. The ACCU is the best independent developers organisation and is responsible for the value-for-money programmers conference in Oxford each spring bringing in some of the world's best software minds. Our industry would be much poorer if not for the ACCU and the likes of Astrid.