At home, what can we do to keep us warm?

- heating (electric, gas)
- fireplace
- water bag (for the feet)
- electric blanket
- a lot of blankets
- dehumidifier – I use it to make the air more dry and therefore more warm)
- human body – two or three people together for instance in the couch feel less cold than one person alone

I am a person that, while at home, I always have more clothes on than everybody in the house.

Usually we find common degrees like Math, Languages, History but I found a peculiar Online Teaching College that has three quite interesting Degrees. I’m talking about Northwestern College and the degrees are:

• business administration degree
• criminal justice degree
• health information technology

The degree that interests me the most is the business administration degree. I’m already working in administration services although in a basic job. This degree would improve my skills and give the knowledge I need to improve in my career.

There is an online application we can use so we don’t have to leave our house to enrol. Learning lessons are easy to follow, there are no fixed schedules therefore we don’t have to miss our job or leave our family alone at home to attend classes. Everything is done online so we can use our lunch hour or coffee break to catch up with the lessons. With this degree I would feel more confident to get a better job or to get a promotion on my present job.

Online learning is a great way to keep up studying even if we have a full time job and a family to take care of.

Image via Wikipedia

As you know car insurance prices vary from one insurance company to another. If you need a car insurance or if you want to lower the bill of your actual insurance then compare. How do you do this:

- Make a list of all the insurance companies you might want to contact
- Ask each of one for car insurance quotes
- Compare the prices
- In case you have more insurances (home, life or other) if you can get a package price in the same isurance company
- Negotiate the price – say that you have a better price from another company

Insurances are very expensive and sometimes, if we don’t look for several quotes we end up having a huge bill to pay.

Now that I quit my full time job I really am thinking about getting an online degree. I could do it from home, take and pick up my kids from school and still take care of the house.

I did an online research and I found the Western Governor University that has been mentioned in several well known magazines and TV channels. The website of the WGU is very simple to navigate and it has deep information on the online University. Students come from every social stratus, from different locations, in fact there are students from all the U.S. States studying in the WGU. A lot of people are full time workers that are looking for a online business degree to succeed in their career.

Western Governor University is a non-profit university and prices are lower than in other online universities. You can ask for admission at any time of the year because new student groups start their studies every month, so if you do not enter in one month because a group has already started, you will start the following month.

I am really thrilled with this idea of getting back to “school” and WGU really is an excellent choice.

photo credit: Robert S. Donovan

Being almost jobless I have started a deep job search online. I would like to work from home and I have been looking for something that can make me pay my monthly bills. However I saw some posts talking about job scams and what are the signs that makes a job offer not reliable.

Here are some of the main reasons to not trust on a job offer:

- Jobs that offer a salary of millions. Make 100k in one months is an example.

- Social security number required

- Bank account requested

- Cash advance required

- MLM jobs

- Email of contact from gmail, yahoo, hotmail. Only trust those with personalized email addresses

- No references on job webpage

When doing a job search make sure you have reliable information. Check if the phone numbers on the site are working and even make a phone call to make sure it is a real company with a real job offer.

It is 90 times faster than a normal refrigerator and 40 times than a freezer.

Velocity: nowadays it’s the faster way to chill drinks. We don’t have to be worried about leaving a bottle in the freezer and find it broken later.

It’s the right choice for parties, unexpected guests or if you have little space in your freezer at home.

Trust and Security: capable of keeping an exact consistence of temperature, not changing the taste or carbonic level of the drink. It’s easy to clean and keep.

Versatile: it can chill any bottle of all sizes and materials, like aluminum, glass or plastic.

Easy to use, economic, no-toxic and adjustable to any material. Just mix a couple of ice cubes and two glasses of water and voilà!

I actually first found out about the possibility of making money on the Internet when I was looking for an online loan. I notice that all the loan sites online had similar ads on them. I wondered why, and when I investigated it, I found out about online affiliate programs. You can actually be paid for having a website that gives traffic to other websites. Don’t get me wrong ? it isn’t anything to count on right away. It requires a lot of work, and it won’t necessarily immediately give you a lot of money. Still, with a few hits here and a few hits there, soon it can make real money on the Internet.

One way to make money on the internet is has a copy writer. This isn’t a good job for the undisciplined or those without a stern constitution. You see, it is either feast or famine with freelance work. It is easy to go for a month or two without lining up a gig. When you do get a job, you have to milk it for all it is worth. Fulfill the contract, go beyond the call of duty, and try to get additional work. Every employer is precious, and it is difficult to keep one for longer than a single job. Nonetheless, if you are able to impress them with the quality of the work that you do, you’ll be able to make money on the Internet quite easily. It won’t necessarily make you rich, but it will allow you to live at a decent standard of living while working from home. For me, that is more than enough to make it worth it.

Go to the site Nasa World Wind and download the World Wind 1.4 . With this program you can see images like this one:

MODIS - 10-4-2003, Hurricane Kate, Atlantic Ocean

With this program you have access to tridimensional maps available through NASA with amazing details.

If you are a little tired of exploring our planet earth then try: File – Moon and explore the moon. Have fun.

.AVI – Audio/Video Interleave: This is the most common type of file for PC and can include almost all audio and video formats. The most common are DiVX and Xvid for video and MP3 and WAV for audio.

.MKV – Matroska (Matroska Video) -  This type of open code file is being used very often mainly because, on the contrary of others, this file format supports multiple channels of audio and subtitles in only one file

.MPEG2 – Moving Picture Experts Group 2 – This is one of the most used type of files. It is the codification used in every DVD disks and also by station that broadcast with digital signal.

.TS – Transport Stream – This type of file is part of the standard MPEG2 and is used in TV station broadcasts.

.DIVX – This format was created by DiVX Inc., the company that created the original DiVX format also known as MP4 or MPEG 4. This was the first format to offer a good relation between compression and image quality.

.MOV – Standard video file from Macintosh, that can be read by Quicktime from Apple.

.WMV – Windows Media Video – This format was created by Microsoft to replace the .AVI that offers more capabilities, for instance compression capabilities as well as high definition signal us.

.H264 – This is the format adopted for the broadcast of high definition signal and also for Blu-ray. It preserves the image quality and at the same time a very good compression rate.

.VOB – Video Object – These files are present in every DVD Video disks. Inside them there are the Mpeg2 video, the audio and subtitles.

.FLV – Flash Video – Coded files to be used in web pages that use Adobe Flash technology. The most famous application of this files is You Tube and all the other sites that offer video in the Internet.

I’ll post about the audio file extensions soon.

If you are sure that you want to erase all traces from some computer files you have good results with Eraser. The Eraser free computer software is a file destruction tool. Once installed in your computer you will have the eraser option available on the context menu of Windows Explorer and in the recycle bin menu.

Eraser Features are:

Works with Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP (32/64),Vista (32/64), Windows Server 2003 and DOS. It works with any drive including IDE, SCSI and RAID, and CD-RW’s.
Uses the Guttmann (Default), Pseudorandom Data and US DoD 5220-22.M methods.
Erases Files and Folders.
Erases Files/Folders that were only previously ‘deleted’.
Erases all hard drives using ‘Darik’s Boot and Nuke’ method.
Erases Index.dat on Reboot
Erases Encrypted Files and Drives.
Erases FreeSpace on 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP and DOS.
Erases contents of the Recycle Bin.
Erases Compressed Files and Drives.
Erases Network Files, Floppy Disks, CD-RW, DVD-RAM, DVD-RW.
Erases Windows Temporary Files.
Erases Internet Cookies.
Erases Paging (swap) file.
Erases Internet Cache.
Appears as an ‘Erase’ option on the Context Menu of Windows Explorer and Recycle Bin.
Comes with an Eraser Scheduler that allows you to create user-defined tasks.
Defeats File Recovery software applications Hardware tools.
Supports FAT32 and NTFS Files Systems.
Eraser is easy to use and comes with a dedicated support network.

Be careful, remember that using Eraser your files will be erased forever, you can’t recover them even with Recuva program.

Eraser software is FREE.

I wish you a

Very Happy New Year!!

On Christmas Eve my husband bought PC Guide magazine (portuguese version) and while I was checking the magazine I realized that it mentioned an easy recover program – Recuva - that was able to recover files from hard disks, digital cameras and MP3. I thought to myself: I’ve got nothing to lose so let’s try it!

I entered directly on the Recuva site, downloaded the free application and installed it.  I inserted the memory card on the Laptop slot and ran the Recuva application.  The first scan came out negative, no files had been found, I was disappointed. Than there was the option of Deep Scan that would take some minutes. Once again I thought: let’s do it!! And I did, after a few minutes of looking at an empty scan some .avi files appeared

and I instantly received my Christmas present: all the movies I had done. I was so thrilled.

I know there are other applications that can do this job but Recuva did it very well. Recuva is signed by Periform, it is very easy to use and fast in the process of locating erased files. You can select from the first menu the type of files you want to recover or you can select to recover every file. You then have the chance to visualize each file that the program detects and decide if that’s the one you want to recover.

Definitely this is an application I’m going to keep on my computer to be used when…I erase something by mistake.

Free search engine optimization is a technique of promoting your website, free of cost. The main target here is to make your website appear on the top page of every search engine.

There are several methods to promote your website among search engines. However, it is important for you to do this work carefully otherwise your entire effort would go waste. There is a certain process through which search engines give rankings to websites. These search engines send out spiders that find and scan the whole website including its content. Then, these spiders categorize different websites according to the keywords and gives rankings to each website.

There are quite a few ways that you can follow and make these spiders notice your website and get top rankings in various search engines:

• The most essential thing that you need to keep in mind while designing your website is the keywords. A keyword is the word that people usually put into the search engines when they need to get any related information. In order to find out some useful keywords, you can do a small experiment. You can search few keywords on any search engines and check which one has the least amount of websites under it. Try to utilize even these smaller keywords as these can also generate quality traffic to your website. This makes keywords the most important part of the free search engine optimization.

• The next important thing in the free search engine optimization that you need to keep in your mind is the design of your website. Here, you should divide your keyword evenly on the content of your website. The ideal amount is three to seven times for every 100 words you write in your website. This helps your website get higher rankings quickly.

• Try to put some extra content on your website. Search engines love sites with lot of quality content. This will also improve your website rankings.

• Other important thing is to get higher rankings by advertising the page link of your website. You need to register the link of your website in to the link directories of various search engines. But this is a very time consuming process. So, in order to complete this process quickly, you can take help of the automate software. This software will automatically put your website on search engines through coding and special spider attracting tactics.

Now, what are you waiting for? Just follow these free search engine optimization tips and make your website a top ranker on the search engines.

If someone is interested in buying the blog itself or the domain just let me know. This domain is payed until September 2009.

Please email me at soleflor at sapo dot pt with your offer, I’m open to suggestions.