The world around us

With all the chaos of our move, and the touch decisions of what to keep and what to get rid off, the one thing that I’m really thankful for is that I work on a laptop so I don’t have to worry about transporting it at all. Besides the ease of working from anywhere in the house or traveling with it, a laptop just really makes sense for our lifestyle. The only thing that might be required is some extra Dell Memory to increase its current capacity. So far, I have not required it at all, but as I continue to work on it, I’m likely to have to add it.

In all my research, the segments that I like to work on are niche segments such as kids bedding that are overtaking the rest of the market. By focusing on a specific segment, companies are able to make a deeper impact on the customer and pull in more customers than if they were just a regular merchant. It definitely is the age of specialization now and the more a company specializes and gets to know its customers, the greater its chance of success.

The cost of food could be rising soon. Prices of items such as corn, wheat, oranges, avocados, milk have increased substantially due to increased demand for ethanol, bad weather conditions and increasing fuel costs. Consumer Price Index has said that food costs have increased by 4% over last year’s prices, while they increased only 2.4% last year. The main reason for the increase in prices is due to the rising cost of corn from which ethanol is made.

Citigroup analyst Deborah L. Weinswig noted that food inflation for the first four months of the year has risen at its fastest pace in 15 years, largely due to demand for corn. “Although rapidly rising food inflation could constrain gross margin upside, the broad-based nature of the inflation as well as generally accommodative competitive environment suggests price increases are likely to be passed on to consumers.”

Nothing sounds better than a vacation when one is drowning in a sea of work, right? I would love to put all this packing and moving on hold and take off for a vacation right now. A vacation to a place where I have not been so far, some place like Brisbane in Australia. One always hears about how expensive all of Australia is, but there are some really great deals to be found for accommodation in Brisbane which can start as low as AUD$65 for a nice three star hotel.

Hotels in Brisbane are rather nice for the price that one pays and while some of them have year round special deals available, there are a lot of last minute deals available at Cheaperthanhotels.com which specializes in just these sort of travel deals. Brisbane has tons of fun stuff to offer, from its famous outdoor markets, to its Riverwalk and numerous festivals that take place all year round. Plan your trip around the festivities that you want to take part in and don’t worry about finding cheap hotels in Brisbane. It is possible to find them and it’s easier than you think!

It feels a bit weird to be not working 18 hour days that I have been working for the past 5 months, a huge relief to finally ease up a bit. While I’m still working all day, its not only to do with writing and on the computer now, since I am busy trying to sort out our stuff, get the packers to give me an estimate, sell some of our larger pieces of furniture, sell our car and all our electronics. All this is keeping me super busy these days.

Ever since I got this new digital camera at the begining of the year, I’ve been taking lots of pictures and some of them are good enough to the enlarged and framed. For example of picture that I took is a close up of a palm frond and I wanted to display it in four different versions, color, black and white, sepia and negative, but wasn’t sure how to go about doing it. I have found the solution in Photofiddle I think, since this is exactly what they do. By making it easy to personalize photographs and turn them into artwork, Photofiddle opens up a world of new ideas for home decorating.

What is really great about this is that it is just so simple to create an artwork. All you have to do is select the style that you’d like, upload the picture, crop and review it and that’s it. There are over 50 styles of art to select from, varying from Warhol pop art to oil paining to water color and modern abstract. The company has already received acclaim worldwide for its unique offering and has been featured on Oprah’s Olist, and also in USA Today, PC Magazine, Yahoo Tech Editor and Better Homes and Gardens. This is the perfect time for me to find it since we’re not taking any of my art work with me once we move and had planned to find or create some new artwork for our walls.

Thanks to being able to watch movies on the laptop, we’ve caught up with quite a few of the recent movies we’ve missed at the theaters. We’ve got just a couple of movies left in our movie rental plan and then we can watch movies from our own personal selection of movies which are quite a few. This is going to be a good time to catalog them and organize them according to genre so that they can be stored accordingly.