The kids will read some number of minutes each day starting today through March 10. There are several ways to pledge:

1. You can pledge by the minute. I’d estimate he would read somewhere between 200 and 400 minutes over the 10 day period, so that’d be good for $2 to $4 dollars at a penny per minute. Or you can pledge a dollar a minute, I’m sure they wouldn’t mind. :) Or something in the middle.

2. You can pledge just a flat amount and I’ll figure out what the per minute rate was when we return the paperwork by March 15.

3. You can completely ignore this email! By far the simplest solution.

I know in the past when I’ve been approached about buying stuff from students for fundraising, I balk because of the relatively small return the school sees. In this case, you will be assured that 100% of the money raised goes to the kids. That’s why *I* like it. There is a downside, of course: there will be no cookie dough or other goodies to enjoy later. To resolve this, I’d recommend you buy something you really like at the store, donate a similar amount to the school, and feel good knowing you’ve saved probably 50% of the cost that you would have paid in a school fundraiser *plus* given the school more money than they would have seen from their paltry commissions.

Thank you for reading this note. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Just checking out the wpToGo android app. Enjoy the picture of the air conditioning duct above my desk.

So … I’ve come full circle and migrated all my posts back to WordPress for this new site, and all my old sites now redirect here. As a result, Scottopolis has content (though admittedly not much, as I’ve been a lazy blogger up to this point) going back about four years even though it is a new site.

Regardless, none of this really matters at the moment given that I have a total readership of somewhere between one and two. Hopefully you fractional readers will enjoy the new site.

Of particular note, I’d like to point out the ‘art’ I created for Scottopolis. First, there is the seal:

The seal of Scottopolis, including year founded and city logo.

The basic logo was created using the self-proclaimed Official Seal Maker, which gives you a lot of flexibility to create a quasi-official looking seal for whatever purpose you want. The basic logo came out looking like this:

The basic seal for Scottopolis prior to modification in GIMP.

After I downloaded that, I decided I’d like to punch it up a bit, so I loaded it into GIMP (the Gnu Image Manipulation Program), converted it to gray scale, used that as a bump map, and got the 3D looking effect in the final version. Finally I did some work on the alpha channel (transparency) so that it would be usable on just about any background. I got rid of the credit on the logo because it looked horrible bump mapped. Plus, I figured at that point that I’d done a lot of work on top of what the Official Seal Maker did, so it was as much or more mine at that point. Even so, take a look at their web site, it is fun to play around with if nothing else.

I’ve been asked why I used a pumpkin in the logo. It was either that or a shamrock. The shamrock I thought would be fun since I’m an eighth Irish. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it to look right, particularly bump mapped, because it was just an outline without any detail work whatsoever. My wife had the pumpkin idea, and once I found it in the clip art collection, I decided it would be perfect.

Next I decided I needed a favicon.ico file for the address bar & bookmark lists. Since I’d already used the pumpkin in the seal, I decided to stick with that theme. Using GIMP again, I created a couple of brown ovals for the outline and creases of the pumpkin, and filled it with orange, then added a green stem to the top. The hard part was coming up with something that looked good while being constrained to 16 pixels square. It’s obviously not a real pumpkin, but I think it is recognizable and works.