The LuxMob Info Tags

It is that time of year again – time to buy gifts for the holidays. Here’s a list of unique gifts for men this holiday season.

Unique Gifts for Men

Instead of going with a sweater, tie or, god forbid, underwear, men will be more likely to appreciate a unique gift this year. Unique gifts for men can be funny, practical and pretty much anything so long as they aren’t expecting them. You can find the following unique gifts for men by simply searching for the product name on any search engine.

1. Sky Caddie – If he plays golf, he will bow before you for giving him this gift. The Sky Caddie combines two things men love, gadgets and golf. The Sky Caddie is a GPS system about the size of a cell phone. It will tell him where he is on a particular hole, how far it is to the hole from the trees he’s stuck in and so on. A very cool gift for golfers. Expect to in the range of $350 for this golf gadget.

2. Battlestar Gallactica – Season 1. Look, he likes science fiction, even if he won’t admit it. This classic 70s television show was redone this year on the Sci Fi television channel and has been a big hit. Staring Edward James Almos, the season 1 DVD collection will set you back $45 at online retailers.

3. Bully Bag – Okay, this one is off the charts for unusual gifts. The Bully Bag is a bull scrotum mounted on a solid oak base. Don’t worry, it’s coated and sealed with polyethylene. Great conversation piece and good for keeping change and stuff in. The Bully Bag measures, on average, 6 inches by 7 inches. Hey, there bulls! Expect to pay $40 online for this hilarious gift.

4. Nomad Writing Journals – If you’re buying for a person that loves the outdoors or to travel, Nomad Writing Journals make great gifts. These journals are tailored to activities such as travel, fly fishing, bird watching, backpacking, camping, rock climbing and so on. They come with or without a case and provide writing space as well as cues for writing down important information. A great keepsake to preserve their travel and outdoor experiences. The journals cost as low as $9 without waterproof case and $25 with case.

Finding unique gifts for men really isn’t that hard. The above list should give you a start on your gift buying efforts.

Rick Chapo is with www.nomadjournals.com - makers of writing journals for travel and outdoor activities. Writing journals make great Christmas gifts for him or her.

Q: What’s worse than moving? A: Moving in the middle of the
school year.

My family did it more than once when I was growing up. I still
remember some of the incidents-being introduced in the front of
the class, having to share a locker until they could find one
for me, breaking into the already-formed social groups, having
the wrong “accent”.

Whatever the reason for the move, moving is stressful.

Your kids are going through the same stress you are only with
less understanding and absolutely no control. If they don’t
already know what it’s like to “be the new kid on the block,”
they’re about to find out.

The NCC says it takes as long as 16 months for both adults and
children to adjust to a move.

Here are some tips for helping make the move easier for your
family.

1. Keep structure amidst the confusion and disorder.

Tighten up on meal times, bedtime routines, and other traditions
that give structure and stability to your family life. Stay home
and skip the babysitters for a while. Let some important things
remain stable while the earth moves beneath their feet.

2. Expect regression.

When we’re stressed, we retreat to former times to regain
stability. And our kids do too! You can expect a newly
potty-trained child to relapse, little ones creeping into your
bed at night, more tears, picky eating, nervous tics. Loosen up
on these things. They’ll go away once things settle down.

3. Acknowledge both negative and positive feelings.

You, too, will be having them. There’s this you’ll miss, and
this to look forward to. The old town had an amusement park, but
this one has a great children’s museum. You’ll miss the snow,
but now the beach is an hour away. Ambivalent feelings are
typical of any transition. Help your child look forward to good,
new things while they say good-bye, sadly, to things and people
they’ll miss. Share your joy in your beautiful new home, and
your frustration in not knowing where the light switches are, or
the ice cream store.

4. Orient to the way your child thinks.

When we moved when my older son was 6, we left him with my aunt
and uncle while we went to look for the new house. A naturally
outgoing child, he was upset until he learned we’d be leaving
the family dog there too. Children look at things differently.
In his mind, he knew we’d come back for the dog. He was calmed.

5. Be concrete and talk about details.

Help the child see what it will mean to them, depending upon
developmental age and temperament. With a preschooler, let him
help you pack up a treasured item in a box, seal it up, move it
around in a wagon, then return it, open it up and take the
treasured thing out and put it back where it came from. This is
an experiential lesson that what we pack up doesn’t disappear
forever. Children are concerned about their possessions, just
like we are. Also they displace their general anxiety onto
something concrete like that because they have no other way to
express it.

With a toddler, use the doll house and dolls and toy cars to
show what will happen. Read books about moving. “Mallory’s
Moving and her Monkey is Missing” (
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0964546302/susandunnmome-2
0 ) is a good one.

6. Instead of focusing on logistics, focus on people and
feelings.

The move will get accomplished. Take time to deal with the
emotional aspects and it will pay off in the long run. It’s a
lot more important. This is just one of many transition s your
family will go through, and how you handle it will have
repercussions in the future. All transitions bring ambivalent
emotions and fears and fantasies about the future, which is
unknown. You’ll grow through this as a family. 7. Make a trial
run if you possibly can.

Go visit the new place with your children. Show them where their
new room will be (let them decorate it if possible). Visit their
school. Meet the neighbors. Point out the “same things” like the
DQ and McDonalds. Look up sports and scouts programs. Show them
where the new movie theater is.

8. Expect an adjustment period at school.

Children learn best in a comfortable emotional environment, and
a move is stressful. It will take them a while to get
acclimated. Observe when you pick them up, or talk with them to
find out if they’re making a satisfactory social adjustment.
According to research one of the highest emotional intelligence
competencies is being able to break into an already formed
group. Be compassionate.Help them learn the skills. You may be
going through the same thing yourself! The EQ Foundation Course
( http://www.susandunn.cc/courses.htm ) can help.

9. If not you, then who?

We’ve lost track of who brings the homemade cake over - the old
neighbor, or the new one. Don’t ask for whom the bell tolls –
let your children choose a cake, bake it together, and carry it
over to meet the new folks. Or have an open house and invite the
other families over. 10. Saying good-bye precedes saying hello.

Let your child have a going away party with their friends, and
then a new party in the new place. Take an occasion (Easter,
birthday) or none at all — a skating or bowling party, or
sleepover.

Your first task in setting up a business web site may be deciding on a domain name. If your business has already established brand name recognition with consumers then you should probably consider using your actual business name as your domain name also. If however, like most businesses, you are trying to draw attention from customers who are searching for your products and services, but who likely don’t know who you are, then a different approach is needed.

For example, someone searching for an affordable interior decorator that can help them in the Denver area, a domain name such as - www.denverinteriordesigns.com tells people 2 things right off the bat when they look at this url - (1) You offer interior design services and (2) you operate out of the Denver area. So before planning anything else, you have already begun the process of capturing visitors who are pre-qualified by using an url such as this one in this example. Ultimately, this should be your goal.

A third thing to consider is that very likely, after completing the keyword research needed to optimize your web site for search engine listing, you will discover that “Denver” and “interior design” are 2 of your best key phrases. Having them placed strategically in the domain address may give you a slight boost in ranking as well.

Should you hyphenate long domain names?

Ideally you want the domain name you choose to be fairly short; it’s easier for people to remember the name. If you choose to use a slightly longer domain name hyphenating it may help keep from misspelling it when typing it in the browser bar. Some seo consultants will tell you that search engines like Google(c) will penalize you if you use hyphens. However, it is our experience that it makes no difference to the se’s whether the name is hyphenated or not.

The one thing we do recommend is that if you are going to use hyphens in your domain name, purchase the same domain name without the hyphens and re-direct visitors who forget to add the hyphens when typing, to the hyphenated version of the domain. That way, no matter what they type, they will arrive at your landing page.

To Dot.com or not to Dot.com . . . ?

Most people are conditioned to search using a Dot.com extension when looking for a web site. Dot.com was here first and it’s what people are most familiar with. Try to get the Dot.com extension for your domain name first. After that we recommend that you also purchase all of the secondary extensions of your domain name as well. This keeps other web site owners from benefiting from traffic that should rightfully be yours because someone purchased say, the Dot.net version of your domain and benefited from traffic that misspelled your domain name when typing it into the browser.

Secondly, you may find that owning the alternate extensions of your domain name may prove useful in other ways somewhere down the road.

Brad Knell is the owner of Better Search Solutions, a search engine optimization and web promotion company. Check out his website for more info -
http://www.bettersearchsolutions.com

Hard Drive and Multimedia Drives: Today, we will investigate the new SATA drives. This hard drive does not come in the Compaq Presario SR1617CL-B; however, this is one of the technologies that you should be aware of when doing comparison shopping. SATA stands for Serial ATA. SATA is being touted as the next generation replacement for IDE drives (a.k.a ATA, PATA Ultra DMA). The SATA hard drives are designed to deliver 150 Mbytes/sec transfer speed. This gives you a big boost from the 133 Mbytes/sec you get from the best ATA-7 drive commonly referred to as Ultra DMA-133. Surprisingly, the every day performance of the SATA drive has been about the same as the ATA predecessor.

One of the significant technological features is NCQ. NCQ stands for native command queuing. NCQ employs an algorithm called Rotational Position Ordering (RPO) to speed access to the data. I know all this acronym soup sounds “geekie”; therefore, I am going to simplify this tech talk for you.

Imagine being in a hardware store. You have a list of items that you need to purchase. In front of you are several aisles. The items on your list could be on any one of them. The first item on your list could be on aisle 3 and the second on aisle 17 and the third on aisle 1. You get the picture? This is very inefficient. If you go in sequential order down your list, you could end up going back and forth between the first few aisles and the last few aisles many times.

Well, NCQ using RPO fixes this inefficiency problem. NCQ using RPO, if it were a shopper like you, would reorder the list of items according to the aisle. In other words, all items on aisle 1 would be at the top, all items on aisle 2 would follow, etc. You can quickly see that all of the back and forth traveling would be stopped allowing you to get the list of items in a more timely fashion.

There are more details about SATA that could be discussed such as the 33% improvement reported by Seagate attributed to the NCQ technology versus SATA drives without the NCQ technology; however, when buying a computer, here is what you should know: in the real world of home office - small office desktops, SATA only shows significant performance gains when the system uses RAID technology which is seldom used in these environments.

In summary, although the hard drive manufacturers are excited about SATA, the average home office computer with a single hard drive does not benefit enough to justify the increased cost of the SATA drive. It is December 13, 2005 as I write this article so in the future as the price gap closes it may well be worth it. If you are planning on having a server with several users and a SATA RAID configured server, in that case, the benefits will abound. In my next article, I will pull the covers back on the multimedia drive community.

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Olan Butler is the Chief Architect of BHO Technologists, a computer productivity & organization software and service provider http://www.bhotechnologists.com with headquarters in Kansas City.

For years, Dell has enjoyed one of the strongest brands on the market. Lately, however, the giant PC maker has been taking some real heat in a number of blogs and consumer affair sites. In fact, a quick browse of sites like My3cents.com, Ripoffreport.com, ConsumerAffairs.com and BuzzMachine.com will turn up multiple negative posts and comments from dissatisfied Dell customers. Not exactly what you would expect from a company with such a sterling reputation.

Dell executives say they’re monitoring online complaints and taking steps to correct those issues. In particular, they’ve added more customer service centers and employees in an effort to better resolve customer complaints. These measures seem to paying off. In a recent article, Investor’s Business Daily cited internal Dell numbers that show a 35% year-over-year improvement in customer satisfaction and a 30% improvement in its ability to resolve problems the first time out.

Considering the fact that Dell surveys about 24,000 consumer customers a month, these numbers are worth noting. But I wonder if some of the steps Dell is currently taking might come back to bite their brand in the long run.

Great Out of the Blocks

I recently purchased a Dell computer online, and I have to say the experience was outstanding. In fact, Dell executed flawlessly.

I happened to be in the market for a new PC and saw a great price in one of Dell’s advertising circulars. I went to their web site and easily found the advertised box. I added a few extras (nothing like a little extra horsepower to jazz up a new PC!), placed my order and sat back to await delivery. Afterwards, Dell sent me several tracking e-mails to keep me apprised of my order’s status.

The computer arrived a couple days before promised — a nice surprise. I whipped it out of the box and set it up in a matter of minutes. Everything worked fine and I began to install my own software. During the installation process, however, I hit a snag and my computer locked up. I called Dell, and in a matter of minutes they helped me resolve the problem.

I’m sure my experience is repeated thousands of times a day around the globe. After all, this is where Dell really shines. They do the acquisition and setup experience in less time, at a lower cost and with less hassle than any other personal computer company. That’s what Dell’s value proposition and brand promise are all about — delivering a low-cost, customized PC to your door with minimal time and effort on your part.

Not So Great Down the Stretch

Although Dell has mastered the PC acquisition and setup experience, they have struggled to provide service well after the sale. And that’s where the Dell brand is taking a hit.

Dell built its reputation by providing quality PCs at a very low price — a classic application of the lowest total cost value proposition. What Dell doesn’t provide is a true customer intimate solution or the best total solution. If a complicated problem arises several months after buying the computer, your problem-solving experience with Dell is likely to be very different (and far less satisfying) than the initial acquisition experience.

Until now, Dell has gotten by with this approach because their traditional customers, who tend to be experienced consumers of technology, don’t expect much service after the sale. However, Dell’s customer base is expanding, and that seems to be where many of the problems are coming from.

As Dell has achieved dominant market share and picked up more new customers, a growing number of them are first-time buyers or PC novices who require a great deal of hand-holding after the sale. If you read the posts on the customer affairs sites and blogs, you quickly get the idea that the majority of complaints are coming from technology newbies. Plus, as the absolute number of customers continues to increase, the number of mistakes on Dell’s part is bound to increase with them.

A Shift in Strategy

As a low-cost provider, Dell does not have the profit margins to provide comprehensive customer service. But that’s about to change.

Dell recently announced a spate of paid customer support options ranging from consumer services that mirror the comprehensive in-home services offered from Best Buy’s Geek Squad to comprehensive business services. The business services run the gamut from simple system set-ups to complex deployments that coordinate rollouts at multiple sites and meet tight customer deadlines. Looking ahead, it’s just a matter of time until Dell offers comprehensive IT outsourcing that mirrors similar service offerings from HP and IBM.

Why this shift in strategy? One, Dell is trying to protect its brand by offsetting a growing number of customer complaints. Two, and more important, they’re hoping to boost revenues by turning customer service from a cost into a profit center. To me, the most interesting aspect of all this is what it might do to the Dell brand.

Currently, Dell dominates the best total cost value proposition in the personal computer market. But some day their top line revenue growth will stall unless they do more — hence their ventures into providing value-added services after the sale. My bet is that Dell will successfully navigate this shift and that customers will want the added services will pay for them. However, adding these services and becoming a services company may prove confusing to customers. Ultimately, it could confuse their brand.

Is Dell a best total cost or a best total solution company? Can they implement both value propositions without confusing customers and/or diluting the brand? For now, they remain firmly entrenched in the best total cost camp. But if their intentions are to migrate — however slowly and tentatively — toward a best total solution strategy, it should make for a very interesting journey. More important, it should teach us all some valuable lessons about the challenges involved in maintaining a #1 brand in a rapidly changing environment.

Get your free whitepaper: The 10 Biggest Technology Marketing Mistakes… and How to Avoid Them

Rod Whitson serves Townsend as President and Chief Brand Strategist. Townsend is expert at helping organizations with innovative products and services develop differentiated, compelling value propositions. Townsend is the largest integrated marketing agency in Southern California. Rod has personally led recent branding engagements with Intel, BAE Systems, Merck, DowPharma, Marsh & McLennan, and the University of California system. He has also worked with a host of successful and not so successful early stage technology and life sciences companies. Since Townsend’s founding in 1993, it has helped clients create market valuation in excess of $80 billion.

Visit Rod’s blog, Branding the Complex

© 2006 Rod Whitson - All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Our bodies are truly incredible machines. What makes cells healthy? What causes disease? Scientists are discovering the answers: Keep human cells healthy and fully functional and with out degeneration.

True health begins with the cell. The health of our bodies depends on healthy cells. The cells are the fundamental unit of life. Starve it, poison it, injure it and the resulting damage causes disease and degeneration. Nurture it, protect it and feed it the nutrients it needs and it repairs itself providing health and longevity. All of us begin as a single cell and divide again and again as we grow.

Every day billions of new cells are produced to replace those that have served before them. This natural process is constantly under the attack by the environmental toxins, pollutants, preservatives, synthetic chemicals, and the oxidative damage that occurs in our daily lives through our lifestyle choices.

Disrupt the fragile balance within your body with toxic substances, poor nutritional habits, distress, psychological stressors and the results: Disorder and Disease. The notion of true health is not just the absence of illness. It is the constant empowering of our bodies to perform at optimal levels with exercise, energy, stamina, flexibility and endurance.

For each of us true health is obtained when we incorporate all of these aspects of a healthy lifestyle. Having reserves to deal with unexpected events and stress in our lives.

If given the proper nutrients in the right amounts, ratios and balances our bodies will repair and rebuild themselves. You can help make a positive impact on health in our world.

Gina Bucci, has researched every health product on the market. Visit her website and take a Fast & Free Health Assessment. See what your body may be lacking. Listen to your body calling before it is too late. We take our health for granted. The Usana Health Science products are created by Scientist’s and PhD’s from all over the world, to help everyone maintain health and happy lives. Nutritional’s we all need and must recognize sooner before later. Start focusing on preventative measures and avoid or help degenerative diseases you do have, such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, chronic disease, cystic fibrosis. Cystic Fibrosis affects 1 in every 3000 children. Once considered fatal and terminal inherited childhood disease, taking lives of children by the age of only five years. In 1970’s scientists discovered through research: Vitamins & Nutritional Supplementation & Natural enzymes CURED these children and SAVING THEIR LIVES!!! Miraculously improving these smart, sweet childrens’quality of life! All with a simple lifestyle change! See My Story: http://www.olivegrapes.usana.com

Alaska’s fishing vacations are one of the most popular with tourists. With people wishing to escape the hustle-bustle of the daily life, these relaxing fishing vacations are a great way to can get closer to nature.

Salmon is common along the Alaskan coast. So is giant halibut. Visitors can also catch salmon weighing up to 50 pounds. King salmon over 50 pounds are not at all uncommon. Grayling and northern pike are easy to catch in many inland streams. Other varieties of fish, like grayling and northern pike, are easy to catch in many inland streams. And you can fish amid some of the most incredible scenery on the continent.

To be sure, it’s not perfect. The productivity of most Alaska streams is not high in comparison with those in warmer climes. This means that some heavily fished streams do not quickly produce many large fish, particularly in the Interior. Large salmon runs compensate in many streams, however.

The extreme tides and ocean currents surrounding Alaska creates ideal habitats for baitfish, which in turn attract returning salmon and bottom fish in astounding numbers. Alaska promotes fishing as its main sporting event. Large numbers of tourists visit the place to take part in this adventurous sport.
South-central Alaska is home to the most famous fishing areas in the state. Coastal waters and watersheds embody the place with varied land and seascapes. In addition to salmon and halibut, other fish like trout, pike, grayling, Dolly Varden, burbot, whitefish and other species can be found year-round in the many watersheds that form the main tourist attractions.

Southeast Alaska, sometimes called the “panhandle,” is a land of deep fjords, rushing mountain streams and glaciers. Much of the land is in the Tongass National Forest. Summers are cool and moist; winters are cooler and snowy, but much less cold than portions of Alaska not warmed by the ocean. Salmon return in large numbers to thousands of streams. Halibut move into near shore waters in the summer. Several species of trout are available. A variety of bottom fish can be caught. Shrimp and crab can be found in some waters.

Lower Cook Inlet is also a popular fishing destination in the summer months. Clams, halibut and salmon keep the anglers busy throughout the day. The Kuskokwim and Yukon rivers drain most of Interior, Arctic and Western Alaska, which is sparsely covered by trees. Grayling are most widespread in the region, along with trout, pike, burbot, char and shellfish.

It is advisable that first-time visitors should have a professional guide to advise them. It is always wise to visit the place as part of a guided tour, which will provide all necessary fishing equipment.

Enjoy your Alaska fishing vacation.

Any marketer knows that nothing beats word of mouth advertising. It is simply the most powerful and cost effective advertising ever known. Even before the days of the Internet. Word of mouth advertising got every business where it is today.

I know many entrepreneurs that never have and never will spend money on advertising. Their entire business comes from people telling other people about their product or service.

Could you imagine never spending money on advertising, but always having a steady stream of customers on your door step begging for your product or service.

There is one catch to running a business only on word of mouth advertising. You must be selling an outstanding product or service. If you sell crap, the only word of mouth advertising you’ll have is negative.

I’m sure you’ve heard the expression before. A satisfied customer will tell three people about your product or service, an unsatisfied customer will tell ten.

If your customers aren’t happy you’ll have to work ten times harder and spend more money on advertising to sell your product.

Positive word of mouth advertising is unbeatable for two main reasons.

1. It’s free advertising. This is self explanatory. The less you have to spend on advertising, the more money you can put in your pocket and back into your business.

2. People are endorsing your product or service. Having someone endorse your product puts you at a greater advantage. When someone tells their friend about the positive experience they’ve had with your product, there is instant trust. People trust their friends. If a friend says your product is it, they’ll instantly trust you. Trust is a huge barrier to break down when it come to selling anything, online or off.

To give you an idea of how powerful word of mouth advertising can be, take a look below. Your online business can grow exponentially without you ever even having to lift a finger.

Let’s say you start out with 10 satisfied customers you got with paid advertising.

If those ten people tell only 3 people each, you could get another 30 customers for free. But this is where it starts getting good because word of mouth advertising never stops once it gets going. If those 30 people tell 3 more people each you could have another 90 new customers for free!

90 X 3 = 270

270 X 3 = 810

810 X 3 = 2430

2430 X 3 = 7290

7290 X 3 = 21,870

21,870 X 3 = 65,610

65,610 X 3 = 196,830

etc…

You get the idea. More and more people just keep learning about your business all threw friends and associates. And it’s all free advertising!

If you think the above numbers are a bit of an overstatement think again. Go to Google.com right now and do a search on Autoresponder Magic. Autoresponder Magic is an eBook that was written by Yanki Siler several years ago. More than 80,000 web sites advertise his Ebook on their sites right now for FREE!

When Yanki started out several years ago he didn’t even know what an eBook was. Today he has more traffic coming to his site in a day then most web sites do in a life time.

Make no mistake, word of mouth advertising is the most powerful form of advertising ever known and handing out free Ebooks like Yanki are one way to take advantage of it.

Brad Dunleavy
Online Advertising
www.TrafficVirusEbooks.com

Brad Dunleavy specializes in “viral” ebook marketing strategies and ebook software compilers.