Originally posted on June 22, 2006 @ 11:29 am
FILLMORE, California – Happy Ivy doesn’t have a bathroom or a kitchen in the bus he calls home. He does, however, have a video-editing station.
Living in a squalid, Woodstock-style bus parked in a Fillmore, California, orange grove, the 53-year-old homeless man charges a power generator from a utility shed and uses Wi-Fi from a nearby access point. From this humble camp, he’s managed to run a ’round-the-clock internet television studio, organize grassroots political efforts, record a full-length album and write his autobiography, all while subsisting on oranges and avocados.
He claims he created one of the first handheld computer scanners and played a major part in the data transmission industry in the early 1990s. “I’ve always been trying to stay up on internet technology,” Ivy said.
Source: Wired News
This is an amazing story. Apparently nearly all homeless people have e-mail addresses, according to Michael Stoops, director of the National Coalition for the Homeless.
Helping the homeless get e-mail addresses has been a priority for years at shelters across the country. And in an age when most every public library in the nation offers internet access, the net has proven a perfect communication tool for those without a firm real-world address. Yay technology.