Welcome to Something for Nothing

Today is Thanksgiving and so I think it’s more than appropriate to talk about a website that’s goal is to do good for other people. It’s called the Robin Hood Fund. The Robin Hood Fund lets people make a wish for something and then each week wishes are granted from all sorts of categories.

Since today’s Thanksgiving I have to point out my favorite category which is Help Me Help Others. This is a great category because you can request money so that you can do some good for someone else. I’ve even submitted my wish for my wife to get a new digital camera. I’m hoping the cute picture of my son will get some votes since my wife would really love the new camera and with the new baby coming money’s tight.

I’ll copy below how the Robin Hood Fund works from their website. Pretty neat concept I think. I like it so much I’m actually helping to develop some of it.

Step 1 Make a Wish

Tell us a story about what money is needed either for you or someone you feel is deserving. For the price of a latte, the Robinhood Fund community might make your wish come true. There are five catagories to choose for your story. The type of request will help you decide which catagory to put your wish under. Your wish will be voted on against other wishes in the same catagory. Every week the Robinhood Fund community votes for the wishes they feel should be granted.

Step 2 The Community Votes

No elite board of directors - you decide whose wishes to grant. Community members can vote in each of the five categories:

* Health and wellness - Need $ for exercise equipment, a spa to reduce mental stress, $ for a health membership? All are valid reasons that fall under this catagory.
* Help me help others - This catagory is for the true “giver” in you. Tell your story for a wish for someone else to benefit. A family in need, an organization you are passionate about, someone you know needs help but can’t or won’t ask for themselves…
* Me, myself and I - Tell us why you deserve your wish. If liked by the “merry men” of sherwood forest, your tale may well turn a wish into “granted”.
* Twist of fate - Sometimes there are events that hit us sideways, out of nowhere, a blue streak of bad luck. A tale of this type might turn luck toward you after all and make “lemonaide” out of lemons.
* Weekly Wish - Each week a wish is sponsored. 20% of the Robinhood Fund for that week goes toward the weekly topic. This week it is tech gadgets. Need a gadget to make life easier, tell us a tale about what you need and why. Maybe Robinhood and his merry men community will agree and give you your fee.

Step 3 Wishes are Granted

Each week, the coffers are emptied and the funds are distributed among the categories. The funds for the weekly amount are divided to each of the five catagories equally funding as many wishes as the fund will allow. If donations are made to the fund in general, those too will be distributed equally.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving and enjoy getting your wishes granted.

My wife recently blogged about my addiction to PayPerPost. I must admit that it isn’t PayPerPost that I’m addicted to. I’m addicted to the money that PayPerPost sends to me. Wouldn’t you want to make money from blogging? A quick look at my blog certainly tells you that I don’t mind ads on blogs. In fact, I think it’s great for people to put ads on their blog anytime that they want. The key is to find ads that actually pay for being on your blog. Well, PayPerPost puts the money where there ads are and so why wouldn’t I love PayPerPost?

What my wife doesn’t understand is that I love the community of people that do PayPerPost as much as blogging. There’s a great community on the PayPerPost forums that has become quite close. We take care of each other. We help each other. We teach each other. We pray for each other. We give advice to each other. We comment on each other’s blogs. It’s great.

Today, my wife even mentioned that she was thinking about getting started with PayPerPost. I have enough blogs that she could share in the fun. She was concerned that she wouldn’t be very good. If you read the article she wrote about addictions then you know she’ll be fine. Really she was just confused about how you got paid. She thought you were rated and that determined your pay. I think she’ll really enjoy it. The hardest part will be doing it with my son. I’ve got a plan though.

Here’s my plan (although I thought I posted this somewhere):

Each night when I come home I will take my son to the park. This will let my wife have some quiet time and could enjoy doing PayPerPost. She’d be able to blog about whatever and make a little extra money for our family. What do you think? I can see it working.

Many of you probably know that I made it to the finals of the first ever Cambrian House Idea Warz. Well, I came up a couple votes short of winning, but Cambrian House liked my idea so much that they have actually decided to do a market test of my idea Spoil My Spouse. The official market test website isn’t up yet, but I’ve been told it should be ready by the end of the week. I’ve seen it in beta format and it’s starting to look quite good. I really see the potential for this idea if we can just market it properly. So, any of you that want to possibly spoil your husband or spoil your wife then go and sign up for Spoil My Spouse.

The basic idea for spoiling your husband or wife is that you can purchase a package of gifts which will be sent out at random throughout the year. Essentially it takes care of the thinking and gift selection process for you. I think most men don’t really care for the gift selection process and really just want to find something that their wife will enjoy. If it is true that it is the thought that counts then it won’t really matter what you get them. With spoil my spouse it will just be a great reminder for those of us like myself that forget to do these nice little things for their wives.

In other news, I’ve had a second idea called It’s Just Lunch for Networking which has been competing in the second Cambrian House Idea Warz. Today they announced the semi finalists and by some miracle my idea made it into the semi finals.

Any of you that want to help It’s Just Lunch for Networking become a reality can go and vote for it. I appreciate all your help and hopefully we can make it to the finals again. We’ll see what happens.

May It’s Just Lunch for Networking Win!

Not to mention…

May People Sign up with Spoil My Spouse and spend tons of money on their husband or wife.

I’ve really enjoyed watching Dancing with the Stars. I’m of course completely captivated with Dancing and so seeing professional dancers is wonderful.

Tonight Emmitt Smith was announced as the winner, but I must admit that I don’t really care to watch most if any of his dances again. I do however love watching Edyta Sliwinska and Karina Smirnoff dance. They were my 2 favorite dancers. Kym Johnson should be up there too, but she can’t be my favorite since her partner sucked. Sorry Jerry.

I’ve gone and selected 2 incredible dances. The first is Joey Lawrence and Edyta Sliwinska from Week 6. It’s something beautiful. Just ignore Joey’s singing at the beginning.

Here’s a little latin love from Mario Lopez and Karina Smirnoff in Week 6 of Dancing with the Stars - The Mambo

Enjoy the videos. There are so many more good ones.

I’ve talked about my idea I use to call Spoil My Wife which has been renamed to Spoil My Spouse. Well, it’s going to be a reality. I’ve been told that later this week the website where all you wonderful husbands and wives can go out their and spoil the person you love. I’ve actually seen the beta version and it looks quite nice. If you are someone who wants to have a bunch of surprises for the person you love then this will be great

You know you want to bring your loved one a nice gift. Something a little funny, a little unique for your husband or wife. Well, Spoil My Spouse automates all of that for you. The basic idea is that you will sign up for a package of gift which will be sent to your spouse at random times throughout the year. Of course, you’ll be able to include a customized message that tells him or her how much you love them and that you were thinking about them.

Pretty sweet huh? I think that people doing small things for their husband or wife would really make a dramatic difference in the marriages of many people. I think we all want to take care of our spouse, but now we’re going to help you to remember to do it.

I’m pretty excited to see it coming together. Once it comes out later this week I’ll post more about it. Hopefully everyone out there that has someone they love will sign up and also help promote the website for me.

Ok, now stop reading this and go spoil your husband or spoil your wife.

I’ve mentioned to a few people that I can finally put some videos of my son online. Here’s the first one that I was able to chop up and upload to YouTube. Isn’t my son so cute? I love when he finishes the first board and says “I made it.”

Is it weird that I love to go and visit an office supply store? Well, I admit it. I love walking down the aisles of office supply stores. Office Max or Staples, it doesn’t really matter. I just love seeing all the new stuff. As you walk down the aisles you have that fresh paper smell in the air. It’s fantastic. What can I say? I love getting new office supplies.

I think that this all started back in high school when I was on the debate team. There are two essential items as a debater. Stacks of evidence (Translation: Reams of Paper) and pens. Don’t think I did this mansy pansy debate where you get up and philosophize about something. I did policy debate where you would speed read (we called it spewing) as much evidence as you could get out in the alloted time. Well, if someone is spewing evidence then you better have a high quality pen to record what they say, because you have to respond to it. It’s all my debate coach Dave’s fault for getting me into office supplies. That’s when I bought my first box of pens. They were the nice one where the ink just rolls off the tip. Oh yeah.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t go overboard and I’m not stupid. You won’t catch me paying extra for designer personal checks or something like that. No No! I only buy cheap checks. In fact, the cheaper the better. I’m so cheap with checks I use the blank ones they give you when you open a bank account.

However, I have my weaknesses. Pens. Sticky Notes. Dry erase markers. Pens. Paper. File Folders. Pens.

I love looking at stats on my blog and my favorite part of stats is seeing how people were able to find this blog. Most times stats packages call this referrers or referring pages.

When I see that someone was kind enough to put a link on their blog and send traffic my way, I figure the least I could do is to go and visit their blog. Generate some traffic. Click on some Google Adsense (if they have any) and then most important is pimp their blog with some comments. I don’t know a single blogger that doesn’t love to see comments on their blog. It’s a great feeling. It lets you know that people are indeed reading your blog. It also lets other readers of your blog know that they aren’t the only one reading your blog. I love commenting on other blogs. Probably because I always have something to say. I can’t remember finding a topic where I was utterly speechless. Sometimes I think the post is dumb and doesn’t deserve a comment, but I always could say something if I’d like.

So, all you bloggers out there. Go out and pimp someone’s blog. In fact, maybe I just came up with an idea. I should post a message on the forums I’m on and we can rotate whose blog we’re going to pimp with comments. Each day or probably every other day, we could choose a blogger that we smother with comment love. Sounds like a good idea to me. We’ll see if other people agree.

Either way, you’ll find plenty of my comments across the blogosphere.

Ever since the MWC decided to sign a deal with CSTV they’ve talked about streaming video online and CSTV on demand. Turns out they have a model to follow. SPEEDtv is doing this with their product called Automotive News“>SPEED on Demand. They’ve even built in some of the great TIVO features like rewinding and fast forwarding through parts that you want to see again or don’t want to watch. What a great offering. Many of us have to work and so having a streaming TV component is essential to a TV station these days and SPEEDtv seems to have done it the right way. They have a whole bunch of other video stuff under the interactive menu too. Tie this video into their Automotive News and their package blows CSTV out of the water. Will CSTV ever catch up?

This post sponsored by Speedtv.com

Recently, PayPerPost (PPP) announced a new website where you can get married in Vegas on Nov 18th 2006 and PPP will pay for it. Essentially, you have three weeks to decide and plan a wedding in Las Vegas. I live in Las Vegas and so Vegas weddings are pretty normal. Honestly, I’m always surprised how many people come here to get married. I have a friend from Canada who came down to Las Vegas and got married and now it’s his favorite place on earth. I digress.

I am so surprised that so many people want to have a payperpost wedding. If you take this opportunity and get married in Las Vegas then PPP will give you the following:
* The wedding license and ceremony
* One nights stay at a premium Vegas Hotel
* $1000.00 hard cold cash yours to spend any way you want.
* Your wedding will be taped and streamed
* Crazy PayPerPost antics live for everyone to see.

I told my friend and Las Vegas neighbor Jules that I’d be happy to film the event if she was interested. Turns out she’s really interested in taking Ted up on his offer. I guess her and her boy toy have been talking about getting married for a while. Should be pretty interesting.

I just had an interesting thought. I have never actually met Jules. I’ve chatted with her on IM, on the PPP forums and we’ve commented a fair amount on each other blogs. However, that’s all. How funny would it be if the first time I met Jules was at her wedding? Only in Las Vegas would something this crazy happen for your wedding.

Ok, Ted!! All you have to do now is pick Jules to get married.