September 30th, 2010 by

A swimmer needs to practice every day, which is why the occasional swimming pool resurfacing can be so devastating to an athlete. But while standard techniques can take entire days, now there’s a much better way to do things, one which does not even require hired help.

That’s right, do-it-yourself swimming pool resurfacing is now achievable thanks to the miracles of modern technology. It is a straightforward procedure that will have the pool ready for business in a few relatively short hours, a real godsend for swimmers who have to work hard daily to maintain their fitness. Not just swimmers who require the practice time will benefit, of course.

To have a pool without water in it is pretty depressing, least of which is due to the fact that pools in need of renovation do not generally look too good anyway.

Needless to say, it is possible to do your swimming pool resurfacing in the fall, after all the barbecues and other poolside gatherings. But in any case, it is now a fairly simple matter involving just a few hours, so why spends hundreds or even thousands to hire others?

Swimming pools have been around since ancient times. The Great Bath at Mohenjo-Daro close to five thousand years ago was covered by a tar-based sealant. Heated pools were known to the ancient Romans who could afford them. But it seemed to have been the British of the mid-nineteenth century who most popularized swimming pools, and ever since then resurfacing has been one of the primary maintenance tasks.

For the individual homeowner, modern advances have made such upkeep much less difficult. Readily available in the form of a gel coating that could be applied to gunite, conrete, or fiberglass surfaces, modern resurfacing is now just a once-in-a-while kind of chore, with each application lasting up to thirty years or more!

September 29th, 2010 by

Most people have heard of 3G cell phones, whether it be through advertisements or word of mouth, understanding that 3G is “good” with little understanding beyond that suggested fact. In fact, the 3G of 3G no contract cell phones simply means “third generation”, referring to the third “generation” or wave of scientific advances that have upped the performance and technological capacity of cell phones and mobile devices, including CDMA and GSM standards.

Specifically, 3G cell phones are those fulfilling certain specifications permitting use of wide area voice and data telecommunication, internet access, video messaging, television – along with most of the modern applications we associate with normal smartphones. By IMT-2000 specs, to be classified as 3G, a device must provide peak rates of data transfer at 200 kilobits a second.

Before 3G cell phones, there were of course cell phones of the first and second generation. A new “generation” has become widely available more or less every ten years, each offering new frequency bands, higher rates of data transfer and non backwards compatible transmission technology. The first generation, 1G, relates to the first generation of analog based mobile phones produced during the eighties. This was replaced by 2G on the GSM standard in 1991, which was the first digital standard allowing data to be digitally encrypted for the first time.

It also offered data services to mobile devices for the first time, starting up with SMS text messaging which has become progressive, but also including picture messages, email, and file transfers. Though 3G cell phones are the current standard, with 4G looming over the horizon, 2G networks are still fully functional in numerous parts of the world.

3G cell phones first stumbled on fruition in 2003 when the first 3G network was launched. By 2007, 200 million people had subscribed to any one of the 190 3G networks operating in 40 countries. Still, only about 7% of cell phones users are subscribed to a 3G network, given that most cell phones users are in places like East Asia or the Middle East where networks are slower to roll out and technology is still a few years behind places like Europe or North America.

Set to succeed 3G cell phones, 4G is slowly beginning to find its way to the market. The 4G standard of data transfer is 100 megabits a second for users in a state of substantial mobility, such as behind the wheel or on a moving train, and 1 gigabit for pedestrian or stationary users. This upgrade in data transfer will allow 4G to improve and continue using features established by 2 and 3G, such as video calls and broadband internet access, as well as newer technologies such as streaming HDTV. For 4G, the CDMA standard is set to be abandoned, in lieu of the newer OFDMA.

September 29th, 2010 by

The serial entrepreneur is a special breed of a special breed. Take Zalman Silber, for example. Already a President’s Club member at famed New York Life Insurance Company, he stumbled upon the idea of a “ride” located at the Empire State Building. After all, what do tourists pay for if not to get a bird’s-eye view of the city from there? So why not provide them the Skyride, an attraction that is as enticingly named as it is misleadingly so, a tourist trap of an attraction as any to be found in the backwoods of a small hick town, except that it’s right there in the Big Apple instead! And it’s nothing more than a half-hour documentary, some of which is made up of helicopter flybys over city landmarks. Whoopee.

But it’s wildly successful, and from such success he has founded other successes. And that’s exactly what a serial entrepreneur is. But a new breed of serial entrepreneur has come on the scene. No Zalman Silber peddler of old-economy businesses, these young men and women are as much technicians as they are visionaries. That is to say, they harken back the age of a Thomas Edison, when businessmen actually built the things that formed the bases of their fortunes. And one of the most outrageously incredible startups has been one from serial techpreneur Seth Priebatsch (who founded his first company at age nine and has pocketed enough from other ventures to get this latest off and running), based on his idea of “the game layer.” This is…well, it’s hard to explain. Best get a cup of coffee started.

Like most of this generation, Priebatsch really likes to play videogames. It is almost certain he has tried his hand at making some of his own, given that he also appears to have a certain amount of programming expertise. But no videogame can possibly compare with the thrill of creating a business – one that is successful. And that is what propels the serial entrepreneur. The thrill of the chase.

And here’s where it all ties in to Priebatsch’s Big Idea: the game layer. It’s a kind of platform whereby just about any task can be turned into a game – and with very tangible rewards. In programming terms, it would be a little like an API, or Application Programming Interface, a set of pre-made ready-to-serve software that makes programming that much easier. A bit like a template, if you will, though vastly more open-ended and customizable.

Well, Priebatsch’s game layer is a platform upon which a business, say the local bakery, can reward you for achieving certain goals in a game. Yeah, really! The game allows players to compete for rewards at stores, gyms, museums, and so forth.

Nice idea – except that “game” doesn’t necessarily mean “videogame.” A game could be anything. Frequent flier mileage is a kind of game, according to Priebatsch’s take on things. It’s just not particularly fun.

He aims to change all that, in the process introducing a “game layer” to the world.

September 28th, 2010 by

Tourist traps. Made to wring every last dollar out of you. It’s as if they were thought up to ruin your vacation. And sightseeing rides rank right up there.

Take Zalman Silber’s Skyride in New York’s Empire State Building. With a name like that, you’d think it was up there at the top, where it’s located. Instead, it’s merely on the second floor. Moreover, express access to the top – for which you pay an additional fifty percent of the ticket price – is just a matter of skipping a few lines. It’s not as if you go straight to the top. You’ll still have to wait on lines, only perhaps one or two less.

And so what is the Skyride? A movie. A half-hour film. That’s it! Definitely a case where the sizzle sounds better than how the steak tastes.

But Zalman Silber redeems himself with his other attractions, the Skywalk and The Edge. The first amusement is aptly named for sure, essentially a catwalk a thousand feet above street level outside the top of the Sydney Tower in Sydney, Australia. It’s an exhilarating experience where, unlike traditional observation decks enclosed behind glass, visitors walk out onto a metal plank that juts out of the building, creating the breath-taking feeling of being suspended in mid-air!

As can be imagined, wind gusts are quite strong at such a height, and special “skysuits” cable-tethered to support structures are used to ensure guest safety. But the Skywalk is open in most kinds of weather, and available practically the whole year.

A similar attraction is The Edge at the Eureka Tower in Melbourne, Australia. This time, visitors are in a fully enclosed cube that sticks out of the building near the very top, with fully transparent glass all around – even beneath one’s feet! A really cool feature of this amusement is how everything is initially opaque, and only suddenly transparent to create an exciting sense of unexpected suspension almost a thousand feet above ground!

These two are great fun and a must for any to-do list when in Sydney or Melbourne. These are the kinds of experiences that really make vacations memorable. After all, vacations are about more than simple relaxation and getting away from work. They are about experiences – ideally, new experiences, positive experiences, unique experiences. And while such attractions as the Skywalk exist elsewhere, such as over the Grand Canyon in the State of Arizona, there’s only one such thing in Sydney and one such thing in Melbourne, offering stunning vistas outdone only by a helicopter flyover.

So beware the tourist traps and spend your hard-earned dollars instead where it would go the furthest. Patronize only those rides which offer true value for the money!

September 27th, 2010 by

Italian marble statues – the phrase brings up any number of images, from ancient examples like Augustus Caesar to the achievements of the Renaissance. Given that such works are priceless, even with all of the money in the world they could not be bought, assuming they were offered for sale in the first place.

But replicas of such marble sculpture are available for everyone to enjoy, with a degree of faithfulness that is belied by their affordability. Museum-quality replicas of such masterpieces are a great way to enjoy art in your own home or office.

Greek vases, Italian statues, Flemish canvases – any number of reproductions can be purchased to adequately appoint any setting, lending an elegance or austerity to your interiors or exteriors.

Of course, not everyone who purchases replicas is interested in such high-minded matters. In fact, one of the largest class of clients for such fare is the entertainment industry. Stage or screen, production assistants are regular shoppers of extremely accurate props, although interestingly enough there exists some controversy as to how much verisimilitude is really necessary.

Many directors insist on painstaking accuracy, not only in historical terms and not even also in technical terms but right down to every ding, scratch, or other such detail. Most take a more practical approach with an eye on the budget, where the role of the prop determines the amount of attention paid to its details.

That said, however, it ought to be noted that museum replicas often do not merit such intense scrutiny simply due to the fact that they’re often employed as a part of the background and no more than that. Accuracy is probably not too great a concern in these cases, though in the 1980s Spielberg hit “The Goonies,” Michelangelo’s David had to be anatomically correct in order for a sight gag to work!

September 26th, 2010 by

A backpacking tent is really a necessity even when you expect to do only a simple hike. I learned this lesson the hard way, personally, and it would have been at a great cost were I not lucky enough to have been rescued by volunteer forest rangers who dutifully answered to a midnight call.

My friends and I hadn’t taken any gear at all, never mind a backpacking tent. It was meant to be nothing more than a quick enough romp up and down a easy mountain of modest height, some two thousand feet above ground level and the tallest point in all the region. It was Mount Buck, near Lake George in upstate New York, the busiest tourist attraction around for miles. Yet as luck would have it, it turned out to be a cloudy, then rainy, day (note to self: check weather forecast day-of).

Nevertheless with no backpacking tent, we decided to proceed anyway. After all, we’d traveled up from New York City hundreds of miles, way over three hours by car; we really needed to stretch our legs! But soon it got dark – just like in the movies, fading to black in mere seconds – and we’d thought we were done for. It was literally black, and we decided to remain in place so that we don’t worsen our predicament.

Luckily, that fateful decision proved to be the right one, as it was through remaining on the trail that volunteer forest rangers, hiking up the trail hours later, were able to fairly easily rescue us. But until that hopeful time, at one or two in the morning, we had to endure the cold – how cold it gets, and how quickly, in a forest! And so never leave home without portable shelter: always take your tent along, no matter what.

September 24th, 2010 by

Rhinestones are diamond simulants or imitations made of rock crystal, glass, or even acrylic. As the name suggests, a rhinestone used to be rock accumulated from along the River Rhine. Eighteenth-century Alsatian jeweler Georg Friedrich Strass was the first to coat glass with metallic powder in this kind of a way as to simulate diamonds. We’ve come a long way since then, with some producers even able to reproduce the sparkling effects of a genuine diamond.

Rhinestones are discovered anywhere a diamond would be, from apparel to jewelry. They’re primarily used by those who can’t afford real diamonds, but musical celebrities have elevated the status of wearing them. Personalities as varied as Liberace and Elvis Presley have worn it so much that they’re now widely associated with it, and even caricatured that way.

The diamond simulant, nonetheless, is no cheap thing, inexpensive only when compared to the real thing. The gemological characteristics desired are often matched (though never all of them simultaneously in any one material), making the simulant a valuable object in its own right.

One of the largest producers of rhinestones in the world is the Austrian concern Swarovski, which has a custom of manufacturing fine crystal products such as miniatures and chandeliers. From 2004 through 2009, it was a Swarovski creation that served as the star atop New York City’s famous Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree.

Preciosa is a Czech company that’s responsible for most of the other rhinestones in the world, with a method that uses only about thirty percent lead in order to minimize refraction.

Other unique coatings and coating processes are utilized to create crystal rhinestones that exhibit diamond-like traits such as rainbows. Like Swarovski, Preciosa virtually makes sculptures, jewelry, and the like. Indeed, the former Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Hapsburgs host most of the fine rhinestone makers in the world.

September 24th, 2010 by

Bronze statues are all over the place. Keeping them clean seems like quite a challenge! But apparently, bronze statues will need only the most basic levels of care in order to look quite presentable. All that is needed is good ol’ soap and water. That is it! Dish soap and warm water. Go figure!

Hard to believe, of course, given the state of your typical bronze sculpture inside the parks or on the street. And just why are so many made of bronze in the first place? Well, it turns out that bronze has some characteristics that make a sculptor’s job that much easier.

They’re strong but not brittle, so that more daring action poses may be used with less visually intrusive supports. They also expand a little right before setting to ensure that a mold is likely to be totally filled, down to the slightest detail.

Interestingly, the cleaning of iron statues, a less popular but still fairly common kind of sculpture, will most likely be a lot more involved. Rust or peeling paint might need to be removed first. Utilizing sandpaper should suffice, and then it’s on to the soap and water! Stone statues, however, usually need no soap at all except in cases of heaving staining. White marble statues, however, must not come into contact with bleach.

Regular exposure to the chemical will almost undoubtedly damage the marble! In fact, there’s virtually never a good reason to use bleach with statuary, besides the fact that it’s harmful towards the environment, killing any plant it touches.

Now all this sounds straightforward enough. So why are all of the bronze, iron, and marble statues out there so dirty? In a word, money – or the lack thereof, rather. Local and national parks departments are among the very first to be cut back in an budget shakeup, and regrettably this is an even worse recession than any previous within the past seventy-five years!

September 21st, 2010 by

To make money by blogging, you should find explosive niches to blog, topics people care about – a lot of people. The easiest thing to do, if all you really care about is money, is to start up an MFA site. No, this isn’t a Master of Fine Arts website, but a made-for-Adsense website. A website designed specifically for Google’s Adsense program, where you place interactive ads that pay you for every click made on them!

Each click from a unique visitor, as determined by a unique IP address, usually. That is why it’s so crucial to find explosive niches to blog about, since you’ll only be making money if enough people click on the advertisements you put up on your site. Of course, you now come to the next problem to be solved: how to attract all those people?

First off, know that you need to appeal to tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of guests to your web site – each day. That is right; every day, your website needs to have enough traffic for you to make money, since every click will typically only yield pennies – yes, pennies! So you’ll need thousands of people clicking those ads to be able to make a decent amount of money each day. That’s how you blog residual cash to your business, by getting commission off of referrals!

But conversion rates, the number of folks who really generate income for you, are generally around three percent. That means for every hundred visitors, chances are only three or four – or two or one! – will actually click on an ad, netting you less than ten cents, generally. That’s why it is so essential to find topics which will interest the greatest number of folks! Blogging popular television shows is really a good way to go in many instances.

September 21st, 2010 by

Article Marketing is really a time-honored promotional method that bear minimal costs for maximal gains. It’s nothing more than soft-selling your goods or services, the better to breeze past consumer defenses in our age of ad-awareness and ad-sensitivity.

What article marketing does is present a company in the most innocuous light possible, in the role of a helpful and knowledgeable advisor – with no sales pitch whatsoever. The name of the business is only casually mentioned in passing, probably no more than once – but the name gets out there, in the public consciousness, and that’s what’s important.

Article marketing isn’t advertising per se, however, for it does not overtly promote anything. Indeed, its power comes precisely from not selling anything at all, ostensibly. Instead, it works by providing information which is helpful and timely in an interesting way, info that’s free to the prospective client.

As an example, a local accountant might pen an article in the local newspaper or be interviewed on the local radio or television station every April, tax season. He or she will freely share some general ideas, and somewhere along the way will be a simple reference to his or her business. That is it. And that is all it takes.

Have a better mousetrap? Potential consumers can be turned on to your product while reading an article about common household pests. Whatever it is you have to offer, you can offer it within an article that puts your expertise in the best light! People simply do not like being sold to. But when you take the initiative to share openly, they’re a lot more likely to be receptive to anything else you may have to say. As could be imagined, there is a great deal more involved to this proven method of practically free advertising and marketing, but that’s about all there is to the fundamental concept!