Ten years ago, in my late teens, I wrote to a few people for advice in planning my first expedition. Two of the dozens of letters I posted received replies that took me by surprise – the first was from Pen Hadow, starting a chain of events that led to him guiding our unsupported North Pole attempt in spring 2001. The second was from one of my childhood heroes, Sir Ranulph Fiennes.
I decided to write after reading one of his books but wasn't sure where to find an address, so I sent it to the book's publishers, asking them to pass it on. I only half-expected a reply and was gobsmacked to get a three-page handwritten letter a couple of weeks later.
Ten years on, things have come full circle and I have an 'advice/assistance requests' email folder with several hundred messages in it. Few of the plans I'm privy to ever come to fruition, so it made my day when Tony sent me a link to an article in today's Sunday Times on 15-year-old Jordan Maguire's forthcoming 'Last Degree' North Pole expedition, where he cites me as one of his sources of inspiration.
If this sounds like I'm blowing my own trumpet, I don't mean it to. The lesson I'm slowly learning is this: no matter how hard-won your experience, knowledge and expertise is, give it away for free and you'll get more back in return than you ever imagined possible.
Jordan aims to raise £25,000 ($43,500) for the Wellchild children's charity. For a 15-year-old, that's a pretty lofty goal; the best bit is that he's raised more than £17,000 already.
So, two thoughts for the day. The first is to consider sponsoring Jordan if you're able to – www.justgiving.com/northpoleexpedition. The second is to think about what you've learnt in your time so far on planet earth, and where that experience might be doing some good rather than languishing untapped in your noggin.
Who knows what you might set in motion?
— Filed under Inspiration, Other expeditions
My ever-faithful, 16-month-old PowerBook suffered a near-fatal soaking on Thursday afternoon. Once dry, it showed a few flickering signs of life, but the hard drive was making some alarming noises and it was clear that some rather key components (namely the battery and the screen) were never going to be quite the same again.
I rushed it into the Apple Store the next morning, to find that their 'Genius Bar' was fully booked up for the day. (Apple, if you're reading this, how about an 'A&E' department? Nothing would have pleasd me more than to have had a geek in a white lab coat boot up my laptop with a stethoscope pressed to its keyboard. 'I'm sorry, Mr Saunders…') They could fit me in the next day, but would probably have to send it away for repair, perhaps for a couple of weeks. I swallowed hard and wondered if it was fate that my bank balance that morning so closely matched the retail price of a new 2Ghz MacBook Pro.
Here's where the Doozers come in. I think I've written about them before but it bears repeating. The wonderful Jim Henson puppet show, Fraggle Rock was an unmissable element of my (admittedly limited by today's standards) TV viewing schedule as a boy. The Doozers were ancillary characters, a merry gang of knee-high humanoids that spent their days building elaborate towers and bridges, from a crystal made from radishes and turnips (bear with me here). The effort, skill and time that went into these constructions was astonishing, yet the radish crystal towers were also the staple diet for Fraggles; the Doozers' intricate buildings were eaten on a regular basis. Yet the Doozers welcomed the fact that the things they devoted their lives to creating were being destroyed, because it gave them the space to build something even better. To start again from square one.
I bought the MacBook Pro. Here are a few first impressions (Mac-leaning geekiness follows. If you're here for polar expeditions or general derring-do, you may wish to look away now):
I like:
- Apple's superb packaging. Open the box, plug it in, turn it on and it works straight away. Brilliant.
- The screen. Higher resolution, brighter, sharper. Two thumbs up.
- The speed. Most applications are much snappier and it takes far less time to boot up.
- The 'MagSafe' power connector. Considering my track record, it might extend this laptop's life a little further. (Providing it doesn't blow up, of course.)
- The ease at which it recovered data from my knackered laptop. Via the magic that is Firewire, it hoovered all of the files/emails/etc I was panicking about losing from my old computer's waterlogged hard drive, leaving me free to make a cup of tea. Stress-free computing at its finest.
- Front Row. Dashboard and Exposé were always good for wowing Windows-using cynics and invoking envy in ThinkPad-toting road warriors on long haul flights. This is even better.
I'm indifferent about:
- The built-in iSight camera. While the PhotoBooth software is undeniably amusing, I can't see myself using this much. Mind you, I said the same about cameras in mobile phones and I use the camera in my Nokia N70 all the time now.
I don't like:
- The 'bloat'. My MacBook Pro came with a 100GB hard drive, which would have been excellent news were it not for the fact that nearly half of it is used up before you save a single file. After copying over 10GB of music, I have about 50GB left to play with, so I'd guess software/OS/etc takes up nearly 40 gigs. Hmm.
- The noise. A weird one, this. In many ways, it's a lot quieter than my old PowerBook – fan and hard drive noise are practically nonexistent, yet there's a persistent high-pitched whine in the background. It's barely perceptible, but hugely annoying. At least it was, until I stumbled across Daniel Jakut's Magic NoiseKiller, which may or not employ actual magic but has left my computer quieter than a mouse.
Buying my first ever Apple in January last year was the best purchase I've ever made. It accompanied me through a period of my life where I've grown, achieved and accomplished more than ever before and proved an invaluable tool in achieving a level of productivity and organisation that would never previously have been associated with the words 'Ben Saunders'. The MacBook Pro isn't another quantum leap forward, but it's good enough (along with a little Doozer zen) to make me feel ok about a water spillage that wound up costing me £1,779.00.
— Filed under Miscellany
Odd kind of day, yesterday.
The kind of day when traffic lights turn red the moment you approach, the petrol station you drive into when you're nearly out of fuel has plastic bags over all the pumps, the projector for the talk you're giving that evening is locked into an office and you have to help the organisers kick a door down to retrieve it, and the kind of day where you find that, on the drive home, half a litre of water has leaked from a bottle into the very innards of your beloved Apple Powerbook. The computer you run your entire life from – a million-dollar expedition, tens of thousands of emails, a diary chock-full of hundreds of meetings and speaking engagements, a web design business, the book you're writing and ten gigabytes of music.
I'm typing this on my old PC. Looking over at the black screen of my lifeless Powerbook, I can't help feeling that half my brain is missing.
I'm going to wheel the carcass into the Apple store this morning to see if anything can be done. After a thorough overnight drying, it boots up valiantly and the hard drive seems ok, but the screen is worryingly dim and the trackpad/button appear to be dead. Hopefully the boffins can resuscitate it. If not, I might be bankrupting myself to get a new MacBook Pro. We'll see…
— Filed under Miscellany
I have just been informed by my local Sainsbury's that spray starch has been 'discontinued'. We're doomed!
— Filed under Rumination
I was invited to join the Times/Flora Pro.Activ marathon team (a wonderful bunch of people, including none other than four-time Olympic gold medallist Matthew Pinsent) for a 20-mile training run around London yesterday morning.
We cruised through the quiet streets at a steady nine min/mile pace and all went swimmingly until fifteen miles or so, when Matthew (who'd be the first to admit that he's hardly built for distance running) started dropping back. I slowed, thinking for a moment that I might be able to say something encouraging before pacing him back to the pack. And then the sheer absurdity of the situation sank in: what on earth was I supposed to say to someone that's won four gold Olympic medals and eleven world championships in one of the most brutal sports imaginable? 'Dig in'? 'Try harder'?!
I kept my mouth shut.
— Filed under Rumination, Training