eBates is an online rebate portal. You get cash back on your online purchases by going to eBates site first and then clicking through their links to reach the sites you’re planning to do your online shopping on.
Payments for the previous quarter are sent on or before the 15th of the month in February, May, August, and November via Paypal or paper check and they’re set up so that no Paypal fees get taken out which is nice.
This past quarter I shopped at drugstore.com, eBay, iTunes, Sephora, and Vista Print and got $48.18 back.
I’ve been a member of eBates since 2004 and have now received a total of $509.66 in cash back just for clicking through their site before placing orders I’d be making anyway.
If you’re not already a member it’s definitely worth signing up. If you’re planning to sign up I suggest you use one of my eBates links so that we both get $5 when you make your first purchase.
Disclosure: Some links in this post are affiliate links and I will receive a small compensation if you make a purchase after clicking through them. Affiliate links are an easy way to support Carrie Actually at no additional cost to you.
How do you get your tunes at work?
I could use my iPhone but a don’t like to be surprised when people walk up behind me so I don’t like to wear the headphones in my office and up until a few weeks ago my Bose Sounddock wouldn’t charge my 3g iPhone and now that I got a new Sounddock that will charge it, it’s staying at home for enjoyment there. So internet radio becomes my favorite option.
Pandora
Pandora is only free for the first 40 hours you use it each month, which works out to about a week for me since I’m using it from work almost exclusively.
With Pandora, you plug in the names of a couple artists or songs you like and it puts together a playlist for you. You can refine that playlist by adding more songs and artists or giving the songs Pandora chooses to play a thumbs up or thumbs down. It learns from your actions.
Pandora has excellent audio quality, consistent volume between songs, and can figure out not to play Christmas songs outside of the Christmas season (last.fm cannot figure that out) which are the factors that make it worthwhile to use as much as possible (all 40 free hours every month).
Last.fm
Last.fm is all free all the time which is a huge plus. The only drawback to last.fm is that the sound quality isn’t great and I find I have to adjust the volume of the computer a lot to keep the songs from being too loud or too quiet.
I’ve been using last.fm since July 12, 2005 (it keeps track in my profile, I don’t remember that off the top of my head).
The reason I started using last.fm is because I’m a statistics-oholic and with the help of the Scrobble plugin it collects statistics about what you’re playing in iTunes or on your iPod and combines that with the statitics about your internet radio usage for a complete picture of your musical consumption. You can view charts of what you listen to sorted by artist, album, or track and by the last week, last 3 months, last 6 months, last year, and all time.
When I first started using last.fm it was actually called AudioScrobbler and it’s main function was that plugin. AudioScrobbler later got merged into last.fm. I’ve forgotten about the website for years at a time and it kept collecting my stats about the music I played so it’s fascinating to see the big picture of my musical tastes over the last 5 years. Fascinating like I wish I could install the plugin in my brain and keep track of all the trace bits of music I hear in stores or restaurants or other people’s cars.
Overall
To get the best of both worlds: awesome sound quality from Pandora for my 40 free hours and complete picture statistics from last.fm, I use a third party website called Pandora.fm by Real-ity for those first 40 hours. It plays the music from Pandora and logs those songs as songs listened to in last.fm. Then I switch over to last.fm for the rest of the month.
There’s only one drawback to internet radio on the whole: it’s smart and it will figure out and play your guilty pleasure songs. This xkcd comic is a very accurate representation of internet radio:
Disclosure: Some links in this post are affiliate links and I will receive a small compensation if you make a purchase after clicking through them. Affiliate links are an easy way to support Carrie Actually at no additional cost to you.
What is StumbleUpon?
StumbleUpon is a way to mindlessly surf the internet guided by your friends and the topics you are interested in. StumbleUpon is a great way to find new content and kill time when you’re bored.
How to get started on StumbleUpon
- Head over to http://www.stumbleupon.com/ and create an account.
- Once you’re logged in, start by telling StumbleUpon what topics you’re interested in.
- Add some friends. You can find them by having StumbleUpon search your email address book or you can ask your friends what their usernames are or check their profiles on other sites for links to their StumbleUpon profiles. (You can find me here.)
- If you’re using Firefox as your browser (which I highly recommend), download the StumbleUpon toolbar. (If you don’t like your toolbar area being too cluttered up, it’s easy to turn turn toolbars on and off as you want to use them by right clicking in the toolbar area.)
- Start stumbling. Press the “Stumble” button at the left end of the toolbar to get to a new site. Use the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons to tell StumbleUpon whether you want to see more sites like that in the future or not.
How to get the most out of StumbleUpon
- I do most of my stumbling via Channels. My favorite channels: People I’ve Subscribed To (icon has two people, one in an orange shirt and one in a yellow shirt) which gives you sites based on your interests that your friends have already thumbed up and Search (magnifying glass icon) which gives you sites that other StumbleUpon users like you have thumbed up and match a search term you’re interested in, if you want to see what people are saying about a certain topic I find this more useful than a Google search.
- StumbleUpon learns what you like from what you thumb up. If a friend asks you to give a thumbs up to a site and you don’t want to see more pages like that, don’t give it a thumbs up.
- The more you put into the system in terms of telling it what you like and adding new sites that you like, the more you will get out of the system. The recommendation engine gets smarter as you participate more. If you’re a website developer, it will do you no good to only submit your own sites because StumbleUpon won’t have any info on what other sites you like so it won’t be able to find other users like you who might also like your site.
