I"ve raised over $10,000 so far this year. That was my goal.

Up until a couple hours ago I was planning to shut the site down tonight. However, I just found out that a friend, Chris Rawson, is having a hard time meeting his fund raising goals this year in the PMC.

So, I'm going to keep it running for a few more days. When I agree to a bundle, I'll just give the buyer the URL for donating through his PMC account instead of mine.

Since the post went up about building your own software bundle, on Monday, I've had at least 600 offers come in.

Probably more than that. But I've lost count.

I do know that, right now, I have 341 unprocessed offers. Offers I haven't even read yet.

The thought has crossed my mind more than once that I may have made it a little too easy to build a bundle this year. :-) I can't possibly keep up. Eventually everyone will hear back from me. But it'll take awhile. Next year I need to more fully automate the system. (Duh.)

Since we went live I've added at least ten new titles to the list of what's available. Also, I ran out of the most popular apps in the first couple days, but many of them are back in the bundle builder again because the donors stepped up with larger donations! Yay!

I'm two thirds of the way to my $10,000 goal, and all but the first $1,000 of that is from selling these bundles. (That total doesn't include the $700 or so that I got for the two Adobe apps that were auctioned on eBay. Those haven't been credited to my PMC account yet.)

For the third year, I'm selling thousands of copies of mac applications, to support my fund raising efforts in the PMC.

I'm running a bit late this year, but I think I've found a great way to present the software that's available, and to make it really easy for the buyer/donor to choose what he/she wants in a bundle.

I have three targets to meet before we're done:

• $4400 by the end of September (I'm "legally committed": they'll take any balance from me, personally)
• $6700 by the end of October, to meet my "Heavy Hitter" commitment
• $10,000 by the end of December, to meet my personal goal for 2008

Please go build a bundle and make me an offer, and tell people about this however you see fit: twitter (where I am sethdill), digg, your own blog, StumbleUpon, smoke signals... whatever.

The first weekend in August, for the sixth year in a row, I'll be riding in the Pan-Mass Challenge. This year they've told us there will be 5500 riders, and we ride about 200 miles from Sturbridge, MA to Provincetown (on the tip of Cape Code). The real point, though, is the money we raise: millions and millions of dollars, all for the research and treatment of cancer at the Dana-Farber Cancer Center in Boston.

The total project goal this year is $34,000,000! (And we'll raise more than that, we surpass our goal every year.)

Last year I raised about $5,000 for the PMC by collecting donations of Mac software from the authors/publishers and then selling it in bundles on eBay or giving it to people in return for making donations to the PMC.

I'm running late this year, but the project is and running again and this time I want to raise a total of $10,000.

Right now, I need donations. If you produce mac software, please donate some! I need at least another 90 titles, with a minimum of five licenses each. Sixty-two apps titles have been donated so far.

(If you're not a software producer, I could also use some regular donations! I have had two big donors every year since I started doing this, but this year one doesn't have the money to donate anything, and the other only had $500 to donate instead of $1,000.)

Last year, an employee at Adobe sent me a copy of Flash CS3 which he purchased on his discount. This year, he came through again and got a coworker to go in on it with him so I'm also getting a copy of Illustrator CS3! However, 99.9% of the software that's donated is just a set of licenses, no physical goods or costs at all.

Those big-ticket items are nice, but that will only account for about $1,000 of the $10,000 I need to raise.

Please help out if you can.

My goal this year was $6,600. At the monent, the PMC's fundraising status page says I've raised $6,666.39. I know of another $300 that will hit the account before the month is out, so in the end I believe we'll end up very close to $7,000.

This means three things for the immediate future:

First, I get my life back. It's fun to run this project for two months, but it's very intense and time consuming. If I try to do it all in the last two months of fundraising next year, Corinne and Rich have both offered to shoot me.

Second, I can stop talking about this project here on [tw] and finally return to our normal fare (Lauren, Corinne, Mike & Shannon, programming and of course cycling).

Third, I'm going to stop accepting offers for software bundles at the end of the day today. The only reason I'm not stopping immeidately is so that anybody who was planning to make an offer can do it. You have 11 hours, people.

What a relief.