A few days ago I began a grass-roots charity drive to unify the Mac and development communities behind a great cause. Of the 10,000 people who read this blog, exactly four of you noticed. In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have buried it under 17 meters of yappery. My bad.

For those who didn’t notice, I’ve made a new, dedicated web site for the drive, called Club Thievey. Note the non-obscene URL for easy sharing: http://thievey.org

The deal in a nutshell is this: make a tax-deductible donation to the Madagascar Fauna Group and I will send you a plush lemur. I will personally pay for the lemur and for the shipping, even internationally. We’ll all take pictures of our lemurs and post them on the Club Thievey site.

My goal is to give away 100 lemurs by the end of the year. That means that tomorrow is the deadline. If you want to join the Founding Troop, time is running out!

You’ll be in good company. Aside from myself, Club Thievey’s Founding Troop includes (in alphabetical order):

1. Bob Ippolito, Mochi Media
   

2. Brent Simmons, Ranchero Software
   

3. Chris Parrish, Rogue Sheep
   

4. Daniel Jalkut, Red Sweater Software
   

5. Daniel Pasco, Brain Murmurs
   

6. Gus Mueller, Flying Meat
   

7. Guy English, Rogue Amoeba
   

8. Matt McVickar, Sakuzaku
   

9. Tim Wood, The Omni Group
   

10. Wil Shipley, Delicious Monster Software
    

If you can’t afford the minimum donation of $100, you can sign up for a recurring donation of $10 a month. Nobody reading these words cannot afford $10 a month!

You can find out more about the Madagascar Fauna Group on their web site:

http://savethelemur.org/

You can also go directly to the donation site:

https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?id=1507

Donations to the Madagascar Fauna Group are 100% tax-deductible!

Some for some technicalities for people who care about technicalities.

Club Thievey’s Founding Troop

My original intention was to run this thing through the end of the year, but I have to ask myself, if someone wants to donate money to the MFG on January 3rd, would I still be willing to send them a lemur? That seems like a pretty clear yes, but at the same time, I want to recognize the people who got off their duffs during the original drive.

As such, I’ll be cutting off the “Founding Troop” at the end of the year. Anyone who makes their donation before then will be in the Founding Troop, and everyone else will simply have regular club status. Once the year closes, you will never again be able to get into the Founding Troop!

The Golden Tamarind

At Wil’s suggestion, I will be adding a Golden Tamarind award for people who donate more than the minimum. This is just a little icon that will go alongside your lemur picture to let the world know you gave a little more.

The Golden Tamarind is a multiplier, so people who give $200 will have 1 Golden Tamarind, while someone who donated $500 would have 4 Golden Tamarinds. Tamarinds, by the way, are the staple food of ringtailed lemurs like Thievey.

Golden Tamarinds are cumulative, so if you find yourself with an extra $20 here and there and find you’ve donated an extra $100, you can can submit your receipts and get a Golden Tamarind.

In other words, you can donate as little as $10 today to secure your place in the Founding Troop, then accumulate Golden Tamarinds as time goes by.

Delicious Monster at Macworld

I am going to be at Macworld this year. We’re not exhibiting or anything, but I’m going to be down to give interviews, sign my book, and demo Delicious Library 2. While neither are primary objectives, once I have a few drinks in me I might sign up beta testers and interview potential monsters. If anyone was planning on pulling up a dump truck full of money to try to poach Wil’s last remaining engineer, it would be a good time.

Now, let me make this clear: being a member of Club Thievey will not officially increase your chances of getting an interview with me, getting hired by me, or getting into the Delicious Library 2 beta program. The key word here is officially. How well that translates into reality is yet to be determined.

I will say this, though. If you consider yourself to be some sort of news organization with its pulse on what the Mac community and its developers are doing, and you don’t cover Club Thievey, my respect for you is zero.

Seriously, if I have to read another story about how David Pogue ate a burrito, and it gave him gas, and when he farted it sounded kind of like “subnotebook” from a so-called news organization that didn’t notice that, right now, the Mac community and and its developers are making a huge fucking difference in Madagascar, I’m going to punch someone in the balls.

If you have any questions or want to set anything up for Macworld, email, Twitter, or iChat me.