Last post, I talked about sites I believe are legitimate ways of earning money or prizes online. Now I’m going to talk about a site I am completely unsure of. I make no promises to anyone that joins Lockerz.

The premise of Lockerz is that you join their site and earn “ptz” by answering a daily survey question, logging in and inviting friends. When you invite 20 people, you become a “Z-lister” and get double “ptz.” Yeah, the names are lame. Anyway, the site is still in Beta but as of now you can only spend your points on redemption days. The thing that has made Lockerz users angry is that they will not tell you when redemption is, only that it is “coming” and could happen at any time on any day usually near the end of the month. That means you basically have to sit at your computer refreshing the redemption page for 24 hours straight for five days to ensure you get the chance to spend your points.

The prizes include DVDs and video games to PS3s, Xboxes, Nintendo DS, PSPs, Wiis, iPods and even laptops. The amount of points to buy these items varies and makes little sense. For instance, DVDs are more points than video games. You won’t know what prizes will be available until the redemption site opens and because of the large amount of users, you have to have light speed mouse skills because every prize sells out about two seconds after the page goes live. This results in many angry comments all over Lockerz Facebook fanpage, which they completely ignore.

The other part of Lockerz is the random video blogs they post almost daily that I am pretty sure no one watches. They’re usually some hipster inside jokes or have some semi-famous band that I’ve never heard of doing something wacky. Funny story, I commented on their Facebook page that no one cares about their videos and they deleted the comment then blocked me. Touchy subject I guess.
continue reading "Lockerz: I just don’t get it"

Many people who know me know I love legit ways of winning things and making money on the Internet — the trouble is finding the legitimate sites. For the most part, you can’t go wrong on sweepstakes and contests sponsored by corporations. For instance, I won the Razer Carcharias headset from Mountain Dew when they were running their Game Fuel competition with Blizzard Entertainment. By watching videos and clicking around the site you made points each day. Those points were essentially like raffle tickets that you could use on their hourly drawings for lots of gamer and Mt. Dew loot — e.g. entering 200 points put your name in the drawing 200 times.

On Twitter, I have won free domain names from NameCheap (yes, this very site is a result of that) and a World of Warcraft prize pack from Blizzard, although it took its sweet time showing up.

MyLikes, formerly Likaholix which I posted about before, has been pretty sweet to me. I’ve won a lot of money (that’s right, cash) through their contests, which simply require that you make a list of likes for specific categories in the contest like “favorite beaches” or “best beer.” The webmasters choose the best lists, usually the most diverse and with the most detailed comments, and send money by Paypal or Amazon gift cards to the winner. 
continue reading "Winning online … this is not a scam … I think."

Did you know DARPA is still around? You know, those guys that basically invented the Internet (hint: not Al Gore). I always assumed it was sort of absorbed by other government agencies/bureaucracies but apparently they are alive and kicking. Sadly, their Web site is a little boring and unimpressive, but that’s beside the point.

I only found this out because I heard of the DARPA Network Challenge. Apparently it’s the 40th anniversary of the Internet (woo hoo!) and to mark this event they’re giving away $40,000 cash to one person. The contest is basically a way to show how the Internet has evolved into a social networking, information gathering, communication beast:

The challenge is to be the first to submit the locations of 10 moored, 8-foot, red, weather balloons at 10 fixed locations in the continental United States. The balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roads.”

A-whaaa?

A $40,000 cash prize will be awarded to the first entrant to submit the latitude and longitude of all ten balloons.”

So basically people have to work together in order to find all these balloons so that one person can get a load of dough? Seems more like a social experiment into what people will do for money. I wonder how many people are going to be giving fake coordinates of balloon sightings to throw off contestants?

HOW TO COMPETE

1. Register on this web site on December 1.
2. Find other people interested in helping you solve the DARPA Network Challenge.
3. Starting December 5, submit locations to the web site immediately after you find them.
4. For updates, follow us on Twitter.”

I’m interested in seeing how this whole thing plays out because right now there’s some serious confusion. Registration opens Dec. 1, balloons are launched Dec. 5 and submission deadline is Dec. 14. There will be no other prizes but if one person doesn’t get all of the correct coordinates it goes to the person with the largest number of correct entries.

It’s all sort of weird but exactly what I’d expect from a bunch of nerds who invented the Internet. Keep it up, you glorious geeks.

You think you get a lot of spam e-mails? Try being an editor for a newspaper.

The amount of spam I receive is astounding, and most of it is written like a press release trying to entice me into thinking their product is awesome enough to let the entire population of Hugo, Okla. know about through our fair publication.

Needless to say, I check my e-mails with one finger over the delete button. I read in the Oklahoma Press Association publication awhile back that one paper decided to start sending e-mails back asking to send a sample of their product. Surprisingly, this method has worked and the paper has received items like coffee pots and make up. They then review the items, good or bad. This is a fun idea, but I just don’t have the patience right now.

One junk e-mail has stuck out for me as I have received it about three times now and the product just sort of blows my mind.

Meet the SPIbelt:

Look at that handy little pack. She can fit so many things in it, too! A phone, a wallet, some keys … And it fits right on your hips, one might even say it fits snugly above the fanny. Oh wait, I’ve seen this before:

It’s a fanny pack, people! I’m only an assistant editor not a miracle worker, I cannot bring the ’80s back for you.

This post is going to be a bit of a life update since I have neglected my blog for so long, but do not stress for it will also directly relate to the Internet.

I haven’t updated my blog since April because May became quite hectic for me.

I graduated.

My family came to visit.

And I got a job within the same week. In a few short days, all of our stuff had to be packed and moved 484 miles to my new home in Hugo, Oklahoma.

Internet was a necessary utility of course, so I went in to the local cable company, SuddenLink, and signed up for the high speed Internet/cable TV package. We had cable in Columbia and though we had a few connection issues, overall we were happy with the package. We had phone, 10 mbps Internet and cable that included a DVR box.

I was surprised for the price of the package (~$79 a month) that we weren’t getting any deals. Only 56 channels and no DVR or cable box of any kind. It was the Internet, however, which really irritated me. After using it for a few days we were confused why YouTube videos wouldn’t load and we’d get kicked off any online games. We checked the speed and were amazed that we were topping out at only 128 k. We visited the SuddenLink office and discovered that our package was, in fact, for 128 k. I guess I should have clarified what “high speed” meant. To upgrade just a little in speed was going to be $15 more.

Frustrated, we decided to do our research. Turns out that in this small town DSL is actually faster than cable. So at the beginning of this week we took the plunge, ditched SuddenLink for good and got an AT&T/DirecTV package. For the same price, we get 200 channels with a DVR box and a lovely 6 mbps download speed. Joyous day! I am all about getting the most for my money so I think this was a wise switch.

Also, our SlingBox now works.

What’s sad is the lady who works at SuddenLink didn’t even bother trying to convince us to stay, she even admitted to having AT&T herself.

I am, however, frustrated that I did not know about the Blizzard deal running with DirecTV before purchasing everything. I could have gotten a free in-game WoW pet and got to watch BlizzCon for free.   It’s always something.

Something amazing, even magical, happened to ESPN.com — unicorns. It seems that the code has been purged now from the site, but when you entered the infamous Konami cheat code (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, enter) on any ESPN.com page a plethora of sparkly unicorns and rainbows would appear.

Don’t’ believe me?

The more you pressed enter, the more unicorns would appear. It seems the source of the Java script came from cornify.com, which prides itself on being “the #1 unicorn and rainbow service worldwide, giving websites sparkle around the world.”

Missed the unicorns on ESPN? You can enter this code into your browser’s address bar and cornify any page:
javascript:(function(){var%20d=document,j=d.getElementById('__cornify_nodes'),k=null;
var%20files=['http://cornify.com/js/cornify.js','http://cornify.com
/js/cornify_run.js'];if(j){cornify_add();}else{k=d.createElement('div');
k.id='__cornify_nodes';d.getElementsByTagName('body')[0].appendChild(k);
for(var%20l=0;l
k.appendChild(j);}}})();

Or, for more fun with Java, enter this code into your browser bar while on any image-heavy Web page:
javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.getElementsByTagName("img"); DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=(Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5)+ "px"; DIS.top=(Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5)+" px"}R++}setInterval('A()',5); void(0)

now watch the images dance around the screen.

Fashion is not my strong suit. I think I have a general idea of what’s cute but for the last four years of college my regular wardrobe has mostly consisted of Mizzou T-shirts and jeans. My footwear is usually flip flops or a pair of flats in the warm months and Converse or snow boots when it gets cooler. Now, I’m about to graduate (yay!) and am thinking I should probably be a bit more stylish and adult in my dress. But this world of fashion can be so confusing!

So, being the nerd that I am, I of course turned to the Internet. I found http://www.polyvore.com/, a site where you can create sets of clothing, bags and accessories to get ideas for outfits.

I am clearly no fashionista but within about 30 minutes I had created:

Cool Day by amberrosie featuring Stella McCartney earrings

Picnic Date by Angendil featuring Betsey Johnson bracelets

For: nat26 by Natalcia? on Polyvore.com

I got onto the beta for a new kind of social network site, Likaholix. You create your page and begin listing things that you like. You can add comments to go along with your liked items (books, music, movies, parks, restaurants, products, Web sites, cities, etc.) and say why you like them. You also can view other people’s pages and like items on their list, or just learn more about things people like. After awhile, Likaholix will begin recommending things you might like and is usually fairly accurate. The more you like, the more personalized the recommendations become. Of course, the coolest part is being the first to like something.

At first, it was like Facebook or Twitter (read: crack), in that I couldn’t stop. Within the first week of  joining, I was liking like a mad woman:

I was the first to like 52 individual items and 113 people liked things that I liked. I’m thinking, I’m pretty popular. Plus there’s a neat contest giving away Kindles for top beta users. Rockin’, I can do that. Then I realized there were people with literally thousands of likes. I don’t even know if I like thousands of things. Am I just a pessimist? It appears not. I noticed that many people were “liking” items but then their comments would be negative about the product or often along the lines of, “I haven’t seen this movie/read this book but I want to.” Kind of defeats the purpose of the recommendation part of the site.
continue reading "Likaholix: What do you like?"

I re-stumbled upon a fun Web site called Wordle. You can enter text or Web site links and Wordle will create a word cloud. The words that show up the most are larger in the cloud. You can edit the format the word cloud appears in (horizontal or vertical words), the color scheme and the font. They’re pretty artistic.

Here is amberhanneken.com:

I copy and pasted Leviticus from the Bible:

Columbia Missourian:

A Web comic I read, Nemu Nemu:

I copy and pasted “Harrison Bergeron”, a short story by Kurt Vonnegut:

Go make some Wordles!

It’s something every adult thinks about at some point in time, “What will happen if I’m suddenly gone?” Many of us consider things like what will happen to our possessions, assets, pets, remains, organs and loved ones should we suddenly pass on. Some of us have plans, either verbally given to family or written out in a living will or trust.

Slightly morbid
But what about our online identities? How will the people we game with, chat with and interact with online ever know what happened? I know I’m not the only one who has thought about this because there’s a site for it: SlightlyMorbid. For $9.95, $19.95 or $49.95, this service will allow you to create a list of friends and a list of trusted contacts. The site then creates a certificate with simple instructions to be given to your designated trusted contacts in case of emergency so that they can notify the people you know online.

Of course, this service seems like something I could do on my own, which is probably a good idea. If you don’t have a trusted friend already with access to your accounts/friends list online, then it’s a good idea to keep that information somewhere with your other important documents either printed out or on a flash drive.
continue reading "Signing off the mortal coil"