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Good morning everyone, and welcome to Radio Free Monday!

Ways to Give:

ixzianna is a disabled student raising funds for a Power Assist device, the MX SmartDrive, which will help her resolve accessibility issues on a somewhat un-Accessible campus where she is starting a Bachelor of Visual Arts degree. You can read more, see a demo of the MX SmartDrive, and support her fundraiser here.

thephoenix04 linked to a fundraiser for a former coworker's daughter, who has been selected to represent her school and state at the Congress of Future Medical Leaders Conference, where she'll be accepting an award and meeting with Nobel Prize winners and other young future leaders in science and medicine. She needs to raise funds to attend the conference; you can read more and support her here.

editrx has been struggling to keep her indy bookstore afloat for this past year, and on top of her troubles there, she's now been the subject of a violent assault by her housemate. She's dealing with mounting medical bills and trauma from the assault. She doesn't have a new fundraising site yet, but funds from her ongoing YouCaring fundraiser will reach her, as will income from the Starcat Books online etailer. She also has jewelry for sale on Etsy. (Obviously if you're shopping her etail or etsy there may be a delay in delivery.)

digitaldiscipline is participating in a team attempt at The Sufferlandrian Knighthood, a bike training event to raise money for Puppies Behind Bars and Oxfam. They'll be showing a live feed of the grueling workout; you can read more and support their ride here.

News to Know:

brainwane linked to Donorschamps, a twitter bot a friend of hers wrote to find "classroom requests for exciting projects, preferably for high-poverty schools, that just need a little more to be successful". You can check or follow @donorschamps to find almost-funded campaigns that you can help push over into success.

wrw47 linked to a job opportunity at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for academic staff/researchers in the Computer Science department. They're looking for people with UNIX use and programming experience; you can read the job description here and wrw47 says you can also ping his askbox if you have questions.

And this has been Radio Free Monday! Thank you for your time. You can post items for my attention at the Radio Free Monday submissions form or via email at copperbadge at gmail dot com. If you're not sure how to proceed, here is a little more about what I do and how you can help (or ask for help!). If you're new to fundraising, you may want to check out my guide to fundraising here.

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So, I decided I wanted to learn more about the stock market.

Well, it's always struck me as a terribly irrational way to run an economy, but if I'm going to dislike it I should understand why. And really the only way I learn is by doing, so I asked Nakki about it, since I knew she did a little investing, and she pointed me to the RobinHood app, which lets you buy and sell stock in realtime for no fee.

I threw fifty bucks in and built a portfolio, just to kind of see what’s what, and today I made my first sale -- I bought Grubhub at $18 in late January and just sold it for $25. Probably I shouldn't have sold, but the whole thing's an experiment, not a wealth-building exercise, and seven dollars' profit is a bonus.

Plus it freed up just enough cash to buy into Fitbit. :D We'll see how well my picks continue....