Going Green without Spending Green

We have this mistaken idea that to go green, we have to spend green dollars. Well, actually, you do not need to strain your budget just to adopt an eco-friendly lifestyle. In fact, you will be fattening up your wallets with these tips on going green without spending your green dollars. And trust us, these ways are easy, effective and convenient.

Reduce Food Waste

Your grocery bill may constitute more than 50 percent of your total household bills. Thus, any and all efforts to reduce food waste will add up to big benefits to your pockets and to the environment for many reasons. You can achieve this end by:

* Reducing your food consumption in terms of shopping for groceries.
* Using leftovers for new dishes and enforcing a no-dregs policy
* Planning meals in advance to avoid too many leftovers

Use Heaters Wisely

We are so dependent on hot water for many of our needs from washing our bodies to washing our dishes and clothes. Well, go green by choosing cold water for many activities in the house. Start by taking cold showers when the weather permits instead of hot tub baths. Then progress into using unheated tap water for washing your hands, dishes and clothes. Studies have shown that tap water is just as effective in killing germs as hot water. The trick is in washing your hands properly for 20 seconds, soaking the clothes for 30 minutes to remove stubborn dirt and washing off the dregs on the eating utensils before placing on a full dishwasher.

Unplug the Appliances

You can save as much as 10-15 percent of your electricity bill simply by unplugging the cords from their sockets when these are not in use. This is because so-called phantom electricity does not flow from the grid into your appliances. And speaking of appliances, you can save money by either buying ones with the Energy Star logo or ones that have been refurbished. Of course, make sure that the refurbished appliances are also energy-efficient. You ought to save money in the long run instead of sticking to your run-down appliances. However, do recycle said old appliances with the manufacturers or with the recycling centers.

Use Recycled Materials for Your Home

As much as possible, use recycled materials for your home. You can purchase scrap lumber from hardware stores, vintage wood and glass panels from garage sales and old houses, utensils and ornaments made of recycled materials from green stores and sites, to name a few options. You will often spend less on these items and yet get as much mileage as you possibly can from them. Better yet, you should adopt the motto of environmentalists everywhere - reduce, reuse and recycle. You will soon find that indeed being eco-friendly has its rewards for you and for your children's children.

Starting today, take a look around your home and see what else needs to be done to be as environmentally-friendly as possible.



Read about ways to start going green in the kitchen and more about the different ways to recycle.

Choose A Backup Software For Your Data Center Disaster Recovery Plan

A data center stores all the programs, files, applications and other digital information that a business needs to have, so they may reasonably compete against businesses using the internet. If their files where destroyed, this would bring the companies production to a halt, possibly causing a crushing blow to its positive cash flow. This is why it's absolutely critical to invest time and money in a reliable data center disaster recovery plan.

If you are already convinced that you must protect your data, then the next question is what exactly are we supposed to look for in a data center disaster recovery plan anyway?

It does not matter if you are a huge multinational corporation or a new business just entering your fast growth phase. Every business needs a first rate computer backup system.

Computer backup systems are a part of data center disaster recovery plans because they play the major role of safeguarding the pertinent data that keeps your business alive and restoring that data if a computer hardware failure occurs. Because of the importance of its function, selecting the right computer backup program is critical to your data center's disaster recovery plan.

Listed below are several facts to consider during your search for the best computer backup system:

Protection: How many levels of safety does the program have? Does it have a proper administrative login procedure? Can it keep your files intact in its own "vault" so they cannot leak out, get misplaced, or become erased? Determining what the program's security system can and cannot do is vital in making a selection. The program you want to choose must be capable of top-rate security.

Ease of Access: Even though you're backed up files have to be secure, at the same time they should be easily accessible. This encourages frequent updates and simplifies documentation procedures. An accessible system boosts the businesses efficiency, allowing more time to work on other important issues and responsibilities.

Storage Space: Storage pace is always a big issue for online computer backups. Even a small mom and pop business can have an amazing amount of data that needs to be stored. It's vital to know all your storage options and the limitations of your online computer backups, so you can confirm if it can, in fact, handle all or your valuable data.

Ease of Use: It isn’t a must-have requirement, but an easy to understand and operate program is a big plus for a number of reasons. A simple but effective program will be operated, verified, backed up, and given quality control checks more often. This minimizes the risk of file recovery disaster and increases the likelihood of a full recovery from computer crashes.

Dependability: Another important point to look for is if the program can store and restore your data completely when asked too without having to jump through any hoops? You should make sure it is easy to restore your data.

Don’t include yourself as one of the many businesses that do not pay enough attention to their data center disaster recovery plans. Neglecting to check if your computer backup system is up to restoring a file recovery disaster is going to be a painful experience when you most need it.

At all times you have to remember that depending on which computer backup system you select, it will make or break your data center disaster recovery plans. So be sure to take your time and pick wisely.


Data Center Migration

Data center migration services

Economic Stimulus - Just How Much is a "Billion" Anyway?

When I was young I heard there were small handfuls of millionaires in the world. As far as I knew they all lived in Texas. I couldn't fathom a "million" dollars back then. As I got older I heard of a few billionaires, I always figured they were kings or sultans.

Now, scared and strapped Americans are hearing talk about billions upon billions. Our government recently approved a plan, signed into law that will spend $787 billion. The newscasters and folks on Wall Street say it's a lot of money. So just how much money is that anyway?

Most simpletons like me may have a hard time figuring out "just what is a billion?" Well, let's try to put this in perspective.

First, go find a whole bunch of one-hundred dollar bills. Start by placing them end to end, you can use tape if you need, but keep doing it over and over until you reach the amount of the stimulus package, let's say about $787 billion - but you can round up or down. When you're done, you'll find the row of hundreds is 745,000 miles long. It's a distance to the moon, back to earth and back to the moon. It would take a jet flying at 450 mph over sixty-nine days to cover the distance.

One billion seconds ago was the year 1978. Jimmy Carter was president and Queen's hit "We are the Champions" was number one on the billboard charts, "Garfield" made its comic debut and Roman Polanski made his getaway to Europe.

A billion teaspoons of water will fill two Olympic size pools, four and one-half Nimitz class aircraft carriers weigh one billion pounds, six states the size of Texas equal a billion acres, and, a baby born today will be nearly 32 years old in a billion seconds.

Wow, that really sounds like a lot of money! Now I'm really depressed.

All my articles are posted on my blog at: http://mywritingcoach.blogspot.com.

Get your Economic Stimulus Package Bill news at iTaxRebate.com

Your Guide To Select An Online Nursing School

Nursing is a booming career field with tremendous career opportunities. Throughout the years, the field of nursing has brought millions and millions of people above the average paying jobs. The nursing career opportunities arise like the golden sun everyday and await all degree holders of nursing. With the high demand in nursing jobs, schools that offer nursing programs are growing rapid. And to ease the students to earn the nursing degree, more and more online nursing degree programs are available to enable the students to earn their nursing degree from anywhere and at their own pace.

Too many choices on online nursing degree programs may sometime make you hard to decide which one to choose. Here are a few factors to consider when select an online nursing school:

1. The Online Nursing School Is Accredited

When an online school is accredited, it means that it has passed or surpassed a set of nationally recognized standards for its teaching process. The accreditation of online nursing school is optional but it is important to secure for your brighter future in your nursing career path. Many employers are more opt to hire nurses from an accredited online nursing school. Another important factor to consider pursuing your nursing degree from an accredited online nursing school is credit transferable when you want to continue your education in the future.

2. The Lecturer-to-Students Ratio

Teacher-to-students ratio is important when come to the personal attention spend by each lecturer to his/her online students. You can check with the admission department on the average online student to a lecturer. With the lower teacher-to-students ratio, the more personal attention you receive from your lecturer. Most of online nursing degrees will require some hours of physical class, labs & clinical works, you will have a better opportunity to ask questions and learn more.

3. The Lecturer-to-Students Ratio

Students who graduate from nursing school are required to undergo an examination called NCLEX-RN (National Council Licensure EXamination-Registered Nurse) before receiving licensure as a registered nurse in United States. You can check out the nursing schools average NCLEX-RN pass rate, it will be a good indicator to show whether the online nursing programs offered by that nursing school are inline with the state requirement in order to become a certified nurse. Of course, you will want to compare pass rates for the last decade to get a more comprehensive picture.

4. Clinical Assignment

Most of online nursing program will require you to complete you clinical assignment in hospital; if you have transportation difficulties or you are working while earning your online nursing degree, you may not flexible enough to travel for long distance; thus, in selecting your online nursing school, you might want to consider a online nursing school which can offer you to complete your clinical assignment at hospital near at your state or near to your home.

In Summary

The best way to make that final decision about an online nursing school is to know what you want. But you should also realize that you should be looking at the details of the online nursing program of your selected nursing school as hard as the school will be looking at your application for enrollment.

Online LPN Programs

Online LPN Nursing Programs

1,000 Song Searches: A Comparison of Music Searching with iTunes and Zune Marketplace

Being an iTunes user for several years, I never thought much about its search capabilities. Until, that is, I experienced the elegance of Zune software's search.

When searching for a song with iTunes, you enter a search term or two (example: "Van Morrison"), and press the Search button to see a list of matching results.

Simple enough. But if you spelled 'Morrison' wrong (with one r, perhaps, or two s's), iTunes won't return any hits. At best, if you're lucky, you'll see a "did you mean...?" message from iTunes.

And don't try partial searches, either. If you try to save time and avoid errors by entering "van mor", you likewise won't get any Van Morrison hits in your iTunes search results.

Another scenario: enter "Eddie Cochrane" as your search term, and iTunes returns no matches. Why? Because the artist you're looking for is Eddie Cochran... you have to lose the trailing e, otherwise iTunes won't help you.

iTunes search is simply unforgiving of typos or incomplete words, and returns only songs that are exact matches to your search terms.

Zune software, on the other hand, is much more forgiving, and much more effective as a tool for finding music. Most noticeably, it provides dynamic searching. As you enter your search terms, a filtered list of search results appears in the details pane. Every letter you press further filters the list - so as you spell your song name or artist name, you can see the results changing dynamically. You get immediate feedback on what you're looking for.

Because of the dynamic search, you can use partial spellings in your search. Enter "van mor", for example, and you'll see all Van Morrison songs appear as you key in the letters.

Zune software lets you mix and match partial search terms for artist and song name, too. This can be a very quick way to filter your results down to a desired song. Enter "van mor moon", and you'll get an idea of how quickly you can filter down to see Van Morrison's track Moondance.

Another useful trait of Marketplace search: it returns everything in that artist's catalog - even items that may not be available for download. This actually facilitates search - by providing a positive hit on your search terms. With iTunes, you have to scroll through search results to be sure you're not missing it, buried among the tribute albums and cover versions by other artists. Or, that you haven't missed it because of iTunes' lack of forgiveness about typos and partial search terms.

On the flip side: While iTunes search is primitive, it is responsive. Press enter, and the results come back faster than the dynamic search of Marketplace.

The benefits of Marketplace search really hit home to me recently during our Rock'n'Roll research, where I and a small team searched for 500 rock and roll songs in each of iTunes and Marketplace. The efficiencies of Zune's Marketplace really stood out in that research project.

Zune software may not be perfect, but when it comes to helping you find the music you want... it blows the doors off of iTunes.

Harvey Chute is webmaster of http://www.Zunerama.com, a Microsoft Zune resource center that provides one-stop for all things Zune, including Zune user forums, Zune specifications, documentation, FAQ, and a daily blog providing analysis and commentary on Zune news.

Bestel iTunes Gift Card.

Article Writing - The New SEO Master Tool - Part 1

Since search engines were invented, there has been a constant head to head between the search engine algorithm writers and webmasters. Every time the algorithms changed the webmasters tried to outwit them. The internet is full if conflicting SEO advice on how to achieve top rankings. This article hopes to clear up some of the confusion.

In the beginning it was sufficient to have an adequate amount of keywords on your website in order to rank highly in the search engines. This led to keyword spamming, a practice which still continues today amongst inexperienced webmasters.

Then along came Google and the goal posts shifted. Google put more emphasis on webpage linking, Their thought was simple - if one website had a link to another website, then it was as if the first website was placing a vote of confidence for the second website's content and therefore the second website must be useful and relevant to the readers of the first website. Thus the Google Page Rank was invented.

Soon the webmasters and internet marketers got to work. This saw the emergence of link forms and reciprocal linking sites. Internet marketers declared that the more links that appeared on your site, the higher it would rank in Google. Suddenly link pages from websites started to run into multiple pages as the race was on to exchange links with whoever would agree. Some sites started to have thousands of links point to their sites and began rising in the search engine rankings.

Of course the game of cat and mouse with Google continued as the search engine giant once again changed its algorithms.

It is now widely accepted that previous linking strategies are failing because of what Google now expects from links.

RELEVANCY

Google expects links on a site to be relevant to the readers of the original site.

ONE WAY LINKS

Google gives a much higher priority to one-way links without a reciprocal link in return.

ANCHOR TEXT

It is better for the anchor text (the actual text that contains the link) to be keyword relevant to the content and also to vary as numerous instances of the same anchor text without variance can be interpreted as keyword spamming.

The importance placed on the above factors has all but eliminated the effectiveness of previous linking strategies. Most links on link page directories were exchanged with any site who would reciprocate. Therefore most of these sites were not relevant to the original site.

The reciprocal linking strategy also negates the one-way linking preferred by Google. Most link directories contain the same anchor text in all links, as this anchor text was advertised on the "link to us" page.

Therefore Google now looks upon these reciprocal link directories as having no value. They do not distribute page rank and therefore do not help the ranking of your website.

That is why I now describe article writing as the new SEO Master Tool - please see Part II of this article for the reasoning.


Bourne SEO offers Web Design in Sussex and other services.

Debt Reduction Is Easy

Debt can be easily reduced. There are several ways to reduce debt. If debt becomes too big, then a person can even be declared bankrupt. According to a Federal Reserve study, 1 out of every 100 families in America declare bankruptcy every year. This spells badly for the economy too. This means that there are no savings for the future. Savings are required for future capital investment and generation. In fact China is a country where the savings per family is the highest in the world.

The reduction in the debt will help us to buy goods and services that we want to by, pay for the future bills such as medical and home bills when we are unable to earn. Savings in Debt reduction can fund a second home or education for your children. For most families the major chunk of debt is the credit card debt and the cash advances taken against credit cards. Its necessary that the credit card amount be paid in full and not the minimum balance. By paying minimum balance, you are incurring debt as well as interest charges. The credit card companies can charge an interest rate of almost 36% compounded annually. Therefore it's best to clear out accounts and not revolve the credit. Resist from paying the card bill with another credit card. At the end of the day you would need to repay the amount.

Another chunk of debt is the payday loans, which are taken to override short-term cash problems. For example if you have issued a check for the electricity bill and don't have cash in the bank, the payday loan will cover the shortfall. However these need to be paid back within a week. If not the loan sharks can charge a hefty rate of interest. Therefore it's essential that you reduce the debts for a safe and secure financial future.


Kristy Sinsara

Kristy Sinsara

Conversational Hypnosis - A Powerful Sales Tool

If you have not heard of conversational or covert hypnosis then it is time to you get to know about it.

What is conversational / covert hypnosis?

Conversational hypnosis is a term used by Ericksonian hypnotherapists to create a trance using embedded words in the verbal text. Some people see this technique as unethical because the client has a right to knowingly participate in the development of trance. On the contrary, other specialists affirm that conversational hypnosis is a well-tested and effective Ericksonian technique, and definitively not unethical in any way.

Conversational hypnosis is one of the most effective and efficient techniques of hypnotherapy in producing quick and permanent results. However, special training and skills are necessary to be able to effectively use this technique.

How can conversational hypnosis relate to your sales job?

If you have already gone through the special training to apply conversational hypnosis in your job, just think of the possibilities especially when you are trying to close a deal with a client. You are definitely going to experience a higher closing rate compare to those who have never heard conversational hypnosis.

Every purchaser will have a motive. It is either something that they want to have, wished for or something that can potentially contribute to growth to whatever they are doing. For example why would an individual live a big house when he or she can live comfortably in an average sized home? Or why would a business owner expand his or her business to other states or overseas when it is doing well its current location?

If you are equipped with the skill of conversational hypnosis, you will become a better sale person. Because some how or someway, you will be able to manage and convince your client that the product or service you are selling is what they want or something that can help improve whatever that they are doing.

Do keep in mind though that such skill isn't only for selling. It is really a great addition to your life because you will be able to use conversional hypnosis to persuade an individual, a group or even large audience to do your bidding.

Just imagine how nice it would be to get someone to do something for you just because you are too lazy to do it? Or just to do something as you please.

Can conversational hypnosis be used in an unethical way?

Obviously the answer would be YES. To the extent where you can even make a stranger give you all his cash in is wallet at that point of time. If such skill ever falls in the wrong hands, there would certainly be havoc.

However the supply of appropriate training is very limited worldwide. Not many people can find the right access to the proper conversational hypnosis training courses. Even if there is one available, it will come at a hefty price tag.

How would you know if you naturally have the skill of conversational hypnosis?

Every individual would somehow be in a group of friends. Regardless of its size, as long as you know you're the leader of the group, you pretty much have the natural gift of conversational hypnosis. Unfortunately many of us aren't born leaders. This is where acquiring the knowledge and skills of conversational hypnosis will be beneficial.

It's always better to be the leader in a group of friends or in a relationship because things will go your way, which is favorable to yourself. And the best part is your followers or companion will be happy to have it your way. Isn't that wonderful?

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