In order to make an extra bit of pocket cash, I've been using PayPerPost on my JDorama review blog. The idea behind PPP is that bloggers sign up and after their blog is approved, they get to choose from a list of advertisers what they want to post about. Each opportunity has different requirements and, as such, pays varying amounts. Once you write your post, you submit it to PPP for approval. After the post is approved, you wait 30 days and payment is sent via PayPal. In the beginning, I thought this was a really awesome service. I could make some (fairly) quick and easy money while blogging. However, after about a month, the opportunities began to dry up. Instead of $10 or $20 opportunities, all that is available nowadays are $5 opportunities asking you to blog about a educational tutoring service. Granted, I've made about $150 in the short time I've been using PPP but it doesn't seem that I'm going to be making much more than that.

If you're looking to make a little bit of money off your blog and you don't mind waiting the 30 days for payment, PPP would be worth a shot. I'm really hoping that things pick up for them and a bigger variety of opportunities become available for bloggers. Otherwise, this service is pretty useless.

I've always been a PC girl. My Windows machine has always done pretty much what I wanted it to. Now I've run into somewhat of a snag. I do quite a bit of amateur voice acting and lately it's been a lot of singing parts. However, I can't get my Windows-based laptop to mix music properly. So I will be looking into getting a MacBook. I'm currently using Audacity for my voice recording needs. And it does a good job at recording. However, when you go to mix tracks, you can't manipulate one track while you have the other tracks open. Meaning: if you want to mix two vocal tracks with one instrumental track and one of the vocal tracks needs the volume raised. Audacity won't allow you to change the volume on JUST that track. You need to close the other two tracks, try to get the volume on the first track correct then reopen the other tracks to mix. It's time consuming and annoying. I end up with tracks that has the instrumental part too loud most of the time.

After talking to some friends that own Macs, I really like what GarageBand has to offer. I can have a bunch of tracks open and manipulate each track however I want. Of course, the main problem is the price. We purchased our Dell laptop just about a year ago so we're still paying that off, which makes a Mac a bit unaffordable at the moment. Hopefully I'll be able to scratch together enough money to buy one soon. It would be nice to be able to work on the music stuff properly.

Granted, I'm not looking to change everything over to Mac. I still enjoy video games, which my PC does very well. But I'm not elitist. I know that certain machines do certain things better than other machines do. I'm OK with that. I just need to find which machine does what I want and does it well. And maybe I can branch out with some other media-based projects with it at the same time.