Donation drive for a friend...

[seawasp]

ETA: The drive is over. Thanks very much to everyone who participated! The funds covered what was absolutely needed.


I have a friend named George Green (kharaku). He's made some... pretty bad life decisions, and he's stuck at the bottom right now; check his LJ entry here if you want details of the problems that make this an acute issue. To a great extent he's gotten himself in this mess, but at heart he's a good guy and some of his current problems are NOT his fault, so I'm going to do this for him once.

Short version: George's stuck in the Ukraine with essentially no money, and his laptop -- the tool he uses to do whatever work he can get as a web designer, writer, etc. -- was stolen from him.

He needs a new laptop; his ideal would be a Mac Powerbook but he's used others; the last one taken was an ASUS P50IJ.

I have set up a Paypal donation button below for people to contribute towards getting him a replacement laptop, probably from craigslist or some similar used location unless people are extraordinarily generous; any excess will go towards helping him have some resources to get the heck off the streets/out of charity places. If someone HAS an appropriate laptop they would like to donate, contact me and I'll arrange to get it to him.

I will leave this up for two weeks; if insufficient funds for a laptop  are given, I'll send whatever I have to George to at least give him something to work with.

Comments

[kharaku.livejournal.com]

The Two options are
US Post Offiice Express International (the price difference between priority and express are nominal given the difference in tmes)
if you box it yourself it's around 69 bucks.

DHL says to use DH Express International but doesn't show a price when I do a rate quote, and I don't know much about how to send with DHL.

My address:
George Green and Yulia Serdyuk
Sykhivs'ka St, 26, Kvartira 66
L'viv
Ukraine

Україна
79066
м. Львів
вул. Сихівська, 26,
квартира 66

Try to write both addresses.
If it's DHL just writing in English "Hold at Lviv Office" should be fine.

If it goes through the post office it will enter into the Ukraine Post which is across the street from the apartment and they'll leave a note so there is no need to write hold at post office for USPS shipping.

The USPS option is safe; the Post Office here gets anything from the US from Poland (In the Europeon Union with very strict laws) so it should get here with no problems safely.

DHL sends through their own network so it'd go to Kiev then Lviv but they are rock solid reliable and they actually speak English

2 Gigs is the max ram for the machine so that works great! (i might have a buddy with a bigger hard drive, 50 is kinda small no big deal) if you have a bootable OS X cd it'd be handy because finding a ppc version of os x would be a challange here if i run into problems.

This is a really amazing find!

[kharaku.livejournal.com]

if anyone happens to have an old usb webcam it'd be handy to have also (not being nitpicky; a lot of odesk clients refuse to workm with people who don't have one... i can try to find a reasonably priced on here but they are still considered cutting endge in ukraine :/ )

[melchar.livejournal.com]

Like I said, I accepted it from a friend who felt bad about me just giving him money. ^_^ I'll try sending it by USPS [at least in part because I don't know anywhere close that does dhl]. I don't have a webcam, but I will check to see if I have OS X [at this point, I don't remember if I did anything there].

[kharaku.livejournal.com]

sounds great my friend says someone probably has a wevcan on the cheap (no one gives away technology here; it could have a past fresh date and they'd still charge the original price but my friend thinks I can borrow it long term with no worries).

This is truly a life saver! I already have links saved so I can do XCode/native iOS apps on a g4 mac!!!!

This is AMAZING!