Get Out Of Debt

On April 1, 2004, Google announced that it was getting into the e-mail business. Its Web-based, ad-supported service, Gmail, wasn’t much more than a basic inbox with a great search feature. But it offered 1 GB of storage for free in an era when 1/250th of that amount was considered luxurious, leaving some observers myself included wondering if the press release trumpeting Gmail was an April Fools’ prank.

Nowadays, when Gmail makes headlines, it’s often for service hiccups. Outages and slowdowns, usually brief and isolated, are fodder for both news stories and panicky tweets (“Is Gmail down for everybody or just me?”). Last month an embarrassing bug crippled the service for about .02% of users 30,000 folks for five days. When you’re as central to the way people get stuff done as Gmail is, trouble for a tiny percentage of users is still trouble for a lot of people. (See 10 Gmail tricks you might not know.)

Gmail’s biggest challenge isn’t its reliability record, which remains sterling compared with most of the corporate e-mail systems it’s been known to replace. It’s the sheer number of things it does. Little by little, 2004′s stripped-down Web mail morphed into a kitchen sink.

The emphasis on crazy quantities of storage remains I currently have 1.8 GB of e-mail and 5.5 GB of room to spare. There’s no longer anything basic about the service, though. It’s chockablock with features, options and related tools, some of which are only tangentially related to e-mail. You can use it to place phone calls to any landline in the U.S. for free. And make video calls. And send text messages or do instant messaging. You can manage your calendar on the left and your to-do list on the right. Did I mention Buzz, the Twitter-like social network that was briefly controversial last year before sinking largely unnoticed into the Gmail gumbo?

A Google engineer invented Gmail in his spare time, and the current incarnation still feels like a bunch of geeks built it to please themselves. More than 50 features reside in its Labs section, a repository of optional, experimental tools that’s an interesting peephole into the minds of the developers. Some of the Labs features are straightforward and useful, like extra keyboard shortcuts and the ability to view Flickr photos inside messages. Others are a tad idiosyncratic, like Don’t Forget Bob, which looks at a message’s recipients and suggests other people you might want to add to the list. And a few are downright peculiar, like Mail Goggles, which forces you to perform simple math problems before permitting you to send e-mail late at night over the weekend just in case you partied too heartily and are about to send a message you’ll later regret.

I use and like numerous Labs features, but exploring the offerings always leaves me wishing that the Gmail team spent less time on quirky side projects and more time on the fundamentals. For instance, Gmail’s user interface is a cacophony of links, buttons, menus and lists, with none of the pithy discipline of the Google.com home page. For years, the inbox let you read messages only in a threaded view called Conversations, which people tended to either adore or despise. It recently started allowing you to switch to a conventional, unthreaded view but still doesn’t offer the option that makes the most sense to my particular brain: Conversations sorted in reverse-chronological order, like the inbox itself. (By organizing them with the oldest messages at the top, Gmail requires superfluous scrolling to get to the most recent items.) (See Google in TIME’s list of the 50 best iPhone apps of 2011.)

Every so often, I get fed up with Gmail and flee. Sometimes I abscond to a big-name rival like Microsoft’s recently spruced-up Hotmail, and sometimes to a spunky upstart like Threadsy. (Thanks to Gmail’s support for the IMAP e-mail protocol, it’s possible to abandon it for an alternative and take your e-mail address and mail with you.) So far, I have always come skulking back. For all of Gmail’s flaws, it has the same relationship to other e-mail clients that Churchill said democracy has to other forms of government: it’s the worst one except for everything else.

Part of the problem isn’t Gmail but e-mail itself. Programmer Ray Tomlinson invented it in 1971, when the only people on the Internet were a smattering of government researchers and academics. Today e-mail is abused as much as it’s used, by spammers, marketers, nutty uncles and others who bombard our inboxes. Once an unimaginably speedy form of communication, it can feel plodding and overcomplicated compared with younger, sprightlier alternatives such as Twitter, Facebook Messages and text messaging. Maybe that explains why young people aren’t all that attached to it. (A recent survey said the amount of time 12-to-17-year-olds spent using Web-mail services like Gmail on their computers tumbled 48% in a year.)

In short, e-mail is ripe for reinvention. Google is doing its part with Priority Inbox, which monitors your Gmail inbox, watching which messages you open and attempting to push the one you’ll want to read right away to the top. For me, the option seemed hopelessly crude and confusing at first. But once we figured each other out, it became a compelling reason to stick with Gmail rather than leave in a snit. (See the promises and pitfalls of cloud computing.)

Google’s most radical rethinking of e-mail didn’t show up within Gmail, however it was with Wave, a stand-alone service that the company announced in 2009. Wave didn’t set out to improve e-mail so much as replace it with a hybrid of mail, instant messaging, word processing and file sharing, and it was rife with big ideas. (As you typed a message, your correspondents could see it arrive character by character, typos and all.)

The company unveiled Wave with hoopla that might have impressed even Steve Jobs, put it into beta testing, and opened it up to the public. And then … Google pulled the plug after just a few months when the service wasn’t an immediate hit. It was a little as if Ray Tomlinson had given up on this e-mail thing in 1972. (Comment on this story.)

I hope the Wave wipeout hasn’t left Google too timid. Reinventing e-mail may be a daunting proposition, but reinventing just one e-mail service Gmail would be a great start. And in this case, the best way to reinvent it might be to bring back some of the minimalist thinking that helped make Gmail such a wonder back in 2004.

Eyeglasses are truly one of the most incredible inventions in the history of man, without them many people who’ve made astounding contributions to society would have been unable to participate in even some of the simplest everyday tasks. Thinking about the sheer number of people you know that require some type of vision correction and how their lives would be affected for the worse if eyeglasses had never been invented puts some perspective into just how important the invention of eyeglasses was to humanity.

We know a good time frame for when eyeglasses where invented, as there are several references to lenses that magnified and aided vision in writings dated between 1265 and 1290, but the actual person responsible for inventing eyeglasses remains a mystery.

Original Glasses

From descriptions and imagery in paintings it is known that the original eyeglasses were quite a bit different than the glasses of today. Original eyeglasses were only perched on the nose, with no extra means of support – this made them very uncomfortable for the wearer and very unsteady if the person wearing them had to do any moving about at all. It wasn’t until the more than four hundred years later (sometime during the 1720′s) that the frames evolved into what we would recognize as eyeglasses today with arms that use the wearer’s ears as the primary means of support, making glasses much more comfortable and stable to wear.

The first pairs of eyeglasses produced had frames made of metal or bone and, at the time the “opticians” didn’t have the capabilities of producing flawless lenses in glass so original eyeglasses had lenses made out of quartz.

Over the next few hundred years glasses evolved in both function and comfort, glass became a viable option for lenses because production methods that eliminated bubbles and other imperfections emerged. Glasses were produced to correct a variety of vision problems, from simple magnification for reading to correcting near sightedness and far sightedness.

Evolution of Eyeglasses

In the mid 1780′s, American pioneer, inventor and visionary Benjamin Franklin invented the first version of the bi-focal. It was said that Franklin was bothered by the hassle of having to constantly change glasses to be able to clearly see as he completed different tasks, so to put an end to the hassle he began work on a set of lenses that would work to correct both vision problems that he suffered from.

In recent years lenses have evolved even further beyond what even the great mind of Benjamin Franklin could have imagined – progressive lenses these days have any number of different correction properties as you proceed from the top of the lens down to the bottom.

The frames of eyeglasses have also come a long way since the invention of eyeglasses. Today your average wearer has little trouble getting their hands on an almost weightless frame that is practically indestructible. New advancements have made possible the creation of eyeglass frames that can be bent and twisted and then will just return to their originally designed shape.

It’s also safe to assume that without the invention of eyeglasses that there would be no hard or soft contact lenses and that there would be no vision correction surgery available. Though it’s impossible from the information that we have to determine exactly who invented eyeglasses, it’s very safe to say that whoever had a hand in the creation and development of this form of vision correction changed the way that a huge part of the history of the population went about living their lives for the better. If it weren’t for eyeglasses as we know them, there are a lot of people over the course of the last several hundred years whose quality of life would have been substantially lower than it was because of the benefits received from eyeglasses.

Debt consolidation loans are loans that are used to pay off existing debts and in the process merge the debts into a single loan. Debt consolidation loans are therefore useful for people whose debts have spiraled out of control and who need to simplify their finances.

It has never been easier to obtain both secured and unsecured debt. These days there are thousands of lenders willing to issue various forms of debt – such as store cards, credit cards, and personal loans – to all kinds of borrowers.

Lenders seem willing to lend money to almost anybody in today’s economy and even people with adverse credit histories are not automatically excluded from applying for many different types of credit.

While this can seem positive, it can lead to situations where borrowers who are unable to manage their finances properly are successful in obtaining large amounts of debt. This is, of course, not a good situation for a borrower to find themselves in and it is becoming more common as lenders’ continue to loosen their lending criteria.

Individuals who overextend their borrowings can find themselves in situations where they have store cards, credit cards, car loans, personal loans etc from a variety of lenders. Each of the individual debts will require the borrower to make monthly payments towards the balance of the loans and the interest charged on them, which can cause havoc to their personal finances.

Not only can the overall amount of money due each month be too much for the borrower to pay, the sheer number of payments due can be difficult to manage and budget for especially if the payments are due at different times of the month.

This is where debt consolidation loans can help. If the borrower feels that their finances are out of control and they wish to only make one payment towards their loans each month, they should consider debt consolidation loans as an alternative to managing their debts on an individual basis.

There are several different forms of debt consolidation loans, including secured and unsecured, and the product that will suit each borrower’s requirements will depend on their individual circumstances.

Details of the borrower’s personal situation will need to be assessed and matched to the criteria for the various debt consolidation loans available on the market at the time of application. These details will include the borrower’s employment situation, whether they are a home owner or a renter, and whether or not they suffer from any bad credit.

If you wish to receive expert advice on debt consolidation loans, contact an independent mortgage advisor today.

Lincoln National Life Insurance Company Rating

Here is the newest, revised version of the best insurance companies listings. These are compiled in a top 100 ratings guide format. The listings are in alphabetical order helping insurance agents & brokers locate an insurer. Find out how your opinion compares. How can you possibly rate an insurance company? I will mention briefly the various ways, show you the method I is used for this article, and why.

BY NUMBER OF AGENTS

This ratings guide listing method evaluates the insurer by the sheer number of insurance agents & brokers currently licensed and under contract. with carrier. I feel this evaluation to be worthless for a multitude of reasons.

First of all there are a number of career health and life insurance agencies that have thousands of representatives. However, of these,up to 80% of the total agents are relatively new in attempting to establish credibility in the industry. Four years down the line only 6% of many an insurance company agency force will maintain enough production to stay career representatives.

Moreover, my findings uncover inaccuracy of this method due to licensing renewal process state insurance departments impose on the insurer. Most state departments of insurance send the renewal report forms on a yearly basis. There is a fee to be paid by each ins agent renewed. What makes it difficult is the variation of different paperwork procedures by individual states for removing non-active ins reps. The paperwork consists of costly, time consuming forms and procedures for the insurance company to make any changes. Renewing all the sales representatives is often cheaper, and thus the route the insurer frequently takes. This also gives the insurance company bragging rights to how many sales people write for them. Lincoln National Life Insurance Company Rating

Personally I was shown in state insurance department records as licensed for 11 years after I wrote my last case.

INSURANCE CO FINANCIAL RANKING LISTINGS
There are four or five top independent firms that employ this insurer rating of a company based on a multitude of financial factors. A lot has to do with projecting the financial stability of the insurer. This is accomplished by closely dissecting past and present financial history. It covers how the insurer investments perform, and the rate of return. An insurance evaluation also takes in consideration the amount of cash on hand, and how much exists in reserves to pay present and future claims.

There is a consensus among life insurance association members into believing that the highest rated insurers are the best of the bunch. Yet association members make up less than 12% of the total producer base. The other insurance agents and brokers, (the majority), do not agree that these are always the best ones to use for their client’s needs. Logic tells you that a newer quality insurer does not have past history to start out top ranked. In my situation, clients bought what I presented them. Nearly half the time it was NOT the highest rated company by the rating firms. I however sold the client what their emotional needs demanded. Many past insurance companies with rankings in the best 100 later financially failed, and still frequently do in today’s world. Lincoln National Life Insurance Company Rating