Funny Stuff is all around

Archive for May 17th, 2008

Recently we added a female puppy to our family. We have an adult dog also. I forgot how much work it is to train a puppy. This Labrador retriever is 9 weeks old and very smart. She has learned her name and she sits on command. We have decided it is time to get started with her leash training.

This is an area that causes many people grief. They expect to put a leash on a puppy the first time and have them follow. This is most likely not going to happen. To begin leash training it is helpful if you can get the puppy used to the feel of the leash. To do this attach the leash to the puppy’s collar and let them drag it around the yard. If the puppy has been restrained for a period of time let them get rid of some pent up energy prior to starting the first lesson on leash training.

Once the puppy has pulled the leash behind them for a while pick up the end and gently tug on the leash. It is very important that if you are using a choke collar that it is not in choke mode. Once you have the leash in hand let the puppy get used to the idea that you are connected. Make the leash training fun by running with the puppy and saying its name often. Then take the leash off the puppy and put it away.

The next day repeat what you did the day before but for a longer period of time. Try taking a few steps to see if the puppy will follow. Praise them if they do and gently tug on the leash if they do not. It is important that you are gentle with the tugs at the beginning of leash training so the puppy does not become afraid of the leash. The goal is for the puppy to associate the leash with going for walks and spending time with you.

Each puppy is different, but most will respond well to leash training in a matter of days. During the course of leash training you will also want to incorporate the verbal commands that accompany walking a dog such as come, sit and heel. Once the puppy is responding to basic leash training you can work on getting them to walk on heel. Many people do not complete this step in leash training.

They are the people that you see being pulled down the sidewalk by their dogs. This is not a comfortable or fun way to walk a dog. The two of you are fighting against each other in this situation. The dog is hurting its neck and your arm is being stretched. The leash training needs to include walking on heel.

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Ever heard of a house-cleaning service that not only cleans your house, but makes sure that you stay healthy? Maid Brigade is perhaps the only concept in the burgeoning maid-services and cleaning franchising industry that does not resort to harmful chemicals in order to clean your house. Instead, the company uses products that are safe for your family as well as the environment. Established in 1979 and franchising since 1984, the company today has more than 405 locations all over the United States and the world. Maid Brigade is quite famous for the astounding quality of services it provides. If a customer is unsatisfied with any part of the cleaning process, it is redone without extra costs!

When you join Maid Brigade as a franchisee, you need not carry out the actual work; instead, you become the CEO of your location. Your job will be to check whether the right people are appointed for executing the jobs and whether they are performing their work well. Since management skill is the basic requirement, the franchisor attracts go-getters from all kinds of backgrounds. The start-up costs for a Maid Brigade location is quite moderate and the area assigned to each location is quite big. This makes the business grow at a phenomenal rate! The franchisor also offers exceptional support to make sure that you become highly successful in your franchising business.

In the beginning, Maid Brigade will provide you with an excellent training program at its corporate location. The one-week training will make you aware of various topics from the financial, marketing and technological fields. There’s also the effective Mentor Visit program where you get to visit a working franchise before you start your own. Besides these trainings, the franchisor will also provide you with its proprietary Total Management Software System and 2-Person Team Cleaning System. What’s more, your franchisor will teach you how to manage your employees and how to obtain clients and retain them effectively. Apart from the owners, training classes are also held for managers and staffs of a Maid Brigade franchise. Moreover, you will get total support from the marketing wing of your franchisor.

If you want to know more about this thriving franchising concept, link to the following page: http://maid-services-cleaning-franchises.brandexpansion.com/maid-brigade/

The microsoft’s mcsa is good for professionals and all materials are available in e-books.Like mcsa course many courses have e-books available on websites.They all have a good writing pattern.

The demand of e-books is increasing as they are a great way to promote a service or product but many peoplecan’t write e-books. If you take note of the information detailed here there is no reason why you can’t start yours right now. There isn’t any reason why you have to write it yourself because there are many people online who can do the writing for you or assist you with things you are unsure of.

The subject of your e-book is quite easy to work out if you have an interest in a specific area,why not write some articles and get the feed back on whether people are willing to pay for this information. You should start by writing a range of articles which will not only help you with your writing practice but they can be used to get interest in the book you are compiling. If these articles are sent to article directories, within a short space of time you will come know how many people have shown an interest and can estimate how successful it will be.

The overall structure can be a work in progress while the article content is being written. Most books are set out with an introduction, the main topic and then a conclusion but you may want to add a resource section as well which is quite normal these days. You can attract studentsby adding fun stuff on e-books like mcse certification course has .Consider writing several more articles as a bonus because adding this as a bonus will enhance your sales.

Normally authors will write an article and then insert it into their e-book to get the feedback of how it will look when it is completed. Most e-books are around the fifty age mark for ease of reading but they need to stay on their topic and provide excellent information. Because it’s more difficult to read on your computer screen than on the page, ensure that there’s no information that essentially useless to your reader. mcse online course has quality contents so the students find it more useful.The microsoft’s mcp courses is good for professionals and all materials are available in e-books.In these e-books only essential readings are provided.Like mcp certification many courses have e-books available on websites.They all have a good writing pattern.

If you want tomake more attractive to your e-book then why not research some additional information which you can add as a bonus. Your bonus material could include a small report (just write two or three additional articles), checklists, or add templates. However, as with all the material you create for your e-Book, ensure that your bonus material is relevant because it should be valuable on its own.

Could interior design be the right career for you? In this article we’ll look at the creativity aspect of this profession.

Creativity is a subtle, but vital quality to have when considering interior design as a career. Much of your advancement will depend on your ability to be original in your creative efforts to design any space. Clients will always want to hire a designer that can offer them something that nobody else has.

Often clients do not want to change everything, or buy new furnishings and draperies; they simply want to make whatever they do have look and feel different. Creative thinking is the only thing that is going to help here.
Colors are your ally, and creativity can help you in setting colors against one another. Many designers love to add color to a room and change things just using this method and perhaps adding accents to existing items.
Accents in a room can vary. You can create a great space by adding throw pillows, valances, and vases.

Interior design could be the perfect career choice for a person that likes to be creative, but not idle and/or isolated.

And, of course, it is good do have practical home improvement skills. Knowing how to lay tile correctly to achieve a professional finish can be a great asset.Discover more
How to tile

By Selwyn Gerber:

certified public accountant

The earliest reference to behavioral finance is a 1979 paper by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. They observed that investors placed different weights on gains and losses. They found that individuals are more worried about possible losses than they are excited by equally probable wins. Later, other researchers concluded that investors consider the loss of $1 to be twice as painful as the pleasure associated with a $1 gain.

benefits of cost segregation

Their paper, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Making Under Risk,” reported on how different groups responded when faced with different problems. One group was told they had been given $1,000 and had to decide between a sure gain of $500 or a 50% chance to gain $1,000 and a 50% chance to gain nothing. Another group of subjects was told that they had been given $2,000. Their choice was a sure loss of $500 or a 50% chance to lose $1,000 and a 50% chance to lose nothing.

cost segregation consulting

In the first group 84% chose the sure gain. In the second group, only 31% opted for the certainty of a small loss. In mathematical terms, the two groups faced identical problems. The expected outcome is the same in each case. But certain gains have more value to investors than certain losses.

In an entertaining application of this principle, MIT professor Dan Ariely writes about trick-or-treaters in “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions.” Ariely initially handed out three Hershey’s Kisses to young children and then offered them a deal. The kids could trade one piece of their chocolate for a miniature Snickers bar, or they could trade two of their Kisses for a full-size Snickers. Most children quickly handed over two small pieces of candy for a large piece of candy. Later in the evening, the professor changed his terms, offering the large candy bar in exchange for all three Kisses or a bonus miniature candy bar for free. Rationally, the trade maximized the amount of chocolate a child ended the evening with. But, most children took the bonus bar and gave up nothing. They short-changed themselves by a factor of eight in terms of lost chocolate in this decision. Ariely thinks the driving factor in the decision making process is loss aversion, rather than gain maximization. He wrote, “There’s no visible possibility of loss when we choose a free item (it’s free).”

Meir Statman developed an idea known as the “fear of regret” to explain why investors often hang onto losers far too long. People often undergo a short period of remorse when they think they made an error in judgment. Statman theorizes that sometimes investors avoid selling stocks showing a loss to avoid the pain of having to face the fact that they made a bad investment. This allows them to avoid the embarrassment of declaring the loss to the IRS, their accountant, and perhaps their spouse.

Other researchers think that investors happily follow the crowd to avoid the feelings of regret if their decisions turn out to be wrong. It was common at the end of the internet bubbles to find investors taking solace in the fact that everyone else owned it so it was bound to come back soon. The human brain has evolved to experience the pleasure of gain far less intensely than the pain of loss.

Another finding of behavioral finance is that people often strive to find order where none exists. Tversky worked with Thomas Gilovich to show that a basketball player with what the fans considered to be a “hot hand” had the same chance of making his next shot as he did at any other time. They mathematically demonstrated that something which appears to be orderly, like a steak of consecutive shots in basketball, may very well be nothing more than luck. Applying this lesson to mutual funds, a hot manager is no more likely to have a great year next year than he was in the previous year, yet investors have historically chased the best performing funds.

“Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with the 130 IQ…Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.”
-Warren Buffett

In all walks of life, successful people have a great deal of confidence in their own abilities. But in investing, confidence has nothing to do with success. Confidence can impact investment decisions in subtle ways. One published study demonstrated that investors have a tendency to invest in local companies, the ones they are most familiar with and have confidence in their future performance. The study looked specifically at investors in telephone companies and found that investors are more likely to own their local company than one of the other regional phone companies. No rational reason explains the geographic tendency found with stock ownership. The authors attributed it solely to investor confidence in the company’s future, grounded in familiarity. This same tendency can afflict professionals, and blind them to the changing circumstances decimating their favorite stocks.

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People with a love for smoking cigars realize that the evolution from an individual ritual tends to finally grow into a fixation for the ideal cigar. When you carry on with your apparently continuous pursuit for the perfect atmosphere for that exclusive, solitary brilliant stogie, you discover there is a proper process to that final stage. This way for some a hobby turns into an art.

Apart from buying a superior cigar, you likewise want to understand the dynamics required in decently stacking away them until you are set to undergo the pleasure of smoking them. Many cigar lovers have endless discussions about the procedure one has to follow to make sure cigars can be stored for a long time without losing their quality. Most people agree that the temperature inside the repository should stay between 68 and 72 degrees Fahrenheit. However there are experts who disagree and keep the temperature on a constant level of 70 degrees. The problem is that if the temperature is too low the cigars will lose their flavor more quickly. About everybody will confirm, nevertheless, that the proper humidity of a cigar humidor must be set at between seventy to seventy-two percent.

What you will be able to do to see your cigars are decently looked after is to invest in a safe cigar humidor. This represents a first investment that, after a while, will unquestionably bring in it’s bread and butter. Thus what should you find once you determine it’s time to invest in cigar humidors? First of all you have to make sure that the seal on top of the humidor should be tight. If not, the temperature will fluctuate and your cigars will miss their refreshing flavor a lot faster. Also it is possible that it will prevent any detrimental exchange of moisture. The cigars may not light the way they should when there’s too much moisture. On the other hand too little moisture will make the cigars burn too fast. You see, a very delicate matter.

2008 is a great year for the franchise industry; unfortunately the same cannot be said about the rest of the market. Since 2001, the economic depression has seen many competent workers out of job or trapped in a highly unsatisfactory work. Most of this talent pool is now turning its attention towards the franchise industry, thus giving a boost to the business. As of 2005, the annual turnover of the industry was $1.53 trillion according to a report by PricewaterhouseCooper. It has increased tremendously in the last two years and poised to grow even more in 2008. There are various reasons behind the advancement of the franchise industry, despite the ongoing slow economy.

The changing demography and society has given rise to new kinds of businesses like maid service, senior care service or handyman service. Though the demand of franchise for sale offers from the food industry remains in the first position, it is experiencing a slower business-rate when compared to these emerging categories. Some franchise fields that are luring people into starting a franchise with them are staffing franchises, child-related franchises, green food franchises and technology-related franchises. All these segments are spreading quite fast and so is the franchise industry. To keep up with the burgeoning demand, the franchise business itself is changing the rules of the games. By July of this year, the new FTC rules regarding the franchise disclosure document will be in place. These long overdue changes will make the industry more transparent by giving all kinds of relevant information of the franchisors to the franchisees. That will make people trust this form of business more than ever.

The other aspects of the industry that are changing include the rigid stipulation that the franchisee has to be owner/operator. Nowadays, technology has provided effective tools to the franchisees for remotely monitoring their units. This has drawn in franchisees with good investment power that otherwise stayed outside, because they did not want to leave their jobs. The International Franchise Association is also wooing investors from specific strata of the society through its different programs. The VetFran or MinorityFran programs of the participating franchise companies have broadened the prospective franchisee base. The active courting of women in franchising business, especially by those offering home-based low cost franchise business for sale, have brought in talented franchisees who left the job scenario for family or some other reasons. What’s more, the trend of the business to encourage people to buy a franchise as a multi-unit operator is bringing in angel investors and those with big ambition and talent for it. All these are helping franchise business to surge forward as the economy slowly walks on. With brandEXPANSION your business will never slow down…

Almost everyone I know owns a personal computer. Take a peek into anyone’s computer, and you will find all sorts of data stored there—emails received and sent, chat histories, communication logs, transaction records, bank account information, even details about credit cards, and much more. And your computer follows the same trend of setting itself up as a storehouse of information!

But what you may be finding out now is that people with bad intentions are finding it easier and easier to get your personal information as well as misuse your financial data! It is like an intruder entering your personal territory, when he/she has no right to be there! While some hackers do it just for fun, others have far more evil designs, as you will see:

(1) With the Internet being accessible to everyone, the hacker has a chance to “prey” upon your PC through another computer without your even being aware of it! You would require great tactical skills to outsmart him/her! Often, by the time you catch an intruder tampering with your system, it is too late!

(2) A favorite ruse is to act as the “intruded computer” and keep a watch on your system. As a victim yourself, naturally you will not suspect another victim! The hacker therefore has an opportunity to completely re-format your hard disc without your knowledge. So there goes your credit card details, details about the money you have in your bank accounts, and God knows what else! Why, these clever intruders even manage to get hold of user names and passwords without any difficulty!

(3) And if you are still puzzled about how the hacker gets into your “secure and personal” system, well my friend, he has wonderful tools with him! They are capable of penetrating where they wish. And mind you, some of them never enter via the front door—it is always a back door entry! These are known as “infections” or “viruses”. A few common ones are Subseven, Netbus and MoSucker.

(4) Trojan horses are bold intruders who have no hesitation in making an entrance via the front door or front window! They are more dangerous than viruses. In fact, they let in more viruses into your already damaged computer! These “clever” horses are capable of disfiguring your system configuration altogether, taking screen shots of your current screen on the computer, capture all the keystrokes and finally bringing the whole system crashing down so that it no longer works. If you have a printer, they even manage to print matter via your printer. Using a Trojan is child’s play for any hacker!

Then, how do you protect yourself from these hackers?

You have to opt for Network Security, if you want to keep your system safe. An active defense system is like having two personal guards looking after your personal property. The defense network sends out constant alerts on impending threats, gives information about whether the intruder has made a successful entry or has been blocked, and conducts repair jobs immediately if needed.

Ensure that the patches provided by your computer vendors are downloaded and installed. They must be checked for updates at least once or twice a week.

An infected computer can be compared to an “ill” person. When you are sick, what do you do? Consume the required course of antibiotics. Well, the antibiotic for your “infected” or “ill” computer is anti-virus software. This type of software keeps you informed about the “germs” and tells you how best to deal with them. Well-developed software can free your computer of these viruses completely. The best known and most popular ones today are—Norton Anti-virus and MacAfee security center.

It is thus an unending battle between computer vendors and hackers! As fast as a computer vendor discovers a loop hole and patches it up, so fast does the intruder discover another way of getting over this obstacle! It is not a once-in-a-while occurrence; the process goes on day in and day out. Both sides are therefore kept busy all the time!

If you believe your computer network to be flawed or vulnerable, get a free quote for computer network security services or visit bsecure.com.au; keeping computer networks in Sydney Australia, secure!

Various types of currency can be found all over the world and to learn about the different types, the place to search is the internet. The net is littered with various sites that can help one learn about money and how it affects everything from one’s portfolio to the country’s foreign exchange. Knowing all about the money used around the world, as well as currency conversion can be a great thing for one to learn.

One currency type that is seen in many European countries is the euro. This form of foreign money replaced the currency that many countries in Europe were using, such as the franc and the deutschmark. The euro has created a foreign policy that has linked over fifteen countries together. If one wants to learn more about this unique form of money, then they can visit the website of the European Commission, at www.ec.europa.eu.

To find out more about global forms of money, a visit to www.factmonster.com will be informative. This site is mainly intended for children to do research for their classes, but one can learn much information from this site. For example, a person can learn that Poland uses zloty as their main form of money and Russia has the ruble. Also available on this website are links to more detailed information about the countries listed.

Currency fluctuations can affect the foreign markets around the world. However, if one does not understand the various types of money that are in existence around the world, then they can become lost in the world markets. If one is looking to make money in the markets, then the internet is the place to begin educating one self. By understanding all one can about the world markets, the foreign exchange and how the foreign exchange rate works, then perhaps one can dabble in some currency trading.

By Selwyn Gerber:

Stockmarket investing

An illustration of the idea that “The essence of effective portfolio construction is the use of a large number of poorly correlated assets.” – William Bernstein, The Intelligent Asset Allocator

Stocks

In the example shown in Figure 9-1, the different asset classes include a variety of stock indexes, various measures of bond performance and real estate. We see that risk steadily declines as the portfolio becomes more and more diversified.

Retirement planning

An example of standard deviation might be helpful to illustrate this idea. Consider two stock portfolios which both end the year with total gains of about 25 percent. Both portfolios began with a value of $1,000 and end up increasing in value to $1,250.

http://www.revver.com/video/758305/wealth-management-tax-free-bonds-wealth-enhancement-intelligent-indexing/
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While both investors reach the same end point, they arrive by sharply different paths. The bottom line represents slow, but steady, growth. The top line shows that winning streaks always come to an end.

Most investors would prefer the steady gains of 1 percent per month shown in the lower line of Figure 9-2. While both investors end up with the same account equity, the investment performance symbolized by the upper line in that figure gets there by giving back a significant amount of profits along the way. The loss of paper of profits can hurt just as much as realized losses. Had you invested with the manager who achieved the returns shown by the upper line in Figure 9-2, you might even feel like you lost money during the year.

This graphic portrayal of the sequence of the gains illustrates the idea that investors usually prefer lower volatility when it comes to returns. This visual observation can be confirmed mathematically through a calculation of the standard deviations of the monthly returns. The gain achieved with a steady 1 percent per month return has a standard deviation of 79, significantly lower than the standard deviation of 111 for the upper line shown in Figure 9-2.

From this relatively simple example, we can see that standard deviation can serve well as a measurement of risk. Steadier gains are preferable to most investors, and the steadier the gains the lower the standard deviation.

The idea behind diversification is that you can limit the impact of any single stock or asset class by investing in a combination of asset classes. As a result, declines in the total returns of one or two assets might be offset by increases in others. In Figure 9-1 we can see that as the number of investment types in the portfolio increases, the total degree of risk decreases.

“Savvy investors embrace risk and recognize that it is the source of their superior returns. The key is to quantify risk, manage it and diversify.”
- Rip Van Winkle Wisdom