Archive for February, 2009

“Golden handshakes” make top executives of ailing companies rich

by Ades on February 28, 2009 in Business with 11 Comments

When the companies are crashing left and right and losing literally billions of dollars in this crisis, who gains the most? It’s the top management of these companies! Because most of the Fortune 500 companies have a thing called “golden handshakes” for their top executives.

A golden handshake is a clause in an executive employment contract that provides the executive with a significant severance package in the case that the executive loses his or her job through firing, restructuring, or even scheduled retirement. This can be in the form of cash, equity, and other benefits, and is often accompanied by an accelerated vesting of stock options.

Typically, “golden handshakes” are offered only to high-ranking executives by major corporations and may entail a value measured in millions of dollars. Wikipedia

CEO’s and top executives of troubled companies have been getting millions of dollars as their compensation for their job loss.

Here is a nice graphical illustration of these statistics. It’s just amazing.

What is your opinion on these compensations, and their amount? Do you think it’s fair? Do you think too much is being given out? Appreciate your feedbacks. I will hold my opinion as not to skew your answers.

P.S. The author wrongly used the phrase “golden parachutes” instead of “golden handshakes”. Golden parachutes refer to the compensations for the job loss by executives due to acquisitions or mergers specifically. However it has been used interchangeably with golden handshakes a lot during this crisis.

BackupUrl.com – capture a snapshot of any website

by Ades on February 27, 2009 in Online Tools with 21 Comments

BackupUrl.com is a website that allows you to capture a snapshot of any website (URL) and store it for you to access anytime in the future.

What is it useful for? I guess you could use it store different versions of your website, or you can also use it to prove stuff, for example; if someone denies that your banner was never removed from their website but you found it to be otherwise on certain days, you could capture it and show him that your banner was in fact missing from the page(s) etc.

Since it’s a third party application there is no way someone could alter the results, thus making it a reliable source of evidence.

Website: backupurl.com

Blogs do make money…

by Ades on February 26, 2009 in Blogging Tips with 16 Comments

Author of Fake Steve Jobs blog (now discontinued) has an interesting article on Newseek. He thinks that blogs do not make money and bloggers shouldn’t have false hopes for making tons of money with their blogs.

For two years I was obsessed with trying to turn a blog into a business. I posted 10 or 20 items a day to my site, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, rarely taking a break. I blogged from cabs, using my BlackBerry. I blogged in the middle of the night, having awakened with an idea. I rationalized this insane behavior by telling myself that at the end of this rainbow I would find a huge pot of gold. But reality kept interfering with this fantasy. My first epiphany occurred in August 2007, when The New York Times ran a story revealing my identity, which until then I’d kept secret. On that day more than 500,000 people hit my site—by far the biggest day I’d ever had—and through Google’s AdSense program I earned about a hundred bucks. Over the course of that entire month, in which my site was visited by 1.5 million people, I earned a whopping total of $1,039.81. Soon after this I struck an advertising deal that paid better wages. But I never made enough to quit my day job. Eventually I shut down—not for financial reasons, but because Steve Jobs appeared to be in poor health. I walked away feeling burned out and weighing 20 pounds more than when I started. I also came away with a sneaking suspicion that while blogs can do many wonderful things, generating huge amounts of money isn’t one of them. read the full article

Well, I believe that it all depends on your objective of your blog actually. If your blog’s main objective is solely to make money then it’s a very difficult situation indeed. Because just like him, you may end up wasting your time blogging about something that is not really beneficial to you and won’t be of any benefit in the future. And when you shut down your blog, you will have this huge regret. Because it took away your precious time and effort, and all for nothing. But if you do blog for other reasons, for example to share your knowledge and expertise, to spread your idea and thoughts, to build and establish your brand etc. then, even if you shut down your blog in the future, you know that your time and effort spent for your blog was not in vain.

So, if you are blogging solely to make money, then spend some time thinking and formulating a strategy on how you can transform your blog from i-must-blog type of blog to i-enjoy-blogging. Making money should not be the only objective for your blog.

Here is two posts that I wrote while back that are very related to this topic:

Gold prices to quadruple by 2010, Chris Wood

by Ades on February 24, 2009 in Make Money, News with 16 Comments

Chris Wood is a person who has predicted US Mortgage Crisis back in 2003. He is a managing director and chief strategist of the broking firm CLSA.

His latest prediction is that, by 2010, gold prices will quadruple to $3500 (per ounce) from the current $994 (per once) price. That’s some news!

The collapse of securitization is a much more deflationary situation in the U.S. than anything seen in Japan when the bubble collapsed in the early 1990s…

Gold may be the safest haven for investors as policy makers accelerate responses to the crisis, devaluing currencies versus hard assets such as gold in the process, said Wood. Gold is likely to more than quadruple from the current level of $986 per ounce currently to $3,500 in 2010, he said. Bloomberg

Back in Malaysia, Datuk Husam Musa, Kelantan Exco suggested that Malaysia should convert its reserves from foreign currencies to gold dinar.

“Malaysia can obtain as much as RM162.6 billion ($1 = RM3.6) for this year if the reserves were in the form of gold dinars following the rise in the price of gold globally.

“If we follow the current value, one gold dinar is worth RM518 with the lowest value being one Dirham (RM5),” said the Kelantan State Exco, Datuk Husam Musa in tabling a working paper at the Gold Dinar Seminar 2009 at University Malaysia (UM) here today.

“The price of one gold dinar this year increased 11.07 percent to RM512.20 compared to RM461.15 last year,” he said. Bernama

Should you invest in gold?

According to Chirstopher Wood investing in gold may be “the safest haven for investors”, and many other economists share the same opinion. Here is the graph of gold prices for the last 10-years. Having said that, do your own research and seek professional advice if you are serious about investing in gold.

Sketchory – 250,000 free drawings

by Ades on February 22, 2009 in Links with 10 Comments

Sketchory provides 250,000 free drawings which can be freely shared, in unlimited number, with the additional freedom that you can use up to 5,000 sketches even commercially. Founders of this project are Dominik Schmid, Philipp Lenssen and Nikolai Kordulla.

Drawings were collected from another project of theirs called SketchSwap where people can draw things and submit, in exchange they will get one random sketch from someone else.

Website: http://sketchory.com

gmail themes

by Ades on February 21, 2009 in miniblog with 3 Comments

gmail now allows you to choose your own colors for the custom theme, check “themes” tab.

Facebooks comments replacing WordPress comments soon?

by Ades on February 21, 2009 in Blogging Tips, Business Ideas, Online Advertising, SEO & Promotion with 18 Comments

With Facebook’s new commenting widget you can put comments box on any page and allow people to comment using their facebook login. Great thing is that, the comments will appear on their own profiles just like any other notification message in the Facebook.

Do you know what that means to you as a blogger? It means a great opportunity to promote your blog on the facebook for free. Imagine 20 people commented on your blog and these 20 comments appeared on their own facebook profile and seen by their network of friends. E.g “Adam commented on AdesBlog saying….” Obviously there will be people who click on the link and come to your blog.

Mmhh… I think I have to sit and figure out how to replace my wordpress comments with this facebook comments widget. If you find a way how to do it, do let me know. Because it needs to correspond to every post on your blog accordingly. I am not sure if that is possible. It would be better if facebook team could come up with wp plugin for replacing wp comments.

The widget does support comments from people who do not have facebook accounts. So that’s great too. It means you won’t lose anything.

Here is a video by facebook engineers on how to setup this comments widget on your site, (might be little techie for beginners):

For more info you can go to here, developer wiki or forums.

Learnerade – Genius in 28 Steps

by Ades on February 18, 2009 in General with 10 Comments

Sufiah’s story is well known to many, especially in UK and Malaysia. Because, currently she resides in UK and her mother is originally from Malaysia. Her story is long and sad.

Sufiah was accepted to Oxford University at age 12, but due to family and other problems, the situation grew to be too much for Sufiah and she ran away from Oxford at age 15. The rest of the story you can read it yourself here.

What I want to mention here is something else. Halimahton Yusof is the mother of Sufiah, who basically homeschooled all her children and made them extremely successful (see screenshot below).

Sufiah and my other children did not want to stay at school, as they were already so far ahead that the school did not cater to their needs.

Things seemed to work out well in spite of our difficult circumstances, and my children ended up being many years ahead of their peers. Halimahton Yusof

After all the media attention Halimahton Yusof was getting tons of emails from supporters, well wishers and others on how she made her children so successful. What technique that she used etc.

So, instead of answering them individually, she wrote a book called “Genius in 28 Steps“. In this book she shares her technique on how to help children achieve extraordinary results at an early age. It costs just $10.90 and it is in the form an ebook.

My experience has shown that any ordinary child can achieve these things — but this is only possible if the child’s potential is nurtured in the right way.

The techniques I use are simple enough that anyone can use them, and yet they are extremely effective. And now your own children can also benefit from these techniques.

In my digital book, Genius in 28 Steps, I have refined and distilled my teaching methods into 28 key principles. Everything I know about teaching children to excel is contained within the pages of Genius in 28 Steps, and I hope that you can use this book to help your children fulfil their true potential. Halimahton Yusof

What is a ten dollar? It’s a lunch for somebody, it’s a pack of cigarette for someone else… But for parents with young kids, it’s a small investment towards their children’ future, that could potentially bring huge rewards. So, if you are a young parent (like me) this is a must buy book. (I am sure bachelor bloggers can also benefit from the book, to become genius blogger perhaps? ;)

Website: http://www.learnerade.com

2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Save as PDF

by Ades on February 16, 2009 in Software with 13 Comments

If you are using Microsoft Office 2007, you can add this free add-on from Microsoft for saving files as PDF (see screenshot). Once installed it will allow you to save files as PDF in all eight 2007 Microsoft Office programs:

Microsoft Office Access 2007
Microsoft Office Excel 2007
Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007
Microsoft Office OneNote 2007
Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007
Microsoft Office Publisher 2007
Microsoft Office Visio 2007
Microsoft Office Word 2007

If you want to convert other files, see the post below.

Online Tool: Free Docx to PDF Converter

by Ades on February 16, 2009 in Online Tools with 13 Comments

There are many “free” online conversion tools on the net, but they make your life difficult. While they are free, most of them will force you to wait before you get your converted file. And that spoils the whole “free concept” thing.

But this open source tool JODConverter seems great. No BS, no nonsense – just upload and get your file converted.