Audioblogging From Kilimanjaro Via Satellite Phone

GlucoPilot writes "Apparently a charity called Cops On Top is climbing Kilimanjaro as a memorial to the late Officer Isaac Espinoza of the SFPD. That in itself is pretty amazing, but the /. amazing thing is that they are AudioBlogging the whole thing via Satellite Phone by calling to an audioblogging site and having their MP3s automatically posted to their dasBlog (open source blogging system) at www.copsontop.com/climblog. Cool stuff. Their latest blog post is at 15,500 ft."

sat phone

[juggle88]

The nice thing about sat phone is: the higher you climb the mountain, the clearer your audioblog.

Macho Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

I was up Kili in 2001 and at one of the huts (we took the coca-cola route) we met up with some RCMP (canadian federal police) that were headed to the summit as some kind of similar fundraising/memorial deal. They had their sat phone, usb camera and laptop with them and thought they were the shit. Of course, being macho idiots they hooted and hollered all around the site and proudly proclaimed how they were all going to summit and have happy pictures to prove it. That two of them were part-time Elvis impersonators (seriously!) didn't help the scene.

While we spent a day acclimatizing they took off for their summit attempt and sure enough, next day we saw 3 of them coming back with altitude sickness, 2 vomiting, 1 with severe headache, and only one made the summit, where he couldn't get the electronic gear to work.

So fine, the current group of idiots made it to the top, where they "hit a few onto the glacier" with a fucking baseball bat they carried up there. But being macho idiots in Africa while carrying a local's lifetime's wages in gear around with you is not appropriate behaviour. Worse still, collecting money to go on a "mission" like this is almost as bad as the Tahiti posting guy suggests.

Stop it!