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.

Based on the traffic some of the pages get on this site, it's clear that a lot of people are watching for the next auction, still.

We've almost reached our goal for this year ($6,600, about another $1,000 to go), and we're also just a couple weeks away from the fundraising deadline (October 1).

(Yay! We're almost done! Freedom...)

There will be at least one more auction on eBay, but don't wait for it! I've put up a list of all of the software that's still available. Pick out what you want, and make me a reasonable offer! (Instructions are on that page.)

What's reasonable? Since you're picking out only the software you want, I'm encouraging people to offer at least 1/3 of the retail value. So you could pick out $600 of software, and make me an offer for $200 to $300. Seems like a good deal, no?

Once we agree on the bundle, paying for it is even easier. Just make a donation to the PMC (via the link I provide on that page), and then send me the receipt.

Cool, huh? So go make me an offer. :-)

The "Business Bundle" auctionM closes in just a few hours, but hasn't yet even met its reserve price.

The reserve isn't high on that bundle. I guess if it doesn't meet the reserve, I'll just hope that all of the apps sell through the "Make me an Offer" page. Still, I'd hate to have wasted the money on eBay's fees. :-(