There’s always something cool about buying good value deals. This applies to goods bought online as well as in actual stores. It is proven that the purchase of goods can create a natural high. This is the same high that people can experience when eating chocolate or when you achieve something that you really wanted and put a lot of effort into. I experienced this last time when iBOOD had one of their famous ‘hunts’. I was planning to buy a cheap laptop, as I know that these are particularly well priced. When I was finally able to order this item it made me feel great and was definitely worth the wait.

The type of goods that are offered on the site are mostly electronics. Many of the items are modern goods but as shown on the picture below, the occasional vacuumcleaner can also be found. Up to this day, iBOOD is only available in most European countries. If you are living outside of Europe, the only way to use their service is to do your shopping through a European friend. Bad thing about this is you will lose some of your profit to shipping costs. With the pace the site is growing at though, it wouldn’t surprise me if iBOOD would soon be operating internationally.

Whenever I check the prices that iBOOD is selling at, it can sometimes come close or be cheaper than wholesale prices. Because iBOOD offers their products throughout the whole of Europe, they are able to buy very large supplies from the source.

The brilliance of iBOOD comes into play whenever they run out of stock. Because they handle with this problem in their own special way, they are able to stay so cheap and outperform all of their competition. What they will do with unsold stock is either put it in one of their famous ‘mystery boxes’ or make the item appear in one of their iBOOD hunts. When a hunt takes place they will continuously offer new products on one day until they are sold out, or when a certain time has passed. Because a lot of people are waiting for that one item they are looking for, they are more likely to do impulse buying. They will often buy more then they initially wanted which results in iBOOD making a good profit on items that other companies would still have in their warehouse collecting dust. This video on Youtube, which was made by ‘stefontube’, shows the iBOOD mania very well in a funny way.

To add to the iBOOD mania, they mostly have two mystery boxes coming along during a hunt. These boxes are much talked about and created a hype and therefor very popular. You know that a box offers great value for money but you just never know what exactly is in it. This makes it very exciting to get one. By doing this iBOOD is able to get rid of their unsold items, which are still awesome products but just less wanted then the top products, and create a massive flow to their website. If you ask me this is one of the greatest marketing tricks ever by any online shop. It’s not without a reason that the site was chosen as site of the year in many different countries.

If you are curious about what kind of products you could find in a mystery box, you can check it out for yourself. Many people make unboxing video’s of their box and put it on Youtube. This is stimulated by iBOOD as you can win a prize if your unboxing video is original or funny. I have actually bought 2 iBOOD mystery boxes during a recent hunt. I will make a post about them as soon as I get them delivered and describe the content of both boxes with some pictures.

Doing some shopping on iBOOD can definitely be a lot of fun and deliver you good deals. I do have to warn you though, be careful not to end up with products you didn’t intend to buy…

I have never before had any problems with my blog and wasn’t really aware that a WordPress blog can sometimes be vulnerable. This all changed when a friend told me that his antivirus program came up with a message for my website and that strange things were happening. At first I thought that his internet provider just had a bad connection or something but when I experienced the same problems I knew something was wrong and had to fix it. It didn’t really help that I had no working virusscanner on my computer at the time.

After many attempts to fix the problem I came to the conclusion that I had to manually replace every post and build the entire site up from scratch. The good thing about this was, that it made me think about what I was doing with the blog. I looked very closely how every post was built up. It became clear to me that a while ago, I had a different approach to my posts then in the more recent ones. Because I am a perfectionist and like to create order in almost everything I do, I tried to get some kind of standard in my posts. This way I organised my entire blog better and this makes it much more fun to work on my blog.

Sometimes I think it’s a good thing to break down everything you have worked on for a long time and build it all up from scratch. By doing this you can use all your gained knowledge, to rebuild it even stronger. This doesn’t just apply to a blog or website, but could apply to almost anything you could work on or invest time in. It has certainly applied to me in other instances in my life. This goes back all the way to my childhood where I built lego structures or even a cardhouse, to later take it all down and built it back up from scratch.

While i was rebuilding my blog I came to realize that I actually like the process of creating something in the best way I possible can. That to me is probably more important then the end result. This applies to a lot of things in my life. To say it in a more abstract way, the road to get somewhere is often times more exciting to me then the actual destination. If you want to be even more philosophical you could say that life is just one big journey in which the destination doesn’t really matter.

In the end, having my blog infected by malware has made me gain more experience about rebuilding a strong blog. I also have better knowledge now about preventing it from happening in the future. Let’s just say it’s a refreshing way to start of 2012 and let’s hope my blog will be even stronger in 2013.

Anyone that is over 30 years of age, should be familiarized with the characters of The Muppet Show. It hosted a lot of different characters like miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Animal, Gonzo, Swedish Chef and many more. The most famous of all these is probably Kermit the Frog. The creator of the puppets that make the characters of the show, is Jim Henson. He first came up with Kermit the Frog long before the actual Muppet Show was created. Kermit was introduced in 1955 and has gone through some transformations to finally become the Kermit the Frog as we know him today. His voice was played by Jim Henson until 1990, when he died.

Jim Henson is not only the spiritual father of the Muppet Show but has also worked on Sesame Street in its forming days. He has worked on the creation of Bert and Ernie, Big Bird, Cookie Monster and Oscar the Grouch. Most of these characters are still very prominent in Sesame Street and have world wide popularity. Kermit the Frog also used to be a part of Sesame Street before Jim Henson went on to make him a part of The Muppet Show.

The most amazing thing about the Muppet Show for me has always been the familiarity that many of the characters have. The best example of this might be the duo Statler and Waldorf, criticizing the Muppet Show at the end of each episode. Statler and Waldorf are two older and grey men who make jokes about how bad they think the Muppet Show was, from their balcony seats. This always reminded me of some of the older people that I used to know, who are giving critique reviews on everything they see from the sideline. Most of the Muppet Show characters have this kind of familiarity to them and have very distinct personalities. This makes it very enjoyable to watch.

The original Muppet Show took place in an imaginary theatre. After the production of The Muppet Show stopped, in the early 80′s, a couple of movies were made with the muppet characters. The copyrights to many of The Muppet Show characters were sold to The Walt Disney Company in 2004. This finally led to the creation of the new movie The Muppets. In this movie, real persons are interacting with The Muppets, just like some of the previous Muppet movies. Jason Segel and Amy Adams play leading roles next to the many muppet characters. I think Jason Segel is the perfect person to play this role as he fits the vibrant and happy atmosphere of The Muppet Show perfectly. In other words, it wouldn’t be a problem to make a Muppet based on the personality and appearance of Segel.

Visiting The Muppets movie is a great idea and can also be a perfect way to spend Christmas evening with your kids. The movie is currently playing in cinemas throughout the US. You can even get a cinema ticket for free if you buy one of The Muppet dvd’s on the internet, starting at $10. Definitely worth the money and your kids will absolutely love this timeless entertainment.

I have spent last year’s Christmas in Phuket, an island of Thailand. For me it was not standard to go on a holiday for the Christmas period but I have no regrets about it. To me the Christmas feeling doesn’t mean that much anyway. I just see it as a time where you eat as much as possible in a short time. In Thailand you can do this everyday of your holiday and the food will be much better and cheaper then most other places of the world. The highlight of the holiday for me was definitely when I talked to friends from home online, telling me that their car was snowed in and they couldn’t leave the house. After hearing about all of their misery I poored myself a drink and went for a relaxing swim in the swimming pool.

Now you will probably ask yourself, I can’t afford this. All of this is however, reasonably affordable. The only thing you do need is some flexibility with your flight schedule and some investment of your time. Many people want to book everything in advance so that they don’t need to worry about anything during their holiday. This is understandable if you take kids with you and just want some relaxation. You could however save a lot of money by just going to your destination without booking any accommodation. You would then need to search around the area for good deals and make comparisons. Most of the time you get charged less if you are there in person. You will also be able to visit accommodations that are not advertising on the internet which are cheaper then ones that do.

Going to your destination without any reservations might feel a little adventurous or even dangerous. To me it felt very unsettling at first because I wasn’t used to it and was thinking about everything that could go wrong. The truth is that you can almost always find a hotel with a free room, wherever you are. If you are not completely comfortable doing this, you can always find a good place to stay for the first couple of nights and find another accommodation from there. There are also many forums on the internet at which you can always find stories of people going to the place you are interested in. A very resourceful and popular forum is that of Lonely Planet.

When you are looking for a plane ticket online, most sites will only let you search for a set day or week. Many of the websites run by airlines do not give the possibility to look for the cheapest flight for a whole month or year. They don’t do this because many people have a set date that they want to travel on or they don’t want people booking the cheaper flights only. A lot of money can be saved if you could just find these cheaper flights. The website Skyscanner does just that. You just have to select a departure and destination point and they will give an overview of the cheapest date. It is so far the best site I found for cheap airplane tickets and it has saved me a lot of money. A round trip ticket from Europe to Thailand can be found for around €500,- or $660 per person.

Besides saving money you could even earn money on your holiday. It is very easy to set up your own blog and post information about your holiday. Think of it as an online diary that you keep of your traveling experiences. This can also come in handy to keep your friends back home informed. If you want to find out more about a holiday blog which can make you money, you should check out the blog that Dave Lee made. Some months he has earned over $4.000 with his blog. It contains all the information you need and he is very open and honest about his own earnings and what he did to achieve it.

Another way of making money could be by selling your photo’s or making money on your video’s. A website like iStock offers the possibility to sell pictures. Because there is a wide offer of these on the internet, you would have to offer a high quality to be able to make money with these. If you have a lot of interesting video’s you can upload them to Youtube and make money on advertisements if you get a lot of viewers.

A year not travelled is a year not lived. That’s my current life’s motto. I truly believe that you are not living your life to the fullest if you never leave your home environment. For me the best thing about traveling is coming back home and looking at normal every day things in a complete new way. A wise man once said “The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land”.

At a very young age, Derren Brown became interested in hypnotism and manipulation. In interviews he has said that he wasn’t the most popular kid in school. He then started being interested in hypnotism to be able to perform it on the more popular kids to gave him a feeling of being in control. In the following years his interests grew larger then just hypnotism and also included things like card tricks, ‘magic’ tricks, Neuro Linguistic Programming and the art of creating illusion. This wide interest gave him a good knowledge of available techniques and made him able to become a more complete illusionist/mentalist. In his television shows he uses many different techniques and even combines them, to create very amazing effects.

Derren Brown has been very famous in the world of hypnotists and so called mentalists ever since the start of his television shows in 2000. He doesn’t yet have worldwide familiarity due to the fact that his shows air mostly in the UK. His first appearance in the US was only in 2007 at the Sci Fi Channel. The fact that some of his shows are on the controversial side doesn’t help his popularity neither. Some television channels are reluctant to broadcast the shows in fear of damaging their reputation. I don’t think that this matters much to Derren Brown as he mostly cares about giving his best performance. Going for a greater popularity would limit him in his freedom of pushing the edges, what made him so good and distinguishes him from the rest.

Most of Derren Brown’s popularity and fame comes from a television show where he played Russian Roulette live on English television in 2003. A volunteer put 1 bullet into a gun and Derren decided from the speech of the volunteer, in which chamber the bullet was located. The stunt ended well but there is still speculation if real bullets were being used or that the whole show was staged. I personally became very interested in Derren Brown when he went to the dog races for his show Mind Control. He was able to collect money from a losing ticket that he bought. Supposedly by using the power of suggestion, he was able to convince the lady at the payout window that he had the winning ticket. This boggled my mind and I have watched every bit of Derren Brown on Youtube and television ever since I saw that.

What I like so much in Derren Brown’s television shows, is the fact that he uses a very wide variety of tricks and techniques. Because he is doing this it’s always very hard to understand what he is doing and how he is doing it. Even for colleague illusionists it can sometimes be confusing which technique he is using since he constantly mixes so many of them. The best example of this are his theatre shows that he performs in England. He has made four of these shows in the past and is currently touring with his fifth tour. The theatre shows are more about tricks and techniques that were used in past times and have a different feel to them then the television shows. Most of the techniques he uses, have been around for long times but the television shows use them in a more modern way while the theatre shows makes you experience ‘magic’ as they did in earlier times.

You can’t help but thinking that the ‘trickery’ that Derren Brown uses in his shows might get old and repetitive after a while. The opposite is true. In the new show ‘The Experiments’ a complete new world is explored. It consists of 4 episodes where manipulation plays a big role. In every episode we get to see that regular people just like yourself, are capable of doing unimaginable and horrible things. There is an episode called ‘The Assassin‘ where somebody commits an assassination with the use of hypnotism, another person is manipulated into confessing a murder he didn’t commit in ‘The Guilt Trip‘ and a group of people is shown who are doing awful things to a random person in ‘Remote Control‘. There is also an episode called ‘The Secret of Luck‘ which is a little more happy where the feeling of being lucky is the focus of the show.

Like he has done with many of his shows, Derren Brown has again shown how a person can be manipulated and controlled. This transcends out of just hypnotism or illusions but will be interesting to watch for anybody interested in human behavior. If you aren’t already familiar with Derren Brown’s work, now is a good time to start. I don’t know many other people currently on television who are able to consistently make television shows that leave you on the edge of your seat the whole time with your jaw dropped on the floor. Somehow he has always been able to build the show up to a climax where you will be swept away and will change the way you look at things forever.

I got thinking about the unhealthy food style in Western parts of the world during a trip to Asia. The Asian food is very simple most of the time but very nutritious. You can order food on the streets of Asia very cheap, that is better in quality then the food that some of the restaurants out here are serving. The most important thing in my opinion for the difference in quality is the amount of time that is spend in preparing a meal. In Asian parts of the world a meal is still considered a very important part of the day and a lot of effort is made to make it enjoyable.

While in Asia food is very important and something people look forward to during the day, the Western world seems to think of it as a necessity. Many families don’t even eat together anymore for dinner but heat up their food in microwaves or prepare their own quick meals. The rush lifestyle has led to a rapid decrease of food quality and therefor you can easily miss out on vitamins which your body needs.

The other day I walked into a retail store where I saw a blender to make fruit juice. It had a very nice design and got my attention right away. I got to talking to a shop employee and she told me about the functionalities of the machine. The blender could even blend ice cubes with the fruit so that the juice is ready to be served at a chilled temperature. The first thing I remembered were all the times I have ordered fruit juice in my life. It never really gets old to drink it and makes me feel fresh and full of energy afterwards. I could even make milkshakes with this thing. The idea of not buying this seemed more strange to me then buying it, so I just took it.

If you think a blender is expensive, you’re very wrong. First you have to know that blenders these days have very strong blades which can basically last a lifetime. Other then that, a good blender has scratch resistant glass and is tested to withstand extreme temperature changes. This means that buying a blender is a cost that is done over the course of several years. A good blender can currently be bought online for less then $40.

As with anything new, it takes a little knowledge to make good fruit juices and to know which ingredients you like best. There is however a ton of information about it available on the internet. One of my favorite websites has become that of Natalia KW, who decided one day that she was fed up with processed foods and addictive snacks. She has a lot of information on her website about eating healthy and adding fruits and vegetables to your meals.

What I was mostly interested about was a book that she co-authored with Philip McCluskey who lost 200 pounds in 2 years by living healthy and adding fruit juices to his life. Together they have a lot of knowledge about juice recipes and have put together the best recipes in their book. It can be purchased as e-book or hardcopy through their website. Really recommendable if you are new to the juice world and want some professional advice.

Another good way to get recipes is a software program that I found, which has over 100 recipes. The good thing about this program is that you can just enter the vegetables that you currently have in your fridge. The program will then look for recipes which contains these ingredients. By doing this you can always use up all of your vegetable supplies. This is the way I started out with and I now have a couple of favorites which I make over and over again and know from head which ingredients are needed. When first starting out as a fruit blender, you need some recipes to start out with and can then test which ones you like best. This program offers just that.

Modern Warfare has been one of the household names in the first person shooter genre for years. It basically sets the standard for any other games in the genre and has a very wide base of dedicated followers. The game appeals not only to kids and young adults anymore, but is also very popular with people in their 30′s and 40′s and sometimes even older. In my opinion this can be attributed to people who grew up with games and still loving to check out the new games when they hit the shelves. I am a part of this group myself. In my youth I have been an enthusiastic gamer. I can remember when the shooter Doom was released and I played it all day and all night long. The cheat codes and shortcuts to many of the Doom maps are still engraved in my brain.

I don’t play games as much anymore as in the past. When a game like this comes out I do however, still like to check it out and play for a while. I guess gaming has become a part of my life because I grew up with it and this probably applies to many gamers out there. This could be a reason why sales of new Modern Warfare games get more popular. The young fan base gets bigger every year, but the older gamers are still out there too and are a very dedicated bunch.

It’s amazing to me how much the gaming industry has changed. Modern Warfare 3 was created by Activision which is a household name in gaming as long as I can remember. I used to play games on the Commodore 64 which were made by Activision like Pitfall, which was a very popular game back then. The graphics cannot be compared with today’s graphics and we can now play games on our phones that even look better. The image below shows the difference between the game Pitfall, which was first released in 1982, and MW3. Today’s generation of gamers should realize that they are very lucky in the quality of games that’s available.

Modern Warfare 3 uses the same engine that the first Modern Warfare used. The game has new story lines and missions to perform. If you want to experience something completely different then what MW1 and MW2 offered, MW3 might not be the game for you. It does however take the game to a new level and has new features like killstreak and points-based leveling.

The killstreak system gives you rewards when you are on a killing spree. When you die, you counter resets. The more people you killed the better the reward. The types of reward can be anything from a medpack, to a chopper which can give you air support. If you played games like World of Warcraft or similar games from the MMORPG genre, you are probably familiar with the points-based leveling. The principle of this system is that your character can gain experience while you are playing. With this experience your character becomes better at what he is doing. This also applies to the weapons and you will have less movement while shooting a gun, which makes it easier to aim. This makes the game less of a mindless shooter but adds a new dimension and makes it more rewarding to play the game longer.

If you are new to Modern Warfare 3, you can become overwhelmed with all the different options and possibilities of the game. There is however a lot of online information which can help you to overcome this problem. There are guides out there made by professional gamers which can take you through some easy steps of understanding the game fast and easy. A website with a lot of information is Kosh. To see what the gameplay looks like you can check out this video on Youtube, where the makers of the game comment on it themselves. The game can be bought in most game stores and online for PC, PS3, Wii, Xbox 360 and the Nintendo DS. The price for the game on any of the consoles is currently less then $60. If you can’t wait another day to play it, you can choose to download Modern Warfare 3 here.

Marcel the Shell has a very cute and fragile voice which sounds like that of a little scared kid. It is actually the voice of Jenny Slate, a comedian who’s worked on Saturday Night Live. The combination of this cute little voice and the randomness of the subjects that he talks about, make for a very funny video. Last year was the premier of the first ‘Marcel the Shell with Shoes on’ at the AFI Fest. After that it went on Youtube and has gotten around 13 million views so far. After not having heard from Marcel from a little while, he was back a couple of days ago with a new short movie.

There doesn’t seem to be a real story in the video but it’s just Marcel talking about his life. It is shot in a way that they make it seem like they are making some kind of documentary about Marcel but we only see the parts off camera where Marcel is talking to himself about issues that he is thinking about. The movie is shot using the stop motion style. This might very well be the reason that it takes so long for a new movie to come out since it’s a very time consuming way of filming.

If you think Marcel the Shell limits himself to Youtube, you’re wrong. There is also a children’s book out about him. Plans are to make Marcel even bigger then that. Jenny Slate, the voice of Marcel, has said that she even wants to make a tv show about him. “Our hope is that it will be like The Muppet Show, a place where our comedian friends can come and play around in a world full of shells,” says Slate.

Only future can tell how big Marcel the Shell with Shoes on, will become. Check out his first and second video on Youtube.

More and more electronic devices are using computer technology to operate but are mostly still ‘standalone’ products. This means that they operate by themselves and cannot communicate with other devices. The next step is to connect these devices to the internet or with each other to improve user comfort. What the actual influence of this will be on daily life, is hard to predict. It can lead to a self-thinking fridge that will order food from the supermarket when supplies drop below a certain point.

When electronic devices are connected to the internet, data will become available for yourself to use or whoever you want to share it with. If you allow yourself to think outside of the box and let your mind go free, many crazy scenarios can be imagined. Just imagine your computer becoming aware of your central heating system using much more energy then normal. It could then out of itself make an appointment with the repair guy and pick him up in your self-driving car. On the way there it could then get you some soda at the supermarket as you are running low on it. It will save you a lot of time on boring activities.

The Google X project is supposedly looking how the implementation of this technology can be done sufficiently. In the course of doing this they are testing ideas which are sometimes outrageous but could lead to a revolution once they are here. Amongst these ideas are the ‘space elevators’ as seen in the picture below. These elevators will make it possible to enter space without a rocket. Google can use these to collect information from space and the solar system. The Google X project is thinking out all of these possibilities and deciding in what way all of this information can be used best.

What Google is mainly interested in is the collection of information. This has always been their core business. The activities that are part of Google X all have in common that they collect information in some way or the other. In the case of self thinking devices, the information collected is about behaviour of the user of the product. For instance it gains information about the eating patterns of a person by monitoring supplies in the fridge. While this can be good for the users in the way that life will be easier, it comes with a price of losing privacy. What this information eventually will be used for is yet uncertain and can be a point of concern for some.

I myself am interested in the new technologies that Google brings, but not wanting to give all of my information out. As we are more and more living in a world where knowledge equals money, and therefor money, I can definitely see a downside to all this. A good thing is to always keep dreaming about possibilities and push the boundaries like Google has always done. As with all good things, there will probably also be some bad aspects but only time will learn what the outcome will be. In the end technology cannot be stopped and if Google is not investing in these kinds of technologies, another company will probably sooner or later, take its place.

There are several ways to avoid the extreme crowds in the stores by doing just a couple of simple things. Most important is to plan ahead. When you think of what you want to do for Christmas weeks in advance, you can already make a list of necessities. Many of the needed items, like decorations, candy or beverages can be held for a long time. If you know exactly what you need for the holiday, you can stock up on these items already and only go to the store for meat and other items which you prefer to be fresh. Another great idea is to make reservations for these items well ahead of time and even have them ordered to your home. This will cost a little bit extra money though.

In current times, it has become quite easy to shop on the internet. Web shops have the same, if not wider, offer then physical stores. The advantage of this is that goods can be delivered to your home and shopping can be done from the convenience of your home. Beware though that delivery times are probably gonna be a little bit longer then other months of the year.

By planning a free day or even leave work a couple hours earlier you can avoid the shopping crowd quite easily. It will only cost you some of your saved up free time. If you would however calculate how long you would spend in the shop on a more busy day, this is just an investment. In the end it will eventually give you back more free time then it costs. Not to mention the annoyance that you would have to go through, which might ruin your whole day.

If you still want to go shopping on Black Friday, be advised to write a list of things you want and stick to it. You will not be the first person who ends up with a bag full of stuff you don’t even need. The ‘craziness’ of the whole day can do this and you can get caught up in buying poor deals. This can easily be avoided by knowing well in advance what you want and sticking to your guns.

You have to remember that Black Friday is very strongly marketed to get your money, just like Christmas is very good for retail business. Store owners want to lure a lot of people by showing overpacked shopping malls and advertising with deals which are too good to be true. Most of the good deals are however in very limited supplies and only available for some of the people waiting all night for it. The money you would save up this way would be much easier made by working instead of having to sleep outside of a store in the cold.

If you decide to do part of your holiday shopping online there are many possibilities. A great online shop to buy from is Amazon.com which sells almost anything you can think of. Amazon has been around for many years and I have yet to find a product which they are not selling. You can also find good deals in a wide variety of products on Barnes and Noble, which has a very easy to use layout. Another good site would be Ebay.com to buy cheap new, or second hand goods from other online users. Be sure to make the holidays fun and plan ahead!