Sassy Black Friend

Massive carnage

Well, not really. Basically we’ve been working on redoing the basement so it can be used as a bigger guest room, freeing up the small bedroom on our first floor for a real office. I know it must sound like we live in a palace. The issue is, the house has three bedrooms, a “den” and a full basement.

When we moved in we used one of the two upstairs bedrooms as my office. But the room is incredibly cold all the time, so I needed to move. So the den upstairs became my office and the second bedroom turned into the den/land of sleeping animals.

While the boyfriend was working from home I moved down to the living room/dining room and he used the office upstairs. I learned to love working on the first floor. It means I could cook and work, and our first floor is quieter for some reason.

So once we’ve got new bathroom sinks and laminate floors in the basement, people can actually stay there. Read more »

Lost in Translation

I had to share this with you guys. A professional acquaintance posted something she’d translated from French to English on her blog. Now, she didn’t know a word of French, so she just assumed the website she used got it right. Never ever do this. Unless you’re just translating to get the gist of things for your own use, it won’t work. If it did the UN would have fired all their interpreters and be using Google translate with voice recognition.

Here’s a fun example of how word to word translation doesn’t help you actually understand things. This is a very successful song by Francis Cabrel. Direct translation from Google is after the jump. Tell me how good the song is from that.

L’Encre De Tes Yeux

Puisqu’on ne vivra jamais tous les deux
Puisqu’on est fou, puisqu’on est seul
Puisqu’ils sont si nombreux
Même la morale parle pour eux
J’aimerais quand même te dire,
Tout ce que j’ai pu écrire
Je l’ai puisé à l’encre de tes yeux

Je n’avais pas vu que tu portais des chaînes
À trop vouloir te regarder j’en oubliais les miennes
On rêvait de Venise et de liberté

J’aimerais quand même te dire,
Tout ce que j’ai pu écrire
C’est ton sourire qui me l’a dicté

Tu viendras longtemps marcher dans mes rêves
Tu viendras toujours du côté où le soleil se lève
Et si malgré ça j’arrive à t’oublier
J’aimerais quand même te dire,
Tout ce que j’ai pu écrire
Aura longtemps le parfum
des regrets.

Et puisqu’on ne vivra jamais tous les deux…
Read more »

The strangest things…

I get obsessed with the strangest things, really. After my weekend shopping trip I was sitting in the living room thinking about the floors in the house. They’re all hardwood and tile, which make them easy to clean, but not very comfortable in cold weather. Neither the boyfriend or I wear shoes in the house much, and we don’t own a single pair of slippers.

Now, we have a couple of fantastic rugs in key areas, but we can’t exactly afford to slap down an area rug anywhere we might walk.

So I turned to J, who never wears shoes inside and is always cold. She introduced me to the idea of slipper socks. We are hooked. More on that later, including photos of our new colorful collection.

YouData pays you to look at ads

I was doing some research for a report and I happened upon a new website, YouData. I sent info to L to see if she’d heard of it, but she hadn’t. So, I checked it out and figured I would try it to see if I could contribute to the Work at Home Jobs Experiment area.

The site says:

Your attention is a valuable product. Advertisers need it, and you are the sole owner and supplier. Stop giving it away. Stop letting other people sell it!

You should be the only one selling your attention.

By placing a price on your attention, even a small one, you start to filter out irrelevant advertisers who do not want to waste their money buying the wrong attention. Think you hate irrelevant ads? Think how advertisers feel – they have had to PAY for them for decades! Give advertisers a direct market and a fair price for your product, and only ads relevant find their way to you.

Fair enough, so how does it work?

First you sign up for an account on the YouData site. You have to confirm your identity with an email address and a phone number. Then they ask you to fill out a somewhat extensive profile. It’s your choice how much information you provide, but the more you tell, the better chance you have to match to advertisers. I filled out the whole thing in about 10 minutes, so it isn’t too much work.

Once your profile, or MeFile (as they call it) is complete, you can open the advertising widget to see what ads are available for you. The following is a screen capture of my widget, with no ads available right now – more on that later.

If there are ads that you match, they appear in the list. You get a certain amount of money for viewing the list of ads, and more for clicking through to each ad’s landing page. Here’s a partial list of the ads I got in my first week and what they paid (I’ve blacked out the individual advertiser information) but you can see how it works.

All together there were 20 some ads I was able to view and get paid for. YouData says they pay via PayPal on a weekly basis – every Friday, and so far they have. This was my first week and I got a payment notice this afternoon.

One thing to note, however, is that YouData is brand new, and don’t have a lot of advertisers yet. So there’s no flood of ads to view. Like I said, I had about 20 when I signed up, so we’ll see how many more come in over the next few weeks.

The company is very up front with their new status, and says:

We’re just getting started! This is a pretty new concept, and we have not reached all the advertisers yet. We appreciate your patience and assure you that we are working hard to spread the word that advertising can actually work better for everybody when consumers and advertisers can deal with each other directly.

Just so you know, though anyone can create a MeFile, YouData is most actively rolling out in 3 geographic/local markets in Texas, in addition to one very significant national demographic, online females and mommy bloggers. Hey – we have to start somewhere! If you live or go to school in the areas we are focusing, or are female, you should see the number of ads increasing relatively steadily and quickly. In other locations and demographics, it might take a little longer to see a significant number of ads flowing your way, but we WILL get to you. [Emphasis mine]

So that’s a caveat. You can kind of tell from the profile questions the kind of advertisers they have so far. I’m a woman with a pet so I did pretty well.

The verdict? We’ll see. They paid on time and the site is easy to use, so I’m cool with it so far. There’s also some thing you can download to see the ads without going to the site, I assume it’s a browser add on, but that’s not my kind of thing. If anyone else has used YouData, what did you think? Oh, and they do have an affiliate program, the details of which I have not at all checked out, so I may or may not get something if you sign up for YouData via this link.

Work at Home Jobs Experiment – Little Sister’s Today.com blog

This experiment is only mine on the technical side. My Little Sister (not actually my sister, more like an emotional parasite I can’t get rid if) asked me to help her setup a blog on Today.com. I’d never heard of it, but I have to admit, not a bad deal for the causal blogger.

You earn $1 for every approved post (seems like they’ll approve anything over 100 words) for 1 post per day. So, you can’t post 50 times in a day and make $50. Fair enough. You also get paid a small amount for the traffic your blog receives.

The catch, of course, is you don’t have total control over the blog, and can’t use any other moneymaking tools on it. There are google ads on all of the blogs, but they’re managed by Today.com, not the user. Hopefully she’ll make enough to get be a good Christmas gift this year.

For beginners like Little Sister, that’s just fine. $1 a day is enough to remind her to write something. Here comes the shameless plug. Check out Little Sister’s Always Watching blog where she writes about the crappy television shows she likes to watch.

Work at Home Jobs Experiment – My Lot

This is the second site in my work at home job experiment series.

MyLot is an online message board site where you get paid to create and participate in discussions about pretty much anything you can think of. The beginning was a little rough for me. The sign up process felt like a personality test. After creating an account I had to select from over 200 “roles that I play in life” and that was only the first of a dozen categories to select from. Yikes.

But, once I got through that, things were a lot better. You can search and browse for discussions related to the issues you select, or look at new and popular discussion topics. I responded to a few quick questions like “do you eat breakfast everyday” and “how often do you get drunk” to get familiar with the site, and then tried starting my own.

Unsurprisingly, my thread about NPR got no attention, but asking what movie to see with friends did pretty well. Like any huge site, it’s really difficult to get a topic moving, because there’s so much competition. Most of the really popular topics are about making money online, which… duh.

I wrote 12 posts in 2 days (probably 1 1/2 hours in total time) and have made $0.19 so far. So, not exactly a cash cow. But, the site is fun, and I think you have to look at it like a nice way to spend time, and earn a little money as a bonus. I would definitely recommend this site as a good way to waste some time and talk to interesting people.