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Thanks for your money. Now give me more

Wow. This morning I launched a donations drive that was supposed to net me € 2,500 in, hopefully, a month or two or so. At least that’s what my “sensible” average projection was. Instead, it netted me € 3,200 in about six hours, and donations are still coming in.

Thanks, all. Awesome. Humbling. Scary, even, in a sort of way. I mean, I have to be extra good and stuff to repay you all.

First things first, now that the donations are going so well I will happily continue to receive them. And every cent of them will be used for QuirksMode.org; the first 2,500 for the compatibility table update, as promised, the rest for a plan I’ve had for quite a while now, but that hasn’t yet gotten anywhere. (And no, I’m not going to give more details right now.)

I tried to get corporate sponsors for my plan (it’s liable to be expensive), but I didn’t really get any replies in the past month or so — in most cases not even an acknowledgement of receipt. I should have turned to the community earlier. On the other hand, the community cannot provide a regular income. I mean, if I’d run a donation drive again in a month the results would be distinctly less great. This drive succeeded so well only because it is unique.

But anyway. The compatibility table updates.

I’m extremely glad that I snuck in a small print at the last moment saying that I’d run the updates in August at the earliest.

Not to put a too fine point on it, but the last couple of weeks have been totally shitty for me. I poured beer over my MacBook Air, which, surprisingly, the hardware magicians in Cupertino didn’t foresee. I have to buy a new one. A few days later I turned to my ancient and crappy Windows XP laptop, banged on the keyboard in annoyance when it took fucking forever doing something that should be easy, and the screen went in tilt mode and nothing worked any more.

Also, last week I was ill, some sort of virus, I suppose, and I had little energy (still don’t have much). Actually, the combination of illness and no laptop is an insidious one. There were plenty of times when I could easily have gone online for an hour and gathered some interesting mobile stories, or typed out a few Linkbait entries or a few mails. However, now I had to leave my bed and sit down at my desk to do so. And I didn’t. So I’m behind on pretty much everything.

And then there’s the really serious problem in my family that I’m not going to blog about but that will take a considerable amount of my time in the near future.

Ages ago I planned to go on holiday for three weeks from 15th of July (my birthday) on. I still plan to do that, gods willing, and I’ll likely be offline for the entire period. Before that I will definitely not have time to update the tables. So mid August it is and it will remain.

Although this donation drive was supposed to be a serious source positive energy source, it went too fast for my comfort. Can’t really explain it, but it would have worked better if I’d seen a slow but steady stream of donations in the next few weeks. Now I feel as if I have to do something right away, but I’m feeling tired even while typing this post.

Ramble on. I hardly slept for three out of the last four nights.

Anyway.

Thanks for all the fish, I really appreciate it, but I’m not going to reply to everyone in person.

And I’m not going to put my Tables on fucking GitHub because I’m afraid of it. I have no fucking clue what even the beginner’s tutorial is talking about. “Oh, don’t forget to do sudoku -warble five times a day, or nameless Lovecraftian horrors will suck out your soul through your nose for an appetizer.” At least, that’s how it sounds to me. Strange as it may sound, I’m not a developer. I haven’t developed anything really serious for the past four and a half years. And my Unix is worse than my Greek. At least I had five solid years of (ancient) Greek at school. Unix? I know rm -rf *, and I heard it’s bad for your health, so I tend not to use it.

The point of any change in how the Tables are created would be to save me time, not to spend more of it on arcane writings of incrowdy geeks. Yes, I’m being unfair. But I’ve earned that right.

And the fact that my official rate is € 5,000 per week does not mean I actually invoice that amount per week. Or even per month. The last month I invoiced more than a week of work in total was March 2010. So there. I don’t develop, I consult. And there’s only a small market for browser compatibility consulting.

And I’m a lousy entrepeneur. Remember the Corsican druid in Asterix on Corsica who goes out for mistletoe? That’s my entrepeneurship. (The worst thing is, it works sometimes. Hardly a week after I made the Corsican comparison to a friend Vodafone turned up out of nowhere and gave my whole career a new direction. And paid me for the privilege.)

Thanks for listening. I feel much better now. And by all means do give me your money. I’ll spend it wisely. Or at least I’ll spend it.