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Archive for July, 2010

Many of you probably had experiences with movies like mine when you were growing up. Your parents (if you were lucky enough to have at least one) would use the TV or Movies to keep you occupied (out of their hair). My Dad would give me two dollars every day for entertainment so I spent it mostly on movies. Yes, every day, and keep in mind that this was the early fifty’s when most theaters were 25 cents and the most expensive theater in town was seventy five cents. The same money would be around twenty five dollars today.

At the time most movie houses were showing double features and some had three features with two cartoons and a serial. And because of my love for movies I saw every one of them at least twice and some many times. This went on for years and of course couldn’t have been good for me. However it gave me a focused education in films and stories and perhaps a little confusion about real life.

People in movies don’t have to follow through with work and school and oh yeah, the big one, Love. The music plays and they simply are already a brave policeman or cowboy or engineer or even president. The heros in movies seem to do little or no work to be anything they want. I Expected no less for myself than rocket speed to sucess.

Somehow in my little kid brain I replaced my parents love and parts of real life with western movies and their stars. You can imagine why nice family type movies and westerns were so appealing to me with no brothers and sisters and living with my grandmother. In later years it was shocking to discover my movie heroes didn’t give a crap what I felt or know me from Adam. “Gosh Mr. Rogers, don’t you remember me? I was the kid in the fifth row back?”

“Sorry, I don’t give autographs” he said. “Huh?” I said as he walked away. Now I was a young adult when this true event happened, but still I stood there sort of in a daze until my wife came looking for me. She said, “What’s wrong with you?”

“Roy Rogers just gave me the buzz off,” I said. “He must have known it was me that threw rocks at the screen.”

“Oh, don’t be silly” she said. “He wouldn’t give me an autograph” I said. “Oh is that all, so what?” she said. “Why would that bother you so much?” she said. “I don’t know, it just does that’s all” I said. There was this little pause and she said, “For your information they live like three blocks away from us. You mean you didn’t know!” she said.

“No, I don’t keep track of where people live,” I said. “I see Dale Evans every week at the store or post office. She’s very nice” she said. “Oh great, my childhood hero lives close enough to hear trigger fart and I can’t even get an autograph?” “It’s almost like not being able to talk to your uncle or something because he’s too darn famous.”

“Listen honey,” she said, “Trigger can’t fart anymore and besides you’re taking this way too seriously.” “Yea,” I said. “So what can we do to find out why it affects me so much?” “You saw too many of those westerns I think. Didn’t you do anything else?” She said. “Sure, lots of things,” I said. “But the movies made the stuff I did more dangerous.”

She said “Now that I think about it most of the jobs you do are related in some way to movies and now you’re a screenwriter.” she said. “You seem to be obsessed with not only stars but also in the locations where they were filmed, like Lone Pine for example. We found every rock that Randolph Scott used in his westerns.”

“It feels like I’m looking for my long lost family.” I said. “She said “Remember the actress last year that was kidding you about one of your scripts? She knew you were only kidding and laughed with you about it. Why didn’t she affect you the way Roy did?” “It’s probably because she’s a new star of today’s movies,” I said, “And I didn’t grow up watching her.” “Remember what Jack Palance said to you about movies? He said you were full of crap about them that they were only movies.” “Yeah,” I said, “he said he only made films for the money and could care less and “You should do the same.”.

“OK,” she said, “I have an idea. Why don’t you write about it? You write about everything else so maybe other people have the same problem or worse they let it happen to their kids.” “That’s right,” I said, “it is happening to kids today isn’t it, only in a little different way with music lyrics and the general bad behavior of actors.”

“Yes,” she said, “only its worse now and these kids won’t get over it maybe ever.” “OK, that’s what I’ll do is give my opinion about how movies can be improved and still make the studio money.” “So you’re going to tell them to remove the violence and sex and make lame one hundred and twenty minutes of nothing? I can hear the laughing already.”

“No, of course you need these elements of real life in any story. You must have a good story and a reason for things to happen. Some movies today start out dark and evil and progress to dark and evil and end with dark and evil and that’s no way to tell a story. For a film to be successful the audience must tell friends about it. One big problem is the high cost that scares investors into making something safe.

What they need to make movies safer for investors is a new kind of testing. Why make a film unless you KNOW people will like. I can’t believe investors take such big chances with all that money. It’s possible to make good honest pictures that people will love and still make money for the studio.” “You know that not one person in Hollywood is going to pay attention to you don’t you?” she said.

“I know, but it doesn’t matter about that because Hollywood’s days are numbered anyway. They are so mixed up they can’t even make an original movie or endorse an original screenplay. Can you see them making Rocky 15?

Good actors have little to work with in Hollywood and that’s a shame. That’s why indie films are getting bigger and better every day and sooner or latter with the combination of pissed actors and increased technology a new generation of indie films will put Hollywood to shame.”

The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

–Albert Einstein

I have always been fascinated with the past. As a youngster, the older a story, myth, or legend was, the better I liked it. By quite a young age, David, Icarus, and Ulysses seemed quite real to me.

That interest soon led me into reading histories as well. The battle of Thermopylae (where in 480 BC the Spartan-led Greeks heroically held a narrow mountain pass to block the passage of the Persian army under Xerxes until betrayed by a traitor) seemed as immediate to me as D-Day (the Allied invasion of Normandy in France to establish a Western front against Germany during World War II) did to people who were alive in 1944.

By the time I had finished the sixth grade, I had read all of the standard history texts used through the end of high school. Branching out, I also began to read biographies and autobiographies to meet other prominent figures from the past and bring them into my present for consideration.

By the time I finished high school, I knew that I wanted to study history in college. That was a happy choice because Harvard University, where I would be an undergraduate, was unusually well stocked with great historians.

Quickly, my tutors there taught me to disregard secondary texts and to focus on original documents written by contemporaries who had participated in or observed the events. Old newspapers, diaries, pamphlets, and written versions of oral histories became my stalking grounds.

From this experience with the raw material of history, I began to form a different impression of how improvements occur than what had been described to me by books and teachers. I had been told that with rare exceptions, making progress was continual and ever upward. In this view, new knowledge was highly sought after by most and quickly appreciated.

By studying day-to-day records of those who first imagined improvements, I found instead that many of the great advances in knowledge were widely ignored or long delayed in implementation. For example, Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks contained many practical ideas that lay fallow for centuries before the ideas became everyday realities.

The Romans knew how to make mortar for their roads that lasted for centuries by mixing in fine pumice emitted from Mount Etna while modern roads made with coarser materials crumble after a few seasons. During the Middle Ages in Europe, much classical learning was all but eradicated. Centuries passed before the Renaissance revived interest in and awareness of this earlier knowledge.

The Chinese became insular and lost their command of the seas after having once had the world’s most advanced navy. The highly energetic Japanese similarly rested in suspended animation when it came to most improvements until forcibly exposed to the Industrial Revolution by Admiral Perry’s gunboats. Until recently, modern Egyptians had no more idea of how their ancestors constructed the pyramids than they did how to clone camels.

Questioning thinkers have always tested the opportunity to improve on what was previously known, but those quests were hobbled because access to what had been known earlier was usually quite limited. Expand awareness of the best of earlier knowledge, and you could greatly expand potential to improve — that much seemed obvious. The lack of access is worsened by so much knowledge existing in secret or near-secret conditions.

Paradoxically, some advances were once so well established that no one bothered to document them, such as the use of some rare herbs to treat medical problems. In addition, knowledge (or what seemed to pass for knowledge) was expanding much faster than any individual could absorb in more than a limited area.

To me, it seemed like there was one hope: Gather up the undeveloped ideas of people like Leonardo da Vinci and get busy working on them. But don’t wait several hundred years to get started. Work on the most promising undeveloped ideas right after they are conceived. That’s the first lesson of how to accelerate improvements.

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If you are one of the many people who are looking for ways to improve gas mileage, and lets face it just about everyone is, then read on to discover a few gas mileage secrets.
The car or truck that you are driving may be the latest model, it may be the best looking vehicle that you have ever owned, with its shiny paintwork and beautiful finish, but in reality it is very poorly designed. Did you know that only a fraction of the gasoline that you put into your car is actually used? The rest of it is pure waste in the form of heat, exhaust gases, and carbon deposits that slowly destroys your engine.

Just imagine for a minute, every dollar you spend at the gas pumps over half of it is being totally wasted and literally going up in smoke. Not only is this a waste of your hard earned cash but it also has a devastating affect on the environment, with all those exhaust emissions being pumped into the atmosphere. So we should all be looking for ways to improve gas mileage and cut down on this awful waste.

One of the simplest gas mileage secrets is not so much a secret as common sense. Keeping your car in tip top condition and regularly serviced is most important, as a poorly maintained engine will result in poor fuel efficiency in any vehicle. So

1) Always have your car serviced at the recommended intervals, and try using an energy conserving grade of oil as this will help to reduce friction and improve fuel consumption.

2) Check your air filter regularly and either clean or replace it when required. A clogged or dirty air filter reduces the amount of oxygen being mixed with the gasoline and so interferes with the correct fuel mixture, which causes it to burn rich and uneconomically and reduces the performance and power.

3) Stick with the right type of gas for your vehicle. By this I mean the use of the correct octane rating that is recommended for your car, if this is regular gas then using a higher octane rated fuel will simply be wasting your money.

4) Tire pressures can have a real affect on fuel economy. Always make sure that they are inflated to the correct pressure as tires that are under inflated can seriously reduce the gas mileage of your car.

5) Have your brakes tested by a competent mechanic. If you have binding or sticking brakes then you are literally driving with the brakes on and you can just imagine what this is doing to your fuel consumption.

6) Try to avoid aggressive or erratic driving. Such actions as quick acceleration and hard as sharp breaking will also have an affect on your fuel economy. Always try to accelerate smoothly and calmly, and think ahead when it comes to breaking and give yourself time to break gradually.

7) Did you know that you can dramatically lower your fuel consumption with the use of one of the gas mileage devices available on the market. These hydrogen car kits use a small hydrogen generator which basically turns water from a small resevour under the hood into HHO gas which is then mixed with the regular gasoline from your fuel tank and burnt in the engine in the usual way. This mixture burns more efficiently and cleanly giving you improvements of gasoline consumption of 35% or more.

These 7 tips are not really gas mileage secrets, they are simply things that we can all do as ways to improve gas mileage, save money, and at the same time reduce the amount of harmful exhaust emissions we all put into the atmosphere.

Every manager knows that protecting computer data is important, but how many can be completely confident that their backup systems will work when needed?

At CBL Data Recovery Technologies, we see some of the most extreme examples of data loss. In recent years, our assignments have ranged from recovering the entire welfare system of a European country to a UFO enthusiast’s RAID array, from a rural school board that thought it lost pupils’ marks to an international freight company’s $700 million billing records. Our work spans an incredible range of challenges. Fortunately, many of them are avoidable.

How Data Gets Lost

The two largest contributing factors in data loss are hardware or system malfunctions and human error. Together, they account for almost 75 per cent of all incidents. Software corruption, computer viruses and ‘physical’ disasters like fire and water damage make up the rest.

There are three major trends in data loss today, representing industry-wide shifts in technology and market behavior.

First, because we are storing more data in smaller spaces, the impact of a data loss incident is magnified. Ironically, the very same technological advances that allow us to do ‘more with less’ contributes directly to the increasing severity of data loss.

The media that stores data is fragile, whether it is tape, flash memory or hard drive. Even ‘hard’ surfaces like CDs can be physically damaged. The mechanical components in a hard drive must work with greater precision. The distance between the read/write head and the platter where data is stored is steadily decreasing. Today, that distance is 1-2 microinches (one millionth of an inch). A speck of dust is 4-8 microinches and a human hair 10 microinches. Even a slight nudge, a power surge or a contaminant introduced into the drive may cause the head to touch the platter and cause a head crash. Data in the contact area may be permanently destroyed.

Second, data is more mission-critical. Users are storing greater amounts of critical personal and commercial data like bank accounts, hospital patient records and tax records on their desktops and networks.

By definition, loss of mission-critical data brings major business processes to a halt. In the worst case, that can mean bankruptcy.

Finally, most of the backup technology and practices are failing to protect data adequately. Most computer users rely on backups and redundant storage technologies, and for many users, this is a successful

backup strategy. Others are not so lucky.

How Is Data Recovered?

Data recovery is more than pulling strings of bits from mangled disk drives or tangled file systems. There are large elements of problem solving and crisis management. Clients bring a diverse and vast array of technology problems to data recovery companies, looking for cost effective and, above all, timely solutions. How corporations and individual people respond to a data crisis is often a revealing look at how they conduct their day-to-day business. Typically, the ones that confront a challenge directly are the most successful.

First of all, users and managers must recognize that any loss of data is an immediate and urgent problem. It may not be confined to one system or network and its impacts could reach beyond a single branch or department. For example, an entire organization may have purchased machines that all have faulty hard drives or installed corrupted software.

Denial is dangerous and costly. Escalate the situation promptly. By far the majority of situations are successfully

handled in-house. The customer should only ‘surrender’ immediately and call for outside assistance when there is a ‘new’ noise coming from the hard drive or when the data is so valuable as to be priceless. In most cases, working through a planned recovery checklist will bring back the data. If it does not return when reasonable measures have been tried, then the organization has to accept that the data is really not coming back. At this point, decisive action can literally mean corporate survival.

Data recovery is the last resort when everything else, including commercial software, fails. When customers need data recovery, they need it fast. In three cases out of four, we can recover all the data within 24 hours or receiving the media, so reducing the time in transit is important. Over the years, CBL has become adept at the logistics of getting clients’ drives and media into our laboratories from anywhere in the world. The Internet may be creating a world without borders but the word has not reached the world’s major airports. As well, technicians have often become skilled at finding the parts necessary to rebuild rare or obsolete equipment.

Data recovery typically occurs in an emotional climate of great distress. Personally and professionally, a great deal is riding on a successful outcome. Dealing with a client’s psychological state, as individuals and organizations, is a large part of a successful data recovery project. While a project may literally call on the talents of every member of a team, clients should only deal with one person, to facilitate the creation of a bond. That relationship is designed to be an immediate and continuing comfort to the client, but it also ensures that there is clear communication, built on shared experience and a common vocabulary.

Clients are almost invariably reassured to learn that while some damage to data is permanent, it is a rare case that absolutely no data all is retrieved. In most cases, some of the data can be recovered, even in extreme conditions.

Data recovery companies should provide a report within one business day after receiving damaged media, outlining how it plans to perform the data recovery. Some projects may require several days, or even weeks, but about 75 per cent of all assignments should be turned around in less than 48 hours.

Close communication and understanding can be critical in those unfortunate situations where choices have to be made about the data. Which files do you need first? Which ones are you willing to sacrifice? Do you want the data in text format now or would you prefer to wait to see it we can recover it in the original format?

There are no manuals for data recovery. There is no one set way to retrieve data. Each project should be analyzed on an individual basis and only then an action plan be developed.

It is best never to work on original media. Data should be duplicated bit by bit to reduce the risk of causing further damage to the data.

Sucessful Outcomes

For most projects, success comes from a combination of innovative logistics, applied problem solving and what can be called ‘technology triage’, where answers are looked for from within the issues.

Projects always pick up where others have left off. As the ‘repair shop of last resort’, data recovery experts do nothing but provide solutions.

Our business is all about restoring order in chaotic circumstances. We force rebellious technology to fulfill its promise to our clients by making everything right again. And it is kind of fun to do the impossible.

http://www.cbltech.com

Co-authors: Darryl Peddle, Lisa Smith

With the high costs of fuel today, it pays to save energy and money on home improvement projects where you can. To help with your budgets, here are three awesome products in the marketplace to check out.

1) Hurricane Socks

We always use a number of measures to get rid of dirt and dust from our house. However, it becomes quite difficult to prevent accumulation dirt once the rainy season and hurricane season starts. To prevent water from coming into your house, hurricane socks can help. Made from high quality water absorbing material, hurricane socks are usually 3 inches by 3 – to 4-feet long cylinders of polypropylene packed in strong nylon.

You can place these hurricane socks at the bottom of the doors and windows to prevent possible water dripping and leaking. And surprisingly, these water absorbent socks are able to soak one-gallon water. That means you can change a single hurricane sock after couple of days; simply wring it out, let it air dry and use it – over and over and over again. Crack those tough wet jobs with easy-to-use, economical hurricane socks.

2) Abzorb Mats

Sometimes even after taking all major precautions to keep the house clean, floors – especially the garage and kitchen floors – become dirty and greasy. But don’t worry! An easy solution is to use Abzorb Mats, made of top quality absorbing polypropylene, backed with high quality epoxy resin.

Abzorb Mats:

? Keep you garage cleaner and safer from slipping accidents on greasy spots.

? Prevent damage to not only flooring (wood, concrete and others) but also walls, cabinets other areas.

? Absorb gallons of water, and when the water evaporates from the mat, you can use them over and over and over again.

? Are easy to use and clean, and last for years.

? Also come in rolls for easy cutting with scissors or other sharp tool.

Available in multiple sizes and affordable price ranges, Abzorb Mats can be used inside your garage, home (under pet dishes, in children’s rooms, under kitchen appliances, etc) and other areas as well as; for example, outside on decks under grills.

3) Draft Stoppers

Along with house cleaning, keeping your home warm is also important, especially during winter season. A central heating system and / or living room fireplace combo is excellent for this purpose, available in local home improvement stores and online.

Note, though, that even if you have your systems and fireplaces in place and running, you need to try hard to prevent possible heat loss, since severe heat loss may overload the systems resulting in overuse of electricity, not to mention excessive energy bills. A simple way to avoid this is to block gaps responsible for heat loss with quality draft stoppers.

A well graded draft stopper is made using finely ground corn cob filled in a cylindrical polypropylene bag, easy to shape as you’d like, and place accordingly. These draft stoppers are long lasting, economical and tough on heat loss.

So give it a try – nothing to lose – - save energy and money with any or all of these 3 nifty home improvement products.

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Image taken on 2009-09-20 20:40:45 by stevendepolo.

Award-winning university professor reveals the secrets to get better grades in college without cramming or becoming a book worm. His Tricks of the Grade strategies gets students at least a B in Every course.
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