Shyzer.com

Will Ferrell is back. “I’ll use this weapon on that devil horse if I have to! You sure it’s not a bear or a puma?”

Simpsons, Pokemon, and Bill Cosby. Are any other three items combined funnier then these?

You think you fight above stupid shit with your girlfriend? This guy feels your pain all too well.

Margret doesn’t like to watch films on the TV. No, hold on - let me make sure you’ve got the inflection here: Margret doesn’t like to watch films on the TV. She says she does, but years of bitter experience have proven that what she actually wants is to sit by me while I narrate the entire bleeding film to her. ‘Who’s she?’, ‘Why did he get shot?’, ‘I thought that one was on their side?’, ‘Is that a bomb’ - ‘JUST WATCH IT! IN THE NAME OF GOD, JUST WATCH IT!‘

And finally, I have to plug this movie. It’s not every day that I see a movie that immediately cracks into my Top 25 Movies Ever list, but this one sure shot up the charts quickly. The basic premise is a Fahrenheit 451 meets The Matrix type movie. It’s the future, human emotion is outlawed, and a small underground is fighting to preserve such items as artwork, literature, and music. The action scenes don’t even come close to those in The Matrix, but the acting and emotions portrayed by the characters are far and above superior. In fact, I honestly can say I would have rather seen Christian Bale portray the character of Neo over Keanu Reeves. Seriously, if you have a night to burn or have access to Kazaa Lite, go rent / download Equilibrium. You won’t be disappointed.

[EDIT]This post is amazingly outdated at this point. Most of the info below is no longer valid, but the gist of the post is still the same. If you have a few bucks and a few friends, you can get a free iPod. If you’re still interested after reading this post, click one of the image above and get started![/EDIT]

I’ve never liked scams. In fact, I have yet to find anybody who genuinely thought being scammed out of money or time could be called an enjoyable experience. Which is why I tend to take almost everything I read on the net with not just a grain of salt, but a whole damn truckload of salt.

So as you can imagine, when I saw a site offering free iPods, I laughed and moved on. Maybe I should have done a little more research back then.

My sudden shift in attitude came earlier this week while I was talking to some fellow clan members. I’m sure many of you don’t know, but there is an on-line video game based on the Matrix coming out this fall. As you can imagine, people began making clans and websites in preparation for the game once it finally came out. One such clan even went so far as to make an extremely difficult test and application process to weed out the idiots, which means that those of us in the clan are pretty tight-knit and don’t try to screw with each other. Therefore, when I saw one of them posting that his friend had actually gotten a free iPod from some website, I decided to listen to him and do some research of my own.

Well I’ve done my research can say with a straight face that this looks to be a legit operation here. The site is located over at www.freeipods.com and is run by a company called Gratis Internet. They specialize in online pay-for-performance acquisitions and are even a member of the Better Business Bureau. I’ve been able to go back and trace many of their older offers they ran and frankly, there are tons of satisfied customers and only a few people that talk of being disappointed.

But enough about all of that. I’m sure you are sitting there saying to yourself, “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE DAMN IPOD?! HOW DO I GET IT?!” Quite easily. In fact, it only takes three simple steps.

First, create an account at freeipods. (But don’t do it yet you idiot! Wait until you’ve read of all this before you run off all half-cocked thinking you’ve got everything under control!)

Second, you choose one of the links on freeipod’s site, click it, and sign up with THAT company. (Calm down you idiots! No, you don’t need a credit card or have to pay a dime if you do the E-Bay offer!)

Third, you get 5 other people to do it.

So why would I be making this long-ass post if that was all you had to do? I mean, couldn’t you have just found that information on freeipod’s site? Of course you could have. But could you have found this easy ass guide I’m about to give you on their site? No, I didn’t think so.

Being the cheap poor person that I am, I quickly realized that there might be some hidden charges here. I mean, you never know what a company will just start charging you when you sign up for a new account with them and as I scrolled down the list of links you could click, I marked them off. AOL will give you a thousand free months but of course they want your credit card. Columbia House will dump mounds of CDs in your lap, just as long as you buy five for $35.00 a year later. E-Bay will….wait a minute.

E-BAY! See, I’ve been selling and buying things on E-Bay for years and if there is one thing that I learned early on, it was that you need not a single credit card to make an account and start buying things on E-Bay. And what’s this I see? All you have to do is make an account and “bid” on something? You don’t have to actually “win” the item? Oh this is gonna be sweet…

That’s right. Freeipods gets a referral bonus from E-Bay for every basic account created! All you have to do is give them your name, e-mail, and address and you are in! Once through with that, you just have to become the highest bidder on an item. Notice I didn’t say win. For instance, I did a quick search on E-Bay for digital cameras and found hundreds of them starting off at 0.01 cents. I made a bid of 0.25 cents, became the highest bidder, and was done. Of course, somebody came behind me and bid $50.00, meaning I didn’t win the digital camera for a quarter, but that’s the beauty of it all. That’s what is supposed to happen!

“But Goob,” you might be saying, “E-Bay won’t let you use a free e-mail account like Yahoo of Hotmail. What should I do?” Well that’s easy. Go to Yoggin.com or Big Puns. Or heck, if you own your own website, just make up a new e-mail account and use that!

That’s it! You’re done! Now all you have to do is get five friends to do it! Without much effort, I got a fellow clan member to sign up and do the E-Bay offer within minutes of asking him. In fact, I planned on just going down my buddy list and getting four friends to do it for me as well before I realized that I should share the wealth. Why get my friends to help me when I could easily help them get their own iPod as well.

Which is where this whole post comes into play. I want to help everybody get an iPod so this is what we are gonna do. I still need four more referrals since I decided to wait and ask people here in my post. My referral link is right here [link has since been removed], so click it and THEN make your account. I’ll get credited with a referral, you’ll have your account, and everybody wins. But like I said, I want to help my friends get five referrals as well.

So, if you click my link and sign up, say something in the comments of this post! Let me know you signed up using my link and then go ahead and post YOUR referral link. I’ll post those here on Shyzer and send them to all my friends until YOU have your five referrals. I’ve got plenty of clan members who are waiting for the rest of us to sign up before they sign up so that they don’t lose people a referral and honestly, if you think about it, how hard is it to get five people to do this for you? I’m looking at my buddy list right now and see 10 or 15 people who I know would take five minutes out of their lives to do me a favor, even if they didn’t want an iPod or not. So do me the favor, click my link, do the E-Bay thing, and then leave a comment with your referral link so that I can help you!

Here’s a few tips you might want to consider when making your accounts: Make sure YOU USE THE SAME HOME ADDRESS for signing up for E-Bay as you used for signing up at freeipods.com. This makes the verification process quicker and you will get credited sooner. If you are waiting to be credited on the e-Bay offer, you may or may not get credit for it until after the auction you bid on is over. So if the auction you bid on lasts for a week, don’t expect the e-Bay offer to be credited to you right away after bidding, give it awhile. And finally, it’s best not to have your referrals signed up using the same IP address as you. So getting someone in your house, using the same internet connection as you, signed up as your referral is a BAD IDEA. They will check to make sure they are indeed unique referrals and if they suspect that you’re cheating, then no IPOD for you. And it goes without saying, don’t try to sign up 5 extra times pretending to be your referrals. At least, not from your own home. =)

A great site for tons of information and links (including multiple sites where people photoed the iPod as it arrived at their house) is over at Forever Geeks. I suggest anybody who wants further proof to go check it out.

Earlier this month, Clay, Julianne, and Colton came down to stay with us for a week while my mom was off working. It was enjoyable having them around, which is evident from my total and utter lack of worthwhile posts while they were here. We played baseball out in the back yard and colored picture of Cinderella or Snow White. We stayed up late rehashing old memories and during a few nights, we went ahead and made a few new memories to go along with them. But in the middle of that all, I was reminded of an important fact that at times slips my mind.

You see, while The Kids were down here, we went out to eat with our grandparents. It was a chance for everybody to get together and see each other again given that it had been so long since we had all been in the same room together. During dinner, the topic of an e-mail my granddad had sent my father was brought up, which triggered this chain reaction in my grandmother’s brain. She slowly turned to me, looked me square in the eye, and calmly said; “And I need to clean your mouth out with a bar of soap!”

Say what?! What did I do?! I had just been laughing at something my dad said! It didn’t take long for me to figure out what she was talking about though. She wasn’t talking about something I had said just then or even something I had said that evening. No, she was talking about a few choice words that may or may not have been used by myself here on Shyzer.

That’s right. My grandmother had read Shyzer. Heck, I didn’t even know she had a computer that could load Shyzer! Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining in the least bit of ways. I found a deep sense of satisfaction that my grandma had read my site and maybe even still reads it now. She’s seen what I spend a majority of my time doing, she’s read some of my writing, and now whenever she has the desire to see how I’m doing, she can log onto the Internet and check it out. Now maybe I’m amused by simple pleasures, but I just think that is down right cool.

But there was another lesson to be had from that experience. I have no idea who reads my site. Sure, I have a general idea of which friends and family members do and don’t. It’s easy for me to know when David reads my posts since he is the only person from VT.EDU to ever come to my site. It’s pretty obvious that my siblings and parents read my site if only for the pure fact that they tell me. But the truth of the matter is that no matter how many people I know visit my site, I honestly have no idea of who else visits my site.

Which is why I shamelessly ripped off the Vegas commercials to promise that whatever happened on the camping trip, stayed on the camping trip.

All I can say is it was one of the most memorable trips I have had in quite a while. Various questions I’ve had for what seems like years were answered, some old friendships were reminded of their strengths, and a much-needed forum for my true self to emerge was widely available. I wish I could say with a straight face that I wish I could tell you more about our trip, but honestly, I can’t.

Because like I said, whatever happened on the camping trip deserves to stay on the camping trip.

I couldn’t be any happier with the end result.