24 Hour Marathon for "Doctors without Borders"

Myself and many others in my social and work circles spend endless amounts of time working and taking care of what we consider to be important activities in our lives. We are all dedicated, respectable and good hearted people. I applaud my friends and co-workers for their efforts day in and day out, having a family and successful careers in this day and age are not an easy task and many on top of that give of themselves daily to help others less fortunate.



For 2009, I decided that it was time I took another step, over the years I have always given time and money to certain activities local to my community to help but recently it has been reduced to simply "money" it became easy to just enter my credit card info or reach into my pocket and pull out some change or bills to drop in a bucket. Now though I have decided that I will start checking locally for some ways I can help my community more with my own two hands and I very much want to put some of the energy that I use for my various online activities behind helping another group of professionals who spend enormous amounts of their time and energy doing amazing work all around the world.

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an international medical humanitarian organization created by doctors and journalists in France in 1971.



Today, MSF provides aid in nearly 60 countries to people whose survival is threatened by violence, neglect, or catastrophe, primarily due to armed conflict, epidemics, malnutrition, exclusion from health care, or natural disasters. MSF provides independent, impartial assistance to those most in need. MSF reserves the right to speak out to bring attention to neglected crises, to challenge inadequacies or abuse of the aid system, and to advocate for improved medical treatments and protocols.



In 1999, MSF received the Nobel Peace Prize.

So I have decided that on February 12, 2009 at 15:00pm CET (Central Europe) I will begin a new and crazy endeavor to host a 24 hour long Friday Morning Report in order to raise money for charity. Specifically the "Doctors without Borders". My goal is to raise $500$2000 (Updated due to such a positive response in the first 12 hours of announcing! Thank you everyone!) for their cause and I hope that you will support me and them in making this happen. Many of my friends have inspired me to take on this challenge not to mention the entire SAP Community Network who managed to accumulate almost 4 million points in 2008 for which SAP has agreed to donate a sum of 200,000 € to the World Food Programme. I have no doubts this will be a difficult task, stressful leading up to it and most likely stressful during the course of the 24 hours but I will push on and I will make it!



Everyone who is interested can tune in to watch me throughout the 24 hours as well as the various videos segments available about the MSF program and their activities as well as segments done by friends, co-workers, associates and others throughout the timespan of the show. You can catch the show here, http://fridaymorningreport.tv, there is a live chat available and I will be watching on Twitter as well. Many might wonder if my show is the proper format for such an event, personally I think any format is a good format for helping others, true on my show we laugh, and have fun and things are normally on a lighter side of life but that does not mean we care less and this show will be extra special because the fun we have will be made helping a great cause! So please join us for an interesting evening and participate and if you can donate to this great cause!



I've setup a site where you can donate directly to the cause, you can find that here. If you are unable to donate, please at least spread the word to those you know - there is a lot of things happening in the world right now that we may not be able to directly stop but we can DIRECTLY impact the support made available to those who really need it!

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Starting 2009 off with a thought!

I decided to go ahead and do a small video, I seem to be moving more and more in that direction these days with my show, Friday Morning Report so I figured why not kick off my blogging here for this year with a small video as well.



The video is a look back at some of the professional/semi-professional things to happen to me during the 2008 year as well as what I think will be very dominant in the upcoming 2009 year now.



OK so 2008 here we go, some links to show my highlights, things of interest and importance.

• Friday Morning Report
  
• Starship Enterprisey
  
• Enterprise Geeks
  
• Enterprise Irregulars
  
• Social Media Collective
  
• Craig's Rantings
  
• SAP Developer Network
  
• @eventtrack
  

Beyond that I honestly could go on for hours about friends, family, my books, my kids, the list is simply endless but those I will save for me ;-) and for all of you I will simply say I hope your 2009 is half as good as mine looks because my looks amazing!



So 2009, what do I think of 2009? I think we are in for a real awakening of technologies and their uses. As many sit back and fret over the financial situation I see this as an excellent opportunity for companies as well as individuals to make use of the tremendous amount of technology already in place to make working virtually very easy. I've been a virtual worker now since 2005 and although there are aspects of not being in an office that are missed the benefits to both me, my family and the environment far outweigh them!



2009 I think will be the year that we start to use more and more of these tools, such as Veodia to work, collaborate and communicate across the globe.

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