I look at a site called Charity Navigator at work a good amount. It scrapes togehter information about nonprofits – primarily from their 990 reports but also from annual reports and other available documents and produces a report that they use to rate nonprofit organizations.

I think their base criteria are very valid, essentially what are they doing with their money?
How much of their budget is for program expenses? How much for adminstration? And how much is for fundraising?
Another interesting stat is how much does it cost them to raise money? Most times you’ll see it represented as cents on the dollar. A well put together special event, for example, can cost less than twenty cents for every dollar raised. Some are closer to 5 cents, meaning 95% of the money raised goes directly into the organization’s budget. Of course purely mathematical models have their limitations and many nonprofits do great things but have interesting relationships with $$$ that can give them poor rankings. And CN od very upfront about this across the site – they are not making subjective judgements, only quantitative.

One of the interesting & flashy things about the site is that they have assembled quick lists to see the best & worst on their scales. Here’s a list of the the Top Ten Worst
Charities There are some zingers on there. Check out Voice of Evangelism – WTF?

So this is sort of a cop out because it is another animal. Well, I am trying to focus my craft a little, I am dabbling a bit in pet photography. Big $$$ there.

This is my family’s newest dog a skinny lil’ guy named Chili – who is a three year old Saluki. They are an esoteric breed of dog – very very fast runner with entertaining personalities. Also very skinny, Chili looks like he hasn’t eaten in days, he’s just a skinny fellow.

So my grandfather died a little abruptly last week and my sister & I needed to quickly fly from Boston to Harrisburg which is not the simplest task. The only direct flight was going to be $700 a person, that’s fucking $1400 for me and my sister, which is not particularly cool. So, I talked with my family, we chatted with a travel agent, no dice. $1400 down the hole – the inevitable?

So I always hear about bereavement rates that airlines can sometimes offer, I figure I might as well call up the airline – US Airways – direct and see if I can do a little finangling. I suck at bargaining, usually I end up feeling kinda guilty about the whole thing. One of my largest acts of bargaining took place in Ankara 4 years ago when a young woman was trying to sell me some weird beaded scarf that I finally agreed to pay for but I forgot my numbers and said “3″ (ooch) lira instead of “4″ (dert) lira – I still feel vaguely guilty about that one.

Anyways, I make the call and end up speaking to a nice woman who I have kind of a hard time understanding. I mention bereavement and she continues on taking my information – I am not sure that she knows what I am asking. Finally she puts the flight togehter and gives me the rates – $220 per ticket roundtrip! I refrain from squealing like a little girlie-man but am extremely happy. The bemusing part is that I really didn’t need to do much at all to actually prove that I had a death in the family, but that’s cool with me, the again why shouldn’t they trust me?

So it all went through and we ended up spend in $440 instead of $1400 – that’s 31% of the ticket price. Pretty awesome. The flight was perfect too, only an hour & a half. I took a pretty nice shot of Boston out of the window as well that I will fix up later. The only weird part was a charge of $578 extra on my card, which some customer care agent explained was an accidental charge for another ticket – some system problem? It’s all straightened up now.

It’s to see that not all airlines are completely greedy heartless corporations, yay!

This is a little issue I have using Firefox. It’s definitely not a real legitimate issue with Firefox or with the Internet in general, rather my hamfistedness. I subscribe to salon.com so you bet your ass I check that shit all the time. I am particulary soft on Audiophile – its a great daily music column chockful of goodies, especially the music videos, I love that stuff.

Anyhow, the point is that in Firefox I can type in sa and salon.com pops up, cool! Just like any other web broser, right on! So – I often try to press down to select salon.com and enter very quickly. Simple stuff, no problem. Except 10% of the time I press enter too soon, before I scroll down a bit. This would be no problem except Firefox automatically does a Google “I’m Feeling Lucky” search (a GIFL?) and brings up the website with the closest correspondence to those two letters. I wish it was Scientists of America or The Silly Association — no, not even close — it’s the fucking (or not fucking anymore) Sexaholics Anonymous webpage!

Now my lifetime search history stored away in the CIA web tracking db shows about 400 visits to that site from me! That’s a tough one to explain. Even closer to home, my lady friend discovered it on my screen when I accidently typed that in and walked away. Awkward! That’s a dilly of a pickle! There are a lot of weird sites out there but that’s a tough one to explain, what are you supposed to say, what good can words do now?

So, yeah that’s something I am dealing with. The shit I have to handle everyday…

I am starting a new lil’ feature on my humble blog – The Greatest Photo of the Week (that I took!)

I really like the color of this cat, reminds me a lot of Neon, a childhood kitty of similar markings. Very expressive face too.

Stay tuned next week!

I have what I consider to be a pretty good idea for a Google maps project. Looking around my homely apartment it’s very apparent that the majority of my furniture was rescued from the street and probably had several previous owners before that. It’s sort of a pain in the ass to tell when my own trash days are here (Monday & Thursday, sucka!) as well, so sometimes stinky trash lingers beside my house.

An amicable solution?

I think it would be sweet to have a Garbage Day Maps that would combine the Boston city trash db with Google Maps for an easy viewing of trash days and a nice way to figure out when all the college kids will be tossing out there Target bookshelves and random knicknacks. That would be awesome!

After many long hard months of taking photos of random sights, my perserverence pays off in a doozie – one of my shots was choosen to be in the Weekly Dig (Boston’s better alternative weeklie) and thus my name is released to the rest of the world.

I had a brush of fame when a photo of mine at a award reception for work showed up in the Boston Business Journal but that’s small photos compared to this break. Phone hasn’t been exactly ringing of the hook, but it will, oh it will…