Been a while.

I'm finding a new thing lately. Well, not "new", but new to the last few years. Virtual money and real cash. It seems like in more and more venues, virtual money and objects are having real monetary value.

In places like SecondLife and IMVU, people pay real cash for virtual money, that they then spend in the virtual world. And on the same token, they can sell this virtual money for real money. The MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) games really started that. Entire companies existed that would sell you money in the game, if you paid them.

More elaborate is things like SecondLife and IMVU, which I've dabbled in. You can create things for these "games", then sell them for the virtual money. If you have enough of this virtual money, you can then sell it for real world dollars. I haven't made enough to turn around and sell it for any significant amount of money, but I can see how it works. And with the economy getting bad and money getting tight, I'm seriously considering trying to pursue this further. What's better than essentially free money, right?

Call for help

Get this. I found a nifty website. It's simply called "Hard to Find 800 Numbers". And it's just that. A list of 800 numbers you can call. Everybody from Amazon.com to Google.com to Yahoo.com's corporate headquarters. Have a look.

Hard to Find 800 Numbers.

Ultra portable and ultra cheap

Asus has started releasing what are being called ultra-portable laptops.
These things, when closed, are about the size of an average hasrdcover
novel, and half the thickness, while still sporting a full keyboard.

Well, that's not entirely true. The keyboard is significantly smaller
than a typical keyboard in order to save space. It definitely takes some
getting used to. The specs aren't bad, 1.6 GHz processor and up to 2
gigs of RAM, depending on your model. It works because it runs Linux.

That's right. No Windows operating system. Instead, it's Linux. It, like
the keyboard, takes some getting used to if you've only used Windows.
But like the keyboard, it's that easy to get used to, if you're willing
to try.

The hard drive isn't very large at all (mine has only about 2 gigs of
space), but with an SD card slot and three USB ports, it's real easy to
expand the memory on flash drives and the like.

Now, here's the kicker. The retail price for an Asus EEE PC with a 1.6
GHz CPU and 512mb of RAM running Linux? Just shy of 300 dollars. To me,
that's the most impressive part of this whole thing.

That's a great price, considering it'll do just about everything my
desktop computer (running Vista) will do, minus run the games.

All in all, it's worth checking out if you're looking for something
portable to use for photo editing and MP3's and office applications.