Interloper View

The following is a comparison of the various medical cards in Malaysia, covering Prudential ING AIA Great Eastern Allianz AXA Affin Life  The comparison is based on a 30 year old male who does not smoke. I am not sure when it was last updated. The website it was linked to no longer exist. The spreadsheet is as here .

My recent accident got me to think about insurance when I found out that my medical card did not cover for the bridge needed to replace the three teeth I lost. We consulted an agent from another insurance company who happen to be a close friend to my parents. According to her, bridge should be covered since it was to restore the function of my mouth before the accident. The other two insurance cover maintains that bridge is considered cosmetic and is therefore not covered. ©  Marissa CC: Attribution-ShareAlike Sadly, it is usually the case when it comes to insurance. We get insurance for the peace of mind that we will be covered when we need it but when we really need to coverage, we are told that we are not covered. I am switching my medical insurance for now. I hope the new policy will provide a better coverage than the one I am switching from. For a comparable premium the lifetime limit of the medical insurance is RM 1 million compared to the old one is only RM 720k. T...

In the previous article , I suggested that getting topics from movies, restaurant reviews and online forums. I will continue with other areas in your life where you can get ideas and inspirations for topics to write. © Darren Hester (Macon, Georgia USA) CC:Attribution-NonCommercial Bedtime Stories or Parenting Do you make your own bedtime stories or make up things to entertain your children. Share what you do, new parents would love to have ideas on how to bring up their own children. For example when my daughter was younger she had difficulty recognizing abc. Initially I was frustrated but at the end I devised a method to help her remember. I found out later that this was a common difficulty for young children. She has grown out of this phase but I hope that I am able to help other children with similar difficulty. Travel or Holidays Did you go to a new place or country for a holiday. Why not write about your experience? Did you see something unusual, walking fish , beautifu...

Search Engines Many websites are created daily so it is not possible for search engines know of them. When you start your website, it is your job as the owner to let the search engines know the site.  The easiest way is to submit your sitemap to the search engines. Most search engines accept the RSS feed for your site as the sitemap. SEO or search engine optimization is useless if your website is not even in the search engine. You can submit your sitemap to Google using the Google Webmaster and to Bing and Yahoo using Bing WebMaster . Having your website indexed by the search engine will not generate traffic to your site automatically but will help. The next stage is to announce your articles to potential readers and fans using social networking sites like Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, Facebook and GooglePlus. Release  information: Signed model release filed with Shutterstock, Inc. Copyright:   mangostock Social Network Sites One important thing to remember a...

Recently we took our children for a day of fun and games in at Berjaya Theme Park. Everything seems perfect. The drive to the Berjaya Time Square was smooth with minimal traffic and we did not have any trouble finding the place (unlike the last time where we had to stop to ask for direction and drive around different blocks to find the entrance). This time we decided to park at a nearby open car park (which only charges a flat rate) instead of the covered parking inside Berjaya Time Square). We arrived at the entrance of the indoor Theme Park before it was open but already there were a few others in front of us. Both children were excited with the trip because they planned to go on the roller coaster with a 360 degree loop for the first time. Even though they have been to the theme park multiple times, they have never had the courage to go on the roller coaster. They went from one ride to another while I joined them in a few of the rides. We got into one of the rides known as the “DNA ...

It is fun to make up your own bedtime stories and it provides a great opportunity to spend time with your children. I managed to tell stories I created for seven months before I ran out of ideas and my children lost interest. ©  Jan Teunis  (Belgium) Topic The first step in making a story come up with a topic. Ways of coming up with a topic include: Think of something your children are interested in. Ask your children for a topic. Think of something lesson you want to teach your children. Use Words that Your Children can Relate to To engage children, it is important to provide them with things that are familiar with or can associate with. It will make it easier for them to visualize the story. For example, in the Moths and Butterflies story, I started with fairies. Children know fairies can fly and to them butterflies and moths look like worms, hence the story. I used a similar approach in Dinosaurs . Dinosaurs look like scaly and mutated version of animals we kn...

One struggle for new bloggers is to find a topic. This is especially true for those who want to write and submit articles to blog to earn money. Here are some suggestions to help address this challenge. image © Adrian van Leen for openphoto.net CC:PublicDomain Movies Have you seen a movie lately? If you have, why not write a review about the movie? Discuss the story line, what was good about the movie, what was bad about the movie? Did you go to the movie with your children or friends, if you did then share their comments or reactions to the movie? Was there anything memorable about the movie? Maybe there were some questions that others might be interested in such as did the movie contains nudity. Some of the movie reviews were on movies I recently watched such as Ted , Looper (a movie with Bruce Willis) and Skyfall (the latest Bond movie). Instead of movies, you could also write about television series, especially new series that has just been released like Last Resort...

I previously reviewed the different credit cards that are available in Malaysia and ways to get money back from these cards. A lot has changed since my last review. I have not really gone back to do an in depth analysis. The baseline at the moment for value based on either cash back or prize redemption is 0.5%. The service tax by the Malaysian government adds an additional RM50 per principal card and RM25 per supplementary card.each year. image ©  Adrian van Leen  for  openphoto.net  CC:PublicDomain  Due to the competition in the market, most annual fees are waived. The only exception I found is the Citibank Cashback card. When you first sign up for the card, the annual fee for the first two years are waived. However, when I asked for a waiver, they refused. Instead of approving a waiver, they offered a different card. The other option from them was to sign up for an additional service from them for another year waiver. I refused either option and was b...

Have you ever thought of doing something but did not really know where to start or how to start? There is a simple solution, just go ahead and do it. The result really does not matter, what matters is that you get your practical experience. image © Jasenka Petanjek for openphoto.net CC:Attribution-ShareAlike  Start a little experiment - a proof of concept. This is done daily in companies all over the world so why not do it in our personal lives? The key factor about proof of concept to do it on a small scale with minimal risk. Before you start your proof of concept, you should have some idea about what it is you want to find out. The preparations can be something as simple as reading what other have done in that area. For example, you are thinking of starting a blog. Read about your options, there are free hosting sites and there are sites that require payment. There are some articles which talk about the essential steps to starting a blog. Just to experience it you m...

When it comes to providing feed into this site for my other writing sites, a rss feed is required. The same applies if you want to automatically publish your articles on Facebook (via NetworkedBlogs). image © Michael Jastremski for openphoto.net CC:Attribution-ShareAlike Some sites make it easy for you. The following are the rss for the sites I write for. Note that in each case, strovek is my username, if you need it for your own user name, just replace it strovek with your username for the site.   Triond        http://www.triond.com/feed/user/pen_name/strovek ExpertsPages    http://expertspages.com/author/strovek/feed Bukisa    http://www.bukisa.com/rss/author/Strovek Wikinut    http://www.wikinut.com/arss~sohnm/Strovek/rss.xml  Blogger (using this site as a sample)   http://interloperview.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss      or   http://interlopervi...

There are different reasons for writing online. When I started writing online it was to share my knowledge and experience with my team. I was a programmer managing a group of other programmers. image © Michael Jastremski for openphoto.net CC:Attribution-ShareAlike The blog served a couple of purposes: share some of the tricks I used on some of my projects. set up a standard (comments, error handling guide). a place for me to bookmark solutions or tips I found previously. After that I found that it was earn some spare change by writing and created a few other blogs. The challenge I found in was to get the word out about my writing. My early success was to participate in forums. One such entry garnered 1000 over hits but it only lasted one day and dropped as fast. I have since started participating in other article directory sites like wikinut bukisa Triond Squidoo ExpertsColumn It is much easier to earn money with these sites since the traffic (from all...

The 10 scrolls from Og Mandino's book can be found here .

This was shared with me in Google Plus.  Very touching. When an old man died in the geriatric ward of a nursing home in an Australian country town, it was believed that he had nothing left of any value. Later, when the nurses were going through his meagre possessions, They found this poem. Its quality and content so impressed the staff that copies were made and distributed to every nurse in the hospital. One nurse took her copy to Melbourne .. The old man's sole bequest to posterity has since appeared in the Christmas editions of magazines around the country and appearing in mags for Mental Health. A slide presentation has also been made based on his simple, but eloquent, poem. And this old man, with nothing left to give to the world, is now the author of this 'anonymous' poem winging across the Internet. Cranky Old Man..... What do you see nurses? . . .. . .What do you see? What are you thinking .. . when you're looking at me? A cranky old man, . . . . . .n...

1. “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.” – In other words, don’t settle for anything less than amazing work for yourself and for others. When people see that you expect greatness, they will give you what you expect. The same goes for investing, you will never go wrong with buying excellent companies. 2. “Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.” – When you are wrong, stop what you are doing, admit your mistakes, cut your losses short, and move on. This will prove to be valuable in investing as well as in life and in business. 3. “Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.” – Simply put, no one can say no to great. If you want to live a life that matters, do great work. If you want a portfolio that kicks ass, put in your research and buy great companies. Y...

 A friend shared this with me more than a year ago, I thought I would place it here to share it with others. Inspirational ! SHARE IT WITH CHILDREN Power of Money, By Adam Khoo ( Singapore 's youngest millionaire at 26 yrs.) Some of you may already know that I travel around the region pretty frequently, having to visit and conduct seminars at my offices in Malaysia , Indonesia , Thailand and Suzhou ( China ). I am in the airport almost every other week so I get to bump into many people who have attended my seminars or have read my books. Recently, someone came up to me on a plane to KL and looked rather shocked.He asked, 'How come a millionaire like you is traveling economy?' My reply was, 'That's why I am a millionaire. ' He still looked pretty confused. This again confirms that greatest lie ever told about wealth(which I wrote about in my latest book 'Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires' ). Many people have been brainwashed to think that mill...

A few thing presentation ideas from Steve Jobs: He hardly ever looks back at the presentation. There are hardly any words on the slides, leave alone lengthy bullet points. Even when he's sharing the financial results of the company (in the beginning), he makes them fun to listen to. He is driving the presentation, not the other way around. He's delivering the message, and the slides are giving the added impact to his message.   His words are in absolute sync with the slides. There are no useless headers, footers or logos on every slide, that we often use on ours. It gives that extra space, flexibility and freshness to every slide. You can hardly notice the remote controller in his hand. There are no other visible gadgeteries on him, distracting the audience.   He's so relaxed and calm, and that makes the audience comfortable and receptive to his message. He's so focused on the message. Not even once did he stray from the topic. He's unbelievably well fa...

This is an interesting article on how to ensure misery in Life.   In case you wonder why I bother to bookmark this page , it is because it is funny and by one of the greatest investor of our time - Charlie Munger.

These quotes were taken from the following site . “We both (Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett) insist on a lot of time being available almost every day to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. We read and think.”   ―   Charles T. Munger “We all are learning, modifying, or destroying ideas all the time. Rapid destruction of your ideas when the time is right is one of the most valuable qualities you can acquire. You must force yourself to consider arguments on the other side.”   ―   Charles T. Munger “In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn't read all the time -- none, zero. You'd be amazed at how much Warren(Buffett) reads -- at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I'm a book with a couple of legs sticking out".”   ―   Charles T. Munger ,   Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger The following is taken from another source : “SOME OF THE MOST ADMIRED PEOPLE IN...