An April Fool that is – today is the one day of the year when you can really have some pay-back time to your mates…or someone you have just wanted to get back at for ages. A very popular, and harmless, way to achieve this these days is to do a wind-up phone call.

Everyone knows about these but who ever expects to get one…? this is how you can get have a good laugh because your ‘victim’ will not suspect a thing. So why not Pull a Prank CAll now! – follow the link and choose from 25 funny calls you can make. You can design your call according to the age and sex of your ‘victim’ and the calls can range from quite innocent – but funny – to something on the raunchier side…

You can also download, for free, the call you made so you can relive the fun later on; if you aren’t so sure why not have a listen to one of the sample prank calls and then bite the bullet and go for it…but April Fools does not last forever so get going because after today YOU will be the Fool!

This post was sponsored courtesy of Prankcall.co.uk

I have been trying to think of what to buy for two of my sons who happen to live in different places around the world from me; one son lives in Germany while the other lives in Australia – three of the younger one’s live with me but they are relatively easy to buy for seeing as they have been nagging since August and I have a fairly good idea of what they want by now.

I thought a few years back, as they each turned 18, that I would get them heirloom-type gifts over the following years so that they would have nice pieces to hand on down to their own children in time. Patrick got a lovely fob watch from me for his 18th and treasures it – I am thinking along the same lines for William although more in terms of a stylish watch. I was always generous with my time with them when they were little boys and even though they are far away from me now I think giving the gift of time can still be done but in other ways – what better than a nice watch then…? William in Australia actually needs a good watch so he is the one I have in mind so I spent some time looking at these Seiko Kinetic watches which look as thought they would last a lifetime.

Everyone should be familiar with the Seiko brand and it’s reliability as well as their affordability…in my case those things matter at this time of year. If you are in my situation and are shopping online then you can find a great range of these watches at BlueDial.com and for US customers particularly you get free shipping to continental USA within two days of purchase and just in time for Xmas. You also get the manufacturers three year warranty which is two years longer than other manufacturers offer on their pieces, even though Seiko watches last a lifetime this gives peace of mind and BlueDial also offer their own consumer protection where required. As BlueDial offer watches from a range of manufacturers they can be very competitive price-wise and now is the best time of all to take advantage of this aspect.

This post was sponsored by BlueDial.com

We have done this trip several times now and definitely can vouch for the fact that it does save time and money. Even though Northern Ireland is in the United Kingdom you can find that flying to France usually means two flights unless of course you are heading straight for Paris and in that case you’ve only got the one flight.

When we were travelling to the south of France we needed to do the trip by car and so looked up all the ferries to france and the offers available. Ferry-to-France do very reasonably priced crossings offering a choice of departure/destination points with different ferries but our first trip there was done taking the Belfast-Stranraer-Dover-Calais route. We did it in 14 hours (the Belfast to Dover leg that is…) and it almost killed us! then there was the two day trip from Calais to our destination in Perpignan…

We wanted to do the car-ferry thing again and decided on the Belfast-Rosslare-Le Havre route and found that this suited us to a tee. It was a four hour trip to Rosslare, onto the ferry and an overnight sailing – we booked a 4 berth cabin and found it to be very comfortable indeed, we found that sleeping through a night time sailing made the trip go that much faster. Once we arrived we broke the drive from Le Havre down to Perpignan into two days quite easily and that suited us so that we weren’t too fatigued from driving. If you are in NI and want to go to France by car then definitely consider this option.

It would be a very dedicated person who would make a trip to this particular letterbox way out in the Australian Outback – but believe it or not those people get their mail and leaflets just as everyone else does, and living in such isolated areas they appreciate all those little extra bits and pieces that get delivered that other people would toss aside.

If only everyone was like those Outback citizens there would be alot of very happy marketing people out there because Direct Mail does not always get the best publicity but it is often a make-or-break method for many companies today. The reason for this is due to the poor strategies used by some companies who handle door to door distribution – the difference that can be made to your business in a positive way is demonstrated by Msquared and their promise to get you involved in promoting your business the right way via the medium of Direct Mail. This form of getting your message out there to the public is not merely leaflet distribution in the sense of just leaving the results of your valuable advertising campaign lying on someone’s doormat – this company will ensure that your campaign is managed in the most professional way without any intrusion on homeowners and respect for what you are out to achieve.

We have the internet, we have the television and radio but sometimes you need to get your message across to the actual source – the customer in their home – and turn that prospective client into an existing client.

The picture at left shows very clearly how low our confidence in the way the worlds finances are being managed has slumped. Basically we just don’t believe that those at the helm of things have a clue as to which direction to move in to get the global economy back on track.

It makes you wonder where all those financial advisors get their own advice from; which Financial Advisor Services should be called in to take over from those currently making a mess of things…?

Being in the industry of giving advice to clients about money and investing right now would require nerves of steel and the foresight of a fortune teller; if I was in this game I wonder if I would do just as well with a crystal ball and a deck of cards – being able to predict the markets from one week to the next and then advise clients accordingly could only be done efficiently with expert ‘backup’.

The financiers who survive the worst ‘climates’ in current times tend to do so through utilising long established Financial Advisor Services such as LPL; companies such as this have the advantage of having been around during the high inflation and recession of the seventies which was the last time (before the 1930′s) that such a crisis had ever hit the national economy. Until now of course…