I have been unable to think of any polite way to tell this to people directly, so I'm going to say it on my webpage. I have enough stuff. If you want to purchase a present for me, please donate as much as you would spend on me to one of the following charities. A $5.00 donation means so much more to me than a $50.00 gift certificate. Of course if you want to make me a pizza or just say, "John, you're the bomb." that's okay, too.
Every charity I list is one whose goals I agree with* and your donation is tax deductible — with two serious exceptions:
You can see gifts I've received in my trophy room.
| Humanitarian and social efforts | Charity Navigator.org rating | |
|---|---|---|
| The Book Thing of Baltimore | Need a book? Take. Have a book? Give. You can donate physical books or money. This is a local Baltimore charity. | No. |
| St. John's Huntingdon | This is my church in Baltimore. If you're likely to donate to them, maybe you'd like to visit. They offer a welcoming Christian community and beautiful traditional Anglican mass. | No. |
| The Red Cross | This is one of my favorite charities. Giving blood or platelets means a lot more to me than money. No amount of cash can generate human blood. To donate blood, call 1-800-GIVE-LIFE (1-800-448-3543) or visit http://www.givelife.org. | Yes. |
| Big Brothers and Big Sisters of America | This is a "mentoring" organization which pairs up volunteers with children in need of guidance, friendship, tutoring and other older-sibling type services. | Yes. |
| The Marrow Foundation | This is the non-profit organization which helps fund the National Marrow Donor Program. You should also submit a blood sample to the NMDP to save the life of somebody who matches your marrow. Any donation can be done completely anonymously. | Yes. |
| The National Federation of the Blind | This organization is by the blind, for the blind. They provide job-training, legal advice, braille materials, computer usage advice and much more to blind people across the United States. | Yes. |
| Oxfam International | What they do | Yes. |
| Bread for the World | Who they are | Yes. |
| Computer oriented and technical things | ||
|---|---|---|
| SDF | This is the non-profit educational UNIX system that hosts my website for free, gives me my e-mail and lets me compile programs and do lots of other neat computer-geek stuff. You can join, too, if you'd like to learn more about UNIX. | |
| netBSD | This is the operating system that the above mentioned SDF runs. It is also the operating system that I run on my home machine. | |
| OpenBSD | Similar reasoning to netBSD above. | |
| SnowNews creator | I don't have the patience to explain what this is. It's an RSS feed reader. You can look up what that means in the Wikipedia. The point is, it's a free program that I use and donations help them. | |
| PuTTY development | I don't have the patience to explain what this is. It's a program. You can look it up in the Wikipedia. The point is, it's a free program that I use and donations help them. | |
| Pentadactyl | This is a firefox add-on that changes the entire functionality of Firefox to one that is maximally efficient (for nerds who can handle it). It's a free program that I use and donations help them. | |
| Project Gutenberg | A resource for free electronic versions of every book that is out of copyright. | |
| Videolan Project | An open source video player | |
| Nearly frivolous things | ||
|---|---|---|
Go back.
* "With whose goals I agree" is pedantry up with which I will not put.
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