Everyone here at Desert Bus HQ is pleased to unveil the official t-shirt of Desert Bus for Hope 5.

It was way back in the summer when the very fine and generous folks at Fangamer expressed an interest in being more involved in Desert Bus this year, and offered to create a very special, limited edition Desert Bus 5 t-shirt. Several months later and Fangamer have really knocked the design out of the park.

100% of the profits from each shirt go to Child’s Play, and if you buy during the marathon Fangamer is offering to donate an additional 10% of the profits from  whatever else is in your cart.

The counterpart to Tally’s craft-along prep, is Kathleen’s corporate prizes. She walks us through a couple in a new DBD:

Auctions, challenges, and giveaways are a long-honoured tradition of Desert Bus for Hope, and a great way to raise money for the kids. Last year we implemented a back-end system for Desert Bus in order to track these events, and to introduce our silent auction system. On the whole, we felt that it worked out very well, but there’s always room for improvement!

This year, we’ve updated this system with some new features both on our end, and on yours. These changes should make our lives easier as we progress through the run, and they’ll allow you to do all kinds of cool new things!

The first thing you need to do is head on over to donor.desertbus.org and register an account. You will be required to register if you want to issue a challenge, or bid on a live or silent auction item. All you need to give us in order to register is an email address, so that we can contact in the event that you win yourself a prize.  Then, using this personal account you can:

• check the status of your challenges,
• track the silent auctions you are bidding on,
• view your donation history,
• pay for accepted challenges and won auction items,
• add shipping information, and
• manage your donor profile.

 
On your homepage you’ll also receive messages if you have any outstanding items, like an auction item that needs a shipping address.

The account registration process is already live and running, so if you plan to make us act out a scene from the musical Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark with every role played by a person doing a lousy impression of Sean Connery, or throw down with Octopimp in order to win a lot of autographed widgets, you may want to get this taken care of right away.  You wouldn’t want to miss out on an auction because you weren’t signed up!

See you Friday!

Update: Please note: you should use the same e-mail address to register a Donor account as you use for your IRC login. Bidbot will only recognize emails it knows! If you used a different address for your IRC login, you can add that address as an “Additional E-mail” in the “Edit Profile” section of the Donor site.

Bradley Rains has been composing music for us at LoadingReadyRun for a couple years now, and when he asked if he could perform some of those songs for Desert Bus, I figured that an opening act would be the best way to do it!

Starting at 5:00 PST on the 18th, an hour before the marathon starts, Bradley (joined by his brother and dad) will be performing a set of music he’s composed for LRR, and a couple other things as well.

Check out this promo he put together, and watch the pre-show here, at 5:00PM PST, on November 18th.

Well, it took nearly a whole year, but they’re finally online. Videos from the LAST Desert Bus.
There’s a myriad of technical reasons why this took so long, that I shan’t bore you with, but they’re online now.

Enjoy them in the embedded playlist below (mouse over for the selection controls), or at the following link: Desert Bus Video Archive.
Hope you enjoy them! (There’s a few more coming!)

On Saturday, Tally took some time out of processing all the crafts to give me a little rundown of what her days are like right now.

Hey all! I had some spare time at the Moonbase this afternoon, so I thought I’d give you an update on our preparations.

Wow, it’s really crept up on us, hasn’t it?

Not that we haven’t known it was coming. I mean, my goodness, we’ve got the biggest team ever working on this year’s event. It’s going to be amazing!

Now that we’re so close to this year’s event, I thought I should take this opportunity to tell you what we’ve actually been doing since our first DB5 meeting, way back in March. I’ll start!

Graham

Well, most of what I do for Desert Bus happens once we start. “Hosting duties”, we call them. This year however I’ve also become the volunteer coordinator, arranging with the wonderful people who are donating their time to make everything run smoothly once we start. Blog writers, auction runners, site managers… we’re organized this year! You’ll meet them closer to the date.

Paul

As well as sharing those “hosting duties” (Paul and I usually split the day cycle, mornings to evenings), you see this fancy new DB website? That was Paul. We figured it needed a refresh after 4 years, and it looks damn fine. For the bits of the website you can’t see, he collaborated a lot with…

Ashton

Returning after his breakout performance last year, Ashton is some kind of human astronaut. He’s rebuilt our custom Desert Bus database from the ground up, with built-in interfaces and tracking for donations, donors, auctions, prizes, challenges, shipping and I’m pretty sure it will make toast for you. Assisted by LRR fan (and admin of our Minecraft server!) Fugiman.

Tally

Tally oversees and coordinates the Desert Bus craft-a-long, so her job is far reaching, time-wise. People need advance warning to make amazing things by hand, which is why the post below is from May. In the past month we’ve received probably over 100 amazing crafts that you won’t be able to find anywhere else. Look for the live and silent auction listings when they go live!

Kathleen

We don’t just auction off and give away amazing crafts, but amazing commercial products too! And Kathleen works with companies to arrange those things. From the high-speed internet we’ll be using to ThinkGeek’s Tauntaun sleeping bag (oh yes, we’ve got one!), there’s going to be some awesome stuff heading your way!

Matt

Ever since Penn & Teller scared the crap out of us by calling in during our first event, guest call-ins have been a part of Desert Bus. They’re not just fun to listen to, they’re also a great morale boost for a weary driver. Matt’s job is harassing these cool people until their will breaks and they agree to call us. But seriously, we’ve got some great guests lined up this year (many of whom you’ll remember from previous events!).

Johnny

New to the organizing committee this year, our good friend Johnny (working with another good friend Ian) has been toiling away to make our tech setup the best we’ve ever had. Multiple cameras, Facetime call-ins, backup feeds… guys, seriously, we’re ready for this. As with last year, our erstwhile Derplord Alex has built us a driver-cam overlay to be proud of.

James, Jer, Bill and Morgan are returning as drivers (with Kathleen of course), and there’s a whole heap of other volunteers we’ll introduce you too when we get closer to kickoff, but I wanted to tell everyone just what we’ve been doing this whole time.

Let’s just say we’ve been busy. It’s a far cry from DB1’s “show up, plug in, drive” operation.

More updates to come, watch this space for the madness!

It’s only late April and here we are, officially announcing the 5th Desert Bus for Hope.

Obviously it’s still very early in the planning stages, so we don’t have a whole lot to share.
I can tell you we will be starting this year on November  18th, 2011 @ 6:00PM PST
I can tell you we have a bunch of great stuff in the works.
I can tell you to look forward to a bit of a website refresh.
And finally, I can tell you this year is going to be the best yet!

Look back here soon for detailed information on this years Craft-a-long.

And to keep up to date as best you can make sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook.