Nuclear Terrorism

The book I read to research this post was Nuclear Terrorism by Graham Allison which is an excellent book which I bought from a local bookstore. This book is about the possibilities of nuclear attacks by terrorist organizations which in theory could put even the attacks on the World Trade Center in the shade. According to this book it is more a question of when than if. In Chechnya Soviet forces found a so called dirty bomb before it could be detonated and that is currently the closest we have come to a nuclear terrorist attack. A dirty bomb is any kind of nuclear waste that is in a container along with an explosive that helps spread it around. With a dirty bomb there wouldn't be many immediate deaths although years later people would succumb to things like cancer as a result. It would cost a lost a lot of money to clear up the nuclear waste and render the area safe though. There is a much greater chance of terrorists building a dirty bomb than using a nuclear warhead as many sites like hospitals house radio-active material that could potentially be used. When the Soviet Union disintegrated many nuclear weapons went missing and almost certainly some of these must either be in terrorist hands or countries with terrorist connections. It's interesting that not a single nuclear weapon that disappeared in this way has been recovered. A 10 megaton nuclear weapon set off in central New York would probably result in 1 million deaths not counting those who would die of things like cancer much later. There have been cases where terrorists have demanded a ransom in exchange for not setting off a nuclear weapon and these have been hoaxes luckily. There are countries like North Korea & Iran who have nuclear power stations and have a nuclear weapons capability. Most of the information on how to build a nuclear power station is freely accessible and anyone with the money can probably develop a nuclear capability in 5-10 years. This book is very disturbing but is on a brilliant subject and is really well written and is a reasonable length at around 240 pages.

Adobe Illustrator CS6 Part J

This is the 10th installment in my blog post series on Adobe Illustrator CS6 based on what I learn on the video training course by Infinite Skills on this program. We'll first look at 3D effects which are under the effects tab and there are 3 tools. The rotate tool allows you to turn a 2D image in a 3D way. The image itself is kept flat. The revolve tool extrudes it as if was on a potter's wheel in a 3D and circular way. The extrude and bevel tool lets you customize what you want extruded and all these tools do have various settings along with a preview option which lets you see an up to date image. The programs Indesign & Illustrator use objects and the former is a desktop publishing tool so is artistic based. Layers give you more control over a picture. They let you organize objects as they are and you can turn them on and off to aid you in your work. You can double click on a layer name in order to rename it. You can expand layers with in the layers palette to see the components of that layer. If you double click an object with the mouse it goes into isolation mode and dims everything else so you can work on the item. To get back into normal mode just press escape. Opacity and blending are in the transparency palette which confuses some people because in Photoshop they are in the layers palette. This is because in Illustrator they can be applied to individual objects where as in Photoshop they are applied to the whole image. Alt + Shift lets you drag to re-size an image and is particularly useful if it has been imported and usually you will shrink it to fit.

Adobe Illustrator CS6 Part I

This is the 9th installment in my blog post series on Adobe Illustrator CS6 which is based on what I learn on the video training course by Infinite skills on this software. We'll start off with text and paragraph formatting found on the typography toolbar. You can change things like font, style and size and if you are familiar with Microsoft Word this will be a doddle. The font names often have a t to signify truetype or an a to signify adobe type font. Truetype is often used on web pages. Generally the space between your text is 20 % but sometimes people use double space ie for a test to accommodate a tutor's comments. This is normally set to auto. You can define CSS styles where you apply settings to text and name and store to apply it to other text. This saves you lots of work. You can select text and just apply the settings from that text to other text. You work with the paragraph styles and character styles dialog boxes in doing this. If you double click of the style names in the dialog boxes you get a dialog box comes up with a whole myriad of options you can apply. When you put text in a container a + box signifies the text has over run. Usually you create a second container and click and drag the + box to it to connect that container and the over running text is displayed in that container. The eyedropper will apply a color you select even from a photo. There are text effects under effect like roughen. There are illustrator and photoshop effects and they always retain the vector characteristics. There used to be filters that were permanent and you couldn't undo and were destructive to shapes. Thee aren't used in the program anymore. Effects by contrast aren't permanent and can be undone.

International Relations

The book I read to research this post was International Relations A Very Short Introduction by Paul Wilkinson which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. The birth of international relations can probably be traced back to the Napolianic Wars when a coalition of countries defeated Napolian and his French Army. Later there was the First & Second World Wars when it was realized there needed to be dialogue between countries to prevent wars on a huge scale. From this of course came the United Nations where there was a Security which consisted of 5 members initially Britain, United States, Russia, China & France. They are looking at expanding the number of members and Britain especially is in favor of abolition the member's veto which does cause problems. The Americans for example vetoed calling on Israeli Forces to vacate the Gaza Strip. What makes the United Nations even more vital is the proliferation of nuclear weapons with even some countries connected with terrorism and some rather undesirable regimes developing them. There are some concerns about a nuclear terrorist attack and countries attacking other countries with them. There are also organizations being formed like the EEC & ASEAN which look at countries in a certain region working together. The ASEAN is in South East Asia and purposely does not include Japan or China which it was felt would wield too much influence. The EEC of course is in Europe and most regions now have similar organizations. This is an interesting book and quite an enjoyable read. The A Very Short Introduction series which includes this book is a series where they get an expert to write approximately 150 pages on a given topic primarily as an introduction. I've read and read reviewed quite a lot of books from the series. There are apparently around 300 titles in the series.

Leading business Change

The book I read to research this post was Leading Business Change For Dummies by Christina Tangora Schlacter et al which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. The process of leading business change as it pertains to most businesses is doing more with less people. Employees for most businesses are their biggest expense and they can use technology and different business models to achieve this. A couple of business models featured were agile where a team meets for 10-15 minutes several times a day to discuss a problem but otherwise works on its own. Another one developed in Japan is Kaizen where a small dedicated team works together on a problem continously and looks for continual improvements. There are other models like Lean & Six Sigma and many of these have dummies books about them so I may review them at a later time. The ideal way to lead business change is to be passionate about it and get others enthused about it and be able to explain it basically in a fashion that employees can easily understand along with see the benefits to them. Often companies will merge to make them more competitive and employees especially key one are usually given a retention allowance often in the form of stocks and shares to keep them in the new company. The amount normally has to be negotiated and beware of employees who want unreasonably high amounts of retention allowance as they are probably thinking of their self rather than the company. I did quite enjoy this book which is pretty good.

People Analytics

The book I read to research this post was People Analytics by Ben Waber which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book is about socio-analytics and how human behaviour can be studied especially with regard to buying stuff and how this information can help a company market itself and improve. Most companies now study their competitors intensely along with studying why people make buying decisions. Research has shown people tend to change their buying patterns drastically at life changing points in their life like moving house or having a baby. The data that someone is having a baby is freely available so you will find when that happens the couple are inundated with special offers and advertisements. Social media is a game changer with these huge amounts of data being sold to companies which is why they are usually free to join. Scientists studied people at a speed dating event which is an event where you get 5 minutes with each potential partner and you all fill in a form to say if you want to meet each other and if both of you agree you are both given each others details. Scientists found they could achieve a 85 % accurate predictions by studying changes in the ladies voices and the men probably mostly would agree to see any of them so their voices stayed a receptive pattern. Any company with more than 10,000 employees has probably been the result of acquisitions and mergers but these don't always work out. Ebay purchased Skype and one major problem was neither had regional headquarters and their was a 9 hour time difference between their head offices which hampered communications. In the end Ebay sold Skype on at a considerable loss. A key feature in many companies is the water cooler or coffee machine and this is important because it encourages employees to exchange ideas. Especially in Japan and Technology companies like Google employee interaction is encouraged. Some companies perhaps wrongfully see it as wasting time. Companies like Google have volleyball courts and restaurants where food is free to employees. This was an interesting book but perhaps not a classic but I enjoyed reading it.

Social Media

The book I read to research this post was The Social Media MBA  by Christer Holloman which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. I think this book is edited by Christer rather than written and features social media specialists from 4 continents who look at social media from an international perspective. In the west obviously Facebook & Twitter are extremely popular and the former often vies for most popular site in the world with Google. Half of all Facebook members log in and check their account in any given day. There are other very popular social media sites in other parts of the world. In Hong Kong for example there is a very successful bulletin board site at http://discuss.com.hk & in Japan there is a very popular social media called CyWorld. Two Chinese social media sites which are even more popular than Twitter are Baidu & QQ. The latter being the top micro-blogging site in the world. Many companies are encouraging employees to use social media to promote the company they work for. Some are trying to only have a specialist social media department promote them but they are gradually realizing they can be missing out on potential business. Some companies are very concerned about branding and if any employees do promote them they have to follow very strict policies with in that branding. Other companies are less strict and feel that having a more open policy is better. I think in most companies managers do find social media is a major component of their job even if they have a secretary that handles a lot of it. There are specialist social media marketing courses at most colleges in Britain. Some businesses like Dell have turned their business around with the help of social media. They have exclusive offers to followers on Twitter.  In addition they have upgraded their quality of their computers considerably and at one time their computers tended to use onboard graphics which has mostly been remedied. There are over 25,000 comments and discussions about Dell Computers on social media sites every day and they have a team that monitors this and tries to see if any of the suggestions can be applied to improving their business. I did quite enjoy reading this book and I may join some of the social networks mentioned. One thing I've noticed is a lot of web browsers translate foreign language and Google Chrome does a particularly good job of this.

Marketing On Facebook

The book I read to research this post was Mining The Gold On Facebook by Kimberly Dubbeld-Deas which is a very good book which I bought on kindle. Kimberly has done a series of these books that includes Linkedin & Twitter as well as this book. They break down the process of marketing your company into simple steps that anyone can follow. She also tells you about apps and websites that can help in this process with many of them being free. I own all 3 of these guides and may re-read them so I can market my blogs more effectively. Anyway to market on Facebook you need a business and a personal page and the latter will mostly have interesting information about you and maybe a little about your company but not too much. Your business page can run apps like a social media calender or a like button which a personal page can't do. You need to define your target market which is based on various demographics like age, sex, location etc. One part of your marketing is sending ads to these potential clients and you must work how much you can reasonably afford in seeking out these clients. With many the best you can hope for is they will click the like button on your page and maybe give you some referrals. There is an app called google calendar that will work with smartphones and let you plan your day. At http://quantcast.com they are specialists at defining the demographics of your potential customers for a fee. If you go to http://hootsuite.com they have an app that schedules your posts so they are being posted at different times to maximize exposure. At http://facebook.grader.com you can see stats for visitors to your facebook pages. At http://namechk.com you can check if your page name or business name is available on a variety of social media sites. At http://involver.com they have apps for your business page quite a lot of which are free. You need to define keywords for your business page so people can find you and check your competitors pages to see what keywords they use. Your business page needs 25 likes for you to own that domain. Facebook gives you a generic numbered domain until then. I found this book quite inspirational and very interesting.

Amazon Kindle Fire HDX

The book I read to research this post was Kindle Fire HDX For Dummies by Nancy C Muir which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book is designed to be a shortcut to learning the more complex features of the Fire HDX and the author says it took her a week to find all of them so I think this book is pretty good. This is the 3rd generation of the Kindle Fire and has an Amazon OS 3.0 operating system & a Silk browser for going on the internet. There is a 4G LTE version that lets you have an internet and data call contract but most people use a wireless network and the wireless version. There are 8.9 inch & 7 inch screen options. There is a much publicized mayday button that you may have seen on the TV adverts for this that lets you see an Amazon Advisor and works pretty much like a technical support call but but they can highlight buttons you need to press for a certain and some cases can gain access to your machine to sort out a particular problem. You can also move the video of the advisor around the screen if it gets in the way. Amazon sells a huge amount of online content like audio books, e-books, video, music & apps for this device. Much of this content is free and they give you 20 GB of cloud storage with Amazon free. An additional 20 GB of storage starts at $9.99 per year and goes up to 1,000 GB for $500 per year. I think the main selling point for this gadget is the huge amount of Amazon content it is compatible with and there is a feature called X-Ray that displays the lyrics to audio books as they are being read and displays information about music or video that is about to be played. Amazon owns the IMDB or Internet Movie Database website that this is compatible and is the biggest website of its type in the world. It comes with a calendar and office apps, can print stuff on a wireless printer and you can even display video on a compatible television. It comes with a micro USB lead so you can upload stuff via your computer. It is seen by many as a major competitor to the iPad Air. I did really enjoy this book which is very informative.

Minecraft

The book I read to research this post was Minecraft For Dummies by Jacob Cordeiro which is a very good book that I bought on kindle. This book is a For Dummies portable edition so is only around 150 pages but it is a very interesting book. It's about a game called minecraft which is available as a retail game for both the computer and the xbox 360 and in addition can be played as an online game with both a free basic option and a premium paid option with more features. It can be played as both a LAN multiplayer on online multiplayer game where the various members can work together and build a town rather than just a settlement. To register for this game you must visit http://minecraft.net and normally you activate your account via e-mail. The aims of the game are to build a settlement with stone blocks which always measure 1 metre by 1 metre but can be chopped and shaped by things like a wooden axe. You have to collect various materials and have to keep your avatar alive by feeding him, providing shelter and repeling monsters. It is primarily a stategy with action elements and apparently there are 9 million players around the world. Part of the strategy is for example with various monsters something will work well on one type but not so well on another type. There are wolves in the game which can be a potential problem to you but which you can feed and tame. One of the most important things you can make in the game is gunpowder which can be thrown at things or creatures and explode. Your avatars health is signified by hearts which there can be up to 10 of them and the best way to replenish them is by eating and when these reach zero you die and have to start the game all over again. There are 3rd party sites with various resources but they aren't covered in this book which assumes you know nothing about the game prior to reading it. I really enjoyed reading this book which was priced at a little under £5 so I think is good value. Finally if you play it as a multiplayer game one of you has to be an administrator of the game and you can enter cheats and commands with the / followed by a command. You can ban players who flout the rules by typing /ban followed by the player name and can give a reason for banning them and they can contact you via e-mail to discuss it.

Amazon Prime

The book I read to research this post was What Is Amazon Prime? by Lynda Warwick which is a very good book which I downloaded for free from kindle. This book is an overview of the Amazon Prime services. In America they charge $79 for these services but the cost varies in other countries. With the standard package you get free delivery of postal items from Amazon but not their affiliates and this is normally 2 day delivery. Where standard delivery is the only option this is free. You are able to borrow an e-book on kindle each month and there are no limits as to how long you can keep it. It includes many current or previous bestsellers. You get unlimited video streaming either to a computer, or tablet, or compatible game console as well as compatible television or blu ray player. There are literally thousands of films and tv series. There is a student package where it is free for the first 6 months but you pay afterwards and any student with a .edu email address is eligible. There is also a moms package that is free for the first 6 months and gives discounts on things like nappies and wipes etc. I think this is excellent value and I did really enjoy this book.

Internet Of Things Devices

The book I read to research this post was Security Of Things by Ollie Whitehouse which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. A while back I did a post on how it will be normal to have cameras that record your entire life and upload it on to a cloud provider with a basic package being free but there will also be premium packages you pay for. Of the biggest problem in the near future is being able to search with in huge amounts of data to find relevant stuff. This book takes it a bit further and looks at some of the problems facing manufacturers of what it calls internet of things devices. These devices can be anything from a heart monitor to the central computer on your car and they will be connected continously to the internet. We are looking at a world where many things will be controlled by your mobile phone. One major headache is security for these devices which generally will be applied mid development and may need to be regularly updated as potential security flaws become known. These devices will often remain in use longer than what the manufacturer intended albet by only a small percentage of users. Already we are seeing encryption like PGP or pretty good privacy which is a method of encrypting data that is very difficult to crack and certainly lives organisations like law enforcement a few headaches to put it mildly. Adding security to devices will inevitably push up their prices and companies will have to put by some of that money for future security updates and support. I did really enjoy this book. It is quite short probably not much more than a hundred pages. It's an interesting subject and certainly makes you think.

Adobe Illustrator CS6 Part H

This is the 8th installment in my blog post series on using Adobe Illustrator CS6 based on what I learn doing the video training course by Infinite Skills on this software. In this post I am first going to look at the pen tool that has been a feature of this program since the earliest days of this software. If you hold the left mouse button and hover over the pen tool there is a flyout with various tools on it. Among these is add and delete an anchor point. An anchor point lets you adjust the curvature of a line at that point. Caps lock pressed whilst in pen mode gives you exact mode signified by an x cursor. Control gives you select mode which when a shape is selected lets you move it around the workspace. The shift key gives straight line mode which lets you select a co ordinate and then a straight line is drawn. In select mode you can select part of a shape and it will all be selected. If you click the left mouse button on an anchor point and hold it until - is displayed you can delete. You click and drag out from an anchor point to change a lines characteristics. When you are working with anchor points a comprehensive toolbar is displayed near the top of the screen. Spacebar lets you adjust one anchor point in relation to another. We are know looking at the type tool. There are 2 major types of text with in Illustrator which are container text and point text. Point text is similar to text found in word processors. You have to manually edit point text but with container text some of the editing is automated. With container text you create a container and the text stays with in it. Setting up this container is as simple as choosing and drawing a shape that becomes the container. The text adapts if the size of the container is adjusted and always stays however the container is changed. Point text on the other hand lets you angle text. To choose point or container text just choose the relevant button. You can go into the edit menu and choose, cut, copy and paste pretty much like you can with a lot of software. There are shortcuts for these which are cut - control + x, copy - control + c & paste - control + v.

Adobe Illustrator CS6 Part G

This is the 7th installment in my blog post series on Adobe Illustrator CS6 based on what I learn doing the video training course by Infinite Skills on this software. In this post we are mostly looking at the pathfinder tools which let us do things like merge several shapes into one or subtract one shape from another. The pathfinder tools are brought up by clicking window/ pathfinder. If you use the merge tool on several shapes the same colour it merges them into one shape but if they are several colours it slices them into separate shapes. The crop tool in pathfinder subtracts one shape from another, normally the top selected shape. The minus back tool takes the back shape from the top shape. Unite merges several shapes into one shape. The minus tool removes the selected shapes from an unselected shape. The intersect tool removes everything but where 2 shapes intersect. The exclude tool removes colour where shapes intersect and does the opposite where they don't intersect. It's quite useful for doing logos especially with text. The shape builder tool combines merging shapes into one with subtracting from one another. If you press alt + left mouse click it removes a selected item. There is a symbol sprayer with in the main toolbar that you can select a symbol with in the panels on the right of your display and then print a symbol each time you left click. The left and right bracket keys adjust the size of the symbols with left decreasing and right increasing. There is a symbol spinner tool on the symbol toolbar that rotates the symbol as you print it and a symbol screener tool that lets you adjust the symbols opacity. There is an extensive symbol library with in Illustrator with may be a thousand symbol in total and you can store a symbol in the panel by simply clicking and dragging it there. You can also drag a symbol from the panel to the workspace where it will be printed.

Landscape Architecture

The book I read to research this post was Landscape Architecture A Very Short Introduction by Ian Thompson which is a very good book which I bought on kindle. The term landscape architecture is known to have been first used in a book title in 1828. It is a bit of an ambigous term that has little to do with architecture and there is a lot more to it than mere gardening or landscaping. In America you must have a degree in the subject before you can call yourself a landscape architect. They design a lot more than gardens, often whole towns and will often do things like study the impact a wind farm will have so it is quite technical. It is a very old profession easily going back to Roman times at least and interestingly China leads the world in this subject with its huge urban redevelopment since 1979. In China the tradition is as old as in the west with things like Feng Shui incorporated into it and although at the moment there is much western influence in years to come we may find Chinese ideas influence the west a lot more. In France there landscape architecture prior to the French Revolution was uniform which you can see at Versailles Palace and after the revolution Europe as a whole started to steer towards a more natural look. Hampton Court in London around this time had a huge amount of money spent on landscaping it. In Britain in the 1960's there were new towns built like Telford that incorporated the latest landscaping architecture and in one way that it failed was in the huge amount of tower blocks that were built and low cost housing in general. There was at least planning in things like shops and park space. Many of the so called futuristic buildings have come to be seen as follies that in many cases look worse with age than conventional buildings. The most important aspect of this planning is usability which is often forgotten when they are giving out awards for landscaping. I did really enjoy as it is very interesting and is written by a leading landscape architect. It is part of the A Very Short Introduction which has around 300 in the series and they get an expert to write around 150 pages on a subject. They are quite concise and informative.

Hudl

The book I read to research this post was Hudl For Dummies by Rosemary Hattersley which is an excellent book which I bought on kindle. The Hudl is a low priced android tablet sold exclusively by the supermarket chain Tesco in Britain and it has things like your location and time settings set automatically due to it only being sold in Britain. It has a 3MP camera on the rear and a 2MP one on the front. It has to be connected to a wireless network in order to work. It does stream television via several free apps and via the wireless network. It ues wi-fi direct and Android 4.0 which most recent Android tablets do. There is things like BBC iplayer which is free and lets you catch up on tv programmes and Sky Go which is free to Sky subscribers. If you don't have a Sky subscription you have to pay individually to download programmes, I think the Hudl retail for £49.95 so is one of the cheapest tablets and also comes with various services offered by tesco. You can use an internet cafe to get on the internet with it. It has 16 GB of storage and will work with a micro SD card up to 32 GB for additional storage and has a quad-core processor. You can password protect data on the Hudl but not on the micro SD card so must copy anything important onto your Hudl. It is a good idea to set up a Google account if you haven't got one as you can store additional stuff in Google Drive as you can on a Windows computer. I really enjoyed reading this book and I think it is a great shame the Hudl is only available in Britain. It has also got a scratchproof glass screen and many owners buy a bluetooth speaker to go with it especially if they play video and audio on it. There are also protective cases available and there are various music and video streaming services like Spotify and Blinkbox you can use with it.

Marketing Automation

The book I read to research this post was Marketing Automation For Dummies by Mathew Sweezy which is a very good book which I bought on kindle. This book is about simplifying you marketing processes for your business with it concentrating on the different types of online marketing. It isn't going all your marketing into a turnkey that can just be left running despite the title but will simplify it. One example is having templates for your e-mails and letters so people working for you haven't got to write them from scratch. Another thing is having CRM software and a database so salespeople which this book tends to concentrate on, can stay in touch and access important information. Salesforce.com & SugarCRM are examples of CRM software and the latter one is open source although if you need support you have to pay for it. You also need a host to run it. Yet another thing is if your company is organizing an event have a micro-site specifically for that event and have a specific site name tied to that event. This is better than merely promoting the event on your company website. There are companies like http://data.com & http://equifax.com that have solutions that will tidy up useless records in your database. When you consider many companies have up to 30% of useless and outdated records this is essential. You should have an e-mail autoresponder that will just confirm you received someones e-mail so you can answer it later and obviously this needs a predefined message for them to receive. With all this automation it gives you time to do things like write blogs to promote your product and these need a e-mail and newsletter lists for people to subscribe to. Of course with a newsletter it should contain a link for them to unsubscribe.

Social Media Marketing

The book I read to research this post was Social Media Marketing Unleashed by John Elder which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book is around 90 pages so is quite short and succinct and I think might have been free to download. Much of the book is a history of social networking which has been going on longer than you think. The earliest social media was probably Compuserve which gave people access to the internet but had a site with their own content that many people interacted with. Then along came companies like Geocities which anyone could join and among other things they gave members a small amount of free web space and many of these looked like modern day facebook pages albet with adverts. Then along came AOL who charged $19.95 per month and marketed quite aggressively their cd roms that gave members a kind of interactive sandbox complete with email and a vast array of internet content as well as being an ISP. Then along came sites like Friendster & MySpace that were free to use and were proper social media sites. They gave you your own page that you could set up however you wanted. Nowadays the competition has really heated up with sites like Facebook & Twitter and a lot of the reason the former is so popular over say MySpace is there web site is compatible with a wide range of formats with things like photos and video. Also there is a strong community spirit where you are encouraged to post and your friends can comment on it. I must admit I prefer Twitter out of the 2 because you are encouraged to tweet rather than blog which does take time although I do enjoy blogging. I think alot of people feel if they write a blog post they are expected to write quite a lot where as with tweeting they are limited in length and you just focus on making what you write good. If you do a company it suggests doing the name convention blog.company name.com. It also suggests doing blog posts of about 500 words because the search engines have something substantial to index. I enjoyed reading this book & I think I would recommend it.

Marketing On Linkedin

The book I read to research this post was Mining The Gold From Linkedin by Kimberly Dubbeld-Deas which is a very good book which I bought on Kindle. This is only a short book that presents in step by step form how you should be promoting your small business on Linkedin. This author has written similar books in the same series on Facebook & Twitter as well. Linkedin is the best B2B marketing opportunity on the planet and a must for a business to promote itself. Linkedin do let you advertise on their site with adverts starting at $10 each and there are 2 programs, one for businesses with a marketing budget of less than $25,000 and the other is more than that amount. When you join Linkedin there is a free basic option which is probably no good if you are promoting anything and business and pro accounts which you pay for but let you network easier with other people. Don't forget on Linkedin if you contact anyone especially to do business you normally get another party to introduce and recommend you. There are groups on Linkedin and some are specifically for small business like Business Matters Magazine which is one of the bigger ones. There are also networker groups in general like Leading International Open Networkers or LIONS. You can write articles and answer questions to show off your expertise and become an expert in your field and win business. There are also 3rd party sites like http://lions500.com which are for linkedin networkers and charge a subscription. It is a good idea to start your own group when you get quite a lot of contacts. An interesting thing is often business pages with in Linkedin are ranked higher in Google than a companies website. This is an interesting book that I enjoyed reading and I think it is useful to anyone with a small business.

Hackers On Steroids

The book I read to research this post was Hackers On Steroids which is a very good book which I downloaded from kindle. This book is around 300 pages but is free on kindle at least at the moment and is really good value. This book is mainly about trolls and to a lesser extent RIP trolls, hackers and paedophiles. According to this book these people are often very well organised co ordinating mass attacks particularly on sites dedicated to dead people on Facebook but almost any site can be a target. In 2010 there was a kind of troll wars and these people split into smaller groups. They often use Facebook groups and one issue in the book was Facebook don't take enough action. They do stay with in the law though. The title of the book was taken from a vigilante group for trolls on Facebook that is now defunct. This book does name a lot of these trolls and similar folk. I haven't in case it glorifies what they do. The author of the book is British and does help the police track down these trolls, some of whom have ended up in prison. In America they are streets ahead of Britain in dealing with this kind of behaviour and where as in Britain they might get locked up for a few months, in the States they are looking at many years. One problem with policing sites like Twitter & Facebook is first they are often policed by people in foreign countries often at around $1 per hour, but also if they bar someones account which Facebook does to 20,000 accounts per day these people can circumnavigate it. Let's face it, it's 7 million accounts per year which I think in a lot of cases is the same people over and over again. Many of these criminals meet up on social media sites like Facebook & Twitter and also use instant messaging to stay in contact. This is quite an interesting book which I thought makes an interesting book review and blog post. It's a bit of an unpleasant subject though.

Internet Security Fundamentals

The book I read to research this post was Internet Security Fundamentals by Nick Ioannou which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book tells you all about the various scams and cons that what is often organised criminals do to get things like people's bank details and other personal information that can be used for identity theft. It does a good job in this respect although is rather short but is such an interesting topic I'd have liked to have read more about it. We hear about things like phishing where they send you a fake email supposedly from someone like your bank or ISP asking for personal information but now rather than use a fake website many use a link to the actual that actually installs spyware on your computer or other spying app and watches you typing in your personal information. Many phishing messages use free throw away e-mail addresses which should put you on your guard. In fact there is a market for web sites with similar names to actual sites like banks and these are quite sought after by phishers. A very common technique is offering the latest blockbuster or a porno film as a free download complete with malware that as you install it bypasses your firewall. Often you are asked to install a plug in to play the movie of course complete with malware. It does say if you need additional software to play a file get it ideally from the official site or at least from a mainstream site. Another scam is getting an attractive to strip off on a web cam and getting you to do the same and then blackmailing you by threatening to post it on a social media site of you stripping or even sending it to your employer or spouse. Even if you think you are talking to an attractive lady on the internet often it can be someone completely different just phishing for personal information. If you have a teenager or partner who goes on a computer you mustn't do any internet banking or shopping online on that machine as almost certainly they won't be as you and have the same high standards about not downloading malware or giving away personal details. In fact with teenagers it suggests get them a tablet and get them to use that instead. Never use internet cafes and especially not there machines even for things like checking e-mail. Instead use a smartphone and many have a personal internet hotspot feature that you can use with your tablet or netbook whilst out. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I think it was a free download which makes it a bit of a bargain. It's also very well researched.

Adobe Illustrator CS6 Part F

This is the 6th installment in my blog post series on Adobe Illustrator CS6 which is based on what I learn on the video training course by Infinite Skills on this software. If you set a gradient to go with in a shape by default it will go from black to white. This is regardless of what color is currently in the shape. If you select and drag a colour swatch in the panel it will change to that color. The gradient can be radial or linear. You can set opacity for the gradient so that the background color is let through. If you double click a swatch you get its property box. If you click an external swatch it is automatically added to the panel. There are only a couple of pattern swatches in the panel by default but lots you can add. You can manipulate patterns and change things like whether it goes left to right or right to left and colors of the various elements. Paths and anchor points are what make Illustrator a vector based program. The anchor points can be manipulated to make complex shapes and have handles that can be clicked and dragged to change the path which is normally the stroke. If pen when selected and you click creates an anchor point. If you press enter it starts a new line or anchor point with the pen tool. if you click & drag with the pen tool it creates a handle on the anchor point which can be manipulated. If a shape is closed filling it is quite straightforward. If it is open it gets less predictable. If it is a straight line no fill is applied when fill is selected and if something like an arc it is only partially filled with an imaginary line. If you select object/path/ join it joins 2 anchor points and won't work with more than 2 and they need to be lined up using the zoom tool. If you choose join for an open shape the 2 points are joined with a straight line which isn't always suitable. Sometimes object/path/ average is used which will join in a more natural way and preserve a curve usually. There are 2 tools called sissors and knife under the eraser tool. If you select the knife tool and a shape and drag the mouse through it, it will split it in 2. With the sissor tool you select it and choose 2 points in the shape along which it will break. If you use the shortcut alt+shift+drag it copy something like a line. It's similar to duplicate.

Adobe Illustrator CS6 Part E

This is the 5th installment in my blog post series on Adobe Illustrator CS6 which is based on what I learn from the video training course by Infinite Skills on this software. This post is mostly on shapes, strokes and fills. There is a rectangle tool which if you press shift at the same time changes to a square. If you press alt at the same time as rectangle it moves outwards as you drag it with the mouse. If you click control it gives you the selection tool temporarily whilst using the shape tool and this is particularly useful if you are duplicating it. Regardless what shape or stroke tool you are using these keys will tend to work in a similar fashion. Sometimes though when it isn't applicable to a certain shape or stroke nothing will happen. Pressing the spacebar at the same time holds the shape and lets you move it around. If you click on the workspace it brings up a properties box for the shape you are working on. It will typically let you configure how many lines or what radius is displayed. If you select shift and a line it will set it to 45 degree increments. In the strokes palette there is a line, arc, spiral, grid and polar tools. Polar is a bit like a spiders web. If you go in the shapes palette there is a rectangle, rounded rectangle, hexagon, star and a rather strange tool that can do reflections in things. In the properties box where there is a dimension displayed you can add + or - to the right of cm to add or subtract a dimension or add & or / to add something in proportion to the shape. Control + a will select all. You will often fill a shape to simplify selection. If it's not filled you can only select strokes and can't select inside a shape. Click x to toggle between stroke and fill. Object/ expand appearance lets you expand any part of a shape and will separate the shape into various components depending on the shape. When you save stuff in Illustrator you have the option of saving into a file type that is compatible with an earlier version of Illustrator but bear in mind it might not support all the features or all the things you have done to your drawing. Your picture might end up radically different.

Hotel And Catering Supervision

The book I read to research this post was Hotel And Catering Supervision by Ken Gale which is a very good book which I bought from a car boot sale. This book was published in 1984 and is a guide to the various BTEC & City & Guilds examinations in Hotel & Catering Management. The most interesting part of the book is the history of hotels which I will write about. First I'll look at some of the problems facing this profession. First of all most hotels are quite small and certainly don't have any union membership in general. Generally things like wage rises are negotiated between the employee and their boss. Often people in these professions are poorly paid and often have to live in on the job. This means it is difficult to work out how much is being spent on their accommodation and food etc and also if they lose there job they have to find somewhere to live. Many supervisors aren't given management training in a cost saving measure although they should and many come up through the ranks and are ill prepared for what to expect.

The first hotels were built in Roman times and after that hotels largely disappeared although monasteries would provide accommodation. Hotels then started to flourish in the 11th century when it became fashionable to go on pilgrimages to places like Canterbury & the Holy Land. Much of this accommodation was provided by monasteries. In the 17th century stagecoaches where they had way stations where a fresh set of horses could continue a trip where the others left off became popular and around this hotels were especially built in places like Edinburgh & London. In the late 18th century with the advent of the railways spa towns like Cheltenham & seaside resorts like Brighton became popular. Early hotels were very luxurious and expensive. Gradually holiday camps started to be built and nowadays we have a situation where it is often cheaper to holiday abroad than in this country. One of the biggest recent developments has been low cost airlines that often get a subsidy from where they fly to and pass this on to the customer. I did enjoy reading this book and believe it or not it was only 20 p to buy. It is probably a bit dated but interesting.

Privacy On The Internet

The book I read to research this post was Privacy On The Internet by Adam Kumiszcza which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. This book is rather short but contains plenty of interesting information & you might be interested to know I have just done a book review on the book Online Anonymous at http://scratbag.me which is on a similar subject. This book is about the paper trail we leave when we use the internet that others can use to commit identity theft and other things. Many websites use cookies which do provide information about you and where you go on a particular site which are called 1st person cookies but also sometimes they track all your internet usage and they can sell this information called 3rd person cookies. The latter of course you probably want to delete and they do recommend a program called CC Cleaner which gets rid of most. There is a browser called The Onion Ring or Tor Browser which will hide your identity most of the time you are on the internet and one thing it does in particular is hide your location although you will find it runs more slowly than a conventional browser. There is a website that does help hide your internet information at http://www.janusvm.com/tor_vm/ and that site includes the Tor Browser. Search engines are free because generally they store your information which is sold to companies which is why many of the adverts you receive appear tailored to you. There is a couple of search engines that don't do this at http://startpage.com & http://duckduckgo.com. Apparently social media sites are a nightmare when it comes to protecting your personal data. Google + used to force you to display your actual name publicly on your profile although after much pressure this has changed. Facebook used to collect data from your computer whether it was logged into their site or note which they also have changed. Many people don't realize when they comment on social media sites often GPS or location information is extracted by default and you have to go into their settings to turn this off. Bear in mind if you go on a website and are anonymous it might affect the functionality of the site. A final thing I will mention is if you live in a country with an oppressive regime being anonymous on the internet might be essential. This is a really good book which I thoroughly enjoyed and I might review more books on this topic in the near future.

Online Anonymous

The book I read to research this post was Online Anonymous by Ben Evans which is an excellent book which I downloaded from kindle. This is only a very short but is free on kindle and I think is good enough to part with cash for definitely. The book does say for some people there are legitimate reasons to hide their web presence like they live in a country that has a dictatorship or want to avoid identity theft. If you are on a social media it is worth going in as a visitor and checking what is displayed publicly on your profile. Often people synchronize these sites with their smartphone and information like their address and phone number is displayed publicly in their profile even though they didn't intend for that to happen. Often an identity thief will follow you around the internet checking the sites you regularly visit collecting information along the way. There are anonymous email providers like http://mytrashmail.com that will let you use an email account anonymously for a specific period. If you wish to browse anonymously there is an internet browser called The Onion Ring or Tor which you can download at https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en This browser was financed by the naval intelligence in America and works by using other computers to appear like you are using them and hiding your internet activity. There is a browser that does a similar job on Android Phones where you download orbot and orweb. On the iPhone there is covert browser priced at $2.99 that does a similar job and apparently they charge for that because they have to pay a subscription to have it listed. Bear in mind with some sites if you are logging in anonymously it can cause problems particularly if you are buying stuff. I really enjoyed this book and think I probably wouldn't do something like use Tor browser to surf the internet but obviously for some people especially in a totalitarian regime it's essential. Bear in mind also your ISP stores a lot of information about you which if a security service got a subpoena would have no choice but to hand over.

Blog To Win Business

The book I read to research this post was Blog To Win Business by Henneke Duistermaat which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book is quite short at around 100 pages but is quite interesting. If you look on kindle every other computing book seems to be on blogging but I still found this book quite interesting. The author prior to writing your blog you need to come up with a metric of your ideal reader and every post on that blog has to be aimed at that person. With the huge variety of blogs it is impossible to write something everyone will enjoy so you are writing for a certain chunk of that readership. It helps to write a profile for your ideal reader in quite a lot of detail if possible. When you are writing a post if you have a certain image of the reader in your mind and a profile it helps you write things like you which make him feel like you are specifically writing for him. You must also avoid being condescending and empathize with him. If you have some ideas what problems he faces and incorporate that into your post it will make him feel like you understand just how he feels. This book is mainly aimed at people who blog as part of their job and maybe are selling products although it warns that getting orders isn't an end in itself and you should try and make your blog informative and interesting. It suggests if you have to write for more than one type of person the simple solution is to start a separate blog although you may find that is creating a lot more work for you. Henneke has his own blog and he does write on several high profile blogs like copyblogger as a guest. I enjoyed this book and it does look at an interesting angle on blogging.

Google Chromecast

The book I read to research this post was The Google Chromecast User Guide by Steve Weber which is a very good book which I downloaded from kindle. This book was number 1 on the computing free book chart on kindle. I have also done another blog post on the chromecast at http://scratbag.me which might be of interest. The chromecast basically is a video streaming device priced at $35 that streams video and audio from your router to your television and utilizes the HDMI port. It differs from a lot of similar devices because most of the processing is done by the router freeing up your computer or television. It works with a lot of different services like Netflix & Amazon Prime some officially and some unofficially with various hacks. There is a free software called plex that lets you stream your film and audio especially dvds from your computer to the chromecast. There is another service called crackle that lets you stream free movies from their website but with adverts but there is a paid option as with a lot of these types of service without adverts. There is a service called called vuvo where you pay for individual films priced at from $2-$6. Netflix also does a dvd postal rental service where there is a much wider selection of films for rent and often newer films are included in this. Many studios don't give permission for there films to be screened so it is probably worthwhile subscribing to this priced at $7.99 a mont for one dvd posted at a time but unlimited how many you can watch. There are additional charges if you have more than one dvd posted at a time. Note the chromecast works with HD & 1080p and also 3d. I did quite enjoy this book and the chromecast clearly is a must have and very fashionable item to have at the moment. Also if you can get this book free you have nothing to loose.

Adobe Illustrator CS6 Part D

This is the 4th installment in my blog post series on Adobe Illustrator CS6 which is based on what I learn from the video training course by Infinite Skills on this software. To start with I will look at some shortcuts. Control+ d is duplicate, control+z is undo & control+ y is redo. Alt and dragging it with the mouses enlarges the cursor box. The settings for colour with in the program are at edit/color settings. There is a kind of colour scheme setting which is north america general purpose 2 which is recommended even if you don't happen to live there. There are separate settings for Japan & Europe. If you are doing a commercial print job they can load colors from with in the settings. Often this would be from a print shop. Primary colors are single colors and secondary colors are colors made up of a mixture of more than one color. The 2 main color standards are CMYK & RGB. Global colors which tend to be an option with in the swatch panel update automatically and it is possible to preview them as you work. Standard colors or spot colors don't do this. There is a water corner mark on the swatch of a global color. 4 color images are expensive to print and it is often necessary to use spot colors or lessen the number of colors used. A spot color is unique so can't be a global color. It is normally created with the eyedropper tool on a sample. Illustrator comes with literally thousands of color schemes for things like web pages and they are designed by experts. In the bottom left hand corner of the swatch panel is the color schemes button. You can click and drag schemes into the swatches panel. You can then save the swatch at the bottom of the swatches panel. If a swatch has a gradient or other variation in color it must be saved as an ai file which is native to illustrator and may not be supported by other programs.

Adobe Illustrator CS6 Part C

This is the 3rd installment in my blog post series on Adobe Illustrator CS6 which is based on what I learn doing the video training course by Infinite Skills in this program. In this post I am going to look at the various ways to select objects with in this program. Control+click selects what is underneath as well as the object. If you go into preferences and go into selection and anchor display that is where the settings for selection are. There are 3 normal selection tools which are selection, group selection and direct selection. Selection lets you resize and rotate an object by dragging the boundary box. If resizing you will probably want to constrain the proportions which means using the corner markers on the boundary. Direct selection lets you morph an object by adjusting its boundary box. Control+ direct select is the same as select. The select tools are on your main toolbar near the top. Group selection lets you select 1 object with 1 click and an entire group with 2 clicks on any object in that group. Object/group & object/ungroup let you group or ungroup objects. The magic wand lets you select according to its fill, stroke or opacity according to a tolerance you set in the fly out. Bear in mind you can't select locked layers. The lasso tool can draw a boundary around something and select it. Bear in mind you can always use shift + click to select multiple objects which is often easier. There are select/same & select/object commands. Same lets you select items with the same property. Object selects every object with thesame particular property like on the same layer. The 2 commands are very similar and there main difference is different options. There is an isolation mode where if you double click an object at least twice, sometimes more, it highlights the object and rest fades and you can work on the object with altering anything else. If you alter the angle of an object and choose shift it constrains it to 45 degree increments. There is also a transform option where you can specify an angle. Transform each lets you apply an adjustment to each object in a group individually and identically. Finally if you go into help you can type in the name of a tool and it gives you a description of what it does.

Online Marketing

The book I read to research this post was Why Online Marketing Matters by L V Kline which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book is a guide to promoting your small business online. Apparently small businesses account for 55% of all jobs in America yet 50% fail with in 5 years. Marketing on the internet has levelled the playing field in terms of small companies and large companies competing with each other. In the past you needed a large budget for things like television and radio advertising and direct mail. Nowadays your company only has to be good at what it does. When people are buying something they frequently look to see what their friends on social media sites like Facebook recommend or they look at review sites. Nowadays a Facebook page is as essential as a website. Many people use a CMS program like Wordpress or Drupal to develop their site and with all the plug ins available for these and the fact they are open source it's a sound idea. Many small companies market on craft social media sites like Etsy where the most important factor is your product is unique in some way. A blog is getting to be essential for a small business and it can help feed traffic to the companies main website. Sites like YouTube too are very important and if you get lots of hits for your video it can turn a very small company into a phenomenon in a very short space of time. It most important factor is it should be witty and have that wow factor. There was a company that manufactured food processors and they did a video where they crunched up an iphone in one and sold all their stock in a very short space of time. I did quite enjoy this book which I would recommend.

Mobile Fusion

The book I read to research this post was Mobile Fusion by Haji S Sillah which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book looks at mobile devices like tablets and smartphones and their associated technologies. Some of it is quite surprising like that many mobile networks use legacy hardware and if you have a 4G mobile phone on one of these it won't go any faster. Also at the time of publication none of the mobile networks was a true 4G network. Tablets have become popular since the introduction of the iPad and devices like this are a serious threat to the monopoly held by windows computers which in the future may have to concentrate on niche markets like offices. Apple which is worth more than the combined value of Microsoft & Google is focusing on mobile devices like the ipod, iphone & ipad. Apple has a combined retail trade bigger than the US GDP. It is the largest technology firm in the world. In the future landlines will be replaced by wireless technology like WiMAX. Also devices are set to get even smaller and there will be more power crammed into less space and at a lower price. Integration with things like social media and online payments is set to increase and wireless broadband is set to be seen as a service like electricity and gas. Already with the increase in popularity of e-books bricks and mortar stores like Barnes & Noble are cutting back in that regard and focusing more on online sales. Something that is mentioned in the book is at http://udacity.edu there is a free education courses site which has come from Stanford University offering there lectures online but you can even do online exams and it is free.  Another interesting thing is the rise of mobile apps vs mobile websites and apparently the latter is regarded as better for things like price comparison and browsing. Apple only sell apps for their products at the iTunes store although with other platforms like Android Google don't exercise the same level of control. You can't find all the Android apps in any one place and many are on company websites so you haven't even got to an app store. I did quite enjoy reading this book and have barely scratched the surface of what is in it.  It's well worth reading.

Since I Last Saw You - Gary Barlow

I am reviewing the album Since I Saw You Last by Gary Barlow which is an excellent album. This was Gary's first solo album in 14 years and featured a duet with Robbie Williams who he had rather an estranged relationship with in Take That but it does seem they have patched things up. Robbie apparently wrote The Ego Has Landed about Gary. Gary was the main frontman and song writer with Take That. When Take That split up people thought he was going to be the next George Michael but his career floundered. His first love is apparently songwriting. This album only reached number 2 but was kept off the number 1 spot by One Direction. He has been a judge for 3 series of The X Factor and even wrote a track for winner Matt Cardle. Since Take That reformed a few years ago his career does seem to be under going a renaissance with him having huge success especially especially with the group. I think he has had 3 solo number 1's and 11 number 1's with Take That. He was born in Cheshire, England in 1971 & apparently Depeche Mode inspired him at an early age. He entered a christmas carol competition run by the BBC and made the semi finals and knew then that he wanted to write songs for a living. I did look at the Wikipedia article on him and do recommend a visit. This album I writing about was apparently written about a lot of things in his personal life.

Steve Job's Presentation Skills

The book I read to research this post was The Presentation Secrets Of Steve Jobs by Carmine Gallo which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. Steve jobs was the CEO of Apple Computers until his untimely death and made it into a bigger company than Microsoft but he had been earlier forced out of the same position at the age of 30 despite at that time Apple being a company he had founded and had become a major player in the computer industry. Let's focus on his presentation skills anyway. He never used bullet points in his presentations and normally substituted pictures. He would often have a kind of stage background and people would often say if you were at one of his presentations you didn't forget it in a hurry. He would use headline that were short, simple and to the point, often like tweets on twitter. At one of his presentations he used an actor who had played him in a tv movie and from a distance looked just like him to introduce him. On another occasion he had the CEO of Intel come on stage in a protective suit like they use in the manufacture of processors. He was very much a showman and would typically pose a problem to the audience and them the gadget and explain how it solved it. When he introduced the Apple TV he told them it is a dvd player for the 21st century. His presentations would consist of 3 products and would be displayed in 3 acts and apparently the US Marine corp has done research in how we remember things and found 3 is more effective than 2 or 4 strange as it sounds and is a kind of magic number for anything like presentations. There are technology events where they typically invite a CEO from a technology to do something like a 6 minute talk on a new product launch and they often limit how long it can be because they say if you can't explain its features in that time it's isn't worth explaining. At one technology launch they charge $3,000 per minute for somebody from a company to do a talk and you can imagine they are eager to make it quick. I did really enjoy this book which is hugely informative although only around 210 pages so only short. Finally Steve Jobs also used to take technical facts about his products and translate it into something we'd understand like the first iPod was 5 GB of storage so he explained that's about 1,000 songs.

Amazon

I am reviewing the autobiography Seattle Memoirs by S Kalpanik which is a very good book which I downloaded for free from kindle. This lady was an employee at Amazon.com in Seattle, their headquarters and wrote this book about her experiences there. I think she worked in research or similar and prior to that worked in Silicon Valley for People Soft who made HR software, among other companies. Amazon was started by Jeff Bezos and some venture capitalists and initally was an online bookstore that then ventured into dvds & music. It was based in Seattle to be near one of its book suppliers. They initially wanted to call it cadabra as in abracadabra but thought it might be confused with cadaver and also in those days search engines listed results in alphabetical order and they wanted to be near the beginning. Amazon sells 10 million items per day and rather famously has a 99.999% efficiency standard which means 10 items might get mailed wrongly. Bezos did a course in book retail and the other students probably didn't realize he was going to put a lot of them out of business. Amazon has 900,000 affiliates who are able to sell stuff on the site for a fee. Nowadays of course it has branched out into cloud computing with AWS of which it is the world's largest provider and also ebooks with ebook readers and apparently sells more ebooks than books. There has been controversy over how managers still sometimes shout at there employees which let's face it most companies do. This author joined the company because she saw it as an exciting opportunity. Amazon is one of the most profitable companies on the planet and bought China's biggest online bookstore Joyo, for example and incorporated it into Amazon.cn. They also had an exclusive contract with Toys R Us for selling toys which did turn sour and both sides took each other to court although Toys R Us won their case. This book is very interesting and is around 200 pages which isn't too bad and contains a lot of fascinating facts about Amazon.

Think Like A Tycoon

The book I read to research this post was Think Like A Tycoon by W G Hill which is an excellent book which I bought by mail order a long time ago. When I bought this book new, it was £60.00 but Amazon does have it for sale secondhand for a lot cheaper. I think it has been out of print for a long time. The premise to this book is becoming a millionaire in 3 years or less. You should save as much as possible and the idea is to put very low bids on property that you will subsequently either resell or rent out and of course some of the bids are bound to be accepted reducing your risk. You should use commercial loans which have more paperwork but lower interest and obviously with the bids being very low the banks risk is minimal. You should have at least 25% of what you borrow available in savings. You should look for properties that haven't been advertised for sale and deal directly with the seller who will often be flattered you are taking an interest in the property. The usual system in this book is to fund 80% of the purchase with a loan and get the seller to agree to a 20% promisory note at 10% interest per year over several years. If you don't pay the seller that money though they can subsequently resell the property again though. Bear in mind any property deal isn't going to be perfect and you just have to make the best of it. Auctions are a good source of cheap property and it is often possible to do a deal with the owner and have it withdrawn from the auction. Some properties also have no minimum sale price which is great if there aren't many bidders. Prior to buying a property for the first time you should look at, at least 100 similar properties to get experiences although that is only a general guideline and you may have to see a lot more. This book is part of a set which also includes getting dual citizenship to avoid taxes and buying a car abroad for a lower buying price than what you sell it for. Most countries require you to be resident there for a set number of months to become eligible to pay taxes and if you keep moving you should avoid paying most taxes. Equally if you purchase a car and keep it a set period you can sell it in another country at a profit without having to pay duty. Most of these books are a bit out of date but the general idea is sound. I really enjoyed this book and it's only around 160 pages and is quite succinct. This is the kind of topic I hope to do more blog posts about.

Thais Mean Business

The book I read to research this post was Thais Mean Business by Robert Cooper which is a very good book which I bought from Amazon. This book is a companion piece to Culture Shock Thailand by the same author with one book looking at doing business and the other looking at Thai culture. This book is rather short and I thought didn't cover the subject in as much detail as I'd have liked. It's still interesting though. Apparently Japanese business people are at an advantage over Westerners in the spoken language is still very different but they use pictograms and the Thai wai is similar to the Japanese bow used at meetings and the handshake has no equivalent in Thailand. Bangkok is very much the centre of Thailand with roads and railways tending to go there and terminate. The Thais call the rest of the country up country because the rest of the country tends to be very rural. If you are a Westerner starting a branch of your business in Thailand you will hire a comprador who will iron out any cultural or business issues and knows all about how these relate to Thai culture. Something I did read somewhere else is a lot of Thai businesses borrowed a lot of money years ago when there was a boom and many are having trouble paying it back. Also apparently most computer hard drives are made in Thailand, so much so that when they had severe flooding it had quite an adverse effect on the prices of these. A tradition in Thailand is if you are doing business with someone, you will have to pay a third party what we would regard as a bribe but Thais regard as normal, to smooth out any business problems. Often Japanese business people understand this better than Westerners, with them coming from a similar culture. Something I read elsewhere is the Yakuza will often have offices in the big cities of Japan and they are regarded as an essential element in keeping crime among the general public down.

Commercial Aircraft

The book I read to research this post was Commercial Aircraft by Michael J Taylor which is a very good book which I bought from a car boot sale. This book was published in 1983 so is quite dated but is good as a round up of the various fields that comprise commercial aircraft. When this book was published the idea of budget airlines flying to lesser airports and having it subsidized by them and passing it on to the passengers as cheap airfares hadn't been conceived. Boeing's offerings had only reached the 767 and air transport worldwide was in decline. Small short and medium range aircraft operating for small airlines were very popular and these companies had loads of orders which is probably still the same. Aircraft like the islander were an example of this aircraft that did very well. The first jet airliner was the De Havilland Comet that even did routes like London to Johannesburg and often reduced the flying time by about 60%. Some of these Comets did have crashes so they were withdrawn and by the time the problems were sorted out the Boeing 707 was released and sold over 900 aircraft which is a huge amount. They only sold 112 Comets by comparison. Another type of aircraft is cargo aircraft and with these it is less important how fast the plane travels. In fact in many cases cargo aircraft are retired passenger aircraft that have been modified. You can have combined passenger and cargo aircraft which are frequently small and you often see this in poorer countries or routes that don't get many passengers like island routes. Another type of airplane is agricultural aircraft and there is even one with a turbofan although with these speed is usually unimportant and more important factors are rate of climb and manouvreability.  The first airlines were operated in Germany by airships around the turn of the 20th century and of course there was a big accident with the Hindenburg in America when the Hydrogen that made it fly caught alight. The first airlines operated by aircraft were in America and after World War 1 in around 1919 there was a wave of airlines because they were lots of ex airforce pilots looking for work and lots of surplus military aircraft. These aircraft had a very limited passenger capacity but the price of an air ticket gradually got reduced.

iOS 7

The book I read to research this post was The Complete iOS 7 User Guide by Peter Hills which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. iOS 7 is the latest operating system released by Apple in 2013 for devices such as the iPod touch, iPad & iPhone although there software can often be updated it only works on the more recent models. It requires a certain amount of hardware to work but you can download it on a computer and install it on these. Some of the more popular new features are the icons for a start are clearer and there is a new version of iTunes which includes a radio service which streams music and while it is free with adverts, there is a paid option without ads. Another feature is facetime audio which is similar to skype but only with the apple devices. Facetime of course lets you make video calls. Siri is retained and lets you enter voice commands in your device as well as having a search facility where you can ask it questions. A new feature is your device will work with other devices whether that be transferring files or streaming stuff. It also has upgraded security where it can analyze your fingerprint in order to work as part of this and also uses passcode and password as security. By default if it is inactive for 48 hours you must enter the password and passcode to make it work which is designed to prevent theft. They have tried to put all your settings in one place. I did really enjoy this book and it is maybe a little but is quite interesting.