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Good morning all, and welcome to Radio Free Monday! It's disgusting outside, all warm and humid. It makes a man yearn for snow. Instead, I have links for you!

Ways To Give:

mamculuna linked me to a site listing organisations that are helping rescue animals displaced or injured by the Japan quake and tsunami. Animals are often overlooked during disasters but can be a family or individual's last link to security and home. (vladadog adds, "don't send money to NDSF (aka SDF) -- they don't actually send SAR dogs anywhere or do much of anything useful except shill for $$$ to line their own pockets. For a good overview of NDSDF check out this blog".) As ever, be conscious and aware, and don't give unless you know where your money's going.

tiferet let me know that if you play Poupee Girl, you can donate money to the Japanese Red Cross through the site by purchasing special items in the Katharine Shop. I don't know much more about Poupee Girl than this, but those who play should be aware.

babykid528 let me know about the latest campaign by Random Acts, "Hope to Haiti". Random Acts will be sending a team of workers to Haiti to help with the rebuilding project there, and it's been announced that funds raised for the campaign will also be going to help Japanese relief efforts. babykid528 has a fundraising goal of $5k, which you can read more about here, or you can donate here.

Be Aware!

Okay, I totally lost the username of the person who told me about this, so I apologise for that, but change.org says text message donations involve a delay before the money is released. You can read more about this and sign a petition here.

keeperofqkeys has a post up with handy informational websites about the Fukushima power plants and what's actually going on with the nuclear plant situation in Japan. She's urging everyone to make sure they're informed about the situation from the people who know best. In this vein, in case you haven't seen it linked everywhere yet, XKCD did a "radiation danger chart" that expresses the situation pretty well.

blamebrampton, who has been helping raise funds to send Linwood College Orchestra on a European performance tour, sent me a link to see the orchestra play. They're continuing to raise funds and solicit sponsors for the trip.

Giving And Getting:

madripoor_rose linked me to the Elder-Beerman version of this deal, but the Million Acts Of Goodwill event is offering coupons in exchange for used clothing donations to Goodwill at a number of different department stores. It's running through March 23rd; you can find out more at the link.

stinaleigh linked me to Foam On The Range, who are donating proceeds from a specific product line to Network For Good to help provide aid to Japan.

I don't know who this guy is, but for every million views his video gets, he's donating $600 to the Red Cross. It's a pretty fantastic video.

Education and Entertainment!

I give you all the Fuck Yeah Fanfic Flamingo. Shine on, you crazy pink bird head.

A good friend of mine, tealin, is doing 40 Days Of Art, which is a series on the skills and practice required to be an animation artist. (She didn't put me up to this, I just think the series is awesome.)

Relevant to my recent Discworld reading, the Discworld Reading Guide is a pretty way to lay out all the books in series order.

quark101 linked me to a "Katamari Hack" for Chrome and Firefox 4 users, which turns any webpage into a Katamari game. This sounds dumb but I have been enjoying this damn thing ALL WEEK.

And this has been Radio Free Monday! Thank you for your time. You can always post items for my attention in comments here (or on any post) or email me at copperbadge at gmail dot com (PMs are kind of a bad way to reach me). If you're not sure how to proceed, here is a little more about what I do and how you can help. Remember, non-embedded links are love.

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Okay, let me take another pass at talking about time management and how this hourglass is at once the best and worst thing ever to happen to me. (This may be a slight exaggeration.)

So, Mum sent me an hourglass, which is actually a 15-minutes-glass, as a gift. It comes from CB2 and she just thought I'd like the look of it, which I do; it was a very thoughtful and tasteful gift in its own right. But I thought, what if I started using this to make sure that I focus for at least fifteen minutes at a time on one thing? My thesis being that you can do pretty much anything if you only have to do it for fifteen minutes.

( If you don't have a six minute attention span like me. )

The upshot is, for those who don't want the details, that this system works for me, it helps me get more done, and it has given me more time for pleasure reading and for continuing self-education. But it also occasionally makes me neurotic and restless, and I don't know that it would work for anyone else, anywhere.

If you want to try it, have fun and let me know how it goes; there are plenty of free digital timers out there if you don't want to blow ten bucks plus shipping on a fifteenminuteglass. When I'm home on the weekend and want to get stuff done, I just time it by quarter-hours using the computer's clock.

Though they are awfully pretty.

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In other news, TIM DEKAY JUST WANTS TO MAKE YOU LOL.

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About a week ago I got a coupon for AbeBooks and I bought a book with it, as you do.

I prefer to buy books that are marked "some underlining" or "notes in margins" because I find them interesting and occasionally the source of a lively argument with oneself. This one said "Inscription in front cover." It just arrived, and I opened it up. The inscription reads HAPPY BIRTHDAY SAM.

They're either very late or pleasantly early.

(For bonus points, the book is "The Black Swan: The Impact Of The Highly Improbable". This is going to be like the copy of If On A Winter's Night A Traveler that I got for seventeen cents because it had pages missing.)

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Right before leaving work today, I took a decongestant. Sometimes they don't affect me at all and others they put me on my ass; I got home just in time to be thoroughly wiped out by it, and I'm pretty sure I'm not leaving my bed for the next few hours.

It's okay though, I can share origami with you!

Today's diagram was a bird hat (which looks like a bird, for people to wear, not a hat for birds, though I guess if you could get one to hold still long enough you could put it on a bird). It's actually pretty cool, and if you had a piece of paper big enough you could wear the hat.

Though admittedly you'd look like a fool.

I just stared at the "t" section of my tags for like five minutes trying to find the right tag for this entry before remembering it starts with an "s". I'm gonna go take a nap now.