Hulu

So, Hulu. The site everyone's talking about. It went online today, and I noticed an article about it in my RSS feeds on top of my email. I immediately put in my email adress to sign up for the beta, but who knows how long it'll be until I get an invite to try it out. I quote the hulu blog:

Not everyone will receive an invitation to the private beta today, but we will be ramping up the number of invitations to the private beta each week. In the interim, we've captured a number of screen shots for those interested.

For those uninformed among you, hulu is a site from various TV channels on which they will post, legally, ad-supported TV shows. I know we've seen this on other websites before, but I can't tell you how many time I've been cut off in the middle of a show while watching it. They also tend to run slow and be clunky and cumbersome. Will hulu be the same? Probably. I'm hoping not, though.

I'm a poor, cable-less girl, who only gets to watch her favorite shows with comcast on demand at friends or her grandparent's houses, or with friends when channel surfing. I hardly even have a TV at home, ours is like 12 inches and very grainy and old. The face that we have a DVD player is relatively new, too. We got one about 2 years after they were the norm. Yet another reason I want an iPod with decent video capabilities (wait a second. That's all of them, now, isn't it? Well, except the shuffle). two bucks an episode isn't ridiculous when you look at the kids buying six dollar lunches regularly, with an icee from chevron, and sushi from the sushi place, and cookies or candy or something from the supermarket. While I couldn't watch unlimited TV at that price, I could buy an episode of something every time I heard it was really good. Once every one, two weeks. Come to think of it, that really isn't that much. In that case hulu, please have good and easy to watch content, with not too many ads? Thanks.

I'll keep you guys posted when I gain access. Until then, you can look at the hulu-provided tour. Or, even better, Machinist has an article that shows us the embedding of full shows, tells about the ads, and answers a lot of questions, or at least a lot of my questions. And, um, has the full-length Breakfast Club, embedded full length in the page.

So, where's the hulu facebook app?

What I've Learned from Freebies

So, I've looked into freebies more, and I'm part of the way to my iPod touch. Here's some thing I learned and you should bear in mind on your freebie journey.

• Use an obscure site, but make sure it's legit. Google search the name, look at freebie sites (anything4free, freebiescout, etc.). They often have databases of 'proven legit' sites. It's easier to get referrals on more obscure sites because less people have already signed up for them. While Transcendent Innovations was recommended to me because they are a very legit, good site with good customer service, they are the number one freebie site on most forums, and a bunch of people couldn't trade referrals with me because they had alreay signed up for my site.
• Clear your cookies right before visiting a freebie site to complete an offer. When you click the link to the offer from the freebie site, the freebie site creates a cookie that makes the site you do the offer on know whom to credit. If you've ever visited the offer from a different site before, the cookie will be there and that site will be credited instead, unless you clear your cookies.
• Do not ever sign up for a site you found until seeing if there's someone who will pay you to do it. After I explored a bit and decided on my site, I signed up without being anyone's referral. A pity, becuase there are a multitude of people on the forums who would have paid me up to forty dollars to do what I was going to do anyways.
• Read the fine print. Many of the subscription, book club, etc. services give you two free books now, but require you to purchase 20 in the next year. Make sure you know exactly what you're signing up for.
• Trust your gut. When you're trading referrals to get referrals to your site, be wary of anyone you naturally don't trust. You can always say no.
• Trade referrals. It's fine if you have a good friend or two who is willing to do an offer for you, but it's unlikely that you will have enough close friends that are willing to spend 10 bucks and quite a bit of time to help you get an iPod. If so, congratulations. If not, referral trades are you best option. You can buy a referral for about 25-40 bucks, but many offers require spending 10 bucks or less. Stamps.com, Netflix, Blockbuster, Gamefly, and other reputable companies require purchasing just one month, less than 10 dollars, of subscription. If you don't keep the service, this is a lot less expensive than buying referrals. After a point, usually one or two freebies, the remaining offers are more expensive than the option of buying a referral, in which case you might want to start. You can still get the product for less than full price this way - the iPod touch 16GB is 400 bucks from apple, or 8 referrals from Transcendent Innovations. This equals 50 bucks a referral, so anything less than that saves you money.
• Don't try to beat the system. They will catch you, sooner or later, and your accounts on all of that company's sites and sometimes other company's sites will be put on hold - the people who referred you will lose credit, and you will lose all credits on any of your accounts on those sites.
• Get a PrivatePhone number. You don't want telemarketers at home. If you get a number from privatephone, you get a free, inbound voicemail-only phone number that you can check anytime, online. I have one, and I've had no problems whatsoever with it.
• Get a special freebie email address. At first, I tried using my spammy sites address, but it was hard to find and notice the stuff I wanted. I found I was a whole lot better with a dedicated address. And, surprisingly, I've gotten very little spam in it, despite giving it out to a lot of marketing sites. Still, I recommend gmail for this becuase its amazing spam filters will keep all the important emails from your sites while removing the spam.
  
• Be prepared. Several thing have gone wrong for me yet, and I'm sure a few more will sooner or later. You may end up doing an offer or two for naught, realize that your site is horrible, or something else. Don't expect it to go perfectly. Of course, armed with there tips, it may go a whole lot better for you than it has for me :)
  

Top 10 reasons I hate myspace

I feel like this blog has turned into a serialized version of my freebie-getting madness. While that is the main thing I'm focusing on right now, I'm going to change the subject. So here are the top 10 reasons I hate myspace (slightly inspired by this). Some of this may have changed since after I quit myspace. I only use it to look up musicians now, and only if necessary.

• No respect for those with slow computers or connections. As a person forced to use Windows 98 whenever my mom's work laptop isn't here or is in use, I feel the pain of any page loading slowly, even the google homepage. Adding a thousand images to every page doesn't help anything.
• Along the same lines, too many ugly images. Too many weird 'thanks for the add!' images with weird puppies or girl in stilettos and very little else. Or psychedelic backgrounds or whatever.
• Chatspeak. I know that this isn't myspace's fault, but chatspeak bugs me. It's okay when you're texting, just because a cell phone keypad is hard to type on. But seriously. It takes longer to type l8ter than later because the number 8 is farther from your fingers than the letter a. And the length of the word isn't actually different.
• Either everyone can see your profile or no one can. What if I just want my school to see it? Some other network? Nope. Not happening.
• Pedophiles. I never get approached my creeps on facebook. You never hear about girls getting approached by creeps on facebook. Myspace is a complete other story.
• Ugly. Facebook has a clean, univarsally plain yet quit okay looking design. Myspace's page layouts are cluttered and hard to use. I'm talking about the pages, not the profiles. The profiles are way worse.
• HTML knowledge needed to do anything. I do have sufficient HTML/CSS knowledge to do about anything I want to with a myspace page, but I hate hate hate coding. It's so boring and frustrating. Plus, most people don' have that. That means that they have to rely on profile/image sites. If they don't really understand the code that they're copying and pasting, they can't customise, fix, change, or edit any of it without possibly messing it up, and each image has 10,00 hyperlinked credits to the site where it came from. One small unobtrusive one is quite enough. On facebook, I can move, change, or whatever my page elements easily without any special knowlege.
  
• Ads. They're so obstrusive on myspace. The facebook ones are better positioned and much more out of the way. No hugeflashy banners at the top of each screen.
• Lack of apps. Facebook apps are undeniably cool and fun and (some are) useful. They make your profile dynamic and realy extend your facebook experience.
• It's lame. It's just a bunch of lame people with no lives who can't spell, type, or think for themselves.
  

Woot!

This my new favorite site. I have a feeling I will be spending a lot of unnecessary money on it in the (near) future.

Every day they offer one item (or a two-pack on 2-for-Tuesday, or another amount as described on the wikipedia article) at a very steep discount. Here's a list of the past 100 item and Froogle/Yahoo! prices for many of them. They are definitely cheap. So far, in two days, I've seen first-gen zunes for 100 bucks (!), and a 20 dollar 2-pack of jabra bluetooth headsets that sold for 20 bucks each on ebay in a quick search. I saw them for sale last night but they've sold out now. The items do sell out, and I'm sure the good ones sell out quickly. I've subscribed to the RSS feed and I'll keep my eyes peeled for stuff I want.

I'll probably get another prepaid credit card when my dad get back from Cali so that I can get more products online, since I'm not old enough for a real credit card. I just use Simon Giftcard Virtual Accounts. They're great for people like me and work just fine in place of credit cards.

Freebie hitches and hopes

So, I feel like I've made a lot of progress, freebies-wise.

I have discovered freebie forums such as anything4free, freebiescout (personal favorite) and the free ipod guide. I've also discovered, in these forums, referral trading. I like this a lot because I never really wanted to annoy friends and family or turn into a marketer in their eyes.

I've embarked on my first referral trade, and it's been bumpy. I decided to go with the cheaper level B offers, of which you have to do 50 points' worth to get credit (and when I get credit, the person I' trading with will also do an offer for me). I did one 28 point offer, and also a 32 point offer. One of them went very nicely, the 28 point one. I ordered the product I needed to buy, which was some business cards. I only had to pay shipping. That's it. No obligation, they won't keep sending me stuff or keep charging me some sort of fee. I just bought something from this company, for only a little under 4 bucks. A steal when you look at the rest of the freebies.

The other product I needed to buy didn't go quite so smoothly. I signed up just fine, and I was excited to get a 7 day free trial of a product I thought I might actually like, paying only a $1.95 fee. So I signed up, and it said it would send me a confirmation email. Fine. Until I never got it. In addition to not getting credit for the offer, which it said would be instant. So I waited 12 hours, and then I called customer service. First call, I got a user number that I should have been able to use to sign onto the service with. I tried. Got a error message. So I called again. This time I was put through to a supervisor. She couldn't really help me, because the website was probably just having 'technical difficulties' she thought and when I asked when it would be fixed, she said 'well, you never know with that programming stuff'. Thanks. She did, however, extend my trial another 14 days. Which does me a lot of good when I can't even access the site. I only hope that when/if the site revives itself, I will get credit for the offer, and the credit-giving email wasn't eaten by a serer in Timbuktu. One can hope.

I hope that the person I traded referrals with won't get annoyed. I sent him a not and explained the circumstances. I don't really want to do another offer because many referrals are to come and I don't want to cut off too many options for myself. You can only do each offer once, regardless of the site.

And of course, anyone who wants to help a poor iPodless kid, who really really wants an iPod, could go to the link for the Free iPod touch (see bar on right) and complete an inexpensive offer that will absolutely make my day (or my life). I'll even be able to reimburse you via paypal as long as it was under 10 bucks or so. Email me at monkey[dot]kiwi{at}gmail[dot cohm], before you do an offer so that I can know it's you and then afterwards again. Make a girl's (sucky) day much brighter with only a few minutes of your time? This is an email address I'm using for only the free iPod stuff, so don't try any funny stuff. Thanks SO much!

And more freebie stuff...

So. I posted before about Xpango, the site at which I was going to do one of the free iPod things? I like it because on it I could do offers myself or get referrals.

But then I took a second look, and realized I needed a lot of referrals. 27 , to be exact. And there are a lot of sites. that have it for a lot less. For the same item, I found a bunch of different sites with 8 referral things each. So I looked around, and found one common, well-known, reputable one: Transcendent Innovations. They have a free ipod touch site: youripodtouch4free.com. I've decided to go with this one. This will be my last move. I trust this one most, and it doesn't have an insane amount or referrals. So here goes.

This time, I've looked into methods other than family and friends - I'd like to do something kind of like the guy over at the freebiescout forums. I'm going to try trading referrals of mine for doing referrals on other sites. We'll see how it goes - I'll keep you posted. Of course, if you want to help out, please feel free. I'm still going to sort of look for offers over at Xpango, because I already had a few done and I'll just slowly accumulate credits, and get whatever I can. I've always wanted a Nintendo DS. Or a cool phone or something. So I'll leave the link up there *pokes links*. I've added the new one, as well.

Mac Lust...

I want a Mac, and if I had it my way, I'd work only on macs. Strange, considering I've probably used one no more than 5 time in the past few years. At home I use (windows) laptops borrowed from my parents' work, or our Windows 98 HP dinosaur. It's a hand-me-down. From someone my grandparents' age. I don't want tech hand-me-downs from anyone more than 20 years older than me. I just don't.

Basically, my parents would never pay for a computer. They think that it will 'encourage' me to waste more time on the computer than I already do. True enough. But still, I really want a new computer, specifically a mac.

Why a mac? First, I love the interface. It's so clean, so pretty. I used vista about 6 months before it was released to the general public (I live in Seattle, what can I say...) and I knew that it wasn't going o win my affections from first click. While it definitely is prettier than XP, it's still pretty ugly. And while the whole brushed-metal thing on macs is getting a bit old, it isn't getting old enough to make me hate. And macs, I mean, the interface. It's just cool-looking.

Plus, macs don't come with a ton of crap when you buy them. I get so sick of seeing all the stupid free trials and random brands in my programs list. They're just annoying. Macs come with a sound editor, a video editor, a browser, and all the other essential, good-to-have programs. nd they're really easy to find from the start - no digging through menus.

Macs are also, in my pitiful experience, fast. Not counting my fiends old iMac (rember those colored things?). But that was old enough that I excuse it. Her new computer, also a mac, is amazing enough that it covers for her old computer and a whole lot more.

Plus, macs aren't so mainstream. On a mac, I don't feel like any other girl in any other household anywhere else. I'm not going onto generic-glitterz-12354327647.com and getting my little doll glitters and putting them on my myspace (which I hate, by the way. But that's for another time). I feel like someone who knows what's she's doing, is a little more put together and savvy. Every household has a PC. Not every household has a Mac. But having a mac doesn't feel un-mainstream in the weird way, it feels un-mainstream in the cool way.

Macs are fast, sleek, brilliant, streamlined, beautiful,and simple. And that's what inspires my Mac lust.

The only problem? Well, two actually. One, not everything runs on a mac. But I don't use a lot of weird apps, so that's okay. Two, the price. I'm still workin' on that one. And until I solve that, I'll be here, working on my mom's XP laptop from work. Blecch.

Music

I am somehow attracted to music that should be much to young and/or bad for my taste, yet I enjoy it quite a lot. My favorite music is basically Hilary Duff, Rhianna, Hannah Montana, Paris Hilton, and Lindsay Lohan. I know neither Paris nor LL can sing, but somehow I'm drawn to their music, and I can't stand much 'good' music, or popular music (for my age group, at least). Why am I so attracted to pop? I wish, a lot, that I liked more 'normal' music, rap and more popular stuff, but I can't. How can I make myself like non-poppy music? Ideas? I really wish I had a more mainstream, older, music taste. I hate that I love this, yet I do.

iPods

I want an iPod like no other item. I know that there are cheaper mp3 players out there, and that they'll function for my purposes well enough. But.

So a few weeks ago, maybe 3 or 4, I decided that I NEEDED an iPod. Which I do. But with the start of high school, where iPods are allowed to be visible, i realize just how weird I am for not having one. So, me being me and not really able to afford one,, I did some research on those free iPod sites - you know, the complete 10 referrals and we'll deliver it to your door! types. I decided on freepay, which seemed reliable enough. I signed up, and using a prepaid credit card I had bought for the purpose, completed an offer for a free CD. I basically signed up, ordered the CD, and then canceled my account. Cut to now. I've received no credit for the offer. Doing a few more google searches, I realize that a lot of people run into problems with freepay. Accounts put on hold, no credit received, et cetera. Somehow, for reasons I don't understand, the purchase price of the CD was refunded to the credit card. I /would/ have given friends their own prepaid credit cards , bought them each a CD, and had them cancel an account and hopefully receive the iPod for the price of only a few CDs. Unfortunately, I'm sure that they wouldn't receive credit, either, so I've given up on freepay.

But I still want the iPod. I've found another site in the multitude of sites, called xpango. This site appeals to me more because there are many ways in which you can get credits, including offers, referrals, and buying products. This iPod needs quite a bit more credits than the freepay one, but I trust it more. You can also get other products on this site, so even if I don't get enough credits for this iPod, I may still ave enough for a Nintendo DS or something else I wouldn't mind having in the least.

So I'm going with this, but it'll be hard to complete all those offers and stuff. You can help. Simply go to (link) and create an account. Complete an offer - there's several that involve no cost to you, like eFax or stamps.com where you can sill enjoy a free trial of the service. All I need you to do is make an account and complete an offer.

I want an iPod SO bad. Why? Well there's the cool factor and there's functionality. Everywhere I walk in my school, there's at least one set of white headphones visible. I would estimate 90% of the school had an iPod without exaggerating. I really want it just becuase I feel so left out without one, but i also lie the functionality. I get so bored, so often on the school bus, in the car, when I'm walking somewhere, when I'm procrastinating on my homework, and so much more. I'd love music all those times, and there's a lot of times when I'm bored and I wouldn't mind watching an episode of the office or part of zoolander. I think it'd save me from boredom. Plus, I'd like to have it just to have it. I like having a cell phone in my pocket (no matter ow lame that cell phone may be) and I think I'd like an iPod. I hope to get an iPod touch, becuase the wi-fi thing, checking my email (webmail) at a coffee shop without a laptop. Plus that screen is just SO COOL.

So yes. I want an iPod, and I'd love you FOREVER if you'd just consider doing an offer out of the good of your heart.

me

So, a little bit about me, to start off this brand spanking-new blog.

My name is Rachel.
I'm 14 years old.
I live in Seattle.
I'm a procrastinator like no other.

I'm kind of into technology, I spend my spare time on the internet. I play subeta (a lame but addictive site) for fun, I read tech blogs, I poke around on ebay and Yahoo! answers and any other site, and I'm into Photoshop, digital art (even though I'm CRAP at it), and all that fun stuff/

So maybe I'm a /little/ lame...

But so are you. Why are you reading this when you could be...I don't know, doing something worthwhile.

Anyways, I'm a horrible blogger. I've never really done this before, I've attempted but it's for real this time.

...and I'm sure you'll learn more about me as time passes.

And even though all those things make me sound like a total nerd, I'm not. I have friends, go to pares, and all that fun crap.