Ever since I've been using computers and especially since this newage contraption called the interweb, I've never been willing to pay for anything that's not a physical product that I can hold in my hand or can see in real time and space.  In other words, I've always looked for ways to get software/services, or do similar things, for free.  I signed up for free webhosting.  I got my free internet mail.  I stay away from shareware and always stick to freeware.  This is how I've been since the beginning (1998).  And even now, I'm totally into open source programs and stuff like that.  Firefox, Thunderbird, Wiki*anything.  I love it.  That's why it amazes me that I've actually been paying for some things recently.  I paid $5.99 for a domain name because I finally came to the realization that you just can't get a domain name for free, no matter what.  I bought Bible software for my Palm because I didn't feel right downloading it from "somewhere."  The last thing I bought that wasn't hardware was when I was a freshman in college (2000) and I bought Carmageddon TDR, probably the most disappointing game ever created.  Maybe that's why I don't buy things.  But either way, I'm increasingly looking at ways to do things for some small fee because I'm finding that there's almost no way to do everything for free.  This makes sense, of course.  How can anything be free?  The reason most things are free on the internet is because of stupid advertising.  But some things are just plain free.  Like FreeWebTown and Atspace, which offer free webspace.  The catch is that there are ads on their homepages, which is what you use to login.  However, there's a way around it:  FTP everything, which is free.  So essentially, there's no catch.  The shortcoming is that you can't host PHP and Perl and stuff like that.  That's where I'm at right now.  In order to use cool things like Movabletype or WordPress, you need to be able to host PHP.  So this is where I am right now.  Although I have no idea how to use things like PHP and Perl, I'd like to have a webhost that hosts them so that I can find some cool, free, open source stuff to use on my site.  The geek journey continues...