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I can remember back in Little League Baseball, when I was the smallest kid on the team, and certainly the least athletic. by Dr. David Jowdy.
By Robert Sloan In the current worldwide economic crisis, many people are forced to tighten their budgets. Those with jobs feel a need for less debt and more savings. Those without are adjusting down to unemployment benefits or trying to stretch what resources they have as far as they'll go. Even those in good shape economically can benefit from tightening their budgets. So here are ten tips in no particular order that may help you shorten your monthly expenses and have more for savings or luxuries that you want. 1. Only spend money you actually have. Don't use credit cards unless they are completely empty and you can pay the purchase in full within 30 days. Interest on credit cards is so ruinous that if you keep going on minimum payments you can wind up paying for everything you bought four or five times over before going bankrupt. The debt is real but the terms are so ludicrous that if all you do is avoid and eliminate credit card debt, that is the single biggest money saver you can do. You'll be surprised at the difference it makes actually living within your means -- they are probably more generous than they seem if you're used to living on credit. One less bill a month at a time and then retire the cards in favor of a debit card. Or keep one and treat it AS a debit card. That is dangerous because you could wind up going into debt with an emergency, but if you don't use it as credit even in emergencies you can still collect the perks and inducements credit card companies use to hook people in. Don't try using it as debit unless you really can stick to it. Do NOT think of your credit line as money you have available. Most of the people I know including me, who have made this work, went cold turkey and cut up all the cards before paying off the balance or going bankrupt. If you do this before going bankrupt you can do a lot more with what you have than you thought you could. 2. Cut back or cut out on eating at restaurants unless it's a business meal that may get you important commissions or a date that may get you a good mate. If you're already in a relationship, prepare a romantic meal yourself at home with candlelight and flowers, it's cheaper and more personal. A good restaurant meal can cost as much as a week or even a whole month's food budget and when it's over, you have nothing to show for it but the memory of the experience. Likewise, cut out or cut down drinking in bars. If you enjoy alcohol socially, most bars don't have much social interaction. They're just places people sit and drink or cruise for dates. You can have a much better social experience if you purchase a bottle of liquor for the price of one drink and invite friends over for a party. Sure, it means cleaning up your home before and after, but it's also a reason to clean up where you live and make it more livable. Also you have more control over who's there and what's going on at a party you host. If you like a weekly drink at the end of the workweek, turning that into a gathering of friends as a regular event can be just as familiar and pleasant as stopping at a bar -- and you can rotate who's buying or hosting. 3. Find hobbies that pay for themselves or make your main hobbies pay for themselves. Any hobby that you're good at has some potential for income -- projects you make can be sold on eBay, Etsy and other online markets, skills you have can be shared by writing online for websites that pay for articles. Even if your passion isn't something obviously easy to monetize, you can go to http://www.sitesell.com and invest in an SBI website. The business plan and Site Build It software will turn any passionate interest into an ad-supported topical interest website that usually at least pays for itself and most often winds up making a real profit on the time you'd spend hanging out online writing about your favorite topic. Other venues for topical nonfiction don't take the $299 investment of SBI! so you can start in a no-capital way with http://www.ehow.com, http://www.helium.com and other pay for posts sites. 4. Purchase games that you own instead of getting into pay-for-play online gaming. The quality of home games makes them a good bargain for amount of entertainment time you get, but pay-for-play games add another bill to your budget. 5. Bank at a credit union. You will get better service because your "share" account is exactly that -- you're a shareholder in that financial institution and they will cater to you as shareholder as well as customer. Credit unions often offer better terms and are not going to run the ripoffs that a bank whose main interest is stockholder dividends will pull. You get a better deal and better service with less sales pressure to participate in high risk or high interest financial activities. 6. Take up a real sport or outdoor activity instead of joining a gym for your health. Unless you are so passionate about gym stuff itself, such as bodybuilding as a hobby, it will become both a time and money sink. You can get better health if you take up something like plein air painting, marathon walking, softball or some physical activity that gives great enjoyment but can be organized just by meeting others who are interested in sharing it. Most times the fees for sports clubs and so on are a lot cheaper than gym memberships. If there isn't a club for what you want to do, put up flyers and online notices in your area's local website to start one and give your contact information. 7. Cut back or cut out convenience foods in favor of raw ingredients. Baking your own bread is healthier with whole wheat flour. Oatmeal, the normal kind, cooks as fast as instant and costs pennies on the dollar versus instant packets, even if you put in the raisins, brown sugar, apple bits and so on. Breakfast cereal is a huge offender for not being cost effective, it's expensive and vanishes fast but hasn't got nearly the nutrition that hot cereals made at home do. Turkey is a good bargain for cost of meat and quantity of good meat, either ground turkey or just roasting a whole one with all the trimmings and eating on it for a week. By eliminating overpriced processed convenience foods, you can afford to buy at organic food stores and improve quality. If you don't have a lot of time for cooking, plan for crock pot meals, big batches of food like the roast turkey and choose a weekend day to cook several big dishes at the same time. Save individual servings in Tupperware in the fridge and eat all week without stopping to cook. A benefit is being able to customize that to exactly your own tastes. Even a person living alone can save money cooking in bulk rather than spending hours on just one meal (except special occasions). 8. Shop online. The overhead for almost anything you can buy online is a lot lower than businesses supporting more employees, rent in a good location and utilities for a shop. Retail prices are based on costs of running "brick and mortar" shops -- so online businesses routinely sell way below retail. For the patience of waiting a few days for the item to arrive, you may get it at half price or less. I've applied this to art supplies and my studio setup is worth about three times as much as I've invested in it over the years. I get the best of everything by watching for Clearance sales and email coupons from my favorite suppliers. Windowshopping at physical stores and then buying online can be a way to have fun. 9. Shop at thrift and secondhand shops. If you enjoy the process of shoppng as many people do, it's as much fun going to a thrift shop with a set cash budget in pocket as it would be to cruise through a mall with a credit card. Fou are still getting personal, respectful attention from salespeople and getting to make choices on the spot. That is the real pleasure of in person shopping. So take it to a flea market and spend only cash that you really have and already budgeted. You'll start getting into bargain hunting and improve everything from your wardrobe and furnishings to books, hobbies and tools at a fracton of the cost. 10. Get a good refurbished computer about six months out of date when you need a new computer. Refurbished laptops and desktops have lasted longer with less trouble than the three new computers I've owned. I suspect that the refurbishing process is one more level of shakedown and inspection as opposed to factory processes that rush new tech to market. Same for most electronics. Cost is much lower, quality much higher for the cost and in a subtle way it's far better quality because the refurbishers are very careful about their work and eliminate flaws. You got the survivors of that batch when they get refurbished. 11. Buy a good used car instead of a new car. I know, that won't actually stimulate the economy, but it'll cost a lot less and it has the same refurbish benefits as the refurb computers. You may even manage to get a good running one without making car payments and that could eliminate an entire bill from your budget. 12. For vacations, check out church retreats and club events where the members or congregation have done everything to cut costs and it's not for profit. A weekend camping with comfortable cabins and meals might only cost $30 or $40 a person versus the usual costs of weekend vecations. Even longer vacations can be organized by a group you belong to with a theme or activity that you genuinely enjoy, among people you know. They are much more likely to be cheaper because the group gets group rates and can cut expenses while getting a good time. If you want to organize something like that, plan a year in advance. Get plenty of people signing up for it -- it could be anything from a family gathering to a topical hobby week at a hotel. When hotels sell a certain number of hotel rooms in a package the rates drop real low, plus they throw in perks like free conference rooms and party rooms. The process of planning and organizing the event can be a good way to bond with your friends and have a good time working up to it. 13. Be patient. Instant gratification usually costs a bundle. When you plan a luxury event or purchase and take your time windowshopping, weigh your priorities and choices and change them constantly, that is a pleasurable kind of planning. It's not as painful as cutting back when it's focused on "get the most for my money" and I spend lots of time hunting for bargains on -- luxuries. Extras that I could live without but enjoy very much. It's important to have at least some discretionary budget, not just for finding sudden clearance bargains but to keep out of a bitter hopeless sense of frustration. It doesn't have to be much to be a lot of fun, but every financial counselor or money expert I've ever known has pointed out that entertainment budget is necessary for anyone to save money over the long haul. So when you save money on any of these tips, you make that entertainment budget a little larger. Make sure to reward yourself for all this thrift. For everything that you like and put off till later, think of something cool that you want and will get later on -- don't break promises to self on this sort of thing or it's too easy to go off the budget and crash. I am making this article available by Creative Commons Attribution - No Derivative Works, as it is for public benefit. I have one specific condition you must abide by: if you are reposting this article, you MUST link to http://www.explore-oil-pastels-with-robert-sloan.com as well as my Qassia page. That is the one specific attribution I require for you to copy and distribute this article. This text is part of the article and should not be deleted.
By: Subhash Bassi Google Adsense is online advertising that you can place on your website to make money for you. It is free for you to use, easy to set up, and if you target your ads correctly, you can generate a nice income with very little work on your part. How do you use Google Adsense? By selecting keywords that are relevant to the content on your website you can choose to display ads on your site that visitors are likely to find interesting and click on. You select the format you wish the ads to display in on your web pages. You then cut and paste some HTML code into your website so that the ads can be generated in the places you wish them to appear. It can take a few minutes to get up and running with Adsense, for more details visit to www.instant-adsense-dollars.com but a wise site operator will take the time to use the following tips to greatly improve their Adsense earnings. Here are five sure-fire ways to improve your online advertising earnings.
With no cost on your part to use Adsense, it really is a great way to use online advertising to generate income for you. Sign up for a free account at with this Google service and start profiting from the good quality content you have on your website. Author Resource:-> www.googleadsense-empire.com Article From Freebie Articles
By Alfred Adebare
The Wikipedia Encyclopedia describes open source as “practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's sources.” Before the label open source was coined, developers and producers used a variety of phrases to describe the concept. In fact, earlier researchers used a process which is similar to open standards to develop telecommunication network protocols. Characterized by contemporary open source work, this collaborative process led to the birth of the Internet in 1969. Its application to software gained popularity with the emergence of the Internet. It is said that the open source label came out of a strategy session held at Palo Alto, California, in reaction to Netscape’s announcement that it planned to release the source code for its browser Navigator. The politically correct version is that to clarify a potential confusion caused by the ambiguity of the word “free”, so that the perception of free software is not anti-commercial, the label open source (contributed by Chris Peterson) stuck. The official version is that it was to shed the confrontational attitude that had been associated with free software in the past and sell the idea on pragmatic, business case grounds to the commercial world. Whatever it may be, Netscape listened and released their code as open source under the name of Mozilla. That was the beginning of the contemporary open source movement, whose main champion today allegedly is the Open Source Initiative (“OSI”) which makes and continues to make a case for the open source software to the commercial world. Consequently, we have seen the application of the open source philosophy in other fields inlcuding biotechnology. Linus Torvalds, a finnish software engineer who initiated the development of the Linux kernel went as far as saying "the future is open source everything". According to the OSI, the case for open source software is simple – free access to read, redistribute and modify the source code of a piece of software results in a rapid evolutionary process that produces better software. Advocates of open source argue that when programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing. However, evangelists of free software have been at pains to clarify that open source software is not synonymous with free software. The philosophy of the open source movement is based on practicality and not ethical considerations while free software is based on freedom, not price. Borrowing from Richard M. Stallman, “free software” and “open source” describe the same category of software, more or less, but say different things about the software, and about values. While the two are not synonymous, both have a common enemy – proprietary software. Critics of open source say that open source fosters an ambiguity of a different kind, in that it confuses the mere availability of the source code with the freedom to use, modify, and redistribute it. But open source doesn't just mean access to the source code; the use of open-source software must comply with a number of criteria including as to re-distribution, depending on the license under which it is distributed. Different licenses require different criteria. For instance, under the GNU General Public License (GPL) published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for licensing free software, any work based on the program or any other derivative work must be licensed as a whole at no charge at all to all third parties under the terms of the GNU GPL, whereas an Apache License does not require derivative works to be open source. You can add your own copyright statement to modifications of a source code under Apache License and provide additional or different license terms and conditions for use, reproduction, or distribution of your modifications, or for any derivative works as a whole, provided your use, reproduction, and distribution of the work otherwise complies with conditions of the Apache License. Similarly, there is no requirement that any derivative work created under an Academic Free License (AFL) or a Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) License, should be distributed at all, or for free if distributed. Further, any derivative work need not be free and one can charge for it as you would for proprietary software. The subtle licensing criteria between open source generally and free software is further highlighted when you consider that some licenses are not compatible. For instance, programs/source code distributed under PHP License is not compatible with GNU GPL since GNU GPL is a copyleft license. Which raises a couple of licensing issues: (1) Why are there different criteria under different licenses for open source software? Presently, there are about 54 licenses certified by OSI as open source – a tribute to OSI’s philosophy – which many now see as an unnecessary proliferation of licenses, an issue that forced OSI to admit that - “OSI's approach on the development and distribution problems involved building as many different bridges as possible between developers and the corporate world. In doing this, we accepted a proliferation of new licenses. This is a problem in that although physical bridges between communities don't interfere with each other, licenses do. Interference between different open-source licenses is now perceived as a sufficiently serious problem that OSI has become as a victim of its own earlier success.” To address the issue of proliferation, OSI plans to take all existing OSI approved licenses and group them into three tiers: (i) preferred, (ii) recommended but not preferred, and (iii) not recommended. This is likely to create more confusion. One would then ask why an OSI certified license would be OSI “not recommended” license. Would a ‘not recommended’ tag not be deemed as de-approval (though OSI says its not). It would be ‘preferable’ not to have certified such license as OSI approved in the first place. (2) Why are some licenses not compatible with others? We may well appreciate that compatibility goes beyond the issue of license proliferation. For example, the FSF considers all versions of the Apache License incompatible with Version 2 of the GNU GPL. About version 2.0 of the Apache License, they say: "The Apache Software License is incompatible with the GPL because it has a specific requirement that is not in the GPL: it has certain patent termination cases that the GPL does not require. (We don't think those patent termination cases are inherently a bad idea, but nonetheless they are incompatible with the GNU GPL.)" Apache Software Foundation (ASF), which publishes the Apache License, has adequately replied to FSF’s statement, stating that ASF does not share the same goals as FSF. For the time being, the controversy rages on. Compatibility is really a relationship issue; free software movement and the open source movement can be likened to two political camps within the free software community. While it can be argued that GNU GPL is not compatible with a number of licenses because the philosophy behind GNU GPL is freedom – which proponents of free software have cried themselves hoarse from the rooftops for decades now – GNU GPL itself publishes a list of free/open source software licenses that are GPL incompatible, distinguishing between non-copyleft and ‘not strong copyleft’. Even, copyleft licenses like xinetd have also not been spared and was held incompatible because it places extra restrictions on redistribution of modified versions that contradict the redistribution requirements in the GPL. Don’t they share the same goals? Yet the free software movement has complained that to be lumped together with open source software is restrictive for free software since open source software allegedly has a much weaker criterion than free software. Then one may ask, what is the criteria for determining compatibility with GNU GPL even for copyleft free software licenses? At least FSF is not intending to classify licenses in the same manner as OSI – for now. (3) Don’t some of these licenses support a ‘one way’ street attitude described by John Udell in the Open Source Citizenship where developers are encouraged to take and not give back to the community. Or it could be akin to the situation described by Stallman where commercial developers invited to the “Open Source Developers Day” meeting in August 1998 said they intend to make only a part of their work free software (or open source) since the focus of their business is on developing proprietary add-ons (software or manuals) to sell to the users of the free software. According to Stallman, those developers requested that this should be regarded as legitimate, as part of the community, because some of the money is donated to free software development. Whichever way you look at it, it is a dangerous trend for the future of open source software. The ideals and philosophy of open source is threatened by the ‘marriage of convenience’ of open source with the commercial world, which makes a strong case for the traditional free software movement. It is, perhaps, taking the adage ‘making a case to the commercial world’ too far. Eventually, there may such a blend of both the open source movement and the commercial world that we are not able to distinguish between the two. The enemy would have sneaked in unawares and made sport of all ideals and philosophies of the open source movement. These are all valid concerns that the open source community needs to address. In closing I have a word of advise for the open source movement from my grandmother which I find appropriate – If you don’t know where you’re going, remember where you’re coming from. Sources 1. Wikipedia Encyclopedia Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Alfred_Adebare
Job searches can be one of the most frustrating things that you have to do in your life. After all you know what you are capable of and which jobs would be right for you but convincing other people is another task altogether. The thing with job searches is that the right job is out there but once you have had a few knock backs, which is inevitable, it can really dent your confidence. Especially because getting it right has great potential impact on your life. Get it right and you could be working in a job you love with a good salary. Get it wrong and it could be an entirely different story. Because of the importance of conducting a job search well it surprises me that it wasn't taught in school or that people don't invest more time into getting it right. Here are the things you need to be prepared for and a few tips for getting it right. Write a good CV Well this can be tricky. Mostly because it is a boring and time consuming process. But do not despair. Remember that you are selling yourself. So write about your achievements and make it look good. Employers get thousands of CVs throughout the years and you need to make yours slightly different to all the rest. Perhaps you could write it on pink paper, include a picture or give it a border. Anything to make you more human will help your cause. After all you will only have applied or got an interview as a result of your qualifications so presuming you have the right ones you need to dazzle them with your personality. Send it to as many people as possible Presuming you have written a lovely CV that really shows the world how great you are you need to send it to as many of the Jobs that you like the look of as you can. Remember that loads of the jobs you might apply for may sound boring on the face of it but until you have been to the place and checked it out for yourself you don't know. A boring looking administration job might turn out to be fun if the office has a good working atmosphere. So keep sending it out and don't be demoralised if you don't hear back from all of them - that's the way it goes! But also don't be afraid to check up on your applications. Employers like keen people! Be positive and self assured in your interview It is no good being apologetic about your achievements in an interview. Brag about the things you have achieved in life no matter how small you may think they are. Share as much about yourself as possible. Most employers do not want someone that gives stock answers to the questions they give you they want to hear something exciting and interesting about you. You will become part of the team so they will want someone that can get on with their work colleagues. They won't get that impression about you if you keep giving them monosyllabic answers. Negotiate hard They don't know that your desperate. You will regret it if you undercut yourself. On the flip side the employer is likely to value your abilities if you put a high price on them. That is to say ask for a lot of money and your employer will assume you are worth a lot of money. Shaun Parker has been involved in the Jobs industry for many years and is fully aware of the pitfalls you may face when you conduct a job search. Article Source:http://www.freearticles.co.za/print/58870?KeepThis=true&
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