Site of the Week - Free Rice

It took me awhile to find a site worth talking about. But then I found this site on another blog, and wanted to pass it along. It's a game site called "Free Rice". You pick from any six different categories from geography to vocabulary to chemistry. They start you off with some easy questions like (2 x 1=) or (Starry Night is by...). If you get the answer correct, you'll bank 10 grains of rice. Each question you get correct, you'll receive harder questions and increase the level you're at. The collected grains are recorded and donated to developing coutries where rice is a main source in their diet like Cambodia or Uganda.

This site was founded back in October 2007 by John Breen. Earlier this month, Mr. Breen donated the site to the United Nations World Food Program. He hoped that over the years "FreeRice will be able to grow... helping to feed and educate as many people as possible throughout the world." And it has. Just this past Tuesday, 69,100,960 grains of rice was raised; about 3600 people were feed for a day.

Apparently, it takes 48 grains to equal one gram of rice, and about 400 grams is averaged to supplement 2 meals to feed one person for one day. So during my stay on the site I raised 36 grams, which is about 1/5 of a meal for a person. A small amount but it's start. It was pretty fun though. I got to test my knowledge on famous paintings (those three art history classes didn't go to waste), chemistry element symbols and basic math. I even got to brush up on my level one Spanish. I know the Nintendo DS has games to exercise your brain, but this doesn't cost $100 and you are doing your part to "save the world" so to speak. Know any other sites like this? Post them in the comments section.
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Now playing: Fannypack - Hey Mami
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Site of the Week - Fanfiction.net

In honor of National Reading Month, I’ve picked Fanfiction.net as the site of the week. I’ve been on this site for the longest time. It first started when I was obsessed with Sailor Moon. I went to every site, downloaded almost all the songs in every language, checked out the fanart and the fan fiction.

See, fan fiction are stories written by fans based on a show, movie, book, etc. The great thing about it is that you don’t have to get your readers familiar with the characters because they’ve already seen the show, and the characters’ relationships have already been established.

After hopping from one site to another reading stories that people have written, I discovered Fanfiction.net. There were TONS and I mean TONS of fiction for readers. Some of the categories include Anime/Manga, Books, Cartoons, Comics, Games, Misc (Broadway shows, crossovers, etc.), Movies and TV Shows. So, there’s something for everyone who watches TV, read books or wasn’t raised in a cave.

The stories can range from PG to adult content. Though, there are some downsides.

1. Reading a great story that hasn’t been finished or updated in a long while.

2. Reading a story with excessively bad spelling and grammar.

3. Reading a story that kills or bashes your fav character.

4. Reading a story that starts in the past tense, then present, then past again.

If you’re into anime, almost any show you’ve seen is on there. FYI, Sailor Moon has over 28,653 fan-written tales. With this site, spawns new lingo when reading a story’s description.

Crossover/Xover – characters from that story and another will meet.

OC – Other Character. People like to add in their own characters. It’s fun and fresh.

OOC – Out of Character. The character you’re familiar with will do something not exactly in their nature.

R&R – Read and Review. Reviews help better a writers craft.

A slash or an x between two character’s names is a love pairing. Also known as Slash, which depicts romantic or sexual relationships that include two or more male or female characters. Basically, any gay or lesbian written content.

If you like the story or the author, you can save them to your favorites. You can also get an email alert when your fav story has a new chapter up. Readers also have the ability to leave reviews and feedback. Numerous reviews can encourage an author to write their next chapter sooner, sharpen their craft, and take time to really proofread their work.

If you’ve got some great fan fiction that you’ve written, post them on the site. Know any other fan fiction sites? Post them in the comments section.
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Now playing: The Coral - Dreaming of You
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Site of the Week - Booking Buddy

For the past month I've been toying with the idea of moving to California. I finally narrowed down my locations to the San Diego and Los Angelos area. Sadly, flying clear across the U.S. gets quite pricey. Not only is it not worth it to pack my furniture and send it over, it's also ridiculously expensive to take a four day train ride that's twice the price of flying. My only feasible option is to stuff all I can into two medium-sized suitcases, one carry-on and a bookbag and hop on the cheapest plane.

Luckily, I came across this site called Booking Buddy. You enter in your travel dates, to and from airports, number of people, type of trip and hit search. It will come back with 12 different travel search sites to compare prices. Some of which included are the big site like Priceline, Orbitz and Expedia. They suggest clicking on at least three sites to find the cheapest fair. Once you select a site, you can customize your package by adding a hotel, car rental and other things.

Now, instead of going to all these different sites and reentering your travel info, you can go to one place and enter it once. I've found some pretty decent flight and hotel packages at Cheap Tickets. There are other sites like this (Shermans Travel) but Booking Buddy seems to have more travel sites at their disposal.

Before I do any ticket purchasing I still have to find a person willing to take a roommate with no job but savings to burn. Wish me luck!
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Now playing: Justice - D.A.N.C.E.
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Site of the Week - Geni.com

Geni.com - The Family Tree Site

My mother is one of 10 brothers and sisters. You can only imagine how big our family is. My sisters and I have always talked about putting together a family tree but never got around to it. We’ve even tried Ancestry.com but found that you end up sifting through endless articles, newspapers, and records from decades ago. Since most of my family members were born in Haiti the site wasn’t a big help and it was expensive.

Then I found this site: Geni.com. You add yourself, your sibling, parents and it builds from there. Instead of trying to figure out how a person is your third cousin or great aunt, just enter who they’re married to or who their parent or sibling is and it figures it out for you. Pretty simple stuff, huh? It also color codes the profile cards (blue for male, pink for female and white for the tree creator).

In addition to adding names, you can upload pictures of family members to their profile page and invite them to join and add to your tree. It’s an awesome site to record family events like graduations and births as well as sharing videos, pictures and family links. It also sends weekly emails to members who have joined the tree on events happening soon (For us it’s mostly birthday reminders, which is super helpful). Plus, if someone else has a tree whom your related to, you can link trees and start a forest. Plus plus, it has a map showing you were family members are located. Plus plus plus, like most sites now, you can add the tree to your Facebook, MySpace, blog or other site.

It’s a great way to start a family tree and have others do the rest of the work for you. It’s free, easy and not as messy as a scrapbook. Check it out. If there’s another family tree site, post it up.
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Now playing: Alejandro Jimenez - Que bonita bandera (Club Mix)
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Site of the week - Spark People

Helllooo Sparkpeople.com...

I’ve been apart of Sparkpeople for over a year now. It’s a great place for keeping track of your goals.

When you first start, you’re given two options: create a weight loss program or live a healthy lifestyle without setting a weight loss goal. Then you’ll enter your info (weight/height), have your BMI calculated, and enter your target weight and date to lose it. If it feels you are losing the weight too quickly it will highly suggest changing the target date. Remember, it’s about losing weight the healthy way. Then you finish your profile and select a few other goals such as drinking more water, writing in a journal, getting eight hours of sleep for starters. After that you can start the Nutrition Tracker program.

The good thing about this feature is that each week they recommend meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner. There’s a whole list of items you can add if you’re tired of eating the same thing over and over. The meal plan is flexible enough to be changed to fit your taste and lifestyle. If they don’t have a product you’re looking to eat you can add it in manually. The only downside is if you’re having a home cooked meal, like a stew or stir fry, you may have to add the items of the meal separately.

The other feature is the Fitness Tracker (which I absolutely love). There are two options: strength training and cardio. Pick from a plethora of exercises with demonstrations included then select the days to work out and track the amount of time spent and calories burned.

After a month or so, I got tired of tracking my meals but I kept at the Fitness Tracker. It was great to see my progress in chart form and try out new techniques when I got bored of the treadmill and crunches. You can also enter things like heavy cleaning and yard work to mix it up. Burning calories doesn’t just happen at the gym.

The only hard part is actually remembering to go on the site and enter your calories. Well, that and finding the energy and motivation to work out. If you make a habit of it and really want to change your lifestyle, then it becomes apart of your everyday life.

Or you can look forward to moving up to the next trophy level. Enter meals, workout routines, answers polls, etc., to receive more and more points to get the next trophy level. It’s just another motivational tool. As you can read there are tons to do on the site including posting on the message boards and joining teams. Give it try!

Remember, even if you’re thin it doesn’t mean your fit. If you’ve done a walking tour and felt exhausted and sore afterward, you might wanna get in shape. If you’ve climbed a flight of stairs and felt winded, you also might wanna get in shape. Start the year off right and take care of your body.
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Now playing: Mason Vs Princess Superstar - Perfect Exeeder
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Site of the Week - FiLife Stackers

Introducing... FiLife – your financial guide made simple.

Stackers is a section of FiLife, joined with the Wall Street Journal, where you can compare your debt to other Americans. You just enter an amount and it will calculate what percent of Americans have more debt than you. So, don’t feel so bad; some people are worse off than you. Apparently, 68% of Americans have more student loan debt than me. Not so bad, huh. You can refine your search to people in a certain age range, state and city.



After you’re done making yourself feel better, there are articles to help you manage your cash flow and even plan for the future. Look into disability insurance, 401K, and/or life insurance. There’s even an article on how to ask for the most difficult thing in your career: a raise.

You can also read up on a variety of financial topics, ask questions and even find great deals on credit card offers, financial software, savings accounts, rates, etc. I learned from “How to Buy a Car” that getting a car loan from a credit union or bank instead of the dealership can ease the car buying process a hell of a lot. That way you’re only focusing on the total price of the car instead of that and the lack of financing options. The first time I went car shopping, I realized 0% financing is only offered to people with “glorious” credit looking to finance their payments over 3 years. I was neither. I ended up leaving without a car and was glad. I’d would’ve hating driving something I wasn’t in love with for a price I wasn’t too happy with either.

Start 2009 off right by working to be financially independent and debt free. Found an article on the site worth talking about? Leave a comment.
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Now playing: Moon Phase - Neko Mimi Mode (Opening)
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Site of the Week - HubSpot

The next site of the week spot goes to... HubSpot.com

HubSpot is a great site, mostly aimed at businesses, that helps people to better market their websites. I first heard of it from PC Mag’s “Best Of in 2007”. The main thing that pulled me in was their Website Grader. You enter in your site’s url and an email address. Then, in a few moments you receive an email with a grade (ranging from 1 to 100) and the criteria used to measure your site.

I tried it with my portfolio site and was surprised to receive a 5 of 100. ☹ I thought surely I’d have something in the 60s or so. So, I looked through the report to see where I was lacking. Apparently, I didn’t have enough meta tags for my website, a summary, ALT text for images, a blog, and my domain was expiring in less than a year among other things. And here I thought I was all done with my site after I designed it and pieces it together with HTML code. Nope, there was more work to be done if I wanted more people stopping by for a visit.

FYI - For those who don't speak HTML lingo, a meta tag is a variety of elements in your site HTML that describe what it is to search engines. The most useful one is probably the keywords. You enter a list of keywords that relate to your site. Then when someone uses Yahoo! or googles some of the keywords, your site should appear in the list of results. The better the list, the more chances your site will appear.

They also have a Free Internet Marketing Kit for downloading. It includes an hour long video seminar on the dos and don’t of website redesign as well as a short Q&A part. It also has a PDF version that summarizes the video, and has tips and resources to keep in mind. There are various other tips, resources, webinars, etc. that even bloggers and Myspace page owners can use to help them. The main purpose of it all is to gain new viewers to your site without losing the ones you already have.

Try it out and see how your website ranks. Leave a comment and compare grades.
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Now playing: Saikano - Sayonara (Piano Version)
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Site of the Week

This week Site of the Week is “The Meatrix”. It’s a Flash animated spoof of The Matrix that talks about knowing where your meat and animal products come from and how it’s handled. The main character is a little piggy named Leo who believes where he lives is a nice, big farm where he can run around and frolic all day. That is until Chickity and Moopheus open his eyes to the conditions he and other barnyard animals are actually living in.

Unlike the extreme tactics of PETA sponsored sites that try to shock and disgust you into giving up eating delicious animals forever, this site educates the viewer on things like the benefits of buying from local farms, and the repercussions of companies using shortcuts and unhealthy practices to get you the lowest prices on meat and dairy products while increasing their profits. In actuality, only the companies are benefiting from it and it’s just not worth it. Everyone is hurt by their methods from neighboring town, to the factory workers, animals and even consumers. There’s also a link to a site called Sustainable Table. This site can help you search for stores that sell products from local farms, learn healthy recipes, as well as educational programs and projects. If you live in central or southern NJ, that shouldn’t be too hard.

If you do live near the Trenton area, check out this place called Halo Farms. They sell all sorts of dairy aisle products including ice cream and yogurt. Not to mention their supply of juices including apple cider, bread and snacks. The milk there not only tastes better, it lasts longer. ☺

If there’s anything to learn from the site it’s this:
1. Try to search for products (milk, eggs, etc.) that say “Antibiotic free” on their labels.
2. Eating healthy is good for you but maybe not your wallet.
3. If you have questions about how a company raises its animals, email them. They might actually send you an answer and maybe even some coupons.

And if you do decide to give up meat for good, make sure you get all the missing nutrients such as protein, niacin, and Vitamin A & B12 from other foods.