Posts Tagged ‘orange’

Should You Use an Online Checking Account?

Do you have a checking account? How many checks do you write every month? probably not many. When you do write checks, it is probably just to pay some bills. what if you never had to write checks?

If you didn’t have to write checks, you would save a lot of paper and some time. Saving paper is always good for the environment, as is going paperless in any way. I will tell you there is a way to stop writing checks.

Online checking accounts are great. One popular one is Electric Orange from ING Direct. if you ever need to pay a bill or pay someone, you just send it through your account and they send an e-check. if you need to send a physical check to someone, they take care of that for you, too.

If you want to take money out of an ATM with Electric Orange account, you can. you get free ATM withdrawals at over 35,000 ATMs. Most banks charge a fee at any ATM if it’s not from your bank. you don’t have to worry about this.

Not sure how you’re going to get the money into your checking account? It’s pretty simple, you just have your money directly deposited into your account. Talk to your employer about setting up direct deposit. This way you don’t have to go pick up a check and you don’t have to make yet another trip to the bank to cash or deposit it.

With an online bank checking account, you can earn money from your money just as with an online savings account. The online bank doesn’t have to pay for the same expenses that a brick and mortar bank has to pay for, and this means you can get a higher interest rate and earn more money.

You don’t have anything to lose with this because it’s free to join and set up an account. if you don’t like it, then just stop using it and go back to your own checking account. you might as well try it to see if there’s something you can gain.

Leap Year Baby Birthday Parties

Birthdays are an important part of a child’s life, but the leap year child’s actual birth date happens only once every four years, on February 29th. While the actual birthday celebration is certain to happen annually, in many cases on February 28th or March 1st, imagine the fun to be had when the birthday falls on a leap year. A year with the normal 365 days is often referred to as a common year, so a leap year birthday party is a chance for uncommon fun.

Leaping Literally

Those who are born on February 29th are often called leaplings or leapers, so a themed birthday party involving frogs or kangaroos could be a fun way to celebrate. the leaping animal you choose as your theme will help you determine the color schemes and decorating ideas. the Leap Year Frog Party can be blue, green and yellow, and the Kangaroo Party could be more earth-toned with brown, cream, yellow and orange.

Take the standard party games, and make them all frog- or kangaroo-oriented. you can play Pin the Tail on the Kangaroo for the kangaroo theme and Pin the Crown on the Frog for the frog theme, or Pass the Frog and Pass the Joey. for a bigger game, plan a frog or kangaroo hunt by hiding small theme animals around the yard or house, like an egg hunt.

Making your cake in the theme is a simple way of continuing the experience, and many grocery store bakeries can even do that for you. Last, but not least, you can hand out small stuffed frogs or kangaroos as party favors.

Super Leapers

An alternative to the leaping themes for a Leap Year Birthday party could be to go with a birthday celebration theme of Superman. February 29th is the traditionally recognized birthday of the man of steel, and that can be adapted into a terrific theme party with red, white, and blue streamers.

You can even turn it into a costume party with the guests coming in their Super suits, saving Superman or Supergirl for the birthday boy or girl, of course. this could be fun for all ages from childhood to adult, because let’s face it: we all like to play dress-up and have fun, so who better to celebrate your birthday with than Superman, Wonder Woman and the rest of the Justice League? So make your leap year birthday special, and celebrate it in style. after all, this calendar birthday comes around only once every four years.

College Football – BCS Explained

Replacing what was known as the Bowl Alliance, the Bowl Championship Series is the most recent effort to crown a National Champion. the Conference commissioners and the Notre Dame AD are the administrators of the BCS. Through a rating system that identifies the teams who are to play each other at the end of the season for the National Championship are the two teams who got the highest ratings.

Originally, the BCS consisted of four bowls namely Rose, Sugar, Orange and Fiesta but since the beginning
of the season in 2006, a fifth BCS game, serving as the championship game has been added. this system simply means that instead of the original eight teams who will be playing in the BCS games, with the addition of the fifth bowl. the championship game will rotate between the four BCS stadiums. this year’s championship game will be held at the Fiesta with next year’s game at Sugar, then Orange and the Rose.

There are three elements serving as the basis for the Bowl Championship Series: the Harris Interactive Poll, USA Today Coaches’ Poll and the Computer Rankings. only the Harris Interactive Poll and the USA Today Coaches’ Poll are manually-operated. These two human elements are responsible for gathering and combining all the specific voter’s votes at the end of every week. once the votes are gathered, the relative strength of each team will then be calculated through a special formula, where a perfect score is 1. Teams that follow will be assigned a number less than the number 1. A team’s final BCS average is determined through an arrived average of the three elements.

In 2005, the AP decided that it no longer wished to take part in deciding a national champion, so the NCAA created the Harris Interactive poll. Harris Interactive is a market research company specializing in internet research. after it was commissioned by the NCAA, the Harris Interactive developed a poll for college football as replacement for the AP poll. 114 voters coming from a group or previous players, coaches, administrators, and past and present media comprised the poll. each week, the top 25 teams are identified through the poll voter’s submitted votes. the first poll is submitted only at the second half of September and no longer passes a poll prior to the season or at the post-season.

The USA Today Coaches’ Poll, the second of the two human elements are all composed of members of the American Football Coaches Association making up 61 Division 1-A head coaches. each of the head coaches submits his or her ballot containing his or her top 25 picks every week. unlike the Harris Poll, the Coaches’ Poll also submits a pre-season and post-season poll. the team that automatically gets the number vote is the winner of the BCS National Championship and also the recipient of the Waterford Crystal National Championship Coaches’ trophy.

The last of the three elements is the computer poll. Consisting of six various calculations, each of the programs were chose in 1998 with BCS’s inception. the six people responsible for the programs are Anderson & Hester, Richard Billingsley, Colley Matrix, Kenneth Masey, Jeff Sagarin, and Peter Wolfe. the computer program does not use a margin of victory and they each use different formulas to calculate strength of the schedule. the teams also go through a top 25 ranking with the computer poll. the computer element is created through the four computer rankings used by each of the teams. the highest and lowest teams in the computer rankings are dumped and the remaining four are averaged.