History of Money

The first golden coins in history were coined by Lydian king Croesus, around 560 BC. The first Greek coins were made initially of copper, then of iron because copper and iron were powerful materials used to make weapons. Pheidon king of Argos, around 700 BC, changed the coins from iron to a rather useless and ornamental metal, silver, and, according to Aristotle, dedicated some of the remaining iron coins (which were actually iron sticks) to the temple of Hera. King Pheidon coined the silver coins at Aegina, at the temple of the goddess of wisdom and war Athena the Aphaia (the vanisher), and engraved the coins with a Chelone, which is to this day as a symbol of capitalism. Chelone coins were the first medium of exchange that was not backed by a real value good. They were widely accepted and used as the international medium of exchange until the days of Peloponnesian War, when the Athenian Drachma replace them. According other fables, inventors of money were Demodike (or Hermodike) of Kymi (the wife of Midas), Lykos (son of Pandion II and ancestor of the Lycians) and Erichthonius, the Lydians or the Naxians.

Lozada blasts Gaite for claiming P500,000 came from private funds

Rodolfo Noel Lozada on Wednesday blasted Deputy Executive Secretary Manuel Gaite for claiming that the P500,000 the official gave him did not come from government coffers but from private funds that should be paid.

“Siguro matatalino na ang mga Filipino para paniwalaan pa ang mga gan’on (Perhaps Filipinos are intelligent enough not to believe those lies)," he said in an interview with GMA News.

Lozada said he still believes the P500,000 cash came from government funds.

Lozada had said Gaite gave him P500,000 as spending money while the former government consultant for the national broadband project was in Hong Kong. Lozada said he was bundled off to Hong Kong so he need not face a Senate inquiry last Jan. 30.

He said it was odd that someone whom he met very rarely would lend him a big amount of money.

“Maybe in a lifetime we've met twice, maximum three times. Pero ikaw ba, Kara (referring to interviewer GMA reporter Kara David), ilang beses na tayo nagkita? Siguro mga apat, limang beses na ‘no? Pag ako ba nanghingi sa iyo ng P500,000 bibigyan mo ako?" he said.

(Let’s say you, Kara, how many times have we met? Maybe four or five times. If would ask you P500,000 will you give me the money?)

Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita also on Wednesday said Gaite is ready to face the next Senate hearing on the botched ZTE deal to explain the source of the money.

"In the end, I supposed the owner of the fund has the right to claim that because that is a private fund," Ermita said. - GMANews.TV

Final Post for Alibata

This is my final post for Alibata contest. I am still hoping to win the first prize or the second prize of this Alibata keyword-ranking contest. I could have a chance to win the first or second if the setting for the MSN search will be changed to English (United States) before the checkpoint. I hope and pray that the contest organizers will be able to update the MSN setting. I’m on the top 5 overall as of now at Bayanihan Leader board because as I’ve said the setting used for MSN search was for the .com.ph result. I got 200+ points at English (United States) setting while only have 70+ points at English (Philippines) setting. The English (United States) setting is the original .com setting while the English (Philippines) is the .com.ph setting of MSN. As of January 2008, MSN updated their search engine, the default results are for where it is located and the setting should be changed manually in order to get the results from other location.

I hope the setting will be changed before they run the checkpoint script tomorrow for fair result of the Bayanihan SEO contest for Alibata keyword optimization.

Thanks and good luck to all! God Bless!

Manila Hotel

Valentine's day feature: The Manila Hotel is a 570-room, five star hotel in Manila, Philippines, located in the heart of the Manila Bay area. The Manila Hotel is the oldest premiere hotel in the Philippines, built in 1909 to rival Malacañang Palace, where the Philippine president now lives, and opened in 1912. It was built on 3.5 hectares (376,736.9 sq ft) of land along Roxas Boulevard. It was the residence of General Douglas MacArthur from 1935 to 1941.

The hotel contains the offices of several foreign news organizations, including The New York Times. It has hosted numerous historical persons and celebrities, including authors Ernest Hemingway and James A. Michener, U.S. President John F. Kennedy, The Beatles, actors Michael Jackson, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and John Wayne, publisher Henry Luce, entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr., Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden, and many various world leaders.

The hotel's guest facilities and other services include limousine and luxury car rental, a helipad on the roof deck, airport transfer and transport assistance, medical and dental clinic, a business center with Internet access, 24-hour full menu room service, a delicatessen, a barber shop and beauty salon, a florist, laundry service, a post office, an in-house shopping mall, and arrangement of sightseeing tours. The Bay Club, Manila Hotel's sports and health club, features a jacuzzi, two tennis courts, and one squash court. Guests also have access to a gym, a sauna, swimming pool with a wet bar, a game room, and an indoor golf simulator. Other health club services include a whirlpool, wet sauna, steambox, martial arts, swimming, massages, and tennis lessons.

The hotel has seven restaurants and bars, covering a large portion of world cuisines. They include the Champagne Room for French cuisine, the Cowrie Grill for steaks and seafood, and Ginza, a Japanese restaurant with a wide selection of authentic Japanese food. There is also a pool bar that serves drinks and sandwiches.

Love

The word love has many different meanings in English, from something that gives a little pleasure ("I loved that meal") to something one would die for (ideals, family). It can describe an intense feeling of affection, an emotion or an emotional state. In ordinary use, it usually refers to interpersonal love. Probably due to its psychological relevance, love is one of the most common themes in art and music.

Expressions of love may include the love for a "soul" or mind, the love of laws and organizations, love for a body, love for nature, love of food, love of money, love for learning, love of power, love of fame, love for the respect of others, etcetera. Different people place varying degrees of importance on the kinds of love they receive. According to many philosophers, the only goal of life is to be happy. And there is only one happiness in life: to love and be loved. Love is essentially an abstract concept, much easier to experience than to explain.

Just as there are many types of lovers, there are many kinds of love. Though love is inherent in all human cultures, cultural differences make any universal definition difficult to establish. One definition attempting to be universally applicable is Thomas Jay Oord's: to love is to act intentionally, in sympathetic response to others, to promote overall well-being. This definition applies to the positive connotations of love.

Interpersonal love refers to love between human beings. It is a more potent sentiment than a simple liking for another. Unrequited love refers to those feelings of love which are not reciprocated. Interpersonal love is most closely associated with interpersonal relationships. Such love might exist between family members, friends, and couples. There are also a number of psychological disorders related to love, such as erotomania.

Elmer Valentine

Elmer Valentine is the founder of two famous West Hollywood, California nightclubs: Whisky a Go Go and The Roxy Theatre. He also founded a third that preceded the Roxy, The Trip where famous acts of the time performed, including the Temptations, Joey Bishop, Shelly Berman and others. A former Chicago police officer, Valentine co-founded the Whisky in 1963 with partners Phil Tanzini, Shelly Davis, and attorney Theodore Flier.

Valentine was apparently referred to on the Uncle Meat album by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. The album includes a spoken dialogue between Zappa and Pamela Zarubica (in character as the mythical Suzy Creamcheese), in which the latter says: "I remember Elmer telling me that you really had a lot of talent, but he didn't see how anyone could ever make it who insisted on saying 'fuck' onstage. And he used to drive by in his gold Cadillac and peer in the window. 'Cause he could never get over the amount of groupie status that you had and he didn't have, possibly because he's fifty years old and wretched."

The Roxy has remained a staple of the Sunset Boulevard club scene in the mid-2000s. The Whisky still exists but is no longer considered a prestigious venue, and is widely regarded as being in decline. The Trip lasted only a few years, but was very popular for a time.

Sailor's Valentines

Sailors' Valentines were brought home from a sailor's voyage at sea for his loved one during the early 1800s. They consisted of octagonal wooden boxes with intricate shell designs on them. The idea that sailors were able to make these on their ships is unlikely. With rolling seas and cramped living quarters, it is difficult to imagine this fancy work could have been accomplished by the average sailor or whaleman; however, there is evidence of one created by the captain of a whaling ship.

Today, antique and reproduced "Sailor's Valentines" are sought for their beauty and uniqueness. Many Sailors' Valentines, both new and old can be found on the Island of Nantucket, Massachusetts.

Most "Sailors' Valentines" originated from the Barbados area, an important seaport during this period. Most historians believe the women on Barbados made the Valentines with local shells or shells brought to them from Indonesia, and sold them to the sailors. The Old Curiosity Shop is a source that many of the antique Valentines can be traced back to.

Larry Page

Lawrence Edward "Larry" Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American entrepreneur who co-founded the Google internet search engine, now Google Inc., with Sergey Brin.

After enrolling for a Ph.D. program in computer science at Stanford University, Page was in search for a dissertation theme and decided to explore the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph. His supervisor Terry Winograd agreed and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind). In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub," he was soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student and close friend, whom he had first met in the summer of 1995 in a group of potential new students which Brin had volunteered to show around the campus. To convert the backlink data gathered by BackRub's web crawler into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm, and realized that it could be used to build a search engine far superior to existing ones. In August 1996 the initial version of Google was made available, still on the Stanford Web site.

In 2007, Page was cited by PC World as #1 on the list of the 50 most important people on the web, along with Brin and Schmidt.

Page is also an investor in Tesla Motors, which developed the Tesla Roadster, a 250 mile range battery electric vehicle.

Elmo's World

Elmo's World is a segment of the children's television show Sesame Street featuring Elmo, a small red monster who speaks in third person and is perpetually 3½ years old. The show also features Mr. Noodle, a human mime character, and Elmo's pet goldfish, Dorothy. The segment was first introduced the beginning of its 30th season on November 16, 1998.

The segment takes place in a computer animated crayon-drawn room imagined by Elmo. Each day, the segment begins with Elmo announcing the topic for the day. Then, there is a series of skits and interviews centered on that topic. The skits and interviews are essentially the same everyday only changing the subject matter. They also always appear in the same repetitive order.

In the Season 37 Sesame Street episode "Cookie World", the first 10 minutes of that episode include a spoof of the segment with Cookie Monster in place of Elmo. In one episode where Bert enters Elmo's World, Elmo states that he does not know how to get out of Elmo's World.

Jollibee

Jollibee (PSE: JFC) is a fast-food restaurant chain based in the Philippines and also has locations in the United States,Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Indonesia, Dubai and Brunei. Jollibee is also the name of Jollibee's mascot, a large bee in a blazer, shirt and chef's hat. It is an American style fast-food restaurant with Filipino-influenced dishes specializing in chicken, burgers, and spaghetti.

As of November 2006, it has 1414 stores in the Philippines and 175 in other countries.

Tony Tan Caktiong and his family opened a Magnolia Ice Cream parlor at Cubao in 1975 with Jolibe as the original name. Sometime in 1978, Tony Tan and his brothers and sisters, being partners, engaged the services of a management consultant in the person of Manuel C. Lumba. Consultant Lumba shifted the business focus from ice cream to hamburgers, after his studies showed that a much larger market was waiting to be exploited. Lumba became Tony Tan's first business and management mentor. Lumba next re-formed the name Jolibe to Jolly Bee and made the two words form a single name Jollibee, but changed the "y" to an "i". The Jollibee mascot was conceptualized by Lumba inspired by local and foreign children's books. Lumba next created the product name "Yumburger" as well as the name "Chickenjoy".

The company acquired 80 percent of Greenwich Pizza.

On 2000, the company acquired Chowking, allowing Jollibee to be part of the oriental quick service restaurant segment. Similarly, Jollibee also acquired Red Ribbon Bakeshop on 2005, another popular fast-food restaurant in the Philippines.

In 2006, the company acquired the franchise of Délifrance. This further expanded its penetration in the food service industry particularly in the French cafe-bakery, a growing segment of the Philippine food market. In September of 2006, the company acquired the remaining 50% stake of Delifrance Asia Ltd. in Baker Fresh Foods Phils., Inc. (BFFPI).

seocontest2008

An SEO contest is an activity awarding prizes that challenges search engine optimization (SEO) practitioners to rank themselves among the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN using certain keyword(s).

The first recorded SEO Contest was Schnitzelmitkartoffelsalat by German webmasters, started on 2002 November 15 in the German-language usenet group de.comm.infosystems.www.authoring.misc. In the English-language world, the nigritude ultramarine competition by SearchGuild is widely acclaimed as the mother of all SEO contests. It was started on May 7, 2004 and was won two months later by Anil Dash. On September 1 of the same year, webmasters were challenged to rank number 1 on Google in three months' time for the search phrase seraphim proudleduck.

Rules and limitations can make it harder to benefit from the ranking algorithm, including quirks, of the targeted search engine. For example, the January 2006 Redscowl Bluesingsky contest issued by seologs.com was open for new domains only. That meant that the contestants couldn't benefit from the ranking advantage old web sites are thought to have over new ones. An example of that is the age advantage Anil Dash' blog page had over the well-received but brand new Nigritude Ultramarine FAQ - respectively ended 1st and 6th in the Nigritude Ultramarine challenge. It was expected that the Redscowl Bluesingsky game would be won by a domain of the style "redscowl-bluesingsky.tld" - bound to attract natural links and to benefit from the fact that the URL is made up entirely of the search words.

Niche blogging

Niche blogging is the act of creating a blog with the intent of using it to market to a particular niche market. While it could be argued that all blogs are, in some form, a niche blog, the term as it applies to marketing refers to a particular kind of blog.

Niche blogs are sometimes referred to as splogs, but this is a misnomer. Even though the desired end result for the niche blogger is to make money, the niche blog itself often contains valuable information. Most pay-per-click advertising is content-sensitive, so it is vital to the niche blogger to have useful content that is related to the chosen niche.

Neither blogging nor niche marketing is a new concept. However, only in recent years has the concept of a niche blog come into being.

Because people's interests often change over time, it is important for a successful marketer to stay up-to-date on current trends. By using free services, the niche blogger can quickly adapt to the changing market and create a new blog marketed to that niche.

In order for a website to be profitable, it must have visitors. Normal websites require search engine optimization or paid advertisement in order to gain visitors. Blog services like Blogger, on the other hand, incorporate Really Simple Syndication (RSS). Using this technology, the niche blogger can inform various online directories of the blog's existence. They, in turn, provide links to the blog. Visitors to these directories are then exposed to the blog's listing and may choose to visit the blog. Thus, the directories act as a marketing tool for the niche blogger.