Day 46: Business before pleasure

My Project: 365 Creative Writing Prompts

Day 46: Business before pleasure

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but my project has taken a bit of a beating lately. When I first started out, I wrote every day, but over the past week or so, my project has been on the backburner.

That is not to say that I haven’t been writing. On the contrary, I’ve been writing quite a bit, but for clients. Paying clients. And you know how it goes, business before pleasure.

The client in question was a travel agent who wanted to draw attention to various European cities. As such, I visited London, Ronda, Barcelona, Sicily, Wallis, and Geneva. My visits were online, of course, researching various websites for information on these cities.

And you cannot imagine the work involved to write a 600-word article. But I did it. I researched until I was blue in the face, typed until my fingers were numb and in the process learned all about what there is to see and do in these various cities. With the exception of London, I visited these places personally, but it was so long ago, I can’t remember the details.

I do remember Barcelona though. I was only a teenager when I was there with my family and their friends, but my visit to the Sagrada Familia was one of those memorable moments that stayed with me.

Having visited Madrid, Malaga, Valencia, Seville and Granada, we had our fill of churches, cathedrals and other historic buildings such as the Alhambra. When we arrived in Barcelona and Mom suggested a visit to the Sagrada Familia, we thought … great, another church. Dad said as much with an exasperated “Haven’t we seen enough churches?”  

“Apparently the Sagrada Familia is quite special,” Mom said. “It’s unlike any other church.”

Oh, and it was special alright. Mom was quite right, the church was unlike any other church. After we stood in line for a good 20 minutes, in the baking hot sun I might add, we paid the fee to enter the church. We pushed open the heavy door and … we stood under the clear blue sky. What the heck?

Par explanation … back in those days, the Sagrada Familia wasn’t finished. It still isn’t finished, but back then there was no church to speak off. There was a church façade, but very little else. There was no floor, no windows, no pews, no altar, and most importantly … no ceiling. We felt horribly cheated.

But back to my writing days.

Another job that kept me busy was translating. Dutch to English, Spanish to English, French to Dutch, and German to English. Some of these works were enjoyable, others were a bit of a pain in the butt. 

There was this one particular job where a love-smitten man wanted a 1700-word blog post translated about some skanky saxophone player. I nearly gave up on the whole thing.

But all these were paying jobs, and since money is welcome here, I kept plodding along. 

Right now I’m on a break. There is no work available. However, that can change tomorrow and then off we go again.

www.connymanero.weebly.com

Why Use the Plus Sign When Searching the Internet

With the arrival of the Internet, the world is your oyster.  Unfortunately, it’s not just your oyster, it’s anybody’s and with a pearl of information, you find a whole lot of junk.  Along with reputable companies, advertisers, spammers, bloggers, and other Internet users all vie for your attention.  If you’ve heard of the plus sign and you’re wondering, why use the plus sign searching the Internet, your life is about to become a whole lot easier.

The problem

If you’ve never used the plus sign when searching the Internet, you probably shake your head in frustration wading through pages and pages of useless information.  You know what you want, you formulated your request in your favorite search engine, but you still have to put up with bogus sites, websites with misleading ads, link farms, and false listings.

The solution

Next time when you use a search engine, start you search with the plus sign (+).  As an experiment, say that you’re looking for information on owls.  Type “owls” in the search engine and you’ll be presented with 72 million listings.  Now type “+owls” in the search engine and you’ll only get 71,000 listings.  The plus sign removes all the rig raff.

What does the plus sign do?

The plus sign removes (almost) all undesirable info from your search.  The plus sign tells the search engine that whatever you’re looking for has to include the word that you specified.  If you’re looking for owls, the search engine will only bring up information on those birds and will ignore pages that link themselves to info about owls.

Broaden your search

In addition to the plus sign, try broaden your search for a particular item.  For instance, if you’re looking for sugar free drink, don’t type just drinks in the search engine.  Typing “+drinks” produces about 8,660 results, while “+sugar free drinks” generates only 2,300 results.  Try to be as specific as possible.

Where it goes wrong

Clever advertisers know that subjects such as “love”, “employment”, “pets” and “cars” are hot topics.  They link their marketing pages to those popular sites and as a result you get flooded with millions of search results.  Fortunately, a few search engines are on to those advertisers and eliminate their ads automatically.  Still, it doesn’t take long to type a plus sign before the word or term you are searching for, letting the search engine know that you are not willing to put up with useless pages.

When it gets worse

You might find that, at certain times of the year, you get presented with more and more junk pages while looking for valuable information.  The problem is obvious, annual celebrations such as Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother and Father’s Day bring on a stream of advertisers all trying to lure you to their sites.  

Wonder no longer about why use the plus sign searching the Internet, try it, you’ll be pleasantly surprised and save a whole lot of time finding what you’re looking for.

www.connymanero.weebly.com

PMF Scam - Update

If you read yesterday’s post about the Princess Margaret Foundation scam, you might have come to the conclusion that I’m puzzled by the way they handle their money.

To get clarity, I wrote to them and ask them for an explanation.

Dear Sir or Madam,

I had a look at the sweepstakes and when I add all prizes together I come to about 10 million dollars.

Wouldn't it be better to invest that money into healthcare instead of all those items?

How can you afford all those houses, cars, vacations and electronics?

I'm looking forward to your answer,

Conny

This morning I found a reply …

Hello, Conny, and thank you for your note.

This is a long-standing debate. The problem is, without the prizing, especially the largest of the prizes, the lottery doesn’t hold the same cachet. It would be all but impossible to have people pay $100 (or any sizable amount of money) for a ticket without offering something very substantial in return. The homes, cars and trips provide dreams for ticket buyers, but these dreams fund essential cancer research work at The Princess Margaret in turn. And we need the lottery proceeds because they are the single largest source of funding, outside the government funding, that the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre receives. Since the first Princess Margaret lottery was presented in 1996, more than $227 million has been raised for cancer research programs at The Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. We wouldn’t have had that source of revenue without the lotteries.

I hope you better understand why we hold the lotteries and why we offer such wonderful prizes.

Respectfully,

Kevin Shea

The Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation

This fund raising still doesn’t make any sense to me.  Do people really need a reward to find a cure for cancer?  Isn’t healing (and subsequent living) enough?

The Cancer Society was founded in 1913 by 15 doctors and businessmen.  So they’ve been in operation for 99 years.  Although progress in the diagnosis and treatment of certain cancers has been made, cancer is still a dirty word that for a lot of people sounds like a death sentence.

In comparison, vaccines have been formulated for viral and bacterial diseases.  Nearly all these vaccines were formulated quite some time ago, without the use of computers and with limited funds.  So why is it, that with all our technology no more cures our found. 

One cure our brilliant scientists did find.  The cure for erectile dysfunction (Viagra) and it only took them 13 years. 

When can we expect a cure for cancer?  My guess is never. 

Imagine if you will that a cure was found.  No more donations for the Cancer Society, Princess Margaret Foundation and a list of other cancer related organizations.  No more cancer related doctors and nurses, no more machinery and oh dear, no more drugs.  That translates into a loss of not millions but of billions of dollars.

For the longest time I thought I was the only one being skeptical about the use of all those donations, but after talking to quite a few people, it turns out I am far from the only one.  All kinds of people are more than a little suspicious of cancer “research”.

In general they all agreed, cancer is not just an illness, it’s a business.

Are people really spending $100 on a ticket for the Princess Margaret Foundation?  They bitch and whine about the gas prices; they switch to LED lights to save electricity; they go to the store with coupons; they complain about unemployment after the recession; there’s all kinds of advice on frugal living.  In short … do you really see these people throw away $100 on a ticket that might or might not win?

And speaking of winning … where is last year’s list of winners?  Who won the houses and the cars?  Were they won?