This is the English version of the theme song to the Lazytown a health oriented childrens program - Just ask your toddler in 110 countries! (I won't tell if you bop to it when the Little One is asleep ^^) They also have Bing Bang in many languages on Youtube. The French version is real cute too! ^^
This article or section contains information about one or more scheduled or expected films. The content may change as the film's release approaches and more information becomes available.
One of the rites of spring here in largely seasonless San Diego are the massive flower fields you can see from Interstate 5 in Carlsbad. Flower growers have been raising flowers for the trade for decades here. They are truly impressive and a sure sign that spring is here!
This Quote is from Ghost Soldiers: The Forgotten Epic Story of World War II's Most Dramatic Mission by Hampton Sides:
"Captain Prince nervously craned his neck to learn what the delay was. He heard something strange, a chorus singing softly in the twilight. The tune was hard to make out at first, but then Prince caught it - "God Bless America," the familiar stanzas rendered in thickly accented English, the melody charmingly curdled with the occassional stale note. At the entrance to the town a few dozen teenage girls dressed in white gowns were singing in sad, sweet voices. It was a hastily arranged beauty pagent. The local school principal had gone door to door recruiting the prettiest young women from Platero and the surrounding countryside. Some of the girls slipped garlands of fresh sampaguita flowers over the Rangers' heads and offered welcoming kisses.
Behind this cordon of singers, the village bustled with the sounds of cooking and preparation. The town was planning a feast. People were slaughtering their chickens and cows, building fires, stirring vats of stew. The villagers had prepared a classic Filipino fiesta, with all the gaiety and spare-no-cost lavishness, everyone brimming with a warmth that would almost seem cloying if it wasn't so obviously sincere. Many of the Rangers welled with tears. That the people of Platero were throwing this kind of reception in the mist of war's misfortunes made their generosity all the more stirring."
If you're a World of Warcraft player using Windows, beware.
Posted by MikeyMike at 10:51 AM on April 14, 2007.
If you are a World of Warcraft player using Windows, beware! People will steal your stuff!
Hackers, according to security watchers, have been surreptitiously installing keylogging software on WoW players' Windows computers, hijacking their accounts and selling off their often valuable in-game assets.
Bottom line:
Even if tens of thousands of players are finding their accounts compromised, that's still a small percentage of the total number of users. Still, those affected by the hacks are understandably angry at the intrusion, and security watchers suggest applying patches to stay safe.
For months, hackers--most likely in China and Russia, according to security watchers--have been surreptitiously installing keylogging software on WoW players' Windows computers, hijacking their accounts and selling off their often valuable in-game assets.
And the problem doesn't show any signs of going away.
The gangs perpetrating the hacking are "incredibly active, and it's a good exploit," said Roger Thompson, CTO of security software developer Exploit Prevention Labs. "It's probably a conservative estimate to say that there's tens of thousands of victims." More Here
BLACKSBURG, Va. - The gunman in the Virginia Tech massacre was a sullen loner who alarmed professors and classmates with his twisted, violence-drenched creative writing and left a rambling note raging against women and rich kids.
A chilling picture emerged Tuesday of Cho Seung-Hui — a 23-year-old senior majoring in English — a day after the bloodbath that left 33 people dead, including Cho, who killed himself as police closed in.
News reports said that he may have been taking medication for depression and that he was becoming increasingly violent and erratic.
Despite the many warning signs that came to light in the bloody aftermath, police and university officials offered no clues as to exactly what set Cho off on the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history.
"He was a loner, and we're having difficulty finding information about him," school spokesman Larry Hincker said.
A student who attended Virginia Tech last fall provided obscenity- and violence-laced screenplays that he said Cho wrote as part of a playwriting class they both took. One was about a fight between a stepson and his stepfather, and involved throwing of hammers and attacks with a chainsaw. Another was about students fantasizing about stalking and killing a teacher who sexually molested them.
"When we read Cho's plays, it was like something out of a nightmare. The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn't have even thought of," former classmate Ian McFarlane, now an AOL employee, wrote in a blog posted on an AOL Web site. He said he and other students "were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter."
"We always joked we were just waiting for him to do something, waiting to hear about something he did," said another classmate, Stephanie Derry. "But when I got the call it was Cho who had done this, I started crying, bawling."
Posted by MikeyMike at 04:04 PM on April 18, 2007.
SMS is the answer??
By LI YUAN, COREY DADE and PAULO PRADA April 18, 2007; Page B1
The evening before an ice storm swept over the University of Texas at Austin, in January, administrators sent an urgent message to its 67,000 students, faculty and staff: Stay home tomorrow.
Thanks to a state-of-the-art emergency communications system, students instantaneously received the alert as text messages on their cellphones and via email on their PCs. Building managers received a similar message on their pagers. And the university issued the warning live on local radio and television stations.
A sample text alert from Mobile Campus that says 'University Alert: classes canceled and campus closed tomorrow due to severe storm.'
The next day, the campus was empty, and there were no weather-related incidents. "It worked very well," said Rhonda Weldon, a member of the university's emergency communications team.
With administrators at Virginia Tech facing hard questions about how long it took them to notify students after the first killings in Monday's shooting rampage there, emergency communication is sure to become a pressing issue nationwide.
The ubiquity of relatively new technologies allows electronic alerts to reach more people faster than ever before. In the aftermath of several recent disasters -- including the tsunami in South Asia, Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast, and the terrorist attacks in New York, London and Madrid -- a growing number of governments, communities, school systems and universities have begun using automated electronic-alert systems that can send voice, email or text messages to residents and students, in addition to traditional broadcast emergency messages. The services mean that people no longer need to be listening to radio, watching TV, logged on to their email or near a home phone to be warned of trouble.
"We've never had a culture that was more accessible to being informed," said Gerard Braud, a Louisiana-based crisis-communications consultant, adding that "when you don't communicate rapidly either in advance of or during an event, people get hurt."
Emergency systems that include text messages are easily available and generally aren't very expensive -- some new pilot programs even are supported by advertising. Ms. Weldon says text messaging is particularly efficient because students carry their cellphones all the time. "They'll see [text messages] before they open up their emails," she says. Not only do people need access to the Internet, she says, email is also slowest to reach recipients: It could take one hour to 1½ hours to send an email to all 67,000 users.
More traditional systems feature automated callers that can blast a prerecorded
message to thousands of people in a matter of seconds. Teleparent Educational Systems LLC charges $3 to $4.50 per student per year for automated phone alert services. School administrators can go online and record their message and send it out right away.
Mobile Campus -- which provides text-message services to more than a dozen customers, including the University of Texas -- offers its services free of charge on the condition that the universities allow the company to send two promotional text messages per day to students who subscribe to their services. E2Campus, another text-messaging company that has more than 30 customers, charges $1 a year per student for universities to use their communications services. Both companies say that they received an overwhelming number of inquiries after the Virginia Tech shootings.
Businesses have also begun using such systems. APS Healthcare Inc., a health and disease management service provider in Silver Spring, Md., and ATA Engineering Inc., an engineering test company in San Diego, are both using an emergency alert service provided by Omnilert LLC, parent company of e2Campus. Omnilert charges companies $9,500 a year to send unlimited alerts to 10,000 users via email, text message, pager and the Internet. More Here
NEW YORK - Mother Nature has always ensured that male births outnumber female ones, but the gap has been gradually narrowing over the past three decades in the U.S. and Japan, according to a new study.
Researchers suspect the decline in male births can be explained, at least in part, by paternal exposure to environmental toxins, such as certain pesticides, heavy metals, solvents or dioxins — chemical byproducts produced during incineration or the manufacture of other chemicals.
Traditionally, it’s been expected that for every 100 girls born, there will be about 105 boys. This balances out the higher death rate among male fetuses and infants. But since 1970, the U.S. and Japan have experienced a downward shift in this male-to-female birth ratio, researchers report in the online edition of the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.
Americans love their cell phones -- most of us can't live without them. Yet the Better Business Bureau reports that cell phone providers are the No. 1 cause of complaints among consumers.
This is mostly due to incorrect billing, confusing fees, unexpected charges, and deceptive contracts. These can certainly add up, but I was shocked to learn that the most significant -- even devastating -- monetary damage can occur when your cell phone is lost or stolen.
A $26,000 Cell Phone Bill
San Francisco resident Wendy Nguyen was even more shocked to receive a bill for $26,000 after her cell phone was unknowingly stolen before she left for an overseas vacation. Cingular held her responsible for charges incurred after the phone was taken, up until the time Wendy discovered the theft and called the carrier.
She was able to prove via airline and passport documents that she was out of the country and couldn't possibly have made the unauthorized calls from San Francisco during that time, but Cingular still held Wendy accountable for all charges.
Not only that, they advised Wendy that if she couldn't pay the bill she should consider filing for bankruptcy!
Adding Insult to Injury
Eileen Perrera's phone was stolen while she was on vacation. She filed a police report and contacted Sprint immediately, but then received a bill totaling almost $16,000. Sprint claimed to have never received the call from her reporting the stolen cell phone.
Eileen was able to submit proof from landline phone records that she had indeed called Sprint customer service. As her late fees piled up, the situation remained unresolved for months.
Then there's Pamela Woodson's story. When her cell phone was stolen, she reported it the very next day. However, by that time her account had already incurred over $1,800 in unauthorized charges. Due to the suspicious nature of the fraudulent charges, she was actually interviewed by the FBI -- and cleared of all responsibility. Nevertheless, T-Mobile pressed on, insisting she pay the outstanding charges in addition to late fees and interest.
Can This Be Legal?
If you dig through all the fine print in your cell phone contract, you'll most likely discover a statement that reads something like this: "Should your cell phone be lost or stolen you are responsible for any costs incurred for unauthorized calls made prior to reporting the cell phone missing."
Unlike a credit card, cellular contracts are not required to limit liability for fraudulent charges. But it's also important to realize that the extent of your liability as stated in your contract is your provider's policy -- it's not a law.
The laws that give consumers the right to dispute unauthorized charges vary from state to state. In states where the laws do exist, they're not doing much good because there's no single independent agency set up to review evidence, enforce the laws, and provide a timely resolution.
Why? It all comes down to money. In California, for instance, the significant financial contributions made by the wireless industry to state government gives the telecommunications industry enormous influence over entities like the Public Utilities Commission. In effect, this allows the wireless industry to make up its own rules.
Hachiko: The True Story of a Loyal Dog(Bccb Blue Ribbon Picture Book Awards (Awards))" Pamela S. Turner; Hardcover
Just ordered this for Princess Emma. I think that she's old enough to be interested in it (3 1/2) Her Mom used to meet up with people at the famous statue when she was modeling in Japan.
Plus, great Dog stories are always cool! ^^
Currently reading: Hachiko: The True Story of a Loyal Dog
It's almost here--Haruki Murakami's new novel, AFTER DARK, will be published May 8th!
A short, sleek novel of encounters set in Tokyo during the witching hours between midnight and dawn, AFTER DARK is every bit as gripping as Murakami's masterworks THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE and KAFKA ON THE SHORE.
At its center are two sisters--Eri, a fashion model slumbering her way into oblivion, and Mari, a young student soon led from solitary reading at an anonymous Denny's toward people whose lives are radically alien to her own: a jazz trombonist who claims they've met before, a burly female "love hotel" manager and her maid staff, and a Chinese prostitute savagely brutalized by a businessman. These "night people" are haunted by secrets and needs that draw them together more powerfully than the differing circumstances that might keep them apart, and it soon becomes clear that Eri's slumber--mysteriously tied to the businessman plagued by the mark of his crime--will either restore or annihilate her.
A new novel from Haruki Murakami is always a publishing event. So, to celebrate, from now until June 8th, order AFTER DARK or any of the amazing Murakami books from RandomHouse.com, and receive free shipping! Simply enter the code AFTERDARK upon checkout.
Posted by MikeyMike at 06:51 PM on April 28, 2007 in Tech.
So what is Web 2.0? It's one of those terms that is thrown about, and is often hype. But... at it's core, there is a new way to Internet... I'd say that VOX is one of these new services at allow people to communicate in powerful new ways and convenience. I never wanted to become a programmer to make and keep a blog, and I suspect that few really do in the long run. This video shows and explains a lot about what these new services have to offer!
Mike from (Spring Valley) San Diego, CA
Uses Nikon P5000 digicam and Nikon D70 DSLR for most pictures here.
Mike's Crazy Hours (Pacific Time -8):
SUN: 10am-9pm
MON/TUES/WED: 3pm-1:30am
THU/FRI/SAT: Off - ;)
mavila_92111 AT yahoo DOT com
http://www.personalitypage.com/ISFP.html
![[Cellphones]](http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/images/MK-AJ503_ALERT_20070417185818.jpg)
![[VT logo]](http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/images/OB-AJ415_VTlogo_20070417115459.gif){kind=small}
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