You may not be thinking about your tax return right now, but summer is a great time to start planning for next year. Organized records not only make preparing your return easier, but may also remind you of relevant transactions, help you prepare a response if you receive an IRS notice, or substantiate items on your return if you are selected for an audit. Tax Time Stress: IRS offers Tax Tips to Reduce Tax-Time Stress

Joe Winett reports that Dave McFadden, creator of "The Time Channel" spoof, passed away on Friday. Our deepest condolences to his family and friends. Dave was also part of "Make Me Smile", a comedy show taped in the basement of the Tulsa Library.

According to a Lou Harris survey, the amount of leisure time enjoyed by the average American has shrunk 37 percent since 1973, while the the average workweek (including commuting) has increased from fewer than 41 hours to nearly 47 hours....

Yesterday, I had lots of tasks and projects on my To Do list that I was working on diligently, until 11:30 a.m. or so. That's when I got a call from my daughter's school telling me Amanda had a bad...

For years, I've been saying that I'm going to relaunch this blog and relaunch my website and frankly given life and work, it just hasn't happened. But my life is in major flux right now, and I'm trying out a...

Published at LXer: The Linux 6.12 merge window is wrapping up today with the release of Linux 6.12-rc1 in the coming hours. This is going to be a heck of an exciting kernel. Read More......

As I write this, outside the sun is burning lazily down on a quiet, sleepy and green corner of Manchester as the day draws to a close. Fine weather, often makes me think about an alternate career I considered about a decade ago. I thought I’d share the story.

In 2002, the dot.com crash was in full effect. The internet era looked like it might be over for a while. As a software developer specialising in internet technologies, I was in a little bit of trouble. Whilst contracts appeared occasionally, I realised I was looking at 6-7 months of unemployment.

Not having any savings, and as yet mentally unprepared for the path of entrepreneurship I have now followed for half a decade, I was a little stumped as to how to actually pay my food bills, etc. I applied for barwork, but there was none forthcoming. I looked at minimum wage jobs, perhaps as a cleaner, but was “over qualified”. One CTO of an ISP I interviewed with thought I was too bright for the role he had in his firm, and that I would quickly become bored.

One contract I acquired however, led to an interesting discovery. I was hired by a small startup in Eccles to help “fix” a betting platform. It was a clone of Betfair.com, which was still relatively young at the time. I was hired for three reasons:

1. I knew how to fix the problem - their Bulgarian programmer was an idiot who didn’t understand what he was doing
2. I knew quite a bit about horse racing and gambling, and therefore had “domain expertise”
3. I was cheap

Since the age I’ve been legally allowed to gamble, I’ve been interested in it as a maths problem. Books on technical analysis in FOREX trading - one of which I’ve been reading recently - fascinate me. I had developed quite an eye for reading form, had become a better than “good” poker player, and enjoyed “the game” and all that came with it. I still have an impressive collection of books on sports betting and horse racing. Gambling, quite simply, is something I have always found a little bit fun.

An example of how confident I was: A few years before the events below unfolded, my mother was very concerned about my “gambling problem”. I did not have a gambling problem, beyond the fact I gambled, and this alone was enough to scare her. Sat in a small cafe in the town I grew up in, she decided to try and prove a point. She handed me £10 of her own money - money she could scarecely afford to fritter away at the time - and told me to go and bet on a horse with it there and then. If it lost, I would agree to repay her the £10 and to stop gambling. I didn’t quite understand her logic, but I agreed. I walked to the bookmakers around the corner, backed £5 each way a 4/1 chance in a jumps race, and then sat and watched as it won by 3 lengths. I returned to the cafe with my mother’s winnings, and she became silent as I handed her the cash.

So when I turned up at a rather dingy office in Eccles and discovered Betfair, I was transfixed. The major appeal to me was simple:

It allowed you to take the position of a bookmaker.

Bookmakers say that the moment somebody has to make a choice about which competitor will win a challenge, they are at a disadvantge. That means the bookmakers put themselves in a position where they don’t have to make a choice, they just balance the odds with the bets coming in.

The bookmakers generally don’t care who wins - they will “lay a book” at odds that mean whoever wins, they make a guaranteed profit. Some of them - especially on big prize handicaps - will often “lay to a common liability” which means they might lose some money if a favourite wins, but make a much larger profit if an outsider wins. A few don’t bother risk managing and just hope it all balances out. There are some truly horrifying scare stories about the last group.

The advantage they have however - encompassed in a mathematical measure of odds we call “the over-round” is that they are pretty much guaranteed to make money in the long run.

I opened a Betfair account, deposited £20, and laid a book on a race. I made 27p. It might not sound significant, but the important thing is, because of how I had done this, my risk was effectively zero by the time the race started. It was a “free” 27p that had magically been produced out of thin air.

I dived into the subject, buying whatever I could about bookmaking. I spent a lot of time - and frankly money - understanding the different conditions different laying approaches were best in. Like most geeks, once I choose to learn a subject, I go deep - I try and completely understand the whole domain. This was no different. I read up on the history of bookmaking, the backgrounds to important bookmakers, the maths, the probabilities, the strategies, and spoke to whoever I could about it that understood “the game”.

With my work done at the company, I now had an abundance of free time to put some of this learning to effect.

I was able to lay - and sometimes back using a method called “Dutching” on “under-round” books - over that summer out of Internet cafes (I had no connection to the Internet at home at the time), and cover my living expenses. I ate and drank well, I had a comfortable apartment in Manchester city centre, and was learning about being a bookmaker on a razor thin margin of 102% over-round.

About this time, I thought about becoming a professional bookmaker. The lifestyle of being on-course appealed to me almost as much as the 130% over-round (i.e the roughly 30% profit on capital staked pretty much guaranteed to a bookmaker), and I started to enquire about how to make it happen. I would need £100,000-£150,000 to get started at the courses I wanted to get started at which meant it would have to be a long-term plan. I contemplated assisting established names in the meantime, but without a driving license or a car, I was going to have a problem there as well.

And then the dream was interrupted, and all hell broke lose. 

When you’re trading all day on Betfair, you’re moving money around in order to make just a little tiny bit more money. You are not improving the planet, or people’s lives. It’s boring, and frankly, it’s selfish. Your ego takes a hit, even when you’re winning.

I didn’t have the equipment available to automate the process (despite being a software developer), so for me it was about just grinding it out, hour after hour, day after day. I would get up at 10am, buy and read a copy of the Racing Post, head to an Internet cafe for midday, and lay books on around 20 races until at least 5pm, and during the Summer as late as evening racing allowed. Sometimes I even laid books on US races in the evening, or started earlier and managed to catch races in timezones some hours to the East of us.

It was soul-destroying and boring work. I lost discipline. I stopped managing my risks, and suddenly started to gamble a little to make things more “interesting”. I rode out a lucky streak for a few weeks.

And then I took some losses. I don’t like losing. Nobody does. The original plan said losses were impossible, but I was now being reckless. It was more exciting. But stupid. But the losses hurt.

I started to chase the losses. Any experienced gambler will tell you that this is the beginning of madness.

When you lose, walk away, and accept it. It’s as a good a lesson for life as it is for gambling: don’t take it personally. Right then though, the “red mist” gamblers talk about descended, and it stuck with me for days.

The numbers accumulated as loss after loss built up. Three days later, as an unemployed - perhaps unemployable - software developer, I had lost just over £5,200. Given my goal was to make just £3 per race, this was a rather large sum.

I stopped, stood back, and took a deep breath. I went and decorated a friend’s bathroom for some spare cash to live on and to get away from the screen for a day or two.

I thankfully got a job, and recouped my losses in a more traditional manner, and until the mist that had enveloped me had left, stayed away from Betfair.

Betfair now has an API - a means for a software developer to automate trading strategies. I’ve put off coding anything against it for years for a few reasons. Principally, the environment is now very different as a trading arena to what it was (the liquidity makes the markets zero-sum games, in essence, and that means profitability is harder to come by), and frankly I have other more interesting things to spend my time working on that are likely to make me more money, sooner. I still ponder it though - an automated solution can be developed calmly and unemotionally. It should work quite well.

That said, on evenings like this, when the weather is fine, and a great Derby will be with us at 4pm tomorrow, I think back to those dreams of becoming a bookmaker. Being in the ring at Epsom tomorrow - or even better, on the rails - would not be a terrible way to make a living. Providing you manage your risk properly, of course…

… but then I remember, as with most things, my Mum was probably right.

Learn how to use Google Forms as a time tracking app for studies and analyze how much time you spend on each subject. You can also analyze the study pattern with charts inside Google Sheets.

The post How to Track your Study Time with Google Forms and Sheets appeared first on Digital Inspiration.

I am excited to announce easily my most sophisticated widget ever, Sundial. In the past I have sort of hacked my widgets together. This project was for work, so I was really thorough and did things according to the Apple guidelines (imagine that!). What is Sundial, you ask? Sundial makes it easy to track time on projects through Basecamp. Check it out!

Germany, end of 2013: dark clouds hanging over the heads of analog musicians. A popular music magazine found out that the number of rehearsal rooms and venues for young bands is significantly decreased. Especially the situation for rehearsal rooms is dramatically: too less, too expensive, too dirty and hard to reach. But in cultivated countries there should be room for many different types of culture not only mainstream ...

Welcome! It's thanks to people like you that we're able to save our radio heritage and make it freely available through this website....

The good folks from Bandai Namco Europe have sent us details of the new action RPG That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime Isekai Chronicles...

Rocana's recent experiences at ISKCON Portland temple.

Another controversial green belt housing development is under the spotlight this week after the recent explosion of objection to the plan for Top Wighay Farm in Hucknall...

Statistics have revealed that building new homes being built on brownfield land is at an all time high.

* ACOP - Get paid each time you complete a survey and win money in monthly drawings just for being a member.

A new episode (6th) of my one-hour “Bluegrass and Old Time Music Radio Show” in now available. The show is brodacast four times every Saturday: 8-9 am, 10-11 am, Noon to 1 pm and 2-3 pm Eastern Daylight Time. Remember, if you’re busy and can’t listen to the show, it is also available for download […]

A new episode (8th) of my one-hour “Bluegrass and Old Time Music Radio Show” in now available. The show is broadcast four times every Saturday: 8-9 am, 10-11 am, Noon to 1 pm and 2-3 pm Eastern Daylight Time. Remember, if you’re busy and can’t listen to the show, it is also available for download […]

A new episode (11th) of my one-hour “Bluegrass and Old Time Music Radio Show” in now available. The show is broadcast four times every Saturday: 7-8 am, 9-10 am, 11 am to noon and 1-2 pm Eastern Time. Remember, if you’re busy and can’t listen to the show, it is also available for download as […]

A new episode (12th) of my one-hour “Bluegrass and Old Time Music Radio Show” in now available. The show is broadcast four times every Saturday: 7-8 am, 9-10 am, 11 am to noon and 1-2 pm Eastern Time. Remember, if you’re busy and can’t listen to the show, it is also available for download as […]

A new episode (15th) of my bi-weekly “Bluegrass and Old Time Music Radio Show” in now available. The show is broadcast four times every Saturday: 7-8 am, 9-10 am, 11 am to noon and 1-2 pm Eastern Time. Remember, if you’re busy and can’t listen to the show, it is also available for download as […]

A new episode (15th) of my bi-weekly “Bluegrass and Old Time Music Radio Show” in now available. The show is broadcast four times every Saturday: 7-8 am, 9-10 am, 11 am to noon and 1-2 pm Eastern Time. Remember, if you’re busy and can’t listen to the show, it is also available for download as […]

A new episode (16th) of my bi-weekly “Bluegrass and Old Time Music Radio Show” in now available. The show is broadcast four times every Saturday: 7-8 am, 9-10 am, 11 am to noon and 1-2 pm Eastern Time. Remember, if you’re busy and can’t listen to the show, it is also available for download as […]

This episode is about songwriters and their importance in old time and bluegrass music.

Multimedia-Downloads.com is a collection of only the best audio converters, rippers, editors, recorders, burners, text to speech, video encoders, decoders, DVD rippers, DVD burners, image batch converters and editors, and more.

10 Tips for Effective Time Management
Does having "too much to do and not enough time to do it" sound familiar? If so, it's time to work smarter, not harder so you can increase productivity decrease stress and have more time for fun! Leading Brisbane recruitment-to-recruitment company, Galaxy Recruitment offers the following tips to help you get the most out of your time.

1. Set Goals and Plan
As the old saying goes, "by failing to plan, you plan to fail". Set your goals and develop a realistic plan for your direction.
2. Prioritise and use a To-Do list
Differentiate between the urgent tasks that produce short-term outcomes, and the vital tasks that produce long-term outcomes. Rank your priorities by numbers, colours, or symbols - use a system that suits you.
3. Learn to say "no"
It's a small word, yet many people find it extremely difficult to say "no"! By saying "yes" to everyone just to please them, you may end up overcommitting and letting them down instead. If it helps, remember to phrase your response so that you are saying "no" to the project and not the person. e.g "No, I can't take this project on right now. I simply don't have the bandwidth to complete the task properly."
4. Delegate
If you can, delegate routine activities that aren't part of your core competency. Remember you are delegating, not abdicating!
5. Avoid procrastination
Procrastination usually sets in when a task is perceived to be difficult to achieve. Try breaking your task into smaller milestones that you can satisfy systematically. Crossing off these smaller tasks as you complete them helps you make track of your progress and keeps the end outcome within sight.
6. Be flexible
Be realistic about your goals and allow time for interruptions, distractions and the unplanned "emergency" - they are inevitable.
7. Plan around your "Prime Time"
If possible, plan your tasks in accordance with the the time of the day that you perform at your peak. If you're a "morning person" plot your work schedule around fulfilling the challenging tasks during the day, and the more routine aspects of your work such as data entry, responding to emails or making telephone calls during the afternoon. If you're more of an afternoon or "night owl" reverse the order.
8. Keep a journal with you at all times
Always be ready to write down your best ideas in an instant - you never know when a killer idea might strike! Your journal should also be used as a goal-tracker that you can go through weekly to make sure you are on track.
9. Reward yourself
When you meet your goals and objectives, be sure to celebrate your success and achievements. A bit of positive reinforcement now and then serves to remind you why you are doing what you do for a living.
10. Effectiveness over efficiency
Although you should aim for both outcomes, try not to bog yourself down in processes if they add no value to the outcome. In the scheme of things, completing tasks effectively is much more important than doing things quickly.
Source: Galaxy Recruitment

How much credibility do consumers lend to information from different sources online? I’ve already written about the ethical considerations in blogging – and the fact that bloggers seem to see no need for a code of ethics. So are consumers...

Google Cash - How to Earn Thousands Writing Google AdWords Part Time: "GoogleCash gives you all the tools you need to turn the Search Engine *Google.com into an Autopilot Cash Generating Machine!
Here are the Facts
You DON'T need physical inventory!
You DON'T need to handle any products!
You DON'T even need a website! With my innovative money-making techniques, you'll earn more from the Internet than 99% of Web site owners - and you won't need a Web site.
You don't need to send spam to anyone. All you need is a computer connected to the Internet, and the amazing discoveries I've made.
DOES NOT Require a huge investment. I started with $10 and 2 hours a week.
This eBook is not theory, but a practical step by step guide.
You can actually start earning cash today. Yes, today. Everything you need to know is in GoogleCash.


GoogleCash is a #1 top seller on Clickbank.com!"

Google Cash - How to Earn Thousands Writing Google AdWords Part Time: "There is a Wealth of Opportunity and Money to be made on Google and the Internet. Once I learned this it became my passion. I'd never felt like that about work before. But now I am finding new ways to make money on the Internet all the time. In Google Cash "

Love and sex are so different, although they are sometimes connected with each other. What we always need is to differentiate between them and care about whom we love more then ourselves.

Ezine Acts Love Commentaries include hundreds of emotional stories many people wrote to solve sentimental problems. They have also many sentimental solutions provided. Find your solution.

The Ezine Acts Sentimental Stories delight and make you evening light. Written by real people in love about love experiences and emotional problems, they open knowledge into solutions.

Waiting for “the right time”… Can be like trying to find the end of the rainbow… I tell my son all the time… “When is now a good time.” Yup. Now. Grab this report now. Because… It’s an opportunity of a lifetime that needs to be seized now not later. Best Regards, Matt Bacak P.S. Grab […]

We perceive computers slowing down over time for many reasons. The first is deceptively simple.

A new study finds that rising placebo responses may play a part in the increasingly high failure rate for clinical trials of drugs, but the authors of the study say that the increase in placebo responses occurred only in trials conducted in the United States...

Time in the languedoc is fluid and one needs to get accustomed to it to enjoy a languedoc life in the Midi.

- Around the Region

When a gift arrives do you open the box immediately or opt to play safe?

TIP! Attempt to get ahead of the next day’s work each evening before you call it quits. When you can, schedule your day the night before. Time management is something that more people should really help to improve your life. When you delineate a clear plan of action, you can get lots more done. Procrastination […]

The post Excellent Article With Many Great Tips About Time Management appeared first on Complements For Health.

3 benefits of nighttime exercise workouts.

Use these gym etiquette tips so that you know what to do to have a great exercise workout.

What essentials you will need to consider for the outdoor activity of backpacking.

Humanity has been telling stories since long before the written word. Not to mention, audio fiction is a great choice when you can’t look at a book, like during a commute, while doing chores, or working out. And audio fiction is on the rise.

In comparison to other media formats, podcasting is still under-monetized, according to Tech Crunch. Short fiction podcasts still need crowdfunding backers and paid subscribers. Deep-pocketed newcomers bankroll high production value, or already have name recognition. But podcasting continues to have a low cost of entry, and the prospects for earning a little revenue may be improving.

New York Times Co. said it would acquire Serial Productions, the maker of the hit podcast Serial, a deal that aims to further the newspapers podcasting ambitions.

Terms of the deals were not disclosed, but the transaction could be worth as much as $50 million depending on milestones and performance metrics, a person familiar with the matter said.

Define your abandonment benchmark

On a recent episode of The Upgrade called How to Be a Better Reader, one of the questions we discussed was when to abandon a book. This question can apply more broadly to any entertainment that takes a commitment longer than two hours—including most podcast runs. So ask yourself: How many episodes should I listen before I commit to a series? How long am I willing to struggle before I abandon?

I recommend giving a series no more than three episodes to hook you into its hosts, topics and format. If you are sold, great, hit that subscribe button. But if not, don’t subscribe at all, or unsubscribe immediately. You can always find the podcast later if you want to check their feed, but chances are you won’t, because they were not a good fit for you anyway.

And now, with your new, clean podcast feed, the goal is to keep it that way. Keep the podcasts you love and allow yourself the freedom to unsubscribe from ones you don’t. Your listening will feel a little more like a pleasure again, and less like a chore.

Many web sites have not been able to play QuickTime movies during the past few days.
The symptom is that you click to play the movie and the movie window turns black and never plays the movie.
Here is a temporary fix for web site developers.

search back in time for your ancestors and help with geneology research into your family tree