They have created http://www.islandreefjob.com to entice visitors to apply for “the best job in the world”. Their best job involves earning a salary of 69k pounds for serving as the caretaker to an Australian island paradise for 6 months.

(Photo of island paradise courtesy of talented photographer Natu and licensed under Creative Commons attribution only. See more of Nattu’s photos in his Flickr photostream.)

Although, my dream job might be serving as a food taster for a gourmet Fort Worth restaurant or perhaps director of a Dallas exotic car sharing club, I can appreciate the draw of living rent free in a luxury home for six months in the paradise that is Hamilton Island and being required to maintain a pool with an automatic filter, feed the fish and turtles, pick up the mail, and participate in leisure activities such as snorkeling and scuba diving off of the island.

To get the job you do not need to have hospitality or caretaking experience, but a love of the outdoors and reasonable skill at water sports and snorkeling are helpful.

Fluency in English is recommended, by not required, as the person chosen will write a blog during their sojourn on Hamilton Island and field media inquiries, and produce a photo diary on the blog. Not too tough to qualify for that and even if your English is rusty, it’s nothing that a professional English tutor couldn’t help you overcome.

The hours are manageable also, with an expected 12 hour per month flexible work schedule. That makes the salary a little less than one thousand pounds an hour. The whole take from the job would pay the average Tampa mortgage for years.

Predictably the Australian tourism website pulling this stunt has garnered some hits from their target market of British vacation travels. The blogosphere is also ablaze with chatter about this strongly crafted tourism promotion.

During the first day the job opening was announced the site received several hundred thousand hits and a few hundred people applied before the site’s web hosting company’s servers crashed.

Anyway, if you don’t mind dropping your vehicle off at car storage and heading off to paradise, there is still time to apply for the Australian island caretaker position. Applying involves submitting a 60 second video outlining the reasons you deserve to be hired. Get it done before February 22 at http://www.islandreefjob.com.

Story written by professional SEO Web Copywriter Eric Anderson. Eric’s recent web copywriting projects include a Montana business sign company website and a Dallas car storage website.

The term is hypermiling.
 
A little research enlightened me to the fact that hypermiling is the practice of incorporating extreme automobile driving techniques in order to get more MPG out of the old family battle wagon.
 
These hypermiling techniques are not just gimmicky; they can be effective.  For example, putting your car in neutral and coasting downhill, drafting closely behind other cars on the highway, and gentle acceleration can all add up to a 30% improvement in fuel efficiency.  Since nowadays a 30% increase in fuel economy can prevent your having to get a second mortgage…hypermiling is hot!

Although this is all fine and good, I must admit that when I first saw the term “hypermiling” I instantly thought of breaking the sound barrier in a 2008 Lamborghini Gallardo.  Imagine my surprise when I found out the real meaning of the word.

 
Armed with this knowledge, I had to contact my friend Ron Sturgeon to get his thoughts. Sturgeon is the author of Green Weenies and Due Diligence, a book that catalogs the meanings of some of the more colorful phrases in use in America’s boardrooms.

“Hypermiling sounds like it should mean driving really fast,” said the author and owner of a DFW exotic car rental company.

Good, I’m not crazy.
 
This just demonstrated that people’s perception of the meaning of words depends in part on their backgrounds.  I’m sure that if you start talking about hypermiling at an Al Gore rally, the eco-conscious crowd will instantly chip in with their own tales of high-mpg driving in their Priuses.

Hang around with Sturgeon and his friends and mention hypermiling and you may get an earful about the latest V12 or the new 2008 Viper SRT-10 that just arrived at his Tarrant County exotic car club.  Sturgeon is also apt to start making suggestions for exotic car rentals in Dallas TX that he can set you up with to increase your hypermiling experience.
 
Whatever you think of hypermiling, just make sure you don’t show up to Gore’s Earth Day rally in Sturgeon’s Ferrari 360 Spider rental because the lack of fuel efficiency may not be “green” enough to earn you “cool” status and that would be bad.

 
Written by G.D. Gregory.  If you are interested in having me write stories for you or seeing my portfolio, please contact me at ggpsu@yahoo.com.