Choosing the Right Hearing Aid - Turning Up a Whisper

There are so many hearing aids on the market that sometimes it can feel a little bit overwhelming. How are you supposed to know what the best option for you is? There are several factors that determine the power and versatility of the aid. In general, there's a compromise between size and power: the more powerful the hearing aid, the bulkier it will be. Price also plays a large factor which will determine your hearing aid options.

Generally, hearing aids can be broken down into the following categories, all of which have both advantages and disadvantages.

Completely in the Canal

The smallest aids are called completely-in-the-canal hearing aids, and are molded to fit inside the ear canal. They can improve mild to moderate hearing loss, but their power is limited due to the small batteries required in such small models. Additionally, the smaller batteries do not last as long as the larger ones. However, they are small and discrete, work easily with the telephone, and are less likely to pick up wind noise because they fit inside the ear.

In the Canal

Larger than completely-in-the-canal hearing aids, are specially molded to fit partly into an individual's ear canal, although it doesn't fit as deeply as its smaller cousin. It is less noticeable than larger models, which also comes at the cost of power and battery life. However, they have more features than the completely-in-the-canal models, which are too small to feature many options.

In the Ear (Full Shell)

Made to fit into the outer ear, and is good for people with anywhere from mild to severe hearing loss. Although it is more visible and can pick up background wind noise, it has easy-to-adjust features like volume control and has larger batteries that can last much longer than the smaller ones in in-the-ear aids.

Behind the Ear

These aids are strapped to the top of your ear and sit behind the ear itself. These models work for all ranges of hearing loss and are available for people of all ages. While they are generally speaking the most obvious of hearing aids, newer models are reducing the size. Behind-the-ear aids also have the most amplifying power of all hearing aids.

If you're interested in learning more about hearing aids and their benefits, visit http://hearingplanet.com.

Joseph Devine

Hearing Aid Repair High Point NC

General information on hearing aids

Hearing aids have been manufactured and designed for people who need assistance to make sounds accessible. They cannot correct hearing loss but can enhance and help you to improve your lifestyle. Not only could they improve on hearing sounds but may help with your speech.

Hearing aids are electronic and are operated with a battery sensing devices which can improve all levels hearing needs by adjusting the appropriate signal. Majority of hearing aids today have two appliances which work independently. The hearing aid could help with your speech as you should hear clearer and how the words are spoken.

When you go to choose a hearing aid the audiologist should look at your hearing ability, take into account home and work situations, medical conditions, any physical limitations and cosmetic preferences which should provide them with enough information and understanding to suggest the best hearing aid for you. Remember you must be comfortable with the hearing aid and be able to ask if you need a different one.

Amplification can be a reasonably effective treatment for people who are hard of hearing but it has been met with resistance. Amplification can assist with speech understanding even in a busy and noisy location.

Most people don’t understand loss of hearing whether it be sensor neural or conductive, they tend to speak slower or louder thinking this will help the person hear and understand. With a hearing aid no one will need to be treated any different which could save uncomfortable and embarrassing situations especially with strangers and help you to lead a normal life.


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Getting the Best Price for Your Home Includes Landscaping for Curb Appeal

If you own a home, then sooner or later you are going to be ready to sell that home. Maybe you've already sold a home or two. People tend to move more often than our parents did.

There are a lot of things that go into getting the best possible price for your home, but the very first thing your home needs is curb appeal. When a prospective buyer, or a realtor for that matter, pulls up in front of your home, they immediately form an opinion about your house. Fair or not, that's what people do. You can have the most beautiful home in the city, but if prospective buyers don't get a super positive feeling about your house the minute they lay eyes on it, they are going to enter and view the rest of your house with a negative impression.

Fixing that problem is easy enough to do.

When people pull up in front of your house there are two things they see. A house, and the landscaping in front of that house. If the landscaping is unattractive, the house will appear to be unattractive. Landscaping for curb appeal does not cost a lot of money, it's simply a matter of making sure the landscaping is neat, with well defined edges, and colorful. But when landscaping for curb appeal, the most important thing you need to do is to raise the beds with topsoil. Of course you have to do this before you plant.

Plants do much better in raised beds, and the plants in the beds really stand out. In order to raise the beds around your house you do not have to buy expensive stones and build retaining walls. Just establish the outline of the planting beds, cut an edge into the soil with a spade, and fill the planting beds with approximately ten inches of good rich topsoil. You'd be amazed at how much you can raise a planting bed without any type of retention.

Here are two more things you don't need:

Plastic edging. It's expensive, a lot of work to install, and it never stays in place. You can cut an edge with a spade and your landscape will actually look better. Then you can make the bed a little larger any time you need to.

The other thing you definitely do not need is weed control fabric. The stuff just doesn't work. The weeds grow right on top of the fabric, then root through the fabric making it even harder to keep your beds weed free. You'll find a really good article on weed control on my website.

When landscaping for curb appeal, plant placement and selection is very important. In a corner bed you need a centerpiece. I like Canadian Hemlock because they are evergreen and provide an excellent background for more colorful plants. In front of the Hemlock you can use a bright colored evergreen like Gold Thread Cypress, but don't use too many. Usually three is all you want. Around the backside of the same bed you can use a darker evergreen like Taxus or even a flowering shrub that you keep trimmed down low like Weigela. Lots of colors are fine, but don't stagger the colored plants in your landscape, use them in groupings, and be careful not to use too many in any one grouping. When you use more than three of any colored plant they lose their effectiveness. You are adding them for contrast, and when used sparingly they look much better.

There are lots of landscaping photos on my website that will give you a lot of good ideas.

In front of a house I like to use an arc of medium height plants like Blue Girl Holly, then put a couple of taller plants behind the arc. When landscaping for curb appeal you want the landscape to stair step toward the house. In other words, the lawn is the bottom step, the raised bed is step two, low growing plants step three and so on.

If you are re-landscaping an older home you probably should start with a sledge hammer before you do anything else and bust out the sidewalk to the front door. Builders put in the ugliest sidewalks in the world, and they usually are hard to maneuver as you walk toward the front door. Once you have the old sidewalk removed, let your imagination run wild. Remember, you are landscaping for curb appeal, and there is no better way to establish ultimate curb appeal than with a beautiful curved walk that gently winds its way to the front door. Once again, there are photos of such sidewalks on my website, and you'll see what wonderful landscaping opportunities they present.

The last step in landscaping for curb appeal is to create an interesting shaped raised bed in the front yard. Fill this bed with spring flowering bulbs, and annual flowers for the summer. If your house is going to be on the market in the fall, add some chrysanthemums for a burst of fall color.

So what's the best benefit of landscaping for curb appeal? You'll gain great experience so you can make sure your new home is landscaped just the way you want it!


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Cedar Hill Landscaping

How Steve Jobs Personally Benefited from Options Backdating at Apple Computer

Apple Computer stock dropped recently after the San Francisco Recorder, a legal newspaper, said Federal prosecutors are examining Apple’s stock option documents to decide whether to file criminal charges. That was an escalation from the previous level of expectations. Some of the stock’s cheerleaders are saying it won’t hurt Apple or Steve Jobs, and there is not a chance he will be leaving Apple.

I think that’s wrong, or at least expresses a lot more certainty than any outsider could know. The other, quieter announcement was that Steve Jobs has “decided” that he needs to hire his own attorney to deal with the SEC and the Justice Department from now on. Up to now, he has been represented by the company’s outside law firm.

One of the big advantages of being in and around Silicon Valley for 25 years is the déjà vu effect. I have seen this before. CEOs usually don’t hire their own counsel until the company counsel tells them that the company’s interests and the CEO’s interests have diverged. In other words, if Apple’s counsel has seen enough to believe the company was hurt and the CEO was involved in it, they have the potential of representing the company in a lawsuit against the CEO, and therefore have to advise him that they can no longer represent him..

Now that the company has admitted Jobs knew about the backdating, I think the next announcement we will see is that Steve Jobs has been notified he is the target of a criminal investigation, and then the Board will have a very difficult time doing anything other than suspending him until the investigation is over.

I think these things because I have been through the numbers, including what I believe is the largest stock option grant ever, to Steve Jobs in January 2000.

Overall, since the current proxy disclosure rules started in 1994, Apple made 15 rounds of options grants through their September, 2002 fiscal year. If you look at the price of those grants compared to the annual range of the stock for the six months prior to the grant and the six months following the grant, all 15 should average somewhere around the 50th percentile of the annual range. Some grants made right before the stock declined would be in higher percentiles, while others made right before the stock shot up would be in lower percentiles. But averaging all 15 rounds together, it seems reasonable to expect the 50th percentile if no funny business was going on.

Apple’s grants average in the 15th or 16th percentile. That is powerful evidence that a company backdated, or at least granted options right before they had reason to believe the stock was going to jump. Of course, Apple has now admitted that they backdated options, and Jobs knew about it

There are three transactions the SEC and Justice Department probably are looking at for backdating. One was on July 11, 1997, when Apple repriced options and executives turned in old options with a $7.44 strike price for an equal number of new options with a $3.31 strike price. There were only two other days in the 1997 fiscal year when the stock closed at a lower price. On August 6, only 26 days after the repricing date, the stock jumped 33% and then added another 11% on August 7. The question is whether someone decided on August 8 that July 11 would have been a great day to make the repricing effective.

A second case was January 17, 2001, when four top officers (not including Jobs) got options totaling two million shares at $8.41 a share. A few months before, on the last business day of the 2000 fiscal year, September 29, AAPL was cut in half when they preannounced an earnings shortfall. It kept dropping to the $8.41 option price, and then staged a nearly 60% rally in four months.

The third and most serous case is the giant 40 million share (split-adjusted) grant at $21.80 a share to Jobs on January 12, 2000. This one is a bit tricky, as the company has said Jobs “didn’t benefit” because the stock eventually went below the option price. But here’s what really happened.

In the previous 26 trading days, AAPL fell 26%. Jobs then got his grant on the exact day the stock hit its low, and the stock rose 65% in the following 10 weeks. The issue, again, is whether someone decided in February or March that January 12 was a great day to price the boss’s options, it being the lowest price for many months. AAPL stock eventually went below the option price, and the options were cancelled. The company says due to “irregularities in the grants, the options were canceled and resulted in no financial gain to the CEO.”

Oh, really? This bunch of options would have expired in January 2010. Apple’s stock kept declining in the tech bear market, so the Board gave him 10-year options on another 15 million shares in October 2001. But the second batch went underwater, too, and on March 19, 2003, Jobs “voluntarily cancelled” all 55 million options. That’s why the company claims there was no financial benefit to him from the perfectly-timed 40 million share grant.

But the Board of Directors Compensation Committee report for that year disclosed that “in exchange for his cancelled options” Jobs was given 10 million split-adjusted shares worth around $75 million at the time. They were restricted from sale for three years, and when they became free to trade on March 19, 2006, they were worth $640 million. Not bad!

Here’s the rub, and I am indebted to compensation consultant Graef Crystal for doing the calculations. How did Apple’s Board decide on the number 10 million shares? Almost certainly, they used an options pricing model to calculate the current value of the options, which still had seven and eight years to expiration. Even though they were underwater on that day, the long time to expiration gave them value. Crystal used the Black-Scholes option pricing model to calculate the current value of the 55 million options: $77 million. That’s close enough to $75 million to believe this was their methodology.

But remember that the value of the options also depends on their strike price, and the very favorable strike price on the first 40 million grant raised their value quite a bit. If the strike prices of the two contracts had been set at the 50th percentile of the daily closing prices in their respective fiscal years, the calculated value on March 19, 2003 would have been $10 million less, around $67 million. So the Board might have given him, say, $65 million in shares instead of $75 million, or 8.7 million shares instead of 10 million. Those 8.7 million shares would have been worth $557 million when the sale restrictions expired on March 19, 2006, instead of $640 million. That’s an $83 million difference.

Yet in an October 4, 2006 filing with the SEC, Apple said: “In a few instances, Apple CEO Steve Jobs was aware that favorable grant dates had been selected, but he did not receive or otherwise benefit from these grants and was unaware of the accounting implications.” He didn’t receive the grants? He didn’t benefit from the grants? What about the $83 million? Get real.

It now appears that the paper trail around the October 2001 grant (7.5 million shares at the time; 15 million split-adjusted) was falsified. Recently, Apple has been saying that, yes, there was something wrong with the first and maybe both of these grants, but Jobs was not aware of the “irregularities.” But Jobs also was CEO of Pixar at the same time, which also appears to have backdated stock options. So he is the only CEO of two companies caught in this scandal, and it looks to me like someone on the East Coast has decided to teach the freewheeling entrepreneurs on the West Coast a little lesson by nailing a very big target. I still think there is a substantial risk that Jobs will be forced to leave Apple, and therefore it is too risky to step into the stock yet.
Michael Murphy, CFA, has been a technology stock analyst for over 35 years. He founded the first technology investing newsletter, the California Technology Stock Letter, in 1982. He now writes New World Investor, a weekly advisory letter, with more information available at http://www.NewWorldInvestor.net.

gregory reyes options backdating

Common Sense - The Missing Link in Online Business

I like to think that my approach to business is 1 part experience, 1 part research and 2 parts common sense. I know my business; that’s my experience. I read as much as I possibly can to strike a balance in my efforts between tried and true and newer methods of business planning and marketing. But to me, the most important, and often lacking in my opinion, is the common sense part of running any business, especially online.

I do not claim to be an expert in SEO or SEM or any of those acronym concepts. In fact, I’m not sure who legitimately can claim to be. In my observation, the rules to those theories seem to change daily if not more often. However, like most online entrepreneurs, I do try and pick up as much as I can from all sources in trying to market and run my business.

In working on both my own business and my client’s, I have found that too often I can get too focused on the technical aspects of my website and business. We are constantly inundated with tips, tricks and techniques for getting more traffic and finding new leads. Please don’t think I’m discounting any of those or disparaging those giving advice. On the contrary, I think it is necessary to take in as much information as possible in determining your own strategies. The problem, in my eyes, lies in getting too involved in these “new” concepts and losing sight or doubt your innate sense of how to do things.

I am not suggesting any hot new modes of marketing, nor am I guaranteeing any way of making thousands of dollars a week! I am merely suggesting that before, during and after implementing any new techniques, you always take a look at your website and all your materials from your customer’s point of view. Better yet, have someone else take a look.

Make sure that you have designed your site and written your copy in a way that is accessible to both ends of the spectrum: the techies and the technically challenged alike. In a perfect world, each visitor to your site would be very computer and internet savvy. Unfortunately, we all know it is not a perfect world. You must make your site as user-friendly as possible.

I spent a lot of time designing my website. I put a lot of thought into what I wanted to say, how I wanted to say it and how I wanted it to function. Those are all important things to consider and steps that must not be skipped. However, shortly after launching the site I discovered what I could improve.

The first thing I did when I uploaded the site was to inform all my friends and family. I knew within two days that I needed to make things a whole lot simpler! I had not taken into account that I have grown up in the internet age and things that I take for granted like knowing how to navigate a site via a site map or navigation bar are not second nature to everyone. I got the best feedback from my 91 year old grandfather who really wanted to see the whole site and know what it was all about. He tries so hard to keep up with the technology, but using the internet is not his cup of tea.

After speaking with him and a few other relatives, I sat down and took a hard look at my site. I went through and made two ways to get to every single page. I tried to simplify things as much as possible. I didn’t change the copy because I had made a point to write copy that was inviting to potential clients from any background. I used my keywords as much as I felt comfortable doing without sounding like a broken record.

Albert Einstein once said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.” In our excitement to boost our search engine rankings and generate traffic, I think it’s important to remember those words. The more people who can use your site and hear your message; the more customers you will have!


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