May 3rd through May 9th is the American Humane Association’s “Be Kind to Animals Week” (registered trademark) and while we’re about to honor mother’s everywhere, it’s also time to acknowledge our “pets.”

Personally, I’ve never once considered any animal living with me as “my pet.” The animals that are kind enough to be my companions and friends are just that… and so much more. There is a huge amount of responsibility when taking another living creature into your home. A responsibility that is not “throw away,” but for life.

So this week means a lot to me. Each animal we’ve been so lucky to have in our home arrived either at our door or we found via pet fairs. The idea of any animal being put to sleep due to lack of love is horrifying.

The other horror would be to lose your dear friend and never get them back! That’s why Be Kind to Animal Week is even more important!

So that is why the Home Again Web Site is making a massive move to get your friend tagged. If in the event they are “lost” and cannot find their way home, that tag will mean a world of difference!

And, in conjunction with this eventful week, Bringpetshome.com is a fundraising Web site specifically created to help shelter animals.

But their generosity does not end there! For each of your friends you register into their program, they are donating $1 to the Humane Association!

That’s a lot of potential lives saved just for being responsible and doing the right thing.

The HomeAgain program (amazing results!) has recovered over 500,000 lost pets! Over 500,000! That’s remarkable. And all because you took or will take the time to ensure your friend’s well being.

Microchipping is a permanent form of identification that cannot fall off or become impossible to read, giving pets the best chance of being reunited with their owners when lost.

Don’t let this week go by without taking care of your animal loved one! Become a part of this program and make sure Fido or Sparky is safe and well loved.

You’d think on a Sunday I’d just be sitting back enjoying a truly pleasant, slightly chilly, day here in Las Vegas. But, truth be told, that is far from the truth. I’ve been working my buns off.

However, I did find something of real interest to anyone doing anything online or offline. If you get the Sunday paper, and read the Parade magazine, and follow Marilyn vos Savant, then you most likely already saw this… if not keep reading. (I’m going to paraphrase, but the message is the same.)

While there are loads of people out there only too willing to get rich quick, losing money to scammers may not always be your fault.

Turns out the con game played by (financial) swindlers is beyond devious, and the example given is for stock market swindles (but use your imagination and you’ll see how this could easily translate to just about anything online).

Person X tells and/or emails 1000 potential clients that a particular stock will go up on a given day. In the meantime, he or she is also telling 1000 OTHER people that the particular stock will go down.

He or she has a 50-50 chance of being right, so… once he/she determines which side “won” this person concentrates on that group. Digging around Person X comes up with another stock (or whatever) and hits the group of 1000 that “won.” But, the twist is this time, out of those 1000, he/she tells 500 this new stock is going up; while telling the remaining 500 it’s going down.

The more times he/she repeats this pattern, Person X eventually ends up with a list of people who will believe anything he/she tells them.

Unfortunately, in this case scenario, too often those on the “winning” (read lucky) side, often cough up their entire life savings thinking there is no way this person can be wrong.

The information is then summed up with this:

While this ruse isn’t a pyramid scheme, it does illustrate how easy it is to concoct ways to trick people by preying on their wishful thinking.

The long and short… back to what we continue to advise (and I was once told by a financial advisor) – making money or not is a 50-50 flip of a coin. You can do just as well as the “expert” in predicting what’s hot out there (online or off) as the next guy – if you’re willing to do your homework first.

Stay safe, be happy, enjoy your Sunday!

Related articles

• Whom Can You Trust With Your Money? (abcnews.go.com)
• Financial Scams On The Rise As Economic Suffering Spreads (huffingtonpost.com)
• Planning a Retirement Without Dividends (nytimes.com)

We are long time subscribers to Discover magazine, and this morning there is a sidebar column chalked full of information useful to those of us using the internet – be it for fun or business. According to this analysis, written by Adam T. Hadhazy, here are some amazing facts (worth noting!):

Fact 1: Number of Bytes Transmitted Online

According to a University of Minnesota report, researchers estimate the volume of internet traffic is growing at an annual rate of 50 to 60 percent.

The number of bytes transmitted over the course of last year:

o A whopping 78,000,000,000,000,000,000

Fact 2: e-Commerce Spending

In 2008, the United States alone spent $214.4 BILLION online. These statistics come from comScore reports. They continue to draw the conclusion that online spending is increasing by 7 percent per year. However, this is down from previous years (before the huge financial mess the country and world has gotten itself into or had done to us by greedy s.o.b’s, which was growing at a rate of 20 percent per year). Time for those recovery plans to kick in!

Fact 3: Trojans, Worms, Viruses, etc.

Symantec reports a total of 5,060,187 bot-infected computers, the same computers that deliberately send out spam to the rest of us poor suckers, have produced 1,122,311 different trojans, worms, malicious code, etc.

To make matters even more critical, and to highly encourage you to PROTECT your computer (I recommend Kaspersky!), the Sophos internet security firm “discovered a new infected WEB PAGE every 4.5 seconds, on average).

NOTE: If you’re using nothing but the feeble Windows firewall to protect your computer, change NOW. It’s much better to get a real firewall/antivirus and malware protection system (again I recommend Kaspersky) that to trust to the fact that the folks at Microsoft 1) stay on top of things (they don’t) or 2) give a damn whether your system gets infected or not. BE SMART.

Fact 4: Number of Minutes We Are All Online

Viewing JUST the social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, internet users have racked up a whopping 34,916,000,000 minutes in the United States alone viewing just these sites. In fact, in January 2009 all by itself, the average user spent 10 percent of all of his/her minutes online in these network communities.

Fact 5: What State Ranks Highest for Adult Website Subscriptions?

That dubious honor goes to none other than… Utah. In fact 5.47 households out of 1,000 have adult-content site subscriptions. Montana comes in with the lowest rate, only 1.92 out of 1,000 households. And, just to round things out, 36% of all internet users spend time on at least one adult web site per month (reported again by comScore).

So what does this all mean to those of us using the net for say internet marketing?

o Online purchasing (e-Commerce) though lower than recent years, is once again on the rise.

o Facebook and MySpace may be very popular (duh) – and worth investigating – but also make us warn that you best have a truly unique approach to getting some of that traffic. Invest real time into building the community. You’ll get the traffic, but you still need to persuade them to choose you for the sale.

o Not protecting your computer, and not having a firewall warning system in place, has got to be the dumbest thing anyone owning a computer can manage not to do. There are those out there with, apparently, plenty of time on their hands to figure out ways to either ruin your computer or, at a minimum, make it necessary for that trip to say the Geek squad at Best Buy to fix it up. This can be very expensive, so why allow it to happen in the first place? Get the best program out there that covers everything from surfing to email to… And again I suggest Kaspersky.

o Maybe, just maybe, we all need a bit more fresh air. I know I am guilty of rarely stepping outside. While I have, and continue, to lose weight, really watch and upgrade my diet, and get a bit of strength training indoors, nothing beats stepping out your door. In fact, medically, to ensure you get enough Vitamin D, you need to spend from 5 to 20 minutes outside every day – during the critical 10 to 2 hours (high noon) WITHOUT sunscreen to absorb the Vitamin D your body needs. Step outside, do a bit of weeding, talk to your neighbors, walk the dog. But get some fresh air LOL!

o Well… the last being the adult websites, don’t know what to say about that, but the fact that it’s Utah (we live in Nevada) has us laughing our heads off.

Okay, there are enough stats to keep you busy and maybe planning some internet and marketing strategies and plans for your business, blog, website online.

PLEASE Don’t forget to COMMENT!

After reading our friend and fellow Whole-Hog-Blogger, Judy at More Than Sew So and her current (at this time) post Who Is This Man, today I figured presenting some educational and highly enlightening new sources might be a better way to serve our Sunday readers (and beyond).

So I’ve compiled a short list of highly rated, highly regarded blogs whose sole purpose is to present news – current event style – on what’s really going on in Washington, as well as great pieces about the entertainment industry, sports, etc.

Here is the list:

The Daily Beast
Ana Marie Cox, writer and featured speaker on MSNBC news
The Huffington Post

Granted one must have an OPEN mind to read the above. I’ve heard them take all sides on all issues versus some out there that are strictly “old guard” trying valiantly to uphold that which clearly a majority of our nation turned down – emphatically – in November and celebrated – joyously – just a few days ago in Washington, D.C.

No one knows the future, but heading into the future without a plan, and flying on the old “wing and a prayer (and screw your fellow citizens) plan” obviously did not work. Wanting to stick to the same – for reasons unknown, but perhaps it is the “unknown” that scares some people – has moved our great country more than giant steps backward not forward.

My mind reels actually to hear most of what comes out of these news sources not because it’s BS, but what our government believes it can get away with (and until recently has) – and as We The People, we have let them.

I should at this point mention my two favorite news shows (television) which are programs over at MSNBC:

Countdown With Keith Olbermann and
The Rachel Maddow Show

But before I close, in the interest of maintaining a fuller spectrum of where to get your news, if you’re dead set on getting just the rhetoric of the die-hard GOP base, and feel it necessary to cling tenuously to the past, here are a few news sources online just for you:

Thinkgprogress.org (a misnomer, not much on “progress” but worth a laugh), along with FoxNews (which originally aired The Simpsons – a creative and very much “progressive” cartoon show for its time – but showed its true colors very early on – lopsided and biased and staunchly right winged – way right)

Enjoy your Sunday, and remember….

Give us your opinions – it is a free country let alone a “free” internet – your comments most welcome! Please comment!