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Dry Erase Boards for Home or Office

I’ve been homeschooling my kids for three years now. At first, I was worried about how well I’d be able to prepare myself for each subject and how well I’d be able to teach, but I got the hang of those things fairly quickly. After all, second grade arithmetic is a far cry from calculus, so I’ve been ok in that respect. In fact, one of my biggest challenges is making sure I have the right materials and equipment on hand to facilitate learning. You might think that fancy laptops and other high-tech devices would be necessary, but I’ve found that a simple dry erase board is the best tool I have.

Dry erase boards are great accessories for any home or office where conveying information is important. Unlike the old-fashioned chalk variety, dry erase boards are not messy at all. There’s no chalk dust to deal with, you don’t have to bang the erasers together to get them to work, and your hands don’t get gritty and dirty from the markers. Plus, the writing surface is always smooth and perfect, and there’s no need to worry about that awful sound of fingernails screeching down a chalkboard.

I bought three dry erase boards to use during my homeschooling efforts. There’s a large one that I use for writing out examples when I’m teaching, and then each of my kids has his own smaller dry erase board to write out answers, copy sentences, and so forth. This greatly reduces the amount of paper we use, and is a lot easier on the environment as well.

Offices can make great use of dry erase boards as well. I know that when I was working full-time, we had a dry erase board in every conference room. These were top-end models that had a scrolling surface for continuous writing, and had a printing mechanism that could copy whatever was written and turn it into a physical document. I doubt that any home users would need something so elaborate, but I know this was a big hit with all the clients we had at our meetings.

This type of equipment can easily be found at any office supply store, or you can order online as well. There are all different sizes available, and you can get various easels and stands if you don’t want to drill mounting holes into your walls. Markers can of course be ordered from anywhere too, and are not at all expensive when purchased by the box or carton.

Dry erase boards are terrific for a bunch of different applications, ranging from business meetings to homeschooling to memos. If you want a versatile piece of office equipment that’s affordable and environmentally friendly, then order your own board today.

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Your Guide To Business Planning Software

Is this economic downturn upending your life? If you?re one of the many people who have found themselves newly unemployed as a result of the onrushing recession, you may have found yourself idly thinking about starting your own business. I?m not going to lie to you ? starting a business is a risky proposition, even in the best of times. But if you have a can?t-miss idea and the wherewithal to make a go of it, there?s no greater satisfaction. However, just jumping in with both feet is no way to go about it ? you need to make plans first. That?s where business planning software comes in. These useful applications can help you understand the potential and risk of your business before you spend a single cent. In this feature, I?ll spotlight some of the leading business planning software products and hopefully help you pick one to use moving forward.

One of the most useful pieces of business planning software is BizPlanBuilder by Jian Software. Before you get a business off the ground, you?re going to need to know where the money is coming from. If you aren?t funding it entirely out of your own pocket, you will need to approach a bank or investors for seed capital. And without a business plan in hand, you might as well stay home. A solid business plan should act as a blueprint for the first five to ten years of your business, and BizPlanBuilder takes the frustration out of composing one. Using a template composed from thousands of successful business proposals, you enter the salient financial and creative details of your business and the program structures, formats, and even provides expert business planning advice as you move through the process. It?s truly an invaluable purchase.

Another well-reviewed business planning software package is Palo Alto Software?s Business Plan Pro. With over five hundred sample business plans to crib from, you can browse the library for a plan to use as a starting point for your own endeavor. In addition, Business Plan Pro is designed to require a small time commitment for plan preparation, giving you more time to concentrate on the logistics of your new company. In addition, when you purchase the product they throw in a veritable wheelbarrow of goodies, including a subscription to INC magazine and a gratis company logo from HP Logoworks.

Third on the list of programs is Whitebirch Planning. As opposed to the other business planning software in this list, Whitebirch Planning is a focused financial tool that lets business owners create robust scenario analysis and formula-based financial models that you can use to predict the health of your company moving forward. With a rich reporting frontend, this is a must for a company going through the growing pains of the early days.

I hope that this guide has helped you, and when your new company goes public let me know and I?ll by a share or two.

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Check out the technology of PC to PC calls: save a bundle ? it’s easy and free

The technology required to make PC to PC calls is similar to making calls with a regular phone. In phone to phone communication, also called analog telephony, three steps are required for communication to occur. In the first step, the sounds of your speech must be converted by the telephone into waves of electrons. These electron waves are analogous to the sound waves you emit with your mouth, hence the term ?analog?. In the second step, these electronic waveforms must be transmitted over a telephone cable, through a series of switches, to the receiving telephone. In the third step, the receiving telephone must convert the analog waves back into sound.

Making PC to PC calls, also called ‘IP telephony’, requires that the computer convert the sound waves of your speech into digital representations of the sounds. IP telephony must also transmit those digital representations along a cable, and the receiving computer must convert the digital representations back into sound. Aside from using a different device, a computer, instead of a phone, the significant difference between analog telephony and IP telephony is the manner in which the sounds of your voice are represented. In IP telephony, your sounds are coded into digital representations of the sounds you make, and these digital representations are converted to analog audio by the receiving computer. Since IP telephony encodes the sound, a code key is required. These keys are called audio codecs. A digital representation of a sound means a specific number is assigned to that sound.

To conduct a PC to PC call, like a phone, your computer and the computer you call will need a microphone and speaker. This means your computer must be equipped with a sound board. If you can play music on your PC, you have a sound board. In addition, you’ll need software that emulates a phone. This will be a program that displays a phone image, with buttons for numbers, for initiating the dial, for receiving a call and other similar phone functions. This software is often called a ’softphone’.

Of course, your computer will also have to be connected to the Internet and will have to connect through the Internet to a server that will control the PC to PC call setup and the signaling between senders and receivers. These servers implement a PC to PC protocol called the ‘Session Initiation Protocol’, or SIP. There are many SIP providers available today, some offering free PC to PC call services. Others offer PC to phone service by charge. Still, others provide both free PC to PC call and PC to phone call services for free and rely on advertising to make a profit.

Getting started is easy and quick. For example, the Yahoo Messenger can be downloaded for free. After it is installed, you add a contact and you simply click on a call button to initiate the call. Google provides free PC to PC calls with its Google Talk client. Skype is one of the more popular SIP providers and many others are appearing on the scene with free PC to PC call services and low PC to phone call prices that out price traditional telephone companies.

IP telephony is now preferred to the plain old telephone system, if for no other reason than that PC to PC call services are free. This is because the Internet imposes no charges on the user for connections made anywhere in the world. The flat fee you pay your Internet provider is the only associated cost. As long as the Internet continues this policy, these services will be the preferred telephony method for people and businesses wanting to keep their voice communications cost low. Have parents in another state, children spread all over the country? Start using IP telephony and save big bucks on staying connected to those you care about.