Students Of Success

You must be prepared before speaking with any of the insurance company’s representatives. Collect all important documents and evidences, including the photographs, police and medical reports, and statements of your witnesses. Take notes of important details and review the policies given by the company. Do not say anything that will cause your claim to be denied. Examine every photograph; they might see an angle that may be turned against you.

Return to the scene or the place where the accident happened. You might find more evidence. Photograph anything that will help you win your case. Capture every angle. This will not only provide you evidence, it will also help you remember events or things. Look for physical evidence that will prove the extent of injury or will oppose the description of the event, like a piece of wood or nails. Do not move the object so as to preserve it. If it cannot be preserved, take pictures of it.

In taking a photograph, use a camera that will provide you detailed and accurate photos. Take photos immediately. Ask somebody to stand as a witness and instruct him to take note. Take several pictures so that you can have the best photos to show the insurance company as a proof of your claim. Have it printed as soon as possible. Ask for a receipt; make sure that it has a date on it.

If you are injured, go to the doctor or other medical provider immediately. A delay will cause for the company to question your injuries. Ask your doctor to photograph any marks or bruise, these wounds will heal soon. Have a copy of your medical report. Detail your injuries and how it affected your everyday living. Take note of things you might remember that you have not thought of before. All these notes will serve as evidences you can include in your demand for settlements. In taking notes, do not forget to include the date and time and the name of the persons who provided you with information.

Look for witnesses, record their statement. List their names and other personal information. You might find reliable witnesses that will back you up. Ask for their numbers so you can contact them anytime. They might be able to tell the exact story. You might also get significant information that you failed to record.

Let the insurance company know that you are prepared. Review all these evidences as well as the company policy.

About the Author

I’m not an artist, I’m not a poet. I just love writing anything I want. I wasn’t born a genius, I just want to know and understand something I don’t. I like to find the difference between similar things. It’s like counting birthmarks on each identical twin.

For comments you may contact The Personal Injury Site Moderator at their website at http://www.personalinjurylawyersinc.com

The family home is definitely where most people want to remain as long as possible as they age.

The memories, familiar surroundings and the fact that it is probably paid for, make it ideal.

However, each year brings unsettling decisions closer and closer. Your parent’s health will probably deteriorate.

Hopefully, the decline will be gradual and graceful, because an acute need for admission to a nursing home could mean the loss of their home because of the Federal Medicare spend-down requirements.

A discussion of the ins and outs of this dilemma is beyond the scope of this article. If you are facing that situation you should seek a competent elder care attorney immediately.

Over time, you will become aware that your parent’s days in the home are numbered.

They may become confused, unable to maintain a large house or become accident prone.

Or the reason could be financial. Rising taxes, the costs of maintenance and fuel could make staying in the house economically impossible, especially if they are living on a fixed income.

Now you are faced with the problem. What to do with the house?

The house may have been lived in continuously for 20, 30, 40 years or more. The roof and major mechanical systems such as the plumbing and electrical may not have been upgraded and may be in need of expensive repairs.

The kitchen could be hopelessly out of date and homes of a certain age do not have the number and types of baths that today’s buyers demand.

It is very likely that extensive and expensive repairs and/or remodeling would be required before the house can be sold for current market value.

This may be possible for some families but for others, especially where the younger members are in different cities or even states, it is not practical.

You could therefore be faced with the challenge of trying to sell an older, outdated home to today’s demanding buyers.

My wife is a real estate agent and hates to waste time and money trying to convince today’s finicky buyers, who are looking for homes with as many bathrooms as there are occupants in the house; to settle for outdated and possibly rundown homes.

Even if a buyer could be found, the lender would insist that code violations and certain mandatory repairs be performed before they would issue a mortgage to a new buyer.

Your best bet in this situation is to sell the home to a wholesaler or rehabber, as-is.

This person or company is in the business of dealing with older properties in need of renovation and repair. They will buy the property from you, invest the money, time and effort to remodel it and then will sell it for the full market price, hopefully. But that risk is theirs, not yours.

You can find these rehabbers easily. They usually advertise in local papers with ads that say something like, “We Buy Houses, Anywhere, Any Condition!”

Check with a couple of them to make sure you will get a fair price and a quick, no hassle sale. We suggest you give preference to those who will buy the house now and will also give you or your parents a percentage of the after sale profit or will pay small monthly payments for some years after the sale in recognition of the wholesale purchase price of the property. I am sure your parents would not object.

Copyright 2005 Bill Young.

Bill is a former bank mortgage officer and is now a real estate investor and personal financial adviser. His company, Metropolitan Business Council, pioneered the concept of residual payments to homeowners the purchase properties from. To receive a fast, fair quote on your property, click here: http://FastSaleTopPrice.Com If you or someone you know are facing the loss of your home foreclosure, you may qualify for government help! http://SaveYourHomeLLC.Com

News broke this week that Yahoo has purchased the Inktomi search engine for around US$235 million. This is an interesting development in the search engine industry that may impact greatly on exactly where sites get their traffic from. Another new development in the past few weeks is the change to the HotBot service but first, I’d like to look at the ramifications of the Yahoo/Inktomi deal.

Here’s a bit of background information on how the Yahoo and Inktomi search engines work. I’m sure everyone knows Yahoo but not everyone may be completely aware of how their search engine works. Yahoo is a directory. This means that it is a categorised list of sites that are listed by human editors. Getting listed in the Yahoo directory requires a yearly payment for commercial sites. You can get listed for free if you have a non-commercial site but it is very hard to do and can take months. Yahoo provides additional results when you use their search function that come from Google. In the past, Yahoo has used other search engines to provide these results (including Inktomi) but has used Google for the last couple of years.

They initially used results from other search engines to just compliment their own. So, if someone searched for something that wasn’t in their directory, they could still get results. The way it worked was that they would provide results from their own directory first and then a user would click on “web pages” to get more results. Strangely, Yahoo actually changed the way this worked during the year so that the results from a search were a mix of listings from their own directory and Google with the Google results being the more prominent of the two. This has essentially made the payment of the US$299 per year for a directory listing an unnecessary expense. Many people still use the directory to browse for sites but, in my experience, more people use the search function.

Inktomi is a full crawler based search engine that provides results for other search engines. They do have a web site but no-one uses it to actually search - it’s more of an informational site. Inktomi’s results formerly appeared in many search engines but in the last few years, their popularity has declined. The main site that currently uses Inktomi is MSN but Inktomi only provides the fifth level of results. MSN provides sponsored listings from Overture, their own Microsoft sites, their own human edited directory results, LookSmart listings and then Inktomi. So, Inktomi does drive traffic to sites but far less than a search engine like Google.

So, what does all this mean to us? It’s hard to say at the moment but there are three options. Either nothing will change (which is unlikely), Yahoo will use Inktomi together with Google on it’s site or it will dump Google and use Inktomi for it’s search results. Yahoo actually owns part of Google, maybe 5%, so there is a chance that they will keep using their results for this reason. Also, Google provide far better results for searchers than Inktomi so Yahoo would be making a mistake to replace Google. But, apparently Yahoo is annoyed that Google has become competition to them through Google’s own site and that Google’s news search service is also providing competition.

Without a crystal ball, it’s very difficult to know what is going to happen but it’s worth making sure that you are prepared for all occurrences. There is really very little that you need to do because it is only the popularity of Inktomi that may change. Even without the searches from Yahoo, Google will still be the biggest search engine in the world due to the fact that it’s own site is very popular and it’s results are also used by AOL (amongst others). So, what can you do to get the most from Inktomi?

Inktomi is the only major search engine that uses meta tags. This is actually the reason that it is not as popular as before because meta tags allow webmasters to “trick” Inktomi into thinking a page has more relevant content than there really is. Therefore, Inktomi’s search results are not very good. However, as there is a good chance that Inktomi will now become popular again, you need to make sure that you have your meta keyword and meta description tags in place. Make sure they are relevant to the page that they are on - you don’t want to be caught “spamming” their search engine. The other thing that will probably make a difference is to get other sites to link to you. Link popularity makes a difference on all search engines except possibly AllTheWeb.

I’ll keep you updated here with any news on what Yahoo decides to do and any changes that I find out about the way the Inktomi generates results.

As I mentioned above, the other major search engine news in the last month is that HotBot has finally updated their site. HotBot is owned by Lycos and was quite a popular search engine a few years ago. It has become far less popular lately - since it was purchased by Lycos and was just left to “die”. It’s results largely came from a mix of the ODP, DirectHit and Inktomi. DirectHit has since become Teoma which is owned by AskJeeves but HotBot went for months after DirectHit ceased to exist saying that it’s results were coming from them.

So, HotBot has essentially become another meta search engine - like DogPile or Excite. It now works pretty much like Netscape does. A searcher can choose which search engine they would like their results to come from. The search engines that you can choose from are Fast (AllTheWeb), Google, Inktomi and Teoma. This may mean that HotBot starts to get some of it’s market share back but as webmasters, there is nothing that we can do to target HotBot. All we can do is target the search engines which provide it’s results.

About The Author

Sean Burns is the author of the WebmastersReference.com Newsletter - http://www.webmastersreference.com/newsletter. More than five years of experience in site design, marketing, income generation, search engine optimisation and more is passed on to subscribers - hype free. Sign up today to get real information of real value to webmasters.

seanb@webmastersreference.com

British historian, David Irving, was convicted in an Austrian court recently for the “crime” of denying the Holocaust. Irving pled guilty to the charge since he faced upward of ten years in jail. He will serve three years.
Some people will say this is a good thing since the Holocaust was such a terrible thing. While there is no denying the Holocaust was a terrible thing, locking someone up for an opinion is a bad thing as well. It is also something that will come back to haunt Europe. Fascism equals fascism, and these “anti-hate-speech” laws are fascist.
One can label Mr. Irving a “jerk” or “insensitive.” But should the guy be locked up for three years for an opinion? He was not even calling for violence of any kind against any group. No, just the fact he had issues with the authenticity of the Holocaust placed him in jail. Scary stuff.
Austria is certainly not the only place in Europe with these draconian laws. They are all over Europe. In Britain, British National Party Chairman, Nick Griffin, was recently put on trial for the crime of “incitement to commit racial hatred.” In other words, he said politically incorrect things. He spoke of a need to cut back on immigration and fears that Britain would become a non-white nation. Well, half of America would be in jail if such things were a crime here. Luckily, he was found not guilty on some charges and the jury deadlocked on others. He still has to face a re-trial on the other charges. Again, no violent calls for assaults, murders, etc. Just a “right-wing” guy with views.
In Germany, a guy was recently sentenced to a year in jail for printing the word “Koran” on toilet paper and then distributing it, some to mosques. What’s next? Two years in jail for cartoons?
Which of course brings us to the “infamous” cartoons. The cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad by a Danish newspaper has actually led to riots and death. Do you have any doubt arrests will occur for “anti-Mohammad” comments or publications?
Europe had better come out of its politically correct period. They are making up for the Hitler era with Hitler policies. This cannot go on forever. Repression is always fought against, even if little by little. To lock up people for opinions and views not to the current liking of the government is fascism. There is no other way around it. To quote Mr. Irving, who will do three years for his opionion, “The law is an ass.” No doubt. And one that simply will not be tolerated.

Robert Carberry is a freelance writer from New York

For most of us involved with web building or e-commerce, hit
counting is old news. We all have our hit counters so we have an
idea what traffic is like at our site on a day to day basis.Some
even go as far as to note times and chart responses to
promotions. But as our on-line world evolves, so must we.

A new breed of free counters and trackers are making a big
splash and for good reason. These counters offer an expanded
variety of tracking and counting features that some of your
older counters may not. If you look on our front page at
http://www.imr-central.com , you can see that we use Aaddzz.com
( at http://www.aaddzz.com/) for our tracking purposes. While
Aaddzz is just one of many, they do offer very extensive
counting and tracking statistics, and it’s all free. Included in
the features are hourly, daily, weekly and monthly counting,
browser identification (do most of our visitors use Netscape or
I.E.?), time zone statistics, geographical identification and
more.Webstat.com is another company offering similar free
services as is Hitbox.com.

Another way to track your visitors is through your advertising.
We always recommend targeted advertising, and certain types
allow you to track who is visiting you, and more importantly,
why. For example, GoTo.com sells keywords to websites, also
known as keyword sponsorship. The idea here is that when people
run a keyword search (i.e. flowers), you pay “x” amount for your
flower site to come up in that search. With your GoTo account
management center, you can see exactly which keywords are
bringing in the most visitors and conversely, which aren’t. Of
course, this is useful in choosing your keywords at GoTo, but
also helpful on a larger scale. These words may provide insight
as to what really brings people to your site, therefore helping
you narrow your focus to enhancing what is working and either
improving or eliminating what isn’t.

Another often overlooked method of tracking is visitor
communication. There are a variety of ways to achieve this goal.
One effective method is by the installation of visitor-feedback
scripts at your site. You can find a variety of free resources
of this kind. ( For starters, check The Javascript Source at:
http://javascript.internet.com/ ) Also, don’t forget that
visitor feedback is not just important as people surf your page,
but when they use it as well. For example, if you sell a
product, a simple feedback form at the end of the checkout
process can provide insight as to the effectiveness of your
checkout system. (i.e. Is it confusing? Is it a detriment to the
purchase?)

Finally, good old fashioned e-mail can be a great tracking tool
as well. When someone corresponds with you through your site or
business, take the time to ask them a very quick question. For
example, from time to time when we welcome a new subscriber to
our e-zine, we often write a personal thank you back, and just
ask them how they found out about us. Sometimes we’ll even ask
what feature about our e-zine was of interest to them. Of
course, you can’t abuse this practice as you could end up
annoying visitors/clients…. not good. But if you are brief and
genuine with people, my experience is that they are usually more
than willing to help and often even like getting involved.
People generally like to have their opinions heard, especially
if they think it may make a difference… and in a properly run
business, it will.

Tracking is more than numbers and geography. It is about knowing
your current user-base and using those facts and figures to grow
and expand that base . As webspace and e-commerce competition
intensifies, in-depth tracking is another handy tool you may
want to consider to keep yourself ahead of the pack.