How the Nasdaq Works

The Nasdaq, which lists over 3,200 securities and trades about 2 billion shares a day, is a uniquely electronic exchange and the fastest growing stock market today. (The acronym Nasdaq stands for National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotation system.)


The market was formed after an SEC study in the early 1960s concluded that the sale of over-the-counter (OTC) securities (those that aren’t traded on the existing stock exchanges) was fragmented and obscure.


The report called for the automation of the OTC market and gave the responsibility for implementing that system to the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD). NASD began construction of the Nasdaq system in 1968, and its first trades were made beginning February 8, 1971, when Nasdaq became the world’s first electronic stock market.


Unlike the specialist structure of the New York Stock Exchange, in which one specialist represents a particular stock, Nasdaq market makers compete with each other to buy and sell the stocks they choose to represent. More than 500 member firms act as market makers for Nasdaq. Each uses its own capital, research, and system resources to represent a stock and compete with other market makers.


Market makers compete for customers’ orders by displaying buy and sell quotations on an electronic exchange for a guaranteed number of shares at a specific price. After market makers receive orders, they immediately purchase or sell stock from their own inventories or seek out the other side of the trades so they can be executed, usually in a matter of seconds. The four types of market makers are



  • Retail market makers: They serve institutional and individual investors through brokerage networks that provide a continuous flow of orders and sales opportunities.



  • Wholesale market makers: They serve primarily institutional clients and other brokers or dealers who aren’t registered market makers in a particular company’s stock but need to execute orders for their customers.



  • Institutional market makers: They execute large block orders for institutional investors, such as pension funds, mutual funds, insurance companies, and asset management companies.



  • Regional market makers: They serve companies and individuals of a particular region. By focusing regionally, these market makers offer their customers more extensive coverage of the stocks and investors in a particular area of the country.






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Performing Your Due Diligence when Investing in Dividend Stocks

Before investing in any dividend stock, you must perform due diligence to ensure it’s a suitable stock for your dividend investing needs. The following checklist helps you ask the right due diligence questions to sift through your stock possibilities:



  • Examine the company’s most recent quarterly statements, including the balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement.



    • Look at the income statement to make sure the company is profitable and whether profits are growing.



    • Refer to the balance sheet and income statement to calculate the Quick Ratio and Debt Ratio to determine the company’s fiscal strength.



    • Check out the cash flow statement to ensure the company has sufficient cash to cover liabilities and the dividend without a problem.





  • Crunch the numbers to examine the company’s fundamentals. Financial statements and Web sites can give you dividend per share, indicated dividend per share, yield, and earnings per share. From these figures, you can determine the price-to-earnings ratio, payout ratio, net margin, and return on equity.



  • Explore the company’s Web site and the Web sites of its major competitors to find out more about the industry and the individual companies.



  • Investigate the company on Yahoo! Finance or Google Finance for news articles and key statistics.



  • Read reports written by stock analysts at investment banks to determine whether the company is performing up to expectations.



  • Research financial publications online or off.






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Ten Ways to Improve Your Painting Skills

As you grow in your art, you may hit a plateau. You may need a kick-start for inspiration or wonder how to improve your art skills. The good news is that there are lots of ideas to push you to the next level. Refer to the following list whenever you need a little spark to get your inner fire going.



Buy better art supplies


Possibly the easiest way to get better is to upgrade your art supplies. A well-cared-for sable brush can last your whole career and produce the same fine lines on its last day of work as on its first. A better grade of paper helps give your paintings depth and texture. More expensive paints produce richer colors.



Practice, practice, practice


Improve your drawing skills. Draw every day. Keep a sketchbook and use it. Set up a studio space you use only for creating art. Paint every day. Paint from life.



Study art experts


Take workshops. Watch how-to videos. Read art books. Visit art galleries. Join an art club. Subscribe to an art magazine. Look up art sites on the Internet. Take a life drawing class. Copy an old master work for study. Explore art movements in history. Read biographies of other artists.



Dig deeper


Observe your subject and really "see" the details. Think of a title that captivates the audience even before you paint. Incorporate symbolism. Tell a story. Communicate. Create mood. Illustrate a cause. Paint what you know. Research your subject.



Make use of composition and design


Design your composition before painting. Plan a color scheme. Plan and use a value pattern. Use thumbnail sketches. Make sure to include a center of interest. Obey the laws of perspective in realistic landscapes. Take the image all the way to the edge of the paper. Use thick and thin and broken lines. Make more gradation. Make no two shapes the same.



Nurture your inner artist


Watch a sunset. Appreciate beauty. Visit local galleries and museums wherever you are. Wonder at the world. Collect art you admire. Listen to Mozart. Travel for new discoveries and perspectives. Buy a new color of paint just because you like it.



Tend to your creature comforts


Make your work area ergonomic and comfortable. Clean your palette before putting on fresh colors. Set up your painting area in a room with a view. Play your favorite music while you paint. Find a painting coverall you like to wear over your clothes.



Spark your artistic creativity


Look for an unusual angle. Try a new tool or technique. Look at the painting in a mirror. Create a series of related paintings. Choose a theme. Turn the painting upside down. Zoom in. Include an element of surprise. Look at the painting from a distance. Create something totally new.



Improve your artistic technique


Layer paint. Change colors every inch. Use economy of brush strokes. Add interesting shadows. Leave some white paper for sparkle. Observe light and shadow.



Pass it on


Teach someone a technique. Show a child how to watercolor. Start a critique group with other artists. Organize a show just for yourself or for your painting group — it's a wonderful motivation to keep painting.










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How to Install a Deadbolt Lock




Affix the template to the door.


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Use masking tape to affix the template at the proper position.





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Potty Training Children with Disabilities

Handling the physical aspect of training a child with a disability is wildly different with individual kids, depending on the disability. You may need to provide high-tech props that facilitate movement from walker or wheelchair to the toilet (see the "Working with Special Gear" section in this article.) On the other hand, your child may need nothing more than some bars to grab onto when she's sitting down — and your friendly assistance.



One of the hurdles that parents and caregivers face is that kids with physical disabilities sometimes are so hamstrung by their limitations that even the idea of pleasing adults doesn't motivate them, the way it does other children. Also, some aren't moved by the idea of being a big kid or wearing big-kid underwear because they're happy being "little" and "dependent" — it feels safer, considering the physical mountains they must move every day, when they're trying to move around successfully.



Obviously, different disabilities have special problems built in. To discover the best way to potty train your child, try some of the following ways of obtaining advice on potty training a child with a disability:



  • Study up on your child's disability. A good resource for info is the Family Village.

  • Seek insight from other parents of children with disabilities. Your community will probably have support groups, or you can join one of the many on the Internet.

  • Ask an occupational therapist or psychologist for advice on potty training a child with a disability.

Understanding muscle control issues


While most children can control their bowels and bladders by about age 3, kids who have disabilities may take much longer. Their medical problems can delay the development of the muscle control a child needs to regulate herself. In some cases, a physical problem can even prevent a child from developing this ability. Check with your doctor to find out whether you can expect eventual potty use — or not. Remember, however, that a doctor is not a prophet.



You have the advantage of knowing this particular child better than anyone. Therefore, if you're sure that she can be trained, you have nothing to lose by trying — as long as you're not pushy or critical.



Coming to grips with your child's muscle control issues is key to helping her become potty-proficient. You'll discover, as you investigate, many strategies that work in training special-needs kids.



Sometimes, a child's motor difficulties will make her use the potty only if you take her. Escorted, she will do it. Otherwise, she's a no-show. The good news is that eventually she'll decide to go on her own, but that may take time.



Get your physician to be your ally. She should provide you with information on understanding your child's limitations and boundaries insofar as muscle control. You don't want to try to get your child to perform actions that are beyond her capacity, but you do want to be there with encouragement.



Enhancing physical progress


One of the best ways to enhance your child's physical progress is to potty train her as you would any child: "You can do this — I know you can. We'll find ways to work around your brace."



To promote physical adjustment to potty training, you can forge mind/body links in the following ways:



  • Help her connect bathroom with body functions: Move into the bathroom for diaper changes and emptying diapers — you want her to associate poop and pee with the place where the toilet is.

  • Brag on tiny successes: Make sure your child gets huge bravos for the baby steps she makes, whether that's making a tiny dribble in the potty bowl or saying "I potty" after she has done it in her diaper.

  • Help her handle nighttime frustration: For a child with disabilities, staying dry at night is hard. You can expect a child who lacks mobility to have trouble making it through the night dry, and she'll need special handling and empathy. You may need to transfer her from wheelchair to toilet many times before she's able to handle it by holding on to grab bars (see the "Working with Special Gear" section later).

Before you kick off her program, make sure she's eating and drinking a nutritionally sound diet. You don't want constipation to get in the way of progress. Next, talk to her about the body signals that tell your child she needs to go potty. Unfortunately, certain physical disabilities tone down that urge feeling. Remember, too, that a child with a disability may have a muted sense of body in general, so being messy may not bother her.



Your child may miss the potty sometimes, so you should tell her not to worry about accidents. She may also be pretty bad at cleaning herself. All toddlers are fairly messy at this stuff, but the disability may take your child's messiness quotient up a tad. If handling toilet paper is out of her league, just do the task for her. She may eventually learn how by mimicking your moves — but for now, you remove the possible frustration involved in her desire to be clean but lacking the coordination to accomplish that.



After addressing diet, body signals, and messiness, try these ways of enhancing your child's potty progress physically:



  • Set up a success-oriented environment. Get removable obstacles and stressors out of the way. Install handrails or other physical supports so that she can feel safe and sturdy when she sits on the potty.

  • Pad the potty seat with foam (from a crafts store) or buy a softer, padded toilet seat if your child thinks the seat is too hard or cold.

  • Use waterproof sheeting on surfaces where your child sits so that she can hang out clothed in just underpants or diapers. That way, she can be wet long enough for the feeling to bother her. The waterproof stuff is there just to make cleanup easier.

Working with special gear


You can train a child with a disability on a specialized potty chair (custom-made for the child); or build steps up to the potty; or mount a set of grab bars on the walls on each side of the adults' toilet. You can also purchase some terrific wheelchair-conversions that make potty use easier for a wheelchair-using child.



A tot with motor developmental problems is often potty trained on an adaptive toilet seat or extra-high toilet, which you can shop for at a medical supply store, or online at Web sites such as the following:






Another possibility is checking with your occupational therapist for availability. Some state agencies provide equipment for families whose incomes make these pricey toilet options out of the question.



Some of the aids and options that are good for potty training a child with a disability are the following:



  • A custom potty chair, or one that's modified from an existing chair. Check Able Generation — they work with kids and their parents to get the product just right.

  • A wheelchair with a hinged center-section padded seat that lowers to become a commode chair.

  • A cushion that self-inflates to assist a child in going from wheelchair (the getting-up part) and moving onto the toilet.

  • Grab bars on each side of the toilet for leverage in moving from a wheelchair or walker to the toilet.

  • Toilet supports that come with chest strap, safety belt, padded cushion, armrests, and footrest.


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Source:http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/potty-training-children-with-disabilities.html

Clearing Up Common Dividend Misconceptions

Stock market investors and analysts often take sides on the issue of investing in dividend stocks. On one side are the cheerleaders who believe dividend stocks are the next best thing to free money. On the other are the naysayers who believe that dividend stocks are the next worst thing to a government takeover.


As is usually the case when people start taking sides, their radical beliefs are based on myths or misconceptions implanted in them by misinformation or someone else’s misdirected advice. Truth tends to lie somewhere in between, and only by stripping away some of the most common and influential myths is the truth revealed.


Myth 1: Dividend investing is only for old, retired folks


Dividend investing is admittedly attractive for seniors, whose goals are typically capital preservation and income. Younger investors, however, can also benefit from a dividend investing model, even if it comprises only a portion of their portfolios. Although seniors may want to stick with large, well-established corporations, younger investors may want to aim more toward the middle to lower end of the dividend spectrum. Younger investors wanting growth stocks should buy up-and-coming companies that are established enough to pay small dividends but demonstrate that they still have plenty of growth potential (in both capital appreciation and dividend payments).


Dividend investing isn’t a get-rich-quick strategy. It’s a great way to build wealth over the long term (which means you want to start when you’re young) to secure a steady cash flow for your retirement years. All affluent older investors were young once, and many of them followed a relatively conservative dividend investment strategy even then to build their wealth.


Myth 2: Dividend stocks are safe investments


Investing is risky no matter how you slice it; the risk of losing money is always present. However, some investments, including dividend stocks, tend to be safer than others.


Don’t put all your investment eggs in one basket. Even when investing in safer options, diversify to spread the risk among several sectors and among companies in the various industries you choose to invest in.


Myth 3: Companies must maintain a stable dividend payout


Companies are not obligated to pay dividends or to keep the payment stable after they start. However, dividend cuts tend to reflect poorly on a company and its share price, so companies tend to be conservative in establishing a dividend policy. Companies protect themselves by choosing a dividend payment method that allows them to manage shareholder expectations:



  • Residual: With the residual approach, the company funds any new projects out of equity it generates internally and pays dividends only after meeting the capital requirements of these projects.



  • Stability: A stability approach sets the dividend at a fixed number, typically a fraction of quarterly or annual earnings, called a payout ratio. This gives investors a greater level of certainty that they’ll receive a dividend and how much it’s likely to be.



  • Hybrid: The hybrid approach is a combination of the residual and stability approaches.




Myth 4: You should always invest in high-yield stocks


Don’t judge a stock by yield alone. Yield is a valuable measure of how much bang you’re getting for each of your investment bucks, but it alone doesn’t determine a stock’s true value; you also need to look at the share price. You can use a minimum yield to screen out stocks that don’t meet your income requirements, but carefully evaluate a company’s fundamentals before investing in it.


A high yield can mean many things — some positive, some negative. High yield may be a sign that the company’s share price is sinking and that the company may be in trouble. If the high yield is out of whack with its sector, that may be a sign of an impending dividend cut. By the same token, don’t immediately write off low-yield stocks.




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Building a Web Site That Reinforces Your Brand

If by any slight chance you're wondering if you need a Web site — or a stronger Web site than the one you already have — make a list of brand names you know, and then look online to see if each one has a Web site. You probably won't find a great brand that isn't backed by a great site. That's because in today's wired world, building a great brand and building a great site go hand in hand.



Before building or strengthening the Web site for your business and your brand, give some thought to the kind of people you'll be serving online, the kind of information they'll be seeking, and what you want to achieve through your online presence. Answer the following questions:



  • Who is likely to visit your site? Will your site be visited primarily by current customers? Or will it be used by job seekers, suppliers, customer prospects, or others seeking information about your business?

  • How will people use your site? Will people want general information, such as your location, open hours, and product lines? Will they want answers to frequently asked questions about your offering? Will they want to study your organization's background and experience or find out more about your products? Will they want the ability to request quotes or to study customization options? Will they want to buy online? Will job seekers want to apply online? By knowing what people will want from your site, you can design its features and functions accordingly.

  • What are your goals for your site? Every site should advance the brand image. Beyond that, do you want your site to generate leads, capture online sales, provide customer support, or simply deliver information about your business? Your answers in this area help you weigh site development costs against the value you expect your site to deliver.

Settling on the right type of site


Most Web sites fall into one of the following categories:



  • Company contact sites: Easy and economical to build and maintain, these sites are like online business cards, with graphics that advance brand images while delivering the facts that online users seek about businesses. Minimally, a contact site provides your business identity and description, information about your products and services, your open hours, and how to reach you online and at your physical location.

  • Brochure sites: These sites are online cousins to print brochures. This kind of site needs to advance your brand image while delivering clear information about your company background, products, and services.

  • Support sites: These sites reinforce existing customer relationships by providing online service and customer communication, including information about product usage, installation, troubleshooting, updates, and news. They're useful when many customers have similar questions or service needs that can be addressed online by companies prepared to respond immediately to user questions.

  • E-commerce sites: These are sites designed to sell goods online. They invite and allow customers to view products, make choices, place orders, submit payment, and, often, track delivery. Because of the complexity of the functions required, these are the most expensive sites to build and maintain.

Considering content


Content describes electronically delivered information, including text, photos, or graphics. As you plan the content for your brand Web site, keep the following tips in mind:



  • Build your site page-by-page. Don't think of your site as a single unit with many pages. Think in modular terms, with an introductory home page and links to pages that each covers a single topic.

  • Think of your home page as the welcome mat to your entire site. Just as you wouldn't try to tell your whole story on the cover of your brochure, don't try to tell your whole story on your home page. Use your home page to establish your brand image, convey your brand promise, and invite users to click for specific information.

  • Use keywords to your advantage. Keywords are words or phrases that people enter into search engines when they're seeking information or a particular Web site. As you develop each page on your site, think of the keywords that describe the content of your page. Then use those words in the page headline and several times in the page copy so that, when consumers seek information through keyword searches, your page has a chance of appearing in the search results.

    Keyword searches may send users to internal pages of your site rather than to your home page, so be sure that every page identifies your brand and provides an easy link back to your home page.

  • Be spare with words and generous with design. Online, people skim pages, grabbing information from headlines, clicking on easy-to-understand buttons, and stopping only when they see information that seems to meet their needs. To catch the attention of these fast-moving page skimmers, avoid long blocks of text in favor of quotes, testimonials, headlines, graphics, and a design that's clear, clean, and capable of conveying your brand image at a glance.

Mapping out easy navigation


Navigation is how users access information on your site. Most sites use menu bars and colored or underlined text or icons to help users navigate Web pages and know where to click to reach the information they want.



On your home page, present clearly labeled selections so that site visitors know exactly how to proceed to get their questions answered. When you're putting together the content of pages other than your home page, follow this advice:



  • On each page, provide navigation keys so that users can jump from site page to site page with ease.

  • On each page, provide a link back to your home page.

  • Keep navigation choices clear and to a minimum.









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Strategic Planning: Customer Management Processes

Customer management processes cut across all your customers — current and new. In evaluating your performance, written or unwritten, your organization goes through the following processes when acquiring and serving your customers:



  • Selecting customers: Are you identifying the right customers whose problems you can solve?



  • Acquiring customers: A quick way to evaluate this process is to look at your customer conversion rate. How many prospects are you turning into customers? How effective is your marketing strategy? Is your message the right one, and does it hit the right people at the right time? What’s your sales cycle? Has it improved from last year?



  • Retaining customers: Assuming that you’ve landed the right customers and are able to deliver what you promised, your customers should be sticking with you. While you’re acquiring new customers, you still want to take care of the old ones. Word of mouth is also important here. When your customers are highly satisfied, they tell their friends.



  • Building relationships with your customers: Are you growing your relationships with your customers, or are they stagnant? You can measure this success by seeing whether your customers are buying more from you year after year.




Scandinavian Airlines realized the importance of managing its customers’ relationships by breaking down customer relationship management processes to their most basic, uncomplicated level.


Jan Carlzon, CEO, says, “Last year, each of our 10 million customers came in contact with approximately five SAS employees, and this contact lasted an average of 15 seconds each time. Those 50 million ‘moments of truth’ are the moments that ultimately determine whether SAS succeeds or fails as a company.”




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What's on an Apartment Rental Agreement (Lease Agreement)

When you rent an apartment, you'll sign a rental agreement (lease agreement) — a legal document stating your responsibilities as a renter. An apartment rental agreement can be short and simple if the landlord owns very few units, or it can be five to ten pages full of complicated language if the landlord owns many apartments. In either case, the lease agreement covers several important items in addition to the actual amount of rent you'll be paying and when that payment is due.


Length of term


The shorter the term (of your stay in the apartment), say one year, the more freedom you have when it comes to renewing your lease or moving out. Conversely, a longer term allows you to lock in a particular rent (no price increase!), even if there's an escalating clause for subsequent years. If you leave before the end of the term, you'll lose your security deposit; and if the landlord wants to sue you, you'll have to pay all the rent over the course of the term, whether you're living there or not.


Deposit


Landlords insist on a security deposit, both to protect themselves if you fail to pay the rent and to use to repair any damage you may have done to the apartment. If you return the apartment in good shape, you'll get the deposit back when you move out. If repairs are needed, they'll be deducted.


One reason many landlords ask for two months deposit is keep their tenants from not paying the last month and there being no money left to draw on to make repairs. In most states, the landlord is required to pay the tenant interest on the deposit.


If you're aware of a problem, like a leak, and fail to report it to the landlord in a timely manner, the agreement may state that you're liable for any damage, so be sure to let your landlord know about a problem as soon as possible, even if your landlord is slow to make repairs.


Utilities


In some apartments the tenant must pay for every utility (water, gas, electricity, garbage collection, heat, and so on), while in other apartments some utilities may be included in the rent. You might even see text about agreeing not to waste utilities that the landlord provides.


Subleasing


Landlords want to know to whom they are renting, so they protect themselves from having their tenants let someone else live in the apartment, be that while you're living there (including a boyfriend/girlfriend or family member not named on the lease) but mostly if you were to leave the apartment for a time and want to let someone else stay there and pay the rent.


But even if your lease has a clause that doesn't permit you to sublease, if you speak to your landlord, and if the person you want to sublease to has good referrals, you might be given permission. Just remember, you'll still be responsible for late rent, damage, or other costs incurred by the people you've subleased to. And if you sublease illegally, you'll have broken the terms of the agreement and the landlord can take you to court and throw you out.


Other terms: Late fees, insurance, improvements, pets, and more


Your rental agreement may state the amount of late fees that can be applied if you don't pay your rent on time; forbid you from having a pet; and make you buy renter's insurance. Here are other terms that might be on the agreement:



  • Spell out what being a good tenant means, in terms of noise, and so on



  • Make you ask for permission before making any alterations to the apartment and/or make you pay to restore the apartment to the way it was before leaving if you do, even if you think of them as being improvements



  • Allow the landlord access to the apartment to make repairs or inspections or to show the apartment once you give notice that you're leaving. The landlord, however, will have to give you reasonable notice before entering you place — unless there's an emergency, such as a broken water pipe.



  • Prevent you from conducting a business on the premises



  • Specify furnishing and/or appliances that are included if the apartment comes furnished



  • List when you're allowed to move in and out (particularly if there's a service elevator that must be reserved)



  • If the landlord is responsible for painting, and state how often painting will occur




Going to court


Most rental agreements specify the conditions if you and the landlord have a legal dispute, including which court (which may be limited to arbitration) and under what circumstances you might have to pay the landlord's legal fees.











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Adobe Premiere Elements: Playing Clips in the Monitor Window



Figure 1: Control playback in the Monitor by using these controls.

The Monitor window offers buttons and tools for controlling playback and various other editing actions. Take a close look at the playback controls right now by loading a clip into the Monitor and clicking the Play button. Somewhere in the middle of the clip, click the Pause button (the Play button turns into the Pause button after you click Play). Now you can play with some controls that help you identify specific frames in a clip:



  • Click the Step Forward button. The clip moves forward by one frame. You can also press the right-arrow key on your keyboard to move forward one frame at a time.

  • Click the Step Back button. The clip moves back a frame. You can also control the Step Back function by pressing the left-arrow key.

  • If you want to remember a certain spot in the clip, move to the spot and click the Set Marker button. This places a marker at the current location in the clip. A marker is kind of like a virtual stick-on note.

  • Place the mouse pointer directly on the Shuttle control. Click and drag the control to the right. Notice that as you drag the Shuttle farther to the right, the clip advances forward at an increasing rate. Drag the Shuttle left to play the clip backward. Let go of the Shuttle by releasing the mouse button. The Shuttle snaps back to the middle and the clip stops playing. Shuttle controls have been common on professional video equipment for years because they provide quick yet precise control over playback.

  • As a clip plays, notice that a pointed indicator moves to show you your current location in a clip. This pointed indicator is often called the CTI, short for current time indicator. Another common name for the CTI is playhead.

In addition to the visible Monitor window controls, Adobe Premiere Elements allows you to rely heavily on keyboard buttons as well. Premiere Elements uses the industry-standard key combination of J-K-L to control shuttle operation in the Monitor window. Press J to shuttle back, L to shuttle forward, and K to stop. Notice that the J, K, and L keys are conveniently located right next to each other on your keyboard.










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How to Use the Cable Cast-On Method




Knit into the first stitch, bring the new loop to the right, and slip it onto the LH needle.


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When you knit into the first stitch, you don't slip the old loop off the LH needle, as you do when using other kinds of cast-on methods.





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Practice Digital Photography by Going Light    

When you want to learn how to use a specific piece of camera gear, such as a new lens, or master a specific photography technique, try going commando. When you go commando, or travel light, you take just enough gear to master the technique you want to learn or only the lens with which you want to become more familiar.


Having lots of gear is a good thing, but some photographers have so much gear that they might never really master any particular piece of it, like a specific lens. When you limit the amount of equipment you take, you learn how to get the most out of the gear you have on hand.


You also learn to improvise to overcome any shortcoming of the equipment you have with you. For example, if you’ve just purchased a prime lens (a lens with one focal length), you have to learn the art of foot zoom, which means you have to move toward or away from your subject to get the composition you want.


You can combine going commando with an artist’s date, a specific time or times each week when you’ll take pictures. In this instance, your goal is to master a technique or a new piece of gear. Use this technique a couple of times a month, and you’ll master every piece of gear in your camera bag.


Take photographs on your way to work and on your way home from work. At many times of the year, this coincides with the Golden Hour. You may feel uncomfortable leaving an expensive camera in your car while you’re at work (it may not be prudent, either!). If so, travel light; bring your camera and one lens and park it in your desk while you work.


If you have an occupation where you can’t keep your camera secure while you work, consider investing in a point-and-shoot camera. You can take pictures on the way to work and on the way home and keep your camera hidden in your glove box while you work.




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Source:http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/practice-digital-photography-by-going-light.html

Featuring Photos and Slides on Your Business Website

Photos and slide shows are excellent ways to showcase your products, services, activities, and expertise. Although photos can be posted on your own business website or blog, photo- and slide-sharing sites allow other people to comment on them, forward them to others, and find out more about your company.


Use the search function on any of these image-sharing sites to see how many, if any, of your competitors use them. The presence of many competitors is a strong hint that your business needs to be there, too. The absence of competition is ambiguous: It can give you a temporary advantage or indicate that this effort isn’t worth it. Being first isn’t always the best idea.


You can achieve multiple marketing goals by following this advice for using image-sharing sites:



  • Cast a wider net for prospective customers. Some prospects prefer looking at pictures to reading words! It’s all part of finding new prospects where they are. Display images of your company, products, or services, accompanied by informative descriptions, to attract customers’ attention.



  • Entice viewers with samples of your products. For example, see Bleeding Heart Bakery. Whether you’re selling scarves or hookahs, candles or cupcakes, you can use image-sharing to lure visitors with representative products.



  • Display photos of completed projects. Photos sites work exceedingly well for architects, builders, construction companies, and home painters as well as for interior, landscape, product, and packaging design companies and any other business with highly visual work results. This advice is excellent for service companies such as Wojcik Lawn Care & Landscaping or McClain’s Painting Service.



  • Build awareness of creative work. In perhaps the most obvious application for photo-sharing, creative folks can display their portfolios to a broad audience. Because these sites make it easy to upload, catalog, and remove images, many artists use image-sharing sites as a free alternative to modifying websites. See ceramic artist Marylou Newdigate for an example.



  • Enhance branding and site traffic. By using your logo, tags, web address, and links on profile pages on these services, you can build name recognition.



  • Improve search engine optimization. Photo- and slide-sharing sites can be helpful to your search engine optimization strategy. Every site may be a bit different. I talk more about SEO in the later section “Optimizing images for SEO.”



  • Supplement your website or social media pages with additional photos. For example, you might display thumbnails on your website or one image from a set or a slide sequence of photos, with supplemental photos on a photo-sharing site.



  • Advertise to photographers. Photo-sharing sites are a wonderful way to offer goods and services to photographers, such as cameras, lenses, photo-editing software, lighting equipment, workshops, studio space, or travel packages for photo safaris.



  • Improve customer service. Upload images that are limited to use by specific customers or invitees, perhaps marking them private for limited visibility. You can post pictures of works in progress, images of prospective sites or buildings, or photographs of optional product features. This feature is particularly useful when photos interest a smaller audience than the one served by your website.



  • Collaborate on content. Shutterfly has the special Share Sites feature to help people easily collaborate on the creation of photo albums, whether private or public. For example, the American Youth Soccer Organization uses Shutterfly for online registration, to share pictures and videos, manage schedules, access volunteer assignments, and do even more.



  • Build community participation and buzz. In a novel interactive application, Marvel Comics created a Flickr group for movie lovers to post photos of themselves with statues of the Incredible Hulk that had been placed in movie theater lobbies to promote the film.



  • Establish your expertise with presentations and slide shows. Slide shows and PowerPoint presentations are extremely valuable tools in the B2B world. To increase your visibility and reputation as an expert, post your presentations from webinars, speeches, product demonstrations, and technical support directions on sites such as Slideshare.













dummies

Source:http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/featuring-photos-and-slides-on-your-business-websi.html

Analysing Your Website's Click Paths

Path Analysis allows you to see how visitors are moving through your website, which pages they enter and exit by and which are the most common pathways through your site. Some things to look for when performing path analysis:



  • Do a lot of your visitors arrive on your home page and then not go any further?



  • Do most visitors enter your site via the home page but instead arrive on a specific product or service page?




Being able to monitor whether visitors are finding the pages you want them to or taking the actions you want them to take, such as subscribing to a newsletter or purchasing a product is very useful.


For example, perhaps you’re launching a new product and have placed ads on other websites or on Google AdWords. Hopefully, you’re directing people straight to the page about this new product and not to your home page. Then, to judge the effectiveness of your copy and online advertising, measuring how many people are entering your website via this new page is important.









dummies

Source:http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/analysing-your-websites-click-paths.html

Keeping Communications Open after a Prospect Says No

During the course of a sales cycle with a cause marketing prospect, you’ll surely have many conversations, but there’s one word you never want to hear: No, as in, “No, we have no interest in working with you.”


A verbal no will trigger a defensiveness in the prospect that can be very difficult to overcome. That’s why you never want to cross that bridge. Your goal with a good prospect is to keep the lines of communication open so that you can work together some day.


There are many good ways to avoid the dreaded no. How you go about it depends a lot on what you have to say:


“Let’s wait until next month when you have all the information you need.”

“I'll sign you up for our e-mail newsletter so that you can get regular updates on the progress and success of our programs.”

“How about our next program in March? It has many of the same things you liked about this program, but the timeframe is better for you. I'll call you in February.”

Always try to keep the door open, even if it’s just a little bit. Because a closed door might just never open again.











dummies

Source:http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/keeping-communications-open-after-a-prospect-says.html

How to Choose an E-Mail Marketing Provider with a Good Sender Reputation


8 of 9 in Series:
The Essentials of Building Your E-Mail Marketing Lists





Getting more of your marketing e-mails delivered starts with sending your e-mail from a reputable e-mail server. Because your own e-mail server isn’t likely to have a reputation, delivering your mail through an e-mail marketing program (EMP) with a respectable and well-known reputation is one of the most important steps you can take to maximize your e-mail deliverability. Make sure you choose an EMP that can do the following:



  • Authenticate your e-mail: Authentication allows e-mail servers to identify the sender of an e-mail.



  • Eliminate customers with high spam complaints: EMPs send e-mails from their own servers on behalf of their customers even though the e-mails appear to come from their customers. Because too many spam complaints might cause the EMP’s servers to become blacklisted, associate with an EMP that takes action when one of its customers receives too many spam complaints. Reputable EMPs keep their overall complaint rates low — and your sender reputation as clean as possible.



  • Affirm the quality of its customers’ e-mail lists: Although EMPs can’t guarantee or predetermine the quality of their customers’ e-mail lists, reputable EMPs require customers to adhere to strict permission policies to caution their customers when attempting to use e-mail addresses that could generate a high number of complaints.



  • Adopt a policy for spam tolerance: Some businesses, such as those in the financial and medical industries, inherently receive a lot of spam complaints because their legitimate e-mail content looks similar to a lot of spam e-mails. Use an EMP that either has options for such businesses or has a policy to refer such businesses to another service that specializes in industries where spam complaints may be higher than average.



  • Keep customers from sending repeated e-mails to unknown users: Spammers send billions of e-mails to every possible e-mail address hoping to uncover real addresses. Because ISPs (such as AOL, Yahoo!, and Hotmail) spend a lot of money bouncing e-mails sent by spammers, they aren’t appreciative of e-mails sent to nonexistent addresses. As a result, your deliverability could suffer if your e-mail server is labeled as a nuisance. To help protect your sender reputation (as well as that of the EMP), most reputable EMPs stop sending your e-mail to nonexistent e-mail addresses after two or three attempts even if you don’t remove the e-mail addresses yourself.




E-mail filters often rely on sender reputation before content filters, so check your EMP’s sender reputation against the competition by signing up for a free account at Return Path’s Sender Score service. Type the domain name of the company and then click each of its listed e-mail servers to see the sender score for each server used to send e-mail on behalf of the EMP’s customers. A score of 0 on a particular e-mail server is the worst, and a score of 100 is the best. After you feel comfortable that you’re sending e-mail via a reputable EMP, you can be sure that your efforts to optimize your e-mail content won’t be wasted.












dummies

Source:http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-choose-an-email-marketing-provider-with-a-g.html

Looking at Employee Personality: The Big 5

The Big 5 is probably the most famous and most commonly used personality model in the workplace and employers commonly use it in the selection process. Unsurprisingly, this model has five personality traits. An easy way to remember the traits is to use the acronym OCEAN. The following table shows the relationship between these five traits and job performance.

































Personality TraitBrief DescriptionLink to Job Performance
Open to experience/closed to experienceFrom being open to new experiences and imaginative to being
less open to new experiences, narrow-minded, and unimaginative
Predicts training performance
Conscientious/disorganisedFrom being well-organised, focused on targets, goals, and
deadlines, dependable and good at paying attention to detail to
being impulsive, disorganised, and less detail-focused
Predicts performance across most jobs and organisational
settings
Extroverted/introvertedFrom being outgoing and good at dealing with people (managers
tend to be more extroverted than the average person) to being less
outgoing and comfortable in own company or that of their close
friends
Predicts performance for some jobs – sales, for
example
Agreeable/tough-mindedFrom being usually good-natured, keen to co-operate with
others, careful to avoid conflict, easy to get on with, and not
argumentative to being unfriendly, strong-willed, and not averse to
conflict
Nice to have at work and can be useful in customer-facing roles
but studies report it being the weakest Big 5 predictor of good job
performance
Neurotic/stableFrom having a tendency to experience negative states such as
anger, anxiety, and guilt, to being stable, rarely upset, and
typically calm
Predicts poor job performance








dummies

Source:http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/looking-at-employee-personality-the-big-5.html

Network Basics: Switching and the OSI Model

As you may now be aware, switching fits into the OSI model at Layer 2. With switching and bridging happening at Layer 2, they deal with the MAC address information found in the Ethernet frames. If you go down to Layer 1, a device such as a repeater or hub simply takes the electrical impulse on the wire and amplifies the signal. A switch, on the other hand, reads the Ethernet frame into memory, reconstructs it, and retransmits it out of the destination port (or all ports, in the case of a broadcast frame).


Switches support the following three basic types of forwarding mechanisms:



  • Store-and-forward switching: A process by which the switch reads the entire Ethernet frame into memory before examining it, at which time the switch will identify the destination address and make a forwarding decision. This type of switching provides two benefits: The switch is assured of a complete frame and no collision will occur on the network before sending the data. The drawback is a slight delay on forwarding of the data.



  • Cut-through switching: With this process, a forwarding decision is made as soon as enough of the frame is read, which can be as little as 17 bytes of data past the preamble. From that much data, the switch can identify the difference among Ethernet II, IEEE 802.3, IEEE 802.2, and Ethernet_SNAP frame types. After this difference is identified, the process of forwarding the frame to its destination can begin.


    Depending on the type of frame and the use of Access Control Lists (ACLs), a total of 54 bytes of data can be read. This condition can significantly reduce the delay in forwarding data to its destination, because without the store-and-forward delay, you can approach true wire speed. The problem occurs when you experience a collision on your network for a data frame that is partially forwarded, making the work done forwarding the frame useless.


    This issue is mitigated on networks that are entirely switched because collisions will occur only when you have two or more devices connected with a hub that is then connected to a port on a switch. By eliminating hubs on your network, you eliminate collisions.



  • Fragment-free switching: This process is similar to cut-through, with the exception that the forwarding decision is not made until the first 64 bytes of the data frame are read and are collision free. After 64 bytes are read, the switch has enough data to forward a legal frame because Ethernet requires frames to be at least 64 bytes.


    On a fully switched network, this process does not provide a benefit over cut-through switching. However, if the chance for collisions is high, this process is preferable to cut-through switching because it prevents forwarding frames that are less than the minimum Ethernet size. (These illegally sized frames are called runts.)




Both switching methods that forward data before the entire frame is read into the switch have a critical flaw when dealing with the integrity of the Ethernet frame. The last piece of data is the FCS, or Frame CheckSum, which is used to verify that the Ethernet frame that has arrived at the switch has not been altered or changed through a network error.


Because the switch has not read the entire frame, the switch is not able to calculate a checksum or compare it to the FCS found at the end of the frame. Frames with a failed checksum should not be forwarded; but in this case, most of the switch has already been forwarded by the time the switch knows the checksum is wrong.


Because of the speed of the current switches, you will likely find that most switches on the market, like Cisco’s switches, use the store-and-forward method of passing data because the new speeds of moving data internally in the switch outweigh the cost of forwarding bad data.




dummies

Source:http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/network-basics-switching-and-the-osi-model.html

Supplemental Feed for Your Goats

Goats need supplemental minerals, vitamins, and other nutrients in addition to those they get in their hay, grain, and browse. Vitamins and minerals are essential to keeping goats healthy, making sure they're growing well, and assisting in reproduction and the development of skin and bone.


You can supplement your goats' browse and feed them essential minerals and vitamins by supplying them with free-choice loose minerals or a mineral block, which you can find in most feed stores. Goats prefer minerals with salt; if you have to get a salt-free mineral, supplement it with a salt block.


Never buy a so-called "goat/sheep mineral" because it doesn't have enough copper for a goat's needs. The amount of copper that a goat needs can kill a sheep. If you can't find goat-specific minerals, you can use a cattle or horse mineral.


With good hay and an adequate mineral block, your goats get by just fine. But you can also give them some of these supplemental feeds to make them even healthier:



  • Beet pulp: Beet pulp adds fiber, protein, and energy to a goat's diet and contains calcium and phosphorus. It comes in 50-pound bags and is cheaper than grain but doesn't supply as much energy and so shouldn't be used as a substitute.



  • Black oil sunflower seeds (BOSS): Black oil sunflower seeds contain vitamin E, zinc, iron, and selenium and also add fiber and fat to the diet. BOSS make the goats' coats shinier and increase the butterfat in their milk. Mix the seeds into your goats' grain; they eat them shell and all.



  • Kelp meal: Kelp meal is a good source of iodine, selenium, and other minerals. Used as a supplement, it helps protect goats from iodine deficiency. Kelp also improves dairy goats' production, increasing milk volume and butterfat and helping decrease mastitis.



  • Baking soda: Many goat owners offer their goats free-choice baking soda, which aids digestion by keeping the rumen pH-balanced. If one of your goats has a digestive problem, offer baking soda. Baking soda is also one of the treatments for floppy kid syndrome.



  • Apple cider vinegar (ACV): Some goat owners add unfiltered apple cider vinegar, which is full of enzymes, minerals, and vitamins, to their goats' water.



  • Treats and snacks: Just because goats love grain doesn't mean it's good for them to have all the time. You can find plenty of other nutritious snacks for goats:



    • Corn chips are a good grain substitute for wethers because the saltiness encourages them to drink water, which helps prevent urinary calculi.



    • Goats love apples, watermelon, peaches, pears, grapes, bananas (peel and all, if organic), and dried fruit. Just make sure that the fruits aren't in pieces large enough to cause choking.



    • Vegetables are a nutritious addition to any diet. Goats love carrots with their tops attached, celery, pumpkins, squash, lettuce, spinach, and other greens.






Avoid members of the nightshade family, such as potatoes and tomatoes, which contain alkaloids, as well as plants with oxalates, such as kale. These can be poisonous to goats.




dummies

Source:http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/supplemental-feed-for-your-goats.html

Leadership For Dummies





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Developing Your Mission as Leader


Once you've established a goal, your mission is the plan of action for you and your team to reach that goal. Use these guidelines to help lead and attain your mission:



  • Don’t take an untakeable hill. The cost is too high.



  • Approach your mission incrementally. Do many small things well, and you’ll have a big success.



  • Bring your group into mission development and planning at an early stage. Listen to what they have to say, and make the modifications you need at the start.



  • Work to get ownership of the mission from everyone in the group. Your followers are going to do the heavy lifting, so they have to know what they’re in for.



  • Make certain that you have a “point of no return.” If the mission is not going well, know how far you can go and still regroup. You’re not General Custer, and leading shouldn’t be the Battle of the Little Bighorn.



  • Lead people; manage events. Keep your troops motivated.







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Leadership Qualities


All great leaders have certain characteristics in common. Being a great leader has nothing to do with how you look or how you speak; leadership involves preparation and accepting responsibility, even when you don't want to. These skills are necessary to be a leader and motivate people to follow:


Embracing Responsibility


Embracing responsibility is an attitude:



  • Drop the word “no” from your vocabulary.



  • Learn to volunteer.



  • Take an interest in people around you and learn to like people.



  • Promise little — deliver a lot.




Eliciting Cooperation


Your goal is to have your followers trust you:



  • Find out what people want — and why they want it.



  • Figure out ways of trading what you have — the power of a leader — for what you need — the cooperation of your group.



  • Smile at people and look them in the eye. It’s the start of trust, and trust is the beginning of cooperation.



  • Share information with your team and keep them informed.




Visions


Leading starts with developing a vision:



  • Visions are more than ideas. They are doable dreams.



  • Visions link the present to the future.



  • Use visions to inspire your followers to achieve more than they thought possible.



  • Make your visions positive. Everyone wants to make the world a better place.




Planning


Planning is necessary if your team is to attain its goals. Keep these things in mind:



  • Plan for every contingency — and remember that you can’t plan for every contingency.



  • Leave a lot of wiggle room in your plans. When things go wrong, you can adjust.



  • Make certain you have adequate resources. If you get into the lifeboat without food and water, be sure there’s someone on board who has the skill to get both.



  • Plan for change. Be happy when it arrives.




Listening


Strive to take in as much information as you can:



  • Pay attention to the nuances of what people say and how they say it.



  • Pay attention to the needs of your group.



  • Focus and concentrate — listen to only one person at a time.



  • Learn to develop your own inner voice — and then learn to listen to it.



  • Pay attention to the world around you. Seeing is a form of listening, and visual impressions are often the most powerful.



  • Learn to hear the voices of the downtrodden. Their needs can become your cause.







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Using a SWOT Chart as a Leadership Tool


A SWOT (Strengths and Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) chart is a tool for assessing and accomplishing your mission as leader. Use a SWOT chart to list strengths and weaknesses of the team you’re leading and your opponent, then you can determine where opportunities exist and devise a strategy. Use this SWOT chart of a baseball team as an example:


image0.jpg



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dummies


Source:http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/leadership-for-dummies-cheat-sheet.html

For Seniors: How to Make Your High Bid by Proxy in an eBay Auction

To bid on eBay, you don’t have to sit in on an auction 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, manually upping your bid every time someone bids against you. You can make your high bid by proxy in an eBay auction. By proxy means that eBay’s automatic-bid feature stands in for you so that your bid rises incrementally in response to other bidders’ bids.


When you make your maximum bid on the bidding form, you actually make several small bids — again and again — until the bidding reaches the maximum you specified. If the current bid is up to $19.99, for example, and you put in a maximum of $45.02, your bid automatically increases incrementally so that you stay ahead of the competition — at least until someone else’s maximum bid exceeds yours. Basically, you bid by proxy. No one else knows for sure whether you’re bidding automatically, and no one knows how high your maximum bid is.


The bid increment is the amount of money by which a bid is raised. As a buyer (or seller), you have no control over the bid increments. The current maximum bid can jump up a nickel or a quarter or even $100. To determine how much to increase the bid increment, eBay uses a bid-increment formula that’s based on the current high bid. The following table lists the bidding increments.

















































eBay’s Bidding Increments
Current High Bid ($)Next Bid Increased By ($)
0.01–0.990.05
1.00–4.990.25
5.00–24.990.50
25.00–99.991.00
100.00–249.992.50
250.00–499.995.00
500.00–999.9910.00
1000.00–2499.9925.00
2500.00–4999.9950.00
5000.00 and up100.00

Here’s an example:



  • A 5-quart bottle of cold cream has a current high bid of $14.95. The bid increment is $0.50 — meaning that if you bid by proxy, your automatic bid will be $15.45.



  • A 5-ounce can of top-notch caviar has a high bid of $200. The bid increment is $2.50. If you choose to bid by proxy, your bid will be $202.50.




When you place an automatic bid (a proxy bid) on eBay, eBay’s bidding engine places only enough of your bid to outbid the previous bidder. If there are no previous bidders and the seller hasn’t entered a reserve price, your bid appears as the minimum auction bid until someone bids against you. Your bid increases incrementally in response to other bids against yours.


To place a proxy bid in an auction, type your maximum bid in the appropriate box or click the Place Bid button. A confirmation page appears, and you have one last chance to back out.


image0.jpg

Before placing your proxy bid, give serious thought to how much you want to pay for the item. Be sure to take into account any other costs (like shipping and tax) you’re expected to pay.


If everything is in order, click Confirm Bid. Or, if you get cold feet, click Back to Item. After you’ve placed your bid, the acknowledgment page lets you know whether you’re the high bidder.


If you’re not the high bidder in an auction, just scroll down the acknowledgment page to the rebidding area and place another bid.




dummies

Source:http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/for-seniors-how-to-make-your-high-bid-by-proxy-in-.html

Journal Your Job-Search Journey on Your Facebook Wall

Use Facebook as a platform to share your job-seeking progress with friends and family. Let them know what steps you took that week to find work. Share interesting insights about yourself or about job seeking in general. Celebrate your successes, like having finished your résumé or getting a callback from a target hiring manager.


Ironically, sometimes the people closest to you are more reluctant to help. But if you post about your job-seeking journey so that friends and family can see how committed you are to finding a better position, then they may be more serious about offering to support you and make introductions for you.


That’s exactly what happened for a client who had a history of job-hopping on Wall Street. His behavior wasn’t a problem before the market crashed. But when the job market got very competitive with many brokers out of work, his reputation caught up with him.


His friends and family had been disappointed with his inability to settle down, and so they were unwilling to risk their own reputations to help him out. He used Facebook to start journaling his progress and through targeted Wall posts he was able to reinforce his commitment.


Slowly, his friends’ and family’s resistance wore down and they began to see him in a better light. In the end, it was an introduction on Facebook that landed him his next position.




dummies

Source:http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/journal-your-jobsearch-journey-on-your-facebook-wa.html

Targeting Your Real Estate Marketing

Real estate agents often encourage you to spend thousands of dollars on advertising and marketing that may not even be appropriate for your property.


Big glossy advertisements don’t necessarily result in bigger prices. More important may be listing your property on a major real estate website, along with a well-designed and worded signboard outside your property that attracts and informs drive-by home-seekers.


You can reach local buyers by letterboxing brochures and by placing advertisements in the local newspaper. If your property is likely to appeal to buyers from other areas, advertise in publications with a metro-wide circulation (including an agent’s own in-house magazine).


Skilful use of photographs and descriptive text can highlight your property’s best points, particularly those not obvious from the street. Sing the praises of your location as well as of the property itself.









dummies

Source:http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/targeting-your-real-estate-marketing.html

Referring to Values or Formulas in Other Cells in Excel 2010 Formulas

Linking formulas are formulas in Excel 2010 that reference a location in the same worksheet, same workbook, or even a different workbook. When you create a linking formula, it brings forward the constant or original formula to a new location so that the result in the linking formula remains dynamically tied to the original. If you change the original constant or any of the cells referred to in the original formula, the result in the cell containing the linking formula is updated at the same time as the cell containing the original constant or formula.


You can create a linking formula in one of two ways:



  • Select the cell where you want to enter the linking formula, type = (equal sign), and then click the cell with the constant (text or number) or the formula that you want to bring forward to that cell. Then click the Enter button on the Formula bar or press the Enter key.



  • Select the cell with the constant or formula that you want to bring forward to a new location, and click the Copy button in the Clipboard group on the Home tab or press Ctrl+C. Then click the cell where the linking formula is to appear before you click the Paste Link option on the Paste button's drop-down menu on the Home tab.




When you use the first simple formula method to create a link, Excel uses a relative cell reference to refer to the cell containing the original value or formula (as in =A10 when referring to an entry in cell A10). However, when you use the second copy-and-paste link method, Excel uses an absolute cell reference to refer to the original cell (as in =$A$10).


When you create a linking formula to a cell on a different sheet of the same workbook, Excel inserts the worksheet name (followed by an exclamation point) in front of the cell address. So, if you copy and paste a link to a formula in cell A10 on a different worksheet, called Income 2010, Excel inserts the following linking formula:


='Income 2010'!$A$10

When you create a linking formula to a cell in a different workbook, Excel inserts the workbook filename enclosed in brackets before the name of the worksheet, which precedes the cell address. So, if you bring forward a formula in cell A10 on a worksheet called Cost Analysis in the Projected Income 2011 workbook, Excel inserts this linking formula:


='[Projected Income 2011.xlsx]Cost Analysis'!$A$10

If you ever need to sever a link between the cell containing the original value or formula and the cell to which it's been brought forward, you can do so by editing the linking formula. Press F2, immediately recalculate the formula by pressing F9, and then click the Enter button on the Formula bar or press Enter. This replaces the linking formula with the currently calculated result. Because you've converted the dynamic formula into a constant, changes to the original cell no longer affect the one to which it was originally brought forward.




dummies

Source:http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/referring-to-values-or-formulas-in-other-cells-in0.html

Avoiding Dreadful Marketing Ideas

The following marketing landmines masquerade as quick fixes. When the business chips are down, each of these worst ideas pops up to look like a good solution. Don't be fooled. Make sure every new idea soars above every single idea on this list.



1. Fight bad business with good advertising.


Here's the scenario: Business is down, so the owner points fingers at the economy and the competition and decides to run ads to overcome the problem. But the economy and the competition likely aren't the culprits. Business is down because customers have defected — and new prospects haven't been converted — because the company's product or service is lacking.


Running ads before improving the offering will only put a spotlight on the problem. In the words of advertising legend Bill Bernbach, "Nothing kills a bad product like a good ad." Instead, fix the product, polish the service, then run the ad.


2. Run kitchen sink ads.


A kitchen sink ad is like a kitchen sink argument in that every point — every feature, every idea, every department's viewpoint — is tossed into the mix in an effort to get more bang for the buck (a truly awful phrase that deserves its own place on the list of worst ideas). The result is a jam-packed ad featuring a long list of product bells and whistles but no clear focus and no attention-grabbing consumer benefit to seize and hold the prospect's mind.


Take aim instead: Know your best prospect and what need that person seeks to address. Then stop that person with a headline that highlights the promise of your most compelling benefit, backed by copy that proves your claim with facts.


3. Portray the customer as a fool.


Trying to be funny or grabbing attention by showing the customer as an inept bumbler wandering through life in search of your solution is hardly the way to win customers and influence buying decisions.


Form a sincere relationship with your prospect instead of poking fun at the very person you're trying to influence.


4. Save the best for last.


It happens in presentations, sales letters, and ads. Businesses wait to divulge the greatest benefits of their product until the last minute, thinking that prospects will be sitting on the edges of chairs in rapt anticipation.


Not so. If your opening doesn't grab them, they won't wait around. Four out of five people read only the headline, they listen to only the first few seconds of a radio ad, and if the first impression of a personal presentation is weak, they tune out for the rest. Eliminate slow starts and lead with your strengths.


5. Change your logo often and dramatically.


And while you're at it, change your Web site constantly. And your advertising tagline, too. It sounds ridiculous, but it's what happens when businesses let media departments, freelance artists, employees, and others create materials without the strong parameters of image guidelines to ensure a consistent company image.


If you want prospects to trust that yours is a strong, steady business (and you do!), show them a strong, steady business image.


6. Build it and trust they will come.


Sorry, but consumers aren't just sitting around waiting for the next new business, new Web site, new branch outlet, or new event to come into existence. They need to be told, reminded, inspired, and given reasons and incentives to take new buying actions. When you build it, build a plan to market it.


7. Move fast: If you snooze you might lose.


This is irresistible bait for businesses that operate without a marketing plan. They don't know their own objectives and strategies, and so any tactic sounds like a fine idea.


As a result, when a proposal comes in from an ad salesperson, an Internet business opportunity promoter, or even from a company that wants to merge or partner, the business owner is all ears, fearful that this might be an opportunity too good to pass on. Often, the idea comes with a quick deadline or the threat of involving a competitor instead, leading straight to a hasty decision.


Remember what they say about the correlation between haste and waste.


8. Think people will care that you're under new management.


Or think that they'll care that We've doubled our floor space, We've added a new drive-up window, or any other self-congratulatory announcement that produces similarly low market enthusiasm. To move the spotlight off yourself, add a customer benefit. Turn We're celebrating our fifth anniversary into We're celebrating our fifth anniversary with five free events you won't want to miss.


Remember, prospects care most about what's in it for them.


9. Believe there's a pie in the online sky.


Contrary to rampant belief, the opportunities of the cyber world aren't just ripe for the picking. The chance of opening a Web site and instantly winning business from distant new prospects is as likely as opening a toll-free line and immediately having it ring off the hook with orders.


To win your slice of online opportunity, invest time and money to drive people to your site.


10. Believe your customer is captive.


Reality is, your customers know they have other options.


If they're standing in front of you, and you turn your attention to answer a phone, they notice. If you offer new customers a better deal than current customers enjoy, they notice. If you spend more time and money courting new prospects than rewarding business from current clientele, they most certainly notice and in time will begin to disengage from your business as a result.


Realize that customer loyalty is the key to profitability, and that earning it is a never-ending process.



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Source:http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/avoiding-dreadful-marketing-ideas.html

How to Treat Cuts and Wounds in Chickens


3 of 12 in Series:
The Essentials of Tending a Sick or Injured Chicken





If you find a bleeding chicken in your coop, or if you suspect a chicken’s skin has been cut or torn, it’s important to treat the bird quickly. Chicken skin is thin and tears easily, and bleeding wounds are very attractive to other chickens. Whether the chicken caught on something or was attacked by a predator, skin injuries need immediate attention.



  1. For shallow wounds, wash the area with hot water and soap and gently pat dry, or clean the wound with hydrogen peroxide.


    If the wound continues to bleed, use styptic powder or pressure to stop it.



  2. Flush the wounds with hydrogen peroxide, iodine, or betadine.



  3. Place the chicken in a clean, separate area and check the wounds for infection several times a day.



  4. If infection sets in, clean the wounds two to three times daily.



  5. If the chicken can’t reach the area with its beak and the weather is warm, apply a wound dressing to prevent flies from laying eggs on the wound.




The outlook isn’t very good with deep punctures caused by animals. Keep the chicken warm and quiet to prevent shock. If the chicken is very valuable to you, take it to a veterinarian as soon as possible.




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Source:http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-treat-cuts-and-wounds-in-chickens.html

How to Repoint a Brick Wall




Mix up enough mortar for 30 minutes’ use.


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Slowly add water until the mix is stiff enough to form a ball. Then mound it up. The mix should stand without collapsing or slumping.


Mortar continues to stiffen as it sets; so, if you mix up too much mortar, you'll just end up throwing it out. At least you have a good excuse for working on the house a little at a time, as long as you do the worst areas first.





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dummies

Source:http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-repoint-a-brick-wall.html