I have been using ING Direct for about two years now as a secondary savings account, and I think everyone out there should have at least one ING account as a savings account.  Most major banks give rediculously low interest rates.  Between .01 and .08% APY, even if you use a Money Market or CD you are likely to get no better than 2-3% APY at best. ING Savings accounts have between 5 and 5.5% APY and are FDIC Insured to $100,000. This makes them provide far more interest than a typical bank savings account, money market or CD. Also, since it is a savings account you have far more flexibility with your money and can pull your money out without penalties or time delay’s as you have with CD’s.

The beauty of a high interest savings account is with a highly volatile stock market, and mutual funds being unpredictable at times, you can get a steady interest rate with no risk of loss. I always calculated that if you made enough interest risk free to live off of, you could have a healthy financial life that will last and your funds won’t run out from under you.

ING is easy to use, links to your existing bank accounts for easy deposit/withdrawals and even has checking accounts now with very high interest returns. ING can accept direct deposits from employer’s so the easiest way to start savings, is to carve out about $50 - $100 per pay check (if you can) and have it direct deposit into your savings account. Before long, you will have nested some money at the end of the year that you will not have missed.

Remember the key to growing all savings is to not withdraw, so keep adding as you can and hopefully you can build up a small savings for yourself.

This post is not sponsored by ING in any way, I just happen to use them as my secondary banking service and I really thought everyone should gain benefit from all they have to offer.

-Dragon Blogger

I have been using various painting and art programs over the years for digital photography touch ups, or simple banners, logo’s and posters that I create for various events and reasons.  One of the simplest and easiest to use programs that is also Freeware, is called “Paint.NET“.

This program has enormous amount of functionality for a freeware program and is very similar to Paint Shop Pro 8 in its ease of use and style.  Thought not quite as powerful as Adobe Photoshop, it has a much easier learning curve and flexible tools to get the job done.

Its use of layers is very convenient, my only issues are I can’t seem to find the ability to re-select and move around text after dropping it on the image.  I also wish it had more shapes for drawing tools than square, rectangle, circle and oval.  It has a freehand shape tool which is very very nice, but sometimes I want simple star’s, or hexagons or other shapes which I can’t easily create.

The tool has nice effect’s such as blurring, sharpen, ink, pencil…etc  Which can produce a variety of enhancements on images.  Some examples of what I was able to do with this paint program is take a photograph of my latest tattoo, and digitally alter it to become a logo for my DragonBlogger account.

Here are what I have accomplished with Paint.NET

Here is the original Tattoo

Here is my logo:

Here is also a Pencil Sketch conversion just to show what Paint.NET can do.

NBC Heroes comes back to us with Season 3 on September 22nd.

I for one am very excited to see the new season of the show, the third chapter “villains” appears to focus primarily on the Level 5 escapee’s from “The Company” and revolve around the Heroes from the first two season’s interfacing for good or bad with the villains.  Sylar returns in Season 3 after finally re-acquiring his powers by injecting himself with the antibodies from Claire Bennett’s blood.

In the new season we look forward to seeing more clashes between hero and villain, and I for one hope to see if Adam Monroe escapes his coffin prison.

In the meantime while we wait for Season 3, be sure to read the NBC Heroes Novels on their website.  These novels do a great job of filling in the gaps between the episodes on the show.  My favorite ones include “The Ten Brides of Takezo Kensei” which tells of the story of Adam Monroe throughout the last 400 years, and how he was married ten times and the various fates of each wife.

Here is the link to the entire Heroes Novel Library, and there are 99 Novel’s at the time of this blog:

http://www.nbc.com/Heroes/novels/novels_library.shtml

NBC Heroes Season 2 meanwhile releases on DVD on Tuesday August 26th.  I am thrilled to catch up on this Season, and while it was only 1/2 a season long (11 Episodes) it was much more story driven than Season 1.  Many people were disappointed because there was less action and too many plot twists and storyline, but I really think some of the characters were fleshed out well.  In particular one of the main stars of the Season was the Man with the Horn Rimmed Glasses (aka.  Mr. Noah Bennett) who’s character shows the dedicated and devoted father he is, but also that he still has care for what he “Used to do” for The Company.

There are some good Heroes Novels which show some of the run-ins and encounters Mr. Bennett had while on the Lamb, as well as what happened while he was held in captivity in “The Company” after he was brought back from the dead with the regenerative blood from Claire.

I am starting this blog after a previous blogging experiment and learning experience with my former blog known as “Wanderer Thoughts”.  I have found it invaluable to host my own blog site, and I highly recommend the company “Dreamhost“.

This company has great prices, services, DNS name services and I now work on 3 web sites hosted from this company.  Dreamhost was easy to use, configure, easily integrates with google for mail, calendar or other applications.  Or they have their own fully functional webmail service which works quite nicely.

Check out some of my other web sites I manage:

http://www.rockalongproductions.com

Site for Music Production Company which puts together shows in Arizona at local venues.

http://www.bridgepointconsulting.net

A real estate/contracting consulting site that is still under construction for a friend of mine who is starting their own consulting business.

So, in blogging now I am in the process of adding custom plug-ins to word press.

Does anyone out there have good recommendations?  I am probably going to add commentluv, I really like the way Exquisite Corpse uses this comment system which has link backs and shows your most recent blog post.

You can see this commentluv plug-in in action before I get mine working.

http://beforeiamfamous.com/exquisite-corpse/exquisite-corpse-information/

This is a good website and has been a blog I have followed and participate in regularly, you can enter their contests and have unique poems crafted on a weekly basis.  Some of it is really nice to read and see what comes together from participants just inputting random words that conform to the contest.

-Stay Tuned, there is more to come.

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