Interloper View

I started blogging back in 2008 with Programmer’s Journal on the Blogger platform. That was the first time I realized that I am able to earn money online. The earning is not a lot but it turned out to be a game for me to experiment and see how much I could earn. I wanted to share my experience below. MyLot required a lot of active time (well at least until the rules for the site changed). I received quite a few payment from them since I started but stopped when I thought that they had stopped paying. However, after I heard they were still paying, I continued until the latest change - where they stopped sharing revenue completely. Triond is another site I received several payments from. It is great because of the low cash out limit so I did not have to wait long to reach the payout and receive my money. Bukisa is another site that was good to me for a while. I was attracted to it initially due to the high earning rate but later they changed it to be a partial share.

Of late, I have been writing mostly movie reviews. I found that this is a rather save and easy way for me to write online. The few times I tried writing on other things, the editor of the site I wrote for found many mistakes in my grammar. Surprisingly there was minimal or no grammar mistakes for the movie review I wrote. I love watching movies so I am happy to be able to write movie reviews. After a few disappointing movies, I try to be more selective on the movies I watch. Some movies are for my own entertainment while others to allow me to spend time with my children. One movie such movie was Warm Bodies , even though it was a zombie movie it was not scary at all. There was a part we had fun with. It was the point when the main character a zombie named “R”, he had turned back into human and was shot by the human survivors. The girlfriend was trying to convince them that he is human and used the fact that he is bleeding as proof. Zombies do not bleed. I told my children,

The following is the Malaysian Voters Education Series. Know your rights: Introduction: Episode 1: Episode 2:    Episode 3: Indelible Ink Episode 4 - Phantom Voters Episode 5: Episode 6: Episode 7: Episode 8: Episode 9 Episode 10: Election for Newbies Submit complaints if you are not allowed to vote to Permantau at http://pru13.info/  , if there is enough complaints, your candidate can submit a police report.

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. The o

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 about social ne

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 know today.

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 billed RM625. I cancelled

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 might

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://interloperview. blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default I was not able to find the url to obtain the rss feed

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