Wedding bands

I guess that New Year is one of the most popular times to think about 'popping the question', I am indeed one of the many who took advantage of New Years Eve (many years ago now..) to get engaged.
When it came to the rings or wedding bands, we went for simple traditional gold bands in 18ct gold, but the choice goes far wider than that. Although I don't think I would ever be personally comfortable with a diamond ring for a man, I could quite happily have gone for a 'white gold' ring instead of the more traditional yellow.

Latest Progress

The first month has been a busy month for me off-line, and reasonably busy on-line too. I have completed a few cassette to CD conversions, and although paid-posting was very quiet, opportunities are just starting to appear again. I don't 'chase' paid posting as much as I used to, and often don't have time to follow up every opportunity.

For that reason, I was excited to hear about 'oxamedia' a service that posts dynamic ads similar to adsense, but after setting it up, I found that the button that is supposed to take you to a 'log-in' page to see the performance of your sites does not seem to work, and takes you to a 'page does not exist' error. My conclusion is that if one one hand the ads are working, but on the other, I cannot log in and therefore cannot see earnings (or be paid..), then it looks like an active scam to me.

I found another opportunity that seems to offer a service matching advertisers to publishers on a space 'rental' basis (more passive income..), but so far have not been able to work out whether it will be worthwhile.

In other news, my arm is on the mend, the cast came off three weeks ago, and although it is a bit painful and a bit swollen, I can use it pretty much normally. I managed to take a photo of the last X-ray, I have one more X-ray in about two weeks time as a final check. I marked on the X-ray where the break was, but it is fairly difficult to see much of the break in the photo.

Medicine carts

Although the worldwide economy is experiencing difficulties across all types of industry, some industries such as medical and municipal will often be less effected by economic strictures.
The growth in infrastructure may well slow down a little, and a few jobs may be lost, however, in the main, some industries remain relatively unaffected although it is true to say that the armed forces seem to be taking more of a hit that usual at the moment in terms of 'rationalisation' and consequently, job losses.
Although hospitals may experience a slight staff-loss, it would be very unlikely to see many job losses in important operational sectors, therefore the manufacturers of scalpels, hospital beds and medicine carts probably don't need to worry just yet!

Acoustic guitar lessons

This year, my daughter was allowed to choose an instrument to play at school. Although I have played piano a little in the past, I was hoping she would choose acoustic guitar lessons, because guitars are relatively inexpensive and very portable (unlike pianos...). However, she decided to follow in my 'footsteps' and chose piano/keyboard instead.
The 'upside' of choosing piano is that I can help her quite a bit in the early stages, but I have not quite given up on the idea that she may eventually want to also learn guitar. Probably mainly because I gave my guitar away to my niece some years ago, and would like an excuse to buy another...

Quiet January

2012 has so far been a quiet month for online activities, but that is more than made up for by how busy I have been offline with my regular job. It is nice to have a break over Christmas and the New Year, but I could do with a few things that would give me a boost to my Paypal funds...

Although I have pretty much decided that the laptop restoring idea is not going to make much profit, I do have a lot of spare parts, some of which I may be able to use to make up a few working laptops with a few additional parts. For this reason, I have started trawling eBay looking for bargains again.. I am assured that of the four 'spare' laptop motherboards I have at least some of them can be 'repaired' so hopefully that will give me a platform to sell some working systems - if that doesn't work, I will need to catalogue all the spare parts that I have and see if I can sell those off instead...

Scanning software

For the modern office, and even for the modern home, document management can be a crucial process. A combination of scanning software and file organisation can help to successfully store and recall documents without needing physical folders with reams of paperwork.

My home scanner can produce PDF documents with character recognition which makes searching easier - every document that comes into our home (bills, statements, insurance certificates etc..) are scanned and then destroyed. They are destroyed to prevent identity theft, and every file is backed up on a daily basis so there is little chance of losing a document.