7 ideas to start conversations

Small talk is a great way to attract women. With the right conversation starters, you can get a woman to be attracted enough to start a conversation with you. Here are some quick ideas for conversation starters.

1. The best way to start a conversation is to have a smile, make eye contact and say “Hi”.
2. If you see a girl reading a book, tell her that you are interested in it too and ask her what she thinks about it. Try to get her to talk about her favourite character.
3. Do not start a conversation with a complement that she is expecting or that someone else might say. You want to appear different.
4. Try to determine what she would expect from another guy and never do the same. Being different is the key to making a great impression.
5. Ask her what the time is. This is a well known opening line, but it still works. If you think that you can pull of a cocky attitude and want her to know that you are flirting with her, try asking her the time when she can see your cellphone.
6. Ask her for directions to where you want to go. Just say that you are a bit lost and would she mind giving you some directions. When she says yes, you can ask for directions to any random place or even ask for directions to her place.
7. Say something unexpected. You want her to stop giving you the same canned responses that everyone else gets.

Written by Mary Nicole Hicks. Read her latest article “Making Small Talk” at http://www.romancebible.com/articles/making-small-talk. You can reprint this article as long as you link to http://www.romancebible.com

Improve memory and recall with sleep

Memorising things is hard. Through out or lives we are trying to memorise everything from events and history to exam answers and a plan for the future. Many students will spend all night trying to remember key facts for exams. It is ironic to think that sleep has such a large effect on memory and learning. All the students that spend all nighters to memorise answers may be doing more damage and be more forgetful than those who get a good nights sleep instead.

For insomniacs it may be sobering news that not only does a lack of sleep affect the memory and recall of exams answers, but also the memory of faces, sceneries, experiences, procedures, and many other things. Our memory of procedural and skills could be the most important and is also the most affected by sleep.

In order to counteract the effects of sleep, people drink coffee. Coffee has caffeine which helps to reduce the feeling of tiredness. The problem with coffee and ultimately caffeine is that all it is doing is masking the symptoms of a lack of sleep. It does not help to improve memory, recall or learning.

When you sleep, your brain tries to sort out all the memories and information from the previous day and file them for future retrieval. It goes through a process called memory consolidation. It is during this process that short-term memories from the day are set as long-term memories.

It is only after a 6 hour period of memory stabilization that memory consolidation occurs. This means that a 6 hour sleep will not have as much of an effect on your memory as an 8 hour sleep would.

Written by the award winning Mary Nicole Hicks. Read her latest article “Association method to improve memory” at http://www.pickbrains.com/articles/association-method-memory. You can reprint this article, just link back to http://www.pickbrains.com

Ukulele tips for beginners

The Ukulele is not hard to play from a technical perspective, but it is hard to learn. Ukuleles are not a very common instrument, so you will not always be able to find a teacher or someone else to play together with. This means that you will have to learn it yourself and that will slow you down. I hope that the following tips can help you on your way.

Learn how to turn a Ukulele. It is important to have your ukulele in tune. If you want to have other people listening to you or want to sound good, being in tune is very important. Bad tuning can make even the best players sound bad, so it is important to get it right. There are many way to help check your tuning; Digital tuners, pitch pipes, or just using your ears all work, you just need to pick a method that suits you.

Buy only the best quality Ukuleles. The top quality ones do not cost a lot and it is worth spending. They will say in tune longer, will be easier to tune and will sound better.

As you Ukulele is so small, it is important that you hold it correctly. Make sure that as little of your body is touching the Ukulele as possible. The more of your body that is touching, the more smothered the Ukulele will sound.

There are so many great songs that only require 3 chords to be able to play. Start learning the chords C, F and G and you will be able to play all these songs.

Most of all you need to enjoy playing, There is no point putting in all the effort and time to learn if you are not going to enjoy playing. Have fun.

Written by Mary Nicole Hicks. Read her latest article “Origin of the Ukulele” at http://www.musicguidebook.com/articles/origin-of-the-ukulele. You can reprint this article as long as you link to http://www.musicguidebook.com

Online Dating Don’ts

Online dating opens up many possibilities. The social opportunities that it provides means that it can lead to friendship, happiness, love and marriage. It is based on the idea that people can use messaging to establish a relationship with another person that has a foundation of trust and love (or lust). There are something that you should not do with online dating.

Although online dating is a great way to meet people that you can latter meet with in-person, you do not want to be giving your details to every Tom, Dick and Harry. It is not safe to hand out your phone number, street name or address to someone until you feel that you have started to get to know them. No harm would come from even not disclosing your name until the second or third email. This gives the other person a sense of achievement once they get it. Say anonymous for as long as possible.

Most people have had a failed relationship in their past. You should not talk about your last relationship online though. To do so shows that you are not over your last relationship and gives people the idea they they are just there for you to vent your frustration on.

Make sure that you do not just say what you do not want. People do not like reading negative messages as much as they do positive ones. Try to focus on your positive side and prefer to talk about your strengths rather than your weaknesses.

People do not like others who brag. It is ok to state your situation and say that you are rich, famous and handsome but do so without bragging.

The one thing that you should not do most of all is lie. If you did have a chance of getting the other person to meet you or get to know you better, a lie such as using someone else’s photo can screw your chances.

Written by Mary Nicole Hicks. Read her latest article “Email style for online dating” at http://www.romancebible.com/articles/email-style-online-dating. You can reprint this article as long as you link to http://www.romancebible.com

Learn about free dating websites

The online dating industry has become very large in recent years, with many sites now out there. It is now one of the most popular ways to meet online with tens of thousands of couples finding love though online dating sites. In todays digital age, many people just do not have the time to actively look for a date. This is where the online dating sites help. They make the dating process quicker by allowing you to weed out the people who are not suitable though questions like “Do they smoke?”.

Online dating sites strive to make meeting the person of your dreams as simple as possible. Features such as emailing you when you have a match, rating a person against your match criteria and profiles allow you to quickly find the type of person you are looking for.

The first step towards online dating is to search for free dating sites. Although all the dating sites would like to pay money for access or extra features, there is no reason to do so. Free websites allow you to do everything you need to do.

The next step is to find a free online dating site that suits your tastes. There are many sites out there to suit a wide range of people. Have a look around and you will see that some will suit you better than others. One you have found a site you like, sign up to it.

After you have signed up, you want to set up your profile and submit a picture. The profile and picture are important as they help others to find more about you and give others something to start a conversation with. When searching for potential matches, do not set your match criteria to specific. Keep an open mind and if a date does not work out see if you can become friends. Girls like to play “match maker” and get their male friends going with their female friends.

Written by Mary Nicole Hicks. Read her latest article “Popular Dating Myths” at http://www.romancebible.com/articles/popular-dating-myths. You can reprint this article as long as you link to http://www.romancebible.com

Solve your problems with a payday loan

In life, things happen at the wrong time. Just when you have no money, something breaks, something needs to be repaired or something needs to be replaced. When you are unprepared for medical bills, can not pay for medication or have dental emergencies, aren’t you glad that you have pay-day loans available to you to help pay for everything.

If you wake up in the middle of the night with flu symptoms, what are you to do. You did not pay for your flu shot this year and now you are in a fix. How are you going to pay for the doctor and medication without money? Pay-day loans!

When life has got you down, a pay-day loan is just what you need to help get you back on your feet. You can get them within 2 minutes on-line. Approval is almost immediate and you can have the money in your bank account within an hour.

Pay-day loans are brilliant, well at least for the people that run them. If you fell for the sales pitch above, you might find yourself in crippling debt. If you really were sick, would you really want to have a loan that you can not pay off causing you more undue stress? Pay-day loans are the biggest con of all time. They prey on the poor in their time of need.

The problems with pay-day loans is that they are too hard to pay off. They can have interest of up to 36%. What this means is that if you do not pay the loan off in 3 years, you will owe 2 and a half times the amount that you borrowed. Suddenly that $1000 you borrowed is now $2500. In another three years it will be $6000. If you can not afford it now, will you be able to afford it tomorrow? If you have a pay-day loan, you have just screwed yourself.

Instead of using a pay-day loan, learn about saving money. The idea of saving money is that you will have money saved up for that rainy day.

Written by Mary Nicole Hicks. Read her latest article “How to grow your net worth” at http://www.pickbrains.com/articles/grow-your-net-worth. You can reprint this article as long as you link to http://www.pickbrains.com/

Creativity and Culture

Creativity is not just about having good ideas. Creativity is part of our culture and the most important factor in all human advances to date.

There are many factors that make up a culture ranging from brand names and fashion to movies and technology. Each of these factors is directly influenced by creativity.

Brand names are a great example of our culture that is effected by creativity. Without a lot of creativity, it would be hard to distinguish between the many brands. Brand names strive to be more creative than their competitors so that they get more recognition and ultimately sales. There is a lot of creativity that goes into making a brand what it is. A brands logo is a focal point for brand recognition is based on a creative way to express the brands image. Even the brands image required a creative spark for it to be created.

The fashion world is heavily influenced by creativity. All the followers of the cult that is fashion want to show that they are up with the latest trend. As a new style is created, the cult followers eagerly part with their money in order to be one of the first to embrace a trend.

Movies have a high aspect of creativeness to them. The story lines, dialogue, clothes and props have all been spawned from someone’s creative streak. The creativeness in these movies have a large impact on our culture through our dreams, inspiration and from people comparing situations in movies to their own situations.

Creativity is the corner stone of all human societies and makes us human. It has allows us to take great steps forward and affects every aspect of our culture.

Written by Mary Nicole Hicks. Read her latest article “6 tricks to inspire creativity” at http://www.pickbrains.com/articles/inspire-creativity. You can reprint this article as long as you link to http://www.pickbrains.com/

Hot drinks during winter

Now that winter is here, we are looking at ways to stay warm. While we can turn up our heaters, put more wood on the fire and curl up in blankets there is one thing that can warm us from the inside out. A hot drink can take away those winter blues and make us feel toasty warm again.

There are many types of hot drinks that you can have. They range from the black teas and herbal teas to the sweeter drinks like hot chocolate. That sweet taste of hot chocolate can do wonders on a winters night. With marshmallows, cream and chocolate sprinkles a hot chocolate can be both a hot drink and a creamy dessert.

To go with you hot drink you can also have a biscuit or two. Biscuits are great with hot drinks as they can be dipped in, turning a dry crunch biscuit into a soft, wet taste sensation. Most biscuits can be dipped or dunked. The softer smaller biscuits will fall apart if they are left in the hot drink for more that a moment. Harder and larger biscuits might need to be in for up to 30 seconds before they soften up and are ready for enjoying.

When choosing a flavour of biscuits for dunking in a hot drink, nothing really beats anything with chocolate. Chocolate is great for dunking as the hot liquid melts the chocolate, allowing the chocolate flavour to be released and spread throughout your mouth.

So the next time you are feeling cold on a winters night try a hot drink to warm yourself up. Also try the best biscuit for dunking in the world, the Tim Tam.

Written by Mary Nicole Hicks. Try the Tim Tam Slam from http://www.marynicolehicks.com/articles/tim-tam-slam with your next hot drink. You can reprint this article as long as you link to http://www.marynicolehicks.com/

Beware of the curse of free blog hosts

As blogging becomes more popular than people expected, more and more individuals and businesses are setting up blogs for many reasons. A vast majority of these new blogs are hosted on free blog hosting sites. This can bring more expected problems than it is worth.

For a beginner, free blog hosting can be a brilliant starting point. Without having to spend anything a blog can be setup to try blogging. The problem is that free hosts bring unexpected problems.

The first problem that a many free hosts in the past have faced is that the host is out to make money. If the free blog hosting is not making them money, they will just stop it and leave you out in the cold. This has happened before and it will happen again.

The second problem is uptime. Many of the free blog hosts also run paid services. When they have a problem, they will work on getting the paid service back running before they care about the free hosting. This means that your blog will have more down time and may lose visitors.

Once your blog starts to grow, you might look into making a bit of money with advertisements. If you are lucky enough to be on a host that allows you to place advertisements on your site, you still may run into problems. Free blog hosts always want something and in most cases they want to use the best advertising space at the top of your blog. How is your advertisement going to be seen when people are seeing your hosts advertisement first.

If your blog does become large enough that it prompts your to move hosts, you may find that this too will be a minefield of problems. Moving hosts means changing the URL that your blog is found at. If your free host does not allow this to be redirected, you may have to start your blog all over again, losing your regular visitors.

By all means, use free blog hosts to try out blogging, but if you are serious do not expect that you can get away without paying for a more professional blog host.

Written by Mary Nicole Hicks. Read her latest article “Bad blog posts” at http://www.pickbrains.com/articles/bad-blog-posts. You can reprint this article as long as you link to http://www.pickbrains.com/

Beware of the curse of free blog hosts

As blogging becomes more popular than people expected, more and more individuals and businesses are setting up blogs for many reasons. A vast majority of these new blogs are hosted on free blog hosting sites. This can bring more expected problems than it is worth.

For a beginner, free blog hosting can be a brilliant starting point. Without having to spend anything a blog can be setup to try blogging. The problem is that free hosts bring unexpected problems.

The first problem that a many free hosts in the past have faced is that the host is out to make money. If the free blog hosting is not making them money, they will just stop it and leave you out in the cold. This has happened before and it will happen again.

The second problem is uptime. Many of the free blog hosts also run paid services. When they have a problem, they will work on getting the paid service back running before they care about the free hosting. This means that your blog will have more down time and may lose visitors.

Once your blog starts to grow, you might look into making a bit of money with advertisements. If you are lucky enough to be on a host that allows you to place advertisements on your site, you still may run into problems. Free blog hosts always want something and in most cases they want to use the best advertising space at the top of your blog. How is your advertisement going to be seen when people are seeing your hosts advertisement first.

If your blog does become large enough that it prompts your to move hosts, you may find that this too will be a minefield of problems. Moving hosts means changing the URL that your blog is found at. If your free host does not allow this to be redirected, you may have to start your blog all over again, losing your regular visitors.

By all means, use free blog hosts to try out blogging, but if you are serious do not expect that you can get away without paying for a more professional blog host.

Written by Mary Nicole Hicks. Read her latest article “Bad blog posts” at http://www.pickbrains.com/articles/bad-blog-posts. You can reprint this article as long as you link to http://www.pickbrains.com/