Effective Acne Tips

If you read my other blog, you would know that I suffer from acne. I wouldn’t say that my condition is bad because I have seen people worse that mine but it does not help when society keeps letting me know of my bad skin condition wherever I go, in glossy magazines, etc.

I am fortunate that I am not to the point where the mirror is my enemy (yet) although I have days where I feel that I would look more beautiful IF only the acne are not around! To be frank, I have tried many possible solutions but none seems to work permanently. Perhaps I am not diligent; perhaps I am too cheap to try the more expensive products, hence better? That is the perception, anyway.

Some people will advice me that I should not eat chocolate or spicy food. Well, I think those are just old wives tales because I did abstain from them before but there was no improvement to my complexion.

As someone who is practically glued to her computer the whole day, of course I did my research on acne online and one of the best resource site that I came across is www.acne.com. I have found the tips here useful. One of the most effective methods for me is to apply a coat of Benzoyl Peroxide 2.5% cream ALL OVER MY FACE. Many people were shocked by that because usually people apply acne cream on the affected spots only but trust me, you can really see a huge difference.

There was once the pharmacy ran out of 2.5% so I bought one with 5% strength and ended up burning my skin. Hahaha! It was a lesson well learnt!

Job-O-Matic

I recently registered with something called Job-O-Matic that I saw from Feedburner. They say that we could have another way to monetize our website or blog by creating a job board. That sounds great so I joined hehehe

However, after joining, I am not sure if as an independent and individual blog, I could get the sales or not. The good thing is that even if you are not able to find people who are willing to pay you to advertise on your job board, Job-O-Matic will automatically fill your board up with their ever ready database of jobs and you will still receive a cut of the commission.

The jobs that Job-O-Matic fills for you are based on your tags or keywords. I have tried it out on my own newly created job board and was happy to note that only relevant results were displayed. Luckily!

Although I have a job board, I think such a concept works best for sites like JobStreet. They can use such a board to cater to their overseas browsers. As for now, since my readership is not as impressive as I would like it to be, I am not going to put my job board live first.

Perhaps sometime in the near future when I have grown my readership further and spent time redesigning the Job Board, I will link up to it from my blog.

If you have tried Job-O-Matic with success, I would like to hear from you!

iSalient – Total Web Based Survey Solutions

Last week while at work, I was given the thankless task of collecting data from a recent survey conducted by our company. I say thankless because nobody understands the amount of work that I have to put in after setting the survey forms, making sure they are filled in as accurately as possible and collecting the data and then analyzing and interpreting the data and putting them into pie charts and graphs. A lot of thought has to be put into each survey and we do that about twice a year (!), not forgetting the time, energy and sleepless nights.

I am always afraid of missing out an important item in the survey and then I am answerable to the boss. Believe me, the stress is no fun at all.

I sort of complained to my friend about it and he said my company is so back dated!! He told me that his company has been using a web based survey solution provided by iSalient for sometime now and the problem I faced, which he has also encountered is not a thing of the past.

According to my friend, iSalient offers a complete solution to surveys and analytical studies online. By using iSalient alone, we could really thrown out all the old software that we have been using and cost us a lot of money to upgrade yearly.

My friend encouraged me to convince my management to upgrade to the new technology of iSalient because this program guides users through the process of getting a survey off the ground from its free question templates and styles that we could customize with our own questions, to distributing the survey forms to reach a larger database of people, to interpreting the results from the feedback and generating quantitative analysis and rendering detailed reports in a professional style.

I am impressed to say the least! I hope that by the next round of survey, our company would have upgraded the whole survey system. If they haven’t, to be frank, I don’t want to get involved anymore!

Is This How We Bite Her?

I came across this linky love game where Venomous Kate invites everyone to bite her twice a week on Tuesdays and Fridays. Actually, I got to know of it from the beginning but was too lazy to read in detail how to play it. In fact, I am not even sure now! Hahaha!

I think what we have to do every Tuesday and Friday is to write a post linking to Venomous Kate’s Bite Me! post and then trackback to her post. That’s it! That’s it? I hope I got it down to pat!

I think this is the best linky love game I have come across because Kate says we could edit our old Bite Me post with a new Bite Me permalink and then send a trackback to her. So you need not even write a new post twice a week.

Plus, Kate’s blog has a Google Page Rank of 5. I don’t know if you noticed but bloggers with PR5 are usually not generous in giving out links so this is a very good chance to get two linkbacks to your blog twice a week without much effort.

Even if you do not want to Bite Kate, you can leave a comment on her blog and it will be counted as a backlink to your own blog as well since she has implemented DoFollow. w00t!

Can You Spot The Fake Fish?

I am actually an animal lover and if my parents did not stop me from bringing home anymore animals, our house would have looked like a zoo. I used to keep an aquarium of exotic fish and marine creatures as well but that proved to be too much work and because it was my aquarium, it was my sole responsibility to keep it clean. I had to give it away when I took on three jobs to make ends meet.

Now that there is a new technology, I see myself enjoying the beauty of marine life again. I recently came across a wood burning fireplace DVD that when it is played on the TV, the fireplace is so real, I could even feel the “warmth”. It even comes with the sound that a fireplace makes! Amazing!

For me, having a fireplace at home would be too much to bear in tropical Malaysia! Luckily, there is the Ambient Water video aquarium which has the same concept.

Can you see spot the fake fish? I can’t! That’s why I absolutely would love to have it in my home! No work, total enjoyment!

Unexpected Linkbacks

I was talking to a friend today that I have been blogging for a long time now but have never networked. Most of my family members and friends do not even know of my blogs.

However, these couple of months, I have started to network and build backlinks by leaving comments on other blogs. I do read blogs but I am what people term as a lurker. Previously, it was not easy to make me leave a comment unless the post is so compelling that I feel the need to make my thoughts known.

Since I started networking, I have been acquainted with quite a few foreign bloggers and do drop by some blogs on a daily basis and leave comments as well because it is one thing to read but another to show support to the blogger by leaving an appropriate comment. Bloggers feed on comment count too, that was that I found out.

Recently, I got to know of a BenSpark contest which I find very interesting so I gave it four buzzes. Unexpectedly, Drew, the author of BenSpark, gave my blogs and my posts linkbacks. I was so surprised and touched. Like I said, I did not expect it and I did not even write my buzzes hoping for anything in return but Drew so kindly provided me with all the links. Thank you.

Bloggers are an amazing group of people!

Do You Have An Ugly WebSite? Win A Redesign!

I actually just got to know of a web design contest last night offered by a Dallas SEO services, lifeBLUE. Now, don’t get me wrong because this is not a contest where you submit your design to win but to win this, you submit your existing website, tell the world how ugly it is, solicit as many votes as you can and by the end of the contest period on 8th August, 2007.

The website with the most votes, effectively snagging the title the worst website design ever, will win a professional web design from the web designers from lifeBLUE. This is an amazing opportunity for people to get free publicity for their website, free linkbacks PLUS a shot at winning a free web design package.

If you don’t win though, you better engage someone to help with a new design because I am sure you don’t want to be known as the owner with the 2nd worst web design, do you?

Check out the contenders at http://www.lifeblue.com/web_design_contest/

If you want a brand new site, meaning you do not have any right now, you can still participate by submitting a Blogger or WordPress.com blog and then promote the contest on your own blog, forum, email and anywhere that you can think of. You will still be eligible to win.

To get you started, when you submit your site and then link to lifeBLUE with the anchor text “Dallas web design” or “web designers”, you will automatically be allocated TEN free votes! How cool is that?

Quickly get your ugly site submitted so that you have more time to plug its ugliness!

Random Thoughts Off My Mind