The Consumer Salon

One major source of procrastination in the area of backing up personal or business data stems from creating a complex mental picture in one’s mind of what you think you have to do: Buy a stack of rewriteable CD’S, label them, buy the best Backup Software, run through an inventory of your complete hard drive, in order to determine what to back up.

Just take some kind of action – doing this is so much more important than trying to be Captain Organized. Write down 5 things you do with your PC that results in crucial files you would never want to lose. This is your first micro-step. You’re now done with the first portion of this task and you can reward yourself.

The next step is to find some empty space on a second hard drive (this is definitely preferred to having a diskette, and second hard drives are cheap). Create a folder on this physically separate hard drive and name this folder: “Email Backup”. (this is one of the five things above that you discovered you wouldn’t want to lose)

You now have a dedicated place to back up your email files (in the case of Outlook, for instance, this would be *.PST). Now Google for “XCOPY” and Batch File, and use that information to write yourself a simple *.bat file that copies your email files to that folder at least weekly. Your reward at this point can be more extravagant.

You’re basically done with a minimalist backup solution for now – you can then add additional Xcopy commands for other very important key files.

Don’t go drawing the conclusion that the perfect and responsible backup system has to necessarily involve a complete backing up of all software on a hard drive. The files that you create, with your mind and your time, are the crucial types of information you want to back up, and back up now. Not ZIP files of old teleseminar MP3 files you’ve already listened to.

Your List of Important Files May Include The Following

• Ad Copy Sales Letters
• CSS/HTML/PHP/Javascript code files
• A Masters Thesis
• A collection of Photoshop files for your client
• Your emails: follow the file/export directions for whatever email client you’re using, and then export those to another physical medium
• Your browser bookmarks
• Your website files on your local drive (I don’t consider my web host provider to be an official backup)

If you’re a developer and spent hours on a single source file containing Java or C, I don’t have to remind you of the need for the slightest move toward a responsible routine of backing up (if you’re not already doing this or using a source control system).

The minor task of making duplicates of important files to another hard drive or a diskette that you leave sitting around may not necessarily help in the event of theft or fire; however, even taking this simple action of making a copy has personally helped me in instances such as this:

- I once accidentally clicked the wrong button in WS FTP and copied over changes to a local file instead of uploading this file. No problem – I had a copy of that file in a dedicated backup folder on my second hard drive. This is one of the “Overlooked reasons” mentioned in the title… simple user error that happens to everyone with a devastating result – not a hardware crash or incidence of theft.

In summary, think:

Small and Important Files Regularly Backed Up Now.

Prevention Is Easy When All You’ve Got To Do is Copy A File. The rest can come later.

Don’t revert to Perfectionism Mode and then start searching in Google or Yahoo after reading this article, for more info on backing up Outlook or something similar. You will inevitably come across commercial applications that promise to “revolutionize the way all of your software works” – you’re already distracted at this point and the odds are that you won’t get to your non-Email related files I mentioned above, such as important spreadsheet documents, and other files listed above.

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Steve Bailey has enjoyed working in the I.T. field, whether as an employee or independently, since the late 80’s. For software-related articles, tutorials and reviews, visit his site. Also, available, is a notification sign-up form for free ftp program.

** Attn Ezine editors / Site owners
Feel free to reprint this article in its entirety
in your ezine provided that all content/links are
are left intact.

This morning, which happened to be a Sunday, I got a nice, slow start on the day, and somewhere around noon, I took my first sip of coffee as I sidled up to my computer.

And then, for the next 15 or 20 minutes, I clicked on one article after another, blissfully reading each one without any purpose other than pleasure.

What a luxury, especially when you consider that the articles I read were all mine!

This wasn’t my plan; it just worked out that way.

Do you read your own writing?

Better yet, do you ENJOY your own writing?

Why do you think some people can’t stand looking at their own creative output?

I think this is a very provocative question. Some of the great writers, like Hemingway, were beset by the belief that their work was hopelessly flawed.

I know there are some actors that refuse to watch their dailies or even to see the finished films that they’ve been in.

Perhaps, somewhere, there are painters who never want to look at their own works, once they have put down their brushes.

I don’t want to take away a thing form these folks. They could be geniuses.

But I think they’re missing perhaps the greatest satisfaction of all; pleasing themselves.

Certainly, I don’t like seeing typos that I’ve negligently scattered here and there, but on the whole, I’m reaching that point where I can be a stranger to my work, and accept these offerings as beings in themselves; as breathing, independent messengers.

Instead of wanting to snuff them, I don’t mind kicking back and getting to know them a little better, over a cup of Joe.

Dr. Gary S. Goodman, President of Customersatisfaction.com, is a popular keynote speaker, management consultant, and seminar leader and the best-selling author of 12 books, including Reach Out & Sell Someone and Monitoring, Measuring & Managing Customer Service, and the audio program, “The Law of Large Numbers: How To Make Success Inevitable,” published by Nightingale-Conant. He is a frequent guest on radio and television, worldwide. A Ph.D. from USC’s Annenberg School, a Loyola lawyer, and an MBA from the Peter F. Drucker School at Claremont Graduate University, Gary offers programs through UCLA Extension and numerous universities, trade associations, and other organizations from Santa Monica to South Africa. He holds the rank of Shodan, 1st Degree Black Belt in Kenpo Karate. He is headquartered in Glendale, California, and he can be reached at (818) 243-7338 or at: gary@customersatisfaction.com. For information about coaching, consulting, training, books, videos and audios, please go to http://www.customersatisfaction.com

In October 2004 when my book “Your Retirement Masterplan” (How To Books ISBN 1857039874) was published I participated in eleven 15-minute live interviews on local radio over a period of just five days.

The results were highly encouraging; the book leapt from nowhere on Amazon.co.uk to position 194 out of 3123 competing titles and eventually grabbed the No.1 spot for its core keyword (retirement) where it remained for nine months.

I am shortly to repeat the broadcast exercise for my newly published tome “How to Earn Money in Retirement” (How To Books ISBN 1845281128) but before doing so I am already off to a head start…

Although this title does not hit the bookstores until Friday 5 May 2006 it already ranks at No.47 out of 3453 competitive titles on Amazon.co.uk – which means of course that it is already selling in big numbers online – thanks largely to the success of its predecessor and the initial boost it got from radio promotion.

These promotional interviews are arranged by my publisher’s media consultancy and I do not require to visit a single studio to take part; they are all conducted over the telephone, sitting at my desk at home.

So what if you self-publish your output and you don’t have a publicist to arrange radio interviews?

Does that mean you are excluded?

No way; I have self-published several books in the past and managed my own promotion.

Here is what you do…

1. Wherever you live in the world you’ll find that the majority of local radio stations are banded together into a single network for cost-effectiveness;

2. Identify the controlling network;

3. Visit the corporate website containing links to all subsidiaries;

4. Pick out those stations within a 500/1000 mile orbit;

5. Visit each local station website individually;

6. Scan the daily programming schedules;

7. Highlight those programs that might identify with the topic of your book;

8. Note the presenter’s name;

9. Email him/her with a well-couched request for a live interview;

10. Follow that up with an identical snail mail request;

11. Follow that up with a telephone call (you’ll get to speak to someone in authority);

12. You know your topic inside out; speak up with confidence and you’ll get your interview; maybe not straightaway but, if you sell yourself and your project professionally, you’ll be logged into and up-and-coming slot in the station scheduling.

Go for it…it’s free!

In truth though there is more to creating bestselling books than spieling about them on radio and if you’d like to learn how I manage to produce bestsellers consistently, visit the website featured in the resource box below.

Jim Green is a bestselling author with an ever-growing string of niche non-fiction titles to his credit. http://1st-creative-writing-course.com

Many computer users take hard drive reliability for granted, not even thinking about minimal possibility of drive crash. They suppose that hard disk drive manufacturers have done a great improvement to their products towards disk reliability. And they have, but the reality is that all disks die eventually. Even if you have a recent backup, sudden disk failure is a minor catastrophe. How can we protect ourselves from a sudden hard drive crash? One of the ways is through SMART (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) by predicting future failures.

The essential moment is that the user should understand how drives fail and why. There are two classes of failures the hard disk can suffer: unpredictable and predictable.

Unpredictable failures happen suddenly, without warning and can be caused by catastrophic events, handling damage, static electricity or an electronic component burning out, and there is nothing that can be done to foresee or stay away from them.

Predictable ones are 60% mechanical and occur gradually over time. The degradation of drive performance may include head crashes, head contamination, bad solder joints, bad curcuit board connections, motor break down, worn down bearing, spinning inability, excessive run out, bad servo positioning.

Most hard drives lose their performance slowly, and the disk is able to monitor and diagnose many elements’ condition through SMART, providing an early warning for many types of problems. When a potential problem is detected, the drive can be repaired or replaced before any loss of data.

This technology has developed to be industry standard for drive manufacturers and allows checking hard drive status, reporting it and providing some estimation for future failure date. SMART has been able to predict a gradual degradation of the disk. The original SMART spec (SFF-8035i) was written by a group of disk drive manufacturers. In 1995, parts of SFF-8035i were merged into the ATA-3 standard. Starting with the ATA-4 standard, the requirement for the disks to maintain an internal Attribute table was dropped. Instead, now, the disks simply return an OK or NOT OK response to an inquiry about their health. A negative response indicates that the disk firmware has determined that the disk is likely to fail. The ATA-5 standard added an ATA error log and commands to run disk self-tests to the SMART command set.

Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology systems (SMART) are built in to most modern ATA and SCSI hard disks. SMART disk drives internally monitor their own health and performance. SMART technology features include a set of attributes, which determine reliability-prediction parameters of drive and should not be exceeded under normal operation. Each attribute has an identification number (ID). Some types of reliability parameters are:

- Distance between the heads and the disk platters;
- Faulty sectors;
- Recalibration;
- Drive spin-up time;
- Drive temperature;
- Characteristics of the media;
- Motor and servomechanisms.

Attribute value is a positive integral number, usually in the range from 1 to 253. Initially, all attributes have maximum values. A value of 100 or 200 will often be chosen as the “normal” value. Some attributes are considered life-critical and others are just “informative”. In case of hard drive wearing or when some components of the disk are about to fail, attributes indicate decreasing amount of values. Consequently, high values determine high reliability of the drive and low values – low reliability or high possibility of drive failure. Specific threshold is assigned to each attribute. Once the value drops below this threshold, SMART considers the disk to be faulty, which means it becomes very dangerous to store data on this drive.

Currently, the SMART system can detect about 70% of all hard drive errors.
Its main shortcoming is that it doesn’t provide a direct mechanism for informing the OS or the user if problems are found. In fact, because disk SMART status is frequently not monitored, many disk problems go undetected until they lead to a catastrophic failure.

Monitoring a drive’s behavior, SMART has the purpose of warning a user about the threat of drive collapse while time remains to take preventive action, such as back up the data to a replacement device. So why not use SMART monitor programs freely available on Internet to cut these problems off at the pass?

Vital Data Recovery – Montreal, Quebec, Canada (http://www.vitaldata.ca).
Vital Data is data recovery company, which specializes in recovering data from hard disk drives and other media. Vital Data Recovery offers the most technologically advanced hard drive data recovery available.

Numerous implant recipients who got larry dorr durom used in their hip cup replacement surgical processes are discovering that there are complications that far surpass the typical expectations for recuperation. These implant recipients are experiencing a lot of excess pain sensation for lengthier periods of time, facing revision surgeries and elevated medical expenses, and losing income by being taken out of the workplace at their normal occupations. Although Zimmer Holdings, Inc. is postulating that that their hip cup implant is not conceivably malfunctioning and not to blame for the surgical failures, numerous individuals are filing cases against them and receiving settlements.

In the month of October, 2008 Zimmer announced that it had set aside $47.5 million to pay for claims that had been filed against them. Many physicians have reservations that the hip device is good to go and without problems. In fact, when Zimmer offered up online education to doctors in order to teach them what was supposedly more precise methods for performing the implant surgery, half of the physicians refused to participate. Hence, the whole state of affairs stays on to be disagreeable for all patients involved, but none more than the hundreds of patients who are required to undergo revision surgical process due to the issues with their implant experiencing looseness from the socket.

These annoyed implant recipients definitely merit some aid and compensation which is the reason product liability attorneys are suggesting and telling them to file a lawsuit. zimmer replacment has been paying some of these claims, too. However, even if the money they are being offered seems like a lot to them, in most cases people are deciding too quickly and with no allowance being made for reoccuring problems if they happen down the road. Without waiting to find out what cases are actually going to be worth, people could find themselves incurring alot more expenses out of their own funds when further complications return.

If your orthopedic surgeon tells you that you’re going to need revision surgical process to resolve your Zimmer Durom hip replacement device, contact an lawyer immediately.

Once your attorney figures out that you havea viable case, be ready to stick it out for awhile in order to get the very best settlement you can possibly get. Take notice of the advice that your attorney offers you and don’t demand speedy restitution. Being patient at this stage of the case can pay off vs. just rushing the process.

Creating great article submissions for article directories is a great way to get your name out there as an expert in the industry and helping people get the information that will let them make better use of your products and services.

Here’s How It Works

You write a create great article submissions for free article directories. When a blogger or newsletter editor or webmaster is looking for fresh, informative content for their site relating to the information in your article submission, they copy and paste your writing, including your bio box, and place it on their site. When someone searches for phrases that are relevant to your article submissions, the sites that have your articles will come up in the search list. Bingo! You land readers, the webmaster gains traffic, and the searcher gets the information she needs and the lead to your website with a world more to offer her. Everybody wins!

Creating Great Article Submissions

You can write 1000 mediocre or even downright bad articles and it won’t do you a bit of good, and in fact, could hurt you. Fluffy articles or articles that are thinly veiled advertisements for your business or services aren’t going to be picked up by webmasters and bloggers looking for articles that will interest their reading public. They want to draw people to their site with great information and keep them coming back by providing provocative content. Write article submissions that will do this for them and you’ll get your article picked up and posted all over the Internet.

Here are some tips to help you write great article submissions guaranteed to get picked up by reputable sites and spread around the Internet:

Limit word length. Writing for websites, newsletters, and any online print is most effective when it is between 500 and 700 words. This gives you enough room to give details on any given subject but not so long that your reader won’t make it to the bottom of the article and read your all important author bio box.

Spell check and grammar check. You want to establish yourself as an expert and even if your field of expertise is pine cone birdfeeders (obviously a subject completely unrelated to grammar or spelling), misspelled words and bad grammar give the impression that the writer is an amateur.

Careful keyword usage. Though utilizing keywords and keyword phrases in your article submissions is necessary to signal the search engines, overuse looks like Internet spam to search engine software and can prove ineffective. Using keywords and their variants as well as words associated with the keyword phrase is the best way to get good SEO results.

Careful formatting usage. Using heading tags like H1, H2, and H3 and so on is not recommended for successful article submissions. On the other hand, italics, bold print, bullet points and the like are eye catching and help break up the information and make it easier for your reader to scan on a computer screen. Use these judiciously and consistently.

Don’t include affiliate links. Most article directories have strict rules about how many links may be included in each article submission. Affiliate links make the article as well as the website that prints it look unprofessional. Most webmasters stay away from these kinds of articles.

Don’t forget your resource box. This is the reason you wrote the article in the first place, right? Include your name and a brief bit about how you came to your expertise, your website address, and a few words about what you have to offer. Keep it short, succinct, and insightful. Write it in the third person and don’t include an email address as it may be picked up by spam software. Again, this is not an advertisement, but a modest, brief resume type piece of information for the reader.

Make sure your article submissions end up in the right directories. And in the right categories. Every article directory has a myriad of guidelines and regulations. Follow them and make sure that your article ends up categorized in a place that those who want to find it will be able to easily.

Adrian Lawrence is the webmaster of Article Alley a popular free content directory web site. Please feel free to republish this article providing this resource box remains intact with a working hyperlink to our site.

No-one knows for certain how the name of an Irish Mid-Western city came to be associated with the short, irreverent, often bawdy verses of the limerick.

Some people believe that it came from the school of poets who lived in Croom, Co. Limerick in the nineteenth century; their specialisation was short satiric verses. The genre became a fixture in Victorian times, due in no small part to the author of nonsense verse, Edward Lear.

In the history of Irish literature the town of Croom, in Co. Limerick, is celebrated as the meeting place of the 18th century Fili na Maighe, the Gaelic poets of the Maigue. This was the original birth place of ‘the Limerick’. The Maigue poets, writing in their native Irish, produced a great body of poetry, and the custom was widely adopted in other locations in Limerick City and County. Soon the neighbouring Counties of Cork, Clare and Tipperary began to pen the satirical verse.

Two anthologies on the subject, published this century, list 42 poets and Irish scholars (part-time poets) of County Limerick who were known to have composed Limericks. The themes of these early works included love-poems, drinking songs, poems on national affairs, and satires on public figures.

Two of the first, and most famous, exponents of the Limerick poem were poet and publican Sean O’ Tuama (1706-’75), and his friend Andrias MacCriath (1710-’93). O’ Tuama and MacCraith grew up together in Kilmallock, Co. Limerick and were educated in one of the many hedge schools of the time, with a traditional education incorporating Latin and Greek studies.

O’ Tuama later became a publican and word of his hospitality grew, as did the popularity of the Limerick. Poets in North Cork, Clare and Tipperary began to pen the verses. O’ Tuama and his friend fell out and as a result scathing Limerick verses were written by them to castigate the other. O’ Tuama wrote:

“I sell the best Brandy and Sherry

To make all my customers merry,

But at times their finances

Run short as it chances,

And then I feel very sad, very”.

To which MacCraith replied……..

“O’Tuama! You boast yourself handy,

At selling good ale and bright Brandy

But the fact is your liquor

Makes everyone sicker,

I tell you this I your good friend, Andy”.

About The Author

Jae Taylor

Limerick.com is a popular portal website for Limerick City in Ireland. It covers all aspects of Limerick including a comprehensive resource section on Limerick Poems. You can visit the site here:

http://www.limerick.com/limericks/limericks.html

I have developed and managed my own website for many years and would like to share with you 10 steps that I learned to make your website development a pleasant one.

Developing your Website:

1. Come up with a good domain name that relates to your website’s topic.

2. Find a hosting company that offers all of the necessary tools at a reasonable price. Shop around but I recommend Hostway — http://www.hostway.com/.

3. Learn all you can about web development via books and online tutorials. You can find used programming books at you local used book store or eBay.

4. If the thought of learning programming is too much there are companies that offer free templates but you may have to host your site with them. Here are a few companies to look at http://www.freewebtemplates.com/, http://freesitetemplates.com/ they are not as dynamic as if you learn it yourself but will get you started.

5. Next is to find a good editing tool, which will enable you to edit you web pages and upload then to your host’s servers. I recommend CoffeeCup — http://www.coffeecup.com/.

6. If you are selling a product you will need a way to collect money. I recommend using PayPal — https://www.paypal.com/. They offer many merchant tools including a shopping cart feature.

7. It is a good idea to sell ad space on your site to increase your revenue. You can accomplish this by placing Google AdSense ads on you r site – http://www.google.com/ads_by_google.html and selling your own ads by using third party software like AdPeeps — http://www.adpeeps.com/.

8. You will want to offer link exchange to other websites to better your web visibility. I recommend using LinksManager — http://www.linksmanager.com/index.html it will cost you about $30 dollars a month but well worth the time you will save.

9. You will want to offer an affiliate program to help sell your products or get traffic to your site, I recommend ClickBank — http://www.clickbank.com/ and clixGalore — https://www.clixgalore.com/. ClixGalore offers a pay-per-click option that allows you to pay affiliates as little as $.01 per click. If you want to mange your own affiliate program there is free software offered by COSMIC — http://www.cosmicperl.com/.

10. Lastly, to get a jump on promoting you site join several free traffic exchange sites. I recommend TrafficSwarm — http://www.trafficswarm.com/

I hope this will help you get started, remember that it takes time to get your site up and running but will be very rewarding once it is done. For a good example of all of these recommendations in action visit my website http://www.zeoh.com/. Good luck.

Sports shoes is maybe the most needed piece of equipment you’ll splash out on so it’s very important that you decide on the right shoes.

A great number of people do not recognise that there are many differences in the way in which sports shoes help your feet. It is not good for your feet if you participate in football or tennis in the same footwear you use for running.

“Unfortunately, sixty-five percent of the England’s recreational male athletes & women put on the incorrect footwear for their selected leisure activity,” he says. “Shoes are the most needed piece of sportswear kit you’ll ever splash out on & varying what you wear on your feet can stop damage.”

Football can put plenty of stress on the feet, particularly when playing on firm surfaces such as AstroTurf. The shoes can also put tension on your feet, & it’s not strange for a footballer to suffer from corns, calluses or damaged, thickened & ingrown toenails. A excellent, well-fitted pair of boots is critical and there shouldn’t be any signs of pressure on the foot after a football game or training session.

Racquet sports: It is necessary when taking part racket sports, like that of table tennis or squash, to choose shoes specifically designed for the purpose. These sports involve loads of right-to-left movement and sports shoes will not give the right steadiness. Racquet sport shoes are heavier & stiffer than jogging footwear, since their toes are designed for stop-&-go action. Comfort is advised to be your core concern and It’s very important to replace your sports shoes commonly.

Hill-walking is a very good way to begin a calm fitness schedule, whilst the more experienced go for climbing. It is great for your cardiovascular health but is lower impact and so comes with less risk of damage. Find superb deals on scuba snorkels online today.

A barrister bookcase is a conventional book shelve that comes from n Great England. Its discerning feature is a flawless field glass front end. This glass front end is hinged at the top allowing someone easy admittance to ledgers and other collectibles plainly by raising the glass door. The barrister bookcase is perfect for just about anything. Barrister bookcases were frequently used by attorneys since it was necessary for them to keep on moving. Now, they are very convenient, particularly if one is perpetually moving. The doors make this the case. This forbids them from having to be voided on moving

These great cases

Good quality Barrister’s Wood Bookshelves avoid the use of the normal sidelong opening doors . Instead they use doors with a unusual opening mechanism. A metal scissor device used inside the barrister shelves ensure the moving doors do it in a parallel manner without the problem of getting the doors jam or skew in the process. One advantage of utilizing the barrister bookcase is the ability to have several of these units piled together and have them secured to a wall. When done well, these bookcases give the effect of an appealing cabinet. They can be made out of a number of materials Whether it is constructed utilizing glass or wood, barristers give an elgance to a room.

This special kind of shelves, despite many benifits,can be rather pricy. As Luck Would Have It, there unqiueness has caused some manufacturing businesses to start creating replica editions. Some progressive versions are also ready at very reasonable prices. Some variations have simple looks. These can fit any decor.They can also be trimmed and made into customized storage units easily.The fact that they can be stacked together allows them to be easily used to create very interesting unit placements. Some can be used to create ping pong tables, breakfronts or even dinning tables.

More Here bookshelves