Bring Out Yer Dead (Or why Lenovo Middle East Rocked This Week)

Last Friday I mentioned a need for laptop computers in Sri Lanka, after we had found a medical student was working towards his exams without a computer and cleaned up then shipped out one of Spot On's collection of trusty (if dusty) T61s. The IBM, subsequently Lenovo, T61 is a classic. You can run tractors over them and they carry on working.

I found out later that the machine was being shared by our student and four others. Anandharapura, where these chaps hail from, is not wealthy. It struck me as simply wrong that medical students should be forced to resort to sharing a laptop to prepare for their examinations - although we had at least ensured there was a laptop for them to share. So I posted about it and various people, including the lovely @shelo9 and @toffeeprincess came forward with offers of old laptops they'd cleaned up.

Lenovo got in touch on Twitter and also offered to help. And help they did - two sparkling and rather sleek ex-demo S-Series machines were duly conjured up and handed over. And here's the cool bit - with absolutely no expectation of anything in return. I had been dreading the request for a photo of the students with their new machines or something and I couldn't have been more wrong. "We're really happy to help and do let us know if we can do more," the Man From Lenovo said (@mkdubai, as you ask). I was blown away to tell the truth - left there open-mouthed clutching two long boxes full of smart notebook.

So our students are now kitted out. But there are more of them out there - students from villages and families too poor to be able to afford to give them the PC they need for their studies - and we've now established a line of communication and supply through a philanthropically inclined community Doctor we know in Kandy who has been helping identify clear cases of need. There are very many of these - we appear to have uncovered a terrible lack, but be easily in possession of the solution.

Members of the Sri Lankan community here in the UAE who are travelling home are taking the machines with them one at a time so we don't have to pay customs to the awful government responsible for this whole state of affairs in the first place. And that feels rather marvellous, as it happens. There are no middle men or administrators, this is simply a community thing. It's a much more efficient form of giving that goes straight from one community to another.

So if you have a dusty but functional notebook in your life that's given way to your sleek new Ultrabook, do feel free to clean it up (ie remove your personal data) and drop it off to The Archive (Gate 5, Safa Park), where the lovely Sarah and Bethany will happily take delivery of your bounty so we can get it over to Sri Lanka and help a young medical student rather than have it just gathering dust under the stairs. Don't for a second think you don't need to bother because others will take them along - it would appear we can use them all. So please do feel free to share a link to this post or just let friends know to drop off those old machines at The Archive.

Oh - and we could use some laptop bags, too.

And thank you, Lenovo. You rocked this week.

Acer in Pointless Promo Shock Horror

I was mildly amused at the kind gift of a small, flat stone from Acer Computer attached to my Gulf News this morning. I was mildly irritated that the package was glued to the front page headline and tore the page when I tried to remove it as carefully as I could, but we'll put that down to early morning biorhythms.

There were many newsworthy things in today's papers, including the fantastic and most welcome news that Wadi Warraya (or Wurraya or Waraya or any other way you want to spell it) is to be, belatedly, declared a protected zone. This great news was not in Emirates Today which, you may remember, did launch a concerted one day campaign 'Save the Wadi Fish' that was based around an interview with a conservationist working in Waraya. A big bag of bite size Snickers Crunchers says that ET does a piece taking the credit tomorrow. For now, GN can sit back and enjoy that warm, fuzzy feeling that rewards those who get a decent scoop.

But it was Acer's stone that stayed with me. Disregarding the sage advice of French poet Alain Bosquet, I did not regard my stone so long, so long that it accepted to speak in my place. No, I looked for the invariable ad that explained the invitation attached to the stone: "Nature Shapes, Technology Creates. Individuality is yours alone to enjoy... find out more inside."

Any ad that accompanies such a slice of unremittingly daft and pointless pseudo-empowerment blather is, I thought, going to provide some mild entertainment value at least.

I finally found the ad, buried deeply in swathes of four-page spreads from real estate companies. If you take a minute to go through GN reading the headlines of the ads, you start to understand what Ken Kesey meant by recreating the acid experience without taking the drug:

Experience fine living...because attention to detail is not just a commitment, it's a way of life...; Once a year, the Cereus blooms in darkness; tycoon by day, connoisseur by night; Sea Side Living Starts Today; Your gateway to island living; Live and work in absolute grandeur; Your aspiration for a better tomorrow; Homes created around your lifestyle; Earth, sun, wind and water - the constituents of life, and the quintessence of being; not just another address in the making but a marvel with features extraordinaire...

It's a bewildering array of jumbled up words, sloganeering with no applied intelligence: declamatory, mindless blipverts of aspirational words slung at your psyche in a barrage of positivity and over-promising.

How, you may be starting to think, are our stone-wielding friends ever going to cut through? Answer: they're not. It took me three runs through the paper to find it. And I was looking for the daft thing. The ad was buried on the left hand page 20 and was made of the same old language as all the rest of it. 'Emotion, individuality and temptation at a glance' it starts. Hang on, this is a PC, isn't it? Just checking, thought it might be an apartment in Full Moon Bay. And then, for some strange reason, the next headline is 'Dolby surround sound speakers'! It's like being jerked from a page of Paulo Coelho to a supermarket flyer.

The other words in the ad are irrelevant, you can put them together in any order you like and they'll mean just as much. Print them, cut them out and try it.

Unrivalled | Empowered | Wonder | Style | Concept | Technological | Natural | Performance | Prestige

However, I now have a stone that I didn't have before and for this, like so many other small mercies, I am truly grateful.