Financial & Travel Musings

Generators for the dark times

Arnold — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 12:15:28 +0000

With all the disasters going on around the world these days it’s no wonder that people are looking at honda generators.

Depending on how complete an electricity service you’d like you can sometimes get away with surprisingly low powered (and hence cheap) generators. In the mist of the 1970s when there were regular blackouts we managed quite nicely on a 300W kit which was more than enough to run the TV, lights and heating. It’s never going to do electric cookers but to do them you need really a really serious generator (couple of kW at minimum) which is a LOT more expensive.

Seeing as you don’t need them all the time, it seems best to go low and get a portable gas cooker as well: that combo is a whole lot cheaper than one of the monster generators that you’d need to run electric cookers.

Are you immune to marketing?

Arnold — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 20:55:52 +0000

One of the advantages of doing a marketing MBA is that you become immune to many of the marketing images that we all come across in every day life.

Why that’s so isn’t entirely clear but seems to be related to knowing how the marketing is supposed to work, how it’s designed and so on.

An interesting effect nonetheless.

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Personal gifts for the love in your life

Arnold — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 20:53:18 +0000

When you’ve been with someone for a while you tend to run out of the easy gift ideas.

It’s not that you’re not considering what to get her now and again but unique gift ideas for her are harder and harder to come by. Maybe you’ve had the idea to buy a linked series of items over a few years but it’s easy to run off the end of those or even to get bored with the predictability of them after a couple of years.

The best plan obviously is to think about gifts well in advance of when you’re going to hand them over. Thus, you could start looking actively for Christmas gifts once the summer is over, and three or four months ahead of her birthday, anniversary, etc. Put as much thought into it as you can. Has she picked up a new interest in the last year? Buy something related to that then. Has she mentioned anything more than once? (it nearly always needs mentioned more than once, doesn’t it?)

Unique to her is best if you can manage it. Something that takes account of her interests and what she’s like.

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Re-equipping the kitchen

Arnold — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 20:45:37 +0000

We’re almost at the point where we will be ready to start work on upgrading our kitchen.

Lots of bits & pieces have been chosen. All major appliances though which’ll leave us with a lovely kitchen but really naff kitchen utensils.

So we’re finally getting around to thinking about those kitchen utensils. Some, OK, many of them are seriously old, dated and in need of throwing out so we’re going to start looking around at replacements over the next few weeks.

Do diet pills actually work?

Arnold — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 20:42:08 +0000

Yes, but the question isn’t so much “do diet pills work?” but what kind of diet pill you need.

There’s simply no use picking up a diet pill at random from the shelves these days. For one thing there are way too many different types of diet pill in a typical health food shop. You need to sit down and think about what you need the pill to do for you and, of course, bear in mind that it’s going to work much better if you combine it with a better diet and more exercise.

Say, for example, you have a very sedentary lifestyle then chances are that you need some kind of metabolism enhancer. But it’s not so simple as that because they tend to come with the problem that their side-effects mean that they’re usually not suitable for people with high blood pressure (which is quite common for those that are very over-weight) so you’re going to need to check with your doctor first. Or, perhaps, you eat too much fat in which case you need a fat absorber. Fine, but if you stick with a high fat diet then you’re going to get what’s quaintly called “leakage”.

So, not so simple after all, is it?

Working out at home

Arnold — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 20:34:59 +0000

With the escalating price of health clubs and the falling prices of the equipment that they have it has become quite economic to consider at home ab workouts.

Indeed putting your monthly subscriptions towards equipment for your own home is a reasonable choice for an increasing number of people.

If you’re going to the gym to lose weight or improve your body tone then this is almost certainly a better way to go long term. Within the amount of a typical gym subscription it would be easy to buy one or possibly two good quality pieces of equipment per year. Since each item of equipment will last many years it’s easy to find that you’ve a fully equipped gym a year or two down the line.

Is “natural” any better than regular?

Arnold — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 20:29:24 +0000

One of the ongoing fads in marketing is to add the tag “natural” to the ingredient list.

I laugh when I see the list of “natural” ingredients on one of the packets of sweets that the kids get sometimes. It’s a list of ingredients that you’d definitely never find in nature yet it can call itself “natural”.

So too it is with the diet pills. Thus you can find natural fat burners on the shelves these days. There are some truly natural diet “products” available of course although you’d hardly want to take most of them as there’s quite a tendency for them to give you the runs. Not so the natural fat burners to be fair but, as with all diet pills, you need to check that this is the dieting action that you need and that the side-effects don’t outweigh the benefits.

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An interesting route for the experimental blog

Arnold — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 16:09:02 +0000

I thought I’d try a little experiment with one of the blogs that I’ve not really used in quite a while.

What I did was to write a post matching the searches coming in to the blog and see how that did. Now, before you do that you obviously need some content for searches to find so seeing as we were in the depths of winter I wrote a few posts about that to begin with.

The first trickle of searches coming in were for things like Russian clothing and cold weather clothing. Fair enough as that matched some of the posts in a vague kind of way. So I wrote some more on the clothing angle. Next stream up was along the lines of rain wear which also seemed reasonable enough. However, a month down the line and it’s more along the lines of shiny winter clothes and girls in wet clothes which do follow the progression of the searches and subsequent posts but which seem a long way from the original ones!

As I’m only doing it as a side-line I’m only writing one post a week so it’s taking a while to bring in the search traffic but if you’d like to add it, pop on over to On a Postcard.

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Doesn’t Internet time flow quickly?

Is there too much personalisation these days?

Arnold — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 15:37:02 +0000

Just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should do it.

Until recently it was quite expensive to personalise products but as we’ve all seen there’s a massively growing market in t-shirts while you wait and so on. Now it does seem to make sense to have personalizable coffee mugs and perhaps pens, the range of items that you can personalise these days does seem to be getting out of hand. Do you really need to have your name embossed on your laptop? Perhaps it makes sense for security, but what when you come to sell it?

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Non-global brands

Arnold — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 15:33:19 +0000

A few years ago renaming brands so that a single product name could be used across the world was all the rage. Thus we have Snickers instead of Marathon, Starburst instead of Opal Fruits and so on.

Oddly though it seems to have passed by gateway laptops who sell as Gateway in America but until quite recently as eMachines in Europe. Quite why that should be so is something of a mystery as computers are a product that you’d expect to see marketed similarly around the world these days.

Why, of course, leaves the puzzle as to why they’re absorbing eMachines into Acer at the moment and offloading a lot of eMachines at bargain basement prices.

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Do you ever get attached to technology?