(Dies ist die englische Version eines ursprünglich deutschsprachigen Artikels.)

Child’s Play 2008 is on. Gamers in many countries of the world give money or buy toys, games or other gifts for child hospitals and stations and their little patients; partner hospitals in the US, the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Egypt are delighted about all the donations.

The Question

But where’s Germany? This question popped up in my head more than once during the summer. Why aren’t there any German hospitals participating in Child’s Play? In July, I’ve asked Kristin Lindsay (Penny Arcade’s project manager) about this, and preventively offered my help as “voluntary liason officer”.

Her answer arrived after a few days: “We currently have no partners there simply because none of us speak German. If you’d like to help out to get your local facility involved, that would be fantastic!”

The Job

In a nutshell, the volunteers are needed to make the initial contact between Child’s Play and potential partner hospitals. CP doesn’t know about these local facilities. How should they? They need local gamers, i.e. us, just like in all the other countries. Die people in charge in these clinics have questions, and it helps building trust in the idea when there are local contacts answering these questions in the local language.

From a legal point of view, the volunteers are not really involved. When a facility decides to become a so-called partner hospital, then there’ll be a legal agreement with the US charity itself. Child’s Play only works with so-called non-profit organizations, tho, this can be either the hospital directly, their volunteer guild or the hospital foundation, whichever is applicable.

We, the volunteers, come back into play later, if at all; for example when the clinic may require assistance in building a wish list. The business side of the charity, i.e. sales and shipping, is handled by Amazon.

The Story

About a week later, early August, I went to the hospital Munich Neuperlach. After my appointment I’ve asked around and found the social services office, where I was told that the clinic didn’t have a pediatric station. Bummer! But the friendly head of the office gave me names and phone numbers of people in two other, applicable local hospitals, Munich Harlaching und Munich Schwabing. Excellent!

Well, I didn’t quite expect to see people falling over each other to hear my case. Nonetheless I started doing my rounds on the phone. My two contacts were friendly and helpful, but not the people responsible for dealing with charities. Over and over I was given new names of other clinic personnel which would take care of “requests like yours”, and after a few detours I’ve ended up talking to people who at least could give me some information and the right names. It just didn’t really help right away: “The person you want to talk to is [XYZ], but he/she is sick/on vacation/on a business trip”.

During the next two months I’ve spent a lot of time on the phone. I’ve talked with nice hospital employees who appeared to be seriously interested, who asked for more information. Some of them had questions I couldn’t answer; luckily there was Kristin Lindsay. :) I’ve relayed Kristin’s answers in German to my contacts. I’ve called them on a weekly basis, asked for news and whether a decision had been made yet. But bureaucracy being what it is, this took some time, so I’ve called them again… and again… and again.

In short, I’ve done what I’ve “signed up for” when asking whether they would need a local volunteer.

End of Season One

But then, end of October, all of a sudden it was over (at least for this run). The administration of the Munich Municipal Hospitals told me in a short mail that while they found Child’s Play to be an interesting charity, they’ve ultimately decided against participating. A pity.

In the end there was nothing left to do for me but to thank them for the notice, and reminding them that 2008 very likely isn’t going to be the last year of CP.

Well, and that is the reason why there are no Child’s Play hospitals in Germany in 2008.

Debriefing

Personally, I think it’s a sad outcome, yes. I ponder whether I should’ve contacted more than just two clinics. The chances for success would’ve been much higher, of course. But this was the first time I’ve done something like this, and I had no idea what to expect or how much work it would entail. I figured I’d rather start out small, and increase the numbers in the next year. The sky’s the limit, sure; but trying to deal with 10 facilities at once in the first run, and running the risk of failure, of letting people down, of screwing with the reputation of Child’s Play — that didn’t look like a solid plan.

Child’s Play 2009

Next year I’m going to start out earlier in the year. Also, I’ve decided to change my approach: I’ll “outsource” the search for applicable and interested hospitals.

I’ll outsource them to you.

Do you know a German children’s hospital or a clinic with a pediatric station which might be interested in a contact to Child’s Play? Just ask the administration or the social services people — just tell them about CP. If I had to venture a guess, I’d say most clinics in Germany have no idea the charity exists. If they’re showing interest, you’ll have three options:

• You send them to CP’s Kristin Lindsay.
• You give them my contact data if they want to talk to a German.
• You handle them yourself. :)

Please keep in mind that I can’t promise anything, except that I’ll answer each request.

And with a bit of luck we’ll have more success in 2009, so the press might talk about something else than “OMG MURDAR SIMULATOR GAMSE”. :)

The Fineprint

I am not affiliated with Child’s Play. I do not speak for the organisation, and I am not their representative. All I am is a freelance volunteer who thinks the idea of having Child’s Play partner hospitals in Germany is a really neat one. All statements regarding legal conditions and practices have been made to the best of my knowledge, but still they might be poppycock.

A few weeks ago I was talking with Mike about carefully choosing gifts for our loved ones, about how to select the right things for the right people, so that come holiday season joy would be brought to them. We were discussing this arduous task at great lengths, using big words and long sentences, reflecting the importance of the outcome and the process itself.

I believe our conversation started when the phrase “I need some random Christmas crap” was muttered by one of us.

So obviously, I am not the only person having this particular problem. I am part of a larger group. But this knowledge is no real consolation. What to get family and friends to show them our affection? Each year the same questions arises, like a clockwork, and each year we’re more or less at a loss.¹

I wish there was a way to simulate long browsing sessions in a mall in a very very very condensed way, to allow for picking out gifts — while at the same time taking my very high-importance, hectic lifestyle into account. Oh, and if there was some soothing music, favorably some sort of Easy Listening, to sweeten the experience, that’d be great.

As it turns out, I had to build this simulation myself. I’ve decided to call it random.li, which, incidentally, also happens to be its domain! (I know, what are the chances?!)

Here’s a screenshot.

random.li grabs a number of different items from your favourite Amazon store, in your selected price range, shuffles them, and shows them to you in a 3×3 grid, along with the prices. You won’t even see their titles!

We’re talking about fast-paced, crack S.W.A.T. team-style gift finding. Shiny? Check! Affordable? Check! Bag it, we’re done!

Clicking an item (or hitting the related keyboard shortcut) will bring up some details: its title, what it is etc. A click on the details display will open its Amazon page in a new window.

It’s all rather simple, and I’ve tried to keep the amount of clutter low (yes, the music player in the lower left corner is an essential for me). There’s no registration, no wishlist, no shopping list, no learning curve to speak of. Go there, pick a store, your price range, maybe finetune the categories to search in, that’s it.

Well, have a look if you’re in the market for gifts. Maybe it’ll work for you as it works for me! Comments are welcome, and I’ve also set up a FriendFeed room for support issues.

If you like it, feel free to use the handy “Bookmark” button at the bottom of the random.li site to post the link to your favourite bookmarking / social networking / web 2.0 site, like delicious, Digg, Facebook, Twitter and whathaveyou. I might even send you a cookie if you do!

Cheers! :D

The short story is: not going to happen.

I’ll be shutting escaloop down in about a month or so. It was a nice toy and a fun experiment, I’ve used it to get into Ramaze, but I have neither the time nor the energy to work on it any further.

I recommend moving over to FriendFeed or Lifestream.fm for all your lifestream needs. I am sure there are many more such services, just look around. :)

If you should choose FriendFeed, look me up if you want.

During the last few weeks, I’ve built a couple of pipes I want to share. (”Pipe”, in this context, means an application built in Yahoo! Pipes.)

Here’s one of them.

Your Most Recent Nike+ Run

As I’ve mentioned once or twice in the past, I’ve become a more or less avid runner during the last year. One central piece of my equipment is my Nike+. I don’t run without it. I am a geek, I love numbers. The Nike+ provides me with numbers. It makes running a game.

I sync my iPod with my iTunes after each run, and the Nike site is taking the raw data, crunching it, giving me graphs and more numbers, and (this is the interesting thing) badges for my website.

Now, I don’t really care about those. But when there are badges, there must be an API which provides the raw data to them. Looking behind the scenes, I quickly found it. It’s not password-protected or secured in any way; when you set your nikeplus.nike.com profile to “public”, the API will return some of your data (run overviews, run details etc. — no personal details).

So, knowing the API URL, I’ve built a pipe which will do a few things:

1. Accept any nikeplus.nike.com “brag”-type of link as parameter (when you’re logged in to the site, these are usually labelled “Share with your friends”, “Grab the link” etc.).
2. It will extract your public, numeric runner ID from this link.
3. It’ll fetch the data for the most recent run of the runner with this ID, i.e. you.
4. It’ll build an RSS feed with the data of your most recent run.

When writing the pipe, I’ve made a few assumptions, namely that…

• you sync your iPod after each run
• you’re using the Nike+ site
• you don’t run more than once per day.

Since I am lazy, I’ll only use the data for the most recent run, so the pipe’s results will be exactly that — just a single item, your most recent run.

That being said, I found this sufficient. After adding the pipe’s RSS URL as new “blog”-type service¹ to Friendfeed, FF will effectively trigger the pipe a few times each day, and your latest run will be added to your stream quickly. Next time you sync your iPod, the Nike site will pick up the new data, the API will return the new data to the pipe, and the new run will be added as new Friendfeed item.

The pipe will post your runs in the following format: “[Nike+ runner name] ran [distance] [km/mi] in [time]“, for example “3R ran 11.3543 km in 1:03′54””. The message will link to the public page of the run — a page like this. (3R is my Nike+ moniker.)

Now, why would I want to add my runs to Friendfeed? Well, why not? For me, running is a nice part of my life. I’m actually enjoying it, I’m keeping it casual, and I am proud of every damn kilometer mark I pass. Plus, as mentioned, I am a geek, and I like to share what I build. :)

If you have questions or suggestions, speak your mind in the comments.

• Yahoo! Pipes: Recent Nike+ Run
• Friendfeed: the result — my Nike+ runs as added service.

During the last few weeks, I’ve built a couple of pipes I want to share. (”Pipe”, in this context, means an application built in Yahoo! Pipes.)

Here’s one of them.

Steam Achievements

A few weeks ago, I’ve first tested and then bought the excellent CrossOver Games. It’s an emulator (basically a highly specialized version of WINE) which allows me to play a slate of Windows games, old and new, under OSX. So, that’s how I’ve spent big chunks of my spare time during the last few weeks: playing through the wonderful Portal and the great Half-Life 2 games. (On a related note, I’ve noticed the World of Goo demo is running flawlessly in CXG. Awesome!)

I’ve got the games via Steam, and was both delighted and highly annoyed to learn that newer Steam games offer achievements. You see, I am a sucker for achievements. I love them, even though they aren’t good for anything. I usually spend too much time trying to get this or that achievement. These meaningless little pixel badges are “awarded” for different things you manage to do in different games. You can get achievements in various games, on various platforms. For example on Xbox Live, or, as mentioned, on Steam.

So, being a male gamer in his mid-30s, I naturally like to use these superfluous thingies to brag about my mediocre gaming skills. Meaning, I want them to show up on my Friendfeed profile.

Thus, I wrote a pipe which grabs the achievements from any (public) Steam ID page (here’s mine), spitting them out in an usable format — in Friendfeed’s case, that’d be RSS. (Pipes also returns the data as JSON if you want, or even as a handy HTML badge you can put on your blog or whereever.)

I’ve then added the RSS URL of the finished pipe as new service (type: “Blog”¹) to Friendfeed.

So, that’s all there is to it. Maybe I am the only one caring about this type of thing, maybe not. If you have questions or suggestions, sound off in the comments. :)

• Yahoo! Pipes: Steam Achievements
• Friendfeed: the result — my Steam achievements as added service.