Connect and Reconnect

 Have you ever wanted to reconnect with a long lost friend or maybe a family member that you might have lost track of?  I know I have.  With so many different social networks out there it can be difficult to know where to start your search.

I can give you a few examples from my own searches in the past. A few years ago I wanted to reconnect with my two best friends from high school.  I found one through the LinkedIn professional networking site.  The other one found me through Facebook.  Together we found several other old friends through various networks.

Over the years, I have found some old friends and some long lost relatives through a variety of different social networks.  I have used LinkedIn to connect with old coworkers and others that I had done business with professionally.  Facebook has been a great source for old high school friends and old family members that I lost track of.

Still, there are still some folks that I have not been able to reconnect with in my previous searches.  What if there was a place where you could go and tie all of your various social network information and email addresses into one convenient location?  Now you can with MyLife.com.

At MyLife.com, you can add all of your various social network feeds and email messages in one place and view without having to log into each of the various sites separately.  You can also search the site friends and family with whatever information you have available regarding their past jobs, school, or location.  It is a great help in reconnecting with people from your past.

User Testing

I am always on the lookout to try to earn a little extra money now and then.  Over the years, I have been a participant in a couple of different survey companies that earned me a few hundred dollars.  Through a variety of sponsored post companies, I have made a little bit of money writing reviews on this blog.  I even have made a few buck through some sponsored tweets on Twitter.  None of these activities have generated a tremendous amount of money, but every now and then it is handy to transfer $50-$100 from my Paypal account to my bank account.

A few weeks ago, I was browsing the Amazon website looking for books for my Kindle when I came across 10 Legitimate Ways to Make Money Online by MJ Wolfe.  The price was right at the time, free, so I went ahead and downloaded the book.  As I write this, the ebook is currently selling for $4.77.  The book itself is very short but contains some worthwhile information.

There were a couple of things that I found in the pages that I might be able to do to earn a little bit of extra cash.  Then there were some that were not of any interest at all.  The first one that I have decided to give a shot is user testing through UserTesting.com.  Participants have the opportunity to perform usability testing for companies to give them feedback on how easy or difficult it is to navigate their websites.  Each test takes about 15 minutes or so to complete and the testers are paid $10 for their work.

I decided to sign up last night.  The first thing that I had to do was to perform a test assignment.  To do the testing and be a participant, you do need to have a microphone to attach to your computer.  You simply do the tasks and record your thoughts to give feedback as you navigate the sites.  I have already started to receive potential testing opportunities, but thus far have not met the demographics that the clients were looking for at the time.

Again, it is not going to be something that will get me to quit my day job, but if I can do a few jobs per week.  I was lucky enough to find the book while it was free, but $4.77 really isn't a lot to invest, especially if you can end up making $10 with just one usability test through UserTesting.com.

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Wasted Away Again in Margaritaville

Image via WikipediaWhen I first signed up for Facebook, I really wasn't sure what I would use it for, if anything.  In fact, after I signed up, I probably let my account languish for a year or so.  I didn't really start using Facebook until one of my two best friends from high school sent me a friend request.  Then I started to try to find family and friends on Facebook.

As I got more involved in doing things on Facebook, I noticed that some of my family members had gotten involved in playing various games on there.  So, I started to play a few of those games as well.  Maybe I should say I got lured into playing them.  I started off with Mafia Wars and eventually added Farmville and others.

At one point, I think I was probably playing five or six games.  They were starting to take up a considerable amount of my precious free time in the evenings.  I eventually got to the point where I decided that I was going to cut back on the number of games I was playing.  At this point, there are probably two games that I play consistently, Farmville and Scrabble with my parents.  There are one or two that I occasionally play when I really have extra time.

While I was on my trip to Chicago last week and waiting in O'Hare for my flight home, someone near me was reading a copy of USA Today and a headline caught my eye.  The article announced that Jimmy Buffett was working with a game developer to bring a Margaritavile themed game to Facebook.

First and foremost, I am an avowed Parrothead.  I have been listening to Buffett music for over 30 years now.  I have read all of his books.  I have eaten at Margaritaville restaurants in Key West and the local Cheeseburger in Paradise restaurant here in Maryland.  Needless to say, when this game launches on Facebook, I will be looking for my lost shaker of salt somewhere near the Port of Indecision.

On the 8th Day of Christmas-The Digital Story of the Nativity

To celebrate the season of Christmas, I will be presenting 12 straight days of posts related to Christmas.  We will call it, for lack of a better term, "The 12 Days of Christmas."  Real original, I know.  Some of the posts will be serious, some will be fun, but all will deal with Christmas in some way, shape or form.

These days we are more connected than ever. We have our Facebook accounts, our Twitter accounts, and I even recently started playing around a bit with FourSquare.  How could we survive without knowing every little status update?  They seemed to do OK 2000 years ago to get the story of the Nativity out.  Still, a couple friends posted this on Facebook today, and I thought it was pretty neat.

On the 8th Day of Christmas I present to you The Digital Story of the Nativity.

Name or Obscenity

Image via WikipediaMy given name is Richard.  It is the name that I use on any official documents that require a signature.  I am rapidly approaching the age of 50.  For my entire life, I have gone by the name Dick or some variation of it.  I have been called Dick, Dickie, Dickster, and since I am a junior, my least favorite moniker, Little Dickie.

With the advent of the digital age and the internet, I have had several different email accounts and have joined several different forums.  Usually, when creating an email address or a user ID, I incorporate my name in that email address or user ID.  The user ID that I use the most is dickster1961, a combination of one of my nicknames and the year of my birth.

Sadly, in today's world of political correctness and rigid electronic filters, there have been times when I have tried to sign up for a forum and my user ID has been rejected.  The reasons vary, but they pretty much all center around the same theme that the user ID contains a word that has been rejected by the company's filters.  Once, I actually was having difficulty emailing a vendor that I was dealing with because my email signature was being filtered by his company's spam filters as obscene because it contained my name.

Whenever I have had a problem creating a user ID that contains my name, I will usually write to the company through their "contact us" link on their website.  If at that point they will not allow me to create a user ID that contains my name, as a matter of general principal I will not do any business with that company.  I am well acquainted with the additional meanings that can be associated with the name Dick, however, I take great offense to those companies that assign a rigid ruling of "obscene" to what is a common name throughout history. There have been a lot of famous Dicks through the years.

When I started this blog over two years ago, I gave it my name "Dickster."  When I signed up with Twitter, I signed up with my common user ID "dickster1961."  Associated with the blog and my Twitter account, I have had a relationship with a few different companies that have paid me for the occasional blog post or Twitter tweet.  Those relationships don't provide a lot of income, but every few bucks here and there is always a help.

The reason I bring all this up now is because of some recent issues that I have had with one of those companies and my Twitter account.  I have had a relationship with this particular company for about a year where I have gotten paid to send out tweets.  There has never been a problem with my twitter name in that time.  My last two opportunities have been rejected by advertisers because I have an "inappropriate Twitter handle."

It seems odd that all of a sudden, my twitter name is a problem.  Especially I had posted paid tweets for one of the advertisers multiple times in the past year, and it was never a problem.  I have raised the issue with the company that arranges for the paid tweets to see if the issue lies within their system or whether it is actually with the advertisers.  On the one hand, I would like to have the opportunity to earn a little extra cash, on the other I don't want the hassle of changing my Twitter ID.

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TGIF

Image via Wikipedia

Thank God It's Friday.  A lot of people are claiming this at the end of the work week.  It is always nice to have the weekend and the end of the work week.  I am particularly happy that the week is over, because it has been a brutal week for me.  Not so much because of the work week, but just a bunch of stuff that has happened to people close to me.

It all started on Sunday when I was chatting with a friend of mine on Facebook.  We had a pretty good chat going along catching up on what was going on in each of our lives.  By the time our chat was over, however, I discovered that he and his wife had separated and were probably headed for divorce.  That was the first of the bad news for the week.

Then I received a message from my mother on Twitter.  They had to rush my uncle to the hospital where they found what appeared to be a mass on his brain.  It turns out he had some bleeding in the brain and thought that he might have a cracked skull from a fall that occurred during the snowstorms.  I realized tonight that I have been remiss in checking on how he is doing because I have been so occupied with the sudden passing of my friend David Mills that I posted about a couple days ago.

On Thursday night, I updated my Facebook status to pay tribute to folks with cancer.  Another old high school friend happened to be on Facebook at the time.  She replied to my status and informed me that she was getting ready to undergo cancer treatment.

Finally today at work, they had to evacuate the building due to some fumes in the building.  After waiting outside for over an hour, they announced that it would be another two hours before they would consider letting people back in the building.  I had to leave to take my son to his psychiatrist appointment, so I called it an early day.  At the end of the appointment, his doctor informed us he was moving to another office.  Now we have to decide whether to choose another doctor in the practice or go to an office that is less convenient.

I suppose it is appropriate that a week like this week happens to end on Good Friday, the day of Christ's crucifixion.  A day when things looked bleakest for those who called themselves disciples of Jesus.  Then there was renewal when on Sunday morning it was discovered that Jesus had risen from the grave.  In this Easter season, I hope that all my friends and family will find peace, comfort and renewal.  

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