I suppose it’s time I start having a little more confidence in my ability to write fiction. To be honest, for so long I’ve pretty much written off all of my efforts as being barely a step above an acne treatment review; that is to say I thought the works I’d produced were boring, long, and possibly stomach turning. It’s honestly been a while since I actually wrote something that I thought was worth sharing, and even then, I really wasn’t too sure about actually sharing my attempts. And even though I converted my LiveJournal into a fiction writing journal, I had my doubts about the move, but a plot bunny popped into my head after seeing a writing prompt and I just had to give it a go.

There’s a fiction writing community on LiveJournal I like to follow called the Avatar: TLA 500 Fiction Writing Contest. They regularly provide writing prompts for fanfics in the Avatar: the Last Airbender universe, and writers post a submission that is 500 words or less. After a set amount of time, the submissions are gathered and follows of the community may cast their votes for the three entries they like best. There’s been a lot of prompts that got my creative energies tingling, but I was kinda afraid to post anything. However, I just could not resist the latest prompt and had to give it a go. The prompt in question was prompt #11: Teach, and I submitted this oneshot entitled Lesson’s Learned. And guess what? I actually placed second! I even got a nifty award banner too:

Yes, I am utterly and thoroughly proud of myself for this accomplishment. For someone who wrote a an entry because the prompt tempted me just too much, to have it actually take second place when just about every entry seemed a hundred times better then mine, well that just blew me away.

Since I was up early today (read: up since 12am because my sleep-schedule is all messed up again) I should have gotten dressed and gone into town today and gotten my car insurance paid. Instead I stayed planted in front of the computer and finished getting the site up for It Was You: Omae Dattanda Fanlisting!

Yes, that’s right, I got the approvals from TAFL to build and run the fanlistings I mentioned back in December, and all three were approved! Right now, the fanlisting for Omae Dattanda, the 11th ending theme for Naruto Shippuuden, by Kishidan is up and running and awaiting members:

I hope to get the fanlistings for Sign by FLOW (6th Naruto Shippuuden opening theme) and Dareka ga by PUFFY [AmiYumi] (3rd Shippuuden movie theme) up in the next few days.

I almost didn’t open the approval emails when I got them because when they arrived in my inbox it was still April 1st and I was afraid it was a cruel April Fools joke. Glad to see it wasn’t though!

Did anybody get fooled on April Fools?

I guess people just aren’t into celebrating Halloween much anymore. I was participating in a sort of photo-scavenger hunt at Ecstasy MB and I was rather distressed to find out that I had no opportunity for photos at all! The participating members of the boards were broken into two teams and each team had to find a person dressed in costume as:

• Pirate
• Angel
• Zombie
• Politician
• Superhero
• Animal
• Maid
• Rockstar
• Nurse or Doctor
• Convict
• and Vampire

On top of that we also had to find people in costumes that were separate from the aformentioned and represented one of the following words:

• Scary
• Sexy
• Wacky
• Creative
• Cheap
• Hairy
• Humorous
• Whimsical
• Mysterious
• Gothic
• Bizarre

In years past I recall seeing workers at grocery stores and even department stores dressed up and showing their Halloween spirit. I expected that when I went out yesterday to take advantage of an awesome sale on pork roast (I’m making posole) that I would be presented with a few people in costume. I was dead wrong. I thought for sure I’d see a sales worker at Albertson’s dressed as a witch, catgirl, vampire, and maybe somebody would do something like a clown or with a lot of glitter. You know, something that was in the spirit but was clearly made with whatever odds and ends they could find. I thought for sure I’d find at least one on the list. I found not a one. The closest any of the workers got to dressing up was an orange pin on their vests and aprons that read “Happy Halloween from Everyone at Albertson’s” and had a black cat on it.

There was an older woman in front of me in line that must have been wondering the same thing as me because she asked how come no workers were dressed up this year. Apparently the manager forbid it. Well, shit. I ended up taking a slight detour to Wal-Mart after I got out of there because people are always dressed odd there. Right? Actually, the only people I saw dressed up at Wal-Mart were kids and I wasn’t going to take pictures of little kids. I could just envision the lynch mob that would have formed when parents saw me taking pics of their kids. Scary thought that.

So after scouting Wal-Mart out for about half an hour I abandoned my false interest in a jar of eye cream I had picked up at random and left. Yesterday evening I did get some trick-or-treaters and I asked if I could take a picture of the kids because their costumes were so cute. And really, the little girl dressed as a fairy queen was precious and got extra candy, but the Mom with ‘em vetoed that idea and gave me a strange look. I quickly changed the subject and asked about the costume. Was it home made (it was) and how long did it take? Sort of things. Thankfully the woman chalked up my desire for a picture as a shared interest in sewing and crafts.

Hope my team doesn’t lynch me for the no pics thing. I tried, I really did.

I hope everyone else had an awesome Halloween though! Mine was filled with shopping, cooking, candy, trick-or-treaters, and scary movies.

It was lunch time and I was hungry. Whatever shall I eat, I wondered. I opened the refrigerator but was met with an assortment of unappetizing options. Dare I risk one of the mystery dishes that just might have been leftovers once but now look kind of green and may be alive? I decided against that choice. Instant cup ramen? Tempting, but I wanted something more filling. Then I remembered that I had some Schwan’s food in the freezer still.

I had three pasta dishes from Schwan’s in the freezer, and after some careful consideration, I went with Schwan’s Baked Pasta with Spinach and Mushroom (number #479). It was easy to make and comes in it’s own plastic dish. Just pop it in the microwave for 7 minutes, remove film and add Parmesan cheese, then cook it for another 2 to 3 minutes. Easy as can be. And the results?

Oh yeah, believe me I say it tasted even better than it looks. Paired it with a salad and I was good to guy for lunch. It makes three servings so I put the rest away for dinner. Honestly though, I wouldn’t have mind eating the whole thing.

I just realized something; I seem to be posting about food a lot lately. Ah, well, I’m sure ya’all don’t mind though, right? Better to tease you with yummy food!porn shots than boring posts rattling on about the virtues of various companies that offer virtualization services.

Before you go though, you should take a look at my beautiful stamp collection – I’m very proud of it and have even linked it in my sidebar. A message board that I frequent, EcstasyMB, has a fun little activity going on where members can “purchase” stamps with the board’s currency to trade and collect. My collection is growing by leaps and bounds right now. I do need to update it though, there are a few stamps I recently collected that I haven’t added to my page.

Yesterday was a very interesting day. Lots of things seemed to be going wrong, from a leaking pipe under the bathroom sink, Denali making a mess of all of the items underneath aforementioned sink, irate clients upset about work that had already been sent to them but that they had apparently never received, and a bunch of other things I’d really not get into. Horrible day.

Or so I thought.

It started looking up when the UPS delivered a package that turned out to be an advanced reader’s copy of Homer’s Odyssey: A Fearless Feline Tale, Or How I Learned About Love and Life with a Blind Wonder Cat by Gwen Cooper, a book that I have been dying to read, that I had won from GoodReads.com. The day was looking up.

Then I got an interesting email from Margie at PU2B asking me to update my phone number so that they could contact me. That gave me a bit of a panic attack. I couldn’t help but think that I had done something really, really wrong and was about to get chewed out or something. So I checked my information – it was correct. Did I forget to pay the bill, I wondered. It’s happened before and when it does Verizon has this annoying message that they’ll play for you and no calls can be received or made. So I dialed my mom’s cell (she has Verizon too). I expected to get the recording, instead it went through just fine. Ironically my mother (who should have been working) answered and after a few minutes of chit chat mentioned that she had phone problems the day before yesterday. Apparently none of her calls would go out for a few hours. Network troubles then? I dunno. I emailed Margie back then waited on pins and needles to find out what I did wrong.

Turns out I did absolutely nothing wrong, one could even say I did something right, they were emailing me to let me know that I had won the Disney Gift Card contest!

In all honesty, I hadn’t been able to blog regularly and had honestly thought I was out of the running. First there was the ISP issues and the loss of the desktop computer which forced me to go online only when I was at a hotspt. Then of course, after I finally get the laptop hooked up to use at home, my laptop crashed. Between all that I seriously thought I had no chance. So imagine my surprise when Tony called me and told me I was the winner! I was in such a total state of shock that even after I hung up the phone I was sitting there like an idiot starring off into space, just trying to process the fact that I won before smiling like an idiot and bouncing around in excitement. Unbelievable. I think I even scared Isis with my behavior.

I’ve never been to Disneyland before so this is truly a golden opportunity, and for fear of sounding like a kid, a dream come true. Now I just need to find a friend or two who would like to come with me!

Thank you, Tony, Keith, Margie, and everyone else in the PU2B family. You guys are wonderful!

Oh dear me, I’ve done it again. I applied for two new fanlistings and I’m already working on their layouts. Well, actually, one of them is already finished. I just have to finish working on the content since it’s going to be a mini-fansite -slash- fanlisting. The other I’m just going to leave as a fanlisting…I think. So which fanlistings have I applied for? I’ll give you three hints.

Hint no.1: They’re both characters from an animated television series I’m obsessed with. As in, I even have all of the seasons on DVD.

Hint no.2: They’re both DC comic book characters, one being a hero and the other being a former villain cum heroine (in the series).

Hint no.3: Err…yeah…this is the dead give away hint.

Yes that’s right folks, when I saw that both Jinx and Aqualad no longer had fanlistings at The Fanlistings Network anymore I had to apply for them. And yes, I know, I’m doubly bad for already getting the layouts made and the sites up. I know you’re supposed to wait for the approval, but I was just so excited. I was actually rather disappointed though to see so many other characters who formerly had fanlistings were no longer listed. Bumblebee, Kid Flash, Argent, Gizmo, Mammoth, Speedy, Cyborg, and Robin deserve fanlistings! Heck, I’m really surprised to see Robin and Cyborg’s fanlistings closed. Even the Raven & Beast Boy relationship fanlisting is gone.

Believe me when I say that this Teen Titans fanatic is very tempted to apply for a few other Titans fanlistings *cough*Kid Flash, RavenxBB, Kid FlashxJinx, Speedy, Argent*cough*

In any case, Jinx’s fanlisting is ready to go. I just to finish typing up a few of the content pages, as well as maybe make a few more codes, and voila. Aqualad I just started working on. THe basic design of the layout is done, but I really want to design and background for the fanlisting instead of having a sold black background. I still need to make some codes as well. Not to mention I am planning on getting a new layout for the Aqualad & Raven fanlisting, along with some new codes for that fanlisting as well as the Teen Titans: All Characters fl as well.

Heh, it’s a good thing my laptop memory and diskspace is pretty decent. I logged a lot of hours the past couple of days working on those layouts. Mainly because I had to go through my dvd collection and screen cap a bunch of episodes then of course came the actual designing in Photoshop. And of course, I can’t work on layouts without having some music to jam to, so iTunes was going full throttle the whole time. So, media player, iTunes, and Photoshop CS3 all at once. Poor lappytop needs a break now.

Seriously, WP Remix has me drooling over the possibilities that their premium wordpress theme offers up. The theme offers WYSIWYG page template editing that has over 50 different templates to choose from and also boasts web standard compliancy, is user-friendly, grid typography, and you only need one of it.

Only need one?

That’s what caught my attention when I was looking over WP Remix’s website. Apparently the theme covers just about every conceivable layout, and with the easy customization, will allow you to cut down weeks worth of time to edit and create a new layout for your site. Some of the possibilities listed on the site include:

• Blogs
• +10 Homepage options
• +20 Single page with different layout
• +10 product/gallery page
• +5 Miscellaneous page
• Plugins compatibility
• Ajax slider
• Smart Drop menu
• Tabs
• Tables and more

As you know, I run multiple blogs and have multiple sites. The idea of being able to control all of the blogs’ design with one easy to tweak theme is like a dream come true. Especially since I have long since given up integrating my personal site with my personal blog and have left them as separate entities. The personal site is just too big and cumbersome to make as pages on the blog, and for some reason, whenever I try to do that loop thing, with this blog’s current layout and try to have the site mesh with it as well, it all goes helter-skelter.

For those who like to generate revenue online, you may be interested to hear that that WP Remix’s affiliate program, as of last week, has increased their payout rate from 20% to 50%. Not only is that a rather substantial increase but it also gives you a genuine attempt at making some money.

I’m pretty satisfied with my current host, Hostgator, especially since I upgraded my account not that long ago, so I have even more capabilities, but that’s not to say I don’t keep my eyes peeled regardless. It’s really kind of strange how one can hear nothing but good things about a place, and then WHAM!, suddenly every one is jumping ship. Is it because the users are panicking over a goof-up instead of waiting it out or is it that the incident was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back?

It’s for that reason that I tend to frequent a lot of different sites that offer web hosting reviews. I once was at a host that, initially, seemed too good to be true. Sadly, they were. My so-called 98% uptime was more like 98% downtime, I got double-billed, and then I couldn’t even really talk about the experiance at a message board, that I frequented, for advice because the owners of the hosting service started stalking me. I was ever so glad to move.

After that, I learned my lesson. Read the reviews, you’ll find all the complaints, you’ll hear the compliments as well. You’ll get an idea of how the system works and how the people are before you even purchase anything. That’s the good part.

My reason for continuing to check and keep up to date is simple, I never know when something might go belly up. I like having an idea of what different hosts have to offer and WebHostingGeeks.com makes it fairly easy to find what you want to know about various hosts. They offer up their own “Top 10″ list, as well as list the various webhosts by “best in category” as well. This allows you to find the web host you want that offers the best service in an area of particular interest to you. For example, looking for a good blog host? According to WHG.com, the best blog host is Bluehost.com. They back this up with stats, monitoring information and a bunch of other pertinent information. But most importantly, you can find real customer reviews too. Those always show you what can be hidden behind a stylish design and fancy statistics.

After today I think I’m going to need some wrinkle cream. I swear I can see a ton of frown lines around my mouth and my brow looks permanently furrowed. I tried to upload a video from home on my dial-up connection and it didn’t go well at all. I anticipated that it would take a few hours, I never thought that five hours later it would still be uploading and be only 63% of way at that!

Then after I get here to Las Cruces to use a fast connection I upload it to Viddler. Well guess what? The first time I upload the video it takes a few minutes and then, once it uploads, it says it’s encoding. However when the encoding bar reaches the 100% mark it jumps to a 404 page. I check my uploaded files page and the blog post that I embedded the code in, sure enough, “Video Not Available”. I check my email, since it’s supposed to notify me when it’s finished encoding, nothing.

So I tried to upload it again. Then, after the second one is finished uploading and almost finished encoding, the first one is showing up and working. So I stop the second one, since the first one is working and I’ve now gotten the email notification that it was finished too. But then, after I do that, it goes back to showing that it’s not available. I ask you, WHAT THE HELL?!! It appears to be working now, but to be sure, I uploaded it to YouTube as well and put links to both file locations. Hey, it’s a chance to win $500, I don’t want to miss out because some stupid video site is acting wonky.

And did I mention that, because I was waiting, for hours, for the video to upload at home, I got nothing accomplished on the internet? Yup, didn’t dare try to browse or type up a book review for fear that I delay the lengthy upload even longer.

Lisa recently held a giveaway at her yummy cooking blog. Two lucky winners each would receive two bottles of Country Bob’s All Purpose Sauce And guess what? I won!

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this sauce in some stores around here, but only a few select ones. If it was more common I’m fairly certain I would have tried it by now, give my love of sauce.

If you visit their official website, you’ll find a whole slew of delicious sounding recipes. One that interests me is their Creole Roast. Naturally I’ll also grill some chicken with the sauce and probably make a few kabobs as well. I honestly can’t wait until the sauce arrives and I get to give it a shot.

Thanks a bunch Lisa!

If you guys are looking for a blog with some very scrumptious recipes I recommend visiting her blog. Lisa also provides daily kernels of advice to help make adventures in the kitchen that much easier and enjoyable. Definitely a blog you should add to your feed.

I’ve been told that I am a walking contradiction. I like to take chances and try new things, yet at the same time I don’t much care for change. In my defense I have to say that there are things that, in my opinion, aren’t that bad to tamper with. While at the same time there are things that, if I’m comfortable, I’m loathe to change.

Come October it will be time to purchase another year (or more depending on my finances) of website hosting. My current host is fairly satisfactory. I’ve got a lot of webspace and bandwidth and the price is fair. True, by visiting webhosting review sites like WebhostingRating.com I have seen other hosts offer up cheaper packages, although usually the space is diminished compared to my current one.

Despite the fact that my host had some troubles, I generally feel comfortable here. That and I am truly hesitant to move to an untried host. So over the next month I shall be weighing the pros and cons very carefully to determine if a move is warranted.

I confess to enjoy visiting WebhostingRating.com as each rating for the webhosts featured on the site gives you exactly what you want without fuss or searching. Ratings include:

• Company name
• Contact information
• Package details
• Pricing
• Include and limitations

And best yet, reviews from real people. To see what I mean, check out the information for Bluehost.

Identity theft is a truly frightening thing and has the power to sap away all the joy that normally comes when one is doing a little bit of online shopping. The thought that, with a click, you are not only sending out your personal information but also possibly entrusting strangers with it is frightening.

EBillme.com offers a safer way to shop online, a method that is ideal for those who may not have a credit card. PayPal account, or who just do not like using them. All you do need is a checking account with a bank that offers an online bill pay service.

To use it, all you do is visit a merchant who offers EBillme as a payment option, such as TigerDirect. Just shop like you regularly do, then upon checkout select Ebillme as your payment method. You will receive an invoice, and with the information required, you just head on over to your bank’s bill pay and input EBillme as a payee. Once that’s done transactions run very smoothly.

I used EBillme to purchase a Saitek Photo mouse from TigerDirect – a completely frivolous purchase really, but one I couldn’t resist. The idea of being able to switch the image on my mouse out and make it more “customizable” for me was too great to resist. It’s a USB mouse too, so it’s going to be put to use on my laptop.

My only complaints with EBillme so far is how confusing it is to first start using the service. You have to go to a merchant through their site and then select Ebillme as the payment option. Until this was cleared up I was continuously hunting the EBillme page for a “sign up” link to get started.

Sometimes it seems like Isis gets the most attention on this blog, as she’s the one who stays still long enough for my camera to snap a picture of her. Denali is always on the go and rarely just taking it easy. Which, when you think about it, is a relief really, because it means she’s a healthy and active kitty. And so long as she’s healthy, happy, and active, I don’t have to worry about getting the kitty equivalent of a prescription of Phentermine 37.5 mg from my vet because she’s overweight, or worse yet, diabetic.

Sometimes I have to remind myself of this though, specifically after she’s caused another disaster and is looking all too innocent. Despite it all, I love her to bits and wouldn’t change her for the world!

Now though, Denali has one up on Isis when it comes to the blogosphere! Karen Jo wrote this kitty limerick for Denali:

Denali’s hunting skills are awesome.
She loves to catch spiders, which she finds pawsome.
She is missing a claw
On her right front paw,
But that doesn’t prevent her from being awesome.

Thank you Karen Jo, that was really sweet and it brought a smile to my face and to see a post written about Denali. And yes, her claws did grow back. The one that was not expected to grow back at all made a return, albeit it continuously remains smaller than her other claws, and the one next to it made a perfect full recovery.

And nope, despite the awkwardness of it, her claw-less state did not deter her from hunting in the least. In fact, I’d venture to say she forced herself to hunt a little bit more. She refused to let it get her down.

Yup, I am very tempted to buy me one. In fact, I’ve been tempted for a very long time now and after seeing the sale going on at Buy.com I am even more tempted.

Tempted to buy what, you ask? Oh, just a Sandisk Sansa e280 8GB MP3 Player. You can see it the mp3 player in question to your right. It’s been marked down from $140 to a very reasonable $59.99. Ah, so tempting. I’ve been torn over buying an mp3 player for a long time now. After all, my cellphone does double as an mp3 player and my Inner-Scrooge cringes at the thought of shelling out money for something I already have.

That doesn’t stop me from wanting an mp3 player independent of my phone. though.

That wasn’t the only cool find on Buy.com’s weekly deals this week though. There’s also a SanDisk 4GB Cruzer Micro USB for only $14.99 this week too. I am currently using one to back up my sites on. It’s very reliable and I’ve never had a problem with it since I bought one almost a year ago. The only bad thing is that has this neat little switch to extend and retract the portion connects the USB to the computer (the proper name for that segment eludes me). I tend to sit there and play with it when I’m bored or waiting for stuff to download.

My last post seems to have really attracted the spammers and the spam bots, which is odd, because I wouldn’t think it would be all that interesting to spammers. Aside from the normal vigara, free hentai, porn and penny stocks comments I got hit with multiple funny ones which I thought I’d share. They’re just really, um, poorly written, random, do not fit the post at all, but funny all at the same time.

Assuming either the Left Wing or the Right Wing gained control of the country, it would probably fly around in circles.

So, depending on which wing it is we’re either flying in circles clockwise or counter-clockwise. Right? Received this one 4 times on the same post.

Listen. Do not have an opinion while you listen because frankly, your opinion doesn?t hold much water outside of Your Universe. Just listen. Listen until their brain has been twisted like a dripping towel and what they have to say is all over the floor.

Sure, whatever you say. Received this one 2 times on the same post.

Eat a third and drink a third and leave the remaining third of your stomach empty. Then, when you get angry, there will be sufficient room for your rage.

I think this might become my new motto. Received this one six times on the same post.

I think I prefer these kind of spam comments to the ones full of links. At least these are amusing to read.

There are a ton of songs that I’ve been wanting and a plethora of bands I want to check out, yet hesitate to splurge on their albums lest they turn out to be a total disappointment. Then there are of course the songs that you just have to own but they’re only available on a specific album and you can’t just download that song from a music store either, because it’s only available if you purchase the entire album. Annoying yes? So yesterday while I was down in the hospital’s cafeteria, and shamelessly taking full advantage of their free wi-fi, I downloaded the Free Basic version of MP3 Rocket, a file sharing application, onto my laptop and began happily hunting for some of the songs I’ve been dying to listen to.

Now, I kind of expected to have some problems with it running since my laptop has Windows Vista running on it – no problems occurred what so ever however. I just downloaded the application, installed it, and was ready to go. All that was left to do was to type in my search then sit back and wait for my free music downloads. First song to download was “Excess” by Tricky. I love that song, yet I’ve never found it in MP3 stores and it’s not on the Thirteen Ghosts (2001) soundtrack either. Needless to say, when MP3 Rocket found that song for me and I was able to download it in under a minute I was positively ecstatic.

What’s really neat about MP3 Rocket is that the interface is compact but easy to understand and use, regardless of whether or not you’ve used a file-sharing program in the past or not. Observe MP3 Rocket in action on my laptop:

Click the search tab, type in your search, hit enter, and away you go. On the left hand side you’re treated to a box that displays all of the artists who are being turned up in your search and another that will even tell you which albums are being brought up. I found these to be very handy. For example, when I popped in my search for the song “Excess” I initially searched by artists, Tricky. That search was returning literally hundreds of results and I sat there watching the artists box as artist after artist popped up. I realized soon enough that looking through that long list of results was going to be more trouble than it was worth. I closed that search out and started anew with just the song title – much better.

Another feature that I found to be very handy was the saved and tabbed search results. As you can see in the screenshot above, I have a search in progress and above it are some little tabs. Each of those are the results from previous searches. This allowed me to go back through the searches and check out any other results that caught my eye. There were a couple of songs that jumped out at me that I wanted to return to later after I had downloaded the songs I had already planned to get. This made it very easy, and when I was finished I could just click the little tab’s red X and all was well. Looking for something new to try? Try clicking on the “Most Popular” tab; you’ll get a list of some of the most popular searches going on.

Of course, you can use the MP3 Rocket application for more than just downloading music as well. You can watch television, play games, and even listen to radio stations from all over. I haven’t tried out the games feature yet, mainly because when I’m connected to the internet on my laptop I’m using it downloads, streaming media, and so on. Not to mention, I’ve usually got a limited amount of time to do this as well, so playing games when I’m online on my laptop is never considered. I did try out the TV feature – I watched The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy on Cartoon Network for a bit – and fiddled with the radio feature though. In all honesty however, I was more interested in downloading music.

If you’re looking for an application that is fast, easy to use, and has an extensive network of users, I would recommend downloading this guy and giving it a workout. Is it safe to use? I haven’t had any problems thus far. As with any file-sharing program, it’s best to use common sense and be cautious. Have an active and current virus program installed and running, always scan the files you download before opening and running them, and be wary of any files with funny file formats and or overly large/too small file sizes.

My friend Charity is holding a giveaway on her blog right now, and the prize up for grabs is a $20 giftcard to the store of your choice. If you win, you can choose from the following stores:

• Chili’s
• The Olive Garden
• Red Robin
• Starbucks
• Wal-Mart
• Target
• Barnes & Noble
• Hot Topic
• Amazon.com

Or, should none of those interest you, you can even choose to have Charity send you the $20 via PayPal.

To enter, all you have to do is leave a comment. To gain a second entry you can also blog about the giveaway as well, like so.

Better hurry though, her giveaway ends at 12:00AM Central Time on April 29, 2008 and on April 30th she will announce the winner!

I’ve been meaning to blog this for a couple of days now, even had the page bookmarked, but then I kept on forgetting. But I have remembered now and shall be posting it!

Elizabeth of Table for Five is holding a giveaway on her blog right now and the prize up for grabs is…a year’s supply of Reddi-wip and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. The thought of having a year’s worth of Cherry Garcia is sending me into a Homer-like trance. Mmm, Cherry Garcia

To enter, you can leave a comment on her post mentioning what your favorite flavor of ice cream is and what you like to use Reddi-wip for. Please be aware, Elizabeth, like me, doesn’t care for the promotion of your site or services in her comments. So if you leave a comment and in place of your name put something stupid like “cheap laptops” it’s getting deleted. To gain additional entries you can also blog about it (be sure to put the link to your post in your comment) and or you can subscribe to her feed, Technorati fave her, or add her blog to your blogroll. Since I’m already subscribed to her blog and have her Technorati faved I opted to add Elizabeth to my blogroll.

Giveaway ends April 29th though guys, so hurry up and enter!

That’s pretty much how I feel right now. I just got my email inbox spammed with a ton of coupon offers and solicitations courtesy of an offer I signed up for from InboxDollars. Hey do you know what a Dansko is? I didn’t, not until a few minutes ago anyway.

I signed up to receive offers and coupons through some third-party company and selected the categories “technology, gaming, and webdesign”. Today I got an offer from them and the email’s subject line read: Save 15% off Your Next Dansko Purchase of $75 or More. Sounding like a decent sale, except I had no idea what Dansko was. Opened the email and….it’s shoes. Shoes? How does that fit under technology, gaming, and webdesign? I am so glad I got an email today notifying me that my account was credited (big whopping $2 too) for the signup. I’ve already unsubcribed from them. I mean really, anywhere from 10 to 20 (yes, I counted) emails from them daily is just a bit much.

Still though, I can’t help but to feel like such a total moron for not knowing that it’s a brand of shoes. I am so out of the loop when it comes to trends and fashion, it isn’t funny.

I found this survey on dNeero today which talks about their donate to charity feature and the possibilities behind why the amount of money being donated is lagging behind previous amounts:

See, Dneero seems to be concerned with why people aren’t donating as much money as they used to be. To me, that seems like a ridiculous thing to worry about. I would be more focused on making sure there are is an ever increasing amount of researchers coming in to provide the members with surveys to take. Even though I am one to support a cause, I never select the “don’t pay me, give my earnings to..” feature. Why? Well, there are actually several reasons:

• dNeero has their minimum payout amount set to $20. These surveys really don’t earn you much either. Just some odd cents here and there, guaranteed if you have a minimum of 5 days worth of impressions. It takes TONS of hits to get more than that basic minimum. That said, it takes a very long time to earn enough for payout. I’m fairly certain a lot of people want to actually get their money sometime this year, hence they’d rather have the funds going to them whenever possible. I know this is why I don’t select the feature.
• I’ve never liked people taking money away from my pay for other things. Ask all of my employers, whenever I had to buy equipment I always paid the amount rather than have them deduct it from my pay. I look at it this way. When I get that pay, I might be hard up for money at the time. I’d rather get all of money to pay the bills then and be able to donate to a cause when it’s not going to break me.
• Lastly, the charities I primarily donate to aren’t listed there.

Another thing, which I addressed in my answers, was the “donate to charity only” surveys. These surveys, should you take them, will have the funds automatically given to a charity. Have I ever taken one of these? Nope. Would I? Depends. Right now, the only one I saw that I was qualified to take was on a subject of no interest to me and was ridiculously complex, as in they wanted a lot of lengthy essay-like answers. Not to mention, the price was exceptionally low. So, not getting paid, low price, lengthy time to complete, and I can’t even donate to the charities I like to donate to. Not worth my time, sorry.