Welcome to JoshClark.com

Update Sept. 22: Clay won! Watch for him at the 2008 World Series, and thanks a ton to everyone who voted!!

You all know I usually don’t do stuff like this, but this is a huge opportunity for a friend of mine, so I said I’d try to help him out.

My friend Clay is a finalist in a competition with a chance to be an on field reporter at the World Series. He needs our help by voting for him (It takes about 20 secs). You can vote for him once a day all this week by going here.
All you have to do is click “Vote for Candidate” under Clay Duerson at the bottom left, and enter an email address (feel free to use a crap address).

Or find out more here:
http://www.clayforcubs.com

If you are on facebook, join this group and he will send you reminders to vote:
http://www.new.facebook.com/group.php?gid=74112280018

And finally, to see a video of Clay in action see below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWUOVVl_NQY

Thanks everybody!

When I graduated from high school and moved away from my home and the friends I had grown up with, it was with sorrow. When I came back to visit and hung out with those friends, each time we parted I left feeling that old nostalgia again, thinking back on the memories we had shared together.

When I finished college and it grew time for me to leave the campus ministry that I had called home for four years, and the people I had grown to love went separate ways and our lives became busy and we no longer made memories together, I again encountered that familiar sadness.
Even thinking back on the classes I had so dreaded, I reminisced with a slight longing on the teachers who had really given me something, on those rare moments when educator and student faded for only a breath to reveal simply a room full of people all caught up in this world together, living out beautiful life. Memories and memories.

And now I have fallen into another group of people, and I will grow to love them much as I have so many others, and we will make new memories together and the years will pass even more quickly. And one day in some unknown future, a time will come when I will leave them as well, and they will leave me; even now I can almost taste the sadness that day holds. I will end up someplace new, part of a different group of people, and I will think back on the many I have known before with a sort of sadness and yearning and missing, and I will wonder how long it will take to grow to love this lot as I have loved the others.

Over and over life’s cycles will take me through this bittersweet carousel. Over and over people will come crashing into my life and then dance away into mist, pieces of myself trailing along after them. But that is the way God has shaped this life. It is why He created us, it is why He died for us. For the grand joy of life does not come in packages. It cannot be found in the furthest dark corners of the sky, nor the bottomless blues of the world. It cannot be bought and it cannot be earned; it cannot be touched or smelt and it has no texture to feel nor any color to see. The deepest joys the Creator placed in this world He put in nothing that could be captured or bottled or sold. He put it in a smile, in a laugh, in a tear. He put it in dancing and running, in cartwheels and kisses. He put it in people, and that is something worth considering.

This is the first time I’ve ever sold my previous semester’s textbooks and not had to buy more for upcoming classes. It’s a nice change, for sure. But for everyone out there looking around for the best prices on textbooks, here is a site that is going to save you some serious dough.

Chegg offers a textbook rental service. Huh? Here’s how it works:

1) You rent books from Chegg for a semester (until December 25th) or a quarter (until November 20th). Their prices are ridiculously low compared to even the used prices you’ll find online. Personal example: my fiancé saved $130.68 on the books she ordered from Chegg, compared to the next lowest prices available elsewhere online. And that was just four books. Prices varied, but most were about half of the price to buy the book used.

2) Use the books all semester, even highlight in them some if you like.

3) At the end of the semester, login to your account on Chegg and print out a prepaid shipping label. Slap it on a box with all your rented books inside and ship it off to Chegg.

4) You saved some green, and Chegg plants a tree for every book you rent from them, so you can feel green too.

Typically I’m all for buying and reselling on eBay every semester. At least that’s what I always did. But most of the time you won’t make close to what you spent, although it’s better than the spare change the bookstore would give you. With Chegg, you’ll save more money in the long run and you won’t have to worry about listing all those books on eBay right after finals.

Chegg has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, USA Today, and CNBC, just to name a few, and has been in business for a little over a year.

Check it out

Trainn has just released another great freebie site, this time for all the photography enthusiasts out there.
Their new site, YourCamera4Free, offers five different cameras to choose from, and of course some cash options.

Camera choices are:
Nikon D40
Sony A200W
Canon A650IS
Olympus SP-570UZ
Canon S5
$300 or $480 cash

For those of you new to Trainn, they offer both referral- and points-based accounts so you can do offers yourself or have others sign up under you. They are a highly-rated legitimate freebie company.

Sign up today!

I’m a bit late in posting, but MacHeist has released a new software bundle with $482 worth of great Mac apps for only $49. I bought the last Macheist bundle in January and it was definitely worth it.

Today is the last day to buy the bundle, so act fast if you’re interested. It’s an unbelievable deal for the software you get. Some of the apps have been included in past MacHeist bundles, and after using them I would recommend every Mac owner get them.
As with before, 25% of your money goes to a charitable organization of your choice, so you’re helping others and getting tons of awesome software!

This bundle includes:
VectorDesigner
DEVONthink Personal
XSlimmer
CoverSutra
Awaken
iClip
Overflow
Cha-Ching
WriteRoom
Enigmo
Bugdom 2
Nanosaur 2
TextExpander
SoundStudio 3

And $5 off at Insanely Great Tees.

Check out the MacHeist site to learn more about all the apps and purchase the bundle!

Some call it brilliant, others may call it taking advantage of the less technologically in-the-know public (which, technically, it is). But whatever you call it, if you have an iPhone and you act quickly, you can upgrade to the new 3G iPhone and even make money doing it.

In case you hadn’t heard, on Monday Apple announced a new iPhone with built-in GPS and 3G Internet that’s 2x faster than the current EDGE service. The biggest news, however, is that it’s only going to cost $199. It will be released on July 11th.

For current iPhone owners interested in upgrading, here’s what you can do:

Get a cheap replacement phone to use for the next month
Go to Best Buy or Walmart and buy the $15 AT&T Prepaid GoPhone by Motorola.
Take the SIM card out of your iPhone and put it in the new Motorola. It’s no longer prepaid, but a regular (cheap) cell phone with your number and service on it.

Sell your current iPhone quick
Sell your current iPhone on eBay. They’re still selling on there for over $300. Some people don’t want to wait, some people live overseas, and much of the general public simply won’t find out about the new iPhone release for a while. The resale value is going to drop like a rock, so act quickly. I wouldn’t be surprised if you could get one for $100 bucks by this Fall.
Be sure to Restore your iPhone in iTunes before selling it, then just don’t re-sync your data to it so it’s empty. Whoever buys your iPhone just needs to take it to an AT&T store to get a new SIM card, then they can activate it in iTunes. It might be a good idea to include that info on a note in the package.

Buy a new 3G iPhone and keep the profit
My iPhone sold for $340, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you got more than that. Now when the new iPhone comes out on July 11th, I’ll buy it for the $199 price tag and keep my $140 profit. Subtract the $15 temporary phone, eBay and PayPal fees, and I still make 100 bucks. Slick, yes?

The fine print
I’ve made calls to Apple and AT&T with various questions on the nitty-gritty of this, and from those conversations and everything I’ve read it seems like the perfect plan. But here’s what you need to know:
First, the new 3G data plan will cost $10/month more than the current EDGE data plan, and it will be required with the new iPhone. This means if you have the lowest iPhone plan like me, your monthly bill will increase from $59.99 to $69.99 (plus taxes and fees, of course).
Second, AT&T has already stated that you’re going to have to renew your contract another two years when you buy the new iPhone. This may or may not be a big deal to you.
Third, AT&T has only released limited information at this time, so the specifics of upgrading, signing a new contract, etc. are all still kind of fuzzy. That being said, I encourage you to read up on this stuff like I have before jumping overboard. For example, some internal AT&T documents got leaked yesterday that make it sound like some current AT&T customers with non-iPhone phones may not be able to buy the 3G iPhone for the new low price. Now in reality, I’m using a cheap Motorola phone, but according to AT&T’s online account, I’m still using an iPhone. So according to my account I shouldn’t have any problems, but I also have friends with iPhones that I could stick my SIM card in solely to have in my pocket should reps at the AT&T store ask if I still have an iPhone. In other words, I have a backup plan.

Everything I’ve heard makes me believe I’ll have no trouble upgrading to the new phone for the $199 price, but I can’t make you any guarantees if you decide to do this yourself. That said, get that iPhone on eBay quick if you’re going for it!

30 days and counting… I miss my iPhone already.

Sidenote:
When I called AT&T and mentioned the new, lower price of the next iPhone, the [apparently yet-to-be-informed] sales lady responded: “$199? No, there’s no way it’ll only be $199. Even our other phones like the BlackBerrys cost more than that.” After a moment’s pause I said, “Um, maybe you should check Apple’s site.” Her response?
“Oh wow. $199.”

So. I’m not dead in a ditch somewhere. But life gets busy, what can I say. In the past two months, I have:

• Finished college (forever!!!)
• Started a company (for all your tech needs in the Lexington area)
• Gotten engaged

 
Now, while life in the real world has been vibrant with activity, that in the online has been somewhat…slower.
As is obvious, I haven’t written about a freebie deal since February, and a good one in much longer. The types of freebie deals we all love - the kind that don’t require any referrals - just haven’t been up to anything new.

Regardless, I’ve kinda dropped the ball on the whole blog thing. And I miss it.

Well, I’m back.

There are plenty of other cool sites and services I want to share with you, not to mention even more important stuff, and if a good freebie deal comes along once in a while, you can still be sure to find out about it here (and the forum is going nowhere).

If my writing frequency does happen to go downhill again, feel free to email me. Seriously. Be like, “Where the crap are my blog posts, Josh?” A little encouragement never hurts.

More to come…

Yesterday Trainn revealed a new site specifically for gift cards and cash, which are usually the most popular items of freebie sites.
YourGiftCards4free offers cash amounts of $300 and $430, and gift card amounts of $300, $400, and $450.

Trainn is one of the top-rated, very legit freebie networks. You can see a list of their other sites in my original review.

You can choose gift cards from any of the following merchants:

Amazon.com AMC Theatres American Airlines American Eagle Outfitters Apple Avis Car Rental Barnes&Noble Banana Republic Barneys New York Bass Pro Shops Bath & Body Works Best Buy Bed Bath & Beyond Blockbuster Bloomingdale’s Borders Books and Music Brookstone Cabela’s Crate & Barrel Crutchfield Dave and Buster’s DicksSportingGoods.com Dillard’s DOTS Drugstore.com Eddie Bauer EXPRESS f.y.e Famous Footwear Fandango Fashion Bug Finish Line Foot Locker

Fossil.com Gap Hard Rock Cafe Hyatt Hotels and Resorts J.Crew L.L. Bean Lane Bryant Linens ‘N Things Lord & Taylor Lowe’s Macy’s Marriott Old Navy Overstock.com Pep Boys PETCO Pier 1 Imports Pottery Barn Saks Fifth Avenue Shell SportsAuthority.com Staples Sunglass Hut Talbots Target The Sharper Image TicketsNow.com TigerDirect.com Timberland Wal-Mart Williams-Sonoma Zales

Sign up today!

With no amazingly spectacular freebie deals to write about lately, the blog has been collecting dust. Not to let it go to waste, I thought I’d start a series of posts introducing useful online services that are either free or just a great deal.

To begin, let me give a bit of advice regarding backing up your data: forget about it. You shouldn’t have to worry about copying your things to discs, or dragging them across your network. It’s just too much hassle. Just forget about it.

Let Mozy do it for you.

Mozy is a free, online backup solution that automatically saves your stuff on a set frequency. Every four hours, Mozy is silently backing up my entire documents folder to their secure servers, keeping an up-to-date copy, and I don’t even have to think about it.

Recently I suffered a large amount of data loss. When upgrading my MacBook Pro to Mac OS X Leopard, I made a copy of my entire drive on an external hard drive. After I had erased my Mac’s hard drive and installed Leopard, I plugged in the external drive to retrieve my stuff. An error about disk reliability appeared on my screen, and the hard drive made an odd churning sound, immediately before exploding in a raging ball of fire that incinerated my apartment. Well maybe not, but for whatever reason it had chosen that exact moment to die on me. My stuff was gone.

But wait! Months earlier I had installed Mozy and set it to backup my documents folder on a regular basis. Visiting their site, I followed the instructions to download the saved copies of my stuff. It worked perfectly. My music and pictures were gone, but all of my documents, website stuff, and schoolwork were saved.

Maybe you have all of your stuff backed up on an external drive (which could be stolen or destroyed in a fire, or die just like mine did). Maybe you don’t have any backup solution in place at all. Whatever the case, Mozy is an extremely useful tool that doesn’t require you to do anything but install it and forget about it.

Mozy works on Mac or PC. Their free service is limited to 2GB of storage, which is probably enough for your most important data. If you decide to backup everything you have, you can upgrade to unlimited space for $4.95 a month. I’m seriously considering doing so soon.

Sign up today. You’ll thank yourself later. (Use the link in this post to receive an extra 256MB for free!)

Note: to sign up for the free service, click on MozyHome at the top, then Sign Up Now under the orange MozyHome Free section on the left.

Now that I’m done with school, I’m working full time with my company Lifewire. We provide all sorts of services to the Lexington area: home theater stuff, computer networking & support, commercial pre-wire, and just about everything in between.

We’re about to start providing a new service called Try-a-Mac, Buy-a-Mac.

The problem: many PC users might be thinking about switching to Mac, but don’t want to plunk down a ton of money for something they aren’t sure they’ll like or be able to adjust to.

The solution: we’ll let them rent a Mac from us for a few weeks to try it out. We can even sit down and show them how to use it.

Afterwards they can decide whether or not they’d like to buy one of their own.

We think this unique service is something a lot of people will be interested in, but we don’t know for sure. So, if you PC users out there could take a second and answer the poll below, that would be awesome. You don’t have to live in or around Lexington to answer. Thanks!

On the eve of Macworld Expo, MacHeist has released a full bundle of Mac apps at an incredible deal. MacHeist started up last year, offering the Mac community a chance to solve puzzles and “missions” in order to unlock software to be added to a discount bundle. It was an incredible discount and I was sorry that I only found out about it after the deal was over.

This year, MacHeist has done it again. The full bundle of apps was unlocked today, including $368.75 $428.65 worth of software for only $49. Also, 25% of your money goes to one of several charities you can choose from. Some of the apps even cost more than the bundled $49 price. All in all, it’s an incredible deal.

The following software is included:
1password - award winning password manager
CoverSutra - beautiful iTunes controller
Cha-Ching - elegant and intuitive finances
iStopMotion - make your own stop motion films
Awaken - wake up to iTunes
Speed Download - download manager that does everything
AppZapper - “the uninstaller Apple forgot”
TaskPaper - easy to use To-Do list manager
CSSEdit - web development the easy way
Snapz Pro X - screencasts and screengrabs
Pixelmator - powerful image editing
Wingnuts 2 - Apple design award runner-up for game of the year - just added!

Check out the site soon. This deal is only available for 9 more days.