Sassy Black Friend

Clumsy and clumsier

After all this time together the boyfriend and I have discovered something new we have in common. We’re both incredibly clumsy.

Last night he was painting on a ladder, and managed to fall 3 feet, break the ladder, and sprain his wrist. So, off we went to the emergency room to make sure there wasn’t some serious damage.

Which reminded him that he needs to get some good cheap insurance for when his COBRA expires.

Then this morning I cut myself kind of bad from just cutting a cantaloupe in half. So lame.

Back to reality

Sigh. Home again and back to my actual life. Plans for the rest of today include napping, a trip to the drugstore (need some pronexin, toothpaste, and bandaids so I can at least look pretty when I’m sulking about not being on vacation anymore.

Tomorrow back to work for real, and I have seven or eight conference calls scheduled already. Lame. But, the more calls I have, the more work I get. The more work I get, the more money I make. The more money I make the more vacations I can go on. Ah, capitalism.

Money, money, money

Please excuse this post, I’ve completely lost my mind.

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One more thing…

Did I mention that the boyfriend and I have decided to buy this house? The owner is definitely not coming back, and wants to unload it so he can buy something where he lives now. So, we’re working out the money and other details. We’re working out all of the technical details of owning it together, and plans in case we break up or don’t both want to live here some time in the future. Not romantic, but important.

I’m excited, since we’ve done a fair amount of work, and the house is in great shape. Plus, it looks like the mortgage will be reasonable. Even adding things like taxes and home insurance, we will still only be paying a little more than we were when living separately.

So, lots of exciting things going on. Remind me to write about the finalized vacation plans.

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.

Chickens are wrapped in clear plastic too!

My thoughts on this video, from 1962, about Supermarkets (12 minutes long, but worth it) are threefold:

1. Wow. If they made this video based on my shopping trip this morning, they’d have to include tips on how to avoid: the fighting family in produce, the hungover guy knocking cereal boxes over, and the bitch who stole my cart 3 times. 3 damn times!

2. I miss Mad Men already. Come back soon.

3. Fark says to watch out for falling out of your chair after seeing the prices. I say try not to cry. I mean, sure. Expensive groceries is a fair trade for a Black President and not getting lynched, but come on. Can’t I get a happy medium?