Archive for December, 2007:
Cheap Movie Tickets
Movie tickets may not cost as much in Indiana as they do on the east and west coasts but that doesn’t mean they’re cheap. If you’re anything like me, your wallet has taken a hit in recent years as movie ticket prices have continued to escalate. Besides the common sense tactic of going to matinees to save a few dollars, there are several other methods I have for saving money at the theater.
College Scholarships
One of my nieces is getting ready to apply for college, so she’s looking into scholarships and asked my advice, hoping I knew of some websites she could check out. While there are plenty of scholarship resources online, I gave her the same advice I would give any other high school senior: talk to your guidance counselor first. High school guidance counselors have a wealth of information at their disposal regarding college scholarships and financial aid, plus they should also be able to give you some advice on filling out forms and applying for said scholarships. However, with thousands of potential scholarship opportunities out there, no one person can ever be aware of all of them. That’s why I’ve compiled a list of links for college-bound seniors looking for a little financial aid.
Blog Indiana 2008
I just stumbled upon a campaign at The Point from a group of Hoosiers that want to start an Indiana blogging conference. I think it’s a great idea, and I’m sure there are enough Hoosier bloggers in the state that would attend if one were to happen. They just need to get the word out, so I thought I’d do my part and throw another link out there to their website.
Free Business Magazines
Similar to newspapers, magazines don’t really make their profit from subscription sales. They live or die on their advertising revenue, and to fluff those numbers and increase members of certain key demographics, they often give out free subscriptions to people who work in businesses that their advertisers are trying to reach. For about a decade now, I’ve been receiving dozens of free magazine subscriptions from websites such as Mercury Magazines or Free Biz Mags.
Some of these free magazines are trade publications that would only be of interest to webmasters or IT professionals, but they also offer me a surprising assortment of consumer magazines. Over the years I’ve received free subscriptions to magazines such as Wired, Boating, Maxim, FHM, Stuff, Car & Driver, Horses Illustrated, US News & World Report, and many more. While I hate to endorse reading magazines offline and killing more trees, sometimes it’s just nice to have a physical magazine that you can stuff in your bag and pull out whenever you have a free minute or need to kill some time. They make good bathroom reading as well, and, more importantly, they’re free. I have a hard time saying no to anything that’s free.
Widget Box
If you have a personal website, blog, or even a Myspace page, you’ll want to check out Widget Box. Widgets are cool little gadgets you can add to your website by cutting and pasting a little code from sites like Widget Box. They let you do things like embed video games, movies, and time wasting applications onto your site. As an example, I’ve embedded one of my favorite games, Puzzle Bobble, into this blog post. There are thousands of widgets at Widget Box and just as many creative uses for them.
Elf Yourself
If you want to annoy and/or amuse your friends and family this holiday season, head over to Elf Yourself from Office Max and turn 1-4 people or pets into dancing, singing elves. Click here for an example I created using some staff mugshots from our newspaper, The Noblesville Daily Times.
While you’re at it, you may as well send them a Christmas joke or two. Here’s an old school list of holiday jokes hosted by somebody over at Cornell University. After that, you can let your kids send a letter to Santa and get a reply back at The North Pole. And if that’s not enough holiday spirit for you, then head over to All Things Christmas for, well, all things Christmas.
Hulu: The future of online video?
If you’re a person who watches much television, you’ve definitely noticed that there’s a writers’ strike going on, which has halted production on just about every show on television. What you might not know, is that one of the main reasons for the strike is that writers are demanding a share of the online revenue that studios are expected to generate in the near future or are already generating. At the core of the issue is a new service called Hulu, which may just change the way videos are shared on the web.
Christmas at the Zoo
On Saturday evening, my wife and I stopped at the Indianapolis Zoo to check out Kroger’s Christmas at the Zoo. Besides thousands of Christmas lights and a model train exhibit at the White River Gardens, there’s another reason to visit the zoo this time of the year. The extended hours (the zoo is open until 9 pm) means that you can see something that you can’t see during the summer: nocturnal animals being active. Of course, this also means that all of the animals normally active during the day are asleep during these extended hours.