Me: Want to running this weekend?
Kelly: Actually some friends and I are running at BCCC if you want to join.
Me: Sure, what time?
Kelly: Around 10 AM.
Me: Ok.
*Call later*
Kelly: What size shirt are you?
Me: XL, wait, what’s this for, have I been conned into running for something?
Kelly: Yes, but don’t worry, it’s free and there’s food.
Me: Ghaaaaa, what am I supporting?
Kelly: Infant diseases.
Me: Dammit, I can’t argue with that one.
Kelly: See you at 10.
I broke down and shelled out $30.00 for a 2008 Wikipedia donation. I checked my browser history and that comes out to about .75 cents a pageview for the past year. Donor’s note: semper fidelis tyrannosaurus.
Now I can jam it down everyone else’s throat.
Wikipedia is one of the few organizations to which I donate actual money rather than time, materials and theft and my donation formula is usually very simple:
($ value of software I’ve stolen in the past year)/20 = Donation amount
In 2006 it was about $25.00 while in 2007 it was closer to $50.00 (CS2 was expensive, so was Server 2003).
Lately though, I’ve gotten most of my software through legitimate purchase and purged illegal software so my current tab is $10, $0 if you don’t count cheating your way into a closed beta. What am I to do? Sure, I could replace Microsoft’s free Movie Maker with Vegas or something and bump it to $35.00 but I’d never use it.
After considering my options, I’ve chosen instead to donate $1.00 for every DVD I rent from Netflix and rip putting things comfortably in the $40.00 region (I’ve been busy).