I step out for ten minutes to get a drink and BOOM: $12,000! I don’t know how you guys do it: you must be amazing or something. What I do know is $12,000 buys a lot of toys for the children! Let’s keep it going all the way to Vegas (and back!).

From: You

To: The Children

Subject: Eleven-thousand Dollars

Message Body: You are awesome. That is all.

See Attached:

Yes, we have reached our fist deca-thousand! We now have four drivers on the hook for 24-hours each, and are well on our way to dragging Kathleen into the fray. After that first $500 auction, I don’t think she stands a chance.

It’s over 9000!!

If a spider had $1000 in each hand (leg?), he still wouldn’t be able to match your incredible generosity! You guys have done whatever a spider can and more, fetching Desert Bus the astonishing sum of $8000. As it it wasn’t already obvious, we’re in for the long haul now!

Normally, as our crazy bus trip progresses, we’ll be posting notices of our guests about an hour before they join our broadcast. However, because I expect a lot of activity on the blog in the first couple hours of the event, I’m posting our first guest a little early. Those of you who watched this week’s installment of LoadingReadyRun will know that we all recently became very very re-addicted to Magic: The Gathering, so we couldn’t be happier to welcome Mark Rosewater, the lead designer for Magic at Wizards of the Coast, who will be calling in to speak with us at around 7:00pm PST!

Mark has headed up Magic development over the course of many expansion blocks, and has comedy writing chops from years of working in television. He’s famous for his love of crazy mechanics, and his proclivity for writing extremely long blog posts about design, life, and the funny place where the two connect. We’re hoping that chatting with him will ease the pangs of addiction  from missing Friday Night Magic–only one of the many trials to be suffered as the crew embarks on the first leg of its journey.

Wizards of the Coast has also donated a pretty astonishing selection of prizes–sure to tune your Elder Dragon Highlander deck into  something absolutely terrifying–so stay tuned as those are auctioned off later in the event!

If you have any questions for Mark, you can post them here: we don’t promise to ask him everything (or anything) that’s posted, but we may draw on your questions if we have time.

Yes, you heard right! Desert Bus for Hope has just crested $7000. We’ll let you celebrate, though: we have a bus to fuel up! Thanks to everyone for your generous contributions. You’re the ones who make this event happen, and we salute you for it!

Desert Bus is a lot of work. But it’s not just a lot of work on our end to raise cash and give away prizes. There’s a lot of bandwidth going out to broadcast a high quality stream on YouStream, keep the blog updated, upload photos and pictures and then not to have everything slow down to a terrible crawl (as has happened in previous years).

This year, we’re going to be better, faster (and stronger) than ever thanks to our Technical Sponsors – Servint, Shaw Cable and Sharp’s Audio Visual.

Servint were our first sponsor for Desert Bus 4, and they are the reason you’re able to read this blog post at all. They are donating all the hosting for this year, providing unlimited uploads and an enterprise level service package to keep the Desert Bus site on the air. With Servint’s help, the slowdowns and bandwidth grinding that have plagued us in previous years will be a thing of the past.

Of course, we need to upload information as well, and Shaw Cable really stepped up this year and donated their fastest tier of internet service to us for the week – the appropriately sexily named “Nitro Internet”. We’ve really noticed how much faster it’s making our work, and the faster we can work, the more we can do, the more money we can raise, and the more we’ll suffer! Booray!

Finally, our last technical sponsor is Sharp’s Audio Visual. Sharp’s has generously donated us a 52” TV for the week. As you might know, we interact with the Desert Bus chat by running it through an enormous TV that we can read from anywhere in the broadcast area. With a 52” TV, even the most exhausted Desert Bus volunteer will have no problem reading our chat.

So there you have it – the three companies responsible for technical wizardry behind this year’s Desert Bus for Hope. There’s no way we could do it without them. Please visit our sponsors page to learn more about them and visit their websites!

Guys, this is incredible: our friends over at MarioMarathon have made something amazing.

Head over to MarioMarathon.com/DB to check out their fantastic hub-site. Not only can you watch the drivercam and participate in the chat, you can also play Desert Bus yourself and be ranked against other viewers around the world. Frankly, I am astonished, and have no idea what we can possibly do to to repay them in kind, but mark my word, we will think of something!

United in arms for the children, the Child’s Play Superfriends are geared up to go!

Awesome donations – how do they work?

Really well apparently, as I’m happy to announce that we have crested $6000 four hours out from the start of our fourth epic run. We don’t have any milestone pictures to put up for this occasion (feel free to email one to milestone@desertbus.org), but we are all celebrating on this end.  This is gearing up to be the best Desert Bus ever, so buckle in and prepare for a wild ride!