Gifts for your clients

The time is fast approaching when those in business should be thinking about Christmas parties and corporate gifts and Christmas cards.
The developments in technology in recent years has meant that technology-related gifts are within the reach of even those companies with the smallest budgets. Only today I found a site that was selling a custom Imprinted flash drive with your logo/strapline for less than $4 each.
If you have a little more to spend on important clients, then there are custom printed MP3 or MP4 players available for just a few dollars more.
The custom logo providers probably will not have the largest flash drives available (ie. the 16GB or 32GB monster drives) but I have seen up to 8GB advertised and any customer would be happy with a gift like that. My first proper windows PC only had a 8GB hard drive and that cost a lot more than $4!!!

New dNeero Widget

dNeero are trying out new widget today, so this is like a beta test to see how the whole thing works. Why not click and partake - get paid for surveys and get paid even more for pasting them into a blog - what could be simpler?

Getting away

For the last few years, we have made do with short breaks and local holidays. I am really looking forward to when we can afford to venture further afield once more.
When we were 'Dual Income, No Kids' (DINKies), we gadded about the globe for fun - We are now Single Income with Kid (SIK??) and are duly broke... wouldn't have it any other way I hasten to add...
I long to cross the Atlantic to see friends in the US, and we've always talked about having orlando vacations particularly now we have a little one in tow.. We have friends further North in New York State and Canada who we would dearly love to revisit, not to mention some very close friends in Malta to whom we would love to introduce our daughter.
I am determined to clear all debts and start saving for things like holidays, but right now it is proving hard to clear off the last little bits of credit card debt because when you get close to paying off, the discipline tends to slip a little. Here's to being debt free and climbing aboard a plane bound for anywhere in the near future!

The PC saga continues...

In a mad moment yesterday I went and bought a dual-core CPU for my 'spare' socket 939 PC. Actually, it was not a bad deal at just under £40 for a 2.2GHz dual core including heatsink and fan. This should go straight into my recently purchased mobo, and the current 2.2GHz single core can replace the 1.8GHz CPU in my main PC. This should then give me a complete 'redundant' set-up of my old 'suspect' mobo and a 1.8GHz CPU plus heatsink and fan which I will combine with a spare hard-drive and some RAM to see if I can get the mobo working properly with a fresh operating system install. If it works I will take some screen-shots and flog the mobo and CPU on eBay in an effort to recover some of the recent spending spree... However I spent £2.88 more than I had in my PayPal account so will have to wait for more funds to come in before I can afford to by some thermal paste to do the CPU installs...
I really really MUST get some stuff onto eBay soon, I think I have something like three motherboards of historical interest up in my loft already each of them with CPU's, I have more CDROM drives than is entirely necessary plus a plethora of junk such as 56k modems, network cards and the like....

Holidays

We just managed a few days away on the Norfolk Broads and our little one got to spend a few days with Nanny and Grandpa in the static houseboat that they had hired.
Now they usually go off in their motorhome, or what some like to call a 'recreational vehicle', and they usually take it over to Europe. They always had caravans since we were kids, but the RV is a new thing since they retired... I learned recently that you can get aftermarket warrantees for your vehicles ie. one that continues after the manufacturers warranty runs out, and apparently there are also companies that specialise in rv warranty sales too.
The peculiar thing about the RV is that the manufacturers warranty can run out before you have got many miles on the clock because you don't tend to drive them for every day use. It makes sense to consider additional cover for motorhomes, RV's and caravans.

Vital Free Software

I have previously posted about my CDROM that I made comprising all the freely downloadable software that I would need to install onto a fresh install of Windows (should I EVER need to do this again...), and today I am going to share that list of free software with you:

1. Firefox - Mozilla's browser which I prefer over Microsoft's IE - this is the very first bit of software that I would select.
2. AVG free
3. Malware Bytes - the two best security programs that I have come across for combating viruses and malware.
4. Spybot
5. Stinger
6. HiJack This - the next three best pieces of software for combating an already infected system if it is a recovery task that needs to be carried out.
7. BCwipe - software that security-wipes a hard-disk
8. CCleaner - a great piece of software that hunts out all the bits of data that you really don't need and zaps them for you.
9. Easus Partition Magic - great for copying partitions and hard drives.
10. Syncback - great little program for creating automated backups.
11. Nero Burning - CD/DVD burning software always comes in useful.
12. Thunderbird - good alternative email software from Mozilla.
13. and finally
14. Open Office - real alternative to MS Office and fully compatible, the whole suite for free...

So that's my 'emergency tool kit' and new install CD, most of these are free for personal use (not commercial) or time limited/feature limited - I won't give out the links, just google for 'free download...' (insert software name).
What others would you have on your disk??

PC update

I have recently replaced the motherboard in my 'spare' PC as it seemed to be failing component by component... I am pleased to report my new eBay-purchased mobo seems to be working perfectly now although as ever, there were teething problems.
First of all the operating system on my existing hard drive wouldn't load, so after I had tried reloading the BIOS, I ended up doing a clean install on another disk and this worked fine. Secondly, the LAN socket and the audio output didn't work - so I visited the manufacturers website and downloaded all the drivers for the mobo. This recovered the use of the non-working components so everything was hunky dory...
Except... even after I reloaded the video software that I really needed this PC for in the first place...it wouldn't work!!
So it's good news and bad news - it works far better than my old PC for browsing the internet (I am sure I have a firewall issue with my original PC), but the software that I really wanted to run on it will not work. However I have a spare laptop from work that I have loaded the same software onto and I am hoping that being a dual core CPU, this might be a better bet... If not I will be browsing eBay for a dual core CPU for my socket 939 motherboard in one last attempt to get this software to run...
I am now becoming adept at Windows re-installs and have even made up a CD of most needed freely downloadable software, a list that I will post about at a later date.

Visual talking

Will visual talking be the next big thing??
The jury is still out on this one - it's kind of like texting/sign language/emoticons but takes a little longer to put together, so my feeling is that it might not be as popular as some of the established ways in which we communicate...
Click on the widget below to take part in the debate.

Half-way through the month

I am still considering whether I can continue reporting earnings in the same way or whether to amalgamate several strands of earnings together and report everything in £UK. This week I have seen some extra Adsense coming in from my new Adsense project which is encouraging, and in the meantime I have had a payout from PayU2blog and a few weeks ago discovered that I am due to get a payout of $53 from affiliates. I think that translation of everything into £UK will be problematical and would prefer to report it after it has been paid so that I can be more accurate instead of using an assumed exchange rate.
I have not had much response to the ebay partner affiliate widgets that I have placed in a couple of sites, but am hoping that this will still prove to be a worthwhile sheme in the long run as long as I can drive enough traffic to the sites. As a result I have been attempting to create a bit of traffic for one of the sites today, time will tell whether this was time well spent...
Placement for my new Adsense project is still high and seems to have settled between position 2 and position 4 in Google for the preferred search term depending on whether I search with Google.com or .co.uk, and whether I use spaces or not in my two-word key phrase. This in itself does not guarantee income, yet is very satisfying from an SEO point of view. I never expected to rank #1, but I am now beginning to wonder how easy it might be to achieve...

Backups

There should be no need to stress the point that backups are a necessity for anyone using a PC for anything other than playing games, the debate should only be about HOW the backups are made. I have two external drives that I use for backup, but I find that they seem to fill up awfully quickly even though the two combined add up to over 400GB of hard drive space.
I have just spent most of today moving data from the backup drive to DVD's so that I can erase the files and start again.
There is another methods of backup that I have been considering, online backup not only offers me a flexible alternative, but gives me access to the files from any PC on the internet.
'Better safe than sorry' is a good philosophy when it comes to backup and there are good reasons to have an online remote backup even if you have adequate space on local hard-drives. If you have a fire, or your PC and peripherals are stolen, then your local backups are lost along with your PC equipment, but an online solution remains intact.

Financial Terminology

PPM is a term that I have just learned a bit about. It stands for private placement memorandum and refers to a document prepared for investors who are making a private investment in a company as opposed to an investment that you might make in a publicly quoted company. Public investments are considered relatively safe and are regulated, the PPM is a document that is intended to extend a level of security to the entrepreneur and presents the opportunity for the risks for the investor to be plainly laid out.

Reviewing Finances

It may well be, that like me, you have recently reviewed all your outgoings and things like life insurance have come under close scrutiny. But before you make the rash decision to dump all your insurances to save some money, check to see whether you can improve on your life insurance rate so that you can have a little extra but your dependents can still be covered if the worst were to happen.
Every year we coampare rates for insurance for house and car cover because they come up for renewal, however we tend not to do the same for long term insurances such as life or illness cover.

July Earnings

It is what it is, a means to an end - I am guilty of using munny4hunny for generating income often at the expense of style and content. Guilty as charged...

However, as I have said before, the earnings potential of blogs has reduced in recent years and new lines of revenue must be found. My recent forays into Adsense and affiliate earnings have started to bear fruit, but are still in their infant stages as yet.
In the meantime, a trickle of earnings continues mainly from PayU2blog, and the occasional review from 'sponsoredreviews.com'. This month I have had to adjust the ratio that I had been using to convert £earnings into $earnings which has made my survey earnings look like they have taken a bit of a tumble. On that note, Adsense have requested that I have my earnings reported in £UK rather than £US, once again making it harder to compare earnings as I have previously preferred to use the 'universal' dollar to record revenue.
I will probably overhaul the way that I record earnings and also plan to amalgamate all my internet earnings together in one account and keep a record in £UK for tax purposes, although I am not certain whether I will continue to post specific details of earnings here.
A slow month, generating about $68 in earnings, but a healthier $95 in actual payouts - My Paypal stash is building nicely , though I may have to raid it for the Summer holidays...

Acne Treatment

It's the Summer Holidays and you had better make sure that your teenagers are kitted out with the latest mobile phone, some top acne treatment and enough magazines and DVD's to keep them out of your hair for six weeks or more. After all, you don't really want them around the house getting under your feet and hanging on your phone all day.
I have a good few years to go before we have a teenager in the house and it is not an experience that I am looking forward to... the only aspect I do welcome is that chance of having a lie-in as there is little chance of a teenager getting you up at 6 in the morning...