It's not just children but adults too who need to be taught the wonders of giving thanks. Or is it too late by then? Taking things and people for granted is a troublesome development nowadays and probably accounts for much of the strife in our society.

As always it is as a result of a setback that you suddenly become graceful about the things that you have left. As human beings we are by default self-centred. By contrast we are craving for acknowledgement and acceptance. So if you cultivate the habit of dropping a well thought of and deserved "thank you" in your conversation, the results are astounding. You have heard it said: "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care." When meeting a stranger a quick mental evaluation occurs in our thoughts to discern friend from foe.

Appreciation from someone you don't know always seems unsincere because they don't have any background with you to warrant any report on your personality - good or bad. Salespeople of all creeds have learned the good lines from Dale Carnegie's book "how to win friends and influence people". In the current society of rampant divorce and suspicion at work the catch phrase is more like "how to alienate strangers and bust your marriage"...

If something is going to budge look at yourself in the mirror. To give is better than to receive. Following up on that, you will find more long lasting satisfaction in releasing someone else to be their best than in focusing on your short term comfort.

Amazing isn't it? Would looking after your mate be the answer for a decaying society? Utopians have mused about that one for ages but the fact is that we live in a spiritual world as well as a physical world. Unless you acknowledge the forces at play which pull your attitude one way or the other you will keep drifting like a cork at sea not knowing who to obey.

Notice I use the world obey here. You thought you were a mature person - master of your own destiny. Just check your past and you will find this is not so. You find it hard to connect with God? You'd rather not relate to God at all, hoping you don't have to be accountable to anybody for your existence? You are pinning away searching for substance and reason in a world that's going nowhere fast? Why don't you rejoice that someone introduced you to Jesus Christ, the Son of God

Taking care of yourself is a reflex we barely need to learn. But comfort can also be called by another name: selfishness.

Just like you see avid joggers running on a brisk winter morning just to get physical you may be curious if some people really willingly stretch themselves in the area of money, education or relationships.

Do you know someone who is reeling from a divorce? Have you offered your home to offer a suitable setup for healing?

Do you follow upcoming trends in your field of expertise so that you may steer your career where new opportunities will be? Or do you wait to be retrenched to do something about it with the hope of receiving a termination package or some government pension?

Is the spare room in your home cluttered with junk, broken furniture and other impediments or it is kept ready to welcome an overnight stay?

Do you make just enough money to support your needs because you want to avoid taxes or do you aim at having enough cash to carry out acting on the cause you feel motivated about?

Do you go the extra mile to be reconciled with a disenfranchised family member or do you ignore their plight?

Have you set aside some extra cash for a rainy day? Would you be willing to use it as guarantee for a person in need you care about?

If you run your own business do you shy away from hiring staff - cruising along nicely just by yourself, or do you see your ability to instruct and provide employment for others?

Do you volunteer to teach at your local school or do you waste your spare time watching degrading reality shows to ease your boredom?

Do you speak to the cash register operator when you do the shopping or do you rush home to connect with social media - folks you can never see face to face?

Do you know people next door, do you keep in touch with local events, do you participate in local politics or have you decided to think your vote does not matter?

The choice is up to you: you may choose to venture out of your comfort zone at your own choosing or at the worst possible time you will be thrown in the pool because you ignored all the chances beforehand.

Bread of Life

If you are billing your expertise and your time for your business you know how disconcerting it can be for a customer when they receive their invoice. How can they have the assurance that what they are being charged for is value for money? How can they feel confident that their invoice is a proper account of work actually performed?

The answer is to let them know what is happening. Instead of delaying for the end of the month and cause them to be flabbergasted when they finally get your invoice why not give them real-time access to your timesheets? Not on my watch! Not really. Either you are fudging the actual time you spent on that job or your hourly rate is too high because you don't want to disclose how long you actually wasted on this task.

Customers simply like to be told the truth and if you spent 10 hours on a job and are merely charging 5 it ought to be documented. If the senior manager could have done the job in two hours at a top hourly rate but a new recruit spent twice as long at half the price it is worth letting the client know.

Some IT providers are so fidgety about their charging problems that they send their staff to work on location when they might as well have done their task in house with proper supervision. The concept is that if the customer spots our people at their place they will get some good vibes that we are actually busy on their job.

Baloney! How can you thing that way? Trust is missing in this case. The best way to clarify the situation about justifying your hours and your prices as a provider is to be pro-active by providing the logs of who did what and where. What you need is a system from timesheets to time billing where your customers can see your timesheets. Later they can also review how much time was spent and at what rate. They can see if the contract is still under budget or not before it runs out. You might have decided that the project will not cost more than x dollars and that any extra will be borne by you. You may also charge hardware components or software subscriptions as part of your service.

In the mid 1800s painters making a living out of portraiture experimented with photography. Photography to them was a new technique where they could re-use their skills in image composition. The camera was held on a stand and the operator was able to exactly frame and adjust the image under a black cloth to prevent reflexions.

Would it be that the lack of colour forces the mind to appreciate a good composition instead?

The only situation in life where we see in black and white is at dark or in badly lit conditions like in a cavern. Therefore subconsciously black and white may be associated with unease or fear.

Black and white gives a picture an unusual degree of abstraction. Your eye never runs independently of your mind. A smooth graduation in the levels of gray is quite suggestive in rendering volume or even temperature. In yesteryears of chemical darkrooms the photographer would mask some parts of the negative to give more time for some rich graduation to appear in the light areas.

A black and white portrait has always more standing than the same image in color. Yet again the image of a child is more attractive in color unless you focus on the plight of the orphan the poor or the sick. A black and white portrait of a lady makes you to concentrate on her stare as the makeup has a lesser impact. Looking into someone's eyes is a pathway into looking into their soul. Black and white portraits have this unusual effect.

The removal of colour in a composition or a landscape has a dramatic appeal. The canopy of trees quickly turns into a silhouette. A grey sky heralds rain or worse thunderstorm even if the image was captured on a good sunny day. Still objects tussle with each other through shapes and beams of light.

Photography can suspend life out of time but this is even more pronounced in black and white. It is just recently that newspapers print in color. Photo journalism has come up with a steady tradition of celebrities and leaders providing instant recollection of their faces precisely because those portraits are etched in our memory in black and white.

See Photo Exhibition - nature for some fine illustrations.

A logo is to a business what clothes are to an individual. You have to wear it! It is how you are being seen in the marketplace. People say "First impressions last" - so ensure the first impression is a good one.

In the not so distant past corporate symbols used to be specially crafted typefaces often including a graphic element. They were mostly black and white and often played on optical illusions where the white space became itself a part of the design due to its surrounding borders.

Today with the advent of colour, logos are a de-facto corporate coat of arms rather than a business stamped signature. This is a fashion and I guess you have to tag along with the mood of the day but remember: Do you necessarily have to employ all the colours of the rainbow just because you have full colour printing?

Can your logo be used for marking on uniforms? How does it show in black and white when transmitted through a fax machine? Does your logo provide the same instant recognition blown up large as signwriting on a vehicle or reduced to fit for a cassette label?

You can do some clever animation for the web and for audio visuals on DVD?. With such a broad range of applications the task is to maintain the same business identity across the board. The worst situation is to use one logo one place and something different somewhere else. It destroys your identity. It makes people feel that you are unreliable with no well defined business objective. Yes some large institutions have renewedtheir logos recently but they did it in a concerted effort.

Some business owners make the mistake of having a consultation with their employees to pick from a selection of logo designs. You will get as many points of view as there are voters. What is important is how people remember you out there in the street and how you differenciate from your competitors.

Here are some good Logo Designs ideas.

Being in the wrong neighbourhood on the internet can be as detrimental as being invisible. There is no shortcut way to form your backlinks inventory in a flash.

The web in only 10 years has turned into a very mature marketplace. Long behind are the times of the dotcom boom where the sky was the limit. Now that the dust has settled down we can take stock of the various trends that passed across our marketing horizon and pick the good ideas from the bad ones.

Banner Ads

Animated GIFs were the pride of many graphic designers who did a fine job of getting the visitor's attention but the response rate after a while fell to abysmal levels. Blatant advertising has turned out to be an overused technique. People hate to be interrupted in the event of their web surfing. Over time indivuduals have built a blindness to anything that flashes and grabs.

Link Portals

Akin to a bookmarking website, web addresses with one page after another of links have gone by the wayside. Crawlers no longer tally links found there. Users select to do a query rather than going to a favourite portal and then dig down to their area of interest - only to be disappointed with poor quality sites not really related to their search.

Reciprocal Links

Do something for me and I'll do likewise for you was the motto of roll-your-own web builders. Since few people write straight in html anymore, there has been a split between the techies and the promoters resulting in the dominance of search engine advertising. Reciprocal links were also cause for foul play. People would put up a link for you and take it away soon after you returned the compliment in good faith.

Commenting on Blogs

The boom of blogging platforms 5 years ago witnessed another form of abuse: planting stupid URLs in every blog opened for comments you could dig out. The response was swift. Fast on the back of counter spam measures people tried to streamline the stamping out of such ill. The no-follow link was born. You could click on it but it wouldn't register in your website ranking.

Article Marketing

This is the flow of the free economy - attract people with a piece of some value to get them to return for another piece worth buying. Composing some relevant information in order to build your repute as an authoritative source gives you the opportunity to leave a plug at the end of the article telling people what you do.

Commission Schemes

Pay per click (PPC) advertising is plagued by fraud. Competitors might click on your ads to eat up your advertising budget. Unscrupulous website operators might get people to click on their ads to bump up their revenue (thinking a different IP address might hide their tracks). Instead of rewarding people for each click on their link, affiliate marketing schemes pay a commission on each purchase generated by that link. A cookie is set on the visitor's browser to remember the initial referral in case the sale is made at a subsequent visit.

being rewarded for generating traffic

To optimize your website in the sight of search engines your focus will be two-fold:

On page optimisation

It is quite unsettling to observe that a machine - not a person, is going to pass judgement on the value of your website. The positive side is that it is executed by a computer program which is the same for everybody so that at least we have a level playing field.

In order to ascertain what your web page is on about we use the concept of keywords. It is a token encapsulating your field of endeavour. How it appears and how often will be the yardstick to figure out how precisely you are really related to that category.

The crawler will massage that data to rate your web pages. You can get a feel of how good you are with the SEO tool at bookmarking directory

Off page optimisation

How can a blind, mindless computer find out how accurate is your call to fame for the keyword you have been using above? Easy - by just checking what others are saying about your website on the web. Ouch! That hurts because that is one thing you have no say about.

A backlink is any link on the net pointing back to you. Just like you pass traffic to other thematically related sites there is bound to appear some information about what you do or say together with a link back to your domain.

How that happens is the dark art of web marketing and the search engines count the amount and quality of links pointing to you as an indicator to distinguish between you and your opposition.

It is not only the quantity of links on the net which is being added to calculate your page ranking - it is also the anchor text. This gives the computer program an idea about the keywords you really belong to against what you say about yourself on your website. If many pages out there fail to match your domain with say keyword A then your call to that keyword on your own site is challenged.

Another ingredient is the neighbourhood your backlinks come from. If you are a realtor and your backlinks appear from sites also loaded with hordes of tattoo parlours or gambling propositions (in other words totally unrelated activities) then the weight of those backlinks is lost since it is plain to see that they did not come from holistic marketing focus but from a conspicuous desire to stuff (or worse purchase) links in a hurry.

Doing your bookkeeping in cyberspace? What a novel idea! What would get people to do that?

In an ever fluid environment where being in touch is more paramount than where you reside, online bookkeeping is the way to go and is in fact filling a gap.

Being in touch with your records regardless of where you are can save you an embarrassing situation if you default on a payment because you couldn't remember the date or the amount.

If you run a business or a club there might be a need for simultaneous persons to update receipts and expenses from several locations in an orderly fashion. Setting up a virtual network and deploying some elaborate software can be daunting and costly. These features are a given with a web-based application.

accounting on the go does away with several levels of threats like hard disk breakdown, a stolen laptop, computer viruses and so on. If you use the web for online transactions the next logical step is to use the internet to access your bookkeeping records even from an iPhone.

This concept feeds into the grand idea of cloud computing where users no longer want maintaining their own PC operations. The shift is to use farms of dedicated servers with fail-safe storage and non-stop power supplies.

Strangely for folks who have been using computers in the 1970's this was the starting point In the past all you had was a video display unit connected to a mainframe. Later in the 1980s the IBM PC revolution hit. People demanded extra flexibility in their reports. Frustration ended when they could re-massage their information in a Lotus 123 spreadsheet. It looks like after 40 years we have gone full circle... History has a habit of repeating itself.

Apart from what the pundits are getting across to us the marketing motto is this: "just like microwave ovens and instant - It's all about comfort." If you use the net to check current affairs, listen to music, read your email, apply for jobs and whatever else, the next logical step is to use it to also do your accounting.

What about security? Many services use your email address as your username. They send you your password to that address to make sure it is not a dummy token but indeed does reach you. Apart from that connection they know absolutely nothing about you - neither do they want to. You can also change your email address at will.

In case you have not set any goals and are going through your existence casually you won’t be frustrated. As the saying goes: "Blessed are those who aim for nothing for they shall not be disappointed".

Does that mean that life is a mad race? It’s all a matter of balance. How do you know if you are moving forward or slipping backward if you don't have a yardstick to apply?

It's not simply folks who are trapped in an addictive cycle who suffer from the failure to set clear and achievable goals – it's also all of us who fail to pledge to ourselves and ensure that our circumstances do improve.

Now here is the catch – ready? It's called discipline! The bad news is that unless you establish limits around your life you are going nowhere fast. The good news is that if you manage to rein-in the rebel within you, you will go places.

So how do you make it happen? Can I point you to this goal setting workshop. It is your goal mentoring website where you can describe your projects to be. More importantly it will be your assessment of achievement where you can measure your progress. Where you spend your resources speaks a lot about your commitment to reach your goals. Having to keep a record of where you spend each of those precious commodities will cause you to discover a few things about your character.

Two consequences of this disciplined approach is that you will start managing your time and managing your money. Welcome to the real world of achievers! Life is an obstacle course. Don’t just start the race – finish the race! Obstacles come up against good people for no fault of their own. Turn your back on the past. Unlearn bad habits caused by your past failures and take hold of your future. If you don't begin believing in yourself who will? You hold the formula to your future no matter your age, your looks, your education, etc…

If life is a challenge then what is worth going after? Unless you are sold out on achieving your purpose your energy will disappear at the first obstacle. Expect setbacks – they are part of life. If you have opposition it only means one thing: you are on earth and it only depends on you to find paths to get where you ought to be.

Learn from children. Nobody said to them; "You can't do that." They dream and role play through games all day long. They act out and speak what is in their mind.

Reconnect with the little one you once were and realise your potential.

What can you gain from an computer trading robot? Is it any better or worse than tossing a coin? Contrary to common thinking an algorithmic trading system relying only on technical analysis can unearth a good number of good trades.

Why is it so? To begin with let us be specific. Not all stocks that you find to trade are worth putting your money at risk. That's in fact a bonus because you have a limited amount of capital to trade with – therefore you have to be quite specific about what you pick. Individual stocks especially those with a small capitalization are to be avoided unless you have industry knowledge. Indices and very large stocks behave well under the scrutiny of technical analysis. Even better still commodities have the reputation to be the most tame. In Spring 2010 a commodity such as platinum provided close to 100% returns in only 9 months. Imagine doubling your money in one year.

A trading robot doesn’t care about a company balance sheet (or what remains of it after the creative accountants have done their magic on it.) As you have heard: "Everything you need to know is already factored in the price!" An automated trading system doesn't panic whether or not to be in or out of the market. It is constantly in the market reversing from long to short and back again. It does not give in to market hysteria but it does take advantage of big moves in the market by being brave enough to change side early in a trend.

You might think such an algorithmic trading strategy is the prerogative of players who can afford to hire scores of computer geeks. Check out Trading Pal. It runs on a 9 months rolling window of data. For each instrument traded a chart and a log of trades with a tally of gains and losses is available.

Even though there are many items to choose from people tend to trade in an industry or market they know about. They mentally recall the last high or the last low over the last few months. Regardless comparing your own trades with what Trading Pal performed can be quite a wake up call to the shortcomings of your own homegrown trading methodology (If you can call it that when all you do is give in to your fears.)