Phone Phun

It's not easy getting into college. Study your brains out; get involved in all the extracurricular stuff, fill out applications, write endless essays, and so much more. And that's all before you're even accepted. Once you get the "fat envelope" with your acceptance materials in it, then there's a whole new set of concerns. Now that you're going, you have to answer the biggest question of all: how do you pay for it?

One resource that's available to help figure it all out is 1-877-PAY-4-SCHOOL (1-877-729-4724). Each week they have a new hotline message that includes general tips about the financial aid process, as well as listings of scholarships and other funding sources. They supplement this information on their website with links to "featured scholarships".

Whether you're looking at Ivy League schools or your local Community College, you owe it to yourself to find out what money is available to you out there.

We're constantly bombarded with information. Radio, TV, Web, email, phone, fax—the list does go on. With a fairly high noise-to-signal ratio, we have all become pretty adept at filtering-out most of this stuff. That's all well and good, until you realize that you just missed that vital piece of info that went flying past.

The ad plays on the radio. They give you the number to call—once, twice, three times. It's just as that final recitation of the "where to call" fades off into the distance that you realize "Darn! I really need to new widget, and those guys are selling them. What was that number anyway?"

OnTheRadio.net has a commercial-finder service. If you enter enough of the particulars about your missing ad into their Web form—the time the ad played, the station you were listening to—they claim to be able to help you find your commercial. We tried several times, but were unfortunately met with the sad message "Only radio stations that have commercials registered are shown." Clearly none of our stations were registered, so we never got to find out what the missing phone number was. Hopefully they'll register more stations in the future and help you find your missing ads.

Way back when, you needed an iPod to listen to a podcast. Then folks figured out that it might be useful to listen on your computer. Now you can listen to them on your phone as well.

Podlinez is a service that lets you listen to podcasts on your phone, whether it be wireless or a land line. They currently list over two thousand podcasts on their site as being available through this service, so you can probably find your favorites in there. They include such standards as CNN and NPR news updates, and more exotic fare like updates on the Iditarod Dogsled Race and more. They say that they always keep the most current version available, so you won’t have to worry about rehashing old stuff all over again.

You can browse their list of available podcasts, or enter the URL for your favorites and see if they're available from them. For each podcast, there is a separate phone number, so you'll get what you're looking for. They give you at least a bit of control over your listing, letting you jump ahead or back in a given podcast by pressing buttons on your handset.

While having your phone jammed against the side of your head may not be the most comfortable way to listen to podcasts, it's certainly better than having to miss out.