'Twas the (Charitable Giving) Season

It's that time of year again. A chill wind blowing, long, dark nights, ... balanced by warm fireplaces and Christmas tree lights.

And time to figure out how to spread some Christmas cheer without filling the world with more "stuff."

As with recent years, we are continuing our tradition of donating to charities in honor of our loved ones instead of spending money on "too many" gifts. I encourage you to consider doing the same, and helping those who are less fortunate than we are.

We've donated to the following charities this Christmas season. We would encourage you to do so too, with the charitable organizations that are closest to your hearts. Write up a blog post, or put it on Facebook, or send us a note. We'd love to hear about what charities you love to support.

• Agros, http://oneseed.agros.org, helping the rural poor lift themselves out of poverty (give a goat, a flock of chicks or a can of worms to a family where it will make a real difference in the quality of their daily lives)
• Beads of Courage, helping sick kids and their families
• Big Brothers / Big Sisters, helping kids with mentors and role models
• City Mission of Schenectady, feeding hungry people
• The MAGIC Foundation, helping kids with growth disorders
• Starlight Children's Foundation, helping seriously ill children cope through entertainment, education and family activities

Give generously!

Here's wishing you and yours a Merry Christmas and a peaceful and prosperous New Year!

Worn out

Today, Sunday September 2, 2012:

distance: 8.01 miles

time: 94.27 minutes

average pace: 11.77 minutes per mile

calories burned: 1065

fainted after the run: nobody

calories re-ingested at Perecca's after we were done: unknown, but of course, enough to call it brunch with a cupcake dessert...

Here's a picture of the bottom of my shoe:

http://instagram.com/p/PFE08LhqCO/

Think we'll be ordering new Five Fingers on Amazon later today.

Ciao!

Chunk of Change for Charity

Back in February, DLR softWare LLC made its first charitable donation, based on the proceeds from Sgt Fitness sales in 2011.

Thanks to all the Sgt Fitness users out there, and those of you that voted for your favorite charity through the online voting booth at dlrsoftware.com, I wrote a check for $60.00 to The 3-Day for the Cure.

Spread the word: there are those you know who could actually use a dose of discipline from the old Sarge. And every copy sold through the app store adds $1.25 to the next chunk of change for charity.

Stay fit!

 

Birthdays

Got a really cool present from my honey this year for my birthday (and a great card, too!). Thanks, baby! It's a t-shirt that looks like this:

If it seems familiar, it may be that you read this post of mine from August, 2010:

http://dlrdave.blogspot.com/2010/08/cyclists-creed.html

My writing's been immortalized on a t-shirt! And I get to wear it whenever I want!
I'm a lucky man. Grateful for what I do have this month, not so concerned about what I don't have. Tell me, though... what sounds younger: 45 years or 4.5 decades? My grandparents always told me you're only as old as you feel, and you can stay young at heart your whole life through. I always did think they were pretty right-on.

Marching

March, 2012: it was weird around here. It was just as warm as June or September usually is for about two weeks right in the middle of the month.

But that was mostly a good thing: I started riding my bike to work early this year, the week after we changed the clocks to what the Europeans call "summer time." (Stupid time changing. But that's another topic...)

RunKeeper tells me I've made 6 round trips to work on my bike this month. I swear I did 7, though: I must have forgotten to use the RunKeeper on one of my commutes that first week, because I swear I did 2 the first week, then 3, then 2 again. Apparently I only tracked one of those ones the first week, though. Maybe I didn't have enough battery power that day. I can't remember, it was a few weeks ago already.

Proud of this, though: I already cracked 40 minutes on one ride in this month.

Rock on.

 

Hello Leap Day

February 29th. An extra day. But it's a Wednesday this year, so in some ways, it hardly seems like it.

What are you going to do with it?

Just in case you're not sure, Seth Godin has some good ideas.

If none of that sounds appealing to you, you should check out Austin Kleon's new book, Steal Like an Artist. It's chock full of inspiration.

If you're still not inspired, you're gonna have to write your own blog. That's all I've got for today. :-)

 

Bye bye "Big Money"

Can big money buy the Internet? No, I don't think it can. The Internet's simply too big to buy.

Here's a brilliant idea: let's eliminate money from the political campaigning process. We could eliminate "big money" completely, and take back Capitol Hill. Can you imagine: regular people being elected, and staying regular people for their entire duration in D.C./Albany/Sacramento/Olympia? And then going back to regular lives after their one or two terms?

Joel Spolsky got me thinking along these lines this morning with this Google+ post, and call me crazy, but I think he's got some valid points there.

In fact, I'd suggest taking it even one step further than simply giving away ads on the Internet for free: let's figure out how to ban the *sale* of TV, radio and Internet advertisements for anybody who's running for an elected position. And let's say that anybody who owns an outlet that contains advertising in their stream must provide 5% of that advertising time *for free* on an equal/rotating basis to *anyone* who wants a piece of it that is running for elected office.

It would soon "not work" -- because there would be so many candidates with so many free messages that the channel would be swamped, and the channel "owners" would simply not be able to show as many ads as they were receiving, let alone rotate through them on any sort of equality basis.

But, if we did this, even though we recognize in advance that it would not work well once a certain volume of candidates is reached, the people with money would have to figure out another way to influence the vote rather than simply spending a ton of cash on ads.

Of course, the people with money would still have an advantage. They'll be able to afford to actually physically go to many locations and appear in person in front of people. But for every other medium (aside from an actual physical presence) where money can buy influence, I think we should make the sale and purchase of such influence illegal. We should hold the SuperPacs, the TV stations, anybody who's involved responsible, and be able to charge them and proseucte them for violations. Possibly even taking things so far as to invalidate election results when violations occur.

What if we lived in a world where anybody could advertise their own political campaign free of charge in online video snippets? How would that change things?

Worth some thought, worth some discussion... even worth some action.

All is Quiet

Happy New Year!

2011 is over. Welcome, 2012.

2011 was ok. It wasn't the worst year ever.

It was my bloggingest year ever: 35 posts. Not quite once a week. I'm going to aim for at least once a week this coming year... It helps that I had something I wanted to talk about publicly this year: Sgt Fitness.

Sgt Fitness. The first app I've done that I would consider "potentially useful to lots of people" up on the iPhone app store. Only dozens have bought it and downloaded it so far, but there's still more to come. Still hoping for an audience of thousands and more eventually. Turns out the hard part about selling an app is communicating about it, promoting it, marketing it, and actually getting the word out to the people who'd be interested in it. Building it and putting it up there is easy.

Looking forward to doing some updates to those apps in the coming days and weeks.

Make a resolution to get more fit this year. And, oh yeah: buy Sgt Fitness and let him help you keep your resolution.

So: Cheers to your health! And crank the U2 today, on New Year's Day.