HAITI AND CHESS (HARD TO BELIEVE)

Last night I was doing some web browsing and I was getting bugged by the fact that "some" think that the prices of a well-known company beat everyone else's every time. And blah blah blah. I started tracking the information and, once again, these people were full of the usual crap. This time I studied software prices for chess products. But often the "misperception is reality" (my take on the old "perception is reality" phrase) thing passes as Fact rather than Fiction. I will pass out the 10 point details later of how a PR snowjob gets people to believe stuff that is intrinsically not true...

And for the last couple days I have been thinking about something else, Haiti. These people who have been devastated are, as I write, people. They have love, family, jobs, a government, pain, death and medical problems we all have experienced but theirs were experienced in a particularly harsh way. What do you do when your life goes completely to hell? How does one have hope? Is there a tomorrow?

Other than praying for them, what else can be done? Yes, people donate money to the Red Cross or Catholic Relief Services and other relief programs. The Red Cross has taken its share of grief for past practices. Movie stars and singers are raising awareness by holding gigs and returning the money to provide relief to the devastated Haitians. Twitter is now involved and FaceBook.

But today I saw something which caught my eye and which I found amazingly hard to believe. If you own an iPhone (and a lot of people do), there is a game called Chess Elite. You can buy this "app" through the iTunes store.

I don't have the space to provide the details about changing your Elo rating, prizes, and so on, so here is the URL: http://www.99games.in/chesselitecontest.html

99games says that they will provide data about the distribution of funds by Feb. 25th. If you like gaming on handhelds why not look into this? You get your chess fix and get to do some good too (if you haven't already). I don't know this company, it was featured on the MacNN site which I read several times a day. If any of you participate, please let me know as I would like to know your experiences about this, the app you used and so on. It reads like a worthwhile idea and one has to thank whoever was thinking "out of the cube" (as I called my Blog post the other day). I love ingenuity and compassion.