To get around, Petey uses a power wheelchair. This requires a special van in order to transport him and the wheelchair, but they don’t have one.

Jason can’t afford the van for Petey on his own, because he makes a small salary, sacrificing his time as an act of service. Petey has a single mom with nine children, so they can’t afford the van either.

We have freedom, so we should help to give Petey freedom.

I read about this from Eric Holmlund, who challenged his readers to blog about this fundraiser. Jason has put together a package of over $2,000 worth of digital products donated by internet marketers to help with the fundraiser. If you give the standard donation amount, you can download the products as a gift for your contribution. You can give any amount and it will be 100% tax deductible as a charitable donation.

I’m not making anything from this, and neither is Jason or anyone else – 100% of the profits are going to help Petey.

So please take a look, and consider making a donation. The package of products is a great deal. Yet if you aren’t comfortable giving $47, then give $20, or $10 or what you feel is best.

Like Eric Holmlund, I’d like to challenge you to post this to your blog or subscribers. We can really make a difference in Petey’s life.

Click here to help Petey…

Please leave a comment with your thoughts.

Keep reading for my top 3 reasons to give a gift card…

• You’re guaranteed to get them just what they want… Amazon.com has the earth’s biggest selection.
• It’s the thought that counts… but putting a little value behind it makes it a lot more special and memorable.
• Amazon.com gift certificates are extremely practical and convenient. They never expire, and the recipient can load it into their Amazon.com account, and it’ll be used automatically the next time they buy from Amazon.com. And you can give it instantly, so there’s no need to rush out to any store.

There’s a product being launched tomorrow called the Secret Classroom, which will contain DVD videos of all the presentations given at the Next Internet Millionaire. In case you haven’t heard of it yet, the Next Internet Millionaire is the world’s first Internet reality show. That means it’s a reality show created from the ground-up to be broadcast exclusively online. It’s created by Joel Comm and Eric Holmlund, two expert Internet marketers who have made millions of dollars online. Now, you can find plenty of hype about it elsewhere, but my blog is going to be 100% hype-free. Just the facts. And if you have any questions about the product, I invite you to post a comment right here on my blog. I read all of the comments posted on my blog, and if you ask a question, I’ll respond, too.

Today I interviewed Thor Schrock, one of the contestants of the Next Internet Millionaire. In fact, he was one of the last 3 finalists, making him the last to be eliminated from the competition. He learned a lot about Internet Marketing from the content presented on the show, and he highly recommends the Secret Classroom for anyone who wants a good educational foundation for how to do Internet Marketing effectively. Read more about the Secret Classroom.

Seriously, it looks pretty slick, and not only because it’s in my favorite color. Not a great photo (the green looks nicer than that, it’s actually lighter and more pastel-looking), but you get the idea. I hope they keep it up; I’m a fan. So far I’ve received 2 checks from them, one for $66.63, and the latest one for $62.26 cash back from Audrey’s tablet PC.

With the holidays and Christmas coming up, sites like FatWallet must be doing very well around now.

After reading that post, I had actually navigated away. Unfortunately, Firefox lost my browsing history after I quit it, so it was quite difficult for me to re-locate the blog. That’s partly why I made certain to link to it in this post. The only way I remembered it was by a phrase I remember reading on the blog: “six figure Internet income”. I Googled that, and, fortunately, found the blog I had in mind. That’s why Google rocks: it finds specific phrases across millions of web pages, so fantastically fast. As long as the Google can keep doing that, I’ll be one happy user. They are incredibly good at search. It boggles the mind.

Financial Hack has some other interesting reads, too, so check it out if you’re interested in Internet money.

Adbusters.org is promoting “Buy Nothing Day”, where they’re trying to get people to buy nothing on Black Friday. I’d be curious to know if it has any effect.

Let me add a little content to this post so it doesn’t just read like an advertisement. We’ve been using a number of printers quite happily here at my house. Currently, we use an HP LaserJet 4P, an Epson scanner, and a Dell All-in-One which I won from their Christmas sweepstakes. That’s actually a pretty cool story: last Christmas (I believe), Dell was holding a promotion where you can go to their website once per day and enter in an instant win game. There are lots of prizes they gave away, including big screen TVs and the like. I won a free Dell photo printer, and they delivered it, for free, to my door. Neat!

If you qualified for guaranteed Release-Date Delivery, in the unlikely event that you don’t receive it on Saturday, July 21, we’ll refund the cost of the book. … All copies that qualified for Release-Date Delivery should be delivered by 7:00 p.m. in your time zone.

But when UPS didn’t make the deadline, they added an excuse to the tracking site:

NOTICE LEFT

They claimed that they attempted to make a delivery, but nobody was home. I wonder how many people bought the excuse and blamed themselves! Fortunately, Amazon.com did honor their refund promise. Presumably the people who received the book late get to keep the copy they got, so I wonder how much this is costing them. I guess it wasn’t too widespread, and mostly occurred in far away places scattered around the US.

Here’s the neat box they shipped in. Kind of makes me wish I’d gotten it.

I’d also posted a list of Harry Potter books long ago. Here are some recent posts from my other blogs you might find interesting:

iPhone Interference Detected Warning

Why Information Security is Hard

Run Starcraft in window

The Palm Foleo is basically a very small laptop. The appealing thing to me is that it runs Linux. I love small laptops. It’s a market I’ve always felt has been underappreciated and missed by most companies. When I first heard about the Toshiba Libretto nearly 10 years ago, I was hooked. I never actually got one, but I read lots about it and drooled over it for weeks. I hunted for a cheap one on eBay and visited pretty much every single website about the mini-laptop.

The point is that I like to travel and I like to take my computer with me. In that sense, Palm is absolutely right.

I have plenty of doubts, of course. There’s not a whole lot that’s wrong with my simple iPhone/Lenovo ThinkPad combination. My ThinkPad’s 14″display and full-size keyboard certainly meet my needs, which makes it questionable whether there’s any chance a person like me would buy a Foleo.

When the iPhone came out, it was extremely successful for a variety of reasons that many people have discussed. But let me simplify things with my top three reasons for the iPhone’s success:

1. Everyone has a cell phone and nobody likes theirs
2. Apple elegance, simplicity and design
3. Revolutionary technology: touch screen interface and OS X on a phone

That’s it. That’s why the iPhone is successful, and it makes perfect sense.

So how can the Foleo be successful?

I’m not Palm, but here’s what I think the subcompact laptop has going for it:

1. People’s laptops are heavy and people want smaller, lighter ones that can still do everything they need
2. Palm elegance, simplicity and design
3. Revolutionary technology: full-size keyboard, synchronization with your phone, and easy-to-use and cool-looking Linux on a tiny mainstream laptop

Why it will fail:

1. People already have laptops and the Foleo isn’t good enough to replace it
2. The interface is clumsy and not fun to use
3. The iPhone’s on-screen touch keyboard is actually pretty darn good, the Foleo can’t synchronize with my iPhone (a deal-breaker), and their implementation of Linux doesn’t look ridiculously cool (Beryl, anyone?)

So if you can tell me that Palm will capitalize on the strengths and defeat the weaknesses, they’ve got a winner here.

The problem is that Palm is touting the Foleo as merely a mobile companion. You can type on a keyboard and look at stuff on a bigger screen, but that’s not enough to make up a computer. They need to target a higher-end market. Give the Foleo at least 8 GB memory and make it a real computer, and I believe people will easily pay more than $500 for it. Palm is shooting itself in the foot by charging too little and trying to carve out an all-new market. I really think people would pay $900 for the Foleo if it could replace their laptop, and for many people, this isn’t hard to do. I also know people who run Windows under VMware on Linux. If the machine is powerful enough to do that, we’re looking at more like $1,000 for what people would be willing to pay. Like the Cybiko, there’s just not as much of a low-end market. Target the higher end, like the iPod and iPhone are doing (they’re not the cheapest music player nor smartphone by any stretch of the imagination!), and you’ll do much better.

From a technical standpoint, here’s what I want:

• Firefox. I cannot live without it
• All-day battery life, like my iPhone which can last for multiple days at a time
• At least 4 GB memory. Apple definitely hit the sweet spot here

That’s it. Three simple requirements. You can easily list off others, such as an SD card slot, a fast processor, an amazingly good outdoor display, a camera, blah, blah, blah– but when it comes down to it, none of these things matter. The iPhone is missing plenty of features. The key is that it covers all the essentials. Thus I believe the Foleo simply needs these three simple bullet points. They get those three right, and I’m a customer. And I’ve never bought a Palm, ever. (Back in the day, I was actually a Handspring guy.)

On the other hand, Mike Elgan wrote about six months ago about How Steve Jobs blew his iPhone keynote. Here are the notes I wrote in response, six months ago:

• Jobs was forced to reveal the iPhone six months before release due to the requirement for FCC approval.
  • He stated this in his keynote.
• People buy “smartphones” throughout the year, not just during the Christmas season.
• The iPhone apparently took 2.5 years to develop– not something that can be duplicated in merely six months.
• In the time that competitors are working on a response, Apple can also improve the iPhone.
• Apple TV is not nearly as innovative. There are other solutions that are just about as elegant, including Media Center PCs and the XBox.
• Many people who want an iPhone don’t have an iPod. People who want an iPod don’t want to pay the $300 premium (plus service fees) for an iPhone. They’re in different markets, targeting different customers.
• Even if iPod sales are reduced, they still get the iPhone sales. I suspect their margin on the iPhone is even larger, considering its lack of physical keys and much smaller memory.
• It wasn’t a needless risk: if Jobs didn’t announce it, the FCC would have.
• People have known about the iPhone for months before now, if not only from the patents which Apple filed, which are all publicly available.
• Apple definitely has more for the iPhone which hasn’t been revealed yet. As this article mentions …
• LG KE850