I’ve noticed over the past couple of months that more of you are buying things from Amazon after arriving at their site via one of my referral links. Now, while I like money as much as anyone else, I don’t actually do anything for this particular lump of it - I joined the referral program because I was already using Amazon item pages when mentioning books and CDs anyway. When it was just forty or fifty bucks every quarter I usually just tacked it on to my next book order, but now we’re talking about larger amounts and I’m starting to pay more attention to the whole thing. While I’m perfectly happy to take money out of Amazon’s pocket, that doesn’t mean I need to keep it all for myself, so I’ve decided to donate this year’s referral fees to a nonprofit organization. I haven’t yet decided which one, though - Oxfam, UNICEF, ACS, and UNAIDS all come to mind, but if you’ve got a better suggestion I’d like to hear about it.
Incidentally, it’s easy to help me rack up referral money so that I can give it away. Each item at Amazon has a unique ASIN - this is the ten-character string after the “/ASIN/” portion of the item’s URL (sometimes it’s after “/detail/-/” instead). If you’d like a percentage of your purchase to go to me (and thus to someone else), just copy that ASIN and paste it here - a link with my referral code will be generated, and if you buy your item after clicking on it, I’ll get 7.5% of its price.
A belated thank you to the readers who sent Lonely Planet Tokyo and The Myth of Sisyphus. Chris and I have been browsing the former with vague thoughts of planning a trip to Tokyo (I keep getting these Farewatcher alerts from Travelocity that tempt me with shockingly low prices for roundtrip tickets from LGA), and the latter replaces the battered but much-loved used paperback I’d had for years. It had been held together with masking tape for a long time, but finally disintegrated in my bag a few weeks ago.
Continuing our theme of replaying games that everyone else got bored with years ago, Chris and I have been playing a lot of Shenmue. He thinks I spend too much time with the kitten - and that if there were a game that consisted of nothing but taking care of kittens, I would buy it. Which is probably true. But it’s the cutest little CGI kitten you ever did see, I swear!
Now that the first of two Awful Midterm Weeks is more or less over (Thursdays are no big deal), I’m off to go catch up on my sleep before I die. I mean it. But you can look at some pandas in Times Square while I’m doing that.
From: staff@caoine.org
To: emma@caoine.org
Subject: Email account utilization warning.
Dear user, the management of Caoine.org mailing system wants to let you know
that,
Our antivirus software has detected a large ammount of viruses outgoing
from your email account, you may use our free anti-virus tool to clean up
your computer software.
Pay attention on attached file.
The Management,
The Caoine.org team
http://www.caoine.org
All this time I’ve had a staff and didn’t even know it. Why have I been getting my own coffee and answering my own mail? I’ll just start having my staff do it!
