Have you heard about Idol Gives Back?  More than likely you have.  Have you donated?  The money goes to help kids in our country and others have a better life.  Helping them out with things like books, safe places to live & play and medication.

It’s easy to give back.  You can donate online, by mail or by phone.  Details on the American Idol website.

You can also just open iTunes, click on the Idol Gives Back banner and purchase some music.  Songs from Snoop Dogg, Fergie, Carrie Underwood, Miley Cyrus, Heart and more are available.  That’s a pretty simple way to donate.

I thought I’d write a random post with some of what’s on my mind this weekend.

I’ve been a member of Hulu for a few weeks now and I have to say that I’m quite impressed with it. The TV networks have really come together to create one great solution for internet TV.

Hulu has a clean interface and is user friendly. It’s not over done with ads or extra stuff. It’s been streamlined and the only thing that could make it better is if the site was created with a black background and not white. That’d make the shows look so much nicer.

YouTube has long been the goto place to find anything you missed from TV, or just to watch things you’d never see on TV. However, lately, it just seems like it’s being spammed more and more.

In this example, I searched for Carrie Underwood and got a bit of spam instead.

Since YouTube is owned by Google, you’d think they could detect this. Tons of keywords strung together should be pretty easy to detect. Or what about noticing that a video is tagged with nude or porn but it’s not marked as adult? How hard would it be to detect that? Or what about videos that have the same title, same description, same running time and that were uploaded at the same time? Can we say duplicate content? It seems Google’s SEO rules are not in play at YouTube.

It’s not exactly in English, but it doesn’t really matter. There is an official Simpsons Firefox theme promoting the movie.

Sure, it’s a German theme, but it contains doughnuts and The Simpsons Movie logo.

I had thought of creating a Simpsons theme once, but it would have been much more character orientated. Still, it’s kind of fun and looks decent. Not enough Simpsons for me, but the doughnuts look tasty.

Download the theme from the official Mozilla Addon site.

One way or another, everyone capitalizes off the internet. If you’re in the music biz, write a song about it.

Brad Paisley has written some interesting songs in the past including Ticks, Alcohol & Celebrity and continues his string with one called Online. It’s all about how we mask who we really are on sites like MySpace and become much cooler online.

Apple is taking their TV Get Mac ads and creating web specific ones. Since I block most advertising on the net, I didn’t notice until yesterday. These sure beat out any ‘punch the monkey’ ads or giant pigs with the 50 states on them trying to get me to re-finance. Hopefully Apple will help re-invent the online advertising game too as it’s horribly outdated.

Check out the online only Get Mac ads below.

Drive premiers on FOX this Sunday and the show looks good. It’s about an illegal cross country road race and the characters already seem likable. But I hope to avoid watching it because you know that’ll happen, they’ll race across the country for the next three our four years.

Look at Prison Break. Those guys have been trying to get free for many seasons and now most of them that did get out of jail are back in it. And don’t get me started on Lost. Love the show but annoyed that I may never get to see the ending as it drags on forever!

It’s not often that we watch MadTV but my wife and I caught a few minutes of it last week and caught a hilarious iRack sketch.

It talks about a new Apple product, the iRack, and how some feel it’s unstable and that we shouldn’t be working with the iRack. See for yourself…

Over the weekend, our TV came in stock at Target and we were all over that. We now have a nice new high definition TV for watching movies and playing Wii!

I didn’t realize that you could get HDTV over the normal airwaves too. I was delighted when I got one HD channel with the antenna on our house that was probably installed in the 1950s. With a little playing around, I ended up with 8 HD TV channels! One of which is a 24hour local weather channel. Sweet.