Jina W.

A while ago I decided to challenge myself to learn Mandarin Chinese. Since then, I've been experimenting with various learning resources to find out which works best for me.

Hack Chinese caught my attention because it's simple and effective. It helps you to memorize Chinese characters and it does it really well. Basically, it shows me characters and I have to click the right arrow if I know it and the left one if I don't. There are other helpful options, like a built-in dictionary and a neat dashboard for monitoring. But nothing extraneous, which is just what I want.

I use Hack Chinese to practice my vocabulary for 10-15 minutes each day and I'm delighted to see steady growth. After 4 weeks, I learned almost 300 new characters and I feel that I do remember their pronunciation and meaning. My progress motivates me a lot and makes me keep learning.

I would recommend this tool to any determined learner who wants to sharpen their vocabulary skills!

Every time I go to Twitter I bog down in tons of tweets and Topsy helps me to make sense of all that mess of information. It provides pretty nice range of search options and I find it very helpful when I need to research something on Twitter. The only thing I dislike about Topsy is that it is limited to Twitter only, it would be great if it allowed to conduct searches on some other social sites as well.

Agentfolio is a helpful tool and it significantly increases the efficiency of the home search process. It allows to involve friends and relatives and it is a great service which allows to save lots of time and efforts. The home buying process is often very overwhelming and Agentfolio is sure to be a great help to all!

Getsocio is a great solution for those who need to start an ecommerce site quickly or/and don't want to invest lots of money into website development at an initial stage of business. It provides easy-to-use and handy platform for running small or mid-sized business online at a reasonable price. What is good is that there are many integrated features, including shopping cart, various payment options, built-in email marketing service and some other useful functionality. Besides, there is a nice tech support team behind it, which is essential if you need customization or enhancements beyond the capabilities that already exist.

As for pitfalls, if you choose Getsocio, you should be ready to pay them a transaction fee (up to 5%) as long as you run your website on that platform. Besides, unlike other similar services, they don't offer wide choice of design templates. Therefore, if you want a unique and good looking website, you should consider hiring a professional web designer to customize your website look.

I have been working with this company for several months on a large and complex project. My experience with their developers was consistently positive, their professionalism and technical expertise far exceeds those of many other contractors I have dealed with in the past. It's a good and reliable company to have a continuing relationship and I highly recommend it.

I bought Barnes & Noble Nook The Simple Touch Reader several month ago and I want to share my experience. In my mind it is a good reading machine with lots of advantages. Its E Ink display is perfect, the quality of image is almost like paper book and it allows comfortable reading even in bright sun. I also enjoy the way how the menu is organized as well as speed of browsing and page turns. However, the battery life is only several days although it is declared to be over 2 month. Because of this I don't take this eReader in a long trips.
Except for this issue with the battery capacity it is a great ebook at a great price.

It is a very nice and detailed online dictionary and encyclopedia. I often use is when I have some difficulties or just to entertain myself with some interesting facts.

Nativeremedies is an online store for followers of a non-traditional medicine. I do not believe into effectiveness of homeopathic products they sell. My mother tried to treat me for dermatitis with this stuff with no effect at all.

But as for herbal remedies I think sometimes they can be even more efficacious and safe than some traditional medicines. And Nativeremedies offers good choice of that kind of products. They even have some products for pets that amused me first. Recently my dog had some problems with kidneys and used the Kidney Support together with some other medicines to cure him. Now he is completely ok.
As for my own health I prefer more reliable and tested products unless some minor diseases like a wart or a runny nose.

I recently purchased a dinning set and some accessories by Calligaris. My general impression is positive. I'm addicted to interior design and I enjoy that they have lots of original accessories for home, vases, rugs and other design objects. There is a good selection of materials and fabrics. The quality is adequate to the price. The table which I bought can easily extend from 4 to 10 seats which is very handy when guests arrive. However, I was disappointed by the fact that only standard combinations of finishing materials are available and any deviations are not possible. For example, the fabric which I liked most of all was available for chairs but was not available for sofas. One more problem is that the company is based in Italy and when I occasionally damaged one chair and needed some spare parts to repair it I had to wait for several month for the replacements.

I am using a Dell laptop n5040 for half a year and I am almost happy with it. It is my first laptop, in past I always had only desktops as I didn't believe that a laptop can be as fast and user-friendly as desktops. Of course, I understand that laptops have many benefits but I am old-fashioned in that point.

First of all, I was charmed with the design of that laptop, may be this is just because I like shining things :) Later I also realized that it is a perfect device on the road and on vacation. It has never failed me when I had to do some work being out of office and the quality of graphics and sound is perfect for watching movies and videos.

Now I use it everyday to email, work online, browse the web and just having fun. It is fast, reliable and perfect-sized.

However, I was disappointed when I found that this laptop does not have bluetooth, it is very strange as now every computer has blutooth in-built. Besides it doesn't have the number pad which is quite inconvenient. One more issue it is that sometimes Enter button does not work well but it is a short-time problem.

Anyway, I think it is a great laptop for work and travel at an affordable price.

In January 2012 the company I work for was contacted by Melissa Lark -- sales person -- *******@seenmagazine.us. She told my boss how great seen magazine could help our company to market to their ostensibly huge network of educators and parents. They promised that they would create a tailored marketing campaign that would set our company apart from our competitors. Or so we believed...

First sign of trouble was that they tricked us into signing an advertisement contract of $6,000 which essentially consisted of an banner ad in their magazine. We succumbed to Melissa's attempts of manipulation. After the contract's grace period she failed to return our emails (ostensibly eaten by the spam detector), failed to return phone calls, did a crappy job with the ad and could not post the article for which our team spent a lot of time writing. Now The seenmagazine probably was never interested publishing this free article -- this was only the bait to lure us in.

On March 9th we canceled the contract. Melissa pretended nothing has happened, published an ad which we never saw before and asked for the $6,000. They harassed us with payment letters and now they threaten my company to sue us in court.

How does Melissa Lark sleep at night? She is giving education a bad reputation and manipulating honest educators.

Bottom line: Stay away from SEEN Magazine!

Gourmet has a nice collection of recipes and cooking. For some dishes they even have very nice video tutorials. Unfortunately their collection is not really rich. What I miss at this web-site is step-by-step photos to accomplish the preparation instructions. Besides the way they group the dishes often puzzles me when I have some ingredients but I do not know what to cook of them yet.

This site is for real beer lovers! Their purpose is supporting and promoting beer through education and appreciation. I found here a lot of interesting facts about beer, beer's ratings and discussions, drinking tips, info on hotspots for dining/beer purchasing in big cities. A very friendly and clear design.
I'm sure it is a good idea to promote the positive view on beer drinking as beer antagonists often neglect much more harmful problems and habits than beer that may be even useful if consumed reasonably.

Amazing web-site for food lovers. Lots of tested recepies with illustrated cooking instructions and also useful tips and reviews of kitchen equipment and supermarket ingredients that often help me to choose brands that offer the best value and performance. Recommend it to all home cooks!

It is a very nice place to find deals whenever you need to buy or sell something. It is free, well organized and there are plenty of genuine ads for anything you may need.
Of course it is necessary to take some safety precautions. If your deal implies personal meeting it is more than better to bring a friend with you and also to choose a payment method safe for both sides.
In order to protect your private information from stammers use a supplementary e-mail address to create an account on Craigslist. This will also protect your main e-mail address from extra spam. Be smart composing your ad: choose the best category and put exact instructions how to contact you if somebody is interested in dealing with you; replace some numbers in your phone with letters, this also helps to prevent spam.
It is a perfect place to find some cheap used or discounted products.

Educreations is a cool website that allows to create personal video tutorials using iPad. Its motto: "Teach what you know. Learn what you don't" is the best description of its destination. I think it is a brilliant idea to use iPad to make video lessons, this way tutors can easily exchange information with student even being far away from each other. The only problem is that iPad is needed and not everybody can afford it.

My first impression form The journal was slightly spoiled by the advertisements which are rather annoying and distract attention from the main point. But still it is a nice site. There are many interesting and useful articles on IT topics. The website is focused on questions of transforming education through technology and explains how various technologies can be used in study process. I find here many interesting ideas about appliances and technologies to help my kids with there study. A think all these features make study much more interesting and efficient.

I am new on Twitter, just couple of weeks but I really like it. Before I tried it I supposed that it is something primitive and boring but I was wrong. I like its easy to-use and to-understand interface. It works very fast, no hang-up or bugs or restrictions I enjoy it. I'm not an advanced user and often have problems with adapting to new social sites or software. But not this time! I use Twitter as a supplement for my blog posts and it already gives positive results.

I don't think that only Muslim friendly sites have right to exist. The deeds of some fundamentalists really worth criticism. And it is not only about Muslims just they are the most active in this field during last years.

I love Wikipedia! It is definitely the most useful site of all times! I use it every day both at work and home. And they have info about absolutely everything I need to know!