UPDATE: Turns out someone has donated a bed to Sherry, so I’m shutting down the donation widget. I got a sizable donation from Ian at The Code Factory, and he’s instructed me to forward it on to the MS Society. If any of you had wanted to donate to the bed, please consider donating to the MS Society instead.

I just read an article in the Ottawa Citizen about a mom in Prescott, Sherry McMillan, who has MS and is in need of a bed to make life a little easier for her daughter and her care workers.

From the original article in the Ottawa Citizen:

“She needs the type of bed in her home that hospitals use. A hospital bed is considerably higher than a conventional one, and would allow care workers to exercise and massage her with more ease. McMillan says they often leave her home with sore backs because of the constant bending they do.

A hospital bed would also allow McMillan to prop herself up automatically so that she could do some things without assistance, such as getting into her wheelchair.

McMillan has to wake Tracy three or four times during the night to help her out of bed so that she can go to the bathroom. McMillan says she hates to disturb Tracy, but has no other choice. Besides helping take care of her mom, Tracy is trying to earn her Grade 12 credits to qualify for community college in September. Her school marks suffered following her father’s death a few years ago.”

The beds they are referring start at about $1700, but they are unable to afford one, and it appears that at this point, their only chance is to wait for someone who currently has one to pass away, so they might have the bed donated.

I think there’s something we can do to help here. I’ve set up a Chipin widget (pssst...it’s to the right) to try to get a few donations for a new bed for Sherry. Give if you can, spread the word if you can’t, and I’m sure we can come up with the $2000 needed to get them on their way to getting a new bed.

Wow, it’s been awhile. SO much has been going on that I’ve been ignoring my own web site. Let’s see, I launched a new site today, http://www.chiquitababy.com, designed a new logo for a hosting company (It’s not up yet, but when it goes up, I’ll put up a link), signed two major deals with a couple of clients, and found some new office space in the market on York Street that I move into in a week. Lots of exciting stuff to come.

RealWebJobs has been running for a month now, and things continue to pick up. We’re averaging about 5 new jobs per day, still moslty in Canada, but that will change soon enough.

I did some upgrades to the back end of it last weekend, making the skill selection area for job postings into check boxes rather than a free text field. The next major upgrade to the site will build on that. Plus, it makes the skill cloud a bit more manageable, as employers won’t just be putting anything they want in for the job, making it more useful for job seekers.

It’s been a crazy week. Job postings are coming in, I got listed on a few startup sites like KillerStartups, StartupIndex, and StartupOttawa, and even an interview on the Killerstarup’s blog, KillerBlog. Hits are up day over day, and I’m seeing a lot of traffic coming from StumbleUpon.

Let’s hope this is the start of something good.