Feeling Windy?

Latest survey from dNeero, my favourite survey people...
This survey looks at some of the practical aspects of alternative power sources and wind power in particular - get paid for completing and posting this simple seven-question multiple-choice survey (click below to start).
Like all of the recent dNeero offerings, you need to get your thinking cap on to think up a related question of your own right at the end of the survey.

PayPerPost too fussy?

Since PPP were no doubt the market-leaders about 12-18months ago, there was no problem with them making their 'posties' jump through hoops to get approved. You had to have a ninety-day old blog, there had to be so many posts and you could not have more than a 1:2 paid to non-paid ratio etc.. etc..
They seemed to relax their rulings a little after the great 'google slap' where, let's face it, having PPP on your blog was the main reason for losing PageRank. Presumably at that point PPP lost a lot of blogs and relaxed the rules to try to pump the numbers back up. I doubt whether many of the blogs that left have yet gained their PR back, but that's another story...I have found it a lot easier to complete PayU2blog opps in the meantime, they come thick and fast, and are very easy to complete and have very quickly proved to be at least as good at income generation as the slightly jaded PPP - plus they pay in two-week slots so you get paid a lot quicker than with PPP.
Due to the rate of paid posting on this blog generated by PayU2blog, PPP have deemed this to be against TOS and munny4hunny is no longer a PPP participant. Is this fair? Yes...why not their money, their rules. In the words of a well-known UK comedian: Am I bovvered? Well, I was a bit put out, but I am making very little from them and now at least I don't have to worry about their TOS and about placing the IZEA rankings code on my blog signalling to Google loud and clear that I am a paid blogger and don't deserve any PR!
Talking of IZEA, I don't know what you have found, but I have not found it to be a welcoming experience more of a totally confusing one, and couldn't even be bothered to do the one opp I was offered which was to post about how great IZEA is... I can see how they are trying to combine a social experience with paid posting opportunities, but the result is a site which honestly does neither thing terribly well - I have found other paid posting sites to be easier to use, and I have found other social sites to be better for finding like-minded acquaintances.

No holidays for a while....

In the current economic climate, and since we have decided to survive as a family on my income alone, we have not been even thinking about taking a foreign holiday for a few years. There is every chance that the holiday industry could be a casualty of both the credit crunch and the hike in oil prices, but for the majority of people the family holiday still remains a priority.
There was a point where we spent at least one holiday a year abroad in sunnier climes, and we have a list of friends abroad that we have promised to visit in the future.
I look forward to when we are financially strong enough to afford such a holiday in the future, and particularly look forward to one of those luxury cruises I have promised myself at some point...

Longer lasting vacuum cleaners

Sebo are marketing their vacuum cleaners as environmentally friendly because they last longer and therefore use less resources and produce less waste. This is a refreshing change from the 'throw-away' society that should be maturing into a 'greener' frame of mind.
There are many many consumer goods produced in the last four or five decades which have been made with an element of 'built-in obsolescence' which is no longer an acceptable way to produce goods if we are serious about preserving life on this planet in the longer term.
With this type of thinking, Sebo vacuum cleaners are showing the way froward for other producers who should take responsibility for producing better quality products that will lead to less waste and a better environment for all of us.

More diet pills?

I wonder if you can actually get fat by eating too many diet pills??
The prime factor in using a weight-loss product is that it be confirmed as safe and that it comes with well-defined instructions and a full diet-plan explaining how it should be used just like alli diet pills. I would urge folks not to just listen to hearsay and then go online to make a purchase based on rumor, but to do some proper research and get some good medical advice before putting any medication into your system.
The Alli diet pill system website is clear about when NOT to take their pills and even gives a full run down of the side effects that you might experience.

Letter to the Bank Manager

This made me laugh so hard...an elderly lady actually wrote this letter to her bank. The bank manager thought it amusing enough to have it published in The Times:

Dear Sir,

I am writing to thank you for bouncing my cheque with which I endeavoured to pay my plumber last month. By my calculations, three 'nanoseconds' must have elapsed between his presenting the cheque and the arrival in my account of the funds needed to honour it.

I refer, of course, to the automatic monthly deposit of my Pension, an arr angement which, I admit, has been in place for only thirty eight years. You are to be commended for seizing that brief window of opportunity, and also for debiting my account £30 by way of penalty for the inconvenience caused to your bank.

My thankfulness springs from the manner in which this incident has caused me to rethink my errant financial ways.

I noticed that whereas I personally attend to your telephone calls and letters, when I try to contact you, I am confronted by the impersonal, overcharging, re-recorded, faceless entity which your bank has become. From now on, I, like you, choose only to deal with a flesh-and-blood person. My mortgage and loan payments will therefore and hereafter no longer be automatic, but will arrive at your bank by cheque, addressed personally and confidentially to an employee at your bank whom you must nominate.

Be aware that it is an offence under the Postal Act for any other person to open such an envelope.

Please find attached an Application Contact Status which I require your chosen employee to complete. I am sorry it runs to eight pages, but in order that I know as much about him or her as your bank knows about me, there is no alternative. Please note that all copies of his or her medical history must be countersigned by a Solicitor, and the mandatory details of his/her financial situation (income, debts, assets and liabilities) must be accompanied by documented proof.

In due course, I will issue your employee with a PIN number which he/she must quote in dealings with me. I regret that it cannot be shorter than 28 digits but, again, I have modelled it on the number of button presses required of me to a ccess my account balance on your phone bank service.

As they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Let me level the playing field even further. When you call me, press buttons as follows:

1-- To make an appointment to see me.

2-- To query a missing payment.

3-- To transfer the call to my living room in case I am there.

4-- To transfer the call to my bedroom in case I am sleeping.

5-- To transfer the call to my toilet in case I am attending to nature.

6-- To transfer the call to my mobile phone if I am not at home.

7-- To leave a message on my computer (a password to access my computer is required. A password will be communicated to you at a later date to the Authorised Contact.)

8-- To return to the main menu and to listen to options 1 through 8

9-- To make a general complaint or inquiry, the contact will then be put on hold, pending the attention of my automated answering service. While this may, on occasion, involve a lengthy wait, uplifting music will play for the duration of the call.

Regrettably, but again following your example, I must also levy an
establishment fee to cover the setting up of this new arrangement.

May I wish you a happy, if ever so slightly less prosperous, New Year.



Your Humble Client

.....Even better when you know it was written by a lady who is 98 years old ! I pray that I will have half as much wit should I ever reach her age...

Pimp my ride

19However sad it might seem, I have to admit that one of my favourite shows on TV this year has been Pimp My Ride where some banged up motor is turned into a dream machine by a bunch of custom professionals. I often browse over to TMF to see when the next episode of Pimp my ride is going to be shown and love to settle down to watch the tansformation.
There are UK versions and US versions of the same show and both have pretty much the same format. The presenter starts at the door of the unsuspecting car owner with the news that their car is to be pimped, and their reaction is the first bit of entertainment especially as some of them don't hold back on expressing their delight!!
Then the presenter (Westwood in the UK Xibit in the US) drives the car back to the 'shop where they are greeted by whoops of derision from the mechanics. then the car is stripped to the chassis and totally rebuilt an repainted, reupholstered and has a whole load of gimmicks installed. Sometimes they get an airbrush paint job in a theme suited to the owner, they have some huge gleaming wheels fitted and maybe a games console or DVD player or mini PC fitted just for good measure. the show is rounded off by the resulting re-build being revealed to the owner and here is another chance for the owner to express their glee with various whoopings, quite a few choice expletives, some dance moves (one low-slung individual lost his pants in his celebratory dance...). The ecstatic owner then gets to drive his car back to show his friends who in turn express their disbelief - good wholesome entertainment with great feelgood factor..

Dreaming of rivers of wine...

I seem to be constantly reminded of the things I am missing since we have been living frugally, and the one thing I have been allowing myself as a treat now and again is a bottle of wine..
I got into wine at a late stage really, as I have never been a drinker in my younger days. I started off by trying white wine and finding it quite refreshing, I then graduated onto red wines. I began by working my way through French wines and finding them a bit 'hit and miss' when it comes to consistent quality. However, I then broke into New World wines and was converted on the spot, firstly by Californian wines and latterly by the wines of South East Australia. Now I am no wine buff by any stretch of the imagination, but I find Australian wines not only really tasty, but to be of supremely consistent quality. I have never yet found an Australian red wine that I disliked, even the relatively cheap ones...
One of the things I have promised myself when I am better off, is that I am going to join one of those wine of the month club schemes and have at least half a dozen wines delivered to my house each month - as long as I can find one that specialises in Australian wines, though I will take Californian if push comes to shove.

Bookworm

Recently I seem to spend a lot of my spare time taking my 'spare' PC apart and trying to make it better, or 'Googling' for articles that hep me understand how I can 'fix' it. I am one of those that like to badger away at something, so I will not be satisfied until it is the best I can make it.
This has a detrimental effect on other things I should be doing, such as the long list of DIY tasks for the house and garden.
What also suffers is my reading, I take a similar approach to reading as I do to any other task, once I start I like to devour the book as quickly as possible and generally get really caught up in the story. I also like to find the books from a single author and try to read them all. In this way I have read pretty much everything by Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and by John Grisham. I read them so intently that I am always disappointed when they end (apart from the Thomas Hardy ones, they are so depressing that I often want them to end sooner but I persevere nonetheless...).
Despite the fact that I was really bad at English Literature at school, at least a grounding was provided so that I could get 'into' books later in life when I had become a bit more patient. I believe there are therapeutic properties in calmly sitting down and reading a good book too.
In truth, I probably haven't read a book for more than a year - How about you? What sort of books do you read? Does it say something about you?

Ebaying

I have been doing a lot of eBaying lately selling of some stuff the little one doesn't use any more, and some stuff that I don't use any more... I like to take as professional approach as I can with my eBay sales. I email all purchasers to tell them that their goods are on the way. I always include some paperwork in the package, and I always pack the goods as well as I can.
I figure that I get a good buzz from a package that has been thoughtfully prepared, so I assume my clients will feel the same. I always use clean packaging where possible, and always try to find the original box and instructions for the item as that always gives the impression that you have looked after it well. All my sales go out in shipping boxes that give the right impression to make sure I keep that all important 100% satisfaction rating.

Earnings August 2008

If nothing else, earnings are steady for me month in - month out at the moment. I am averaging about $100 a month and this last month brought in $99.60. In a change of pattern, much more of these earnings are now attributed to adsense and I have reached payout again this month. I would still stress that the majority of my adsense earnings are NOT from blogs, but that balance is beginning to change and it seems that a decent niche blog may be able to yield reasonable adsense earnings - it's not going to make me rich unless I can manage 1000 good niche blogs at the same time, but I am seeing much better results even if Google are no longer including 'blogger' hosted 'dot com' blog keywords in their search results.
Earnings were scattered around paid blogging, adsense and surveys in that order. Surveys just come along when they are suitable so there is not much you can do about increasing activity there, so my focus will be to try to maximise paid posting (blogsvertise sprang back into life again for me this month having ignored me since December) and having a little PR on some of my blogs will help (but for how long??). Adsense is the real aim for me as there is nothing as pleasing as passive income, though to be fair the amount of work you need to do to even make a cent with adsense hardly qualifies as passive...

Making money online

Since I started my own 'make money online' project about two years ago, the dynamics for making money online have changed considerably. This has come about mainly through Google moving the goal-posts by punishing paid links.
Paid posting alone could net you a decent online second income in those days, but those that were doing paid posting are now forced to diversify. I have never been keen on 'paid to click' or paid to read' programs as I can't see any real benefit IE.. I wouldn't feel like I was contributing anything for the payment (also the pay sucks...). So my second stream has been paid surveys and I will talk through the schemes that I use or have used:
Ciao - I used to do these surveys and cashed out twice, but I became frustrated by the amount of times I would spend more than ten minutes on a survey only to find I was not eligible for the survey and would not get paid... The annoying thing was that it was always the same type of questions and if they paid any attention to my profile they would know full well that I would not be eligible for the survey - enough about them, I dumped 'em and will not be going back!
PureProfile - much better system where you get paid for filling out certain parts of your profile to start with and they use this data to filter the surveys you are sent. Not only this but they pay you a small amount even if you turn out not to be eligible to complete the survey. It may take me a while to reach payout, but the process is painless, no problems so far with PureProfile.
dNeero - this is a great scheme and likely to payout quicker than other schemes. the surveys are always short and easy to complete occassionally requiring you to sign up for something, but nothing too onerous. They pay you a set fee for the short survey, then you can earn more by posting the survey widget on a blog based on the traffic it receives. Not only that but you get paid a percentage of the earnings of your referrals. You get a referral when someone joins after clicking on a survey widget on your blog... like this one:

or if you send them an invitation email.
YouGov - The lastest scheme have tried... Like Pureprofile, they pay a small amount regardless of whether you are eligible for the survey and mostly they send surveys which are geared to your profile. Like PureProfile, I think it will take me a while to get to payout, but I have had no problem with this scheme so far...

Am I covered?

If you have seen one of those lists of 'things to do before you're thirty' or 'things to do before you die...' then you will no doubt have considered some of the more risky ventures proposed in those lists. Maybe you are hankering for a bungee jump or want to have a go at sky-diving?
If you've discussed it with colleagues or friends I bet somebody has piped up 'your insurance won't cover you for that!'.
On a more serious note, some medical conditions can make it very difficult to get insurance cover, and in these circumstances you may have to consider the benefits of high risk life insurance. after all, you can get insurance for more or less any circumstances, it's just that it may be more costly and you may have to shop around a bit to get the best deal...

Bedfordshire Uni Clearing 2008

It’s clearing time again, and a last chance to be considering a course in this coming school year. Once again the University of Bedfordshire will be recruiting via the clearing process from 14th August to the middle of September 2008. The University is rated highly for its’ Sports and Media courses which are proving increasingly popular, but is diverse enough to be very well regarded for its’ courses in Journalism, Law and Business. Over the last few years a lot of investment has gone into the university facilities to make the University of Bedfordshire one of the leading educational institutions in the area.
If you are thinking of taking a course, why not give them a ring on their free-phone number and take it from there…

University of Bedfordshire - Clearing 2008 on 0800 013 0925

Mozilla Email client

One of the things that I needed to do when I was trying to recover my online life after the failure of my main PC was to retrieve my emails with POP3 access as opposed to internet emails. I set up some accounts using MS Outlook Express, but for my online income mail I tend to use MS Outlook too.
It was easy enough to recover connection details (although I couldn't recover addresses or the mail archive) for Outlook Express and was up and running in no time. The version of Outlook that I had on my spare PC though was sufficiently different to my current version for me to end up in a frustrating loop whilst trying to set it up. So I took the step of deciding to dump Outlook and try out Mozilla Thunderbird.
Thunderbird turned out to be easy to download and set up and packed with some great features including automatic detection of junk mail. It looks and feels very much like the Outlook software and many of the features and set up are shared. I didn't get a chance to try email rules (which I like to use for spam), but am sure that Thunderbird functionality is at least as good as the Outlook family - and it is of course, completely free!
So Firefox and Thunderbird, two great pieces of free software but where do they get the names? Something from nature combined with an animal: Fire-Fox, Thunder-Bird what other names could Mozilla utilise - how about Mozilla WaterFrog or Mozilla TyphoonBat? Sure beats 'outlook' and 'internet explorer' for imaginative naming anyhow...
Of course Linux users will have been using this software for a long time, and there are more email programs out there that are probably worth mentioning, but if you use Windows in some form the chances are that you will be using the default MS software. I am here to say that there are good reasons to step outside the box and consider other software providers. Next to MS, Mozilla are probably one of the prime most-trusted software providers and all their software is free. If you take the plunge you may be surprised at how good this software is - and if you think MS software is free (because it was pre-loaded onto your PC) just take a look at the price of MS software disks in your local computer shop...

Why Acne?

Acne is a subject that most people are aware of without any in-depth knowledge. For instance, we usually associate acne with teenagers going through puberty, but it can have an effect in later life too.
The basic cause is blockage of the follicles and can be seen primarily on the face, the back, chest and upper arms. Why it is that some people are affected more than others is not clear but could be linked to genetic makeup, stress, ingested medication (including steroids) and factors affecting hormonal activity.

What every man wants...

Call it mid-life crisis if you like, but what man doesn’t get to the stage where he thinks ‘Hmmm a Harley….I could probably afford one of those now…’.
That of course is the sentiment of a white-collar worker, a blue-collar worker may already have an almost-assembled Electra Glide in his garage which has been there for a decade already and has just needed those one or two all-important Harley parts for most of that duration. In many cases your white collar worker will move on and end up with a motor home instead, and the blue collar half-built Harley in the garage will probably end up on eBay someday. the few however, could end up like the guy in the picture...
Such is the stuff of dreams and romance for your average man entering the middle age.

My PC adventures

I am pleased to report the the PC that I created from old parts and a £10 motherboard from eBay has been working perfectly (if not a little slowly) whilst my main PC has been at the menders...
I got a call from the computer shop to say that he had a spare mobo with CPU and RAM left over from a recent upgrade (ironic because the 'old' kit left over from the upgrade was actually better than my original one..). He fitted the new mobo and got it all running for a grand total of £50 which I am more than pleased with.
I have three new 512MB SDRAM chips coming from eBay to add the final touches to my spare PC and I am considering putting another GB of RAM onto my recently refurbished main machine. I was mightily relieved to find that we didn't need to reload the Operating system and all my programs and data are intact..but the lesson is learned and I was glad of the trial run at recovering my online 'life' after a major PC crash. One thing I discovered is that certain parts of my backup system had not been working properly, so that has been all put to rights now. I can certainly see the value of having a 'spare' PC and keeping it up to date in case the same type of thing happens again, and you don't need to spend much to acheive this. Another discovery is that actually computers are not as scary to fix as you might think, and OK we are not getting down to component-level here, but when you consider that parts that make up the whole, ths system is relatively simple to grasp.
Maybe I will start building that dual-core machine...the only thing that stops me is that it is so damn cheap to buy on off the shelf anyway at todays prices.

Moving on from text-speak..

The latest dNeero survey introduces the idea of using images to convey a meaning for those that find typical internet abbreviations or text-speak a bit of a turn off.
The 'talk it up' survey involves a new website that allows you to create visual messages online and then send them to your freinds. Is this the type of service you would enjoy using, are you fed up with text-speak... Well RU ??
Have your say by joining in the conversation and being compensated for your trouble...

Formula one push chairs

The culture around children has changed out of all recognition in the last few decades whether it be as targets for the lastest games and gadgets (PSP, Wii, X-Box etc...) or the amount of effort that now goes into producing some thing like the Maclaren stroller. The equipment that your child wears or travels in is now under scrutiny for development in terms of state-of-the-art materials, technology and most of all...fashion.
In years gone by, the teenager emerged as a target for producers to create products such as the Sony Walkman. In more recent times, this target has widened to include Nike trainers for those that can't yet walk... As with everything, there are upsides and downsides. On the downside is the proportion of our diminishing disposable income that is now ring-fenced by toddler-funding. On the upside is that push-chairs riddled with carbon-fibre and proper tyres with air in them are quite pleasant to use.