Photo-A-Day #960 11/24/07

Tonight was my 15 year High School Reunion. It was great to see old friends and catch up with them. I helped my friend Allie set up the reunion. Well, basically I took in the money and cut all the checks. And I offered a bit of advice on setting things up for the reunion. Part of the reunion, as you know if you’ve been reading this was a fund raiser for Mike and Becky Machinski. The funds that came in from the folks who read this blog and who bought the calendar was amazing and at the reunion we raised a good amount to give to Mike and Becky.

We had a silent auction at the reunion and there were some awesome things in the auction. I bid on 4 things and won each of them. So in the next few months Allison and I will learn rock climbing, Tai Chi and we got a beautiful waterfall photo to put in the house. We have no photos on the walls yet though. I put in a Photo-A-Day Calendar as well as a Portrait sitting. I was so surprised to see the portrait sitting get so many bids. I’m very excited.

It was so great to see everyone and I am so happy that we raised so much money for Becky and Mike.

15 Year Reunion #8 15 Year Reunion #7 15 Year Reunion #6
15 Year Reunion #9 15 Year Reunion #4 15 Year Reunion #3
15 Year Reunion #2 15 Year Reunion #5 15 Year Reunion #1

Who is behind the Avatar…

FuelMyBlog, my favorite online community, is creating book and you can be part of it. the book is called “The Human behind the Avatar“. This fits very well into the mission and theme of FuelMyBlog. Here’s a little history of FuelMyBlog. I feel I can tell it because I was around soon after it came into being and have written about ti many times, I’ve met Kevin, Ian, and Marcus and I write for the FuelMyBlog Blog.

FuelMyBlog is a site for bloggers, new bloggers and old bloggers and everyone in between. The main thing behind FuelMyBlog is the people, Kevin Dixie and his wife Sylvie started FuelMyBlog so they would have one easy place to go to read all the blogs that they liked and to discover new ones. In the time since it was created FuelMyBlog has had many incarnations. It started as a large page of avatars that were clickable. You could click the avatar and “Fuel it” to give it votes and you could also visit the blog of the user behind the avatar. I started getting some decent traffic from FuelMyBlog and wanted to know more about it so I began writing to Kevin and we became friendly. Which if you know Kevin, that is the intention for reading your blog, he wants to make a personal connection because he cares. Both Kevin and Sylvie go through each blog submission to FuelMyBlog to make sure that the blog is a real one, not a splog, no porn and not just a rehash of someone else’s work.

FuelMyBlog has had a couple major overhauls and right now is working great, there are quite a few categories, users can add other users to their FuelRoll. This is a list of the blogs that the user reads and considers the writers of those blogs as friends. You can see it on the right hand side of my blog. That idea of showcasing your friends on fuel came out of an online discussion I had with Kevin about what I thought FuelMyBlog to be and I guess he agreed with me.

Now FuelMyBlog is working on something new. It is a book project called The Human Behind the Avatar, recognizing that each blog is written by a living breathing person and not just an anonymous avatar. Each member of Fuel is encouraged to print out their avatar and take a picture of themselves with their avatar in front of them. Many people have chosen to put it in front of their face. I printed out the Avatar for both me and Allison and we’ll be taking our photos later today and adding them to the project. They will appear in this slideshow below.

The proceeds from the purchase of the book are going to Doctor’s without Borders. FuelMyBlog is an international blogging community and what better organization than an international one that can benefit so many.

so, if you are a member of FuelMyBlog then print out your avatar and submit your write up to the project. If you are not a member of FuelMyBlog, why not? Sign up today.