Melva Gifford

Most of this info came from the notes I took while listening to a radio show called The Browser. For more efficient shopping, you can determine what products are on sale by the last number in the price of the product. Here is a short list of price codes.

Tricks to shopping at Cosco:

You want to look for items that end with a 97c items, they are on sale.

If there is an asterisk on the upper right hand of the price tag, than this item will not be reordered.

An * is clearance.

If item ends at 88cents or 0 cents means these are manager items. May be damaged box or may be had been returned.

Go to Cosco the day after Christmas and buy things at discount. Some will then sale later on eBay.

Cosco has a 30 day price adjustment.

Has a guarantee of each product for two years.

Tricks to shopping at Target:

Regular price has a 9 on the end.

6 or 8 at the end means marked down.

4 is final mark down.

Home depot:

6 final or green tag means marked down

Gabenel Navy:

7 marked down

Office depot:

Anything except 0,9 or 5 is mark downs or clearance

If you have some tricks on shopping of recognizing the codes on price tags, please feel free to share them.

Recently I took some training for a potential job for a web hosting company. Though I paid attention, took notes etc. in the end I did not pass the test for employment. This has given me an opportunity to reflect on how I could have better approached my training and as a result may have been more successful. The following are some suggestions I have for my future trainings and maybe these ideas will help other potential students.  Many of these may have already been done, but maybe need to be done more effectively.

1. Do not be stingy on note taking. Have plenty of paper and writing instruments. If you have access to to type them up in class that may be better. Many people can type faster than they can write and one’s notes are much more coherent. I have a tendency to run out of room on paper and write smaller and thus what I wrote becomes incoherent.
2. If you hand write your notes, type them up that same night, after the training. If you wait, there is a good chance that the notes begin to lack meaning in their abbreviated form unless you have the time to expand upon your notes while your knowledge and memory are fresh. You also have the opportunity to add additional material while it is fresh that you may not have done in the first round of notes.
3. Another observation I’ve made is that I don’t usually look at the notes I’ve written for lectures when they remain hand written. Other people have made the same observation. I have a much higher chance of re-reading notes if they are in a typed form because they’re easier and faster to read.
4. Some trainers are more inclined to answer questions than others. Be quick to note the personalities of your trainers to see where each of their skillsets resides.
5. If you are given an agenda for the week, try to do as many things in advance as you can. As you work through the practices, write down the questions you have for your instructors the following day.
6. If you are confused about a concept sometimes asking why things are as they are can help us understand the logic behind something that may contribute to overall comprehension.
7. I find that if I stay at the place of training then I am more likely to continue to study after the day is over. Once I go home, I’m not as devoted to dedicate an evening to training. There was a fellow trainer and I who stayed in the lunch room to study which can be useful.
8. If you do study together, stay on target. Making friends is great, but don’t waste time socializing when training needs to be done.
9. Some trainers may permit you to stay in the lab and to continue to practice. This is particularly useful for those of us learning new operating systems. I don’t have a Linux work station at home so didn’t have the opportunity to practice shell commands. During training, I learned that the internet may offer free Linux boxes to practice on.
10. It’s amazing the source of helpful web sites there are. I have found some wonderful videos on training for Linux and I during training was introduced to a site called Chasms that will provide pretend screens of all type of cell phones so that you could become familiar with different phones as if you had one. There are some wonderful people that offer resources like this. Take advantage of them and promote them as thanks for those who provide such educational opportunities. I need to go back to chasms and do a like to promote it on my Facebook account.
11. Sometimes neighbors can be a great asset in understanding. Be friendly to everyone and courteous and others may be more inclined to answer a question when a trainer is not.
12. If you have quizzes, the questions you get wrong will show you the area you need to study on in more depth.

I learned a lot of wonderful things during training at a potential job. Hopefully this experience will teach me how to do better in future training opportunities and I hope these recommendations will help with other potential students.

I just made an interesting observations and I want to see if others agree. when I boil potatoes and start peeling off the skin I’ve had more success pulling a potato peel away from the potato if I do it on the width of the potato. The grain of the skin seems to peel more successfully by pulling off long sections of skin at the same time. But when I peel along the length of the potato the skin does not peel off at the same degree. This may be obvious to some but this is just a discovery I made today. What are your observations?

During the summer, I attend a Success 2013 two day workshop that presented several motivation speakers. I took notes. Here are some ideas by the following speakers: Steve Forbes, Adams Ginsburg and Adam Marlel

Steve Forbes: How to get ahead.

–        If you do the same thing as everyone else. You are part of the crowd

–        success can come from using old technology in a new way, or to use common things in a different way

–        no taxes without respiration

Adams Ginsburg: making money on Internet

–        1. You need to know what to do.

–        2. No plan to get it done

–        3. Learn how to get it done.

–        Success is the result of good judgment.

–        Good judgment is a result of experience.

–        Experience is a result of experience

Adam Marlel:

–        Success without fulfillment is failure.

–        When you’re not sharing your gift you are causing pain, either for yourself or others.

–        Stop doing the same old thing. The definition of insanity is doing the same old thing and expecting different results.

–        It is what is underground that makes what makes above ground.

–        If you want money we need to concentrate upon the roots of what causes money.

–        Each person has a thermostat or perception of how much money they can make.

–        We are either growing or dying

This all sounds like good advice to me. Do you have advice, please feel free to share it in the comment section of this blog.

Bad: tendicy

Good: tendency

I interpret tendency to be something like establishing a pattern and thus repeats its self. So that is the way I can remember that there are two Es in tEndEncy. The word has a pattern to repeat that vowel.

We’ll see if that will help me avoid the incorrect i.

If you have an idea on how to remember this word, please feel free to share it in the comment section of this blog.

I watched an online presentation by a guy named Allen Card about job searching and how to be recognized for positive contribution at work. Here are some of the notes I took.

–        Go to Alen’s web site: arlencard.com/subscribe

–        Need to live up to your promises.

–        Keep adding unexpected value to your current job.

–        Hot new ideas are not just from management.

–        Don’t come and do just what is required.

–        3 to 5 times throughout the year provide ideas to help the company

–        a. create new products for company

–        b. innovate by improving current processes

–        c. Contribute intangibles. bring in treats or build others

–        d. Thrill a customer with your service.

–        Even if management likes 2 of 15 ideas, they remember the two things.

–        Provide emotionally appealing benefits.

–        Book: indispensable by Monday.

–        Book: pitch anything. An innovative method for presenting, persuading, and winning the deal. By Oren Klaff

On a side note here are some ideas that I thought would be good suggestions for a web hosting company I was hoping to do customer support at. I heard that near Christmas their call center gets slow so I thought these ideas might be good to use employees who are not on the phones in a positive way.

1. Send a query out to customers and see if any want to volunteer for a review of their web site. Then technical support would look at the site and see how they could maximize SEO (search engine optimization) or settings and such just as an activity for customer support during a slow time of the year and as a result give a free benefit to customers. Maybe even have it as a drawing of customers who are the highest in bringing new customers to blue host. It gives customer support a chance to increase their skills.
2. Slow times are also a good time for retraining of engineers who may not be as effective on the phones as the star performers. Have the star performers mentor and listen to the calls of the low performance reps.
3. There are a lot of places on the internet who will ask support questions to people who subscribe to a site and is not the support site of the web host. Have an un-busy customer support rep. seeks out these sites and give anonymous suggestions that can help a customer.

Many of you are top performers at your job or you have been recognized or awarded for some positive contribution to your employer. Would you take a moment and tells us how you stood out or what you did that helped your company. Let us learn from you.

I’ve been working on increasing my technical knowledge and one of those is learning the ports that email, file transfers, and databases use.  I have a hard time memorizing so I often use mnemonics to help me remember things. I thought I’d share some as an example so that you can consider using visual images to remember data. This is not all encompassing of course, but it has helped me remember some of the ports.

I’ve left out ports that I don’t have a useful mnemonic device for yet.

25 SMTP – unsecure email     I think of how a stamp used to be 25c and mail associates to simple mail transport protocol.

465 SMTP w/ SSL  Just as a normal letter used to be 25c a priority package at the post office is a lot more because it’s secure. Thus the increased cost i.e.: 465.

110 POP (POP3) unsecure emails      I think of a mail man carrying a soda can. The two 1s are the legs of the carrier carrying ‘mail’.

143 IMAP – unsecure email               I’m still working on this one but one thing that helps me remember is that the 1 looks like I. This is unsecure mail or “I feel insecure” to connect the 1 and then I just remember 43 signifying a possible age for mail carriers. Thus 1-43.

993 IMAP with SSL   this image is of a mail man wearing heavy books 9’s upside down look like feet with boots. I know a stretch of imagination here but it works for me. You want to find things that work for you.

80 HTTP standard web browser.        A friend came up with a brilliant memory device here. At the age of 80 is about the time you “Have To Pee” Thus HaveTotPee/HTTP

2082 cPanel port         I use word association and imagery on this one. C panel or spoken out loud it would be See-Panel. Go vision is 2020. But you need a pair of glasses (the 8 looks like glasses to see the SeePanel. And you have two eyes so we get the 2, thus 2082. Sometimes the gyrations of remember something may be worse than memorizing but this is working for me so far.

43 Whois port People often go through a midlife crisis around the age 40 so with  the number 43 I think of a person wondering Who is I, what am I doing with my life?

You might even make a game of it with your class. Some of my peers learned ports by how someone prompted them to remember it. One mnemonic can work for one and another for someone else. Something visual works very well, normally.

These are just a few ideas on how to remember ports and what they mean. If you have a better idea on how to remember this info, please feel free to share it in the comment section of this blog. Thanks.

During the summer, I attend a Success two day workshop that presented several motivation speakers. I took notes. Here are some ideas by Les Brown who is a motivational speaker and minister.

–        Ask yourself what are some of the personal goals you want to achieve.

–        Think of your financial freedom.

–        Determine how much money you feel would make you feel secure. Then multiply that by 200

–        Someone else’s opinion is not your reality.

–        What is your special contribution to society?

–        Knowledge is the new currency.

–        Recession restores resourcefulness.

–        Work on your mind. What you think about becomes about.

–        What you focus on becomes about

–        You need to be around people whom you can learn from.

–        Get out of your comfort zone.

–        You need to become the type of person you’d never been

–        I choose to be an uncommon man.

–        Surround yourself with positive people.

–        Provide more service, and then you get paid for.

–        In business, build relationships. People do business with people they trust.

–        You have to be hungry for success.

–        One idea can change your life.

This all sounds like good advice to me. Do you have advice, please feel free to share it in the comment section of this blog.

Good: sequel

Bad: Sequal

I will see if this will help me remember this word. A sequel in a book is a book that follows the plot line of a previous book. Most likely they will have the same characters. Note that sEquEl has 2 Es. The first e for the first book and the second e for the following book.   We’ll see if that helps us remember this word.

If you have an alternative or  more successful way to remember how to this word correctly, please feel free to share it.