Personal Finance, better balance your income to expense

Personal Finance education or making people aware of better personal finance management skills, still I found to be a topic need addressed for the time being.

Typical example of ciaos of personal finances effect on economy goes like this...

Poor personal Finance management > Individuals borrowing money on credit > Poor planning cause individuals to not able to pay the borrowed money back in time > Banks that lend money in trouble > Banks asking for help from the government to survive > Bailout plan from Gov using tax payer money > Government debt sky rockets

The circle goes on and on as long as Banks continue to lend money to individuals that has no long-term solid means for repaying.

2nd 10 day Results for Traffic Counter experiment



From the results for the day 11 till 20th, as you can see in the chart above, clearly shows a difference between categories. On the last column I have the percentage of that data set as of the highest data set, which is Statcounter.

We are 2/3 way to completing our experiment and so far in both occasions it seemed clear that StatCounter is the only site that record the traffic data relatively accurate. (In this case it means higher numbers -- the numbers that others failed to track)

If you have any other questions about this experiment as we progress to the last part, please feel free to ask them in the comments section.

How to use restrict access & blocking other PCs on LinkSys router WTR54G

Have you had situations where you are watching something or surfing web and the internet is really slow on your DSL/Cable modem and you share the connection with other people or you think other people accessing your wireless is whats slowing it down?

Linksys router and several other routers comes with internet access restriction features and also bandwidth limit features. In this post I will talk about Internet restriction and Mac filter, how to put these into good use to stop unauthorized access to your internet boradband connection with WTR54G Linksys router.

First access your wireless router from http://192.168.1.1 and with your username password, on default its "admin" you will see a window like this...


To use Wireless MAC filter
What this feature does is, it filter certain MAC addresses or block certain MAC addresses from accessing your wireless internet. The MAC address we are referring in this example is your computer's MAC address.

Note: to find out your MAC address; run cmd (command prompt) type "ipconfig /all" it should be referred to as Physical address.

Back in the router page, go to Wireless > Wireless MAC filter
Select Enable, and pick whether you want to prevent the PCs or permit only listed PCs. Then click "Edit MAC filter list" and enter all the MAC address you want or you dont want to access your wireless internet.
Click save changes. and you have just successfully stopped other people from using your wireless.

To use Access Restriction
Access Restriction (AR) will completely disconnect the internet of a certain PC you want you can also specify what time you want this to happen, on what days.

Go to your router access page;
Click Access Restriction
First Edit the list of PCs you are targeting in this AR. Save the list and close. (always save the list or else it would not record the MAC ids) You can allowed up to 10 of these AR policies with WTR54G model router. Give it a name Under "Enter Policy Name" select whether you want to deny or allow and the Days, Times, even web addresses. When everything is done select "Enable" on Status and save changes.

These two techniques are very powerful to a certain level in restricting internet access from your connection to unauthorized computers. But of course there are computer hackers out there who always find ways to creep through these barriers and locked doors and that's what makes the world!

Borrowing money (Loans) Simple version for Eager Learners

Borrowing money or on credit or taking a loan to pay it back later, all these terms refer to the same concept. And in this blog post I am going to break it down for you to understand the deep structure of what happen with borrowing money.

When you are borrowing money from a bank or an institution, you will be borrowing a large portion of money and will divide this into equal parts and pay it back over time with an added fee. This is called the interest on a loan or a credit.

On the opposite side, this is how banks make money. By lending to people and receiving interest on them over time.

There is a "Time value of money" concept involved in the simple money borrowing situation. In other words the Interest you are paying for bank loan (after 1 period) is the value of money over that one period, which you didn't pay until the end of the 1st period. So longer the money stays the higher the time value of money becomes.

It also refers to receiving XX today being equal to receiving YY over periods in the future because of the time value that is taken into account for the money.

For example lets assume you are planning to buy a new Car and you don't have enough money, so you decide to consult a bank as to a potential loan program. For this example lets say you need another $30,000 for the car, that you need from a loan.
Assuming that you met all the criteria the XYZ bank agrees to lend you money at 5% APR.

what is APR?

Annual percentage rate. Now if the bank say you have to pay the $30,000 in 10 years with equal payments of $3000 every year, the APR is the annual interest that will add onto the annual payment. So in this case your interest payment for a year is....

$3000 x 5% = $150

so total payment is $3150 per year.

Important part here is before you accepting the loan and enjoying your hot wheels, you should thoroughly consider whether you can meet these annual payment requirements. Because you can not meet the annual payment with interest, the bank will apply late fees, and that will lead to more other fees before you go "over draft" and into default. So called the "snowball effect".

Little insight: The United States current economy's main cause -- AIG and other big financial institutes failures -- is lending money to individuals and approving them for loans when it seemed from a deep look that they, not in any shape or form, would have been able to meet in the payment requirements in distant future. Yet were approved and the banks now suffer from the imposed-upon defaults.

So in recap, when you borrow money you will be given a certain set period to pay it back with added interest to each period. It is very important to identify whether one can meet the payments sufficiently before accepting a loan.

What is RSS, Simple version for eager learners

RSS, Real Simple Syndication.

There has been exponentially increasing number of web blogs and news websites in today's world. But in this enormous information jungle how are you going to find the information that you need, the information that matches your taste??

In old days, what used to be was, people go out there and watch TV and read newspapers to get the information from out there. Which involve reading the entire Newspaper, meaning more time spent to find what you like. But now with the invention of blog everyone has the capability of producing high quality content that may prove a great value to you, to your knowledge base. This had made it difficult to find the information you like and that has a higher value to you.... and that's when the RSS comes.

RSS with the familiar icon like this is the solution for today's world to have those content that have a great value to you, to come to you and not you having to go out there and spend hours finding content of importance.

With a reader like Google Reader (or NewsGator, My Yahoo) you can stay upto date with your favorite sites and blogs for the information that you value. And RSS or the xml version of the websites and blogs makes it easier for these Syndication readers to capture those information and bring it to the reader's website so you only have to visit Google reader and have the luxury of reading latest articles and blog posts of all your favorite blogs and news articles,
all at one place.

Add ashPresentom to your newly created Reader now!

How to design a user icon (Human bust) in Photoshop



Creation of ashPresentom

10 days update of traffic counter experimental study

It has been 10 days since we started the experimental study to find out which traffic counter is more accurate (well relatively accurate). As I mentioned in the introduction experiment page, I will be posting results every 10 days from the date we started the experiment, today I will be posting the results here.



Results
So clearly from the table we can see that Statcounter had recorded more hits and pageviews than any of the other two.

If we assume our determinant is Page visits (Total views), Google Analytics have the lowest, which in other words (for this experiment) means it had recorded the lesser of visits to ashPresentom over last 10 days.

If we assume our experiment determinant is Page Views, in which case sitemeter becomes the lesser to have recorded a low number of page views.

It has only been 33% of our expected experimental period and these results are starting to clearly tell us which site measure website traffic accurately.

Additions after 10 days
I have added to the site after 10 days another 2 FREE website traffic counters you can find out there. In selecting the counters I paid close attention to the way they display results and easy installation and navigation.
New additions are;
4. ShinyStat (http://www.shinystat.com/)
5. GoStat (http://gostats.com/)

Anna Faris iPhone Wallpaper

This blog post will feature Anna Faris in iPhone Wallpaper. She cast in the recent movie Observe and Learn as the character of Brandi. Enjoy!



Click here to download the iPhone wallpaper

How to make hover button for website (mouse rollover button) with CSS/HTML


Today's post is going to focus on creating a roll over button using CSS and HTML just like the one you see above. And I will go over getting it to work with IE as well.

In website designing, website designer care a lot about website loading time and pay a great deal of time coding in a way it would make the site load faster. For instance if you want to do a rollover button, where you would have a button like this (inactive)


and switches into this image once you move your mouse over the image (button)


You would have to have two different pictures loaded into viewers computer to show this, meaning longer time to load two images as oppose to one.

Lets look at the file sizes of these two images;
They both are in gif fully optimized form,
inactive image is 4.21KB and the active image is 4KB. Total of 8.21KBs

What if you could use only a single image which has both rollover and inactive images in a single image??
Like this one..

This combined image is 7.53KBs not much of a difference but it is something. And loading a single image is always faster in website world than loading more images.

How do you make a rollover button with single image with both active and inactive images in one. First of all you have to design this button with precision. In the above button it has width of 400 pixels and height of 100 pixels which is 50 to one and 50 to other.

After you have designed the button image using this CSS and HTML code you can easily.

CSS code for this feature


HTML to in the body


Portions that make this code work in IE is "display:block" and associating the image to "a" rather than using <img> or linking to <div>.

Break down of the roll-over CSS effect;


With this code we are telling to move the background image of <a> tag to move up by describing its new position which is starting from bottom-left corner.

"a:hover" is the CSS hover or mouse roll-over associated code we use here in CSS.

Fast and Furious 4 poster design



Featured here is a poster design of the lastest action movie, Fast and Furious 4, by aj designs. If there are enough requests there is a possibility of producing a wallpaper based on this poster. So let me know...