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A trip to Venice has been a dream of mine for years. I have often dreamed of all the romance of this incredible Italian village, where canals replace streets and gondolas replace taxi cabs. I have often thought how incredible it would be to go to a place like this with that special someone. Well, this is no longer a dream of mine, it is about to become my reality. My boyfriend and I began dating about 2 years ago and last Saturday night, he asked me to marry him. Of course I said yes, but since both of us are still in school I figured that we would plan a summer wedding and then go on our honeymoon while we have that long break from school. We are already living together so there won't be much rearranging that will have to go into setting up a home for the two of us. My parents have agreed to pay for the wedding, which quite honestly I want to be a simple outdoor ceremony anyway, so I think that it will work out well. Last night, after speaking to his parents Barry told me that they offered to send us to Venice for our honeymoon, on them. Now, he knows that is my dream honeymoon, and when he told me I think that my jaw dropped. Sure I had always dreamed that SOMEDAY I would get to go to Venice, but I never really thought that would be our honeymoon vacation. Barry said he would start looking into Venice hotels tomorrow, but I assured him that I have been planning the trip for years, and I let him know exactly where we should stay.

He said he should have known that I would already have the whole trip planned, and said that he will leave it up to me to plan out completely. After all, he really has never been interested in international travel, so I know the only reason that he chose Venice for our honeymoon is because of me, and I think that is really sweet. He loves the beach, so I think that if we can swing it, we will fly to the coast of Italy and spend a few days as well. This way I feel that it is the honeymoon of both our dreams. I know it will be an amazing trip!!

I was browsing online the other day for ideas for my project for my marketing class and I came across a website that was all about Dedicated Web Hosting. The first sentence was why do you need a Dedicated Web Hosting service? Really, this is one of my needs? I thought I would read on and see what they had to say about it.

Apparently any old web hosting service will just not do (according to this website ha). Dedicated Servers provide you with more storage, greater dependability and faster speed. And then it goes on to say that the customizing is unlimited and the security is high. I actually really wasn't looking into this topic before I ran across the ad, but now I am interested and actually want to find out more.

If you are a business person trying to find the right web hosting service for your company, you are going to want a high security server. This way you can keep your information safe as well as making sure no one can get into your server and mess with it. For a lot of companies, internet access and advertising is their major source of advertisement so they need their information to be portrayed nicely and correctly.

You also get more storage and faster speed with this type of server. When you have a company that has a lot of needs or customers, you are going to need to be able to put all of your information up (storage) as well as make it efficient and speedy for its users as well as yourself and the company (this is an important quality for a website).

There are several different levels to dedicated servers as well. You can get a lower cost one that is simplified and easy to manage or you can go higher up to a more efficient, multi tasking and larger workloads. All of this just depends on what you are using the web space for (personal or business use) as well as how many people will be using it and the amount and kind of information that will be on it. So before you decide on what kind of Dedicated Server you actually need, take inventory and evaluate what you are going to do so that you can find the one that is best for you or your business.

A friend of the families had gotten laid off from her old job as a secretary a few months back and when I was home for the weekend a few weeks ago at a family party she was telling us about the new job she had gotten.

She is working now as the secretary at a family owned and operated business and she said that the family is a little bit older and out of date technology wise. On one hand they are really nice people and do things the way that they used to and are very personal with their customers and you get that great and cared for feeling when you do business with them. On the other hand, they could really benefit from an update.

So Sara (the family friend) decided to help out a little and pitch some new ideas to them and maybe help them to expand a little (she came from a big business where everything was done on computers and here they still file manually). So she went to this web hosting choice website to try to compare web hosting servers for them. Find a web host is the first step to getting them up and running with a website. So she went a head and with the website and customized it for the tiny business and then came to them with the idea. At first they were really weary about it seeing that they still use snail mail to pay their bills but eventually they liked the idea and said that they would take her ideas one step at a time. She pitches them ideas about once a month or every other month or so on small things like paying their bills online for example or how to save money through technology.

So slowly she has been helping them and teaching them how to get familiar with technology. Their company has grown she said in the past few months and they have learned a lot about email and getting their name out there. Fortunately they haven't changed a bit. They are still friendlier than ever and have made sure that even though they have gone “wire free” as the wife says that they remain in personal contact with their clients. They get so many Christmas cards and they know about the children and grandchildren of their clients. It is nice to see that kind of service these days.

Now that we are in college, my girl friends from high school and I don't get to see each other very often. We are mostly all home for the summer, but we travel with our families and school trips and work so it is hard for us to find time to all hang out together and have a great time. Talking on the phone or online is nice (thank God for technology) but it doesn't do the trick always.

So we are planning a weekend in New York for over the summer. It was so hard to find a whole weekend that we were all available but we finally found two different options and then we looked online to compare airline tickets to New York. It wasn't a big deal, but we would rather try to find cheap tickets if we could. So we chose to go the weekend that it was a little less expensive to fly.

Thankfully I have an aunt that lives in New York and she is actually going to be out of town that weekend and it works out perfectly because she is going to drive to the airport when she flies and then when we get there we can take her car for the weekend and then bring it back to the JFK airport parking when we are done. It is convenient to know someone and have that kind of access since we are too young to rent a car (yes, you have to be 25 years old, weird).

Anyways, we are all so excited to go. We're going to go out at night and see a show and go shopping. We have all been to New York several times before, but it is really exciting to be able to go together and now that we are all over 21 years old and can enjoy it a little more. And most of all, we will finally get to talk to each other face to face instead of over the phone and between classes during the school year or flights (some of my friends have been studying abroad) and over lunch breaks over the summer. I am just so excited for all of us to be together again and be able to catch up and go out and get dressed up and shop together and just have a great time.

I always thought the commercials that people make themselves (well not themselves but use actually people from the office) were nice. So many people think that they are corny and cheap and dumb (well they probably are cheap) but I also think that they are personable. It makes you really think about the product that they are selling or the service that they are providing.

I remember seeing a commercial about a wheelchair van sales place and you could tell that they were actually people who went through their day to day lives in a wheelchair. I think it is touching. If I needed a wheelchair or was looking for a place that has mobility van sales I would definitely had gone there. I even know someone I used to work with that talked about this handicap van Florida sales people rented him and he saw the ad for the place on TV and it was the manager talking and his staff in the background and he said that the service was so great.

You always see these big, generic commercials for places that sell in bulk and are cheap, and while the prices are something to look at, the service is nowhere near. When I was in high school over the summer I worked at this hardware store and it was one of those tiny stores where it had been owned by the same family and had been passed down from generation to generation and the employees were mostly older retired men who reminded me of my grandpa and they knew everything possible about everything in the store and gave the best advice and they helped every customer as if they were their only one. It was such a great place to work where everyone knew everyone else's name and the owner would come down and talk to everyone and he knew about people's kids and asked about their families. It was so inspiring and when I see those commercials that seem like they are corny and homemade and cheap on TV I think about working there. Because it isn't always about getting things fast and for a really cheap price, it is also about the kind of service you get and the knowledge of the people that work there. When you go into those bigger department stores, they hire anyone, but at these tiny hardware stores, everything has a background and an interest in what they are selling and also, the most important part, a passion for what they are doing and it really does show.

I have been looking for a way to pick up some extra money, but I really need a flexible schedule, because I am not really the best student and sometimes I need time off when exams or projects come up. It is really hard to make it on just my loans and the little extra my parents send me. It is not really enough to get by. My parents can't really afford to send me anything else, but I know personally I would feel a little better if I could put aside a few dollars for a rainy day, or an occasional pizza.

I was looking for a job in the paper, when this opportunity for flexible scheduling and to make a few hundred dollars a week, just kind of jumped out at me, and although I was a bit skeptical, I thought I would just call the number and see what they said. It was a 1-800 number so I really thought that I would just get a recording or something like that, but instead, I got this really nice woman on the other end of the phone and she told me a little bit about what she was doing, and said that she would like to meet with me for lunch so that she could show me some of the products and items that she sells and I could see if I was interested in doing some sales work.

Well, we met the very next day, at a local restaurant, I figured it was a place where everyone on campus went, so I knew there would be lots of people around that I knew. Anyway the woman was selling sexy lingerie. Don't get me wrong, it was very tasteful and as she spoke about the stuff, I thought, I can sell this stuff. She said that there was no pressure and that I would make a 20% commission on whatever I sell. There was no limit as to how much I had to sell, I could work as much or as little as I wanted. Also, I thought that she was going to make me pay for the catalogs, but she gave them to me for free and said they were to help me get started. Well, I took the stuff home with me on break and showed it to my parents, and mom said, with no initial investment, what do you have to lose? So I am going to give it a try and see how it goes.

Being a student and busy all the time, can find you eating garbage food all the time. For me, a few years ago, I found that my whole body just functioned better when I was a vegetarian, but as a person who likes to travel a lot in my spare time, I found it near impossible to get the nutrition I needed quickly. On the road, just like on a college campus, there is more than enough junk food for you, but hardly a good natural selection in the group. Well, looking around the campus I noticed that there was nothing but junk available in the campus vending machines, and I thought to myself, it is no wonder that people gain weight when they first go away to school. More and more we are eating garbage, but much to my surprise, that is mostly what is available, which doesn't make a lick of sense for a society that is completely going over the edge with obesity. In the interest of the entire campus, I began researching healthier alternatives for our snack machines and found a company called YoNaturals, that provides vending machines that have healthy snacks in them, and thought this is the answer. I started to form a group of students who thought that this was an alternative that we should look into, and we really took off. Some of the students contacted YoNaturals to find out about getting some of their vending machines put up on campus, and then when we got all the facts and figures together, we created a presentation and took it to the dean. He set up a meeting with the board of directors at the college and we presented all our YoNaturals information to them. I think that at first they were skeptical, but when we showed them that it wouldn't cost them much more than what they were paying to put the junk machines on campus, they agreed to contact the company and see about putting up some of these healthier machines around and see how it goes. Well, they will put them in around the campus and see if it is something that takes off. I think it will, because I don't think that all the students want to eat the junk food, but they are just in a hurry and grab what is available. I guess we'll see how it goes.