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Articles by Will Boyd
Financial Focus: How should you respond to tariffs?
The Trump Administration has announced tariffs on trade with other countries. While there has been a lot of uncertainty as to how these policies will evolve, it’s generally agreed that tariffs can be inflationary, and they have also sparked volatility in the financial markets. How should you respond to tariffs — as a consumer and an investor? As a consumer… Review your budget.
Financial Focus: Dividends: Five moves for young investors
If you’re just beginning your career, what are your financial priorities? You might have student loans to deal with. And you may even be thinking about saving for a down payment on a house. These are certainly significant issues, and yet, you shouldn’t ignore your long-term goals, such as retirement — which is why you may want to get started as an investor. And as you invest, consider these suggestions: Take advantage of your opportunities.
Financial Focus: Dividends: Reinvest or not?
As you may know, some businesses pass along part of their profits to investors in the form of dividends. If you own shares of these companies, either directly in stocks or more indirectly through mutual funds, you may have a choice: Should you take the dividends as cash or reinvest them into the stocks or funds? There’s no one correct answer for everyone. So, let’s look at some reasons for both choices — reinvesting or cashing out. Reinvesting dividends offers at least two related benefits.
Financial Focus: Inflation-fighting strategies for retirees
At different times, inflation may be high or low, but, except in those rare periods of deflation, it’s always with us. During your working years, when you may receive boosts in your salary, you at least have the potential to keep up with inflation — but what happens when you retire? As a retiree, what can you do to cope with the rising cost of living? Here are a few suggestions: Keep some growth potential in your investment portfolio.
Financial Focus: Are your heirs ready to receive an inheritance?
In the popular imagination, receiving an inheritance always sounds like a good thing — after all, who doesn’t want a financial windfall? And inheritances can certainly be life-altering events. But they can cause challenges, so you’ll want to help your heirs be prepared. To assist in this preparation, try to address some key questions affecting your heirs: Do they know what’s in your estate plans?
Financial Focus: Retirees must identify, manage income sources
During your working years, you know where your income is coming from because you’re working. But once you retire, you’ll have to identify your income sources, know how much you can expect from them and know how to manage them to help support a retirement that could last two or three decades. So, where will your retirement income come from? And what decisions will you need to make about these income sources?
Financial Focus: How should you respond to market cycles?
The movement of the financial markets can seem mysterious — and yet, if we look back over long periods, we can see definite patterns that consistently repeat themselves. As an investor, how should you respond to these market cycles? To begin with, it’s useful to know something about the nature of a market cycle and its connection to the business or economic cycle, which describes the fluctuations of the economy between periods of growth and contraction.
Financial Focus: Whom should you choose as a trustee?
When drawing up your estate plans, you might find it useful to create a revocable or irrevocable trust, either of which can help your estate avoid probate court and give you significant control over how and when your assets are distributed. But who should oversee your trust? As the person who established the trust — known as the “grantor” or “settlor” — you can also name yourself as trustee. However, this may not be the best move, particularly if the trust is irrevocable.
Financial Focus: Financial tips for widows and widowers
Losing a spouse is one of the most painful experiences anyone can have. Unfortunately, widows and widowers have to deal with more than just the emotional trauma — they also must consider a range of financial issues. If you’ve recently been widowed, what financial moves should you consider? For starters, don’t rush into any major decisions. If you’re still in the grieving process, you are unlikely to be in the best shape to make significant choices affecting your finances and your life.
Financial Focus: Financial freedom: A gift to your family
Here’s a sobering statistic: 72% of retirees say one of their biggest fears is becoming a burden on their families, according to a study by Edward Jones and the consulting firm Age Wave. If you are near retirement, how can you prepare yourself to become financially free, so you won’t have to depend on grown children or other family members? Here are a few suggestions to consider: Keep adding to retirement savings.
Financial Focus: When should you take Social Security?
One of your important sources of retirement income will likely be Social Security — but when should you start taking it? You can start collecting Social Security benefits at 62, but your checks will be considerably bigger if you wait until your full retirement age, which is likely between 66 and 67. You could even wait until you’re 70, at which point the payments will max out, except for yearly cost-of-living adjustments.
Financial Focus: How will higher rates affect you?
As you know, interest rates have risen considerably over the past couple of years. But what does this mean to you, as a consumer and as an investor? From a consumer’s standpoint, it’s not hard to see the effects of higher interest rates. If you want to take out a mortgage or refinance an existing one, you’ll find that it’s considerably more costly, in terms of the interest you’ll pay, than it was a few years ago. And the same is true of car loans and credit cards.
Financial Focus: How would you handle forced early retirement?
When you plan to retire at a certain age, you can follow a strategy that incorporates your investment moves, your health insurance and other factors. But what happens if you’re forced to retire earlier than you anticipated? Unfortunately, this situation is not that uncommon. About 40 percent of Americans say they have been forced into retirement, according to a recent survey from Edward Jones and Morning Consult, a research firm.
8 CSS & JavaScript Snippets for Creating Beautiful Bokeh Effects
Bokeh has long been a celebrated photographic style. In simplistic terms, it features a primary focus on a subject and a gently blurred background. The technique is both beautiful and a sure way to grab a user’s attention. But what if you want to implement a Bokeh aesthetic without photography? There are some unique methods for doing so. Web designers are using CSS and JavaScript to create all manner of Bokeh-inspired effects. You’ll find the familiar blurry lens flare from photos.
Republican Katie Britt wins US Senate race in Alabama
By KIM CHANDLER Associated Press MONTGOMERY, Ala (AP) – Republican Katie Britt has become the first woman elected to the U.S Senate from Alabama as she captured the seat held by retiring GOP Sen. Richard Shelby. Britt faced Democratic nominee Will Boyd, a pastor, and Libertarian John Sophocleus, an economics instructor, in Tuesday’s race for the rare open Senate seat in Alabama. Shelby, 88. is retiring after serving six terms in the U.S. Senate.
Britt, Brooks headed for June 21 runoff
By WVUA 23 Digital Reporter Kyle Hamrick At this time, WVUA 23 projects Katie Britt and Mo Brooks will enter a runoff for the United States Senate Republican ticket on June 21. On the Democratic ticket, pastor and local politician Will Boyd trounced Brandaun Dean and Lanny Jackson with 64% of the vote. The seat up for grabs in the United States Senate belonged to longtime U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby. Shelby began his career in the United States Senate six terms ago in 1986.
Opinion | The Alabama media is ignoring Democratic candidates
Believe it or not, there are Democrats running for statewide offices in Alabama. Democrats are running for governor and U.S. Senate, as well as congressional seats and other down ballot offices. But you would not know that based on much of the media coverage. Let’s take the front page of a recent edition of The Huntsville Times as an example. It featured a package of stories about the top three Republican candidates for U.S. Senate.
Guest opinion: Democrats are running for office this year despite lack of media coverage
This is a guest opinion column Believe it or not, there are Democrats running for statewide offices in Alabama. Democrats are running for governor and U.S. Senate, as well as congressional seats and other down ballot offices. But you would not know that based on much of the media coverage. Let’s take the front page of a recent edition of The Huntsville Times as an example. It featured a package of stories about the top three Republican candidates for U.S. Senate.
Two Special Seasons of Flyers' Basketball Celebrated
Posted: Jun 07, 2021 Dr. John Dempsey described the 2019-20 and 2020-21 Sandhills Community College basketball teams as "the most remarkable I've been around in my life." The president of the college, players, coaches, family members and other supporters of the basketball program recently assembled at Forest Creek Golf Club in Pinehurst to celebrate the accomplishments of the two teams.
Flyers Entertain Titans to Tip-off a New Season in a New Conference
Posted: Jan 25, 2021 The Sandhills Community College basketball team begins the long-delayed start of the 2020-21 season tonight with a 7 pm tip-off at The Hangar against Guilford Tech. Due to COVID-19 protocols, spectators will not be allowed, but the game will be live streamed. As a result of a ruling by the NJCAA to not hold Division III national championships this season in basketball or volleyball, the Sandhills teams in those sports have accepted the option of moving up to Division II.
5 Tools to Check Your Sending Reputation
Updated September 2020. We always stress the importance of a strong sending reputation. Your sending reputation, or how mailbox providers judge your mail, is driven by how your subscribers are reacting to your messages. If the messages you send generate a lot of spam complaints, your sending reputation will worsen and future messages will be harder to get to the inbox.
Using CSS to Control Text Selection
CSS lets you control how text selection behaves and appears on your pages. This can help you improve usability in certain situations and add a little bit of visual flair. Let’s dive in! Select All Sometimes it’s nice to have all the text in an element automatically selected when you click on it. This is particularly handy for text that is copied/pasted in full (code snippets, one-time passwords, promotional codes, etc.). You can accomplish this with some simple CSS.
Twilio SendGrid Joins Authindicators Working Group
The Email Renaissance The email inbox has been undergoing a renaissance for the better part of a decade. At first the changes were small and a matter of necessity. Then iOS and Android came along which meant that the inbox was no longer just on our laptops but in everyone’s pocket. Email had to adapt to new platforms, formats, and ways of being used and consumed. Last year, Google announced the general availability of AMP for Email.
WUOT JAZZ by The University of Tennessee, Knoxville on Apple Podcasts
1 Wynton Marsalis Todd Steed interviews the jazz legend about touring with a big band, Donald Brown, Ted Nash, and his upcoming trip to Knoxville. 7/19/2014 Free View in iTunes 2 Will Boyd and Kelle Jolly Hear all about the Japanese Jazz Wedding and so much more from two of K-town's finest. 9/19/2013 Free View in iTunes 3 Wadada Leo Smith Jazz legend discusses his Big Ears Festival prep and his new recording with Vijay Iyer.
Orange, Wanadoo, and Freeserve Email Address Closures
Since you are reading this, it’s likely you already know that email addresses at certain Orange, Wanadoo, and Freeserve domains will soon be no more and you simply want to know what you as a sender should do about it. I will certainly touch on how senders should address this change below. But first, in case you aren’t clear on what’s happening, I’ll quickly recap the issue.
Beautiful Poetry Brought to You By Spam Email
Note: We want to share a recent poem written by SendGrid Deliverability Consultant, Will Boyd. The original version of this poem first appeared in the Literary Journal, Suspect Press, Issue 15 and was created with subject lines from real spam emails. As much as possible the lines have not been altered in any way.
Body found at the side of the M25 as traffic queues for four miles
A body has been found on the side of the M25 clockwise near Reigate. It temporarily brought traffic to a standstill while emergency response teams descended on the area. One lane remains closed between junction 8 A217 Brighton Road for Reigate and junction 9 A243 for Leatherhead. Congestion leads to almost halfway back to J7 M23 Interchange.
Send Your Best with SendGrid's New Services and Tools
Bring your email program to peak fitness with help from our email experts and diagnostic tools When it comes to your own health and wellness, you know there’s a difference between feeling pretty good and performing at your best. Sometimes you feel okay, and function fine in work and life—but you knew you weren’t in the best shape you could be, and you might not be ready for an intense workout or a challenging hike.
Ridding Email Phish at Massive Scale
How Twilio SendGrid Ensures 99.97% of 50B Monthly Emails are Phish-Free Twilio SendGrid processes over 50 billion emails every month, meaning we touch over half of the world’s unique email users on a rolling 90-day basis. With such massive scale and reach, it’s imperative that we protect recipients’ guarded information and credentials from dangerous phish. A platform’s security and ongoing battle against bad actors only becomes an issue when defenses fail.
Coming Soon: SendGrid Supported AMP for Email!
Email is arguably the workhorse of all digital communication channels. However, as grandiose as email’s scale and reach has become, the experience in the inbox has been mostly static. The graphics and rendering of content have flourished and taken on the modality and style of today’s slimmed down simple design.
Election Results
U.S. House District 2 U.S. House District 3 Governor Lieutenant Governor Secretary of State Attorney General Treasurer Agriculture Commissioner Auditor State Senate District 27 State Senate District 28 State House District 38 State House District 79 State House District 82 Public Service Comm Place 1 Public Service Comm Place 2 Constitutional Amendment Ratify Constitution of 2022 State Amendment 1 - Denial of Bail State Amendment 2 - Fund Broadband State Amendment 3 - Notify Commuted...
Meaningful Change: SendGrid's Donation to Pioneers in Skirts
On average we spend 1/3rd of our day, as adults, at a job—the places we work constitute a substantial part of our life, thus helping ensure that the workplace is a safe and equitable environment. This is part of why SendGrid focuses so heavily on our culture and enabling each of our Gridders to do their very best work. We can all agree that our world is far from perfect.
Automate Routine Tasks With SendGrid’s New Command Line Interface
Often developers and IT organizations have routine tasks that can be encapsulated into a tool. There are likely many SendGrid customers who have written scripts to manage these kinds of tasks. For example, I was recently developing some internal tools, and making contributions during Hacktoberfest. I found myself repeatedly enabling and disabling webhooks for inbound parse, creating API keys, and uploading contacts. As a developer, context switching to make these changes in the UI slowed me down.
Creating Transparency With an Inbox Protection Rate
As the Internet evolved and email became increasingly more important to the day-to-day operations of businesses, universities, and a staple of ecommerce, bad actors realized they could exploit email’s ability to reach a global audience due to a dire lack of security and trust mechanisms. Because of this, email presents a significant area of concern for security professionals around the world.
Giving Back at SendGrid: What We’ve Done and Where We’re Going
Happy #GivingTuesday! Giving Tuesday is celebrated every year on the first Tuesday following Thanksgiving, and encourages people and organizations to give back to the community. The day also marks the 4th anniversary of Pledge 1%–a movement SendGrid joined just prior to our IPO in November 2017. This movement was created with the idea that all companies, no matter their size or stage, can make a social impact by donating 1% of their assets including equity, profit, people’s time and/or product.
Thanks To You - Hacktoberfest 2018 Recap
Hacktoberfest has come to an end. As one contributor put it, “[i]t was a great opportunity to give back to the software I use and depend on.” Thank you to all contributors for choosing to work on SendGrid’s open source projects. Global T-Shirt Cannon via GIPHY We are always astonished by the enthusiasm of the open source community around the world. Especially, when T-shirts are on the line.
Introducing Catalyst - Career Tips for the Modern Marketer
The majority of career advice comes from the top—the executives that have been there and done that. But what happens when “there” isn’t quite the same place and “that” didn’t exist 20 years ago? That’s why we’re thrilled to introduce our new series, Catalyst, where we’ll explore the stories of ambitious young professionals engaging in digital marketing across the globe.
Hacktoberfest 2018: The Hackening is Upon Us
Thanks to our amazing developer community, Digital Ocean, GitHub and Twilio, we are in the midst of another extraordinary Hacktoberfest! We hope you will join us in the fun (there are available issues for all levels of skill, with new issues added daily), we have some art museum quality swag once again for you, thanks to our all-star graphic designer Virginia Van Keuren. So far we have received 524 PRs with 540 story points donated from Hacktoberfest participants from all around the world.
Introducing SendGood: Sending Email to Make a Difference
It all started with a simple idea, or rather, a series of questions. How do we get our brand in front of new, potential customers? Usually, the answer is “advertising.” But what if there was another way? What if, instead of using our marketing budget to buy more advertising, we used it for something better? What if we used it to spread some good throughout the world? It was a simple concept. Do something GOOD and people will help spread the word about you and your company.
Hacktoberfest 2018 Has Arrived!
Did you know the next 31 days at SendGrid DX are dedicated to Open Source? Well, today marks the beginning of Hacktoberfest–the 5th annual virtual hackathon oriented towards Open Source software. SendGrid is happy to participate in this event, and we love to both give back and get help with our OSS projects.
Hacktoberfest 2018: Hack on SendGrid Open Source Projects
Open Source Software (OSS) is one of the most critical drivers of software today, and virtually all of the software we all use today contains some element of OSS. But, this work doesn’t just magically appear–real people contribute hours and hours of their lives to move a project forward, fix bugs, and improve documentation with the result of software getting better and better.
Floaty Bubbles
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Hex Bokeh
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Combating Unconscious Bias While Interviewing
Note: Special thanks to Sue Pomeroy and Ealga ni Aodha for their help and insight in drafting this post. Learn more about SendGrid’s diversity and inclusion progress. The first time I interviewed a candidate at SendGrid was for a software engineer more than four and a half years ago. Since then, I have interviewed a few candidates a year for various engineering and non-engineering positions.
Here’s What You Missed at Collision Conference 2018
That’s a wrap on Collision Conference, “America’s fastest growing tech conference,” which came to an epic conclusion on May 3rd after four days of impressive displays of innovation. Taking place in the vibrant city of New Orleans, this annual event brings together Fortune 500 companies, groundbreaking startups, and world-class speakers from all over the world to explore the latest innovations in technology.
The GDPR is Coming: How To Prepare
Note: This is for general informational purposes only and is not intended to constitute legal analysis or legal advice. You should contact a lawyer to find out more about your particular obligations under the GDPR. If you are part of an organization that does business with European Union citizens, then you may have heard of the upcoming changes involving the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Hacktoberfest 2017 Was Amazing
We went into Hacktoberfest this year with our eyes open, hoping that we would hand out 75 shirts to contributors who helped us close out some of our API library and docs issues. Last year, we had 43 contributors and were super excited to have the insights, expertise, and contributions from these amazing people. DigitalOcean and GitHub both doubled their numbers from last year.
Pinball Physics
You can apply CSS to your Pen from any stylesheet on the web. Just put a URL to it here and we'll apply it, in the order you have them, before the CSS in the Pen itself. If the stylesheet you link to has the file extension of a preprocessor, we'll attempt to process it before applying. You can also link to another Pen here, and we'll pull the CSS from that Pen and include it.
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): What Senders Need To Know
Note: This is for general informational purposes only and is not intended to constitute legal analysis or legal advice. You should contact a lawyer to find out more about your particular obligations under the GDPR. Changes to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) were announced in May 2016 and, if you are an email marketer in the UK, this is pertinent to your email program. The new GDPR aims to harmonize the current patchy rules around privacy laws across all EU member states.
Announcing Hacktoberfest 2017
SendGrid is proud to announce that we are participating in Hacktoberfest 2017. We love our open source community and want to say thanks and provide some interesting challenges—and of course—some awesome swag for people who contribute to our open source repositories this October.
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