5 Most Scenic Locations in the World

 Travel, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Nov 292011
 

If you’ve been around the world, you know exactly what I mean when I say that there are more magnificent sights on this planet than you could possibly imagine.

If you’ve ever wanted to drop everything for a couple of weeks and

great-barrier-reef

Great Barrier Reef

visit one of the most gorgeous locations on earth, you’ll want to check out some of these places. Below is a list of some of the most scenic locations you’ll ever see.

Be sure to bring your camera. You will want to take lots of photographs to remember your travels by.

  1. The Great Barrier Reef, AustraliaJust off the eastern coast of Australia, the Great Barrier Reef has over 600 islands to check out. Not only do all of the blues, greens and great beaches give you a lot to be amazed at, you’ll also have plenty of clear water to wallow in.

    Canadian-Rockies

    Canadian Rockies

  2. Canadian Rockies, CanadaWith plenty of mountains, canyons, caves and open water to explore, you’ll think you’re in a picture it’s so beautiful. An extension of the North American Rockies mountain range, the Canadian Rockies are actually a bit older than the North American Rockies. Check out some pictures of them and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.
  3. Machu Picchu, PeruThis was the site of an ancient city that was discovered only about 100 years ago by an archeologist from Yale University. Machu
    machu-picchu

    Machu Picchu

    Picchu is believed to have once been a sacred place, but is now just a shell of its former self. This is a very popular tourist attraction, and you can see just how large and magnificent the city was and still is.

  4. Sogne Fjord, NorwayQuite possibly the largest fjord in the world, Sogne Fjord is a must for nature and small village lovers. With a combination of gorgeous
    ferry-sogne-fjord

    Sogne Fjord

    villages, equally nice cliffs and crystal clear water make this a great place to visit. If you ever wanted to visit an old-time sea and fishing village, this is it.

  5. Yosemite Valley, CaliforniaCalifornia is always a great place to visit because of the warm climate and abundance of quality towns and scenery. Yosemite
    yosemite valley

    Yosemite Valley

    Valley is perhaps the best looking site out of them all. The lush landscape and mountains that accompany it add to the wondrous scenery. Since there are plenty of hiking trails and mountain faces to climb, the avid adventurer will have no trouble finding things to do.

These locations are some of the most beautiful locations you’ll ever lay eyes upon. If you’re planning a trip soon, don’t forget to check out some of these locations!

- Joe Petchonka, Michigan Buick dealers

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My Top 3 Favorite Scary Movies

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Oct 312011
 

Happy Halloween!

As I write this I am busy handing out candy to trick-or-treaters on a beautiful, crisp autumn evening in upstate New York. It’s a perfect Halloween eve. We are Halloween Pumpkin Stock Photoall artists at Warmpicture, and of course I have my favorite art forms. One of my guilty pleasures has always been scary movies. I’ve been watching them, and even collecting many of them, for the last 30+ years.

So without further adieu, I present to you my Top 3 favorite scary movies for Halloween 2011.

John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978)

Halloween is one of the most successful independent movies of all-time, and arguably the best horror movie ever conceived. Consider that John Carpenter worked with an estimate budget of $320,000 on a movie which went on to gross  over $600 million in its first year. Now that is the definition of success!

Armed with the relatively new Steadycam, Dean Cundey delivered expert cinematography. Carpenter and Debra Hill collaborated on an expert screenplay in which they fused together their favorite campfire stories into a cohesive movie. The as of yet undiscovered Jamie Lee Curtis delivered a stunning lead performance, with great support from the venerable Donald Pleasance.

Add in a blank face mask (which was actually a Captain Kirk mask painted pure white) that became a legendary symbol of horror, and a simple yet effective musical score from Carpenter, and a legend was born. Watch it again, and appreciate it for how great a piece of art it truly is.

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980)

I am often torn between the fact that I love this movie so much, and that I love Steven King so much. King never liked Kubrick’s interpretation of his classic novel. And I can understand why. The book and the movie are very different animals.

But the bottom line for me is that Kubrick delivered one of the most frightening and creatively filmed horror movies of all time. The Shining is so torturous and horrific that it can be difficult to watch. This isn’t the type of horror movie you kick back with a bowl of popcorn to watch, and have fun with. It’s definitely not the type of scary movie you see on a date.

Kubrick’s cinematography, writing style, and choice of location creates a strong sense of claustrophobia and dread. You know something horrible is going to happen from the opening credits. But that doesn’t prepare you for Jack (Nicholson) Torrance’s murderous rampage in the film’s climax.

An entire film course could be written on Kubrick’s direction. And given the sad state of Hollywood remakes and not-so-scary cookie cutter movies, maybe such a course would be good for the future of film making.

Black Christmas (1974)

We’re going old school here. Many of you may not have heard of this one. But if you saw Halloween, When a Stranger Calls, or many of the classic horror movies from the late 1970s and early 1980s, you saw the unmistakable influence of Black Christmas.

Black Christmas was directed by the late Bob Clark, who is also famous for providing us with a much happier Yuletide moment: A Christmas Story. Black Christmas featured a brilliant cast, including Olivia Hussey (Romeo and Juliet), Keir Dullea, John Saxon, and a young Margot Kidder.

A sorority house is receiving very disturbing crank calls. The calls escalate in their intensity, as a rash of unsolved murders and attacks terrorize the small college town.

The killer in Black Christmas is not your garden variety Boogeyman. He is a complete psychopath. Disturbingly so. His phone calls contain multiple voices screaming at each other, including one of a screaming child. Somewhere in that mayhem is his full back story, and frankly I don’t want to know it. Although we never see him, I consider him to be one of the most violent killers in the history of horror. Certainly he is the most unstable.

The twist of this movie loses some mojo 37 years later, mainly because the twist has been stolen and re-used multiple times in subsequent horror movies. But make no mistake. This is one of the most frightening movies ever made.

If you decide to seek it out, just make sure you get the 1974 version and not the less inspiring 2006 remake. Let me know if you like it!

In the meantime, I need to get back to handing out that candy.

So what are your favorite scary movies?

Goal Setting for Success

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Sep 132011
 

Goal setting is used by the world’s most successful people. Whether you want to reach a certain level of web senior on bicycletraffic, build a larger blog following, or achieve a sales target, you need to set goals.

Almost everyone I know sets goals. They set goals to lose weight, increase sales, run farther, and to get promoted. Most fail, with the vast majority giving up very quickly.

You know the type. They are the same people who hit the gym on the first weekday after New Year’s, stumbling over the equipment and trying to make good on their resolution to lose the flab. A few weeks later, they are never seen anywhere near the gym again. Until next January of course.

It’s not that people who fail at goal setting are lazy, or less motivated than those who achieve their goals. The problem is usually that they simply don’t understand how to set goals properly.

Motivation Should Come First

Before you set your goal, you should be able to explain in 1 or 2 short sentences exactly why you want to achieve this particular goal. “I want to get rid of my fat belly” is not a very good reason to start an exercise program after January 1st. If such a goal truly motivated you, there would be no reason to wait until the New Year to start.

Woman on dietA goal should be self motivating. You should want to start it today, right now. Not on some arbitrary date conceived by the media.

Specify Exactly What You Want to Achieve

“I want to increase my sales this year,” is not a specific goal. How will you know when you achieve it? Is 0.1% improvement good enough? Or do you think doubling your sales is important?

You must specifically state your exact goal. Whether it is losing 20 pounds or increasing net profit by 50%, the specificity will tell you when you have achieved your goal. The finish line will drive you when your motivation begins to wane.

Create a Deadline

A challenging yet realistic deadline is imperative to properly setting goals. You can choose an arbitrary calendar date, such as December 31st. But the best date to choose is one which is tied to your goal. Maybe you need to hit a profit target or get your sales out of the black before the end of the fiscal quarter so your company will survive. Maybe your high school reunion is in 120 days, and you want to show up in optimum physical condition.

Dates which hold an emotional attachment are more effective dates to choose than arbitrary calendar dates.

Tell Your Friends

If you really want to achieve a goal, tell your friends. Let them know on Facebook and Twitter. Tell them at the Alarm Clockoffice water cooler. Let your spouse know. Why? Because they will all see you fail if you don’t follow through. Do you really want to publicly fail? Of course not. You will fight harder to achieve your goals and show more discipline if you are motivated by an external pressure.

Another reason to enlist your friends is to increase your emotional support. Good friends won’t offer you a donut if they know you need to lose 20 pounds in 4 months. Good friends will cheer you on as you achieve successes along the way.

Just Do It

By the end of today, you will decide exactly what it is you wish to achieve and why you want to achieve it. You will write it down. Feel Happy Businessman Celebratingfree to start a journal (I use Google Docs so I have access to my goals from any computer with internet throughout the process). Set a deadline date which is realistic but challenging. Enlist your friends and family.

We want to see you achieve all of your goals this year. Let us know when you achieve them!

- Dan Padavona, Warmpicture

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Wear the White Hat

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Aug 282011
 

Cowboy White HatYou have a fantastic blog with great content, but nobody has found it yet. Your web store is set up, your products are excellent, but the search engines have no idea you are there. It is natural to want to take shortcuts, even if some of those shortcuts are frowned upon by the search engines.Don’t do it.Any search engine algorithm is going to have the potential for exploitation, but the search engines know this and are constantly closing doors open to exploitation. Dicey techniques for getting ahead of the competition rarely are effective for long. Even worse, if one is caught gaming the system, a web page can be given a stiff penalty preventing it from ever ranking highly again.

Take the case of J.C. Penney, alleged in a New York Times article from February 2011 to have been gaming the search engines. The Times discovered Penney ranked #1 in Google for too many keywords, and so enlisted a search engine expert to research what was going on. The research found 2,015 web pages with links to the Penney website using tags for different sorts of dresses.

Some of the pages were related to apparel, but most were not. There were links to Penney’s dress lineup from shady looking banking lists, and many other bizarre pages including bulgariapropertyportal.com.

Google has long frowned upon Doorway Web Pages, sites which exist for no other reason than to link to another site and build “authority” for it. It caught BMW in 2006, and it alleged Penney was also trying to game the search results.

J.C. Penney, a venerable and respected American company, saw its #1 rankings disappear. In many cases they dropped back to Page 3 or worse.

The lesson to be learned here is that anyone can be caught, and that the result of being caught is a long term penalty which cripples the earnings power of a website.

Wear the white hat. Engage in proper link building. Create great content which helps people, and share it through social media to spread the word. Guest Post. Optimize your pages, including page titles. If explaining your techniques to your mother makes you feel a tinge of guilt, you are probably doing something you know you shouldn’t do.

Like the old tortoise and the hare fable, the rabbit who races ahead without abandon never wins the race.

- Dan Padavona, Warmpicture

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When Opportunity Knocks

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Aug 242011
 
“Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.” – Warren Buffett
Stock Market AnalysisWe’re covering an unusual topic in this article. I feel we have a rare opportunity to expand our online presence. Whether you are a blogger, designer, or business owner, you need to take advantage of the current economic crisis facing all of us.

 

A few mornings ago CNN was expounding on the world stock markets spiraling down. My wife asked me if our mutual fund company was “doing its job” and selling our stocks to get us into cash. First of all, we have index funds through Vanguard instead of actively managed accounts. And second, I stick to a strict discipline of keeping us in 70% stocks and 30% bonds, rebalancing our holdings once per year.

So when the stock market was racing higher a few months ago, I was reducing my exposure automatically. Now my bond exposure is surging higher, cushioning my losses in stocks.

The most important thing I am doing however is hording cash for additional investment. I like to park my broken economynon-retirement savings in high yielding stock funds, and using the dividends to fund vacations, new vehicle purchases, etc. The rest keeps growing. My favorite fund was giving me a 3% dividend the last time I made a purchase. Now that the market has crashed, that dividend yield is pushing toward 4%. A 4% cash flow with very little risk is quite enticing.

That’s how you should be approaching this economic downturn. In any crisis there is opportunity. This is not a bad environment for business. It is a bad environment for businesses with more debt than cash, and an excellent opportunity for more conservatively funded companies to grow as others fail.

As the economic crisis deepens, you will see competing websites, blogs, and businesses close shop. Some will do so because they were mismanaged. Others will close their doors because they don’t have the patience to grow their market share during the crisis, and reap the benefits when better days arrive. And better days always arrive.

This is the time to envision your web business and blog moving up a tier ahead of your current competitors. recovery sign postAssume that many of them will wonder if pushing forward every day against a backwards moving current is futile. They won’t work as hard as you, knowing that their adsense clicks are going down and that their products aren’t selling as much.

Opportunity is knocking at your front door. Will you be yet another business that gives up when everyone else is panicking? Or will you be the last one standing.

- Dan Padavona, Warmpicture

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