To The Moon And Back

Wine gifts have always been my favorite choice whenever I need to buy something for someone that I want to impress or don’t know anything about. I mean who will turn down wine gifts especially if they are presented like the photos below?

Both products only cost below $50 which is my usual budget for important people like big clients, boss, a favorite couple or even your maid of honor/best man. You can also add wine sticks to your wine gifts so your recipient can easily stake it on the ground when they’re out on a romantic picnic at the park or by the beach.

I’d love to receive one of these for sure. I’m tired of getting his and hers monogrammed towels or matching slippers and bathrobes. Not that I’m not thankful because I am. But if you really want to make an impression, the Classic Wine Duet of Chardonnay and Merlot will absolutely do the trick.

I bought a new domain just recently and wanted to try using blogspot as my host. One, it’s free and two, there are so many cool blogger templates out there that I’d like to try. You’ve all probably tried using a custom domain successfully but I wasn’t fortunate. I tried to follow all the steps from the Blogger.com help page but my changes are not taking effect. So I asked a friend who’s currently hosting her blog at blogspot and she sent me the following:

 The steps are for domains registered at GoDaddy but I’m sure it’s almost the same with other registrars.

1. Log in to your blogger account and go to Settings > Publishing

2. Set the publishing to your blogspot address

3. Log in to your GoDaddy account and access the domain that you want to update

4. Select ‘Enable Forwarding’
- Select 302 Moved Temporarily
- Forward to http://name.blogspot.com

5. Select ‘Enable Masking’ and click OK

6. Open a new browser and type your new domain http://name.com. It should now redirect to your blogspot address (http://name.blogspot.com). It might take a while before the domain gets redirected to blogspot so be patient

7. When the domain redirection is working, go back to GoDaddy account and access Namerservers

8. Check Hosting Name Servers then click OK.
Your namerservers should now say:
Name Server 1: NS51.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
name Server 2: NS52.DOMAINCONTROL.COM

9. Now, click ‘Total DNS Control and MX Records’

10. Under the CNAME section, click ‘Edit’ for the www entry

11. Under points to host name, change @ to ghs.google.com

12. Login to your blogger account then go back to Settings > Publishing

13. Change publishing to custom domain and type in your new domain:
http://www.name.com

14. Save Settings

15. Check redirect name.com to www.name.com

16. Save Settings

Now this may all seem redundant and the original instructions might have worked with you. However, I know a couple of friends who experienced the same problem using their custom domains so I don’t think there’s any harm following the steps above.

Ever heard of payday loans ? It’s like cash advance where you loan a certain amount of money and pay for it on the next payday. I find this very convenient when you need to take advantage of last-minute sales on electronic items, replacing a broken TV set or refrigerator, cheap travel plans, and anything that’s not part of the monthly budget. One great example for this is our household. Every time we receive our monthly pay, I immediately allot them to utility bills, tuition, food, recreation then put the extra in an untouchable savings account. We do this so we can stop ourselves from over-spending. However, there are times when you just need to pay for something ASAP or if there are medical emergencies. Since we don’t want to touch our savings, payday loans have always been the best option to augment the budget until the next pay day. We rarely need something as big as $2500 (which is the maximum amount that you can get through payday loans) so I’m confident that we can always pay on time.

Let me share with you my latest web find. I believe both novice and advanced email marketers will appreciate what this site has to offer. Their main service is ViperMailer, a fully functional email marketing software that lets you send professional email campaigns easily.

So what is email marketing really? An excerpt from their site here:

As defined by ViperMailer, email marketing is a means for your company, group or publication to routinely maintain contact with your clients, contacts, or subscribers via an email building and express delivery system. People like to receive emails from familiar places rather than offers they did not want or ask for i.e. SPAM.

Here’s what you can do with ViperMailer email marketing software are:

Contact group / Email list management
User-friendly control panel
Newsletter campaign statistics - delivery, opened email and link click tracking
Powerful email creation editor that lets you use HTML, attachments and automated opt-out feature
Create proof users for graphical and spelling mistakes
Free professional mailer templates

What’s really great about this company is that they offer email marketing training for free. Simply click the Education tab to gain access on helpful resources and articles about email marketing. Here you will learn how to maximize your email marketing software, building trust with recipients, how to write effective campaigns, call to actions and many more. Aside from these great documents, you can even get a head start by reading the 19 Steps to Launching a Successful Email Marketing Campaign at www.EmailMarketingAuthority.com.

Are you a bit short in cash? You might want to try your luck with cash advance. This kind of loan is best suited for people who need a quick solution to their short-term cash problems. You can apply from $100 to $2500 and can have the money deposited in your bank account the next day. Of course, like every loan requirements, having a steady income makes your chances of getting approved higher. This kind of loan is also not recommended for long term financial problems like mortgage or overdraft loans. This is more for purchases that you can pay until the next payday. I personally haven’t tried getting a cash advance but I know my friends do this whenever they buy electronics or computers. They find it cheaper especially if they manage to pay the loan in full the next month.

From Kathy!

Two Words Meme: This meme is different because it is up to the player to write his/her own words and give his/her own interpretations of these words. Present 12 words that mean something and explain why:

1. Internet - The best thing that ever happened. But since my work has to do with the Internet as well, it’s also sometimes the most stressful area in my life
2. Supah Chipah - My husband and my daughter’s favorite term for imported potato chips
3. GY - My boyfriend Gong Yoo LOL
4. Twitter - non-stop updates from my favorite mommies/women worldwide
5. Coffee - Energy
6. LV - too fabulous to resist. But for the life of me, I really can’t make myself buy one even if I can afford it
7. diet pills - My husband’s only way to lose weight
8. Wireless Internet - a luxury that I can’t afford to lose
9. Scrapbook - Something that I want to do all day but just have no time
10. Shopping - escape, natural high
11. Weekends - expenses, too much plans
12. Treadmill - a scary thing that I need to face daily

… playing like kids.

See more Wordless entries here.

My client is into high yield investments. When he offered me the project, I have absolutely no idea what is it about. So I accepted it and gave the usual estimates. However, as the project progress, I realized a lot of things. One, it’s hard to find a web hosting company that accepts sites offering services like HYIP. And if you ever find one, you need to make sure that it’s totally secure and protected from DDoS attacks. The most likely candidate package would be VPS hosting or higher. Finding a hosting is part of my services so I was relieved to finally found one that assured they can protect the site from minor DDoS attacks (up to 500MB).

The other thing that I’ve read about HYIP is that owners are just stealing money from its investors. Now this bothered me because I wouldn’t want to be a part of something illegal. My client assured me that their investment process is legit, unlike those start up companies whose main goal is to stay afloat for six months to one year only. So now I’m still reading anything that I can about the competitors. I’ve actually learned so much stuff and I’d be lying if I say that I’m not the least bit tempted to invest.

Anyway, I’m thinking if I should pay extra for Cpanel web hosting? As I work on the design and configuration aspect, I’ve realized how hard it is to manage the VPS admin panel.

In the US, at least.

I received an email last week that the Apple’s famous revolutinary phone is now available at *half the price. The iPhone 3G has fast 3G wireless technology, GPS mapping, support for enterprise features like Microsoft Exchange, and the new App Store. And just in case you forgot, just like its original counterpart, this phone has rich HTML email and a desktop-class web browser.

Before you can purchase and activate iPhone 3G, you need the following:*
Credit card
Social security number
Valid government-issued photo ID
Current wireless account number and password or PIN (if you’re new to AT&T)

If you already own an iPhone, remember to sync it with iTunes one last time before you get your new iPhone 3G.

Click this link to find where you can purchase one and please, don’t forget to send one for me. iPhone 3G will be sold on a first-served basis only starting today at 8AM.

Speaking of organizing, my husband and I talked about cleaning up our closet again. A quick glance inside our master closet will show rows of trinkets and gadgets like DSLR, his camera lenses, small cash box, my accessories, a talking Barney doll and some papers from the bank. This closet is for our clothes by the way so imagine my disgust everytime I have to sort through these things so I can find something to wear. Inspired by a TV show last night, we decided to use plastic storage boxes for each items and then put all the boxes on the bottom left side of the closet. My mission is to make our closet look as if a personal organizer came in and re-arranged all our stuff. I’m interested on those big boxes that has small individual boxes inside so you can separate the items according to use. I’m very excited with this small project because now, I can finally segregate my husband’s stuff from mine.