Happy birthday snagger.org

Woo! Since Blogger doesn't follow my day/night system, this post falls right at the start of August 2nd.

My Blogger site is now officially 3 years old.

There were things before, like dinky websites made with Frontpage. Somewhere in the middle of this, there was a self-coded page that took me forever to convert all the comments for. I hosted that biyatch on my own home computer and still somehow had readers even though I turned the box off at night. And back I came, deciding to let someone else do the hard work and let myself focus on the writing.

But old Blogger stuck by me, refusing to lose my posts for a solid three years. Well done, Blogger crew. I'm absolutely shocked that something that's been such a significant presence in my life for so long hasn't ever cost me a cent. Thank goodness for Google who had the niceness and the smarts to buy Blogger out last year and keep the system running and even make it better.

So, dear little website, happy 3rd. Thanks to everyone who sees this for reading it. It means a lot to me, and it'll keep meaning a lot.

Invading Spaces

This blog entry was great. Jeff Maurone, a Microsoft intern, got invited to dine at the home of Bill himself. If I were running Movable Type, I'd definitely join the mile-long list of trackbacks. But I'm not, so I can just plug this really cool article and move along.

Correct me if I'm wrong

But I've always revered stand-up comics as some of the greatest advocates of social progress, whether they know it or not. There's a certain kind of wisdom that derives from the mix of wit and satire that only a good comic will possess.

The comedians on Tough Crowd, however, are not this bunch.

Tonight, like all pundits, they decided to take their conversation to the Democratic convention. Even Colin Quinn, who's a pretty staunch, cynical right-winger (I say staunch and cynical positively, I promise) made a few good jokes in his monologue out of it. Their guests, however, can be a little ignorant. Sometimes it's funny, others, it's not.

Take Ellen Cleghorne, for example. This chick.

This post isn't about politics. Just hang with me.

Everyone within the Democratic party, and just about any undecided swing voter out there, approved of the first night speech given by Barack Obama. A half-white/half-black child born in Kenya, Obama is now running unopposed for Senate in the Illinois district where Jack Ryan (the pervert in the news, not the Clancy character) was incumbent. Anyone who sees him speak remarks him as very eloquent, one of the most poised speakers in years. One Shacker remarked that his speech "almost had [his] dad in tears." I watched his convention speech, and it definitely lived up to his reputation. One of his biggest talking points, not surprisingly, is erasing racial lines.

This post isn't about that. Keep hanging in there.

The part of that point that I found interesting was that he wanted to erase, more than any other label, the one that says a black child who reads is "acting white."

Enter Ellen Cleghorne.

2 minutes into the show, the Tough Crowd pundits, who now stand because chairs were too uncool (or everyone just got up out of them too often), get onto the topic of Obama. Cleghorne, very clearly a black woman (see pic above), rips into Obama for essentially being white. I can't quote her verbatim, but what she said was very clear: he was raised by a white mother, and therefore, he's white.

Correct me if I'm wrong, Ms. Cleghorne, but since Obama was fathered by a black man, that would have made him a slave in the 1860s. In the 1960s, it would have made him a nigger, subject to the colored drinking fountains, stores, and restaurants. And you mean to tell me that in 2004 that it makes him white? Granted, times have changed - but if you happen to find yourself on this post, Ms. Cleghorne, I'm still thinking that you're wrong.

Let's go get some iPods

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Quick links for people who are doing the iPod thing:
The Guide
Signup @ my referral
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This is going to be a monster post, so be forewarned. A few key points for everyone who won't be reading closely:

-This does not by any means guarantee you will get an iPod. The company can bail out anytime they wish and not give you an iPod for no reason whatsoever.
-This process will take time and effort, but not money. The info I provide is here to simplify the process for the people who want to take a stab at it.

Now that that's out of the way, I've gotten some more information on this whole scheme and how to best get through it quickly. By quickly, I mean it will still probably take several weeks to get an iPod, assuming it works. Economically, I think it's worth it to provide a snail mail address for junk mail and spend a couple hours working on this to take a shot at a free $250 toy. Even if it doesn't work, you've only killed a couple hours.

So, on to the pods. They're offered by, not surprisingly, freeipods.com. (Don't hurry off there just yet, keep reading this). It's run by a company called Gratis Internet, an advertising firm. Though I forget the term at the moment, their method of giving stuff away is an advertising technique that has a name that isn't "pyramid scheme" that sounds like it makes sense in the advertising world lingo. Moving on: all signs point to it's a legit company. You can go to gratisnetwork.com to see their website, their domain name whois lists actual people, and they have a BBB page here. That page is worth reading alone to find their other identities: Freeflatscreens.com, freeDVDs.com, freevideogames.com, and freecondoms.com. lol.

How they make money: I'm reporting hearsay, but supposedly the site makes money on advertising when people sign up, do part of the process, and don't get a full 5 referrals to get the iPod.

This guide has a great breakdown of how to go through the process. If anything's still unclear, check that guide.

So, if you're going to go after an iPod, here's what you're going to do:

1. Make an account
2. Do (or don't do) the entry survey
3. Choose an 'offer'
4. Do 'offer'
5. Refer 5 friends and make them do steps 1-4
6. Profit

OK, so time to break this down:

Step 0: USE INTERNET EXPLORER. We all know how much Firefox rocks, but for the time being you're going to have to let it go. The problem lies within the site giving you credit for doing their 'offers'. But there will be one exception, and that's from here to step 2. You can safely make an account and log in to it using Firefox, but don't start any offers.

Step 1: You sign up for the site with an email address and password. You need to be able to communicate with this email account but still ignore spam, so I'd recommend using a Hotmail account for your primary contact. Since you're making an account, you might as well make one and be one of my referrals at the same time by clicking this particular link to make your account: http://www.freeiPods.com/default.aspx?referer=7263887.
(If you're not feeling that generous, think of it as payment for reading this guide or my being an early adopter or something.)

Step 2: Here's where Step 0 comes in. If you log in for the first time using IE, you'll go through a survey (I didn't do it) until you can get to your account page. If you don't feel like doing this survey, after you've made an account, close your browser, go back to the site in Firefox, and log in. Bam, no survey to do.

Step 3: (Here is where you start using IE again. Disable popup blockers because the popups are helpful and probably help track your progress.) Click the link for "Complete Offer," it's in the navbar at the top. You'll see roughly 10 offers. The only ones worth looking at are AOL, AOL Broadband, Ancestry.com, and eBay.

The first three require you to make a trial account using your credit card (The little tagline "No credit card required!" is a bolder lie than Fox News knows how to tell.) You can sign up for a trial, get credit for it on freeipods.com, then cancel your trial. The perk to this method is that it verifies your offer completion very quickly. The downside is that it can be a hassle to go through these services to cancel your trial accounts.

The other option, and the one I've taken, is eBay. What they want you to do is create a new account and bid on something with it. The perk to this way is that it's easy, painless, and doesn't require a CC, but the downside is that it's slow to verify.

Step 4: Do your offer. For the AOLs and Ancestry.com I don't have any more information than what I wrote in step 3, but I do have some more info on the eBay method.
-Don't sell anything: it won't get you credit. Had I been paying attention, I would have known that and not tried to sell anything.
-Bid on something early: you do not have to win your auction. It's been reported that you only have to be the high bidder at some point in the auction. I searched for Gmail invites and bet $1.54 on one that ended up going for like $8.
-Get credit for it: They say it takes up to three business days to get credit for your bid. If you don't have credit after three days, see the Guide for info on emailing Gratis Internet with an "offer problem." They've had reports that people got validated within 10 minutes of emailing. I just sent this email an hour before posting and nothing, but I'll update when I have been validated.

Step 5: Get your 5 referrals. Yay for pyramid schemes. You'll be able to hand out hyperlinks like the one I have to people you know, or people you've invented with the clever use of email accounts and addresses on Arlington streets you've never driven. Make sure you can check email at those accounts if you have to, though. Avoid being stupid about it, because they will check for anything that looks like cheating and have it not count toward your 5 people, so get some decent alibis if you have to invent people. One of the first things they check for is dummy email addresses, so if you need, have me or aroon make you an account at snagger.org or viperstyx.net or pureimaginary.com.

Step 6: Profit! Click the link to the Guide for some pictures of people who have received their iPods.

This will be updated if any new information comes in, but for now I'll try to keep all the reference materials at the top of the post. Happy iPod hunting, boys and girls.