Yes it’s Christmas and New year, and I’ve spent quite abit, apart from the rest of the usual boring months. This year was alittle bit different. I spent quite abit of time with old friends, had some great time with them with the joyous occasion.

Also just recently, I realize some good ways to have good ROI with investments vehicles of up to 10%-15%. SO with this newly gain information, I hope my portfolio of money management will have some slight adjustments.

Oh yes, it’s nearing the end of 2009 (in fact its 2010 now), just taken quite abit of year end bonus here, but not alot. This had went into that investments, and subsequently I would channel some percentage of my money to that vehicle hmm… just thinking about getting $3000 a year for my $30,000 worth of investments…

And it is coming close to a round of increments to salaries roughly 3 months time.

$500/month Citibank Step up Account

Expenses
$20 Dinner for Xmas Eve
$15 Drinking for Xmas Eve
$25 KTV Singing
$20 Dinner for Post New Year ?
$40 Presents for my dear cousins

On the poor
The poor loves to spent money unwise, while they spent most of their time dealing with money problems.

On the contrary, the rich think differently…

On the rich
The rich loves to save money, while they spent most of their problems thinking where to “spend” their money

In fact, before I even decided that I was “right” with these 2 phrases, I did a “backtesting” on some experiments. “Backtesting” is a word used for traders to test their system against historical prices and data.

If you look around you, this is in fact very true. The people who have better financial knowledge will learn and try to improve their wealth over time. While those at the lower end will, however cannot keep up with the pace, and often have to fight with bread and butter issues.

It would be (excuse me with this example again, probably I should bring up my manamoneyonline.com webhost as it had been down ) , like those stocks on the Exchange, where the expensive stocks become more expensive, while cheaper stocks remains cheap.

This I hope, will spur you to get your butt moving to start some basic financial knowledge, instead of spending happily every day.

I have search throughout the Internet, Googling the Wiordpress.org site and other forums etc. No solutions and nothing found. I have a few blogs that are still at the older ends of 2.6/2.7.

So why upgrade ? Due to exploits and bugs and features, especially Fantastico in Cpanel, which automatically updates to the latest version. Now whenever I change webhosting sites, I will use Fantastico instead of manually uploading.

Ok so heres a simple guide (wrote for myself actually) how I figure out upgrading this 2.7 to 2.8 thing, to solve all the STUPID problems with Upgrading Wordpress 2.8.X.

1) Install new WP 2.8 with Fantastico on your web host’s Cpanel

Now here’s the hard part (saving your trouble of reinstalling, you got to do this.) The posts might not have tags or categories due to the change in Wordpress Version. You have to manually create Categories and tags etc. But with the new versions, you can do bulk updates, which is quite simple.

That’s it. Hope your upgrading is a success.

While your desire to live a life free of the eating of meat and perhaps a meat byproducts like eggs and milk is not a eating disability, it is an eating limitation. If you had a food allergy, perhaps to shell fish and you were going to stay as a house guest with someone, you would not feel any guilt letting them know your problem. If you can put your vegetarian lifestyle in that context and prepare for your visit accordingly, there doesn’t have to be any “stigma” or guilt or problems bringing up your dietary needs with your host.

Your host, after all, naturally wants you to enjoy your stay in their home. Anyone who is hosting has a natural instinct to make your stay comfortable and perfect. You can capitalize on that instinct and be polite about the desire your host has to make your stay go well but working with your host to let him or her know about your vegetarian diet and how it might impact food planning.

When you get the invitation to come for a stay, that is the time to discuss what you can and cannot eat in your vegetarian discipline. If you just avoid meat and not dairy and meat byproducts, it is very likely your host or hostess can prepare their regular meals but also put together a small main dish that fits your diet needs. And you can enjoy the vegetable side dishes all you want so by working with your hosts, you can easily integrate how you eat into their meal planning and not disrupt the visit.

But also be aware that there are items that your host may not supply that you may wish to bring with you or go get after your arrival. If you need soy milk because cows milk is not part of your diet regimen, by all means bring that in so your hosts are aware you are taking care of your own needs. Just let them know what you are providing for yourself and if the communication goes well, you can be accommodated and your hosts will be grateful that you did not see it as their job to provide for every aspect of your vegetarian program.

The other side of being a good house guest and not letting your vegetarian way of life be a problem is to be both open about your discipline and not judgmental or “preachy” to others about the fact that they have not made the same diet decisions you have made. In fact, you might even offer to prepare an entirely vegetarian meal for the host family and your own one night just to demonstrate to them just how delightful and tasty meat free eating can be. You may be surprised just how interested and fascinated your friends and family are about your diet and why you are a vegetarian. And by being friendly, open, loving and easy to talk to, you make the visit more interesting, fun and warm and you may even be able to educate your hosts and maybe your own family about why your vegetarian way of life is a good one.

The first activity is a breathing practice known as fourfold breathing. What you do is inhale for a mental count of four seconds, hold your breath in for a mental count of four seconds, exhale for a mental count of four seconds, and complete the cycle by holding your breath out (not breathing in again) for a mental count of four seconds. You continue with this cycle for 5-10 minutes at a time. The effects on body and mind can be startling. You may have noticed that each of your emotional states seems to have a corresponding breathing pattern or rhythm. Well, one of the secrets of Oriental spiritual practices is that you can produce a desired mental or emotional state by using the corresponding breathing pattern or rhythm. If you are interested in exploring many other breathing techniques that you can use in times of great stress, check out what the yoga discipline of pranayama has to offer.

The second activity is a form of cardiovascular exercise known as high-intensity interval training, or HIIT. This consists of short bursts of sprinting followed by short periods of rest. As an example, you could sprint your hardest for 15-30 seconds and then walk for 30-45 seconds. You repeat this
cycle for 15 minutes or so. It is important that you build up gradually so that you are not placing an undue amount of strain on your possibly unfit body. Start with 5-10 minutes of cycles, working your way up to 15 minutes or so. Research has indicated that there is really no need to go beyond 15-20 minutes.

HIIT training, unlike continuous low-intensity aerobic training (such as jogging lightly without stopping), is much easier on your time, is far more challenging, and best of all, burns fat for many hours after you stop working out! In fact, research has shown that HIIT training is far more effective than regular low-intensity aerobic training for shedding pounds of fat. Note that you do not have to alternate sprinting and walking; any combination of a high-intensity burst and a recovery period will do the trick. You can swim, skip, row, ride a bike, whatever.

The third activity is dancing. This is an activity you can do alone or in the presence of other people. Taking dance classes is an excellent way to improve your self-image, raise your confidence, and as a result, increase your coping abilities when it comes to stress. With the vast array of dance styles
out there, being able to find a style that suits you is almost a foregone conclusion — you will find something. Popular options for those who do not see themselves doing ballet pirouettes include salsa, which is a popular Latin dance style; hip hop, which is great to learn if you intend to show your stuff
in the nightclubs; and capoeira, which is a highly dynamic style of dance that doubles as a style of martial art. You can search for videos on YouTube if you want a taste of these dance styles and many others.

The fourth activity is parkour and/or free running. There are bound to be technical inaccuracies in attempting to define these activities for those who have never heard of them before, but suffice it to say, both activities involve turning urban areas into your own personal playground. Free running, for
instance, involves a dazzling display of acrobatics as the free runner moves from A to B. Clubs have opened up all around the globe for people interested in pursuing these activities. A quick Internet search will put you in contact with like-minded individuals.

Well, that is the end of it. We hope that at least one of the activities in our random assortment has caught your attention.

instead of

Invest more cash to get spare cash.

I am saying this because I had almost went into a pitfall of using no money to earn more spare cash. Instead I should be using spare cash for investments, especially when I trade, be it 10 minutes or 3 days.

Investments are low risk, while trading are high risks. So invest now!

What is does is it is able to provide any type of services you see online, plug it in and out of a system eg. a website, and then “publish” it so that everyone else is able to use it.

This is a research that I have done over the past few days and it shows how businesses of today should adapt the same concept to what web services is providing.

 
What is SOA?

This paper focuses mainly on what is Service Oriented Architecture or SOA in short. SOA is a new technology, and a new buzz trend in the IT industry. In summary, this new technology enables business to reach a new level in terms of business process, improve performance and overall cost savings. This will revolved the way Information systems entirely, therefore improving the productivity.

Services oriented architecture, in other words, is a collection of services provided by systems, that allows inter-communications. To use these services, one need to pass simple data to those services and a result will be returned.

At a more in depth level, an IT software system can or should be built with a loosely coupled collection of services. It means a system containing many other tiny systems that communicate to either internal or external services, also known as “web services”.

In return, any data that are passed to these services will return the proper results for the user who requested it. The user, on the other hand, does not need to understand how the system works.

 
Benefits of SOA and how it re-engineers the business process

There are several advantages with regards to a SOA built system. A system in the current context can either be an IT system with a few computers, an IT application for the enterprise, a software guided process flow, or just a piece of software on running on a network of computers.

One of the main advantages, is the ability to plug and play components. As we have discussed above, the beauty of SOA lies in the possibility to take out or bring in a particular process easily. A revolution will take place and business process will change entirely, saving resources and redesigning the business process. This will therefore improve productivity and other related matters.

Another advantage is the ability to break up an entire system into sub-systems or components, and allow inter-communications among these components to talk one another services provided. In other words, we are able to build a complete software just by bringing smaller components together. These web services are able to provide you with enough resources to produce an output desired.

Just imagine a printer cartridge that consists of black, red, blue and yellow ink. When anyone of these inks are used up, you will need to replace the whole cartridge. Then they started selling separate cartridges, black and color. Then they further break it down to individual color, so when any of the ink color is finished, you only need to replace one of them.

Finally, cost saving is the most concerned factor for businesses. Based on the previous advantage, existing businesses with a software system will not need to spend large amount of money to maintain or upgrade. This system may exist all over multiple sites. By implementing SOA, a business can redesign their processes over these sites, such that they can remove duplicate services, standardize software platform, outsourced or sell some of the non-core activities, and concentrate on core business priorities and improve performance.

 
The dawn of re-engineering

The next step in re-engineering the business process is to map out all activities, including those IT and non IT. This diagram will be term as “Heat map”, which will list down all tasks, grouped according in terms of priority, cost, performance, or other measurement factors. Within each job tasks, list down the possibilities of whether it should be automated with IT, whether if it should be kept in-house, outsourced, brought to customer’s or distributor’s site.

Once a diagram is drafted out, the next tier is to look at what value each task will fetch for the organization. We shall call this tier activity evaluation. Identification for the tasks should be decided, like core or non core activities, or it can be grouped as mandatory or support activities. The value of the tasks will then be evaluated, whether it is generating profits to a company, or if it is an important task in the support arm.

The next tier is about evaluating its current level performance. This step is consider most important, as the turning point on each tasks, whether they should be step up, cut down, terminated, or maintained. This is when the services oriented approached is needed. These tasks can then be purchased (if there’s a solution), sold (as a profitable unit), or enhanced by executing Web services.

The big thing of the 21st century in IT is automation and outsourcing. If the tasks can be automated, maintenance cost could be lowered. If not, it will be decided if it should be kept in-house (running IT web services), or it should be purchased, from other vendor providing these services, or it can be sold to customers, distributors or partners, if this service has started.

Finally the performance of core units can be measured after implementation of the re-engineering exercise. By using the SOA approach, the benefits mentioned in this report should take commence and follow through, giving some yield in terms of performance, or cutting down maintenance cost. The plug and play capabilities displayed here, will ensure that if remodeling or transition of services are needed, then it can done freely.

 
Conclusion
To conclude, large oraganizations should actively change the way traditional IT systems work, adapt, and make full use to whatever new technologies that will revolutionized business of today.

It is one of the strongest defensive kick in Taekwondo, and it requires proper technique to execute this properly. When you can perform the back kick well, it is much like a weapon for sparring, because it is fast, direct and powerful, leaving your opponent no chance to go close to you.

After you can do this properly, try it for both legs. After which you may turn it into an offensive kick, and use it to attack. You can even do a jumping back kick with this as well.

A practical usage on the back kick by Sang H Kim:

A demonstration of the back kick on multiple planks

And finally the advance technique, the jumping back thrust kick.

All you can do is to login into the Desktop UI/shell with your newly created password. This tip will help you set your root password so you can use it subsequently.

This is how you set the Ubuntu Desktop Linux password:

1) Type in sudo -i
This switches your shell to Root # priviledges

2) passwd
This sets new UNIX Password for root

Now your Root password is set! And for one reason, if the owner did not set this sudo -i. it means you might be able to escalate root privileges for free.

Without hesitation, I immediately took it to my office and sold it off at half the price, by just being friendly. If only I had waited, I could have save that $36. Anyway, it had passed already. This HSBC card indeed gave me what it mentioned; with 3 transactions a month, you get a $5 cash rebates.

My aunt too gave me a $100 voucher for a bookstore, Kinokuniya. I ended up buying $200 worth of books. Well, books are knowledge, and I can read them at a later date, since these information don’t go outdated. (I bought all books related to stocks investment etc)

Here’s this month’s breakdown:
Savings and Earnings

$500/month Citibank Step up Account
$150 - Profit from US stocks trades

Expenses
$100 Kinokuniya books!
$20 Some Audio CDs. Korean ver - Boys over flowers
$12 A couple of bubble teas. They cost $3 per cup.