Help a Man Get on Broadband
Clint Franklin is my best friend. I have known him since since 2001 and we have spoken more days
every month than not since then. Whereas friendships in my past have fallen aside because of my own anxiety issues
Clint has always been there, without fail. Clint has problems of his own. One problem is that he has been, for as
long as I have known him in the least, stuck on a 28.8K dial-up Internet connection. That was pretty cruel back in
2001, but understandable—I was on 56K dial-up at home and high-speed T1 at college—now it’s just a terrible
joke.
Fast Internet is only avaible in his area via satellite or 3G. Both come with equipment or setup costs and expensive
monthly payments. He has calculated the total cost to be about $2’000 (USD), this is for a two-year contract.
Clint is a very creative guy. He is full of ideas and not full of himself. He struggles to share his creative
abilities because he has an Internet connection that restricts him to the necessity of checking just one or two
websites a day. He has a mountain of technical books because he can’t just Google something and get an answer like
you or I can. He isn’t able to connect with the communities out there that could help him with his endevaours
because his Internet speed is such a limitation. He doesn’t share much with the world because he is not used to
this. Sharing is something takes a lot of time and peraration for him. It took an hour and a half for him to send me
thirteen minutes of audio. We had to do the transfer twice because it failed the
first time around. He has a blog, but only because I
beat it out of him, but he tends not to do much blogging because signing into web interfaces is slow, unreliable and
a big put-off. He doesn’t use an RSS reader, despite my pleas, because that involves downloading stuff and
configuring it. If he wants to update iTunes, it’s probably an over-night exercise.
And despite all of this, the remaining memory I have of Clint through all these years is that he’s always been
there. He has dial-up: just getting online is a chore. He can’t use his phone whilst he’s online. He’s paying
for the Internet call. He gets about a 21K effective connection speed. Yet, I talk to him over IM online almost
daily, and when we were working together on projects in the past, you could
always count on Clint to be the most active in the forums. The guy is a real trooper.
But I need your help. If we’re going to make a real change to Clint’s life we’re going to need to raise $2000
to get Clint on broadband so he can enjoy everything we all take for granted on our fast, always-on Internet
connections. How many videos do you think you’ve watched this week? How many websites do you think you’ve
trawled through without thinking about it? How much data have you consumed, do you even know? Now imagine you opened
your web browser and it took five minutes to log into your e-mail and downloding just 1 MB could
take 10 minutes.
Any favour you do for this man is a favour to me. If you ever thought Camen Design and my work was ever worth
anything, please donate some money to Clint, a guy who actually needs it.
Thank you.
Sorry, dontations are not being accepted at this time.
If you would like your donation amount / name / website address listed publicly (as some form of
trivial compensation for my sincerest thanks), just click the Publish your name and donation amount?
link
when donating and you can enter any info you want made public. I’ll inlcude a list here at the bottom of this
page.