Have something that will bring hte big bucks?

Then you can help.

For the Soldiers Angels VALOur-IT fund raising campaign this year, auctions will be held on eBay via a single seller.

The short brief: You send the info to Holly Aho, she posts them, you package and ship the item as dirrected and get paid for your shipping costs.

The longer and “official” rules to play:

Auction Items Submissions

All auction items will run as a 7 day auction with no buy-it-now options. Auctions will be listed either on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday evening, ensuring a “2 weekend run” during the 7 day period. This is the busiest time at Ebay. With new listings and expiring listings showing at the top of their lists this is the best time to have a new listing, and the next weekend a now expiring listing.

All auction items must be shipped within 5 business days after receiving shipping cost payment. You will be sent shipping cost money either by paypal or check based on your preference.

Things needed to start an auction:

1. Photos.

Images should be no larger than 600px by 600px

Image file names should be short and descriptive. IMG_0001.jpg would be wrong. marinecoins.jpg would be better.

Image file names should contain no spaces. marine coins.jpg would be wrong. marinecoins.jpg or marine_coins.jpg would be better.

There is no limit to number of photos you can include

2. Description of item
Suggestions for a good description:
Include measurements if applicable. Height, width, depth, etc. Is it bigger than a breadbox? lol

Include weight if applicable. Is it paper mache or solid gold? Help the person imagine seeing and holding it in person.

Condition of item. Was it last driven over by a drunken tractor driver or is it new in the box?

Rarity. This is more subjective but give an opinion based on your experience. How many of this item have you ever seen?

Include color(s) in your description. Photos are not good for relying on these details. The buyer may have drastically different monitor color settings than you.

Include method you intend to ship the item with. Say you will ship USPS Priority, UPS Ground or whatever you prefer.

Include flat rate shipping cost in description (see below for more details). This information will be in the auction details but it’s good to include right in the description.

3. Shipping cost
Select a shipping method you prefer, be it UPS, USPS, FedEx or whatever.

Find a zip code for the furthest location in the US from your house as you can think of (in lower 48 states). Go to USPS.com, UPS.com or the website for your prefered shipping provider and perform a shipping costs calculator estimate using your address and the zip code you looked up as the shipping location. This estimate will be the shipping cost for the auction.

4. Price
Include:
Lowest possible value of item. If you don’t know, just say that.

5. Your personal information
(this information will not be shared)
Your name
address
phone
email address

6. Method you prefer to receive shipping cost payment from buyer
Paypal
Check by postal mail

Rules for preparing shipping items

1. All items must be shipped in a box large enough to fit the item as well as shipping materials. This includes any item up for auction, books, small items and even paper items.
2. You must use bubble wrap and/or styrophoam peanuts in packaging your item, even if it is a paper item or a book. No newspaper as shipping material allowed!
3. No boxes with alcohol advertisements or names are allowed for shipping purposes. If this is the only box you have, turn it inside out and tape it back together. Need a box? Large stores like Wal-Mart are happy to give you as many as you want. Visit them late at night while they are stocking and help yourself!
4. Use lots of tape!
5. You will be emailed a “From Soldiers’ Angels” label to print and place on the outside of your box. Please tape it in a visible area, and even tape over the paper so that if the box gets wet the label will be “water-proof”.

Questions? Email Holly Aho at [email protected]!

~Holly Aho

Note: Holly has been one of the backgorund volunteers who has made lots of Soldier’s Angels things go for years, so you can be confident your item will be taken care of well in the auctions.

Put on your thinking caps on what you have that can help the cause…and do it soon. Oct 26th is coming up fast! (Statr dtae of the fund dive!).

This is year 4 for the Veteran’s Day fund drive to raise money for the Soldier’s Angels Voice Activated Laptops for Our Injured Troops (VALOur-IT) project.

This project came about as a result of one then Army CAPT, now Major, a blogger, being hit by an IED and ending up in Walter Reed, and being asked by a rep from Soldier’s Angels if they could get him anything. “A laptop, so I can keep blogging.” Well, from one used laptop from eBay, the addition of Dragon Naturally Speaking from a gracious and anonymous donation, then the suggestion from one of his readers about wider applicability, came the program that has helped thousands of wounded warriors with sight or hand mobility issues.

In fact, if you’ll be at BlogExpo in Las Vegas (10/13-15), you can most likely meet Chuck Z, “patient 0!” BTW, he could use a little help getting there: See this post of his.

Beginning last year, VALOur-IT began providing GPS units (helps those with short term memory issues as a result of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI from IEDs), and Nintendo Wiis (gets them to do physical therapy like things, because they love to play games)

This year, the drive will run from 10/26 to 11/11.

We’re looking for bloggers and websites to promote the drive, and those who wold be so kind to exploit their email lists to help the cause. Effort? Punch our some emails with links to the donate site, and make some posts. Whip up the crowd, ask for a few $. Not hard, but worthwhile.

My allegiance is to Team Navy, but know these things:

• All money goes into one fund to support this project
• Funding only pays for the laptops, GPS units or Wiis, or their transportation…nothing more
• The competitive nature of we former service members allows us to act like we did once before in our lives
• The project affects more than just the “now” for the people it helps. It gives them a leg up on when they leave the service with disabilities, as they can operate computers, despite having had some modifications to their lives

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The project’s blog is here, if you’d like to dig in and see what the program has been and is doing now.

Thanks in advance. Please spread the word and leave a comment if you’d like to participate this year. I’ll get you to the Team Navy leader…:) Well, maybe to the other service team leaders, if I must. голова болит секс

Via a “COD.”

Can’t really follow all Lex

has to say about Naval Aviation?

Go and read this at The Weekly Standard.

Rudy full

Pretty Cool Too rip

Dr. Dolittle 2 film A well spoken reporter manages to take you there mentally, without using the usually irritating “navyese.”

Teaser quotes:

[…]
You sit reversed in cold, dark cacophony while the airplane maneuvers for what euphemistically is called a “landing.” The nearest land is 150 miles away. And the plane doesn’t land; its tailhook snags a cable on the carrier deck. The effect is of being strapped to an armchair and dropped backwards off a balcony onto a patio. There is a fleeting moment of unconsciousness. This is a good thing, as is being far from the window, because what happens next is that the COD reels the hooked cable out the entire length of the carrier deck until a big, fat nothing is between you and a plunge in the ocean, should the hook, cable, or pilot’s judgment snap. Then, miraculously, you’re still alive.
[…]
The Theodore Roosevelt and its accompanying cruisers, destroyers, and submarines can blow up most of the military of most of the countries on earth. God has given America a special mission. Russia can barely blow up Chechnya. China can blow up Tibet, maybe, and possibly Taiwan. And the EU can’t blow up Liechtenstein. But the USA can blow up .  .  . gosh, where to start?
[…]
Onboard we met people more distinguished yet, including Captain C.L. Wheeler, commanding officer of the Theodore Roosevelt, Rear Admiral Frank C. Pandolfe, commander of the Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group, and Command Master Chief Petty Officer Chris Engles, who–as anyone with experience in or of the Navy knows (my dad was a chief petty officer)–actually runs everything.
[…]

Fun read…PJ paints some hilariously true word pictures for the uninitiated.

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• The Mummy video

Nubs the dog from Iraq and his adopted USMC owner are reunited in San Diego. The Changeling move

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Brick movie download

From the St Petersburg Times:

Published Saturday, March 22, 2008 10:43 PM

Nubs, a mongrel befriended by a Marine major in Iraq, is petted after arriving in San Diego in February.
[Associated Press]
Nubs, a mongrel befriended by a Marine major in Iraq, is petted after arriving in San Diego in February.
Breaking News Video

SAN DIEGO — A San Diego-based Marine major from St. Pete Beach was reunited on Saturday with one of his closest war buddies, a 2-year-old dog named Nubs.

Nubs greeted Maj. Brian Dennis at Miramar Marine Corps Air Station when the fighter pilot returned from Iraq.

It was the first time the two were together since Dennis’ family and close friends helped raise $3,500 to fly the dog to San Diego about a month ago. Nubs wasn’t allowed to stay on base in Iraq.
[…]

Quite a story of loyalty there.

More background on this story from a Feb 2008 report on ABC News.

It seems some senior citizens have found a way to help out where they could: Clipping coupons and sending them to families deployed overseas to help stretch their military paychecks:

Elderly enlist as coupon clippers to aid military
Small army of old ladies is determined to do its part in the war on terror

By William Wan
updated 2:29 p.m. ET, Tues., March. 11, 2008

GREENBELT, Md. – Some are frail, their bodies riddled with arthritis. Others are confined to walkers or wheelchairs.

Spread out across the country is a small army of old ladies determined to do their part in the war on terror. Their weapons of choice: scissors and coupons.

They cut out a couple hundred each day, a few thousand a week, and send them to military families in the Middle East and elsewhere overseas, who redeem them at commissaries. It may not seem like much, the ladies say, but every little bit counts.
[…]

Ingenious and very helpful. BZ to these women who would devote their time to save money, and a BZ to the Washington Post for highlighting this work done by these women.

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In a very good way.

Her post, describing a discussion with a soldier at the USO is wonderful. Even if it didn’t give me an opportunity make a teaser headline from one of her observations, it’s still another one of those “must read” posts around the blogosphere.

Titled “Investments”, you won’t be disappointed.

Open trackbacks here.

Sea story? I’m going “green” and recycling this post It was part I of a many part serial posting titled “The Value of the Military Skill Set.” I wrote it while trying to encapsulate what it was I, and others working around me, had learned in the service of the country and how that might translate into useful knowledge for a job in the civilian world. Take any shots you want at the writing. Make it better.

Thanks for the inputs in advance.

Update: Link to the Feb 2005 post is fixed….Friday the 13th hd

It appears there’s a call to wear green on the 11th of January to show support for our troops and to show dissenting opinions to the Close GTMO ACLU types….Details here.

Matt from Black Five has an idea….Send Season’s Greetings from bloggers to the troops overseas.

Details here.

Get your best 30 seconds of video game on.

And…check this out: A simple way to say thanks.

Taking a break from what is normally called “technology” to post a little thankfulness for a “technology” the military uses quite effectively as the real, tangible force multiplier: The Recruiter.

It was easy enough, when taking management time on someone to check the enlistment contract of the sailor in question and make disparaging remarks about the lineage of the poor soul who was detailed to recruit and found themselves a little short of quota near the end of the month, and working under the emotional stress of the “system,” as defined by the analysts defined it….

In retrospect, I have, through introspection and reading the many weblogs over the last few years, have come to appreciate the role these people play in the maintenance of a solid, strong and continually improving best military in the world, and, in history.

While out making rounds today, I pulled into a local Marine Recruiter’s office. I did have an ulterior motive, but it was driven by the need to just step in and shake a few hands and say thanks for the hard work that makes the rest of it all possible. It also told me the quantity of pizza I will have delivered one day soon for lunch.

A Staff Sargent and two brand, spanking new Privates were present. The young man and young woman privates looked all the part of the very young who are carrying the load of the nation. No ribbons but the NDSM graced their khaki shirts, but they got the same hand shake and thanks, for they are the ones, with a global war staring them in the face.

So: My suggestion – stop by those strip mall storefronts and take a moment to tell them you appreciate their work, walking the halls of the high schools and making community meetings, much of it at the expense of their personal time at home, when the entire military is making deployments to the combat zone when they are not on “cake” jobs like “shore duty” stateside.

This work is vital, but not nearly as well recognized as an integral part of the system. I think this is especially important in areas far from military bases, as many of these little outposts of the Armed Services are like little islands unto themselves.

They are our edge to make the non-living technology work to defeat our enemies and help those others around the world less fortunate.