Just saw the most fascinating video of shots taken of the Planet Earth from the space station by NASA. The photos range from the fiery green Aurora Australis over the ocean to lightning storms at night over Africa, the moon setting over the horizon as day breaks, and even a comet passing by.

It gives a glimpse of our world from a different perspective, a 24 hours trip as the world rotates around its axis, starting with sunrise as it passes through the day into night, over the jewel lights of London in Great Britain and other cities of Europe then back to the newly waking day.

Takes you out of the daily grind and struggle for a few moments, and lifts you out of this world.

There are a lot of different hosting sites, offering different degrees of service. Ease of use and assistance to the new website owner venturing out like an old time pioneer into the wild west of the internet may not be the top priority of a large hosting company. So, I was pleased to be introduced to D9 Hosting.

Started by Dan Thompson and Paula Brett in 2007, D9 Hosting offers a wide range of services to people all over the globe. They have a well-thought-out range of packages and rates to cater to different types of users. In particular, D9 has a special interest in helping new people to get started smoothly online and pass through all the complexities the old hand can deal with comfortably. Using their own personal experience to draw on, they give additional suuport to the needs of beginners with on-line videos and other services which are easily accessed. 

Personally I have used their service and found D9 to be very helpful. For example, Paula responded instantly to a chat request and the issue I had was fixed within minutes. I found they have many satisfied users with good word of mouth.

So, I can definitely recommend D9 Hosting with confidence.

Do Heart Surgery and Internet Marketing Go Together? Not your usual combination, I would have thought. Until tonight.

Tonight I was browsing some blogs and came across the website of Dr Mani, heart surgeon. It was very moving. He is a doctor in India.  He is also an infopreneur and an internet marketer. He is a fully trained heart surgeon with a big heart.

He has a second purpose which is to help underprivileged children in India who need heart surgery. To accomplish this, he needs to fund the operations. Each operation costs over £2000. He has a target to do 100 operations. This requires him to raise a huge sum of money. So far he has raised enough to do be able to do 47 heart operations.

To raise the money he became an internet marketer and created a second profession for himself,  whereby he makes money by helping people become successful on-line. The money he raises from this activity he then uses to fund the operations on the children. What a man! And what energy. To master two careers and use one to fund the other is more than most people would ever do. Yet he enjoys both and finds great success and pleasure from helping people in both lines of endeavour.

What is wonderful to see is that through his blog and internet activities, and his obvious desire to help people as an internet marketer to success on-line, Dr Mani has become known to a far wider audience than if he had confined himself to his profession as a surgeon.   His desire to give help to others prompts many people to help him in return. Thus he is able to bring about many good things. It is an inspiration to see how much one man can do and to see how competent we can aspire to be.

Working through John Thornhill’s training program is really empowering. He has obviously put a lot of thought into it, combined with his own experience of learning how to function as an internet marketer himself. So when you go through the program, it is not like some theoretical knowledge that someone copied from someone else. You know that John has been there, done that, found what worked and got results, run into that situation and made that mistake, so he knows what to advise you. It is good to hear him saying things like:  Do this…. that’s all we are going to get into right now, because it will get too complicated. We’re going to come back to it later and I will explain it then in more detail. That’s completely fine with me. I’m quite happy to go on a less-is-more kind of basis. Because I’ve been on the alternative basis. All that happened was a big dead end. I’m talking about programs where it was too much before I even got started. I am sure you can relate to that too. Times when you’ve tried to do a course, listened to webinars or even bought the materials –where the person was telling you how to do something. They might even have thought what they were doing was simple — after all it was for them —  but it was already so over your head and delivered so fast, that you just didn’t get off the starting block and just stared blankly at the screen, head reeling.

For that reason, I think the thing I like the best is the really short videos. It makes it really easy to start and stop what you are doing. It makes it worthwhile even if I only have 20-30 mins available  to work on the program, to turn my laptop on, do a bit of work on the program to try to do the next step. Because I can quickly find the next step I need to take and just do it. If something doesn’t quite work out then it is not so-far-so-fast,  my head is spinning in confusion, and it all became a big plate of spaghetti that I just fell unconscious into. And when it doesn’t quite work out, and I have to stop for a bit and figure it out, then I feel really proud of myself for being able to figure it out, and get the result I was after. There is something really reassuring about a short video which you can play over and over again as needed, watching the screen shots in 30 second blasts as you go along step by step with each key stroke that John makes.

The other thing that I like about the program is that John has obviously worked with different people over the years. He knows who he has found to be reliable, consistent and deliver the product. Obviously, he is going to recommend those people. Some of them are people who have worked in his business, some even were past students. So for someone who doesn’t already have certain things in place, you can save a lot of time, hardship and disappointments by going to the same people. They know how John’s programs work,  which of course is an advantage. For you, though, there is the advantage of knowing that you will get a good service without having to waste more time finding out who to go to, who’s going to give you a good price, who’s actually able deliver you the product or service you need. It’s a two way street. I like that I can have confidence and trust the people he recommends. In turn,  I am happy to recommend them to others.

Aileen

A few years ago, a young couple were sent on work assignments for their jobs in the aviation industry. The work took them to Cambodia, an exciting and far flung adventure with a bit of exotic oriental colour, tastes and sites added. Makes a change from a dreary, grey Scottish winter they probably thought. Get in a bit of world sight-seeing while we are still young. Travel to exciting far away lands. Have a bit of an adventure.

And they found all that. The people of Cambodia are a wonderful; friendly, hard-working and gracious people with a long cultural tradition, beautiful art, tasty foods, sandy beaches and sunshine, palm trees reflected against cloudless skies. Cheap, too, by our standards.  All things we dream about when it’s cold and dark outside.

They had adventures on the way, bunjee jumping, and underwater swimming, encounters with wild animals like tigers. All in all, a great time.

So, why am I writing this post?

Because Michael and Claire  found something else too. Grinding poverty, orphaned children, adults suffering from physical conditions caused by the cocktail of chemicals used during wars in the not-so-distant past that spread havoc and destruction over Cambodia and its neighbouring countries. They even saw children who had been born affected with those same physical handlicaps as the parents which were being passed on to the next generation.

So, a decision was made. They couldn’t just walk away. They had to do something about it.

Their idea was simple. It was provide education in one of the villages as a way to help the children to break out of the cycle of grinding poverty that traps them. There is the old saying: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day: teach him to fish and you feed him for life.

Thus, when they came home, Claire Henderson and Michael Branney started a charity called Gifts4Kids Cambodia. They are sponsoring a young person to go to University to become a teacher. He has been gone for a few years and will soon be done. He will return to the village where he will be able to educate the children.

They started a small school. To begin with, it was literally a sheltering roof put over a gap between the walls of two nearby houses. They began with a couple of children. It was popular, word spread and it grew.

They started an ebay business as a charity to raise funds to support the school, send books, clothes and materials to the children in the Puok district of Cambodia which they decided to help.  They do fundraisers when they are home in Scotland –they live in Glasgow. They also go out to Cambodia, when they can, to visit the school and help with developing their project.

In a few years, since about 2009, what was just an idea to help provide support and education has built up to become a real school. They bought a small piece of land in Puok District and last year they were able to raise a small school building on it. The building has a wood framework covered over with thatch and leaves, the local building materials. You can see the story of the school on the facebook page, in photos, starting from the empty piece of land in a clearing in the trees, as it goes through all its stages, land cleared, wood cut, building frame made and erected, roof frame secured and then the thatching filling in the frame all the way to the finished building. A small two-room village school is born!

They have teachers who do twleve one-hour classes at the school in a day. They are in so much demand that some times 400 extra children show up in a day to see if they can squeeze in to one of the lessons.

See the photos on their Facebook page. You can see the smiling faces of the kids. This is the work of Michael Branney and Claire Henderson and their charity at Gifts4Kids Cambodia. If you have a moment, visit them on Facebook at Gifts4Kids Cambodia and see for yourself what they are doing.

It is heart warming.