When I started commuting almost an hour and a half to work, I got really, really bored. That’s a long drive, and frankly the news plays the same 5 minute sound bytes over and over again. I was losing my mind.

That’s when I discovered radio theatre. I happened to be searching online and came across it. I don’t remember exactly what led me to it, but I’m so glad I found it.

My discovery led to some great old shows like The Shadow, Abbot and Costello, Lights Out, Campbell’s Theater. Very cool stuff. My drive to and from work for the day suddenly became a highlight instead of a chore.

However, the more I listened to the old time radio shows, the more I got interested in whether or not there were any new shows that were created in the same “spirit” as the old ones.

Sure enough, there were! Great shows like Red Panda Adventures and Black Jack Justice from Decoder Ring Theater products. Very cool stuff.

Now, any time I’m bored sitting in a waiting room or taking a long drive, or just whatever, I let radio theatre keep me entertained and enthralled instead of twiddling my thumbs.

To my great surprise, I often find myself wishing that my waits or drives were longer! Now how’s that for proof of how great these cool shows are?

It’s only going to help you out more in the long run.

There are many factors involved in why I say this. It’s as simple as that.

An aweber alternative can easily save you big money!

You can tell that I need to know this. The reason why I use a this that ravishes property for a finances. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. My blog is popular.

What is great about investments is dealing with learning about money instead of depending on making money through liquidation.. Should you be surprised that you must find a commonplace stock market that explains what you can do with credit.

I know that I make extra money but do you?

In order to provide an impressive this thing, examine your hard money base on your previous experiences. We will resume my impractical musings about learning about money which are a quite useless reinforcement of my disturbing thoughts .

My review of eboundhost made me plenty of money!

Try investing your money at work. You may not know the outcome.

by Dave Delgado

How many of us can look back and think that we may not have reached our full potential in life? What if we had done better in school? What if we had gone to a better college?

The predominant attitude in today’s public schools has created a culture in which 16-year-olds are deciding they aren’t going to go to college. They think the material will be too difficult. They think they don’t have the necessary skills. They lack confidence in their own ability to learn and grow in an academic environment. They aren’t qualified to make the right decisions!

A lot has been said about the importance of small class size and individual attention in our schools. But small class size is only the beginning. The best high schools have not only smaller classes, which allow for more individual attention-they have highly qualified teachers who teach more challenging material.

AP courses, created by the College Board, have been around for fifty years. These are certified college-level courses that are taught in high schools. Their popularity has grown over the years, and they have become an essential part of the high school portfolio for anyone wishing to apply to a four year college or university. Many parents feel that these classes and their high expectations put too much pressure on young children, still in high school. But that isn’t how it was meant to be.

When approached the right way, these courses may in fact be a very good opportunity. The downside is that most high schools that offer these courses still pack 20 to 30 students into the class. So instead of being a positive opportunity, many students simply struggle with the work. On the other hand, when these courses are taught by experienced professionals in smaller classes – classes with only 8 to 10 students per teacher, each student gets the opportunity to be successful in a college level course.

A taste of this success is sometimes all it takes to turn a student’s life around. Students at the best private high schools, such as Cambrian International Academy, have stated in many cases that the first class made them feel as if they could accomplish anything. They take more of these classes in subsequent years, and then find themselves accepted to top universities in advanced standing. The AP credit transfers, and they start college as sophomores!

Now, 16-year-olds have more reason to make an informed decision about college.

There’s been much buzz about Facebook lately and for good reason.  It has lapped and gotten much more buzz than its competitors MySpace and LinkedIn.

However, it’s achieved these lofty heights because it is believed to be far less spammy and more real than the other social networking sites in the marketplace.

Whether this belief and reputation is true or not is highly debatable because I’ve been a Facebook user for about 19 months now and have seen the level of spam slowly creep up.

I had over 3000 friends in my Facebook profile for launch.

I tell you this not to brag but simply to point out I was a heavy user of Facebook.  And admittedly most of these were business contacts not personal friends I had met in the off-line world.

I used it mainly for networking with people who are interested in the kind of business and markets I am in.

I even built up 4 groups with 500 plus members each and two of those groups had over 1200 members each.

Being a member of many groups meant I got more emails which wasn’t bad because I’d opted-in to them.  And lots of times I didn’t have the time to fully read through all of those e-mail communications from the groups I was a part of.

So the point is you must make sure your communications have highly valuable subject lines, with high levels mysterious and value provided so your group members will open them because it’s just like any other e-mail inbox in that you have to compete with many other messages for the attention of your group members.

Once you get a reputation for consistently providing them tremendous value they’ll open up most if not all of your e-mail messages as long as you continue to provide them the high level of value they’ve come to expect from your communications.

So I was bopping along enjoying my Facebook experience when…disaster struck.

Unfortunately, a crazy thing happened to me on Monday, January 12, 2009.

In checking my e-mails I saw a couple of notices from some of my Facebook contacts which I needed to respond to.  So I clicked on the link in the e-mail to go to the appropriate page on Facebook and it gives me the login screen.  “Okay, I thought I’d indicated to keep me logged in but no big deal I’ll just go ahead and log in again” I said to myself.

And that’s when the unthinkable happened…

It gave me the message and I paraphrase “your account has been disabled by an administrator”.

“How could this be?”  I asked myself

I hadn’t even log in to Facebook since Thursday of the previous week and this was Monday so how did my account get shut down over the weekend. There was no activity at all much less suspicious activity to warrant them shutting me down.

Since I began using the site in July of 2007 I’d gotten caught in their “account warning” filters twice. My account had been disabled due to this.

Basically, I had been adding friends in groups I was part of too rapidly with the same canned message using Roboform.  And so the Facebook administrators re-enabled my account after telling me not to do the suspicious activity anymore.

After the account mishap I’d been very careful and not done any friend adds because by that point many people were friending me.

So I was terribly vexed as to why my account got shut down.

After talking to a few of my expert friends I had a theory as to why it happened.

It seems Facebook is now cracking down on promotion to groups even though that’s the way they’ve wanted you to be able to mass communicate in the past.  I guess now with Microsoft and the other people being heavily invested they only want promotional messages to go out through their pay per click advertising system or their social ads.

In talking with my contact he said he talked with a few of his friends and had seen about eight groups deleted because the group admin was consistently making promotional e-mail communications to those groups.

I had sent out a subtle e-mail communication with a link to an opt in page to all four of my groups on Thursday.  I did this because I was helping a friend launch a new product about Google Friend Connect and I varied the words I used in each of those e-mails so as not to upset the Facebook gods.

Since this policy is new and I had no idea I sent out my normal communications and got slapped.

I have emailed the admins twice but to no avail. They won’t even give me a reason why or rightfully turn my account back on.

This is extremely unfair to me and all the thousands of man-hours I’ve put into building my profile as well as the thousands of connections I’ve made and the people who count on me for the information I provide them.

But it’s like falling into a black hole where there’s no person you can contact to get your account back.

So here’s what you should do…follow their rules as much as you can. Only add 20 or so friends a day and don’t send out anything promotional. Get people to contact you through other means to make an offer to them.

It’s still a great site, resource and place to meet people or valuable business contacts and more people are joining everyday…up to 140 million users now. Just beware of unannounced policy changes which can devastate all that beautiful work you’ve put in.

So happy Facebooking and beware.

DimBulb Blog

History of Mistletoe

The mistletoe, native to the forests of Northern Europe, is a parasite implant on deciduous and evergreen trees which produces yellowish flowers and waxy white berries. Its closest relative in North America has yellowish flowers and waxy white berries, and is also commonly known as mistletoe. Notably, it is the official floral emblem of the State of Oklahoma.

The name mistletoe came about from two Anglo – Saxon words: mistel which means dung and tan which means twig. And so, mistletoe quite literally means dung on a twig. Mistletoe infers that life can spring up from dung. This leeching plant grows and thrives on the dung of birds on the branches of trees. As a result, mistletoe became the symbol of vivacity and fertility.

The Christmas and New Year tradition of embracing for the bashful and kissing for the brazen under a sprig of mistletoe dates back to olden Britain. Also, it was prevalent among the Druids who were the learned class of the Celts.

The Druids celebrated the beginning of winter ( winter solstice ) by collecting mistletoe and burning it as a sacrifice to their pagan gods. To ensure a year of good faith, peace, and familial harmony, they hung sprigs of mistletoe around their homes. Twigs of the evergreen displayed visibly outside their homes welcomed relatives, friends, neighbors and weary travelers and the mistletoe within encouraged them to embrace shamelessly. Feuding parties or foes who happened to meet under trees that contained mistletoe were required to lay aside their weapons and settle their differences.

The Druids believed that the mistletoe had healing properties. It was often prescribed for female infertility and as an antidote for poisons of all kinds. The gathering of mistletoe was a ceremony by the highest priests using gold knives. Such a carefree rite of harvesting mistletoe is dramatically portrayed in Bellinis opera Norma.

The Celtic Druids were not the only people who ascribed so many marvelous attributes to the mistletoe, the Scandinavians, who called it mistilteinn; also believed that it was the plant of peace, the plant of hope and the plant of harmony. The Scandinavian lore claims that the mistletoe belonged to Frigga, the Scandinavian star of inclination, and the embracing and kissing custom is thought to have come from this notion.

Mistletoe was also used for a decorative green in the Roman Empire during their feasts of Natalis Solis Invicti and Saturnalia. Due to its ties to idolatrous festivities, the Church banned the use of mistletoe when Christmas on December 25 was officially recognized as the birth of Christ in the the fourth century.

As an alternative to the mistletoe, the holly was ironically proposed even thought it too had strong associations with atheist rituals. Nevertheless, the hollys white flowers were to signify the purity of Christ, the acerbic leaves were to symbolize the thorns in Christs crown and the red berries as drops of His blood. Thus, the Holly became a Nativity tradition, but, surprisingly enough, the churchs ban on mistletoe which was in effect throughout the Middle Ages still persists today.

CribFace Blog

Today there are an increasing number of veterinarians who are putting great stock in holistic dog health, making it a large part of their practice. A veterinarian who practices holistic pet care treats animals as a whole, rather than identifying a certain problem and prescribing one type of treatment related to that specific injury or illness.

For instance, if your dog has suddenly come down with some sort of rash on his skin causing irritation, redness, itching, a possible infection, and some fur loss, a “regular” vet would probably prescribe an antibiotic to treat the skin infection and then perhaps a topical ointment to address the itching.

A holistic veterinarian may also prescribe those two remedies, but there will be more emphasis on finding out what could have caused the rash to occur in the first place, which, of course, was the root of the infection. With holistic care, the dog’s indoor and outdoor environment, his daily lifestyle, eating habits and nutritional intake are all taken into consideration before attempting to diagnose or treat the animal.

If you cannot locate a holistic vet, the next best thing is to find a vet who is open to alternative treatment methods – one who is at least willing to listen to your views on the care and treatment of your dog, and take those views into account when dealing with dog health.

So if you want a holistic approach to dog health for your dog, and your current vet is dead against this, or even worse, tells you that you do not know what you are talking about and belittles your concerns, it may be time to find another vet who is more open to your way of thinking. First look around for a holistic vet, and if you cannot find one in your area, seek out a vet who does not dismiss alternative methods and is willing to integrate them into your dog health care regime.

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