Well, I passed the tests and I am officially a ChaCha guide.

So far my impression is fairly positive. Quite a few people on the boards are making 7 to 10 dollars an hour. Me? I’m doing a piddling 2 dollars an hour.
The difference is due to a few things.
First, every guide starts at 10 cents a query. If, at the end of the week, they have done 200 searches with 95% accuracy and a 95% completion rate, they end up on the Top Guide list, which makes them .20 a query for the next week.

I’m still at 10 cents a query and I’m just starting to build my list of useful reference links and whatnot. Without an organized system of quick answers and site links, I am finding my response time to be averaging about 2-3 minutes per question. Once I get a little quicker, I should be able to make a little more money per hour. Plus, making Top Guide will help a lot. So, it might take a week or two to get the hang of it and by then I hope to be making about 5-7 dollars an hour. That would be nice.

If you feel like checking it out and think you can do it, check out their site for more info. If you feel like putting me as a reference, I would highly appreciate it. It puts you on my ‘team’, which provides some perks along the way. To put me as a reference, you just need to add my email address in the appropriate box - ‘jenflower (at) gmail (dot) com”. If you have any questions, contact me. I’ll be keeping you all updated here about my ChaCha experiences.

So, I am currently in my final semester of college (again).  I am finishing up degree #2 and hoping this will end my college career.  I am officially tired of reading, writing and arithmetic.
Anyway, I have been unemployed for a little while now and while it’s terrific that I have given myself the extra time to finish school, I am also starting to find myself in need of some extra cash.

I do make a little extra money every month through online resources (surveys, Amazon, eBay, Google, etc.) but I am always on the lookout for some more.  Aren’t we all?

So, my friend received an email from her friend the other day about ChaCha.com.  For those who have never heard of it, it offers a mobile service that allows anyone to text a question (almost any question, with a few exceptions) to 242242.  After a few minutes, the answer to their questions is sent back to their cell phone.  ChaCha hires independent contractors - people like you and me - to sit at home/work/school to answer those questions.
Her friend made $400 dollars working as a ChaCha Guide last month. Sounds good to me.

So, I decided to sign up and give it a try.  After reading a little more about it, I will have to admit that it requires a lot of time to get a decent amount of money so it may not actually be worth it to put in so much time for so little pay, but I am willing to take that chance.  Basically, it pays 10 cents a question, unless you are one of the Top Guides for the week (you must answer 200 questions/week with 95% accuracy and 95% completion.)  If you are a Top Guide, you get paid 20 cents a question for that week.

So, anyway, the first step was to sign up and take three entrance tests.  I was sooo nervous.  You would think that after a decade of college, I would be cool as a cucumber during a ChaCha entrance exam - I even like tests, for goodness sakes!  But, no - I found myself all shaky and nervous as I took the test.  The three tests consisted of a typing test, a basic knowlege/facts test and a test on some of ChaCha’s policies (which came directly from an article you had to read before the test.)
I was immediately given my score…I passed!

The next part is to read even more about ChaCha and how Guides are supposed to answer questions and whatnot.  Then I had to take a readiness test.  This involves answering 10 queries as though I were already a ChaCha guide.  Now that was nerve-wracking!  And fun, too.

Now, I just have to wait a few days to see if I pass.  If I do, I’ll be an official ChaCha guide. I’ll keep you updated about my experience (if I pass!)

Is anyone else completely addicted to organizing their virtual world?  I just spent the past 3 hours going through all my Gmail messages and making sure I have them labeled (with fancy colors) and sorted and in all the right places.  I even went through all my contacts and added little pictures to everyone and updated their addresses and and phone numbers and such.  I am also in the process of weeding through and reorganizing my Firefox bookmarks. This is actually a task that is always in progress!

My next stop is my Photobucket account.  It is incredibly un-feng shui right now.  Nothing is sorted at all!
Photos mixed in with blinkies. Videos mixed in with backgrounds. Motivational posters mixed in with glitter text.

Everything is all willy-nilly and it drives me batty.

On a side note, it sure has been a while since I posted.  I think I really need to update the look of this place.  It’s just plain ‘blah’.

Okay, so I am new to posting videos to YouTube.
A few weeks ago I made some music videos based on some of my favorite movies.
(My YouTube Channel is here)
I like them, but according to my brother I am officially a nerd for doing it. That’s okay - it’s not like I didn’t already know this.

Well, YouTube has made some changes in the past few days. They have decided that it was necessary to add a feature where the visitors can rate on the comments people leave for each of the videos. Suddenly we are no longer focusing on the creators of the video…we are now focusing and giving attention to the anonymous (and sometimes rude, immature and self-centered) people visit those video pages.
Here are some of my suggestions and additional thoughts on this new change.

1: I think this feature should be optional. Allow us to make the entire system invisible for those of us who do not want to be subjected to tacky little thumbs and Christmas-colored numbers every time we visit a page. The pages are cluttered enough as it is.

2: Video creators should be given an option to turn off comment voting on their own video pages. I am not looking forward to having to go through all my comments to undo the voting of ‘haters’ and those who think they are being funny by voting my responses (and those of my visitors) to red. It’s irritating and we shouldn’t have to be forced to deal with this if we don’t want to.

I don’t want to allow certain people to have that much control over my video page.
If someone has an opinion about a comment, they respond with they own comment.
If someone leaves an inappropriate comment or spam, I delete it.
This is the method that worked before and I don’t understand why this needed to be changed.

YouTube has also provided us with drop-down filters, so that we can choose to only view comments that have been rated ‘high’ or ‘low’ or ‘neutral’ or ‘all’. Unfortunately, people have already begun voting comments for their own juvenile pleasure (big surprise) and I am actually missing valid comments because of this.
I am then forced to go to the pages and play with the comment filters all day long. What a waste of time.

I go to YouTube to upload videos and to watch videos and to provide feedback to the creators. I am not there to have the general public decide whether my question or comment is worthy of a tacky-looking ThumbsUp/ThumbsDown.

A simple comment that contains a question such as “Where were you when you filmed this video?” is given a thumbs-down…why? I don’t know. Maybe they were having a bad day. If the creator responds with “I filmed it in Mexico”…well, that is just open for a bunch of people to give that answer a ThumbsDown because they had a bad experience with a quesadilla once.

I sincerely hope YouTube actually listens to us and if they don’t intend to remove the feature, at least allow us to customize the site to our liking. You can never make every person happy all of the time, but the ability to customize is essential to the process.

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I usually try not to use my blog to state too many opinions on world matters, but this irritated me so much. It appears that someone is suing eHarmony.com because they do not offer a matchmaking option for gays and bisexuals to use their service.
Logically, one would assume that if a person is gay and if eHarmony isn’t offering gay matchmaking services, then perhaps eHarmony is not the dating service they should be using. eHarmony has done research and has had years of experience in matching heterosexuals…and it is their right to only offer the service to them. In my opinion, a private business has the right to offer whichever services they feel qualified or willing to offer. The woman is not being prevented from joining the site. They haven’t denied her the right to use the site based on anything. They just don’t have the services she needs. An intelligent person would normally realize this and move on. She, however, has decided it is her right to make eHarmony change their entire site to cater to her sexual preferences.
It’s like me walking into a formal clothing store for men and deciding to sue because they don’t have formal clothing for women. Aren’t private businesses allowed to decide what services they offer and to to whom they want to offer them?

Are we saying that every business now has to cater to every single difference in this world?

Seeing that this case is being held in California, I have very little hope that the outcome will be what it should be, but I have been surprised before.

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On every site I visit this month, the topics of conversation are the same. 
These topics mostly revolve around: 1) the holidays and 2) exams. 
For those of you who haven’t gone to college yet, never went to college, (or had so much “fun” while they were in college that they have forgotten most of their college years) - the holiday season in December is filled not only with the joys and stresses of present-buying, money shortages, and general holiday concerns, it also includes the stresses of having to avoid a brain meltdown that occurs when being forced to study for the final exams for each of your college classes.

The worst case college holiday scenario?  When an exam AND a paper is required at the end of the term.  “A paper” is a misleading term, I should add.  In college, “a paper” usually stands for “10+ papers/pages or more”.  Go figure. 

Now, we must move onto not only the student’s stress, but that of the professors.  After all the exams and “papers” have been turned in, the professors now have the thankless job of grading each exam and reading each term paper.  How do they get all of this done and still keep their sanity?  How do they get through the act of reading 10 pages per student…10 pages that could just as easily been read (sometimes word for word) from a number of sites online?  10+ pages that get less and less interesting to read as the days inch closer and closer to Christmas?

Well, the truth has finally been revealed…Dan Solove has provided us with a small tour (including pictures!) of the art and precision used by the professors when it come to grading college exams and college papers.  http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2006/12/a_guide_to_grad.html
I found it enlightening…I think you will, too! 

Meghan’s (my daughter) father is stationed in Mosul, Iraq and they lost a soldier the other day when a rocket-propelled grenade hit the vehicle he was in.  This is the first time I am actually struck with a bit of fear about the safety of her dad. 

She has grown up hardly knowing him.  We were never married (I was only 19 when I had Meghan….even good Christian girls make questionable choices sometimes!) and he has spent the past 12 years being sent from city to city and country to country for the Army.  He is married now to his second wife and has recently begun to put a lot of effort into getting to know Meghan better.  I really don’t think she will be able to handle it if her father were hurt while he was over there. 

All we can do is pray and count the days until they are all home again….God bless our troops. 

Heehee - I luffles my little brother!  He came home from work today and his boss gave him a 30GIG Zune for Christmas.  Since Chris has an iPod he decided to give it to me as an early Christmas present.  I am soooooo happy!  It plays videos and music and …  Yay!!  XOXOXO my little brother!  I included a small link to Amazon so you can check out one for yourself.  I know I know…it’s not an iPod, but I am really loving this, so don’t say anything mean about my new toy.

Okay - time to come up with a new name for my blog.  I just found out that there is someone in my Blogging Jens Webring with the same blog name as mine.  She started her first.  That means I should find a new name.  Eeek - this always drives me nuts.  I want a blog name with “Jen” in it.  And nothing trite like “Jen’s Journal”.  There are a million out there like that.

Hmmm…what to do.  What to do.  I’ll keep you posted. 

Well, this was a weekend of ups and downs for us.
The ‘up’ was a very successful day at the Elementary School craft fair.  I sold almost 80 name prints and made a nice amount of Christmas cash.  (Thank goodness!)  Meghan and her two friends, Macy and Alyssa, also made about 100 dollars by selling their chocolate and some of the needlepoint and sewing crafts they made.  It was a fun day, but a little stressful, too.  A lot of people and the responsibility of keeping an eye on the girls and their craft table…eek - I barely had time to take more than 3 sips of coffee the entire day.  On the bright side, I survived without a panic attack, so that is a sure sign that my anxiety disorder is indeed under control.  It’s been so long that I almost forgot what it was like when I was plagued by them almost every day.

The ‘down’ of this weekend was that my Uncle Joe passed away.  He had been sick for quite a while and my aunt and cousins have been under a tremendous strain these past few months.  Sadly, I honestly can’t recall the last time I saw him, but I am sad that I can’t go to the funeral tomorrow.  Our family is so small that I really feel it is important to be there during times like these.  Even if this particular side of the family isn’t as close to us as the others are.  I love the holidays so dearly, that it makes me very sad to think that it won’t be quite a happy holiday for my aunt and cousins this year.

Well, this is yet another late night post, so I must head to bed.  The longer I stay up, the more likely it is that I will not hear my alarm clock in the morning.  And, I really hate when that happens.