BlogsBattle.com

May The Best Post Win

Sam Antar was the former CFO of Crazy Eddie’s, his cousin’s electronics retail empire.
Sam is a much sought-after speaker on the lecture circuit these days, and his seminars may also earn CPE and CLE credits for the attendees.

That’s because he is a convicted fraudster.

Ethics continuing education courses are generally self-paced correspondence courses one takes at one’s own leisure as a part of maintaining one’s professional good standing.
Reading through Sam’s site on the worldwide web, however, is as educational as any structured academic account can be.

As the former CFO of Crazy Eddie’s, Sam presided over one of the most popular scandals in the chronicles of corporate crime.
He lays all of it out, bare, raw, and unembellished by any of the normal self-serving rationaliziations typically given to insiders’ accounts – all unadulterated on his website.

This is an ethics CPE course like no other – if it were accredited as such.
As it is, it’s just a website – but oh, what a website!

White-collar offense never looked so exciting.
That’s because the Crazy Eddie’s scandal was at heart a soap opera featuring all the common human foibles known to a Greek chorus – lust, greed, betrayal, along with family.
Yes, family.

The familial element in this drama makes this type of corporate criminal offense so – if the pun will be pardoned – familiar to lay readers, grabbing and holding their awareness where other accounts would lose them under a mountain / hill of technical particulars.
However, it isn’t that Sam offers no minutiae of his own; his very purpose these days is to combat criminal activity, after all; it’s that these details, which would be so boring otherwise without the benefit of a human drama in which to place them in the correct perspective, come to vivid life against the context of a family power battle that resonantes powerfully with everyone who’s actually underwent any semblance of sibling rivalry.

How’s that for an ethics CPE course!

When I was a personal fitness trainer, I wasn’t too pleased with the idea of a whole certification process just in order to help people exercise.
But that was nothing compared to my shock that certification had to be maintained via online CPE courses as well!
Now needless to say the aim of certification is to be publicly recognized as being skillfully competent, and because things are constantly changing in our fast-paced modern world being competent naturally means some kind of continuing education.
My shock, however, stemmed from the common view of those outside the fitness industry that trainers are simply muscle-heads and nothing more.

Nonetheless, just because I was a muscle-head who happened to be aware of a little bit about the human body doesn’t mean that everyone else interested in becoming personal trainers also do.
But more to the point and very much to my chagrin, it turned out that as much as I actually knew there was so very much, much, much, much, much more that I didn’t – never mind online CPE courses; I barely had the fundamentals covered!

My unprecedented respect for education with respect to the fitness industry now means that I no longer laugh at online CPE courses for personal trainers.
It isn’t destined to be as hard as what lawyers, doctors, and accountants have to contend with, to make sure, but neither is it just a joke, either.
Sure it is primarily memorization of facts at this point, nothing so academically rigorous that any high school student would find it new, but still – it’s a good step in the right path for the industry as a whole and one which I now not only understand but in addition fully support myself.
My days as a trainer are no longer but I have retained a lot of respect for continuing education for anyone.

The potential of Blu Ray video is being met so quickly. Even though there are titles which do not present the format in a good light, fortunately they’re in the minority of offerings. Contrary to the matter of DVD a decade before, when many discs were nothing but straight ports of VHS copies, there being none of the improvements in sound and picture quality possible with the format – some of these actually played straight through from beginning to end, just like a VHS cassette – today’s Blu-ray catalog boasts dramatically improved video images along with digital discrete surround sound. What’s more, with prices that rival those of a DVD, it’s no wonder that consumers have switched in droves!

What’s so interesting about On Off Digital World to me is how it evokes a particular period of old New York. Well, the eighties, anyway. It was a time when a token was necessary board the subways, and pizza was a dollar a slice and comic books just as cheap. It was a time before Neflix and video on demand, when, in fact, cable was just getting off the ground in terms of market share. That was an innocent time, in a sense — when mom-and-pop operations like Montgomery Ward were where you went for electronics. That’s what today’s On Off Digital evokes.

AC electric motor repair is commonly done these days, typically for generator turbines and so on, whether for power plants or ship and aircraft engines.
Nothing unusual about any of that.
But once upon a time, just a little over a century ago, AC, or alternating current, and DC, or direct current, were quite controversial matters – especially for the two men bitterly locked in what would become known to history as the great War of the Currents.

Yes, AC electric motor repair is typical enough these days, but back then, AC was new, and originally appeared unsafe – ironic considering that it won out over DC in lots of applications because of its superior safety.
But before this came about, there were the most acrimonious protests, right down to court battles, not to mention personal smearing strategies in the court of public opinion, against AC, the newer technology.

While it’s arguable that the superior AC standard would’ve finally been adopted, it’s almost certain that the campaign against it, and its most well known proponent, delayed its widespread use for quite some years.
While something similar to AC electric motor repair is still rather expert work, it isn’t the revoluntionary thing it was back when engines running on AC were deemed exotic and, as mentioned before, dangerous.

Thomas Edison, the great inventor, used AC’s initial faults as a means of personally attacking his one-time assistant Nikola Tesla, another brilliant mind.
Likely due to skilled jealousy (though a lot of money was also at stake, as numerous patent royalties were involved), Edison went to great lengths to discredit not only the technology but its most well known proponent – to the point of macabre demonstrations electrocuting animals as well as a condemned prisoner in order to get the public agitated against AC!

As a result of out fast-paced society, fast-paced because new discoveries are being made all the time which leads to things never stand still, even personal fitness trainers need to take CPE courses so as to stay in good standing professionally.
As a former personal trainer myself, I can say, however, that the standard trainer may still not be as well-informed as such accreditations may wish to suggest.

Those employed by chain gyms, which is the vast majority of those nowadays, are often children for whom personal training is a gig they happen to have come upon.
At something like New York Sports Club (NYSC), they wear the red tee shirts that say “here to help you.”
Now some are, certainly, quite knowledgeable and rather enthusiastic about the subject, but for most it is just a job that seemed to fit nicely with a casual interest in sports.

The certification exam they take is honest and rigorous enough for any employing a multiple-choice format, but it is really nothing more than a memory test and definitely indicates no real expertise.
The needed CPE courses run generally along the same lines, regurgitating facts by rote.
Truth be told, these trainers know nothing that could not be gained by anyone who logs online.

Certainly, one may say the same of any profession – but when it comes to physical fitness, the very nature of the area permits for no small amount of misinformation and outright quackery.
The reason behind this is really quite simple: no one really knows.

Yes its true.
I’m a former personal fitness trainer and the only one who can tell the absolute truth: no one really knows.
Unless he or she is God or was there at the creation of Adam and Eve, no one really knows.
Thus, all the personal trainer CPE courses in the world isn’t going to make up for this basic but shocking truth – “the human body is centuries prior to medical science,” as Doctor Sir Roger Bannister said.

The iPhone. Many refer to it the ideal phone on the market today. It’s won really good ratings, offers you simple user friendliness, excellent parts and its options seem endless. There has even been a number of attempted cell phone imitations to the iPhone, not one of which even compare to what a real iPhone can provide. A few individuals believe that the Apple iPhone offers you over the top luxury with a asking price to match. Regardless, if you have actually utilised an iPhone you will know there exists just nothing that comes close. With top world wide web sellers featuring great special discounts on unlocked cell phones for instance the iPhone and many others, it’s now more inexpensive than previously. Therefore if you have never yet had the luck of enjoying an iPhone for yourself, put it off no more, go secure yourself an iPhone at a rate you can definitely pay for.

Ever heard of something called guerrilla marketing? I experienced it myself unwittingly a few near On Off Digital World at the middle of Manhattan. What guerrilla marketing is, is just undercover marketing. Think of it as covert marketing! Such as what happened to me, for instance. I met some lovely young ladies who asked me to take their photograph as a favor – a frequent request around the tourist mecca that is Times Square. In the process, however, they would be showing me everything about their new digital camera – making me wish I had one! That’s guerrilla marketing done right, advertising to me in a way that gets past my guard!

There’s nowhere like Manhattan for shopping. From traditional retailers such as On Off Digital World to modern big box chain stores and franchises, there are a million ways to spend a million dollars! Practically anything can be found in Manhattan, which is why New York City feels like the capital city of the world frequently: if it isn’t found there, it probably doesn’t even exist! Cars, electronics, clothing, you name it. The variety of goods available is quite apt for a city that draws people from all around the world. And that’s one more reason why The Big Apple is often called the world’s capital! There just isn’t any other place like it anywhere.

So you want to be a lawyer. You understand it is going to mean a lot of studying, a lot of time spent with books – but you like reading, and figuring things out, and you enjoy words, language, and all the semantic nuances involved.

You even know that the LSAT exam for admission to law school is difficult, and something to pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for, for special prep courses, coaching classes and so on. You also are aware that law school itself will be challenging as nails, at least during the all-too-crucial First Year.

Great. Maybe you even know that you will be forever hitting the books as a practicing lawyer, forever taking online CPE courses and their tests, one after the other, in order to maintain your ranking with the professional association governing your licensure.

Super.

But are you aware that it will be rather tough getting a high-enough-paying job as lawyer in order to pay off your student loans? In fact, those online CPE courses will cost some money, too.

Oh, you probably think you’ve got that covered. You’ll graduate at the top of your class, or you’ll be accepted into an Ivy League law school and graduate none too low in the rankings so as to get hired by a top corporate law firm and easily recoup your investment in two to three years’ time.

And without a doubt, if such a thing does happen, your odds would be a lot better than those for essentially the rest of your peers, even in this economy. But “better than” does not mean “inherently good.” ’Cause guess what happens – globalization is coming to the legal profession too.

Yes, you heard that right – outsourcing. Indeed, some of the online CPE courses available on the worldwide web were developed overseas! And though the legal profession has attempted to resist it (after all, it took a whole decade for everyone to swap from WordPerfect to Microsoft Word!), it’s finally started to affect the industry.