Donate to AZ Quest for kids for a tax credit. I'm sure other states have similar programs, and god knows us contractors need the break this time of year.
About AZ Quest For Kids
Arizona Quest for Kids is a nonprofit organization that nurtures the hopes and dreams of children who may otherwise not be able to attend college. The program provides adult mentors and college scholarship to talented and deserving young students from families with few financial resources
Candidates for the program are identified at the fifth-grade level and are matched with an adult mentor until they reach the college age. Currently, there are 75 students participating in the program. Once the student successfully graduates from high school, Quest for Kids provides the equivalent of four year's tuition at an Arizona university.
David Highmark, chairman and chief executive officer of Northern Trust Bank of Arizona, founded Arizona Quest for Kids in 2000 to help improve the state’s low number of students graduating from high school and provides financially disadvantaged youth the opportunity to attend college. Through Quest for Kids, he and other organization sponsors hope to provide scholarships to thousands of children across the state.
http://www.azquestforkids.org/school%20tax%20credit.htm
This just posted on the AZDNUG site.....
http://www.azdnug.com/Families.aspx
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Arizona.net Christmas Charity Auction
Most of you know of and have visited our user group sometime over the last 2 years. Interface Technical Training is Arizona's leading Technical Training Provider.
Their training classes vary in price from $510 - $3000 usually depending on the level of difficulty, the technology at hand, and the length of the class.
I have a voucher good for one free training class. ANY training class at Interface Technical Training!!!! The only limitation on this voucher is that it can't be used for any of the Red Hat training classes, and really who cares about that?
I wanted to do something this year for Christmas with lower income families, but that takes money. Buy some clothes, buy some food, and really help out as many people as we can. I would like to do all of this in the name of Arizona.net User Group, and Interface Technical Training.
There is an auction on E-Bay for the above voucher. Every penny that comes in from this auction is going to go towards helping families for Christmas.
This voucher is good until the end of 2004.
I'm also going to need some volunteers to help me with the families. We'll need shoppers, wrappers, and deliverers (is that a word?) so if you are interested in helping please e-mail me at ChristmasHelper@AZDNUG.com
I'm really hoping to get more than $1000 (or more) for this program, but don't let that stop you from bidding. It is an official eBay auction, and the highest bidder will in fact get the certificate, no matter how high (or low) the auction ends at.
The eBay Auction is here:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3645164527
Happy Holidays
Some days back, Julie pointed me to Danah Boyd's blog (RSS).
This morning, she makes a call to Amazon, and publishers in general, to expand their text-based searching: have text-based searching capability on books that Amazon knows you own. She (and I) understand the copyright implications of a text-based search on everything Amazon offers but, obviously, once you've purchased the books, you already have permission to them.
The only thought/concern/question I have is this:
Amazon allows you to check a little checkbox next to books they offer to say “I own it.” While that would be perfect for those books you find at garage sales and random family members' houses that strangely happen to answer all of your latest questions, clearly that's much too easy to get around. I can't think of a way to get around this, other than having to purchase ALL of your books from Amazon to be able to text search them. I still love the idea, and I want it now, but I wonder how many people would use the option with that caveat.
Apparently enough:
Her post got a response from Ian Grove-Stephensen,
Well, I am a publisher (not in your area, unfortunately) and I'm listening. In fact I will go one step better - I'll put my entire list of 400 titles onto a public website as print-locked PDFs, so Google can index them. We've tried this with samples already and been really pleased with the results. We lose a few sales from people who then read them online, but against that we generate a lot of good will and a lot of site traffic we would not otherwise have had. It'll take about three months to complete the project, so watch this space!
Diplomats from 191 countries meet this week in Geneva for the three-day United Nations World Summit on the Information Society. It's the occasion for The Helloworld Project to project thousands of 500-foot-high laser-light SMS messages onto the Geneva fountain.
More here: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,61103,00.html