I will start by letting you know that I am personally involved because I actually work for the Post Office and I have worked in the transportation industry for many years. My current schedule is extremely limited and I am not complaining about that. In fact, I have tried to embrace the hiring process and I understand the way it works. I am currently a casual employee and I intend to be one for quite some time.

Since the economy has been a bust questions have been raised about the fact that the postal system is a money loser and has been for quite a while. Many solutions have been developed and all seem to involve some sort of cutback. While I am currently a postal employee, I am also a business owner, and a transportation sales rep. My unique combination of careers has given me reason to look at the problems with the postal industry with a unique perspective.

As a postal employee it would personally benefit my wallet if we could just maintain the status quo and keep things as they are. I realize that the postal system is losing money and something does need to be done to control these costs, but one of the reasons that I even applied for a job within USPS was the fact that they provided long term security with health benefits and a pension. These days those few things are getting very difficult to count on. When I was younger, that is just the way that I thought things worked. I thought that every job came with basic long term security, but as I entered the job market I quickly learned that there were very few choices that provided these basic needs. Therefore, one day long ago I put in an application at the Post Office. As it turns out many of the careers that offer long term security are those that are provided by the local or federal government. This has been the case since I was younger and should remain this way for many years to come.

As a business owner, I take full advantage of the services that the postal system offers. They give me the opportunity to market to my customers and invoice them as well. It is true that this can all be done electronically now, but some of the most successful marketing that I have done was the result of a piece of literature that was mailed directly to my prospect. Also, my success rate of getting invoices paid in a timely matter are partially the result of the ability of physically mailing the invoice to my customers. I admit that I rarely send a personal note in the mail anymore except for the holiday cards and birthday cards, but my business uses the mail nearly everyday.

As a transportation sales rep, I can truely appreciate the postal system for their economical rates and full service coverage. I can assure you that there is no public transportation company in the world that can compete with the USPS in terms of price and coverage. In fact, there are several transportation companies that tender their customers shipments to the USPS just because it is not cost effective to do it themselves. By eliminating our current postal system this would greatly raise the costs for delivering our mail and packages. True, we are currently paying the same or more via our taxes but we are also providing jobs, a great service, and long term security for many people at a time when these few things are so hard to come by.

I listened to more than two hours of Beatles songs and I don’t recall hearing any swear words in their music. The beat resembles the new music of today and there was even a little hidden sub context that could be found in some of their songs, but it was all done without being blatantly obvious. I can’t help but to think that it was my generation that was the one to embrace all of the language and violence that is acceptable in most media outlets today. The last Beatles album “Let it be” was released in 1970 and for some reason I can remember everything going downhill from there. Nowadays, if I turn on the radio or the TV it doesn’t take too long before I hear or see something that I would have never seen or heard in 1970. I also recall that many of the leniencies that we see today required a great amount of debate to get them approved for public consumption. Needless to say, they all seem to have gotten approved.

Somehow, I feel responsible for the music that I hear on the radio today, I was among the “early adapters”. I approved of it all and screamed “freedom of speech” like everybody else, until now.

Do they really NEED to throw in the extra cus words into the lyrics today? Couldn’t they just eliminate the explicit scenes from the TV shows and still make them good? Sometimes it makes me cringe when I hear or see things in the media. Unfortunately, I keep listening and I keep watching, but man do I wish that they could keep me and my family entertained without doing it quite so much.

I truly look forward to the release of the new iPad and I can almost guarantee that it will get just as much use in my household as does my little iPod Touch. There is, however, one thing that absolutely boggles my mind and that would be the overpriced charge that all of these publishers are charging for ebooks online. I am normally an avid reader and I tend to have a good paperback with me or close by at all times. I often go trolling garage sales on Saturday mornings looking for little fictional treasures, of which, I can usually find a couple without too much effort and without too much cost.

The future is here and all of this seems to be changing before my eyes. All of a sudden for some very strange reason people seem to be very inclined to drop more money on an e-version of a book than they would on a paperback edition. Now, I am not a book publisher, nor do I ever have the desire to be one, but for some reason the math just doesn’t work out for me. You would think that with the onset of providing books electronically that this would actually lower the cost of a new book, not make it more expensive. There are no book manufacturing costs, no trees being killed, and distribution costs seem to be at a minimum. These three things alone would make one think that the price of a good book would drop exponentially. Am I wrong for assuming so? This issue would not bother me so bad if I had not become so addicted to buying $1 games for my iPod. I am still amazed that games that once cost $20, $30, $40 or more can now be purchased for such a reasonable fee. Excuse me if I am wrong but doesn’t it probably take just as much effort to create a quality video game as it does to write a good book? Yet for some reason the price of books seem to be on the rise? Also, once I finish with the book, then what? As far as I can tell I can’t hand that book off to anyone else to read. This all seems great for the publisher but it seems that it is me the consumer that is getting hosed on this deal. Then again, the publishers wouldn’t be doing it this way if the consumers weren’t ready to pay their price. This all just makes me think that other readers out there just have more money to pluck down than I do. Oh well, I guess that I can’t win them all, but I am eagerly awaiting the opportunity to get a copy of the latest and greatest ebook from the library or maybe even half price e-paperbacks.

I can see how the newspapers are hurting to turn a profit, mainly because they are at the bottom of my news intake chain. I am surprised that it is taking the newspapers so long to figure out that there seems to be a revenue source that is right under their noses but they are too afraid to make the leap. I propose two ideas that I feel would assist in boosting the profitability of the near bankrupt newspapers throughout the country.

1) Charge more for your subscription. I know that it can’t be cheap printing all of that ink on a daily basis and you should be compensated to at least cover the bottom line costs. Considering what you guys charge for a monthly subcription that gets delivered to my door everyday, I am truly amazed that you have kept it going this long. I know the economy is tough right now, but the true fans of your daily publication will gladly pay a little more just for the valuable coupons alone.

2) Like many other people out there, I crave for my news online. I want quick easy access to the news and I want it now. I want to be informed so much so that I have included the daily news as my homepage when I first open up my Internet and SFGate.com (aka San Francisco Chronicle) has been my homepage for as long as I can remember, and the truth is, I don’t even subscribe to their paper I live in the East Bay I subscribe to the Argus. Therefore, it seems that charging a fee for access to this website would only seem logical. That being said, it should be a ridiculously low fee for the online subscription, but by all means you should at least be charging for an online subscription. Trust me, I pay a lot more to other websites for a monthly subscription fee and I don’t get anywhere near the information that I get from my newspapers website.

Also, one thing that I have noticed is severly lacking on news sites accross the country is the ability to subscribe to a quality RSS feed. I know why you don’t include a quality RSS feed but maybe you should start trying to charge for a quality RSS feed subscription, I know that I would personally welcome the option.

Now before you start going crazy charging me too much for too little. Let me recap my point. Charge more for your printed publication and charge very little for your online publication and include a quality RSS feed. You might lose me as a subscriber to your printed publication considering that these ARE tough economic times, but I can guarantee that I would increase my subscription to ALL of my favorite news publishers online (if they were priced accordingly).

Anyway, that’s just my two cents.

Normally, I drive around in some kind of company car, rarely do I have to purchase my own vehicle. I had lost my job and therefore lost my car. I had just gotten rid of my spare car because I did not want it sitting around. I didn’t plan on driving much and if I did I had intended to just get another company car so I just bought a cheap car to get me by. That car was a 1992 Volvo.

I bought the car because it was really affordable and it had low mileage, it also had current registration tags that were recently renewed and therefore smogged. I found the car on craigslist.

To this day I am amazed at how wrong all of the features that I listed above were. Here are some of the discrepencies.

First of all, I mentioned that I had purchased the car on caigslist. When I went to test drive the car it was an extremely awkard situation. I called the guy to go see the car and he told me to meet him in front of the house that he had listed in craigslist, as it turns out, this was not his house and when I got to the address I had to wait outside in my car for him to arrive at the address. The address was at a house off of International Blvd in Oakland (scary), I ended up waiting for the guy across the street from the house in the parking lot of a liquor store (more scary). I got to the address at around 6:30pm and the guy kept calling every 10 or 15 minutes to say he was coming. To make matters worse, I had brought my 5 year old son with me to look at the car. As usual, after 20 minutes of waiting he had to go to the bathroom. All of the businesses that were around me appeared to not to have a bathroom so we walked about a block to a gas station that did not have a bathroom for the public but was kind enough to let my son use what they had. As it turns out, the guy with the car shows up while we were gone looking for a bathroom and I missed his phone call. When we got back to where I was parked the guy was gone. I called him again to see where he was and he sounded upset that I was not there and said that he would be right down. Nobody that we encountered spoke very good English and we were approached by no less than three homeless people asking for money.

By the time the guy showed up with the car it was starting to get dark (in a scary neighborhood). I was slightly rattled from the experience so far and gave the car a quick one or two block test drive with the guy and all appeared OK. The car was priced low enough and I wanted to get the hell out of there so we made a quick deal and I got out of there. I drove the car home about 30 miles or so and was pleased with my purchase. The car seemed to do it’s job. I went home and went to bed.

The next day I went to get the car registered so I went to the DMV. Slowly, I started to find out some of the things that were suspicious about the car. I had something to put in the trunk before I left and found out that the trunk would not open. When I started driving to the DMV I noticed that the speedometer did not appear to be working correctly, it would work intermittenly between my house and the DMV. When I got to the DMV I had a few more problems. I took a look at the title and noticed that the mileage was off. The odometer on the car said that it had 120,000 miles on the car and the registration was showing 140,000 miles. Somehow, the car had lost 20,000 miles? At the DMV I also learned that it had a fake registration. Apparently, the previous owner had gone to the DMV a few weeks prior and tried to get the car registered for the new year. I still don’t know exactly how they did it, but they went in and got a current registration for the car and on the bottom of the registration there was a balance due. The previous owner must have gone through the trouble to get the car registered and even gotten a registration slip but never paid for it. At the time that I purchased the car everything appeared OK (at first glance) because the registration looked current and it had new current tags on the license plates. When I asked the DMV about the current tags I learned that they were stolen tags. This ended up meaning that the car had not been registered for at least a year and it need to be smogged and needed new tags. I started to worry that the car may have been stolen but apparently it had not. I left the DMV and went to get the car smogged, luckily it passed. About $200 later the car was appernetly legally owned by me.

The car served me well for about a year. I never got the trunk fixed and the speedometer just started working somehow. Recently, while I was waiting at a stop light, a car rear-ended me. I was surprised because the Volvo barely had a scratch but the car that hit me was totalled. This made me very happy that I had a Volvo.

A few days later I took the car in to the insurance adjuster and he declared my car totalled. He offered me a lower amount at first but I saw this as an opportunity to get rid of the car and took it. I ended up getting $1000 more for the car than I had originally paid for it. I had to go through a little hassle because of the mileage, but somehow that got worked out and I was able to get rid of the car.

The car served me well for about a year but I learned an important lesson when buying a car. Don’t take anything for granted, you never know when you could be dealing with a crook. It worked out OK for me this time, but it seems like I was a little too close to trouble the entire time. Next time I will be more alert.

I have managed to avoid new video game machines and I have ignored the games on my computer for the most part. But now, video games have crept into my cell phone. Who knew that the iPhone would become such an addicting little game machine. They offer top notch video games at an extremely affordable price. Many of the games that I get are free and never usually cost more than a couple of bucks. On top of that I won a $100 iTunes gift card from IUGO, the future does not look good for me.

The contest was held by IUGO games, they make games for the iPhone. They have a popular iPhone game out called “Toy Bot Diaries” that they have made two sequals to, they also have a free trial version available at the app store. I had the free version on my iPhone that I had been playing but I did not want to pay $3.99 for the full version until IUGO had their contest. To promote the contest they lowered the price on all three versions of the “Toy Bot Diaries” games to .99 each. To enter the contest, you needed to buy all three games and collect 25 “data pads” in all three games and you basically had 1 month to get it all done.

I really enjoyed all the extra twists to the contest and walked away impressed with the overall concept of the marketing plan. I know that there was good timing involved because I was currently playing the free version of the game, but I am impressed by the fact that they got me to purchase a game that I really did not want to purchase to begin with. Not only did they get me to buy one of their games, they got me to buy them all. On top of that, they required me to actually play all three games over a certain time period.

I was impressed even more by the fact that I did all of this and walked away from the whole experience happy that I made the purchases in the first place. I also admit that I now have the IUGO brand name stuck in my head for future referrence. I will be sure to check out any of their future products. This, to me, was a great sales and marketing plan done right. Bravo.

… this just in … As if the whole experience wasn’t good enough as it was, I actually won a prize (2nd) in the contest.

My wife has been on this “green” kick lately and has inspired me to keep an open mind. I have been eagerly awaiting the arrival of the GM Volt but the $40,000 price tag is a little discouraging to my current budget. I have also noticed an electric car called the “Zenn” car and is being built by Zenn Motors out of Canada. The car is basically an oversized golf cart, it goes at a maximum speed of 35mph and runs for about 40 miles on a full charge. I have decided that if we do decide to go green on our next vehicle that the Zenn car seems like a great option. This would be almost the perfect car for our family because my wife does not work more than 10 miles from the house. That being said, my wife would have to be the primary driver and she is not too thrilled with the maximum speed (she is a bit of a speed demon).

The thought of having a car the requires no gas or maintenance sounds very appealing. Honey, can we get an electric car?

I spend a lot of time looking at trends and statistics. I think my sales and marketing background causes me to pay closer attention to conversion rates and marketing trends, but whatever it was that the President said this time seems to have sparked some interest in the advertising public. All of a sudden I am getting inundated with marketing from law firms and others that are offering to modify my mortgage or lower my property taxes. I decided to call one of these to see what it is all about and found that this whole thing might be legite. I have dealt with REALTORS and Mortgage Brokers in the past, but there seems to be a new business that sprouted up for the Lawyers. I did a search for “loan modification” on Google and I don’t think that one lender or bank popped up, it was all lawyers. Even the junk mail that I have been receiving lately seems to have changed from bank lenders to lawyers.

I am a believer in the marketing trends and the trend seems to be leaning towards loan modification. After talking to the law firm whose advertising came in mail, I learned that the lawyers are providing all kinds of options by working with your current lender. I was given examples of how one person had their mortgage payment lowered by a third for the next five years, I heard another one where the lender changed the loan to a fixed rate mortgage, and yet another one where the overall interest rate was lowered for the loan.

This all sounds much more promising than the recent past when homeowners were losing their homes to foreclosures because the bank lenders could not work with them. This is the first time that I have noticed and realized how this government bailout could start to work. If it is true that you can now get your mortgage payment reduced by a third and still keep your house, then I can’t see how this wouldn’t help the economy. This would literally free up hundreds of consumer dollars on a monthly basis.

I look forward to the upcoming months ahead.