At just over an hour in (out of 100 total!), we’ve already had an amazing donation drive of an uncut sheet of M14 rares, won by Invariel.

Our first silent auction began at 10: Gavin Card’s Desert Bus for Hope Chainmail Inlay. The auction closes at 6pm, so get your bids in!

The first live auction is AMAZING, you guys, and I’m so jealous of the eventual winner I can’t even believe it. It’s a DuckTales Remastered Lunchbox and a golden NES cartridge that is so rare, it’s not even available on Ebay. Bidding starts at 12pm: go admire it here: https://desertbus.org/live-auction/166

“It smells a lot better at the start than at the end.” – Andy

Andrew Cownden is an actor, playwright, song writer, and all around awesome guy working out of Vancouver, BC. He got involved with LoadingReadyRun the old-fashioned way: high school. He’s been tagging along since 2003, when Graham said “Hey, Andy, can you be in my video?” and Andy said “Um…you can put video on the internet without exploding the computer?”

After attending the Canadian College of Performing Arts, Andy has traveled around the province doing professional theater (or Proh-feh-sional THEATAH *sniff sniff*) for about eight years. He has appeared on TV shows like Eureka and Exes and Ohs (he even has an IMDB profile), and a positively intimidating amount of plays and musical theater performances. Andy also wrote the official Desert Bus theme song, “Tucson or Bust”, which came out of a live improv he originally did on Desert Bus 1. You could say that he makes making stuff up look easy; and he definitely always makes it look good (or at least funny).

Andy will be here until Wednesday, taking challenge requests from viewers (so get creative!), and then he will be going back to Vancouver for an audition. Keep an eye out for him in the early morning and afternoon (PST).

 

Hello, beautiful Desert Bus fans! I am Doctor Mia, Professional Neon Redhead, and I’m one of your official Desert Bus 7 bloggers! It is a bright and slightly freezing morning here in Victoria and the Moonbase is buzzing with excitement because DESERT BUS IS HERE!!

 

I am so thrilled to be the blogger for the opening hours of this incredible week. We’ve got some absolutely awesome, awe-inspiring, outrageous, and [insert adjective meaning ‘good’] stuff planned for you guys and the blogging team will be here to document it along the way. My fellow bloggers are Matthew and Mike, and I’m sure they’ll introduce themselves when the time comes. Hang on to your butts; in 24 minutes, we ride.

Hello Desert Bus bidders! We have a very important announcement that concerns some of this year’s auction lots. Ken Steacy has asked that something a little different be done with his auctions.

A personal note from Ken Steacy:

“It is a privilege for me to again participate in Desert Bus For Hope, which is fuelled by the tireless efforts of the Desert Bus crew. For their commitment and good hearts I can offer only my deepest gratitude, but for their efforts above and beyond the call of duty I have always wanted to offer something more tangible.

Therefore, starting this year (and with the blessing of Child’s Play), 50% of the auction proceeds for all my donations to Desert Bus For Hope will fund operations for the Desert Bus organizational crew, without whom the bus would never leave the station. Thanx to them, and to everyone who contributes for keeping the wheels spinning – let’s roll!”

– Ken “Value Added” Steacy B^)

So to recap, half of the auction proceeds from all of the items donated by Ken Steacy – whether giveaway, live auction or silent auction – will go to the Desert Bus organizational team – the folks who plan Desert Bus throughout the year and are in charge of putting it on. The other 50% will go to Child’s Play. Ken has made it clear to us that he would like this money to go to the team in recognition of their efforts and the hours they put in. Administrative costs (eg: office supplies, shipping costs, etc.) are privately sponsored from other quarters.

The entire auction amount will continue to go towards the total number of hours we will bus for.

As Ken mentioned, this has been discussed and given the ok by Child’s Play themselves – neither we nor Ken would ever proceed with this without their permission.

We love putting on Desert Bus, and we will continue doing it as long as we can, regardless of any sort of compensation. That said, we are deeply touched by Ken’s gesture, as well as by his continual support of Desert Bus for Hope.

We want all of you to be fully aware of exactly where your money is going should you choose to bid on any of the items that Ken has donated this year.

Thank you all for your wonderful support of Desert Bus for Hope!

~The Desert Bus team

Hey all, Graham here. I threw together a little video to help answer the eternal question from the uninitiated: “What is Desert Bus?” Please send this around to spread the word!

Hopefully this will address rumors that we are actually driving a real bus through the desert for some kind of quest of personal discovery. That’s for afterwards.

We’re all extremely excited to get started with Desert Bus 7. So excited, that we’re going to get the party started early with a pre-show the night before we begin!

Join us on Friday, November 15th from 6:30-8:00PM Pacific Time for a behind-the-scenes look at what makes Desert Bus For Hope tick plus live music from The Doubleclicks and Molly Lewis! More surprises and delights await, but only for those who tune in!

Then we will wish you a goodnight as visions of deserts dance in our heads. But don’t sleep in, because Desert Bus 7 is coming at you starting at 10:00 AM Pacific on Saturday, November 16th!

Start your countdowns now. We’ll see you here on Friday.

Photo credits: Doubleclicks – Jessie Kirk; Molly Lewis – Atom Moore

Also, you should check out this awesome video that The Doubleclicks made about Desert Bus

Apple has approved the Desert Bus for Hope iPhone app!

Download the app from iTunes:

US Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/desert-bus-for-hope/id729313552?ls=1&mt=8

Please note: We made a mistake when we set the riders for our content warnings and it appears that they have defaulted to the maximum settings for each. They should be;

• infrequent/mild cartoon violence
• infrequent/mild profanity and crude humour
• infrequent/mild suggestive themes
• infrequent/mild alcohol and/or drug references

You will see these changes reflected in the next update of the app.

Tonight, you are invited to join Ashton, me and our new friend Louis for a tour of the Desert Bus for Hope iPhone app. Starting at 6:00 PM PST, we’ll give you a complete rundown of the app’s features, talk a bit about its development and answer any questions you might have about it. We’ll be streaming as a Google Hangout, so you can join in and participate through YouTube or Google Plus. I’ve embedded the video below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeK499RCwr4&feature=youtu.be

We’re really excited about the app, and anxious to show it off, even while it is still mired in Apple’s approval process. In case you can’t make it, we’ll also leave the archived video here for viewing at your leisure. So come out and get pumped for Desert Bus with us, or on your own time, if you prefer.

Also, be sure to focus all your latent psychic powers on turning this light from amber to green. Let’s get this app out of Apple’s hands and onto our phones ASAP. We cannot wait to let you use it.

Hello everyone! As you may have noticed, many of our prize listings have now gone live on the website. If you hadn’t noticed this yet, you’re going to want to stampede off to drool over all the pretty things now. Go ahead, we understand. We’ll wait.

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What did we tell you? SO many pretty things! We have roughly 300 prize lots this year to auction and giveaway. Not all of them are visible quite yet, this is just the start. There are more listings to come in the next few days, so keep coming back to the website to check for newly added items.

Schedules for live and silent auctions are also up, so feel free to start marking your calendars with the auction times you don’t want to miss. However, please note that until Desert Bus begins next Saturday, auction times are subject to change, so we recommend that you check back on Saturday morning to see whether any of the auctions you want to see or bid on have moved.

As before, in addition to our exciting live and silent auctions, we’ll be doing giveaways for donation drives, art challenges, writing contests and more, so stay tuned during the run for opportunities to win all kinds of amazing stuff! Our social media team also has a whole pile of sweet download codes for games and musical albums – they’ll be giving those away via our Twitter and Facebook feeds and the live chat.

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While our Prize Mistress Tally has been hard at work in the prize mines, she has not been going it alone. We’d like to say a big thank you to Heather Dery, Jess Bell and Mannie Ross for coming in on afternoons, evenings and weekends over the past month to help Tally get the prize mines sorted and ready for Desert Bus 7. These ladies have been an incredible help in getting our prize listings ready for your viewing pleasure!

And a special thank you also to Lori Miller, who made us a fantastic prize mines hard hat. Safety first! Or at least second – the children are always first at Desert Bus, after all.

Hi folks, this is Jer, and today I’m happy to finally reveal the details of the so-called “Secret Desert Bus Project!”

Introducing…

Anyone who reads my Twitter should by now be familiar with the Secret Desert Bus Project, which has dominated my feed for most of the last couple months. In fact, it’s come dangerously close to being all I talk about period, as it has slowly grown to dominate the entirety of my waking life. Ashton and I, along with our new friend Louis Moga, have spent many long days and sleepless nights finishing a project that was probably over-ambitious from the start—and was certainly under the gun from a scheduling perspective since before it began. Even so, we have finally put the finishing touches on it, and I am happy to at last introduce you to Desert Bus for Hope for iPhone.

Desert Bus, but Smaller

A little over two years ago, I hung up my silly sketch comedy hat to go back to school. As a result I spent most of the last two Desert Buses running between classes and trying to keep up with the total on my phone. What I really wanted was a tool that could appraise me of the situation at a glance, at any time. Since graduating and getting a job in the software industry, I’ve tried to take cues from what I’ve learned and design an app that provides as much of the Desert Bus experience as possible in mobile form.

You may remember Louis Moga as the Desert Bus fan who compiled last year’s Burma Shave archive. As it turns out, he’s also a fantastic software engineer, able to turn my designs into a very slick and functional app. Louis’s experience and technical prowess really knit the team together, and his hard work is probably the greatest determining factor in the quality of the app.

At a glance, the dashboard displays the current total and a graph showing the trajectory of the run so far. You can swipe the total to get other information, such as the amount needed for the next hour and the time driven so far. For more information, you can open the Stats & Graphs section to get access to more detailed stats, along with an interactive comparison graph, showing the team’s progress year-on-year.

We think it’s pretty impressive in and of itself, but it actually just scratches the surface of what the app can do. While there was a time that Desert Bus could be represented by just a blog and a total, our website eventually evolved to include challenges, prizes, a schedule and all manner of other details. To help us keep pace, the amazing “Daddy” Ashton Cummings put together a database that later became the spine of the present Desert Bus Website. For the Desert Bus App, Ashton has gone even further, fleshing out his out the website backend into a fully-featured API that allows us to do far more than just track totals.

In addition to donation totals, the app collects and collates all Desert Bus tweets and blog posts into a single feed, formatted for reading on-the-go. It contains the full schedule of everything at Desert Bus, complete with live auction details, event descriptions and guest bios. It lays bare the unlocked and known locked achievements for the run, and has complete stats for each driver. For donations, the app links to a simplified mobile donation interface designed for use in the living room, classroom or bathroom. Along with a complete listing of auctions and giveaways, it even has an interface for real-time bidding on silent auctions.

Those willing to sign up for a Desert Bus account will discover tools that track their personal donation, bid and challenge histories, and a form for challenge submissions to keep the crew on its toes.

All-in-all we’re super happy with the app, especially given how large and ambitious a project it is. We feel like we really shot the moon with this, and have done everything we can to ensure the best mobile Desert Bus experience we could imagine. If you have an iOS 6 or 7 device, please give the app a download and take it for a spin this Desert Bus: we think you’ll be glad you did.

The Catch

There are two reasons I’ve waited as long as I have to announce the secret Desert Bus Project. The first is that secrets are fun, and I like surprises. The second, however, is not nearly as positive. As you read this, the Desert Bus app is making its way through Apple’s famously scary app approval process. This will take as long as it needs to, and could always end in failure. We have had an amazing crew of beta testers working day and night to ensure the app’s quality, but there is always the chance that it will be late, or not make Desert Bus at all.

I wanted to wait until I was certain that the app was coming out before announcing it and getting everybody excited, but at this point I’m resigned to the fact that we may not know for sure until the app actually launches out—which could be on or after the start of Desert Bus. I’m telling you about this now because I want you to know what we’ve been working on, since I’ve been teasing it for so long. I don’t think we could go another year without spilling the beans, so best to make a big announcement now instead of letting it slip out quietly later.

I do have some confidence we’ll make our release date.

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In order to give you a better idea of what to expect, Ashton, Louis and I will run a live hangout on Tuesday Nov 12 at 6:00 PM, PST. We’ll give you a run-through of the app and answer any questions you might have about the it or its creation.

Look for it linked right here on desertbus.org.

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Thank you all for your continued support in all things, and I look forward to seeing you all for Desert Bus next week!