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About Majink

The Press

Feb. 12, 2004 New York Times - Ramblers Unite
Nov. 6th, 2003 Kuro5shin - Wikitravel: Bazaar-style Travel Guide Development

The Person

Affiliations

Michele Ann Jenkins graduated from UCSC in 1998 with a degree in Linguistics and an almost-minor in Journalism (she was short one class). After a few free-lance jobs in the local journalism world she decided that wasn't intense enough for her. So she jumped on the .com bandwagon and spent the next three years working in the high tech linguistic and media world. You can read more about these gigs in the Projects section.

In the summer of 2000 she resigned herself to the fact that Y2K didn't happen and she was going to have to go out and find her own adventures. Her dad suggested Paris. She signed up to teach English in Nepal for three months and a few weeks later found herself trying to explain Windows NT to a room full of rural Newari Villagers in the Kathmandu Valley.

That trip (which also included trekking, rafting, busing, and train riding from the almost-Nepal-Tibet border to the almost-Indian-Pakistan one) sealed her fate as one terminally infected with the Travel Bug.

Realizing two weeks of vacation a year was just not going to cut it, Michele uprooted and replanted in Geneva, Switzerland where she works as a technical consultant for UN Organizations such as WHO and UNHCR. As if that weren't enought, she's now enrolled in McGill University Masters of Library and Information Science Program-- in Montreal.

Since 2000 she's been to 22 countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa. In the spring of 2001, while on a plane flight from Geneva to Kuala Lumpur, Michele realized she'd just technically been all the way around the world - it made her kinda tingly. From Dec 2001 - Feb 2002 she did it again after deciding the best way to get from San Francisco back to Geneva had to be via a boat ride up the Mekong in Laos.

The Site

Majink.org is built using a custom Perl script and XHTML/CSS2 templates. The site and all its content is produced on a Portuguese Aspire 1300 running Debian Linux and Windows (in Portuguese). I've tested the CSS and HTML under the following systems:

  • Konqueror 3.1.3 on Debian Linux
  • Modzilla 1.0 on Debian
  • Netscape Navigator 4.77 on Windows and Debian
  • Internet Explorer on Windows
  • IE on Mac

If you're looking at it in something else, let me know how it goes (or doesn't).

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