Western Union Money Transfer

It's supposed to the be easiest and fastest way of transferring funds from one country to another. Basically all you need here in order to receive cash transferred to you is an ID and the control no. as well as the name and address of the sender.

However if it is your first time to receive funds via Western Union, they will give you additional requirements like two IDs and you will be asked to fill out a form which is not a breeze.

Personally though it is the coolest way of getting paid. Money will be in your hands in a matter of minutes.

Price list for Foreigners visiting the Philippines

Tourists coming to the Philippines should be aware of the prices of goods and services to be able to go around without being gypped by unscrupulous natives. First of all, have in mind that the dollar equivalent to the Philippine money which is the peso is around Php 45 to 46 depending on the day's Forex rate. So with that, $1 can already buy you a good meal in popular fast foods such as Jollibee, Mcdonald's, or Chowking. A dollar would give you 8 rides to 8 destinations within a small city, but when you go to bigger cities like Manila or Cebu, fare rates would be a bit higher. For lodging, you can get a room for as low as Php 300/day to as high as Php 1,200 to Php 1,500 for airconditioned rooms with single beds. A bottle of soda in small sari-sari stores costs only Php 8.00 but you pay higher if you have one in a sit-in resto. Sandwiches, the large ones, cost somewhere between Php 25 to Php 28, the small ones are at Php 15.00

While enjoying the different places, hopping from one beauty spot to another, remember to carry only enough cash in pesos. In our city which is Dumaguete City, the best money exchanger here with the highest exchange rate is still Optimum Traders, situated near a chicken house called Golden Roy's. So if you come around and you're looking for a money changer, ask the pedicab driver to take you to Optimum Traders. Now if he seems reluctant or like he does not know where the place is, then say Golden Roy's and pronto, he will deliver you there without questions asked. Optimum Traders is situated right next to Golden Roy's. If you know how to read signs, then you won't get lost.

Notice of Disconnection

Don't you just hate it when you receive the latest billing and find with it a notice of disconnection? That's every single time you receive the billing, a notice of disconnection is always attached even if you had been paying your bill every month. Their rationale is that it's a billing and at the same time a notice just in case. Isn't this ridiculous?

I have noticed this in almost all the billings----internet, cable, electrical power, and water bills. How can these companies be so antagonistic to their customers? Why use THREAT in your statements? Is that the way to deal with the lifeblood of your business?

Give me a break. We consumers deserve better. We're paying too high for these services to be treated like crap. Can we have more competitors please?

best place to advertise

Advertising has never been so alive since the onslaught of online advertising which is more interactive and targeted. However, advertising through other forms of media is still around. In fact, it is the lifeblood of radio, TV, and print media. This blog hopes to weigh the pros and cons of advertising on television, radio, or print against online advert.
With radio and television you pay per spot, length, and time whether or not the right market got to see the ads or not. It comes out more expensive because you pay a certain monthly rate based on the no. of spots per day, length of the ad, and the time spot chosen. With online marketing, advertisers pay only per viewing of an interested market. And advertisers pay only as low as $0.01 per view or click. With this kind of advertising technique, advertisers are actually paying their prospective market to know their products and services. A symbiotic relationship is thus forged between advertisers and their market which is like getting shares or commissions on products you use. That is why companies that want to reach their real market use the different online advertising agencies like Google and Bidvertiser for better results.

Will there come a time when TV, radio and print advertising can no longer battle the impact of online marketing?

I already see it coming. What's your mind here? Share.

made in China products under close scrutiny

Especially in the Philippines, imported goods from China have mushroomed at an alarming rate until recent news of their safety have put an end to this. Who wouldn't buy them? They're very cheap and are everywhere. Recently however, products from this country have undergone the scrutiny of authorities who found food products like candies , cookies, pet food, toothpaste, toys, household appliances, and garments to be of substandard quality and could be dangerous.

In the US for example a certain brand of pet food had been pulled out and banned from being sold because of its harmful and even fatal effects on the pets. A certain brand of toothpaste, a counterfeit of Colgate, was found to contain cancer-causing ingredients. The Department of Health also found candies and biscuits made in China to contain harmful ingredients.

Appliances like blender, toaster, and the like which are made in China were tested and found to be of poor quality and could easily spark a fire.

China as we know today has been economically moving up because of its ingenuity in producing products which had permeated the global market. But with the latest suspicions and questions about the safety and quality of their products we know that this will surely change the entire picture.

what's with Globelines?

Our telephone and internet connections are serviced by Globelines. However, I cannot understand their policy of not entertaining inbound calls.

Many times I became frustrated and exasperated when I tried to dial the 3-digit numbers the local office has provided for us to supposedly "contact" in case we have problems with our phone or internet.

You know what happens when you dial those numbers? You are redirected many times to robots or recorded answers which prompt you to press one number after the other. And when you come to the end of it and you're supposed to already have a PERSON there to answer you, you will be told to wait for their customer service. You wait and you're fed with cemeterial music all throughout. The waiting and the music do not end because no customer rep will pick up the phone to finally entertain you.

Don't tell me otherwise because I've been into this several times I do not know what to do anymore when I have problems with my internet connection.

I just can't understand why a telephone company has no telephone number that its customer can access when there are troubles? I do not know why a telephone company such as Globelines can't hire real people to pick up the phone? It is unbelievable that a telephone company does not welcome inbound calls from customers. I don't know what you say but the way things are simply means POOR SERVICE.

comment awaiting moderation?

This is one of the observations I have made in all the blog hoppings I have done during the past several months that some blog owners are not quite open when it comes to publishing comments from their readers. After a reader encodes and submits his comments, a notification appears that the comment will be published after the owner's approval. Why? What could be the reason or reasons why some bloggers want to screen readers' comments? Are they afraid to publish negative comments from others? Do they want their blogs to be free from hate words and the like? I wonder.

One popular blogger in our country has more than 200 comments to a post and 90% of these comments are full of hate and anger. Yet, these people who write their hatred for him for his discriminating opinions go back to his blog everyday. These foul comments from readers are the ones that make others come to read what others have said today and the other day, etc.

In media, publicity (good or bad) is still publicity. Clearing your blogs of these comments remove what could have been source of good traffic for you.

If I were you, let freedom of expression reign and welcome everyone with all their baggage. Why? When you have visitors at home, do you let some of them enter while others wait so you could frisk them before entering? Come on, be bold enough to hear what everyone wants to say.

Like when you leave your comments here with your links or url, I won't mind. You can say anything here. This is a free country.

It's now Mozilla Firefox for everyone in the house

Now that I have discovered the ease and the efficiency of Mozilla Firefox, I am now using it for days now as my browser. My kids had been using MF for a long time now and they'd be encouraging me to follow suit but I'd been hard-headed in the past. After I learned and tried it, I found performing tasks simultaneously quite easy. So it's definitely in MF, out IE!

IE or MF?

We used to have no problem with Internet Explorer. In fact we've been using that for years. However lately, something is really not right with it anymore. We could not longer gain access to many sites. We started to shift to Mozilla Firefox and lo and behold, it seems to be working a lot, lot better.

I wonder what you people are using now but right now Mozilla Firefox rules in the house. A friend told us that he got plenty of viruses from using Internet Explorer and we also thought that it's what is happening with our pc. It simply won't work with IE but is okay with MF.

If you got any thoughts on this, leave your comment here please.

work faster at Mylot

Hi, ya! If you have been doing this small technique, good, then this is not for you, thank you for coming. I hope you drop a comment with your url so I would know you came.

I have recently, just recently, found a technique to hasten our work at Mylot. I've been doing this a couple of days ago when something went wrong with Mylot system and it failed to publish many of the discussions I submitted. I tried this method and it worked, my discussions got submitted and faster this time----not a lot of waiting but you need to see to it that you type your discussion carefully.

This is what I am doing now and which has made work faster here on Mylot. After typing my response to a discussion, I directly hit the Post discussion button and I get directed to tag then that's it. I do the same thing when I make comments, I skip the Preview part and hit Post Comment, then move on. This technique has saved me loads of time and more points next to my avatar. Try it.

Nokia does not deny potential danger of cellphone batteries

I just got this from the news tonight that a woman's cellphone exploded and burned itself, her bed and pillow. When interviewed the woman said that she was only charging her cellphone when she heard the explosion. She rushed to her room to find her cellphone burning on top of her bed.

It was found out later that the explosion was caused by the cellphone battery which, they discovered, could get overheated and cause such a dangerous effect.

Nokia officials were contacted and did not deny the potential danger of some cellphone batteries. However, they explained that they had always made sure that safety measures are followed in the manufacture of cellphone units. The officials are now looking into the real cause of the accident.

why?

Blogger.com has been down at least from where we're at for about a month now and it has greatly affected the performance of our blogs which are still on their take-off stage. What a disappointment. Just as I was trying very hard to develop visibility and thus improve traffic on these sites Offbeatmom, Cool Kids' Party, Everydaywear, and clix4pay the whole thing crashes and brings down with them whatever we have tried very hard to build.

It is not easy to get in touch with blogger.com because it does not have any address or any place for us to air our concern. I have surfed everywhere but it seems like it only has discussion groups where people with problems come and get some opinions from others who have also their own concerns with blogger.com. There is no admin or anyone from blogger to help us out. I am just hoping that this blog will reach them and could they please do something to fix it. The problems we have encountered are as follows:

1. Diffficulty publishing or updating our posts. They do get submitted but when we view the blog it's still the same old blog that is displayed. The latest posts do not get published.

2. There are times that the problem is solved but only for a very brief period because after a few hours, the whole thing goes back to its old ways and that is, not being able to update the latest posts.

What is wrong here? I know that others are not facing the same problems but why us? We are not trying to create spams or anything to mislead people. We're here for the same reasons most of these bloggers are here.

We have suffered tremedously from the erratic behavior of our blog host we hope blogger admin or maybe the people of Google should take a look at this problem.

Globe vs. Smart

I will be talking about the comparison not as a user but as a load dealer. I've been into this small e-load retail business for a couple of years, and so far, I can make some comparisons between Globe and Smart on the basis of income and benefits to dealers or retailers like me.

Why is Globe the more preferred? Because retailers get a higher profit compared to its competitor. Aside from the Php 300 free personal load it is sending monthly to its agents who reach a certain sales mark, retailers also no longer have to load their retailer phones with personal load, so that loading to your customers is absolutely free and the 13% commissions all go to you.

Smart still follows the traditional way and which is more expensive, and less profit for its agents. Retailers need to load up their loader phones with personal load to be able to sell. You can resell it though through Pasaload but then again, this will in the end give more headache to the retailers as monitoring of this type of transactions is going to be very difficult. In the end, losses will be incurred.

As to sales, Globe sells a lot more than Smart. I do not know why users prefer it to the other, but based on daily sales, people are buying more of Globe than the latter.

$8.95 lost to a scam...

I never seem to learn. I make a blah-blah-blah about scams and scamming but I allowed myself to be a victim recently. That was actually the third time that I received such an e-mail supposedly from Yahoo informing me that I won this and that much. This time I took the risk and followed the directions for me to "claim the prize". In the process of completing the requirements there was this portion which asked for something like membership fee of $8.95 to be paid via Paypal or e-gold. Since I have not touched my last Mylot payout, my stupid mind made me do the transfer of the amount to a certain Yahoo account. A note from e-gold informed me that I was able to complete the transaction successfully.

Successfully for them but loss for me. I really half-expected this lousy part. What was I thinking?

Old dogs never seem to learn.

downtimes for Helium and blogger.com

I now see a pattern in the two sites I hang out most times. Helium experiences down times in the evening (our time here) while blogger.com crashes in the morning (our time). This had been going on for three nights with Helium and about two weeks with blogger.

Well, that's supposed to be good news for these two sites because it only means they are having more users and that they need to upgrade their systems to accommodate their growing number of members.

If this continues however, especially with blogger.com which hosts all my blogs, this can be very bad as the inability to publish and the errors that come out will mislead the visitors and readers and thus drive them away.

Efforts to increase traffic will be useless as the whole thing becomes erratic. Like now for instance is a good time because the system is working and publication is possible. However this is going to reverse tomorrow morning. Yes, this has happened for weeks now that updates done tonight get published tonight but in the morrow, it's gone or no longer there on the page. It comes back in the evening and disappears again the following day. I mean, isn't this really exasperating?

We hope of course that there will finally be a real fix to this problem. As it is, it dampens the spirit.

back with Helium

Links can do wonders. Guess what? I'm back with Helium, able to view, write, rate and participate in almost everything there because of a link.

I was worried to death during the past couple of days because I could not get into Helium and I was worried about my account there and the stuff I had written---what if??? Luckily this morning I googled one of my blogs and there on top of the page was "where knowledge rules", the link to Helium. How foolish of me not to have thought of that earlier. Goes to show I still have a lot to learn in this second life.

Well, to make the story short, I'm back with my Helium and as of this writing got some $1.07 ---have no way of claiming it should I reach minimum, but I will cross the bridge when I get there. At the moment I am more concerned in writing, not the money thing but of course, it would be nice to have some bonus.

Mylot, Clixsense, Helium

The sites above are the only ones I am actively involved in and I am still trying to compare which of these sites will give me the highest benefits...LOL

Of course, it's been proven that Mylot really pays and in fact I had been paid 4 to 5 times but lately I am having trouble claiming payout from it via Moneybookers. I need to solve this problem before the 15th of this month.

Clixsense without any upgrade, got $1.71---Helium, just plain writing without much revising, $1.10. I became a member of Clixsense way ahead of Helium so that explains.

So far, these three sites keep me uber busy----remember I have 6 blogs to update---and I also get a little there from Google.

Hurray! Everything's up!

I feel like celebrating when I found out that everything is up and running-----blogger.com, Helium and of course my favorite Clixsense which never really went down and just got my cents moving up!

Amazing Helium added me a few cents during my absence and now got around $1.07 without me doing anything. I realized that for as long as there are members who will view and click to your articles you can still have some kind of earnings while you sleep. I got around 35 articles there now and I am so happy with their ranks. I write there as Glenda Hill.

Back to blogger.com------pleeasee----I hope this will be forever. I like blogger the way it is now-----don't ever go back to being erratic again. Just be good, okay?

Paypal blues

We in the 3rd world countries will just have to deal with the fact that in many ways, we are discriminated because of certain capabilities that our country still could not bring itself to acquire. For instance, Paypal. When I first heard the term from my daughter who'd been way ahead of us in terms of internet use, I immediately went to a known international bank to ask about it but all the personnel in that bank were like, "What?", with mouth dropping and eyes honestlly saying they're hearing it the first time. Still not losing hope, I went to another bank with international services but I got the same "never heard" look. That was more than a year ago. Now it's still the same thing------no Paypal.

You can just imagine the hundreds of opportunities we are missing because we could not receive payment thru Paypal. Many income-generating sites require a Paypal account. So if you don't have one, it's like being told to get out and get lost.

I really wonder why our country is not into this. Are we so poor that we could not upgrade our services to include Paypal so that users in this part of the world won't feel kicked around a lot in the Second Life? It is so frustrating that this handicap has limited our capabilities to compete globally. It is just so frustrating to be born in this side of the globe.

booooooo....

I saw that my earnings were going up at Helium and why not? I had invested time writing around 20 or more articles and rated others' work as well. I've been doing great there when, all of a sudden, when I logged in to my Helium account this morning I got this notification that the service is no longer available in my country. Huh? After what I have done there? Why didn't I receive this notification after two or three articles? I swear I have written more than 20 articles there as of today and in fact I got some in rank #1, 2,3 and most are in the upper 50% rank. So why this notification?

I know and I understand that the site only pays through Paypal and the fact that my country does not have any Paypal service here should have discouraged me from signing up to this site, but I went ahead, signed up, got my approval, and I have started writing for them.

What happens to my account now? Are they going to delete all my work there? If not, what if someone wants to buy one of those articles? Who receives the sales and will they inform me about it? I have no way of contacting them since access to the site is denied.

This is a clear example of "foul play". I hope this site does something about this because it is ruining its own reputation if it keeps on with its aloofness and exclusivity. It's sites likel this that makes the internet a failure.