Buy Mac Software, Support Child’s Play

ironcoder » Child’s Play Day:

Child’s Play is a Seattle-based charity started in 2003 by the guys at Penny Arcade that helps make the holidays a little nicer for sick kids staying in children’s hospitals by providing toys and games for them to enjoy. Since its inception over a million dollars in donations of toys, games, books and cash have been collected.

This year a group of independent Mac Developers are teaming up and donating all of the proceeds from sales of their various software titles on Thursday, December 7th to the Child’s Play charity. To participate simply purchase the products as you normally would through the various online stores. Your money will be collected and sent to the charity and you’ll get some great Mac software to enjoy.

Includes some of mph’s favorite software, WebNoteHappy and VoodooPad. (I own the latter and while I don’t do much with it these days it is good software from a great developer.) (Oh, funny — they’ve got the app mph blogged cryptically about just today…)

Looks like a lot of neat stuff. (Guitar Shed especially, not that I’m a guitarist… Oh, and I could pay for Billable if it helped me get around to actually invoicing somebody that I keep forgetting to…)

Happy Holidays Commercial

The holiday commercial for Macs (vs PCs) made me laugh, because it has some nerd cred: one of the things that sucks about programming for PCs is you typically need to do it in C++, whereas on the mac you get to use tasty Objective-C. (Unless you’re me, in which case you are stuck in a C++ API anyway because you use a cross-platform toolkit which happens to be done in C++…)

The embodiment of the PC, by the way, is comedian and author John Hodgman, who uses a Mac.

Leipzig Is Calling You, Henry

Thomas Dolby’s out touring again with a new CD and all, and he’s got this video podcast called The Sole Inhabitant (a phrase from his song White City, and also the name of his current tour), and I have been subscribed to it for a while and I only just got around to watching/listening to it, and wow. It’s footage of Dolby performing live, with a small commentary intro/outro. You get to see practically every keystroke of his performance, and realize that all that electronica is very, very live. Dolby’s rocking the chrome-dome these days, and he looks like some kind of character from a cyberpunk story when he performs — a head studded with gadgets (but practical ones — e.g, wireless earphones, mic, and what appears to be an iSight strapped to the side of his head, footage from which is edited into the podcast) and in one video he’s wearing this weird oversized trenchcoat.

So geeky. So cool. Dolby is the man. I want to be him. I want to be a tenth as cool at my coolest moment as he is while flossing.