Perfect Tips During Your Job Interview

1. PREPARATION FOR THE INTERVIEW

• Be physically and mentally prepared. Decide what to wear days before the interview. Being well-groomed and having a good appearance is essential. Have a good night's sleep, eat a healthy meal and allow plenty of travel time.
• Be on time. Before the day of the interview, make sure where the interview would be held. Take time to find out where the location of the interview is days before the actual interview. Keep in mind to leave enough time for your journey.
• Be proactive. Do research on the organization by reviewing its corporate profile and by reading some relevant information through websites and print materials. Find out the specifics of the job you are applying for and try to prepare some questions about the company - its culture, goals and mission.
• Be your best self. Spend time researching about yourself. Review your past experiences and accomplishments that may fit the needs of the company. Being able to have a grasp of your talents, skills and experiences would enable you to communicate the contributions you can make for the company.
• Be Positive. By being well-prepared, you eliminate nervousness. Just enjoy the interview and be enthusiastic when responding to the interviewer's questions. Confidence and a pleasant disposition brings out the positive energy in you.

2. THE INTERVIEW

• Relax and be yourself.
• Remember to turn off your cell phone before the start of the interview.
• Some first impression gestures are handshakes, eye contact, warm smiles, good posture and a confident introduction of self.
• If there are two or more interviewers, be sure to address all the interviewers in the room when answering the questions.
• Take time to think before you answer questions. A well-thought answer is always better than a rushed one. Try to give complete answers as much as possible and if you do not understand the question, ask for clarification.
• Use concrete experiences to illustrate important information about yourself.
• Avoid using poor or slang language to impress the interviewer. Use familiar but concise words during the interview.
• Show interest during an interview by striking a good balance between speaking and listening.
• Be honest. Answer the questions truthfully and be fair to yourself.
• Make sure to highlight your good points. This would enable the interviewer to asses your performance at work and your potentials to be an effective employee.
• When being asked about your weaknesses and failures, mention how you were able to handle the difficult situation, share the lessons you learned and the improvements you would take to convert certain weaknesses to strengths.
• Don't act desperate by telling the interviewer you are willing to take any job offered.
• If you have some points that you weren't able to discuss towards the end of the interview, take the initiative to mention a couple of things you want the interviewer to know about you.
• Before leaving an interview, ask the interviewer what the next steps would be. Know what to expect and when to hear from them.

3. AFTER THE INTERVIEW

• Thank the interviewer for the time spent with you.
• Make some notes regarding the things you learned about the company. These may be helpful for your next sets of interviews.
• Make a follow-up call to know your status and your succeeding interviews.

Learn How To Improve Your Singing Voice Instantly

All of us have to sing at some point, even if it's just a simple 'Happy Birthday'. Use these simple tips and techniques to improve your voice and your confidence.

1. Keep your arms slightly away from your body. Clasp your hands out in front of you or bring your arms to your sides and a bit forward, raising them about 6 inches in a flexible, relaxed fashion. This will allow your ribcage to fully expand and your lungs to fill to capacity. More air allows you to project your voice more strongly and clearly.

2. Keep your feet about shoulders' width apart. If you like, one foot can be further forward than the other. Make sure you're solidly balanced, but still flexible. Slightly bend your knees. If you must sing while sitting, make sure both feet are flat on the floor, with 12 inches or so between them, and that you're sitting up straight, but not stiffly.

3. Relax! Tension destroys vocal tone. Try not to let your shoulders hunch up and keep your neck from tensing. Don't force your chest up and out when you breath in. This will actually constrict your air flow. Stay in motion, however slightly. This will relax your body and your tone will sound more natural. Try gently swaying from side to side with the rhythm. You'll look better, too!

4. When you inhale, push your stomach out. This will allow you to more completely fill your lungs. As you exhale, bring your stomach slowly in, using the muscles of your diaphram (which is just under your ribcage) to control your tone.

5. If you have to hit a high note or you hear yourself singing flat (that is, if your notes are a tiny bit too low), raise your arms a little higher and smile slightly. For very high notes, try closing your eyes and turning your face up slightly.

6. Conversely, if you start to sing sharp (a tiny bit too high), bring your arms down a little lower and open your mouth slightly wider by dropping your lower jaw. Don't dip your chin towards your neck, however, as this will cause your air flow to become constricted, which will show up in your voice.

7. Find your natural volumn. Many people sing too softly, out of shyness or embarassment. This keeps them from being able to support a good tone. Others sing as loudly as possible, which can result in sharp or flat notes, as well as body tension. Singing at your natural volumn should feel good, not forced or constricted.

8. Find your best tone. Tone is strongly affected by your state of mind. You may find that you sound better when you imitate someone else, like an opera singer, pop diva or rock star. Have fun experimenting and don't hold back! You may be surprised at just how good you can sound.

9. Enjoy yourself! If you take all these tips to heart, singing could become a habit.

How to Make a Cobra With Your Hands

Steps

1. 

   
   Put your hands together as if you were praying.
2. Fold both of your ring fingers so that they touch your knuckles.
   

   
   

3. Bring your pointer finger (or index finger) behind your middle fingers. Stop after this step if you want to make a dog.

Put the fingers that the arrows are pointing to behind your ring fingers.

4. Move your pinkies down into the "mouth" of the cobra to act as the tongue.

Bring your pinkies down into the mouth of the cobra.

The pinkies will rest in this area.

5. Move the thumbs to act as the cobra's mouth.

Hissssss...

Tips

If your fingers aren't very flexible this might be a little tricky for you.

Math Tricks!!!

Here is a math trick so unbelievable that it will
Stump you.

1. Grab a calculator. (You won't be able to do this
One in your head)
2. Key in the first three digits of your phone number
(NOT the area code)
3. Multiply by 80
4. Add 1
5. Multiply by 250
6. Add the last 4 digits of your phone number
7. Add the last 4 digits of your phone number again
8. Subtract 250
9. Divide number by 2

Do you recognize the answer? Search Math Tricks.

PowerPoint Tips & Tricks

Save Your Fonts with Your Presentation

If you're preparing a presentation that you plan to distribute to others, be sure that you check this option by clicking on the Tools button in the File/Save As dialog box. This will work for most TrueType fonts on the Windows platform.

Saving Your Toolbar Configurations

If you like to customize your UI, move toolbars around, configure toolbars, etc, then you'll want to know that all this information is stored in c:\windows\application data\microsoft\powerpoint\ppt.pcb

By copying this file, you can move your customizations to other machines.

Displaying Keyboard Shortcuts in Tool Tips

If you'd like to see the available keyboard shortcuts for menus, commands, and toolbar buttons, go to Tools/Customize, click on the Options tab, and click on "show shortcut keys in screen tips".

Getting Rid of Short Menus

Forgetting user reaction to this feature when it was introduced in Word years ago, the Office team decided to try it again. Unfortunately, it's still annoying. To see all of your options when you click on menus, go to Tools/Customize, click on the Options tab, and uncheck "menus show recently used commands".

Preview Fonts in the Toolbar

If you'd like to see previews of the actual fonts in the font selection of the formatting toolbar, go to Tools/Customize, click on the Options tab, and click "List font names in their font", click Close.

Making Auto-Fit Text Stop Auto-Fitting

Turn this feature off by going to Tools/Options, click on the Edit tab, and uncheck "autofit text to text placeholder", click OK.

Getting Rid of Tri-Pane View

Unfortunately there is no way to permanently avoid this improvement, but you can quickly get rid of it by holding down the CTRL key when you click on the Slide View button.

Using Ctrl-Drag to Copy

You can quickly make a copy of any object by holding down the CTRL key while you drag on the object. You will then "drag off" a new copy.

Making Slides Print Correctly

PowerPoint has certain defaults to determine how it prints each object on the page. You can see over-ride these defaults. Go to View/Black and White; this will show you a gray-scale preview of how your slide will print. To change the print settings for any given object, right-click on it, then click "Black and White", and then choose the appropriate print option for that object. Master objects can be selected by going to the Master page View.

Preview Slide Show Effects

While editing a presentation, hold down the CTRL key while clicking the slide show view button; this will open a tiny preview window showing that slide in slide show mode.

Setting the Default Text Style

If you want to change the style of the text that appears when you type things that aren't the title or the slide body, do the following:
Make sure no objects are selected.
From the Format menu, select Font. Make all the changes that you want there, and click OK.
From that point on, new text will be created in that style.

To Set the formatting for the title or slide body objects, go to the Slide Master and format these objects on the master.

Using Different Backgrounds within one Presentation

Users of PowerPoint 2000 and lower will only have two background designs automatically supplied with the Masters (counting both the Slide Master and the Title Master). However, you can have any design you want on any slide. From the Format menu, select Background. Check the box that says "omit background items" and this will make the slide ignore the Slide Master's design. You are now free to add whatever design you want to this slide. If you want to do this to many slides at once, go to the Slide Sorter, select the slides, and then use the Format menu command. Remember though that if you choose to do something like put a photographic background on many of your slides instead of doing it once on the Master, that your file size may increase dramatically.

PowerPoint 2002 supports multiple background masters.

Using More than One Guide

If you like using guides, but wish there were more, you can create additional Guides by simply holding down the CTRL key while dragging on an existing Guide. This will create a new guide. To get rid of guides, just drag them off the edge of the slide.

Using Guides to Measure

Make the Guides visible by using View/Guides. Then, hold down the SHIFT key while you click-and-hold a guide; the tooltip for the guide will display 0:00. As you move the guide, the distance the guide covers from the beginning of the drag will be displayed in the units of your ruler. In this way you can measure distances between objects, place guides at specific places, etc.

Creating Pages with Slides and Descriptive Text

If you want to create printable pages that have notes or descriptive text associated with each slide, PowerPoint has a feature designed to do just this called Notes Pages, or Speaker's Notes (depending on which version you're using). To view the Notes page for any slide, go to the View menu and select Notes Pages. You will see an image of your slide there, and a placeholder for adding your script, notes, or any other text you wish. You can cut-and-paste text from Word here if you like. To print these pages, bring up the Print dialog, and at the bottom of the dialog where it says "Print What:", select Notes Pages. These pages were originally designed to be used as audience hand outs (with space for the audience to take notes) but were also used by many as speaker's notes: the text block would have the script of the presentation, to be used by the speaker, or for sales binders to educated sales people.

Making Presentation Files Smaller

Prior to PowerPoint 97, there was no internal file compression code inside of PowerPoint, and files could get pretty big quickly. The most common cause of large files is the addition of large bitmaps. PowerPoint 97 compresses these bitmaps, but previous versions do not. To keep your presentations as small as you can, try reducing the resolution of your bitmaps, which will bring their size down tremendously. For viewing on screen, the bitmaps don't need to be more than 96 dpi; they won't print nicely until they're up around 150 or higher, but the screen always displays at 96 dpi, so if the primary viewing medium is the screen, there's no point in having the bitmaps be a higher resolution. Also, the bitmap format can make a big difference to your file sizes. JPEG and PNG both have good internal compression code. GIF has some, but not as good as JPEG. BMP files are the largest; TIFF files will also be very large.

Sometimes, as you're working on a presentation, you'll notice that the file seems to get bigger for no reason. To get rid of this "bloating", save the file using "File/Save As" and give the file a new name. This can reduce the file size up to 50%.

Building Presentations for Distribution to Others

If you're making a PowerPoint presentation that you intend to distribute to lots of different people, here are some important things to watch out for that will cause problems:

1. Stick with the fonts that come installed with Windows; Fancy fonts that appear on your machine will cause problems if everyone else doesn't have them.

2. Avoid embedding sounds and videos: these will not go from Mac to Windows gracefully, and you have to be very careful about how you insert the files in order to get them to "travel" properly. See the FAQ section for more information on this.

3. Try looking at the presentation on a different platform (Mac vs Windows); be prepared for some visual changes in your file--the version or platform may not support some of the features you've put in, so be sure to sanity check your file on several different machines and versions BEFORE you distribute it!

Easily Changing from Caps to Lower Case (or Vice Versa)

If you have text that is in the wrong case, select the text, and then click Shift+F3 until it changes to the case style that you like. Clicking Shift+F3 toggles the text case between ALL CAPS, lower case, and Initial Capital styles. You'll be surprised how often you use this once you get the hang of it!

Nudging Objects

You can use the arrow keys to move objects very small distances. This is a big win for those laptop users who no longer have mice. Select the object, then use your arrow keys. Each press of the key will move the object on "grid unit" (1/12th of an inch, don't ask why); if you hold down the ALT key while nudging, or if you have the grid turned off, you can move the objects one pixel at a time.

Saving Across Multiple Diskettes

From the File menu, select Pack and Go. This wizard will compress your PowerPoint presentation and copy the file onto as many floppies as are necessary. Be sure to format a bunch of floppies BEFORE you start the process, and make sure they are empty. This feature requires PowerPoint 95 or higher.

Subliminal Messages

These can be pretty hysterical in the right circumstances. Create a text object. With the text object selected, click on the Animation Effects button on the tool bar (the one that looks like a yellow star), and then click on the "flash once" button. Go to slide show and see the message quickly flash and then disappear.

Editing Drawings

Anything you draw with the pencil tool, you can edit. To get the object into "points mode", either double-click on the object, or select it then hit the Enter key. You will then see points at every vertex, which you can move. You can add points by holding down the shift key and clicking, you can subtract points by holding down the ALT key while clicking, and you can of course just drag points around.

Soft Shadows

You can create "soft" shadows for square or round objects that sit on a solid color background. Make a copy of the object, then change its fill to be shaded from black to the background color, with the shading set with black going from the center out to the background color at the edges. Make this object about 150% bigger than the original object, and put it behind the object. This will give you the effect of "soft" shadows.

Selecting Small Objects

Hit the ESCAPE key to insure that nothing is current selected, then repeatedly hit the TAB key, which will toggle you through a selection of all of the objects on a slide. This is useful for selecting very small objects, or objects that are covered up by other larger objects.

PowerPoint System Requirements

Mac PowerPoint 1.0 Original Macintosh or better System 1.0 or higher 512K RAM
Mac PowerPoint 2.0 Original Macintosh or better System 4.1 or higher 1 MB RAM	Windows PowerPoint 2.0 286 PC or higher Windows 3.0 1 MB RAM
Mac PowerPoint 3.0 Macintosh Plus or better System 7 or higher 4 MB RAM	Windows PowerPoint 3.0 286 PC or higher Windows 3.1 2 MB RAM
Mac PowerPoint 4.0 68020 Mac or better System 7 or higher 8 MB RAM	Windows PowerPoint 4.0 386 PC or higher Windows 3.1 8 MB RAM
	Windows PowerPoint 95 (7.0) 386 DX PC or higher Windows 95 6 MB RAM
Mac PowerPoint 98 (8.0) PowerPC or better 16 MB RAM	Windows PowerPoint 97 (8.0) 486 PC or higher 8 MB RAM
Mac PowerPoint 2001 (9.0) Power PC or better, at least 120 MHz 48 MB RAM minimum Mac OS 8.5 or higher	Windows PowerPoint 2000 (9.0) Pentium, 75 MHz+ Windows 95 or higher 20 MB RAM
	Windows PowerPoint 2002 (10.0) Pentium III processor Windows 98 or higher 40 MB Ram

How to LOOK good. Best Grooming Tips for Men.

Men now spend more time on the way they look. How men present themselves
at work, in their social and home lives has become so much more
important.
Here are 8 top ways to look cool and feel more confident.

Here's How:

1. Good skin care is easy. Soap or lotion and moisturising are the
two main ways you can improve the look of your skin. Pick a
moisturiser with sun protection because sun damage is the main
factor that ages skin. Vitamin E thelps to revitalize your skin.
Skin products that include retinol help minimize fine lines and
help prevent wrinkles to a degree.

2. Acne. There are now lots of creams, soaps, cleansers, and
medications to treat spots and acne treatments for men. Try a
medicated soap, a cream to apply to the spots and a concealer.
Change products if they are not working.
Don't put up with bad acne. Go to your family doctor if that does
not work. He or she will probably treat you or refer you to a
specialist in dermatologist. Antibiotics and specialised creams
will help to get rid of them. Your confidence will improve 100%.

3. Body odor. A bit of body smell can be a turn on, huge amounts of
acrid stench are a definite no-no. Wash and shower as often as
necessary. Anti perspirants and deodorants help regulate odor and
sweat.

4. Get a good hair cut. Spend out; often the more expensive salons
tend to keep up to date with fashion trends and products and can
offer hair care that makes the most of what you have. Use a
shampoo that is appropriate for your hair type and makes your hair
look good.

If you want to change your hair color the best way is to get it
done professionally. Badly done color changes can say many
negative things about you as a person, unless of course bizarre is
good for your ?alternative? image.

5. Hair styles often need products for the best results. Waxes, gels,
sprays, mousses and volumizers can help keep hair styles to stay
looking good.

Balding hair looks best short, very short. No combing long hair
over the top of a balding head.

6. A balanced diet containing fresh vegetables and fruit is good. It
keeps you healthy and improves skin and hair. Try limiting your
fast food intake. Dietary food supplements and vitamins can help
when a normal healthy diet is not possible or if you become
deficient in some way.

7. Get enough exercise. Use everyday opportunities to avoid a
sedentary life. Walk rather than take the elevator. Avoid using
your car for very short journeys. Joining a gym or sports club
will encourage you to exercise. It can be very good for the social
life too, a good way to meet new people.

8. Clothing. Keep it clean, smart and trendy!
Oral hygeine: Keep teeth clean, visit the dentist, use a mouth wash.
Nails: keep them trimmed, clean and don't bite them.
Socks and underwear- change at least daily.

Top 7 Tips to Make Your Thesis Project Better

Thesis project is a kind of a paper that gives you an opportunity to assert
yourself as a personality and a young researcher. In order to use this
opportunity, you should know how to make your thesis unique and
exclusive.

Do not allow your reader to get bored.

Try to be interesting. Your thesis committee would definitely like to see an absolutely
new vision of the problem in your thesis project. It is better to attract the
reader’s attention by making a catchy title of your thesis project;

Use details and examples of your personal experience.
A good thesis project is the one based on personal research conducted.
So, conduct several interviews to explain how your conversation with the experts or
witnesses influenced your vision of the problem under consideration;

Be brief. Diffusion always affects badly. Too long sentences in
your thesis project can confuse your reader, giving him/her no
opportunity to understand what you mean.
Short sentences are easier to perceive, they are more exact, since related only
to the topic of your thesis project;

Avoid repetition.

Use links.
Remember that a good link between the sentences of your thesis project results
from the natural emergence of your thoughts. Do not misuse the repetitions in
the text of your thesis project as well;

Use Active voice. Exceeding use of Passive voice makes your narration blush and arid;
Follow your thoughts.
It is important for your sentences to convey one idea.
Keep it in your mind; Check and proofread.
It is the first step to improve your thesis project.
Cut all odd sentences and make your thesis project perfect.
Follow the tips presented, and you will certainly make your thesis project better.

Security experts rate the world's most dangerous exploits

Criminal hackers continue to penetrate many more company networks
than most administrators care to admit, according to two security
experts who offered a list of the most effective exploits used to gain
entry.
Topping the list is an attack dubbed super-flexible pivoting. It
abuses Linux machines connected to a network's DMZ, or demilitarized
zone, to bypass corporate firewalls and access sensitive resources on
an internal network. The technique has already been used to steal vast
amounts of data, including "millions of credit cards," said Ed Skoudis,
a senior security consultant for InGuardians, a security company that
frequently responds to major network breaches.
"If the bad guy can get control of one of your DMZ machines, he
doesn't need to make inbound connections there anymore," Skoudis said
during a panel at the RSA security conference. "Instead, he can make
outbound connections that effectively give him inbound access on your
internal network."
Another powerful exploit Skoudis is seeing frequently is the
evolution of an attack known as pass the hash, which is used to
penetrate Windows servers. Windows authentication works by checking a
user's cryptographic hash, rather than password. Attackers can steal
the hash by exploiting a simple unpatched browser or application
vulnerability and then injecting it into the memory of the Windows box.
Although pass the hash has been around for a decade, the attacks
have remained successful. That's in part thanks to a proliferation of
software that streamlines the exploit.
Skoudis was joined by Johannes Ullrich, the CTO of the SANS Internet
Storm Center. Together, they presented their list of the world's most
dangerous new attack techniques and ways organizations can protect
themselves against them.
"The real big problem here is user education," Ullrich told a
standing-room audience. "And user education is more than going to the
user and saying don't click on it. User education also means getting
your own house in order."
Too many organizations are still failing to patch applications such
as Adobe's Flash and Reader, he added. In other cases, they aren't
teaching employees how to avoid social-engineering attacks on social
networking sites and elsewhere.

Other dangerous exploits include:
Advances in wireless attacks, such as those that hack a client
machine and then use it to connect to an access point tied to a
corporate network. Interestingly, this is easier to do with Windows
Vista and Windows 7 than their predecessors, Skoudis said.
Attacks that take advantage of shortcomings in SSL, or secure
sockets layer. The most glaring are SSL's focus on failed connections
rather than those that are successful and the number of banks that
still use non-SSL login pages.
Attacks against unprotected VoIP, or voice over IP, systems. Since
the beginning of the year, there have been some 5,000 scans of port
5060 every day. That's about five times the rate as in all of 2008,
said Ullrich, who monitors internet activity using half a million
sensors across the globe. The take-away is that admins should assume they've already been hacked.
"I believe that a determined but not necessarily well-funded
attacker can pretty much break into any organization," Skoudis said.
"If you think it's less than 50 percent, I think you need to look a
little more carefully."

How to Teach a Dog Tricks

Dogs are man's best friend, and they wish to please us. This can mean behaving and doing what they are asked to do. "Sit" and "stay" are good for well-behaved dogs, but tricks like "shake," "roll over" and "play dead" are also fun.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

Step1

Give treats. Dogs react to food. Give small treats to reinforce good behavior as you teach a dog tricks. As they learn, take away the treats a little at a time until they are obeying commands without food.

Step2

Repeat the action. Repetition is key when you teach a dog tricks. They need consistency to understand what action they are being asked to perform, and repeating the action solidifies the learned behavior.

Step3

Work with the dog every day. Training has to be done on a regular basis in order for the information to stick with the dog. Taking time every day will ensure that the tricks that have been learned in the past will continue.

Step4

Use a clicker. Food is a good option, but seeing as dogs process information with their sense of hearing and smell more than humans, using a clicker to train is helpful. They can be purchased at any pet store. To properly use a clicker to teach a dog tricks you must familiarize the dog with the sound and follow it with the command. You can still use treats as a reward, but the clicker can be the main training tool.

Step5

Use verbal and physical commands. Dogs can associate a word and a hand motion with different actions. When you tell the dog to roll over with your words and hands, it will help them to comprehend what is being asked of them.

Hog/Pig Raising Tips

In almost every rural household in the Philippines, hog raising is a very popular enterprise such that there is a proliferation of backyard producers, which dominates the swine industry.

Other than providing a secondary source of income for small families, hog raising is a fast growing home based business in the Philippines which has the potential for high profits in a relatively short period of time.

Selection Criteria for Hogs

When selecting breeder sows on the basis of physical appearance, consider the following:

• The gilt should have well-developed udder with a minimum of six pairs of properly spaced function teats. A sow with poor udder development is likely to have poor milking capacity.
• Choose those which do not have inverted teats for such teats are inherited and do not secrete milk.
• A long body is more desirable in sows because it provides more space for udder development.
• The body should have uniform width from front to rear.
• Good development of the ham, loin and shoulder is required of a breeding animal.
• Must have sound and well-placed feet and legs. Animals with medium short feet and short upright pasterns are preferable.
• Make it a point to select the biggest animals within a litter.
• Female breeders should come from a litter of eight or more good-sized piglets with high survivability.
• Do not keep gilts that come from sows in which agalactia (failure to secrete milk) have been observed.
• Select vigorous and hardy pigs from a healthy litter in a herd raised under good swine sanitation. Do not keep gilts or boars or breed from litters that have physical abnormalities. These may be inherited.

Most of the factors discussed in connection with a selection of gilt or sow also apply in the selection of a boar. However, the following pointers should also be considered:

• Masculinity, both in appearance and action, should predominate in the make-up of any boar.
• The primary sex organs should be clearly visible and be well developed. Select only those boars whose testicles are of equal size.

However, it is best to select a boar that has been proven and tested to overcome the defects of the herd. Minor defects in the boar may be ignored provided that they are not present among the sows.

Generally, boars should be four to six months old at the time of selection.

Housing

Hog houses must be constructed properly to ensure maximum performance of the pigs. A good hog house may not improve the health conditions of the animals but a poor one will certainly increase disease problems easily.

For a small or backyard operations, cheap and locally available materials may be used such as bamboo and nipa.

Hog houses should be constructed on a slightly sloping and well-drained area so that it will not become too muddy and convenient to work in.

Permanent hog houses should have concrete floors for easy cleaning and to minimize the occurrence of parasites and diseases. Concrete floors must not be too rough to cause foot and leg problems nor too smooth to be slippery when wet.

Facilities and Equipment

Provide the pig house with the proper equipment such as feeders and drinking troughs. Feeders and water troughs are best made of concrete although other materials may be used. Some people use discarded automobile or truck tires cut in halves.

In bigger operations, farrowing stalls are important to reduce piglet mortality due to crushing of piglets.

Heat lamps or electric brooders are needed for survival of newborn pigs. In places where the use of heat lamps is not possible, a box lined with old sacks or thickly bedded straw, rice hull or saw dust can keep the pigs warm and comfortable.

Marketing

Marketing is the last job done on growing-finishing pigs. Choosing a market is one of the important decisions a hog producer must make before sale of slaughter hogs. The market selected may affect income and profitability.

Prices vary among markets. Marketing costs, such as selling charges, transportation, also vary. Shrinkage or the difference between the original weight of livestock and that after it has been prepared for market, will also affect the price. Consequently, hog producers need to be aware of alternative markets and to choose the one which yields the greatest net return.

Hogs are marketed when they reach at least 80 kg, which would usually take around five to six months to achieve. Marketable hogs may be sold to middlemen who usually act as buying or selling agents, direct to meat processors without the intervention of a middleman, or in auction markets where animals are sold to the buyers who offer the highest acceptable price per kilo liveweight or per head.

When a large number of hogs will be marketed, the producer must observe proper shipment and transport handling to minimize losses due to shrinkage, bruises, injuries and possible deaths. Here are some tips:

• When transporting hogs, separate the large animals from small pigs by a partition.
• Provide loading facilities for easier and proper loading of pigs.
• If necessary provide beddings of sand or saw dust. When the weather is hot, wet down the beddings before loading to keep the pigs cool and comfortable.
• Do not overload or under-load the truck.
• Do not excite or over-heat hogs. Give the hogs enough rest and leave them undisturbed until they are butchered.
• Do not overfeed hogs before transport to avoid suffocation or vomiting.

Risks and Rewards

Swine production has many advantages:

1. Swine convert feed to meat more efficiently than cattle or chicken do
2. Swine are prolific, commonly producing two litters per year and from six to twelve pigs per litter.
3. Swine excel in yield of useable carcass compared to other animals that produce red meat. Dressing yield is from 65 to 80 percent for swine.
4. Hogs can convert some wastes and by-products into meat. Examples are garden waste and some types of garbage. (Garbage such as food and garden scraps should be cooked before being fed to hogs to help prevent the spread of disease.)
5. Very little labor is required.
6. It is possible to get by with a small investment for buildings and equipment.
7. Returns come quickly. A gilt (young female swine) may be bred at eight months, and the pigs are ready for slaughter six months after farrowing.
8. Hogs are an excellent source of home-processed meats. This is due to their ease of dressing and to the superior curing and keeping qualities of pork.

But then there are also drawbacks:

1. A hog’s diet must rely more heavily on concentrates, which are expensive, than on roughage, which is cheaper.
2. Production requires fairly careful management to achieve good results.
3. Swine are very susceptible to numerous diseases and parasites.

source: Miko Santos of sunstar.com.ph