Month: August 2009

Since its premiere on PBS KIDS in 1983, READING RAINBOW has helped children build lasting relationships with books at home and in the classroom. As broadcast rights are set to expire, PBS will no longer feed READING RAINBOW after August 28, 2009, and all broadcast rights will discontinue after that date. Production ended on READING RAINBOW several years ago and viewership for the show has declined dramatically. Nationally-recognized stories authored by children will be available online between August and December 2009, at which point the READING RAINBOW Web site on pbskids.org will end. The Reading Rainbow Young Writers and Illustrators Contest was just completed with 96 stations participating in local judging and recognition ceremonies. Still available for the classroom, off-air educational rights remain in effect for a year following the last broadcast of each episode. PBS and member station WNED, producer of READING RAINBOW, are discussing plans to continue the contest on a

Call the school to report absences…

was consulting last weekend for a lady in Ohio who was interested in getting a website, but wasn’t sure what she REALLY needed. You see, she had been bombarded with emails, and quotes from various web designers and firms. She was getting offered packages ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars that seemed to really have nothing to do with her actual needs. She was getting overwhelmed and wanted to hear from someone in the industry what the right course of action. Now you might ask, Mike aren’t you a web designer? Why didn’t you offer her your services? To be honest, the greedy part of me thought about it for about ten seconds until I really took a look at my schedule. I could have taken the job and really done her a lot more harm than good by delaying the project while I worked on my other priorities. So I opted to be the voice of reason for someone who knows very little about the services being offered to her. I listened as she read me the quotes, emails,

In its most direct assault on Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) yet, Google on Tuesday evening announced the forthcoming release of the Google Chrome Operating System, a new open source operating system designed primarily for netbooks but also for desktop computers. Chrome OS is Google (NSDQ: GOOG)'s second operating system, after Android, the mobile device operating system that the company introduced in late 2008. That's also about the time when Google introduced its Chrome Web browser. Chrome OS is an extension of Google's browser code.

WELLINGTON (Reuters) – A New Zealand man has been dubbed the Lord of the Ring after he searched and found his wedding ring more than a year after it slipped off his finger and sank to the sea floor. The ring was lost for 16 months in the harbor of the country's capital city, Wellington, before Aleki Taumoepeau found it shining on the sea floor, the DominionPost newspaper reported Thursday. "The whole top surface of the ring was glowing," Taumoepeau, an ecologist, said. Taumoepeau had been married for just three months when he lost the wedding ring while conducting an environmental sweep of the harbor. He roughly marked the spot where the ring had flown from his finger, but was unable to find it despite returning to the area many times. Taumoepeau's wife offered to buy another ring, but he refused, pledging to find the ring. But, equipped with new global satellite based coordinates and offering up a quick prayer, he found the ring after an hour's search.

Making an online gallery of pictures should be a quick process. The gap between snapping some pictures and publishing them on the web ought to be a short one. Here’s a quick and easy way of making a one-page gallery that uses JavaScript to load images and their captions on the fly.

The Ten Golden Rules Internet Marketing Podcast is Sponsored by GoToMeeting, click here for a FREE 45 Day Trial. Use the code GOLDEN. Ten Golden Rules is an internet marketing consultant based in Boca Raton, Florida. We specialize in internet marketing strategy, online advertising, web marketing and conversion. We will help you get more traffic to your website, and we will show you how to convert that traffic into qualified leads or sales. Our public speaking includes the highly regarded presentation The Ten Golden Rules of Internet Marketing. This presentation has been shared with thousands of internet marketers at events such as: The American Marketing Association, The Direct Marketing Association, The Small Business Development Center, The PrintImage 2005 Annual Conference, Internet Marketing For Profit, Y2 Marketing, The Advertising Federation, The Marketing Executive’s Networking Group (MENG), The Small Business Development Center, The Gold Coast PR Association, InterMedia,

The Marketing Spot is a small business marketing firm in Waco, Texas. My name is Jay Ehret and I coach, teach, consult with locally owned businesses. I also conduct workshops and seminars to empower small businesses to market more effectively. For free marketing ideas, check out my blog: The Marketing Spot Forget pre-packaged marketing plans. My system is based on the four essential spots of small business marketing. I work with you to build this Marketing Circle of Life into a customized marketing plan for your business.

Did you know that LIFE is a dream and a vision, to be explained by STORIES? Our lives have three stages – past, present and future. The past and the future are dreams that exist in our minds in the form of events(stories) that took place and events(stories) that will take place, respectively. The present is the vision stage. We see things live and record, and recall them for future references in the form of stories. The only way we can paint our lives in vivid colors is through stories. Thus STORIES are full of human vicissitudes, and therefore deservedly appealed to us. Our Mission We have one short-term-goal, one mid-term plan and one lifelong mission: MAXIMIZE HUMAN CAPABILITIES through nature-made stories and poems, before we maximize profits for our owners. and The Purpose We Exist Our founder and one of the world’s best story tellers, we believe so, Abdinasir Haji-Bare (he also goes by Nasir, Abdi, The Story Teller, and Non-Governmental Artist –

There was a time, in the 1990s, when the only place to buy a domain name was at Network Solutions. That storied company has since had its up and downs, but no one disputes the pioneering nature of its products. Recently, Network Solutions redesigned and repositioned its website and its product offerings. This includes its newly-named shopping cart, CommerceSpace. Julia Dalton is senior product manager – ecommerce services, with Network Solutions, and she joins Practical eCommerce's Kerry Murdock.

Constructing a privacy policy is a simple process. Simply fill out the questions below and submit it to us – we'll send you a Web page to post to your site.

Test your Web site to see if it’s ready for mobile customers! Select Skin: There are more mobile phones in the world than televisions and PCs combined. And millions of people are using those mobile phones to connect to the Internet. To see your site the same way these millions of mobile users do, try the dotMobi mobile phone emulator, which "emulates" a real mobile phone Web browser.

I'll come right out and say it: Star Wars has a badly-designed universe; so poorly-designed, in fact, that one can say that a significant goal of all those Star Wars novels is to rationalize and mitigate the bad design choices of the movies. Need examples? Here's ten. R2-D2 Sure, he's cute, but the flaws in his design are obvious the first time he approaches anything but the shallowest of stairs. Also: He has jets, a periscope, a taser and oil canisters to make enforcer droids fall about in slapsticky fashion — and no voice synthesizer. Imagine that design conversation: "Yes, we can afford slapstick oil and tasers, but we'll never get a 30-cent voice chip past accounting. That's just madness." C-3PO Can't fully extend his arms; has a bunch of exposed wiring in his abs; walks and runs as if he has the droid equivalent of arthritis. And you say, well, he was put together by an eight-year-old.

Full List Sites to Visit 1. Flickr 2. California Coastline 3. Delicious 4. Metafilter 5. popurls 6. Twitter 7. Skype 8. Boing Boing 9. Academic Earth 10. OpenTable 11. Google 12. YouTube 13. Wolfram|Alpha 14. Hulu 15. Vimeo 16. Fora TV 17. Craiglook 18. Shop Goodwill 19. Amazon 20. Kayak 21. Netflix 22. Etsy 23. Property Shark 24. Redfin 25. Wikipedia 26. Internet Archive 27. Kiva 28. ConsumerSearch 29. Metacritic 30. Pollster 31. Facebook 32. Pandora and Last.fm 33. Musicovery 34. Spotify 35. Supercook 36. Yelp 37. Visuwords 38. CouchSurfing 39. NameVoyager 40. Mint 41. TripIt 42. Aardvark 43. drop.io 44. Issuu 45. Photosynth 46. OMGPOP 47. WorldWideTelescope 48. Fonolo 49. Get High Now 50. Know Your Meme

In May 2008 I decided to improve my MP3 collection, by properly tagging all the files (including composer data), adding album cover art, fixing VBR headers, re-ripping albums that have poor sound quality, and more. I tried several programs, but I wasn't happy with how they worked. None of them did all the things that I wanted, and some corrupted the files. Worse, none allowed me to "look inside" an MP3 file, so the best way to see what was wrong with a file was to open it with a hex editor and try to see how some specifications mapped to the various pieces of the file. After a while I decided to give up on the tools I was experimenting with and write my own. The result is MP3 Diags. There are many programs that create and edit MP3 files, and many of them are broken. As a result, many MP3 files have various issues, ranging from values that are not standards-conforming but that are tolerated by all players and tools (so they look perfectly fine to the end user)

This Ukrainian Star Wars themed wedding cost a small fortune. I don’t know how Jar Jar got invited but somehow he managed.

Over the past century, violent images from World War II concentration camps, Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, Iraq, and many other times and places have been seared into our collective consciousness. These images have led to a common belief that technology, centralized nation-states, and modern values have brought about unprecedented violence. Our seemingly troubled times are routinely contrasted with idyllic images of hunter-gatherer societies, which allegedly lived in a state of harmony with nature and each other. The doctrine of the noble savage—the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions—pops up frequently in the writing of public intellectuals like, for example, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, who argued that "war is not an instinct but an invention." But now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward:

We don't magically know how to do everything in every program. When we help you, we're usually just doing this:

SoTel Systems, LLC is the premier wholesale supplier for business communications products and services. We offer traditional refurbished and unused voice and data equipment, authorized distribution of VOIP equipment, and commercial SIP Services for both inbound and outbound traffic. With nearly 30 years of experience in the telecommunications industry we provide your company with quality products, valuable expertise, and lightning fast delivery.

JEDI MIND INC (Public, PINK:JEDM)

The idea for this film was first conceived by James Cameron 14 years ago, when the means to realize his vision did not yet exist. Now, after four years of actual production work, the Avatar Teaser Trailer has been released. Avatar takes us to a spectacular new world beyond our imagination, where a reluctant hero embarks on a journey of redemption and discovery, as he leads a heroic battle to save a civilization.

When we filmed Stand By Me, none of us knew it was going to be the huge success that it became. None of us expected it to be part of that 50s revival that was so much fun in the mid-80s, and none of us knew that it would essentially launch all of our acting careers. But I think that, if you asked any of us – actors or crew – who worked on the film, we'd all say that we knew we were working on something special, something that was definitely not going to suck, something that we could be proud of. The fact that audiences agreed with us was pretty awesome. I don't know about the other guys, but I was totally unprepared for Stand By Me's success and the way it shoved a lot of us into the center of the spotlight. Maybe Corey knew what to expect, because he'd already been in a ton of popular movies (we all saw Goonies together while we were on location in Oregon) but I certainly didn't know what to do when I came home from a family vacation and saw several boxes on my porch, filled with fa

With nsMarketing™, together we can develop marketing programs that are right for your specific business situation and budget. We focus on generating leads and opportunities for your business. Whether that means helping you get quick results today, building long term marketing strategies or helping you keep existing customers engaged, we can help.

Find domain names, web hosting and online marketing for your website — all in one place. Network Solutions helps businesses get online and grow online with domain name registration, web hosting and innovative online marketing services.

At the core of good science and engineering is the careful and respectful treatment of data. We calibrate our instruments, scrutinize the algorithms we use to process the data, and study the behavior of the models we use to interpret the data or simulate the phenomena we may be observing. Surprisingly, this careful treatment of data often breaks down when we visualize our data. Using examples from a wide range of application areas in science and engineering, we will demonstrate how standard uses of color can distort the meaning of the underlying data, and can lead the analyst to incorrect evaluations, conclusions or decisions. We will also establish demonstrate principles we have discovered which can help people avoid these artifacts and build more effective representations of their data. These principles explicitly consider characteristics of the data, how the data are to be used, and how the human visual system processes color information.

New this week, I'm going to start publishing a top 10 playlist every Monday. Inspired by the movie Knowing (starring Nicolas Cage) that I rented this last weekend, I decided to focus the list on songs about the end of the world. I hope I'm not giving away something about the ending. Anyhow,… Music about an impending apocalypse is not new, as one entry on this list, Eve of Destruction was originally written in 1965. And there are certainly older themes from every genre. There are psalms and hymnals, classical pieces, even the best recognized ragtime jazz of Louis Armstrong's When the Saints Go Marching In is talking about where Louis wants to be on the day of judgment. It's a much older tune than Mr. Armstrong and some of the lyrics are rather dire. Don't believe me? And when the moon turns red with blood And when the moon turns red with blood Lord, how I want to be in that number When the moon turns red with blood Someone go wake up Ozzy Osbourne an

Website security is essential to conducting business online – and it's foremost in the minds of your customers. Whether your site receives personal information, log-in credentials or payment information, SSL Certificates protect data and help you earn your customers' trust.

What is .tel? Publish, store, update and manage ALL of your contact information, instantly and in one place. .Tel is a brand new domain name that allows businesses and individuals to manage important contact information directly on the Internet. The convenient page layout lets you control how your information is displayed and who sees it. Plus, your listing is included in the Telpage global directory where customers can search by name or keywords to find you. Get connected to your customers and friends with just one click. Why register a .tel? * Create your permanent online business card * Expand your communication methods and reach your customers * Your customers can find you from any device connected to the Internet in just one click * Compliment your current Website with one complete contact page * Get listed in a new global online directory * Easy site updates that take effect quickly

Internet denizens and urban dwellers alike need to recognize that an era of anonymity is ending. The population of the world stands at about 7 billion. So it takes only 10 digits to label each human being on the planet uniquely. This simple arithmetic observation offers powerful insight into the limits of privacy. It dictates something we might call the 10-Digit Rule: just 10 digits or so of distinctive personal information are enough to identify you uniquely. They're enough to strip away your anonymity on the Internet or call out your name as you walk down the street. The 10-Digit Rule means that as our electronic gadgets grow chattier, and databases swell, we must accept that in most walks of life, we'll soon be wearing our names on our foreheads. A study of 1990 U.S. Census data revealed that 87 percent of the people in the United States were uniquely identifiable with just three pieces of information (PDF): five-digit ZIP code, gender, and date of birth.

One of the quickest ways to make money with blogging is to join a blog network, like b5media.com. There are other blogging networks that pay bloggers too, and if you’re interested, check out this List of Sources of Blogging Jobs. Of course, different blog networks offer payment in various ways. Some offer flat fees, some offer revenue share, some have a mix of both… Obviously, those that offer some kind of flat fee or “minimum fee guarantee” will ensure that your efforts are paid off more securely and quickly. But, if you want to ‘go at it alone’, then here’s a suggested month-by-month work schedule (of course, you might choose to approach this differently, depending on your working style, availability, resources, personal tastes, etc). This is basically just a guideline to show you what a new blogger can do to get started with making money online through blogging.

Are you a web designer who wishes you could do more in one handy spot instead of having multiple programs open? Well, thanks to the enormous Firefox add-on development community, your web browser can do almost everything for you. We already covered Firefox add-ons for developers, but we couldn’t leave out the people that sit there and actually design what the developers have to build. These 19 add-ons will allow you to choose colors, measure dimensions, save screenshots and a whole lot more. Be warned that you should be selective in what add-ons you add to your browser due to the fact that the more you add, the slower it goes, but can you really resist very many of these?

Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, which was released 50 years ago today, is a nearly unique thing in music or any other creative realm: a huge hit—the best-selling jazz album of all time—and the spearhead of an artistic revolution. Everyone, even people who say they don't like jazz, likes Kind of Blue. It's cool, romantic, melancholic, and gorgeously melodic. But why do critics regard it as one of the best jazz albums ever made? What is it about Kind of Blue that makes it not just pleasant but important? On March 2, 1959, when its first tracks were laid down at Columbia Records' 30th Street Studio (the album would be released on Aug. 17), Charlie Parker, the exemplar of modern jazz, the greatest alto saxophonist ever, had been dead for four years, almost to the day. The jazz world was still waiting, longing, for "the next Charlie Parker" and wondering where he'd take the music.

LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. Our goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books.

In 1998 I worked behind a counter at a popular restaurant where take out was busy in the evenings. Now in those days the process was: Fax machine * Call the restaurant and ask for a menu to be faxed to you * I would run to the back of the restaurant and fax the menu * The customer studies the menu and calls us back with the order. and then the fax machine broke. I wish I could say all hell broke loose, but small businesses have an exceptional way of coping with challenges and moving quickly, so we just called our sister restaurant and faxed our menu to them and had them fax the customers. Of course this was a temporary fix. At this time I was also getting more and more interested in the online stuff. I used AOL, I had just bought my first PC and was figuring out html. We brainstormed and bought a domain name from Network Soutions of course and then with the help of a geek friend put up a website. (Now preserved in the Internet Archive.) Now as people called for directi

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International Space Station comes together