Whisper Talez (Tales)

Few things smell or taste better than plump fruit picked at the peak of perfection. So why not give the gift of good taste? These days, there are countless varieties of exotic and otherwise delicious fruits that are grown specifically to wow their lucky recipients: head-sized pears, hand-shaped lemons and even “star fruit.” In winter or in summer, a basket of fresh ripe fruit is sure to impress and delight.

Why give fresh fruit gift baskets? First, fruit is highly symbolic. Trees bare fruit just as parents bare progeny. Moreover, they are often associated with seduction, taking a page from Genesis – all of sin for an apple, if you remember. And last, since fruit are not only the product of trees but also themselves contain the seed for future trees, they are symbolic of children and parenting in one. Giving fruit can be considered the most thoughtful and symbolic gesture if it is given as a gift of congratulations (as congratulations mark the birth of something new), a gift celebrating a newborn, wedding, or engagement, or as a get well gift since fruit contains within it the nourishment to return to health. But the gift of fruit goes further than symbolism – it is just down right delicious. That’s why I often find myself giving fruit as a thank you gift, a housewarming gift, or a “just because” gift.

It used to be that you had to live in sunny California or Florida to give fruit that anyone cared about – unless you lived in New York or Georgia and could give apples or peaches. But these days, you don’t need to live next to the orchard or grove in order to give the gift of great-tasting fruit year round. Online gift basket companies put together some of the best fruit gift baskets I have ever seen. Filled with rare fruits like calamansi, buddha’s hands, Muscat grapes, and perfect peaches these baskets will impress not only with the quantity of rare fruits but also with the quality, as these companies pay a pretty penny to get their pick of the crop.

A word of advice: if you are looking to give the gift of fruit, order your gift basket from a company that specializes in gift baskets and not necessarily straight from the orchard. Though you’ll pay a premium, the recipient of your gift will appreciate it all the more. Gift basket companies are experts when it comes to arranging, packing, and shipping your fruit so that it is beautiful and perfectly fresh and ripe when it arrives to its destination, whereas groves or orchards really only specialize in growing fruit.

The conventional wisdom says that English is the language of business. But to what extent is business - and economic growth, for that matter - contingent on fluency in the language? An examination of the rise of India and China in the global economy offers insight into the relevance of language as a driver for growth, and reveals that the conventional wisdom may be right, but needn’t be applied universally.

It is worth considering first the growth story unfolding in India. After years of a cool Asian economic climate, in the late 1990s India emerged as a force to be reckoned with, as high value currencies such as the dollar, pound, and marc were leveraged by the cheap Indian rupee and a large supply of great labor. But what facilitated the transfer of wealth from richer countries to a developing country like India was - in a large part - an English-speaking lower class that could replace English speakers in many English-speaking ‘back offices’ located in rich countries, where costs of living demanded that high wages were paid to workers. The result was a massive shift not only in service jobs that led to the now ubiquitous Indian call centers, but also a shift in technology jobs, as a skilled, English-speaking engineering class emerged that was willing to work for a fraction of their American counterparts. Of course, all things do come to an end, and with the creation of a broad-based middle class, so came with it the seeds for tougher times: the rupee appreciated on world markets and prices rose, leading to a much more expensive Indian workforce that made many foreign companies reconsider their investments there. Nevertheless, a newfound middle class ensured that there would be domestic demand for Indian goods and services allowing India to ‘fish for itself’ in the pursuit of economic growth. Had India not had such a large English-speaking population, it is fair to say that it would have remained off the radar of many foreign companies that sought to cut costs, and thus would have remained without the middle class necessary to grow the economy from within.

China, however, offers an interesting counterexample to the utility of English. Whereas in India about 50% of the population speaks English fluently or marginally as a second language, in China that percentage is somewhere in the low single digits. Nevertheless, China’s economy has managed outgrow India’s at a rate of almost 2 to 1. The Chinese growth story, however, is a different one from India’s. Where India’s growth was in a large part the result of job creation in the services sector, which led to a growth in jobs elsewhere in the economy to support a new middle class, China’s growth was driven by the cheapness of labor and thus the cheapness with which goods could be manufactured and sold on the world market, in no small part also due to the country’s manipulation of currency. While the country has made great strides towards teaching English, China never required English on the same scale because growth was fueled by Chinese-speaking factory workers and not English-speaking administrative staff and engineers. Nevertheless, the Chinese growth story would have never unfolded without the demand for Chinese goods from America and Europe, which, to be sure, was facilitated by the existence of Chinese businessmen who spoke English and - to a lesser extent - Chinese expatriate businessmen living in the west who were able to get deals done.

The time has come; I must move back to the US. I knew this day would arrive, I just didn’t think it would be so soon. Had it really been ten years since I’d left my life in Pasadena and moved here to Paris, France? It seems like just yesterday that I had arrived here, wet behind the ears and scared to death. The marketing company I worked for had decided to open up in France and had shipped me over.

It had been hard at first. I missed my family and friends and that comfortable feeling of belonging when you’re born into a culture and stay within it. I hadn’t been able to speak much French in those days either. But I’d persevered, studied the language until I was fluent and made a life for myself here. I had made life-long friends that I hated to leave, but leave I must.

And so it was that I instructed my secretary to contact international moving companies, check their licensing and reputations on the Internet, and ultimately pick the best one. She did and a date was set in one month for the international moving company’s people to come and pack up my French life. I was USA bound.

I was moving back to Pasadena as CEO of the company – a big step up for me. I felt fulfilled that my career was going so well but still…France was where a big chunk of my heart would stay. My secretary seemed to forge quite a friendship with the international moving company’s agent, which was great for me. She even got a real estate agent to call with houses for sale in Pasadena. I let my secretary handle all that; she knew my taste. She showed me the final two choices she’d made for my residence and I made my choice. It was perfect…really.

I just couldn’t get excited about it though. There’s something about Paris, the City of Light that gets under your skin. The Louvre, the Champs Elysees, the Eiffel Tower, nearby Versailles, Notre Dame Cathedral, not to mention the close proximity to everything the surrounding countries has to offer. My international moving company agent and I got into a long discussion about skiing in the Alps of Switzerland in the morning and skiing down into France for lunch. There’s nothing like it!

That’s not to take anything away from Pasadena, surrounded as it is by the San Rafael Hills and the San Gabriel Mountains – it’s considered the premiere city of the San Gabriel Valley. It’s beautiful and all but…I guess one of the main differences is that in Paris, you feel surrounded by ancient culture and history. Something that just can’t be duplicated anywhere in the relatively young USA.

International Moving 

When we go to our daily work place, we usually like to believe it to be a very safe environment. However, one safety aspect that is often and sadly overlooked is that of mold infestation. We usually believe that mold is not a problem to have to deal with in the work place and that mold is a problem that is only dealt with in the home. However, any building is equally susceptible to mold infestation.  If you are an employer, you are therefore responsible for the safety of every person who is inside the building.  If you do not make sure that mold is not in the building, you could be liable for any medical expenses that one of your employees may have as a result of exposure to mold in the work place.  If you suspect that there may be mold in your building, you must first conduct your own testing. If you do, indeed, find mold, it is your responsibility to send off the mold samples to a laboratory that specializes in mold identification. You should receive your results within a few weeks to a month.

The first thing you should do upon finding out that there is a mold infestation, and what kind of mold it is, is to inform your employs that there is a problem. You should inform them of what measures are to be taken. You should next call an inspector as to determine how extensive the contamination is and if the case is mild, and can be dealt with in a short amount of time, or if the case is serious and could take up to several weeks to remedy. If the case is extreme, you should notify your employees that they are being laid off for the duration of the remediation process. You should tell them when the process will begin, and give an approximation of when the process will end. 

You should also ask your employees if they have been experience any kind of health problems since working for you. Specific health problems that you should look for are respiratory problems, skin rashes, and any other kinds of complications commonly associated with mold.

If your building is indeed contaminated, it should never be ignored, be it your home or work place. If you can afford to pay for the medical bills of others, you still do not want there to be health problems for yourself.

Basement Flooding Clean Up In NJ

As you can imagine, drying out a home or other building that’s been submerged in water, whether it’s flood water or rain water, can be quite a daunting task.  Here we’ll discuss a few different ways to begin the process. 

A flood can happen in almost an instant, but drying out a home or other property can take a long time.  Depending on the property you’re trying to dry out, using hot air drying techniques may damage the building, especially if it’s a historical one. 

Before beginning the drying process, be sure to address the electrical hazard.  Make sure all power to your home is completely off.  Just because the power is off for all your neighbors, don’t assume that yours is off, too.  This could be a very fatal mistake.  Not only should you be careful of electrical hazards, but biological ones, as well.  Flood waters such as those caused by Hurricane Katrina can be contaminated with human and animal waste, all manner of chemicals, and even cadavers.  Protect your eyes, mouth, hands, and wear a respirator.  Wash your hands in disinfectant soap after a session of cleaning and again before you eat. 

Take pictures of the damage with a camera or if possible, videotape them.  This documentation will make it easier when you begin negotiating with your insurance adjuster on what compensation you will be eligible for. 

Make any repairs necessary to keep water from re-entering the home.  These repairs should only be temporary while you get the majority of the building dried. 

Any effort to begin drying out a home is the attic.  Any wet insulation should be removed as quickly as possible; it is no longer useful, but it is heavy and holds moisture for quite a long time and will continue to cause damage to wood, metal, and drywall.  If anything in the attic is soaked with water, remove it.  These waterlogged items are heavy and can cause the ceilings to crack.  Fresh air circulating through your home is a good way to begin and if you have any fans, turn them on once you’re confident that you can’t become electrocuted simply by walking around.

Opening the windows throughout the house (as long as it isn’t raining) will help and at this time you should begin to wash down any wooden items in the home in order to remove mud, silt, and other debris. 

Fl Carpet Water Extraction

Everybody’s found that great job that they do not want to let go of, but sometimes something gets in the way that you just cannot do anything about. Or can you? What do you do if you discover that mold is growing at the place you work and your employer does not want to do anything about it? How do you complain about the mold and keep your job at the same time? Sometimes it is easy to get an employer to take care of a mold problem once they realize that it can be a problem to their own health, as well.

But, what about those employers who do not seem to care what the mold does to their employees or their customers? It is dangerous and can cause many kinds of health problems, so what do you do? Do you keep quiet about it? Keep complaining and risk your job? It does not really matter what state that you live in, the truth is that if an employer wants to get rid of you, they are allowed to do so for almost whatever reason they want to and this is what makes issues such as this difficult to maneuver around if you want to keep your job.

Try talking to your boss about the issue first and explain to him everything that mold can do to a person’s health. Explain that he could be liable for the damages both to his employees and anyone else who enters the building. Tell him about the structural damage it could also be causing or how it might be damaging the product you are producing in some way. Most of the time this is enough, but what if they just do not care?

There are a few different things that you can do. You can stop complaining about it and let it get quiet for a while, then talk to someone at your state’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration about the problem or your local county health department. Mold in the workplace is a safety violation for the employer.

If you work in a public building such as a hospital or a library and nothing is done about the mold problems, see if you can take some pictures of the infestation and get them to your local newspaper or television news station. This should draw enough attention to the problem that it gets taken care of, but unfortunately your job may suffer for it. Your employer can fire you for whatever he or she wants, but if they fire you for complaining about the mold, you can sue. What usually happens is they will do anything they can to find a reason to get rid of you, but if you suspect that this is what they are doing to retaliate for your exposing of the mold problem, contact your lawyer.

Water Repair

When it comes to practicing your guitar, there are literally thousands  of teaching methods available. Basic, logical and effective practice habits are an essential building block for any guitarist. You can’t get away from the concept of dedicating a certain amount of time everyday with out any excuses to practice your discipline.

Guitar tools considered standard tools for practicing the guitar, such as a metronome and tuner are indispensable, however there may be ways to improve your skills right under your nose. People can be very imaginative, and come up with some terrific, out of the box practice methods that are quite unique and helpful.

Perhaps it is not unique, but one method I use and really enjoy since it is not as much work as a structured practice session, is to play to the television. The strategy is fun and really develops your ear to find ‘tones’ and the ‘keys’ and improve timing issues in a realistic way. We all watch television to some extent. The music used in different types of shows is fun to emulate in terms of how fast you can figure out what ‘key’ it is in and even the type of ’scale’  being used.

Simply put, television commercials and shows use music that is suitable for the medium. Meaning, a suspenseful ‘Law and Order’ episode may have a lot of tension in the notes played, especially before the ‘dicks’ find the unfindable clue. Commercials such as the ‘Cialis’ ( erectile disfunction medicine ) has a great lead-in slideable chord that is a great ‘measure of music’ to play with.

Since I mainly watch sporting stuff, I hear certain types of commercials that relate well to sports lovers. Maybe you have seen the car commercials for Nissan and I think Chevrolet too, and even the NFL, they use Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Pride and Joy” as their song. Well, I know this song pretty well, but it is fun, and Stevie Ray is one of my influences. I hear tunes and songs on television shows also that force me into quick ‘key’ and ’scale’ decisions.  For the little time I spend in front of the television, I get a lot of real world practice at these two important elements of music mentioned above.

I call it multi-tasking. Watching television and playing the guitar! Try it, but don’t forget  the logical and effective methods for practicing your guitar that allowed you to play with the television. Now your mom or wife can’t say TV is a worthless waste of time! Enjoy.

Guitar Players Center is dedicated to answering the unusual guitar questions and providing guitar upgrades  and information you can use. Check it out and leave a comment or share the information. Play on.

A friend of mine asked me the other day about how I’m adjusting to the move to New York City. Let me preface this by saying that I love New York, and can easily see myself becoming a New Yorker. No other city in the country offers the same options when it comes to consumption, the same culture when it comes to theatre, music, or museums, or the same people when it comes to diversity. Yet if there’s one thing I really miss living in Brooklyn is having space – especially in the kitchen.

Let me just say that NY apartment kitchen design leaves much to be desired. NYC kitchen cabinets often seem as though they were placed as an afterthought – as though the tenant might (someone thought) want to cook something, rather than order in Chinese, Italian, Sushi, and god knows whatever else. Sure, there isn’t much space in Manhattan apartments, but one would think builders would anticipate the desire of tenants to cook by installing custom cabinets in Manhattan and Brooklyn kitchens so that tenants could enjoy the benefits.

The mismanagement of tiny spaces in New York kitchen design extends to bathroom design as well. What this city really needs is a team of engineers who can prove to landlords and builders once and for all that building efficiently really is worth in the long run. I have no doubt in my mind that with the proper custom cabinets, for instance, and the proper appliances, that I could fit twice the amount of utility into my small Brooklyn kitchen as may presently be found there. All it would take is a little bit of consultation with someone experienced in designing small NYC kitchens and some saving, and to be honest, I’m really considering doing it; because for yours truly a lack of space is almost as bad as Minneapolis winters. Ok, maybe not.

Once a job offer is made, a lot of people think they have no basis for negotiating but they would be surprised, with the right approach, that they can often secure compensation packages beyond what they thought was possible. A key point to remember is that negotiating more at the start of a job can turn into a substantial amount of increased earnings over the course of several years. Once people achieve an increased level of earnings, they tend to maintain that difference over where they were for several years.

The negotiation process we recommend at ITS is easy to use. Based on our thousands of negotiations, it was carefully developed to be easy to use. It is based on common sense and the art of soft selling, so that you get what you want without offending the employer in any way.

There are five key areas you want to consider:

(1)   The initial offer, can you get it increased by 10% to 30%;

(2)   The responsibilities, can you expand them to a larger job that would pay more;

(3)   A signing bonus, which can be 10% to 30% of the salary in some cases;

(4)   The benefits, is the company willing to extend;

(5)   Stock options, whether they are available, and under what terms.

ITS gives job hunter’s guidance in each of those areas. There is also a lot of information on salary surveys to give you current information on which to base negotiations, and a cost-of-living comparison of various areas for those who are relocating. Senior level job seekers will be especially interested in the discussion of the various types of stock options and grants, exit strategies and severance agreements, and a dozen or so other benefits that can be a significant part of the total compensation package.

ITS offers Personal Marketing Services that goes far beyond Outplacement Career counseling. ITS uses its own unique technology to give job seekers access to as much as 85% of the advertised openings, including those from newspapers, recruiter openings, job boards, employer sites, and trade magazines. It also provides access to the unadvertised job market among employers, recruiters and growth companies.

For additional information: pr@changingcareers.com or contact Tom Mortenson at 800-320-1277.

Article By: ITS 

Your life needs proper funding – be it for the short-term goals, such as planning for a vacation, or for long-term goals, like your retirement nest egg. Unfortunately, most of us do not have the knowledge and resources to make the best decisions regarding our finances. If this is true for you, then seeking San Mateo independent financial advice may be the best solution.

Californians enjoy the “good life,” but that should not mean spending more money than you have until you are broke. Getting advice about your finances can help you make smart choices with your money – living that “good life” without breaking the bank.

What does good San Mateo independent financial advice do? It helps you prioritize your wants and needs in relation to your money. This way, the most important aspects of your life are covered financially, and in doing so, the financial stress is taken out of your life. You can focus your brainpower on more important things, such as family and friends.

San Mateo independent financial advice is for anyone who wants to be smarter with their money. Don’t be too proud to accept a little help – your financial security can benefit greatly from it.