Rotary Blog Featured on rotary.org
Today Rotary International ran a story on their frontpage about the blog Colombo Regency setup. I am really proud of that blog because they are helping people and documenting it really well.
When the Rotary Club of Colombo Regency, Sri Lanka, invited a man to speak about weblogs at a lunch-time meeting in November, members had no idea that only a month later they would use their new knowledge to create such a Web site and raise tens of thousands of dollars to aid Sri Lankan survivors of the world’s deadliest tsunamis in recorded history.
Just one day after massive waves slammed into coastlines along the Indian Ocean, the club created www.reliefforsrilanka.blogspot.com, a weblog that allows people to immediately donate money, food, and medicine — and read about what the club is doing with the goods and funds. (Tiffany Woods, Rotary International)
That ‘man’ is me. I blogged about the presentation here. It’s great that Colombo Regency is getting the press. The outpouring of support from Rotarians around the world has been amazing. For the record Harsha de Silva is the main blogger on the site who got the photos and stuff going. He’s the guy who invited me.
What the Rotary Club did is really amazing, and simple, meaning that anyone can do it. I gave them this presentation here: (rotary-blog Powerpoint – 4 MB). It’s the least interesting part of the venture but look if you want. I gave the presentation and answered some questions and then I left. I see Harsha all the time but I never thought anything would come of it. Then the Tsunami hit and Tharanga emailed me to say they already setup a blog. I went in and admin’d it a little and put their logo and stuff there but that was about it. What’s interesting about blogs is not their form as much as content. The design is about as sophisticated as a bunch of emails in a stack. What’s cool is what the Rotary Club was doing – buying food, putting it in vans and going out and helping people. Now the operation is actually very serious with warehouses and stuff.
I also emailed Harsha another Powerpoint showing him how to sync with www.flickr.com for photo uploading. In a few steps you can setup and email address with Flickr that’ll let you blog photos by email, which is pretty hot. Anyways, you should check out the site. They update more often that I do and they are awesome
reliefforsrilanka.blogspot.com
I started off not really liking General Sarath Fonseka, him being part of the aggressive war effort. I didn’t support the war (largely cause I thought it would fail), and I thought Gotabhaya Rajapaksa and Fonseka were gleefully stomping everything. Fonseka even came out and said “I strongly believe that this country belongs to the Sinhalese but there are minority communities and we treat them like our people,” in 2008 (
General Sarath Fonseka was arrested on a bunch of trumped up charges, but mainly for daring to threaten Mahinda in a Presidential election. Despite his poor health, Fonseka was arrested in February 2010 and sentence to three years. Word on the street now, however, is that he’ll be released soon. Like any day now. President Mahinda Rajapaksa has told 
I’ve been testing a lot of apps. A very interesting one is iPlayboy, from Playboy magazine. It’s bad porn but a good magazine, especially since you can read issues from its cultural heyday – the Mad Men era of the 60s.
I’m going to get back to blogging. I buy a shitload of stuff on my iPad. Not that I like spending money, and the exchange rate terrifies me, but it’s just so easy, and so good. For example, I’ve been reading comics again. Spiderman, and 
indi, your presentation and more importantly what came out if it has helped so so many people. in fact we have even created rotary history… thank you for all your help.