The Internet is For..

Well, besides that.

Yes, today's post is late; I have a perfectly valid excuse if you want to ask me so-please-don't-drop-my-grade-by-a-letter.

One of the really really cool things about PartnerPenguin working for a startup (zextme.com, formerly zebedoo.com) is that I get to find out about a lot of really cool and weird startups. This occasionally leads to cool things. I feel that promoting startups keeps up morale because of the omnipresent threat of failure. Here are some startups and old fogies who could be really helpful to being a college student or just navigating the internet for useful things instead of junk.

www.freedompop.com
Probably one of the best ideas/startups I've found recently has been freedompop.com. They solved my big problem of not having internet at home. Basically, you order a (refundable) special usb dongle (heehee) which has 4G network connection capacity. From there, it works like a data plan and the first 500 mb are free. 500mb is enough to do homework on Pearson's website (flash heavy) and check e-mails and all the wonderful comments from my readers (*_*). After that, they have a pay as you go plan which starts at $10/mo for the next threshold which is 1 GB of internet.
PartnerPenguin just ran a speed check and it's faster than the global average and 1/3 as fast as the fancy internet at his work (so pretty damn fast). It does run by similar rules to a cell phone in terms of working better near windows because 4G sattelite/cell tower signal. The only problem I've encountered so far was that I had the dongle sent to a different address than the billing address and it bounced and got delivered to the billing address. That defeated the purpose a bit since I'm afraid someone will steal my mail. But their customer service department has been pretty good so far. Will keep updates if I have a problem.

https://pantre.me/
This company is a refrigerator which they stock with (really yummy) healthy food which is all microwavable. They stock the fridge once a day and on sushi day they donate the leftovers (after a certain time) to local kids who need food. All of their food is better than Lean Cuisine at about the same price, and they have a first time user special offer of $5 off the total order. PartnerPenguin and I got 3 full meals for $8.

http://www.transitunlimited.org
I don't know if this is a startup but it's a really handy wiki I recently found. I really like that they put obscure transit juxtaposed with the main transit agencies so you can find out if there is a shuttle between the places where you want to go and how often it runs. I would love if there were more Eastern Cities on there so I'm going to see if I can help edit at least one city in and I call upon my East Coast friends who might have time to edit and share this potentially amazing and time-saving resource.

www.chegg.com
Not the newest site but definitely useful if your school's library doesn't have a rental aspect to their bookstore. Renting or buying textbooks can be a difficult toss-up because what if you need the information in the future? I've rented books mostly for General Ed's where the information was great and informative but I didn't really think that I would need the reference. It's always a good idea to keep your syllabi and maybe write down the ISBNs of the books so that you can get them from a library in the future. I've actually never used this site because I've only used my school's rentals but just make sure you read your whole rental agreement before you ship.

www.wolframalpha.com
The way to know the gods truly do smile upon us. This site is spectacular for most things math. I haven't used it for any other subjects but I think it knows about a lot of things, particularly science-y. It is really useful to see if the answer you got is correct though it doesn't always have a step-by-step explanation. It knows ALLL the math. It's pretty flippin' sweet.

www.amazon.com
I have a friend who worked for Amazon when they were "all a bunch of pot smokin' hippies on roller skates" and is still bitter they sold out. But Amazon has become quite an amazing resource for...just about anything. Of course, they have books but they also have a rather decent amount of food and gear for just about anything you want. If you have a safe mailing address and don't need something immediately, it is almost always cheaper to find a place to get it online. I know there are other places extant on the interwebs but I've had my credit card stolen so I don't generally give the number to places where I have a shadow of a doubt about their legit-ness. Amazon is pretty solid about that type of thing so it's cool.

www.khanacademy.org/
Hats off to Sal. Sal (and The Conductor) got me through PreCalculus. This site has little lesson plans on just about every topic I needed in Math and I think they have a pretty decent breadth of other stuff too. What I really really like about this site is that the "lessons" are very specific, short and well written. Sal, the narrator of the math ones, is very down to earth so at the beginning of the video you feel like he's just talking to you about nothing. And by the end, you know what the delta-epsilon definition of a limit is and you wonder how it got into your brain. Even if you're not in school, this can be a decent tool for learning small bits of knowledge on an as-needed basis.

www.pandora.com
The only reason I would want more than 500mb of internet. I am a strange sort of person who works 5097823640237 times better when I have music in the background. Not talking, just music. I love music like a drug and I need my fix. Pandora was one of my favorite internet discoveries ever. IF you've never used it, (after you make a free account) you just type the name of an artist or a song and it has an algorithm to find similar music. One trick my boss taught me is that you can't hit "like" too many times because it messes up the algorithm. If you have the free version, you get ads like broadcast radio but they tend to be the same ads over and over. (They really think I want a Veraggio ring.) The paid version, no ads, is only $4/mo but even that I can't afford so I just tune out for those 30 seconds. Considering I listen to broadcast radio the rest of the time, (upwards of 2 minutes of straight ads) it's not too bad. I've found some amazing new artists and some great gems which I wouldn't have ever happened upon and I love it a lot.
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No Recipe this week, e-mail or comment me and I'll write you one!