Predictions for Covid-19 Era Business

Bio-security solutions and enforcement: patrols of institutions, communities, country borders.
Tracking devices for bio-security personnel and infected people, novel devices and methods for personal identification,privacy policy management

Portable diagnostic devices compatible with smartphones and networks
miniature infrared-based thermometers, multispectral UV scanners for detecting suspect fluids, bacterial or virus accumulations.

Health research:
novel immunological research = non-obvious anti-virus treatments, like vaccinations methods using plasma from patients recovered from infectious illnesses.

Virtual office applications - networked and telecommuting work systems - solutions for database, hard print management, legacy paperwork, digitizing solutions, 

Personal medical accessories : reusable masks, gloves, smart bracelets for identification,
Green-friendly disinfecting formulations and general cleaning products, compounds for spraying clothing before or after exposure to mass gatherings

Agriculture:
Reprocessing major crops surpluses into alcohols for disinfectant market.
bio-security solutions to safeguard animal husbandry, and to deal with infected animals.
New biodegradable products and compost methods

Selfiecopter and Arduino

Belatedly posting: the guy (Mark Rober) stumbled on the simple secret used on Youtube for earning money by being an advertising associate. In the selfiecopter fake it is all about links to the motor and electronics purchasing. The ultimate truth is no longer important, the money is in the non-obvious combination of half-truths in media, ideas, presentation and hardware.




This is a sort of a high pop science. The miniaturization and electronic control is hi tech. They used Arduino printed circuit, and it is the center piece of  electronics part of Israel's matriculation exams. Extremely hard. But nice to see it being used so comfortably in the video.

Another business opportunity: pet wills

A Missoula-based Internet company recently launched "Pet Living Wills" as a way to protect your favorite dog, cat or goldfish when you are not there. If you could speak on behalf of your pets, what would you say is a question Mary Ellen Campbell asked when a horse she was watching for a friend came down very sick and a choice needed to be made. "So we called and Called and couldn't get anyone, and so we had to make some pretty important decisions life or death about whether to put down a horse" said Campbell. "I didn't really expect that emotional problem I would have trying to decide on someone's pet." The incident lead her to become a co-founder of Pet Living Wills, "It occurred to be how we have living wills maybe because pets cant talk and speak for themselves we need to have something that will speak for them." Boarded animals or animals left with a caregiver often don't have the proper instructions in case of a pet emergency, which co-founder David Firth says can lead to some tough choices. "Most people just don't assume that any thing is going to happen and that's why people have car insurance, because you don't assume your going to have a crash but that may just happen someday." The idea is the first of its kind, and after a three year process, the Internet business went public just last week.

Checking houses for ghosts is also a valid business opportunity

http://www.isurhousehaunted.com - is the strangest online business I've stumbled upon in a long, long while. The site help people find out if their house could be haunted. Do objects go missing or disappear in your house? Do you hear strange noises at night? Have you lived in your house for over 5 years? Answer easy questions about yourself and your own superstitions. Do you believe in black cats, walking under ladders, etc.? A rather clever idea to make money online, don't you think? I believe this particular site accepts US traffic only.

Hitching a ride on the iPhone Boom

2 examples of successful piggyback business This company in St. Petersburg, Fl. has just 2 employees and in 2006 reported revenues of $450,000. Core Cases has been developing and selling metal cases for consumer electronics since 1999. Now the tiny company is designing at least six products for the iPhone, including what it calls the "fusion case," which uses a combination of metal and other materials to protect the phone. It expects to sell about 25,000 of these cases, helping double revenues this year. Singapore-based IStyles has 8 employees and 2006 revenues under $300,000 and has been making and marketing iPod fashion accessories for the last three years and just launched a new collection of sleeves to hold the iPhone. The company, which relies mostly on wholesale and e-commerce sales of fashion accessories for various gadgets, also intends to launch patterned skins for the iPhone once the device is released. "We can't estimate the success of the device, but if the iPod is any indication, Apple will soon be a dominant player in the mobile-phone market by the second or third revision of the iPhone, and we want to be in on the bandwagon starting from revision one," says Ming Keong Kuan, the business's director.

Passenger Anger Inc.

Skyrocketing fuel prices and cost cutting by airlines have led to an unprecedented lows in passenger dissatisfaction, to say the least. According to European Union legislation that came into effect in 2005, airline passengers are entitled to financial compensation for delayed or canceled flights, or if they're bumped from an overbooked flight. However, passengers aren't always aware of what they're entitled to, or don't have time to claim compensation. Which is where EUclaim comes in. A Dutch agency that launched in January, EUclaim processes claims on behalf of passengers, charging a contingent fee of 27% of successfully claimed compensation. In the five months since they got started, the company has netted its clients over EUR 100,000, averaging EUR 400-500 per passenger. Besides an easy online form that evaluates whether a claim is likely to result in compensation, EUclaim operates a desk at Schiphol Airport's departure terminal, and plans to open additional desks at London and Frankfurt airports. The agency also offers multinationals bulk discounts for processing claims on behalf of employees. While compensation isn't regulated by law in the US or most other non-EU countries, carriers do offer various degrees of compensation. Airline-specific policies may include reimbursement for meals, hotel rooms or phone calls. One to start up regionally? In a broader perspective, keeping track of new laws and regulations can often uncover potentially lucrative business opportunities. Hey—how's that for a new business: plough through all locally applicable regulation changes, specifically on the lookout for entrepreneurial opportunities. Post them online, for free, and you could grow a high-traffic website, generating revenue from related (premium) services or advertising.

This company makes money on lost luggage

The company, Unclaimed Baggage, (http://www.unclaimedbaggage.com/ in Scottsboro, Alabama, where Bryan Owens, 44, is the CEO, began as a store started in 1970 by his retired father, Doyle. It may be one store, but what they sell brings in more than 1 million customers per year. Unclaimed Baggage is just what it suggests: a store selling airport luggage that has gone unclaimed. There is so much of it, the retail outlet has expanded over a city block and now attracts visitors from around the world. Owens, who bought the company from his father in 1996 and watched it grow 400 percent, says Unclaimed Baggage has exclusive long-term contracts with airlines around America, Asia and Europe, ensuring his store is the only one of its kind. It's also proof that the word "trash" should be used with wide latitude. Every year thousands and thousands of wayward suitcases end up in Scottsboro—specifically, at the Unclaimed Baggage Center. Once an airline has tried and failed to reunite suitcase and owner (a process that varies according to airline), it will compensate the owner and sell the suitcase—and all its contents—to the UBC, which buys suitcases by the truckload and hauls them to its 50,000-square-foot complex in Scottsboro. There the UBC staff sorts through the bags and puts their contents in a showroom (or some of them: others are given to charity, still others discarded), where they can be seen and bought by members of the public. But are people really interested in buying other people's, uh, lost stuff? "We'll have close to a million people come to the store this year," says Bryan Owens, the owner of the UBC, "from every state in America and thirty foreign countries. This is kind of the Mecca for lost bags." Owens's father started the UBC in 1970, with a rented old house, a borrowed old truck, and a $300 loan. Today the center gets nearly 7,000 new items every day, and Owens says that people can't seem to get enough. "It's a treasure hunt," he says. "Every day is like Christmas here—we never know what we're going to find. Just last week we found a twenty-eight-thousand-dollar tennis bracelet and a one-point-six-karat diamond ring. We've had a medicine-man stick adorned with a shrunken head, and a Nikon camera that was in the Space Shuttle. Back in the eighties we got a well-traveled Gucci suitcase that was packed with artifacts that dated back to 1500 B.C. And once we found a guidance system for an F-16 fighter jet, in a shockproof case from the Department of the U.S. Navy. It was labeled 'Handle With Extreme Caution—I Am Worth My Weight in Gold.'" The UBC sent that one back.

Junk PCs for collectors mean business

Sellam Ismail at http://www.sellam.com/ runs a fun business. In the first purchase of his collection, Sellam Ismail loaded the trunk of his car with old computers he stumbled upon at a flea market for $5 apiece. Soon he had filled his three-car garage with what others would consider obsolete junk. Years later, his collection of early computers, printers, and related parts is piled high across shelves and in chaotic heaps in a 4,500-square-foot warehouse near Silicon Valley. And it is worth real money. Even as the power and speed of today's computers make their forerunners look ever punier, a growing band of collectors are gathering retro computers, considering them important relics and even good investments. "There has been a real steep upward trend in prices in the last year, year and a half," said Ismail, 38. "It seems it's become like the new collectible to moneyed people. Before it was just nerds and hobbyists." He states his own affiliation clearly: he wears a black T shirt with the word "nerd" on the front. He recently brought a quarter-century old Xerox Star computer back to life to be used as evidence in a patent lawsuit. The pride of his collection is an Apple Lisa, one of the first computers (introduced in 1983) with a now standard graphical interface. Such items sell for more than $10,000.

Credit Card Art

Apparently, : Credit card covers wiand artwork mix very well, as Anthony David Adams and Bowen Dwelle of CreditCovers (http://creditcovers.com/) proved in 2007 on only $30,000

After working for several Fortune 500 companies as an idea man, 27-year-old Anthony David Adams was tired of making money for other people. He wanted to create an original idea for a product and company that he could profit from directly.

"I was interested in creating something that would reach a large amount of people," says Adams. After just 30 minutes of brainstorming, he had the concept: personalized "skins" for credit cards, with pop art that would make consumers take notice.

Along with CreditCovers co-founder Bowen Dwelle, 38, Adams hammered a business plan together and secured the startup costs, launching the company in January last year. "For a few hundred bucks, I got the prototype done," Adams says. "It wasn't a million-dollar investment."

Adams did the prototype art himself, but he knew that using exclusive original artwork from popular artists would be the key to success. He approached alternative, counterculture illustrators such as comic artist Jim Mahfood and skateboard artist Todd Francis to create the visual aspects of the covers. Mahfood's designs include beautiful women, while Francis created a tongue-in-cheek parody of traditional patriotic credit card designs--a sinister vulture and a logo that reads "Bloodsucking Financial Institution."

The covers were first sold in local clothing and accessories store Sukara Sterling, and word-of-mouth helped the four-person company get a foothold in specialty clothing stores and youth culture boutiques. The business' small size allows Adams and Dwelle to run it from their laptops. CreditCovers, now sold on every continent as well as on creditcovers.com, expects sales of more than $1 million this year.

With franchise deals in progress, Adams is keeping his hopes for 2008 modest.

Aqua TV

Looking for million dollar ideas? Here is one: http://www.aquavistainc.com/ and startup cost is only about $150,000.

Scott Yen loved his pet fish but hated their tanks. “Fish tanks, by nature, are very ugly,” he says. That’s why the 31-year-old was so interested when a friend brought up the idea of creating a more attractive aquarium a few years ago.

Scott intended to design something that would look like a decorative painting. What he came up with was the Aquavista 500, a 6.6-gallon tank that is roughly 4 inches thick and hangs on a wall, secured by a steel bracket. “The whole concept of the Aquavista brand is to take an everyday product and turn it into a piece of art,” says Scott. Customers can choose from more than 24 inter-changeable frames and eight different backgrounds to customize their hanging aquariums.

This novel idea started taking shape in 2003, when Scott came up with a simple design that he took to a local machine shop, which produced the first rough prototype. Scott and his father, Stephen, 64, used their own funds to finance the creation of the product, and they consulted outside engineers who helped them with the overall design and materials. To make the aquarium easy to maintain, they added a wet-dry filtration system, lights, a small LCD temperature display and a heating system. By 2004, they had filed patents and incorporated the company. By the next year, they had located an overseas manufacturer in China. The aquarium, which is designed for freshwater fish, comes preassembled with all the necessary parts.

In 2006, Scott left his job as an investment banker to work full time on Aquavista. “I didn’t know where this would go,” Scott says. “Something told me this was something special when I saw how people reacted to our product.” The company’s unique aquarium is now sold online and through the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog, and Aquavista has distributors in Europe and the Middle East. Scott is also currently in talks with major retailers to carry the product nationwide and projects 2007 sales of more than $1.5 million.

Thummer?

I found this article (here http://thummer.com ) In 2000, Jim Plamondon quit his job at Microsoft and embarked on an obsessive quest to invent a new musical instrument. His brainstorm: an odd keyboard variant with stubby joysticks and a honeycomb of buttons he dubs the Thummer. Among the last new instruments to be widely adopted were the synthesizer and electric guitar more than a half century ago. But Mr. Plamondon believes his Thummer has a shot. One of the instrument's key features is a smarter keyboard that he says makes playing music more intuitive. Mr. Plamondon is part of a subculture of musical inventors all vying to be the next Adolphe Sax (he invented the saxophone). They range from composers, such as an MIT professor who built a high-tech "hypercello" for Yo-Yo Ma, to basement tinkerers, including a piano player in Traverse City, Mich., whose "friction harp" resembles a TV aerial. They demonstrate their instruments at conferences and niche music festivals. They upload videos to YouTube and sites like Oddmusic.com, which catalogs roughly 10 new instruments a month, including the "symphonic house," a home in Michigan outfitted with walls of resonating strings. Occasionally, their wares are adopted by big stars. Recent concerts by the singer Björk have featured a futuristic device called a "reactable," built by a team in Spain: Players issue eerie electronic tones and rhythms by moving glowing blocks across its table-top surface. The bulk of new instruments rarely get played outside small circles of loyalists or early adopters. One big obstacle is the high cost of producing experimental instruments, which are usually built one at a time. Seasoned musicians who have spent years mastering an instrument also are reluctant to start over with a new one, while beginners gravitate to what they see on stage or in the orchestra pit. And most of the immense repertoire of Western music, from Bach to the Beatles, was composed for traditional instruments. "The hardest thing to do is sell something to someone who doesn't perceive the need for it," says Roger Linn, who is credited with inventing the first digital drum machine in 1979. "I've seen the trail of bodies of inventors who have tried and died." What sets the Thummer apart from other musical inventions, says Mr. Plamondon, isn't the way it sounds but the way it is played. It consists of two keyboards, each about the size of a paperback book. They can be played piano-style on a tabletop or sandwiched together and held aloft. To play a three-note chord, for example, you press a cluster of three buttons. To play the next three-note chord, you keep your fingers in the same shape and move to a different group of buttons. Mr. Plamondon says this design makes the Thummer easier to learn than instruments like the piano, which require players to learn many more chord fingerings. The Thummer doesn't make any noise on its own. It must be plugged into a computer or synthesizer, which uses software to mimic other instruments. To adjust volume and pitch, players thumb a pair of joysticks mounted on the side -- hence the instrument's name. Like the Nintendo Wii controller, it has an internal motion sensor, so players can also adjust the sound by moving the instrument around as they play it. Marc Rossi, a synthesizer specialist and professor of piano and jazz composition at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, says the Thummer sounds like a good-quality synthesizer. He says the internal motion sensor is what's truly innovative: "That could be a whole new world." While veteran players would have little use for a new keyboard configuration like the Thummer's, Mr. Rossi says, "it could be very useful for kids and for people learning music who want less technical demands than a keyboard." Mr. Plamondon, 47 years old, hasn't played an instrument since quitting the tuba after high school. He studied geology and computer science in college and later sold storm windows over the phone. He spent most of his career in the computer industry, taking on a series of software-writing jobs before landing at Microsoft in 1992, just as the company's Windows operating system was becoming ubiquitous. He spent eight years persuading third-party developers to create software for the Microsoft platform, then left the company to take some time off and later pursue his own projects. He says he exercised his Microsoft options and invested in a portfolio of stocks valued at $2 million. He bought a beachfront home on the southwest tip of Australia and moved there with his wife and two children. Most people designing new instruments are musicians. For Mr. Plamondon, financial need was the mother of invention: Shortly after moving to Australia in 2000, almost half of his assets were wiped out in the dot-com crash. He saw the Thummer as a way to start making money again. After years trying to get his project off the ground, his family is strapped for cash. The two kids have put their college plans on hold, hoping that in a couple of years their father will be able to help pay tuition. The family doesn't have health insurance. Mr. Plamondon says he needs to raise up to $1 million to engineer a final prototype, finalize patents and manufacture a first run of instruments. The idea for the Thummer began when his wife and daughter both quit piano lessons after only six months. His wife, Patti, complained that learning to play separate lines on each hand "was like reading Spanish with one eye and French with the other," she recalls. He began reading up on music theory and researching why piano keys are arranged as they are. He wasn't the first to hunt for an alternative. In the 1880s, Hungarian Paul von Janko patented a configuration that made fingerings identical in any key. A similar idea was developed for the concertina with an 1896 patent by a Swiss inventor, Kaspar Wicki. In the fall of 2003, as Mr. Plamondon was playing the videogame Halo, he says he realized he could use thumb sticks like those on his Xbox controller to shift sound effects. He created a company (Thumtronics), hired an engineer to build prototypes, leased an office above a music shop and brought in nearly $500,000 in a first round of fund raising. In 2005, after outside funding for the Thummer dried up, he mortgaged the family's home for about $1 million. "Things got really tight," says Ms. Plamondon. For a time, she says the family relied partly on the paychecks her then-18-year-old son brought home from his computer-store job. For many on the tech-savvy side of the music world, sweeping change seems overdue. One of the last breakthroughs to catch on in a major way was the saxophone -- invented in the 1840s. During the past century, most inventions have only gained cult followings. The Stick, for example, is a bodiless guitar with strings that players tap instead of strum. Inventor Emmett Chapman has sold about 6,000 of them since 1974. Mr. Linn, the drum-machine designer, calls the Thummer "a very good idea," but stops short of predicting its commercial success. Instead, he groups it into a broader category he calls "new little organisms in the Darwinism of musical instruments." The music-products industry faces a mixed outlook. Retail sales fell in 2006 to $7.5 billion, down 4.2% from a record high the year before, according to the International Music Products Association, a trade group. And while the category of computer music products fared best last year, growing by about 15%, sales of some more traditional instruments suffered, such as pianos, which dropped more than 18%. The Plamondons live in Austin, Texas. They moved there in April from Australia, seeking affordable housing and a music- and tech-friendly city. They bought their home online for less than $200,000, using some cash from the sale of their Australian home as a down payment. In Austin, Mr. Plamondon started over, working up the entrepreneurial food chain at conferences and coffees; networking with think tanks and professors; fishing for endorsement blurbs that he posts on Thummer.com, where he writes a blog to build online buzz. He co-authored a paper on the Thummer that was published in the peer-reviewed Computer Music Journal. The funding hunt has been more of a challenge. He recently targeted a pair of Austin investors, Fito Kahn and David Peterman. On a Thursday afternoon in October, Mr. Plamondon walked into Mr. Peterman's office eager to make a deal. His geek tendencies were on display: He set the alarm on his wristwatch to beep, prompting him to announce when there were 10, five and two minutes remaining. As the three men sat down around a table in straight-backed chairs, Mr. Plamondon eyed the papers in Mr. Kahn's hand. "What's in the folder? Is that a checkbook?" It was -- but it wasn't going to be used on that day. The two potential investors had questions about patents and the prospects of manufacturing the Thummer in China. Mr. Kahn said they also want a sleek new look for the Thummer, in part to make it appealing to a younger audience: "We imagine the Thummer as Guitar Hero, only you're learning an instrument as you play," referring to a popular videogame that uses a guitar-shaped controller to simulate the rock-star experience. Mr. Plamondon left with assurances that a written offer would be ready for their next meeting. Waving as he headed toward the door, Mr. Plamondon said, "I look forward to getting a check from you next time." Following their October meeting, Mr. Kahn emailed a proposal to Mr. Plamondon. Instead of the lump sum Mr. Plamondon sought, the investors offered him $2,000 a month for six months and a promise to cover expenses involved in securing manufacturing deals in China. In exchange, they asked him to set up an advisory board and submit more business plans and other "benchmarks." Just after Thanksgiving, Mr. Plamondon turned them down in an email to Mr. Kahn: "I'm going to wait for a better offer," he wrote. None are currently forthcoming. He recently hit a wall at a local venture-capital firm, Gefinor Ventures. Wes Cole, a principal in the firm, says he was impressed by a video of someone playing "Summertime" on the Thummer, but he has reservations. "This is a market where you've seen no successful investment ventures, that I'm aware of." With a handful of working prototypes, Mr. Plamondon is continuing to search for investors and gain a consumer audience. Taking stock of his savings, he says he has about six months left before he'll have to find a full-time job. At that point the Thummer will be relegated to an evenings-and-weekends enterprise, he says, "and that's the death of a start-up."

Gold Is Back And Learns from Tupperware

I found this article on http://www.mygoldparty.com/: More on the common street mantra: Oil tops a record $120 a barrel? Bad news. Gold reaches a stunning $1,000 an ounce? Potentially very good news indeed. Especially to Paige Rhodes, 40, of Alexandria, who has heaps of unwanted gold baubles cluttering up her jewelry boxes. Rather than wait for bold gold to come back in fashion  return to the '80s, anyone? women are scrapping their unwanted gewgaws for cash or checks at wine-and-cheese "gold parties." Think Tupperware parties, but instead of buying plastic, guests bring gold (coins, watches, necklaces, teeth) to be assayed (tested) for carat content and weighed. Depending on the ounce-cost of gold that day, guests can walk away with hundreds or even thousands of dollars. The party host pays them with cash or a check, then ships the gold to a refinery, where it is melted down and recycled. The refinery then pays the host  at a price higher than paid out to guests, the host hopes. "Everybody wins," says January Thomas, 29, of Royal Oak, Mich., who started MyGoldParty.com this year shortly after she married into a jewelry-dealing family and found out what she could get for her unwanted gold. (A lot, because by late 2007 prices had tripled since 2001.) In March, with the stock market swooning, oil prices soaring and the dollar falling, gold hit $1,000 an ounce for the first time. Suddenly, gold scrapping for amateurs looked like good business, says Thomas, who has been traveling to promote and preside over gold parties while her website sells gold-party kits for $699 (includes a gold karat-testing machine, a scale, a jeweler's loupe and a how-to book she put together, My Gold Party). Meanwhile, professional gold scrapping is booming, too. The largest gold buyer online, Cash4Gold.com, which is owned by a Florida refinery, Albar Precious Metals, records 25,000 transactions a month, and "it's going up every month," says Albar CEO Jeff Aronson. He attributes most of the increase to the $2 million to $3 million in advertising he spends a month, but he says the steady climb in gold prices has helped. Online entrepreneurs have responded. Besides the many websites that buy unwanted jewelry, there's a new site, ExBoyfriendJewelry.com, which allows people to sell, trade, auction or give away jewelry from an ex  as long as they share the story of the gift on the site. Still, gold parties can be a fun way to monetize unfashionable jewelry, says Cash4Gold.com president Howard Mosshin. "The economy is in the dumps, the housing market has hurt a lot of people, and people are looking for a way to find liquidity." Thomas says many women don't like going to pawn shops. "At a party, they're less embarrassed about asking how much their jewelry is worth," Thomas says. "Besides, it's a form of recycling and de-cluttering." Rhodes acquired a lot of gold jewelry in the 1980s, "but now I mostly wear silver," she says at a recent gold party here, where Thomas presided. Rhodes brought her doctor husband and a plastic food container rattling with heavy necklaces, bracelets and watches from her own collection and that of her late mother. "We're not sure why she had six gold dolphin stickpins," Rhodes says, chuckling. But they are worth something, Thomas tells her as she tests and weighs and creates little piles of gold jewelry based on karat. Gold is selling at $930 an ounce this day. Rhodes is thrilled to walk away with checks totaling $5,100. "Why not get rid of it if it's just going to sit in my jewelry box for 10 years?" she says triumphantly. Besides, says her husband, Don, 49, "you can always buy new gold things, if it ever comes back."

Last minute sermons: the source

Busy Christian ministers and teachers find that they simply have no time to write sermons, they can always turn to www.lastminutesermon.com, a site started by Bob Austin. He started the site to provide a last-minute service for a clergyman in need of a sound, ready-to-deliver sermon. A typical sermon offered on the site can be preached in between eight to ten minutes, and costs about $12.50 to download. The site’s sample sermon preaches the essence of a Passover in Jerusalem 2000 years ago. Austin goes on to preach that then, Jews awaited the arrival of their messiah, who would, according to Austin, bring in their Golden Age by vanquishing the nations of the world and installing an everlasting kingdom of David. Prior to that Passover, however, Jesus had arrived on a donkey, signifying that he was that messiah but not the military(?) one. The crowds, according to Austin, were bitterly disappointed, and feeling cheated out of the military victories, turned their backs on Jesus and asked the Roman rulers to crucify him. The sample download says that with the destruction of the Temple came the end of animal sacrifices, which was God’s demonstrating his never-changing, unending love for humanity. Romans, maintaining law and order, had to comply with the public sentiment and crucify the troublemaker. After all, they crucified hundreds of Jews years before just to make sure the crowds would learn the lesson and forget the idea of rebelling against the Roman rule. Austin says that preachers are getting bogged down with their shepherding tasks as the writing of sermons is gradually sliding down the list of the daily priorities, leaving the clergyman without a sermon to deliver on Sunday. Sermons downloaded from the site come with a permission to be edited to suit the tastes of the flock. The site has a very simple structure: there is The Author, the FAQ, Free Sample, Contact and How To Buy. Excellent business idea: monetize the church.

TIPS against stagflation

Since both the net and the blogosphere is inundated with financial advice, I found that there only few dynamic, live blogs that actually offer practical advice. To compound the need for non-nonsense advice is that everyone's portfolio is as unique as a portfolio owner.

I found that with he help of George Divel and his blog I could make sense of Treasury paper and CDs, and moved into TIPS (Treasury Inflation Protected Securities).

TIPS perform well even in periods of stagflation, an economic condition that is fast and approaching. "If you buy a conventional Treasury, you receive the same interest payment semiannually for the life of the bond. With TIPS, the Treasury adjusts the principal value of a bond each month (with a two-month lag time) to keep pace with inflation. A higher principal value also lifts interest payments," he advises.

His investment tips like these are being updated everyday. I reviewed my portfolio and adjusted it accordingly with the tips.

I think George boils down the financial market trends and backs it up with his personal experience to learn from. Compared to other brokers, George has the best research tools as well as personal knowledge to navigate wealth planning. His approach to balance risk and tax (consider the deadline looming closer) as well as income is incredibly honest, simple and client-oriented.

Check out http://georgedivel.wordpress.com/.

Holster Spa

Once I was reading Gordon Liddy's Will, where among giving some ideas on character building, he mentions a neat way to customize a holster. I checked it out by picking a Galco belt holster at the same place I bought myself tactical boots, and going through the whole procedure. I soaked the whole holster, exactly per Liddy's instructions, Saran-wrapping my Ruger, inserting it into the holster and letting it all dry in a well-aired sunny room. Just like he said, the leather fit snugly around the gun like a perfectly fitted glove. Moreover, the interior now has enough of tightness that it holds back the gun's grip just enough so the gun won't slip out of the holster too fast when I draw it a bit too spastically. I haven't seen or heard anyone else using the trick. It works.

The hunt is on for No. 2 in a triangle

HDPE must be all around us. I do not have a clear picture of how much of petrochemicals goes into polyethylene manufacture down there in Texas, but we are sure lucky if the high cost of oil ($105 a barrel?) did not make a milk jug cost more than the gallon of milk.

I am sure some of the polyethylene comes from corn (ethanol stream). Some of the polyethylene probably comes from natural gas, through Merox or Sulfrex technology. However, no matter how you look at it, and no matter where on the political spectrum you are, sooner or later you might realize that you would not want let much of the mass of polyethylene in the form of HDPE go to a landfill, or to an incineration plant.

I looked around the house and found that I have loads of that HDPE stuff. The little arrow triangle with "2" inside is everywhere. It's on the bleach jug. It's on the vitamin bottle. Fabric softener. Oven cleaner. Some of the bottle caps are made of the stuff.

My friends are already feeling the gas price. People are staying in. Vermont reports decline in travel-related sports, like fishing and hunting. Pizza delivery has a $5 surcharge for orders under a medium-size pizza. I would like to feel better and stuff my recycling center green box with all of my recycled plastic, and HDPE, Triangle No.2 is most of it. It's going to go and become, at least, HDPE scrap, (or check out HDPE Regrind) pressed and ready to become a resilient padding for a children's playground, or, better yet, a great multitude of laundry detergent bottles.

Shvoong going PayPerPost!

I have been searching for ways of making money off blogs. I have tried ad networks. That experience turned into watching cents trickle in once every other day. I did invest time in promoting the blogs, especially this one, but, maybe having missed the blogging business boat several years ago, I could not achieve that elusive popularity going viral. It seems that any given (new) blog cannot stand on its own. It is not enough to propagate it through Web 2.0 social bookmarking sites. It must be exposed to a live, social media which is composed of other blogs.

And that’s how I stumbled upon PayPerPost.

I was having more fun with my blog than making money. I was actually reading Adsense ads on it, abiding by the rules of not clicking on them, I actually went directly to the URLs. One of the ads was from PayPerPost, and I was impressed what I found. Since then I took the ad network code off my blog, and hope to score more with PPP.

I found that PayPerPost has a huge blogger (postie) base, which should translate into what I like to call a viral potential. Graphics are a little bit to large and glaring, but still web-aesthetic, or neo-web. The Dashboard is a bit too busy, maybe justifiably so, since there are so many activities, site news and preferences to choose from. The back-end engineering works smoothly, as do cookies and HTML code. Things get accounted for and registered with pedantic precision. What I found attractive is the list of post writing opportunities that offer upfront payout. What an info management.

Another added benefit to PPP is its own forum, blogs and business features like direct blog-to-email function,( that for many might be a great answer to RSS), and all sorts of tools and codes. It looks like I have not fathomed all the possible services I can take advantage of on PPP. It is so inviting to use so many methods on PPP to socialize or watch PPP TV that instead I feel that I need to concentrate on my first posts. Blogosphere is huge, live and here to stay and, as they say, it's a shame not to monetize it.

blog reviews