In the U-Tube video hyper-linked below, if you fast forward to the second minute, you’ll see him demo the preparation of a quick chili con carne, using a recipe from his new book and TV series, More Fast Food My Way.

Like me, he doesn’t bother to pre-soak the beans. There’s no need to…

It’s really fun to watch Jacques chop vegetables for the chili:  boy is he fast!  The pressure cooker cooks everything in 1/3 or less the standard cooking time and Jacques also chops in about 1/3 the time it takes most home cooks!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3XYQ6jCRRU

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I have enjoyed reading the book because it’s a make-you-feel-good book and will help you with being more confident and positive in any tantrums. As I was aware that I can often lose my temper quite easily and nobody can push too much the limits of my patience, I have learnt a few tips that I am sure will change the way I react to tantrums.

Last night, I watched an episode of supernanny and there is this mum who slapped her son. She basically could not cope anymore and her patience run out. I believe that this could happen to anyone and especially me. So reading a book like managing your toddler’s behaviour helps with using your common sense and find instant solutions to deal with any push-overs. 

Buy the book here

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The visitors started rolling in for all 4 of the 5 companies today. I am quickly realizing that they are hitting my site  at a rapid pace and I was not prepared to evaluate them as quickly as needed. Hell, I honestly wasn’t even exactly sure how I would evaluate the traffic once it got to my site. I’m using a tracking service called Adminder.com and thought that I would just evaluate the traffic once it was all pool delivered. Definitely learning my lesson on that front. Action plans are a necessity for any project to be successful. However, trial and error is okay as long as you learn from your mistakes and document the appropriate procedures.

After partially evaluating one of the services I decided that the traffic must be evaluated as it is sent to my capture page. The Adminder Ad Tracking Tool allows me to see the referring url’s or the websites that allowed my popunder to load behind their webpage.  While this is awesome… I quickly realized that the popunder providers that I placed my order with are much smarter then the average internet marketer. The particular company that I evaluated tonight only passes through 1 referring url. Therefore, I only saw 1 url repeated multiple times and to different IP addresses when I looked at the click report in my ad tracking tool. It looked the same in my Google Analytics tracking report as well. Meaning that it would appear to the naked eye that only 1 single url or website was the source of all the traffic that my site was receiving at that particular time and to that particular person or IP address.

The average person would look at the 1 url that referred the traffic, click on it, see a website and decide that was the only website sending them traffic. That internet marketer would be wrong. The url that the particular company passed through was actually a main url which was set up to receive different url’s everytime that particular url was clicked. From the traffic suppliers point of view, that technology is called ad serving.  Furthermore, since this makes the referring url that I saw in my ad tracking click report dynamic, meaning that everytime I click on the link in my report the true referring url would change. Hence the importance of evaluating the traffic as it comes through and not at the end. The traffic that passed through to the referring url reported in both Adminder.com and Google Analytics today most likely will not be the same traffic that passes through that single url in 5 minutes much less 24 hours.

Now that I know that the referring url is dynamic and the traffic must be documented in real time, it’s important to identify next steps. So, I’ll leave you to these thoughts. I have many more url’s to evaluate tonight and still need to document the next steps to my popunder traffic project.

–You will never be a successful internet marketer or sales professional unless your know your audience and what they are looking for. Tracking and testing are the foundation for any online business. It is an intimate relationship that absolutely will not function properly unless married together and joined as a team. You must know your product, know your traffic and track &test always!

Rant Over

-AffiliateGeek Out!

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In the battle between Big Ag and Small Food there were notable victories on either side.

As 2009 closes out, the dominant issues in the world of food could be lumped into two competing paradigms that have framed much of the decade. In one corner we have Big Food: factory farms, fast food restaurants, mystery meat, biotechnology and other examples of when the economics of scale are applied to how we feed ourselves. In the other corner is Small Food, whose players include farmers’ markets, ecology-based agriculture and seasonal diets of minimally processed food.

In a victory for small food, 2009 will perhaps be remembered as the year gardening returned to mainstream consciousness. Much credit goes to First Lady Michelle Obama, thanks to the organic veggie patch she planted on the White House lawn. The symbolic gesture created an instant buzz, and many other politicos around the world have followed suit. There are now gardens on the grounds of city halls, governors’ mansions, and other houses of leadership around the world, providing countless opportunities to educate and discuss why gardens are good.

According to the National Gardening Association the number of households with gardens rose from 36 million in 2008 to 43 million in 2009. Michelle Obama’s garden certainly deserves some credit, but so does the recession, which inspired many people to stick their hands in the dirt, not only to save on grocery bills, but to find economical ways to enjoy their leisure time.

Ironically, this proliferation of home gardeners bears some of the responsibility for the rapid spread of a late tomato blight fungus which nearly wiped out the commercial tomato crop on the East Coast. Many gardeners bought tomato starts from stores like Home Depot, Kmart, Lowes and Wal-Mart, nearly all of which were raised by the Alabama nursery Bonnie Plants. Plant pathologists believe the nursery sent out infected plants, which slipped under the radar of agricultural inspectors and brought the spores to all corners. Unusually heavy rainfall encouraged the blight to take hold, prosper and spread. The take-home message: buy your plant starts from local nurseries, or grow them yourself from seeds.

In addition to kitchen gardens, another beneficiary of the recession is a 93-year-old great-grandmother named Clara Cannucciari, whose YouTube videos combine salty commentary about life in the Great Depression with hands-on demonstrations on how to crank out simple delicacies that average 50 cents a serving. The videos helped win Clara a contract with St. Martin’s Press, which published Clara’s Kitchen: Wisdom, Memories, and Recipes from the Great Depression this past October.

It’s impossible to discuss the year in food without an update on the activities of biotech giant Monsanto, whose year can be summed up in a single word: “chutzpah.” In April, the company sued the sovereign nation of Germany when its agriculture minister banned the planting of a type of Monsanto corn engineered to thwart the advances of the corn-borer moth. Monsanto was unsuccessful in forcing Germany to allow its farmers to plant the corn, and recent research suggests Germany’s concern (shared by several other European countries) may have been warranted: French scientists published a paper suggesting adverse affects of this corn — and two other types of GM corn — on the kidneys and livers of rats.

While health and environmental concerns over GM crops are commonplace, in September federal judge Jeffrey White in California’s Northern District ruled that Monsanto’s sugar beets provided an economic threat to farmers who wished to grow organic or non-GM crops. Beet pollen is carried on the wind, and will pollinate chard as well as beets. In Oregon’s Willamette Valley, where much of the nation’s beet and chard seed is grown, the presence of Monsanto’s “Roundup Ready” sugar beets threatens the livelihoods of farmers growing the non-GM varieties of these plants. It’s also likely that after a few years of Roundup Ready sugar beet cultivation in the Willamette Valley it would be difficult to get non-GM beets or chard anywhere in the nation. According to judge White, Monsanto’s sugar beets posed “…the potential elimination of a farmer’s choice to grow non-genetically engineered crops, and the consumer’s right to eat non-genetically engineered food.” The ruling, against the USDA, forced the agency to complete an EIS examining the potential impacts of the GM beets on organic seed growers and consumers before the Roundup Ready beets can again be planted.

Meanwhile, Monsanto’s marketing practices have placed it on a collision course with the U.S. Department of Justice, which this month indicated it’s considering anti-trust litigation. Monsanto’s string of acquisitions have squelched almost any possibility of competition, while its seed prices have risen by an average of 42 percent. When the DOJ dispatched some of its lawyers to meet with Monsanto to discuss these developments, the company engaged the services of Jerry Crawford, an Iowa lawyer who is a friend and financial supporter of USDA chief Tom Vilsack. It’s further indication that keeping Monsanto in line is about as easy as wrestling an anaconda.

Monsanto owns the rights to genetic sequences found in more than 85 percent of corn planted in the United States, and 92 flurl percent of soy. Given the prevalence of corn and soy in the American diet, it’s hard to take a bite of any packaged food without eating Monsanto’s handiwork. What’s scary is how little research has actually been done in the area of food safety, and that nearly all such research has been conducted by the company itself.

While touting its products as safe for humans and the environment, Monsanto’s main sales pitch is based on the claim that genetically engineered seeds will increase crop yields and facilitate pest control. But last summer, a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists concluded that genetically engineered seeds actually don’t increase productivity. Another study, by the Organic Center, found that since the introduction of “Round-Up tolerant” corn, soy and cotton, farmers have sprayed 382.6 million more pounds of herbicides than they otherwise would have. This is partly due to the proliferation of Round-Up resistant weeds: between 2007 and 2008, farmers increased the use of different herbicides by 31 percent in an effort to combat these superweeds. Nonetheless, the company’s Web site promotes the seeds as a key component in “sustainable agriculture.”

While Monsanto has co-opted the term “sustainable agriculture,” retail giant Wal-Mart, already the world’s largest vendor of organic food, is poised to capitalize on the popularity of locally grown food. Wal-Mart is looking at ways individual stores can carry foods grown by local farmers. Another large grocer, Safeway, has this year begun aggressively pushing a “locally grown” marketing campaign, while blatantly taking advantage of the ambiguity in the term “local.” A writer by the name of Food Dude, on the Portland, Oregon blog Portland Food and Drink, busted Safeway with photographs of produce bearing out-of-state stickers next to signs announcing “I’m Local!” and “Locally Grown.”

That large corporations are jumping on the sustainable, local and organic bandwagons is arguably a good sign. It shows that these words, and what they represent, have infiltrated the mainstream consciousness. One of the most powerful vehicles to deliver this message was Food Inc, the movie whose depressing yet important message about the American diet was seen by enough people to make it the highest grossing documentary of 2009.

The year closed with the anti-climactic climate summit in Copenhagen, where U.S. Agriculture Secretary Vilsack acknowledged the huge role that livestock plays in global warming — more than transportation activities by most estimates. Vilsack announced plans to build methane capture facilities at large dairy farms in order to turn that potent greenhouse gas into an energy source. He deserves credit for helping to keep agriculture at the forefront of climate change discussions.

On the other hand, searching for ways to enable the cattle industry, while politically expedient in the short-term, are shortsighted in the long-term. Which brings us to my prediction for next year’s (or next decade’s) hot topic: serious soul-searching on the pros and cons of all things bovine. From the atrocities of feedlots and slaughterhouses to the environmental destruction wrought by cattle, given the skyrocketing worldwide demand for meat, the human addiction to cow products is reaching a breaking point.

Source: http://www.alternet.org/story/144779/the_year_food_was_totally_schizoid%3A_growing_local_takes_off%2C_as_giant_agribiz_becomes_more_dominant

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I see that every single coupon blog in the entire internets is posting THIS COUPON for $5/1 EPT Pregnancy Test. Is this really the kind of item you are gonna wait to costco go on sale so you can pair it up with a coupon? Is this really something for the stockpile? If so, then enjoy the savings.

It reminds of the time I was at Dollar Tree and saw this impulse item next to the register candy for only a buck:

Hmm, gum, punching balloon, or a pregnancy test. Decisions, decisions.

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