The LuxMob Info Tags

Owen burst into the international scene with his spectacular
solo strike against Argentina in the 1998 World Cup.

He helped Liverpool achieve the treble in 2001. His success and
accolade accumulated and he won the European footballer of the
year.

We expected him to go to greater heights but since then his
performance has been mediocre. He is always hampered by his
hamstring and is easily injured. Houllier had to take care not
to use him too frequently to aggravate his situation.

Was he getting too big for his head or was he too ambitious when
he decided to leave Liverpool and play for Real Madrid.

Gerrard for all his prima donna ways did the wise thing and
stayed to see what changes Benitez could bring. There ’s nothing
to lose by remaining in Liverpool. If things didn’t work out ,
he could always move on.

Though Liverpool struggles in the premiership they are walking
on water when it comes to one off battles in cup competitions
like FA Cup or European competition.

Last season he opted to move to Real Madrid as he thought he was
going to a better club to have more opportunities to play
champions league football.

He should have given the new manager a chance to prove himself
in Liverpool . After all, isn’t this the man who won the
Prermiera Liga twice with Valencia and a Uefa cup to boot?

How ironic to see his former club lift the Champions
League trophy while Real Madrid languish in the shadows of
pitiful sorrow after being ejected in the round of 16 against
Juventus!

Another irony I find is that Michael Owen willingly went over to
Real Madrid to exchange place with Morientes. Morientes took
over Owen’s first team position while Owen himself found himself
in fourth position in the striker role.

Michael Owen knows his first team position is in doubt following
purchases by Real Madrid of two strikers Rohinho and Baptista .
Next year is World Cup year and Owen needs to play regularly to
remain in top form in order for England Coach Erickson to select
him for his team.

Ironically, he wants to come back to premiership but the big
guns do not need his services.

Liverpool has so far garnered only one goal from two premiership
matches. Benitez has also sold off Baros to Aston Villa reducing
the number of strikers available to him. Michael Owen is a
proven striker in the premiership scoring 20 goals a season. He
is also a Kop favorite and English. There has been a precedent
before where Liverpool player went abroad for more playing
experience and then return to Liverpool. His name is Ian Rush.

However, I think it makes poor business sense for the club for
buy high and sell low and making loss of a few million pounds.
Also, Michael Owen is physically small in size. His style of
play is to be a lone striker. Benitez preferred style of play is
different . So Michael Owen may not suit Benitez requirements.

Smaller teams are eager to sign him on like Newcastle, Everton
and even Wigan. But I think it would be too embarrassing for him
to accept these offers.

Tired of proofreading for hours? Moving from first draft to perfect manuscript can be a slow and tedious exercise even for the most experienced writers. But you can create a perfect manuscript with just four simple steps.
The secret is to focus on only one area each time you edit. Start with the tone and flow of the overall piece. Then whittle down your word count. Check your grammar and spelling, and finally, read through the piece one last time.

STEP #1 - EDIT FOR TONE AND FLOW

After you have eliminated words, read through the manuscript checking the tone and flow. Is your tone appropriate for your audience? Are you lively and entertaining, or stiff and businesslike? Do you use contractions or perfect English?

If you are not sure about the audience, lean toward a more formal manuscript.

Check the flow of the manuscript by jotting down a quick flow diagram. Each paragraph should have a main topic. List it. Then connect the topics with arrows. Next to each arrow, note how you connect one idea to another. Or use arrows to connect subtopics to the main topic. Make sure all the subtopics support main topics, and main topics support the theme of your manuscript.

To improve the flow of the manuscript, vary the length of your sentences and paragraphs. The change in lengths gives your writing interest.

STEP #2 - PLAY “HOW FEW WORDS?”

Have you ever played the “How few words” game? Go through your manuscript to see how many words you can eliminate and still keep the original meaning.

Here’s an example:

Long version - To properly edit and proofread a manuscript or other piece of writing by an author, other writers should read the manuscript and then eliminate as many words as possible from the prose. [32 words]

Shorter version - To shorten a manuscript, ask someone to remove words. [9 words]

This game is usually much easier on someone else’s writing. We writers often get attached to our words. Ask a friend to eliminate words for you.

STEP #3 - PROOF FOR GRAMMAR AND SPELLING

In the next read-through, check for grammar and spelling errors. Some of the most common grammar errors include misused tenses, misplaced commas, and subjects, verbs and pronouns that do not agree.

Use the search function in your word processor to check for commonly misspelled words like effect/affect, to/two/too, there/their, its/it’s and hear/here. You can find a list of common errors at http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/.

STEP #4 - FINAL READ-THROUGH

Let your manuscript marinate for at least 24 hours. Then, read through it one last time. You’ll be amazed at the problems you missed (of course, if you make any major changes, you should start over with step one!).

Want to learn more? Visit http://www.organizedwriter.com. Julie Hood is the author of “The Organized Writer: 30 Days to More Time, More Money and Less Frustration,” an ebook with a roadmap for combining a writing career with the rest of your life. She manages the OrganizedWriter.com web site and writes Writer-Reminders, a weekly newsletter for writers. Newsletter subscribers receive a free ebook, The Sidetracked Writer’s Planner. When she isn’t writing, she sneaks in cleaning house around a busy household with two children, her husband, and two avid golfers.

Copyright 2004 Julie Hood, Finally Organized LLC. All Rights Reserved.

All about birth announcements

Many people without children often ask me “What IS a birth
announcement?” You might think this to be a foolish question,
but until someone has joined the ranks of those with children,
they may never have seen one.

Who gets a birth announcement?

A birth announcement is simply a way to inform the “world” that
your little one has arrived. Just who makes up your “world” is
really up to you. Typically, you would send a birth announcement
to any one that you might want to share your news with. This
could include everyone invited to your wedding or just the out
of town friends and family who may not be able to see your new
baby immediately. You may want to start making lists of who will
receive a birth announcement around your sixth month of
pregnancy. This will give you an idea of how many you will need
so that you can start checking out styles and begin your “window
shopping.” Of course, once your list is complete start gathering
your addresses - these steps will make the addressing and
sending off of the announcements much less stressful.

When should I send birth announcements?

Typically, most moms order their birth announcements between 1
to 2 weeks after the birth of their child and send them out as
they have time. Sometimes we see moms order their announcements
weeks or months after the baby has arrived, so if you are late,
don’t fret. And, besides, anyone with children will understand.

Most birth announcement companies offer some sort of early or
pre-order option. At Smallfri.com we offer our customers the
option of receiving their envelopes early, for 12 cents each.
This allows the mom who can plan ahead to get their envelopes
addressed before the baby arrives.

What should my announcement say?

Most announcements include the following:

Short introduction, poem or verse. Oh Boy! or We joyfully
introduce are common examples. Baby’s First and Middle or Full
Name and details. Most moms include the date of birth, time,
weight and length. Closing sentiment. Joyful parents or Her
happy family are common examples. It is also common to add any
siblings names in this part of the announcement.

What are common and practical styles of announcements?

In our experience the most common style is a flat card stock
birth announcement. This type of announcement is usually
available in either 5 x 7 or 4.25 x 5.5 and requires no
assembly.

Announcements with vellum, a translucent piece of paper,
ribbons, and die-cuts are becoming increasingly popular. These
are often 2 or three layers of card stock and vellum held
together by a bow or die-cut shape to create a beautiful
announcement.

Some birth announcement companies offer assembly service for
these types of cards, at Smallfri.com we charge 25 cents each to
assemble layered announcements. However, if you have a few
minutes, assembly is really quite simple and can be done on the
couch while watching T.V or feeding the baby!

Another increasingly common style of birth announcement is the
photo birth announcement. These range from photos with baby’s
details printed on photo paper, to the more elegant photo
printed on vellum overlay. When choosing this style of
announcement, you should pay careful attention to your camera
settings and use a digital picture of at least 1 MB.

More Questions? If you have questions when placing an order or
just checking things out, please feel free to call us. We will
be more than happy to assist you during this very exciting time.

how to permanently quit addictions!!

I am a reformed alcoholic. I am a reformed chain smoker. I am an
ex-fat person. I am also not selling anything. My only wish now
is to help people by passing on my knowledge; I guess this
sounds too good to be true. When you have really nearly died a
few times, money takes on a sort of reduced role in your
thinking. Make no mistake about it, we are all going to die,
even you will die one day. When you are young this seems a long
long way away, I’m fifty now, and it sure seems a little closer
to hand than it did. So it makes sense to make the time I have
left quality time, free of drink smoking and obesity; after all
it is easier to get older if you feel fitter, than if you are
ruining your body daily. I wish I had started earlier in life,
YOU CAN.

You may think I have superhuman will-power to quit drinking and
smoking (and gambling and all other excesses). To a certain
extent that is true; I have a great deal of will power, but I
also have a method, a way of thinking, which helps.

For some reason, and it may have been a good one at the time,
you have a craving, an overpowering addiction. You love
something more than you love yourself at the present time.

Think “myself or my health.”

In this “New Labour” “Tony Blair” type world, certainly in
Britain, everything is explainable in terms of something else
more convenient. It doesn’t detract from the plain fact that the
Emporer really hasn’t got any clothes on at all. In short, it’s
not stretching the truth, it’s really a very big lie(s).

This is what you are currently doing to yourself, you are living
out a lie in order to placate yourself, in order to make what
you are doing palatable. What you are really doing is killing
yourself a lot quicker, and a lot more painfully than is really
necessary; and by and large no-one gives a damn whether you do
or you don’t; they are too busy with themselves to really and
truly bother about YOU. By and large this is correct. The few
people that possibly do care either havn’t a clue how to help,
or are simply hampered by the realisation that it is only YOU
who can cure it.

There are really no excuses: If you are drinking too much you
are a pain of a drunk. If you are smoking too much you are a
pain of a smoker. If you are gambling too much you are a
liability, just as you are if you are on drugs. You probably
nodded to all these, and felt agreement, so why don’t you
realise that you are putting an intolerable strain on the
people around you, to say nothing of the strain on the Health
Professionals.

WHY?

Because you are too self-indulgant to stop for a minute enjoying
yourselves to see if you are bothering other people, too wrapped
up in yourselves to care about others. There is no magic formula
to giving up an addiction: You stop doing what it is that is
costing you, and every one around you a fortune. You stop
paying out what you havn’t got on things YOU DON’T REALLY NEED.

To break that down further, in order to do this you will need to
changeyour whole way of life, permanently. Make no mistake, if
you are really and truly HAPPY with what you are doing, then
fine, go ahead and do it, but acknowledge that most things you
really enjoy overdoing kill you slowly, and painfully, and most
things done to excess bring attendant guilt. Stop reading now
if you don’t want to quit for good and all or else you are
wasting someone else’s bandwidth who has what it takes when you
have not got the moral fibre.

What it takes is a modicum of will-power combined with a hell of
a lot of common sense. I have had a lot of addictions, I am an
excessive natured person. I find the first step in losing any of
them is to look at them as a phase I have grown out of. I have
matured to such an extent I no longer need their crutch to carry
me onwards.

Generally speaking, most addictions are to make up for or act as
a distraction from the world as it is. We have to learn to face
up to life instead of running away from it, and hiding behind
false barriers built up on the shaky foundations of fleeting
happiness bought at great actual and mental cost via addiction.

We have to move on and grow up and mature; Much as we ourselves
look at kids and feel, “that’s wrong, but they’ll grow out of it
in time”. And they usually do, don’t they, because they see that
long-term they are better off without doing what they are
doing. Why don’t we tell them at the time? Because we know
they’ll tend to do the opposite, and that only they can learn to
be wise in the fullness of time.We can but advise, and sow the
seeds.

Thus it is with ourselves.

We have established that we can expect NO HELP FROM OTHERS. Why
should anyone else help us anyway, it’s our problem. If someone
came to you with “Ive got a terrible problem with my lawyer, and
my cat isn’t eating, my mother-in-law is being funny and I’ve
got the results of my x-rays tomorrow” you might well be a
little concerned, but I bet your first thought would really and
truly be “how can I get away as quickly as I possibly can
without causing offence? “.

So why the hell should others be expected to listen to you
bleating on about helping you to quit your problem.

IT’S YOUR PROBLEM.

Also you will never stop doing anything you really LIKE DOING.
You have to really want to stop for good and ever, not just when
you attain a certain level, because you will only gradually go
back to what you were before, a PAIN.

If you hear an alcoholic say after a year off the booze “I’m ok
for a pint now” what do you REALLY think will happen if he/she
has a pint/short?? You know as well as I do.

So really you have to :

a) Realise it is just you that matters and does anything b)
realise you have to really WANT to quit c) Realise no-one else
is going to do it for you magically. d) realise that it was a
phase you had to live through e) realise that it will definitely
kill you, very very painfully f) realise that you will have
gained from your descent into hell

There are many ways to quit addictions for different people. If
you are reading this they have probably all failed.

Wrong.

YOU HAVE FAILED. MOST of the methods work if you WANT them to
work. I suggest that you treat it as a phase of your life, and
you have learned from this phase and wish to move on and prove
to everyone that you aren’t stupid. Because anyone who knows
that something is killing them and alienating people, and still
does it, is stupid; has not learned one iota from what they have
done have not progressed one jot in their mindset.

Water, pure little tap water, fills you up and is needed more
than you think. Eighty per cent of the human body is water, so
it makes sense to drink it. This is a good start to purifying
your body and mind. Drink a few litres a day. And KEEP BUSY.

Remember, I make zero money out of this article, but it is
probably the best common sense you’ll ever read.

Most articles you will read have a hidden agenda, TO MAKE MONEY
OUT OF ADDICTED PEOPLE. If you quit forever, they’d lose your
money in the future, wouldn’t they? They plan on you quitting
EVERY YEAR. Why not just do it ONCE; I sure as hell would not
want to quit smoking and drinking on a yearly basis!!

WHAT I GAIN:

I just get to have a few more people visiting my website, if you
stop for a second or two to read this article, as I get a kick
out of getting visitors from all over the world, and seeing my
site visitor numbers rise. I guess you could think of it as an
obsession, or a phase I’ll probably grow out of in time!

But it is also very nice if you can help people, and I’ve been
places you really do not want to go, and had things done to me
you really and truly WOULD NOT LIKE. I SHOULD BE DEAD, I am not.

We all KNOW what we should and shouldn’t be doing by and large,
and no-one can make a difference but ourselves.

It is a sad fact of modern life that everyone expects to be able
to do what the hell they like and then someone will bail them
out at the last minute.

Fact is, if you don’t quit, you’ll die young, in pain and alone.

YOUR CHOICE, YOUR LIFE,

but you WILL die sooner than most.

http://www.stiffsteiffs.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

Now I know why people PAY for domain names!!

Isitebuild - professional site building info This man’s site
will teach you how to set up your website whilst slimming!!

malco may 2003

Quicken provides powerful investment record-keeping tools for individual investors. Unfortunately, once you step beyond investments like stocks, bonds, and mutual funds, the mechanics can get a little tricky. Here are some tips for handling common investments in Quicken.

Certificate of deposits/b>

If you purchase a certificate of deposit, you can treat it in the same way that you treat a bond purchase. Basically, certificates of deposits, or CDs, are just bonds issued by banks or financial institutions often for a shorter period of time. For example, you can think of a two-year CD as equivalent to a two-year bond.

Zero coupon bonds

If you invest in bonds, you may know that some bonds don’t actually pay periodic interest. Instead, these bonds, called zero coupon bonds, pay their interest when the bond matures. For zero coupon bonds, you need to annually accrue the interest on the bonds. The annual interest needs to be accrued because, by convention, you report the annual increase in the zero coupon bond’s value as interest earned.

To record accrued interest on a zero coupon bond, record bond interest that accrues in the normal way. In other words, whatever amount shows as being accruedthis should appear on the statement from your brokerrecord it as bond interest income.

After you record the bond interest that’s accrued, you need to record a return of capital transaction that adds this accrued interest back to the value of the bond. The amount of this capital transaction, obviously, needs to equal the accrued interest amount. But there is a twist here: You need to specify the return of capital amount as a negative value. For example, if you accrue $100 of interest on a zero coupon bond, you also need to record a return of capital transaction for the bond equal to -$100.

By recording the return of capital transaction, you in effect transfer the bond interest money from the associated cash account and add it back to the zero coupon bond’s value. In this way the associated cash account shows the correct cash balance and the zero-coupon bond shows the correct cost basis. The zero coupon bond’s cash basis equals the original purchase price plus all the accrued interest that’s been recorded to date.

Derivatives

Derivatives are securities that derive their value from some underlying security. For example, an option to sell a stock, called a put, is a derivative. It derives its value from the underlying security. Another derivative is an option to buy a stock, called a call. You can use Money to keep records of derivatives, such as puts and calls you buy.

In general, derivative record-keeping is quite straightforward. If you buy a derivative, say a put or a call, and later sell the derivative, you simply have a normal investment transaction. You treat the purchase and later the sale in the same way that you treat the purchase and sale of any stock. If you make money, you realize a gain. If you lose money, you realize a loss.

If you buy or sell a put or call and hold the option until it expires, things work almost the same way. However, in this special case, you do need to record a Final Sale transaction, and the sales price is zero. Obviously, if you hold a put or call until it expires, you don’t actually sell the derivative. But you need to record a sale transaction to reflect the fact that the option is no longer worth anything.

These are the basic techniques you need to know for put and call record keepingand record keeping for similar derivativesbut there are two special circumstances in which more complicated record keeping is required.

Selling Puts and Calls

If you sell puts and callsnote that the earlier discussion involves you in investing puts and callsyou need to record the option as a regular buy or sell transaction. In other words, if you sell a put and the person to whom you sell it exercises the put, you record this transaction as a regular sales transaction. Similarly, if you sell a call, you record the transaction as a regular buy transaction.

If you sell a put or call option and the option never gets exercised, you record the amount of money the buyer pays you as Other Income.

Exercising Puts and Calls

Typically, individual investors don’t actually exercise puts and calls that they buy. Instead, they simply sell the option back to the broker. However, you might end up exercising a put or call, and in this case, you need to perform special record keeping.

To record the exercise of a put option, record the sale of the put option at a price equal to zero. This zero-value sale is how you record the expiration of the option. After you have recorded the expiration of the option, you record the sale of the stock in the same way that you record the sale of any stock. Remember that a put is an option to sell stock.

To record the exercise of a call option, record the sale of the call option at a price equal to zero. This zero-value price lets you record the expiration of the option. After you have recorded the expiration, you record a regular buy transaction. Remember that a call option is an option to buy a security.

Precious metals and commodities

You can treat investments in gold and other precious metals, gold coins, agricultural items, and other commodities in the same way that you treat shares of stock. Rather than entering a share price, you enter a price per ounce or a price per bushel. And rather than recording a specific number of shares, you enter a specific number of whatever unit of measure is used to describe the commodity. In the case of gold, for example, you might enter the number of ounces. In the case of an agricultural item, you might enter the number of bushels.

You can treat options to buy or sell commodities in the same way that you treat options to buy or sell securities. The earlier discussion on handling call and put options discusses the techniques you use for this record keeping.

Seattle certified public accountant & author Stephen L. Nelson wrote Quicken for Dummies and more than 100 other books as well. Nelson holds an MBA in Finance and an MS in taxation. His web site is http://www.stephenlnelson.com