A Happy End To a Sob Story

Not a few will argue that losing your pet cat, the one who affectionately lands on your bed to wake you up every morning, is about as traumatic as missing your own child who fails to come home after school. When that happens, it’s not unusual to start looking, going around informing and asking neighbors clutching one of your empty cat carriers in case you find her.

Your Options, but Is your Cat Replaceable?

Failing to find her in the neighborhood, you can visit the local police and animal shelter and provide pictures and a description about your lost pet. You can also contact the local dailies to place a picture of your pet in its lost and found section in the classifieds. You may event want to post reward money.

It’s easy to find a replacement if all you is a trusted pet companion. Just visit your nearest pet shop or local animal shelter and there’s always one that would tug at your heart. But it’s a heart rending situation because any kitten you see only serves as a painful reminder of the playful times you’ve had with your lost kitty. No, this is not the solution. At least, not so soon.

Everything in the House can be Painful Reminders

And when you return home empty handed, you take your rest on the couch only to see the best cat scratching post you bought from the pet store remains untouched for days now. And by force of habit, you would still continue to buy cat supplies from the corner pet store even when little kitty is no longer around to welcome you home.

Thanks to the Collar tag

Everyday gets the same routine bringing one of our cat carriers with you on a crusade to look for her. You even post reward signs on just about every tree or electric post in the community. But there’s always hope that someone somewhere could have found and sheltered you kitty. After all, the little angel has a collar tag around her neck that has your name and address.

Cause for Celebration

Then you heart jumps as the doorbell rings and the local police delivers your beloved kitty. She runs to her favorite master meowing to her heart’s content and you thank the police officer profusely. All’s well that ends well and little kitty goes back to her den while you go out to buy cat supplies to replace the old. Thanks to her cat collar that has your address on it.

Wines not only please the palate, they please the wallet even better

So you want to invest your idle cash in something that could make you rich down the road? Here's one to think about. The Daily Mail and Reuters call it the "best performing investment of the decade." Is it a currency, a stock a futures commodity, or a bond?

None of the above. It's fine Bordeaux wines.

Just when stock markets have been in the doldrums over the last few years, crashing here and there from the global recession and the many financial shocks and aftershocks that attended 2011, like the European sovereign debt crises that continue to dampen the stocks well into 2012, here comes a light, not at the proverbial end of the tunnel, but a lot closer. And it could be so close, it's just a few stair steps down to your wine cellar.

Everybody loves a good wine and the finest and most expensive are aged wines from several hallowed vineyards from Europe, notably the Bordeaux regions of France. You may even find them in California's Napa valley. Now what determines an investment grade wine? There's one guy who is so respected among the world's finest sommeliers and oenophiles that his word alone can make a wine worth investing. He is none other than (drum roll), Robert Parker, Jr, the world's most influential and powerful wine critic. He rates wines and scores them in a scale of 100. Any wine that gets a "Parker Score" of at least 90 becomes investment grade.

Astute investors go for a portfolio with a mix of risky investments and safe havens. Gold being one of the latter. For sure there are many blue chip investments around, but they suffered the flat if not uninspiring appreciation over the last decade that have caused investors to lose weight. But not so when you invest in fine wines.

It's literally recession proof. Bordeaux wines have been observed to keep on appreciating in value more than just about all mainstream investments over the last decade. While the stocks in the FTSE 100 has appreciated just 3.4% on average, the top 100 wines have appreciated by as much as 40% on average as what most stocks in the Liv-Ex 100, the world's first stock market for wines, will tell you. Between 2000 and 2010, some of the most famous vintage wines from Bordeaux have even quadrupled in market values.

So take your idle money or junk your losing stocks and invest in fine wines, especially Bordeaux vintage. With no VAT taxes, no capital gains tax, unregulated by the FSA and a growth curve that is recession proof, is there anything else to ask in what could be the perfect investment? Indulge the wallet with a possession that knows nowhere else to go but up in value. But don't be so greedy. Leave some for the palate. And in case the wine values falls off the cliff, however unlikely, at least you can drink it.

Car Insurance For Minors

The moment your kid starts to drive using his underage driver’s license, you can expect your premiums to hit the roof. Kids aged 15 -16 with parental consent can get a learner’s permit after passing the required DMV tests, Some states allow even 14 year olds to have one.  But getting a car insurance under 21 becomes an issue as it is often a wallet draining concern for parents, especially if your kid is a boy.

The premium is often paid monthly and depending on the state where you live and the type of car your kid drives, itt is quite common for you to pay more for teen boy rates insurance companies uniformly charge than for you and your spouse’s combined car insurance premium in one year.  And should your kid meet a road accident of his own making, you can expect the premium to triple for three years after making a claim. It’s not unusual for average families to give up their kid’s licenses when this happens, unless the kid can find work to afford them.

While statistical data on road accidents tend to justify a hefty increase and an unforgiving set of policy content for auto insurance under 21, it’s not as if you have no choice but accept what is offered to you. You as a parent or guardian has several options that can keep your premiums within more tolerable limits, lower than if you did nothing about it. 

For starters, it would be wise to start your teen driver with a second hand or pre-owned car that has a good safety reputation like a Volvo or a Honda and none of those exotic cars that are more prone to theft. Older and less inviting cars generally have lower insurance premiums up to a point.  But the last thing you will want to do is get your teen boy behind the wheels of a Porsche or a Ferrari in any model year of the last decade.  Not only will your premiums skyrocket, you are effectively inviting you kid to enter the gates of heaven sooner than later.

Here are a few other things you can do:

·         Take advantage of multipolicy discount insurance companies provide when taking out your kid’s auto insurance from the same company that covers yours.  This type of discount applies when you get several non-life policies from a single company like having both your homeowners and auto insurance from one.. See if you can obtain an umbrella policy that can cover more liabilities especially as your teen driver starts to get exposed to road hazards in college.

·         It’s still a good idea to compare rates, though.  The insurance company that gave you and your spouse the best rates may not do likewise when adding a kid to your coverage even with those discounts, so do shop around.  But having said that, if the difference is only a few dollars, there are benefits to remaining loyal to your present insurer, like being more forgiving.

·         It will require a one-off expense but your premiums get lower once your raise the collision and comprehensive deductibles of your auto insurance.  $1,000 would be the minimum.  In addition, it keeps you from filing small claims that could compromise any future discount insurance firms are known to apply for a claims-free period.  In addition, you may want to lose your collision and comprehensive coverage when getting older cars which often get you less than what your premiums pay for. 

·         If your kid gets high grades, at least a B on 12 credits of college work or a 3.0 GPA in high school, your insurer may offer significant discounts on your kid’s premium.  Check with your insurance company if it does. Many do.  It certainly won’t hurt to encourage your kid to do well in school.

And they say they love to write…

Yes, people who write blogs and submit to article directories love to write.  But not necessarily the people they hire to write for them.  I am always amazed to see clients prod writers in their employ to do their best, otherwise, they remind you that you cannot really be a writer with mediocre articles.  When you love what you do, it’s easy to bring out your best. 

To a large extent, that’s true. But really now, writers love what they do, not because they love to write, but because they love the subject they write about.  There ma be some who do, but I have yet to meet a writer who loves writing just for the sake of writing.

With internet marketing using hordes of writers to churn out thousands of SEO and reputation management articles, writing has been reduced from the lofty perch it used to occupy as literary and journalistic expressions of the learned and the impassioned.  It is now just a cheap way to earn money, not for themselves, but for their clients.

How can you love writing when your words are forced out to produce articles that make social misfits, crooks and politicians look good online?  Did I make the right “birds of the same feather” association? Those articles are about reputation management.  They are essentially PR jobs that make a crook look good.  At least the writer can assume client is falsely discredited and needs to reverse a negative online presence, or image.

How can you love writing when you are forced to make sense out of keywords that don’t make sense and wrongly spelled you can’t do anything about?  Try make a sentence out of “cheap trainer weight loss.”  I’m not saying there are no creative ways to do it, but when you have to do it 5 times in a 500 word article and create 10 articles with it, you could end up pulling your hair on your 2^nd article.

Great Movies You Would Not Want To Miss On Halloween

Halloween night isn’t just for kids.  And if you’ve totally outgrown your drive for trick-or-treating, there’s nothing better than to stay home and have quality time with your family. 

It’s no secret that most video shops enjoy a rental revenue spike a few days before Halloween. And from experience, they know what movie titles to stock up at around this time of the year.  Of course, renting isn’t the only way to watch that scary movie.  For sure there are households that own quite a few film titles on DVD or Blu-Ray as part of their home theater collection.  After watching them once, there’s a good chance these titles start to collect dust on shelves.  But come special occasions and holidays, some titles find their way back on the video player.  They deserve a special screening just for the family on Halloween night.  And here are some of them.

Harry Potter series.

Witchcraft and wizardry makes this set of films a must see at this time.  Nothing scary about them, but the later installments do get a bit darker in ambiance and plot.  Unless you schedule a marathon screening of all 4 releases from morning until night, you may have to make a choice on which Harry Potter film to watch.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Francis Ford Copola’s re-telling of this overused vampiric lore gets a fresh overhaul to the old tale.  You can ofcourse get the Hammer series with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as well as countless remakes on “Dracula.”

Resident Evil series

If you prefer the more acrobatic action type or Mila Jovovich’s presence, “Resident Evil” and its sequels can provide one breathtaking moment on Halloween night.  Just be sure the kids are old enough to take on much of the violence and gore.

Stephen King’s Red Rose

A made-for-TV movie, Red Rose does have the spooky ghosts for a traditional haunted mansion movie genre.  But what sets this apart is its engrossing story that had been woven to sound quite historical when it is not.  You could opt for another like the more comical Haunted House from Disney with Eddie Murphy.  Or the more spooky “The Shining.”  Any of them gets a good vote as giving one hell of a ghostly night on Halloween.

Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride

“A Nightmare Before Christmas” gets equal footing as a must see on Halloween. The Corpse Bride is just a bit more recent. An excellent pair using traditional stop-motion animation, both films will have you laughing with fright. You might not have all the time to watch both back to back, but see if you can.

Van Helsing

In just one movie, you have Dracula, the Frankenstein monster and the werewolf together. The battle is out against a church-sponsored monster-assassin Van Helsing. In case you don’t remember, he’s the arch-enemy of Dracula in the original Bram Stoker novel.  This time, Hollywood gave him a more “responsibilities.”  With action and legend getting some hormonal boost, “Van Helsing” shouldn’t be missed.

Wow, all those films on Halloween night?  Not a chance. You have to do some serious choosing as to which one can bring the best entertainment for you and your family. But these have become timeless samples. Any of them will do. And there’s always next year’s Halloween.

Writing for SEO clients tickles the funny bone

Search optimizing a website means having the right content and more content.  Not just any content, but content peppered with ridiculously phrased keywords.  Now where do you see these contents?  They are posted in blogs, article directories, product review sites, and press release sites, to mention some, with those keywords linked to your website.  It’s those backlinks that increase your website’s page rank in Google and, consequently, presumably, your site gets a higher visibility.  That’s another term to mean your site gets to land on the first result page when searching for any of those keywords.

Never mind if that’s true or not, but I recall my first SEO writing jobs using four mentions of the keywords in the body  with one in the title, the  first sentence and another in the last sentence. I didn’t even known then that Google bothered with location-specific keywords.  It’s like being asked by my English teacher to make a sentence using “wedding car atlanta”,  “fitness total usa”, “slander defamation: or “nature enhancement male”.  I thought it was a joke, but the instructions were clear:  “use the phrases as is, wrong spelling, wrong grammar and all.” 

The rest is history, my writing history that is.  Who would have thought I’d be making sentences using keywords that hardly made sense.  That’s not the worst part.  I was also asked to write about keywords with wrong spelling.  That’s because some idiot would type them in a search engine box and expect a result.  And that result had better be the client whose articles I was writing for.  But that’s what SEO writing is about.  No complaints, no regrets, just a few dollars to show for it.

Taking the Right Road with My College Options

College-bound kids agonizing over what course to take and what college to attend can get a sigh of relief to know that there are websites they can visit for most of the information they need for make a sound decision. One of them is My College Options.  As the name suggests, it presents valuable resource options primarily aimed for students in making more informed choices to get them through college admissions and college life in general.  And by way of assisting them in their career planning process, the site also features sections for parents and secondary educators and counselors as well.

What the Site Focuses On

Created and maintained by the NRCCUA (National Research Center for College and University Admissions) which has been in the business of assisting students and high schools since 1972, the My College Options site offers a free online and offline college planning resource that basically helps the student get through a college admission in a college that is right for his aptitude and interest.  

• If you’re a graduating student in senior high, the site provide and in-school questionnaire that your counselor can administer to your class to gauge your match with any of the 5,000 colleges and universities in the country.  If you missed this, you can simply finish its online profiling questionnaire that does the same thing. Once complete, the site returns with a recommended post secondary program that matches your academic aptitudes and interest.
• The site provides a search resource for a wealth of relevant information such as colleges by state, name and major course.  More importantly for students who are financially challenged, the site offers a nearly inexhaustible listing of available scholarships which you can comb through by state, ethnicity, religion and majors.  Its latest feature will even make a match between your academic profile with the right scholarship package that’s available.
• What spices up the site is its “fat Envelop” blogging advice and tutoring section for students, parents and teachers that contain articles from professional educators covering just about all aspects of college admissions, most popular courses today, featured colleges,  tips and other blog posts to get you through the hurdles you can expect to face in post secondary education.

Strength and Weaknesses of the Site

The site looks more like a commercial site than a serious stiff looking academic site but this is a trifle caveat for the wealth of information that not only enlightens but provides practical assistance to students, parents and educators. If there’s one site to visit to help you in your planing for a college career, this has got to be it.  You get information about the colleges in the country, career options as well as financial assistance options in the form of loans and scholarships. Its matching service provided by the NRCCUA can be most enlightening in terms of your post secondary education options.

The site claims to be interactive, but filling out the online profile sheet to open an site account and get your college match started has more interaction requirement with your school as it would need some data from them to complete the profile.  But once the school’s participation is done with, you have a wealth of useful information and tools to make your start your college life in the right footing.

For sure, the website’s aesthetics can stand some improvement.  For one, using orange for highlighted text on white background must have been done by a color-blind web designer as it can be a real strain to read.  Next is the rather bland text-intensive layout which is simple enough to read but suffers a paucity of images to enhance the visual appeal that the teenage crowd, it main readership, looks for in websites.

Conclusion

My College Options is a veritable one-stop shop for just about anything you need to get you though what is arguably the first major milestone of your adult life – a college admission.  The college and scholarship search alone is worth the visit.  Outside of a boring and cheap commercial look, the site is a standout in terms of the information and assistance it provides.

The Ivy Coach Blog – the “Ivy League” of College Admission Blogs

The Ivy Coach Blog – the “Ivy League” of College Admission Blogs

You know the site’s focus just by its name.  The Ivy Coach is one such site that aims to give students planning to enter any of the Ivy League colleges some good reasons to get their parents to hire the services of a college admissions consultant.  Those reasons can be found in the site blog. 

Getting into Harvard or Yale, despite being the top in your graduating class and having the financial wherewithal to do so, is getting increasingly difficult over the years. These colleges have become so selected that they take in just 10% to 15% of 15,000 to 25,000 students applying every year.  That what the site says and there’s no reason to doubt it given that its founder, Bev Taylor, is a high respected education consultant on college admissions who is regularly on the lecture circuit across the country and the world.  So what could possibly go wrong?

An Upscale Focus that also Works with the rest

The site proves that commerce and excellent blog articles are good bedfellows. When you are convincing people to hire an education consultant to coach your kid on how best to hurdle the college admissions of a selective Ivy Leaguer, those blog articles better have better be good.  And the Ivy Coach Blog has many that can make an impression that you need one. Based on the categories listed on the many of the professional advice and tips on the articles apply to college admissions everywhere, not just ivy leaguers.

• There are around 32 article categories from A to Z with the most concentration (66 articles) on Admission Process.  With 252 articles today, more than half is devoted to such topic categories as Standardized Testing, Ivy League, The Rankings, College Essays, College Interviews, Selecting Colleges, Early Decision and Deciding on a Collage to Attend.  They clearly show a focus on giving advice and tips as well as experiential anecdotes on preparing yourself to face the first major decision in your adult life – going to college.  The articles are mostly opinions of the author and guest writers which are well written and insightful to start with.
•  Other article categories like Talented Students, LGBT Students, International Students, Athletes as well as Parents, Teacher/Counselor Recommendations and the Social Media delve more on the societal interaction among student demographics and their elders in shaping their college future.  
• The Did You Know category is a group of articles that are insightful for impression most students generalize about but are less than factual.  Articles like “Sometimes it’s who you are that counts!” and “There’s life after being rejected” are something every student should read for their enlightening insights.  On the other hand, articles like “Lies, damned Lies, Statistics and Ranking” are quite revealing.

Strengths and Weaknesses

In terms of layout and content, the Ivy Coach Blog is simply one of the better college admission sites out there.  The articles themselves are worth the visit if you want to enrich and widen your learning horizon on the realities of college admissions, less about the technical aspects on how to go through them.  This is where the site gets its good points and bad.  The blog is really more of a sharing venue for the experience and insights of its authors than a technical guidebook for successfully passing the admissions screening of Ivy League Colleges. But that’s just fine.  The site can’t be more technical since this would render hiring their education consultant unnecessary.

The site is still a chip off the formal template typical of stiff newspaper sites but minus the images. The text-rich blog is better off read by middle-aged parents who don’t mind the look and prefer to indulge in the content they can relay to their kids who may not want to bother with it.

Conclusion

The really valuable insight form The Ivy Coach is its focus on college admissions in upscale colleges and universities like Harvard and Yale. Most college admission sights provide generic advice and tips which often fall short when applying in prestigious colleges.  It is said that if you can be accepted in Harvard, there’d be no reason you can’t br accepted in other universities.  And if the interesting and mind-provoking blog articles leave you with more questions, that’s when you should consider hiring their admissions consultant.