A Little Cup of Cyanide

My sister is into this whole working at home thing. First she started doing At Home America. Basically what they do is sell home stuff. She's only sold about $30 worth of stuff, and that was to my parents. It obviously wasn't working out. She had these parties at her house, kind of like tupperwear parties. But no one ever showed up. So, now she's trying to do domain name resales. Oh boy. They make this stuff sound so easy. Just buy a cheap domain, then sell it for twice what you paid for it. Right. Two problems.

1: You have no idea if the site you sell is going to be wanted by anyone. It doesn't matter how cheap you're selling it for, if nobody wants that domain, nobody will buy it.

2: Even if someone would buy it, how do they find out you're selling it? Unless someone searches for that specific domain, they won't know it's for sale. So let's say you're selling whatever.com. There might be somebody who would really love that domain. But if they don't know it's for sale, how do they find it?

Anyway, she found this site http://www.leapfish.com. It gives you an estimate of how much a domain is worth. I was bored as usual, so I was looking at it. I've been thinking about getting a domain for my website, probably wan-pirate.com. So I looked it up, it's about $26. Out of curiosity I checked wanpirate too, which ended up being $40. Amazing. A little dash is worth $14.

I'm trying to start reading more. So, I went to Borders and bought a couple books. Okay, I bought a book, the next Angel Sanctuary, and an issue of AP. The point is that I'm reading. Anyway, they asked if I wanted to get a Borders reward card, and I figured why not? So I got it, and they send me these shortlist things in my e-mail. Honestly, I would never buy anything they have in the shortlists. Except for today, they had some really good stuff. White Stripes! Woo! And I'm looking forward to seeing Bridge to Terabithia. But I was looking at the price to pre-order the last Harry Potter book, which by the way, is cheaper on Amazon. And I found a community thing dedicated to debating whether Snape is good or not. I'll be getting back to that later.

So, I joined the site just to give my opinion. I've actually posted on the site a grand total of one time. But it's pretty cool. It's called Gather.com. It's basically a forum site, and they have everything. Even if they don't have what you're looking for, you can make a community of your own.

You're probably wondering why this is shameless self-promotion. Well, they're having some promotion thing where if you can get five people to join, you get a $20 Borders gift card. Which I need. I would love to buy my books from Amazon, but that involves begging my dad for the credit card. And have you seen Borders prices? I need some extra money to buy from them. They're the only bookstore around here that sells Angel Sanctuary. Just in case you need more of a reason to help me out (not that you need it, since you must be an uber nice, caring, thoughtful person who would just jump at the chance to help out a fellow human being) I give you the top five reasons you should join Gather.

1] It's free.
2] You get to show off your knowledge, or argue until hell freezes over, about whatever you're into.
3] You can earn points to get stuff by participating on the site.
4] Make lots of new friends with similar interests.
5] You can get five more people to join and get your own Borders gift card.

And don't forget you'll be helping me out. But that would be six things, and lists of five are so much tidier. So if you want, just go to this site: http://www.gather.com/inviteLanding.jsp?parentMemberId=29... and sign up.

So, it seems that my luck has finally changed. I was checking my e-mail today and I got this message:

2007 LOTTERY PRIZE AWARD DEPT Company, attached to:
REFERENCE No: ASL- WF97 - 2G3
BATCH No: OX7T - 6T5T - N3N

We are pleased to notify you of the release today as dated of the NL National Lotto/International Promotions programs held on the 30th day of May, 2007. Participants were selected through a computer ballot system drawn from 98,000 names from Europe, America, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Middle-East, Africa,North & South America and canada as part of our international promotions program conducted annually to
encourage prospective overseas entries. We hope with part of your prize awards, you will take part in our
end of year lotto jackpot of 1.3 Billion International Lotto.
As a category B winner, you have been selected by computer balloting system where only email addresses
are soughted, from a total numbers of 30,000 email addresses drawn from all over the globe. After an automated computer ballot of our International Promotions Program consequently won in the second Category. You have therefore been awarded a lump sum pay out of US$2,000,000.00 in cash, which is the winning payout for second categories winners. This is from the total prize money of US$45,000,000.00 shared among the eight international win! ners in the SECOND category.

Lucky, lucky me. It then asked me to send them my name, address, phone number, and a bunch of other crap. Yeah. The sad thing is, there are people who actually fall for these things.

A while back, I got this genius idea for a picture I wanted to take. The only problem is that, in order to take this picture, I would need 6 buttons. I often come up with ideas I can't do because of my lack of resources. But this time I was in luck. My sister told me about this website, prickie.com, where you can get your designs turned into actual buttons. So, now I just have to get a paypal account. Sigh.

Suze put up new pictures on Myspace, so I went to check them out. She was wearing the most adorable necklace ever. I want it. I want it, I want it, I want it. *pouts* Anyway, she told me where to find it so I could look longingly at it whenever I want, and ultimately decend into a downward spiral of depression over the fact that I don't own a credit card.

Okay, I'm exagerating. It's not that cute.

So after looking longingly for a while at the necklace I can't buy, I started looking around at some of the other stuff on the website. They have this spiffy little boombox thing. You can find it pretty much anywhere you go on the site, it's a little boombox with colorful music notes coming out of it. Click on it. It's pretty awesome. It comes up in a pop-up window, and they have lots of different music on it. Most of it doesn't exactly compliment my personal music taste, but I love it anyway. It's one of those things you listen to when you need your fix of obscurity. Unless obscurity is your thing, then this is right up your alley. I like Sammy Joe & Joe Sam's playlist. I like having the random stuff every once in a while, but I really like being able to recognize what I'm listening to.

PS: Everyone has to check out Shoes by Kelly, on Chris's list.

I got back from spring break today. Part of me is happy to be back. The other part of me wants another month or so of beauty rest. Unfortunately, I don’t have another month, and no amount of rest is going to make me look better. So, here I am. I have a week of dirty clothes to wash because I was watching The Watcher last night. Hmm… Movie… Dirty laundry… I would rather spend my night in the company of a half decent movie over dirty laundry any night. So much for the free laundry machine. I also have homework to do. I have to edit poems. Bad poems. I mean laughably bad poems. I don’t have very high standards for poetry, either, since I really don’t like poetry to begin with. So if I think it’s bad, it must be bad. I would share some so you could laugh along, but that would be copyright infringement or something.

The other day I started the ongoing job of organizing my favorites folders. I’m one of those internet packrats. I put everything in my favorites until it’s so full and unorganized that I can’t find anything anyway. And I’d probably be better off just looking the sites up again if I ever go back, considering how often I actually visit the sites I put into my favorites. Anyway, I found Snakes on a Blog among the mess. I used to go to this site all the time, before so much as hearing the words ‘snakes’ and ‘plane’ in the same sentence, or anything associated with said words, started making me want to stab myself in the brain a few times.

It got me thinking.

Wouldn’t it be spiffy if I used this blog to try to achieve some goal? Instead of just taking up web space with crap that is completely useless, I could be using it to do something great. Okay, maybe not great. I’m not talking about saving the starving children, here. But at least self-gratifying. Then I realized that I don’t have the motivation to do anything more than waste time, energy, and server space.

But it still got me thinking.

Unless you've been living in a mayonaise jar in the back of a hermit's fridge, you've probably seen those "above the influence" commercials on TV. You know, like the one where the kids are playing with leeches, or where the guy is standing there letting people change his look. Well, they have a spiffy little website. It's actually pretty neat. I clicked on one of the banner adds after watching the newest episode of Degrassi. I've been playing around with it for quite a while now. There's a lot of stuff to do if you're bored out of your skull like I am about 90% of the time. It's not just a site that rants on and on about how you shouldn't do drugs or whatever. It has a bunch of interactive little activities to do and stuff to look at. Even the site design is fun. When you first go to the site you can choose between a water world and a sky world. In the main site the navigation buttons make funny little sounds when you roll over them. I personally love anything that makes funny sounds. And, it has a possitive message, which is next to impossible to find on the internet.

Even if you think the whole above the influence thing is just a big marketing scheme to make money or something, you should at least check the site out for the sheer enjoyment of playing around with the numerous gadgets they have. You can make yourself an independence flag!