My Bicycle Commuting - Our weather is so nice

Seems like some don't find the weather here not conducive for cycling to work. He didn't ride before the sun comes out. Not only that, he was wearing office attire while cycling to work. Not the normal attire we locals wear, but in suit.

Actually, I think his speed and suit can help him minimize perspiration, and I guess his travel distance is short. (28 Oct 2013)

Top Bankruptcy Myth

Bankruptcy may not really mean bankruptcy. A neighbor of mine, whom people in Singapore know he is bankrupt has a car to use. Why? because his wife isn't bankrupt. Anyway, came across this expert US site on bankruptcy: Sacramento bankruptcy attorney.

As consumer debt has skyrocketed to over $3 Trillion, many believe the only way out from under the mountain of bills is to declare bankruptcy. But is it right for you? Many myths persist to misinform the public.

“Probably the worst myth about bankruptcy is that you need to be flat broke before you should file,” says Sacramento bankruptcy attorney Gerald B. Glazer. “It is not good to wait until creditors are knocking on your door,” according to Glazer. Planning can prepare you for a bankruptcy that causes the least amount of financial disruption.

Indeed, planning for bankruptcy should be better than being forced into bankruptcy.

This is a paid post.

Lets put profit away from the first priority in business

In an earlier blog post, I defined business as some sustainable activities that will benefit the community, not only the customers only. Since this is not the common definition, in recent years a new term, social entrepreneurship, has become popular that matches closer to my definition.

I feel this is a good development and hope that this model will overtake the typical profit orientated models/concepts of business. When the main purpose is profiting, then many people would do illegal, immoral, detrimental activities if profit can be gained. In my definition, business activities are inherently beneficial to others.

Also, becoming more desired are green activities due to the love of our home, the Earth. In a world where there are still many profit centered businesses, it is helpful to have a popular theme where social entrepreneurship businesses can focus on to achieve, at the minimum, sustainability.

If interested to know more about the successful businesses that have been started by many visionary social entrepreneurs, check out the social entrepreneur blog that aims to empower green and social entrepreneurs.

By the way, businesses are also getting smaller with the advancement of technology. Home business should be suitable for many people to start out from, and I might be interested in this upcycling idea.

The neglected R of the 4 Rs

I learned about the 4 Rs on being more earth friendly a few years back. Recycle is the most well known. Reuse could be the second most well known. I think the last two should need more publicity.

I think the third is reduce. I find it contradictory to conduct reuse competition and projects when participants, even though may be told to collect used item, just buy the materials they need. Sometime even though the main item is truly used item, but the auxiliary items aren't. If, by reusing something you increase, instead of reduce, the consumption of another item, may be it is not worthwhile reusing. Thus, it is more important to stress on the concept of reduce than reuse. It is better to have nothing spare for reuse than to have spare things for reuse.

The neglected one is refuse or reject. In a way, recycle is the most effective way, but that is not on the part of consumer, but the manufacturer, starting from the designer. The design and materials used for a product should be as recyclable as possible. However, if they don't have pressure from the consumer to do so, they are not likely to do so. Thus, as consumers we should learn to refuse and reject products where the recyclable level is low.

One practice I think that can combine the last two is by buying custom made products. Take for example printed T shirts. I think most people don't like to see many others on the street wearing the same T-shirt. Wouldn't it be nice if you can print your own T shirt? For example, if you are a fan of Navy, you may consider printing some navy t shirts, or if you want to spread stories about pirates, you can wear Pirate T shirts. In so doing, T shirt companies may end up reduce their productions for the mass market when more people refuse/reject mass produced products.

Sales without "sales" items

Consumers want to save money. So, the retailers organize sales. However, there are some problems with sales. If the sales are real, the retailers profit become lesser. If the sales are faked, e.g. by putting up an increased retail price before the discount, then consumers lose trust in the company, and even the whole concept of sales. Another problems is that in general, like the sayings that pay peanuts get monkeys, usually items on offer are not the normal items. It might not be intentional. For example, at clearance sales, as the name suggest, these items were the ones that weren't chosen by earlier customers, which could imply that these were likely not the best ones among the batch of products.

Recently, technology helps to make possible and easy the way to offer cheaper products to selective or a controlled number of customers. The idea of giving/selling discount coupons online. Savings.com is such an example. In this way, as the discount is not for all walk-in customers, you don't expect the products and their displayed retail prices to be difference than during normal days. By controlling the number of coupons given out, the retailers can have good control of their discount budget.

Of course, lets hope no retailers are so free and bad to categorized their products between buyers with and without discount coupons.

Never go down. Never slow down.

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Is this the only PC shop in Toa Payoh?

I would like to make some good comments about a newly opened computer shop in Toa Payoh Central, Ability Computer Accessories.

My 5 year old computer had been very slow for years and failing to boot up frequently. Two weeks ago it became so bad that not even the first beep sound is heard. Finally, last week, guessing that it could be the PSU faulty, and I happened to walk past this newly opened computer shop, I bought a PSU from the shop

Think, what can you sell online?

For US$1, you can buy something homemade...
For US$1, you can buy some homemade jewelry...
For US$1, you can buy homemade jewelry cleaner...
For US$1, you can buy ... Homemade jewelry cleaner solution!

No, it is not a liquid solution because it can be downloaded. You can buy the "rights" to download the solution :)

Post Sponsored by Archmaille Designs.

Another "bay"

Acobay is a brand new and unique social network site. Another idea of networking. Just share your stuffs. List something you know in its categories. I have shared this blog there.

This is what the sharing site says about itself ... :

At Acobay, people share their "stuff" and get connected with each other by the cars they drive, places they visited, movies they love, games they play, and so on. Then they can interact with people of same interest (by a real meaning!) and get personalized recommendation.

Acobay concept is original, and innovative.

Post Sponsored by acobay.

Help others to help everyone

I think there is a saying, "feed the cow if you want milk". This is what I felt when I look into this service, Zookoda. It is an email marketing application designed specifically for bloggers. Zookoda enables you to send a daily, weekly or monthly summary of your latest blog posts directly into your visitors' inbox.

Now, the important part is: ... it’s all FREE! Is this a free lunch? Isn't there no such thing as a free lunch?

Consider the above phrase, would you charge your cow for the food you provide to it? Thus, I guess that's why it is free. This can be considered as a type of investment. Just as those countries that subsidized heavily for all their citizens to get educated. Here, it is more like a company that is building up an industry, the industry that it is in.

The parent company is into online advertisement, particularly advertising in blogs. With this free tool, it is helping bloggers to improve their blogs readerships, and this translates into an increase in the value of the advertising time and space of the blogs. This should grow their revenue through growing the industry.

More importantly, as bloggers, we can benefit a lot from Zookoda that enables us to:

• Manage email newsletter subscribers
• Enhance your blog with custom newsletter subscription forms
• Design eye-catching newletters to match your blog design
• Schedule recurring broadcasts for each day, week or month
• View real-time open, bounce, click and unsubscribe reports
• Access mobile users by emailing blog content in text format

Did someone accidentally set their price too high?

My Google Adsense income just passed another small little milestone, now at ... US$2.02. I think I have forgotten to blog about it when it passed the 1 dollar mark.However, it wasn't due to my traffic, but some very highly paying advertisements, and I don't quite understand how did it happen. I mean, did some advertiser accidentally set their pricing wrongly?

Cheap and good printer ink

I once had a Lexmark printer, but it has malfunctioned a year ago. It was probably due to power supply fault or due to under utilization, as I seldom need to print at home. I also seldom print at home because the ink is expensive, and refilling is not a task I enjoy doing.

I believe there are people like me who don't own an ink-based printer because ink is costly. Most of us probably know there are cheap ink around, but still worry about using them after reading the advises from the printer manufacturer. Another problem I once faced is in looking for compatible cheap ink, when the packaging is not clear whether the ink supports my printer. If so, you might like to check out . I like their pledge ... , where the bottom line is:

"If for any reason our printer cartridges do not perform to your complete satisfaction contact us by phone and we will immediately work with you to remedy the situation."

They offer printer ink for many different brands. Three of them are Canon ink cartridges, Epson ink cartridges and Dell printer cartridges.

A good feature of the site is it allows us to find ink by printer model number or by ink cartridge number. This makes life easy since there are so many different brands and models out there. Although it is called "Pacific Ink", I later realizes they also carries toner cartridges for laser printers. That's good news for me as I may be considering color laser printers if I were to buy my next printer.

Shipping cost has been a concern for me when doing online shopping. Here, shipping can be FREE when you become a member of the Pacific Ink Cartridge Club!

Lastly, a small note about an error on the site: The "Find Your Ink" search on the homepage isn't working (I am using Firefox) although it works on vendor's subpages. I would expect it to be rectified very soon.

Approaches are different

It started from an article about youths and teens getting AIDS/HIV in Singapore last week. The author prefers safer sex message over abstinence. Then, there were three articles published in oppose to her article, all published on Monday. Next came two articles highlighting the issue in relation to business organisations, on Tuesday and Friday.

All of them concerns about AIDS/HIV. However, there are two groups being concerned here, the employees, who are typically adults, and the youths and teens. As such, I question is the approach towards employees by corporate management for the sake of business, suitable? ... when applying to the youths and teens.

Employees are adults. Thus, management won't want to influence their attitude towards their sexual life. Employees are not with the company for life. Thus, management is mainly interested in their wellbeing during the years they are serving the company. In the corporate context, the main concern is business performance. Thus, if an employee, regardless being HIV negative or not, can remain productive for the company, managment is happy.

Youths and teens are not adults. Thus, adults of this society share some responsibility in their good wellbeing and upbringing. I agree that judging others by our standard is not nice and unproductive. However, that doesn't mean that we should shunt from expressing what our standard is. I am quite sure that in general, no extra-marital sex is still the best preference by vast majority, even though many may not think that this should be the only preference.

Youths and teens will be in this society, or world whole of their life. Thus, our concern for them shouldn't be limited to when they are young, although our influence on them will be very limited when they are older. When they became adults, they will be influence the youths of their time. Thus, our concern should also not be limited by the youths of our time, but all youths at all time.

In society, we are here to live our life, and work is only a part of it. Getting married with our life partner, building a happy family, and parenting next generation are some of the other parts. Thus, being infected by HIV is not simply a health issue, but it affect many other parts of one's life.

I can understand that managment doesn't have the position and the need to promote abstinence lifestyle to their employees. Doing so has little or no business value for the company. It is also quite unlikely that employees will care about such messages as these are not job or career related.

Thus, from the perspective of management, it may be OK as long as the employee is productive during the employment with the company, and the company can manage when many of them are infected with AIDS/HIV. How getting AIDS/HIV would affect the employee life, family, future, next generation (if any) are quite out of the scope of the management.

However, youths and teens are learning and observing about this world and what is life from those who have been here longer than them. They may not like us to indoctrinate them, but they are still being influenced by adults in many ways since the society they live in have been built by us.

Thus, as adults who care about the society and its future, our concern is much more than that. We don't want just to delay their extra-marital sex behaviors until they are old enough, but we should at least mentioned that extra-marital sex is bad. We don't want just to reduce their risk by teaching safer sex, but we must clearly present the simple logic that risk avoidance is much better than risk managment.

Thus, the corporate's approach in raising awareness about AIDS/HIV among their employees should not be used when targetting youths and teens.

An innovative platform for bloggers

I am happy to tell people about SocialSpark! I have been seeing this name for many months, wondering what is it but didn't really read up about it. Finally, I was among the very first people they invited to join in their invite-only Alpha version 9 Apr. Since then, I started to understand better about them through own experience in using it.

They have started the successful PayPerPost about 2 years ago, recently launched IZEArank, and now this latest brainchild ... what's this brainchild about?. After using it, I think I have a much better idea of what is SocialSpark.

There are many community sites such as friendster, and the very recent FaceBook. I think SocialSpark is also a kind of community site -- community of bloggers. Doesn't matter if you are interested in blogging for money, you can too join. As it itself is not a blogging platform, unlike most community sites that also offers a blogging features, you don't need to create and maintain another blog to interact with the bloggers here. You can also list your blogs from various blogging platforms here.

As for those interested in blogging for money, you will like this very innovative place for you to earn, both by advertising for other people, or advertise your own blog or products to increase your revenue.

SocialSpark allows several types of opportunities. Other than normal money paying per post type called sponsored posts, there are also blog sponsorships where you allow a 'welcome mat' and persistent sponsorship banner on your blog for a period of time. Also, there are Sparks, which are free opportunities that serve as ideas/topics for blog posts, but many offer to blog you back if you blog about the suggested topic.

The 3gb communities

Is this just another community-networking site? Sort of, I guess.

If you like to be among the first people to join a new community, this is an opportunity to do so. According to its statistics, it is quite new with less than 500 members, under 100 albums and just over 500 photos now.

Nonetheless, its "Recent news" announces two new systems... , a new MP3 system and a new Chat system. However, these are not new in Internet.

I'm curious what do they mean by 3gb? Typically it means 3 Gigabytes. So, are they saying that they provide freely this amount of storage for members to upload photos and mp3? Is it their intention to let people join 3gb community www.3gb.biz out of curiosity to find out more? Or is it they are so new to have yet to come up with an "About us" section?

Post Sponsored by 3gb Communities.

Get listed at Atlist

Do you sometimes feel lost in the cyberspace? I bet many do. There is abundant information. Sometimes it's just too much. Already, there are many online directories that list and organize information properly. @List or Atlist.org Business Directory also does that. Furthermore, it stands out by also ... providing information from customers through their feedbacks and reviews of these businesses. It is also a knowledge site with many articles sharing expertise knowledge from its members.

I sense that it seems quite new, and for business owners, it might be the good time to join for free, since your business is more likely to be listed at the top when there isn't too many businesses listed in yet.

Try it out, click on this link: Organizations to experience how they have organized information into their appropriate categories, or locations. Or, take a look at businesses related to Health & Wellness.

Post Sponsored by Atlist.org.

Two months experience in "using" the Aductions platform

Aductions has grown since my first review on it. There are more messages in the forum, a couple more reviews done up by bloggers, and two new features, namely "The Lowest Effective CPM Watchlist", and "The Automated Media Planning and Buying Tool".

However, these new features are mainly for advertisers, which I am not. May be, I'll buy some ad spaces next month to experience first hand these Aductions' features.

In terms of using it as a publisher ... How did I find their services? , I didn't really need to use it after I put up my ad spaces. The rest are quite automated. Yes, I login more than necessary to look at how my earnings is increasing, and check out who else are putting up their ad spaces. Basically, there isn't much "work" I need to perform when using Aductions.

I just checked that my ad spaces that have been sold in their platform have been fully materialized. That is to say, my gross balance is now equal to my available funds for withdrawal.

Oh, I almost forget! I did use the Withdraw Funds interface this month for the prize money of US$25 I won in the January Review Competition. It was easy and smooth. I just keyed in the amount, followed a few simple and standard instructions, and very soon after that I saw the money in my PayPal balance :) However, I'm a bit sad that they charge a fee for the payment.

Another thing worth mentioning is their responsiveness. They replied promptly to my questions through emails. Also, as you might have noticed, they left comments about my first review on them.

Nevertheless, I have to be frank that I do feel the progress is slower than my expectation. I am looking forward to my 3rd month with Aductions in getting more sales of my ad spaces, and also hopefully seeing more trades happening on their platform.

Finally, may I put my link here in case any interested readers would like to let me earning some credits by joining Aductions through me :)

Exceeded 200!!

Not long after I moved into 2nd gear, my earnings from blogging exceeded USD100!

That took me slightly more than 4 months at 1st gear.

Today, just slightly over a month at 2nd gear, my earnings from blogging in my PayPal account exceeded US$200 yesterday!! Actually, my earnings had exceeded US$200 on the 8 Feb, the date after which I am able to withdraw the US$25 I have won in the Aductions Review Competition in January.

I shall remain at 2nd gear before I figure out how to move on to 3rd gear.

Unless your identity is worth much more than $1M

Identity theft is not new. In a 1 Feb 2008 article on Herald-Mail, Identity theft puts ugly face on your good name:
"According to the FBI, more than 10 million people in the U.S. experienced identity theft in 2005" and "The Federal Trade Commission reports that 54 percent of the victims of identity theft uncover the theft while monitoring their own accounts. Twenty-six percent are alerted by companies they previously have done business with, and 8 percent learned of the theft when they applied for credit and were refused."

I just learned much about it from LifeLock's, that guarantee your good name. Before reading more in this blog about it, you might want to sign up first using LifeLock promotion codes to get yourself protected first!

OK, most people would like to consider how to DIY first. The above article mentioned a few ways of reducing the risk of identity theft, such as memorize your Social Security number, add a photo ID to credit and debit cards, remove personal information and identification from a purse or pockets in clothing before donating them to second-hand shops, and such. Note that these can only reduce, not eliminate.

So, what do you think? For me, I doubt I am able to do all those tasks, just to reduce the risk. If you think likewise, can stop reading now and check out LifeLock promo code!

Have you returned after clicking on the above link? Or you still don't feel like utilizing the LifeLock Code for them to guarantee your good name at a discount? They are offering 30 days free and $21 saving a year! Mind you, $21 is actually quite a high percentage discount.

Still haven't visited their site? OK, let me state the best feature: their guarantee is up to One Million Dollars! Thus, unless your identity is worth much more than that (which I am delighted to have someone like you reading my humble blog), you should seriously consider subscribing to their service. I will have to check out their plans of going international.

Ecommerce shopping cart article

This is a piece of good advice from shopping cart software company, Ashop, for bosses of online shops: Boost Online Sales with Additional 800 Numbers.

This ecommerce shopping cart article discusses the benefits of having 800 numbers. Having 800 numbers can fill the lack of human touch of an online shop. It should be within the budget range of operating an online shop. It caters for many potential customers who prefer making call then filling up an online order form. It can be innovatively used as a way to track your cost per click online advertisements. Click on the link and read it to learn why these can be achieved.

Recently, even Dell, which has been doing mainly direct sales, has started to make use of traditional retail spaces such as Wal-Mart and Sam's Club. According to Lionel Menchaca, Digital Media Manager, explained that "these strategies are meant to augment the direct model, not replace it." in his blog post More Details on Wal-Mart, Adding Sam's Club Soon. Between black and white, there are many grays.

Pure black or white are extremes, but shades of gray are usually appealing. Don't over restrict your business model to an online-only type. The ability to nicely blend existing traditional useful business methodology, such as 800 numbers, will bring you more sales.

In regard to the cost of having 800 numbers, I have two ideas to share with you:
1) outsource to the call center empire India rather than employing locals to do it or answering calls yourself;
2) sacrifice a little bit of quality and consider VoIP such as fring.

Ashop Commerce sponsored this post.