Will the new remote control work on the TV?

Twelve years ago my sister Corinne [Harland] developed NeuroSarcoidosis which is an autoimmune system dysfunction  that causes the atrification of the lymph nodes in the body. In Corinne's situation it was the lymph nodes in & around the brain stem & her spinal / nerve system. As a result she is now legally blind [unable to drive] has difficulty walking, has to deal with a major loss of memory, & has suffered the usual complications of being on massive steroids for an extended period of time; she is a drug induced diabetic, has had liver & kidney problems and lives with the sever chronic pain of diabetic neuropathy {pain in the extremities, feet & ankles}, the steroids [Pregnazone at as high as 100mg/day – 12x max recommended dose] have caused her bones to become brittle and for her to gain massive amounts of weight.

Despite all of the above she has continued to live a full life with her husband [Richard] and kids Laura & Charles.

Her positive attitude and the firm belief that she can beat this disease, has been astounding to see. My little sister has always been someone who exudes love, creativity , compassion and support to all who have the privilege to know her. It has been this strength that has made her a survivor.

Dr Ivar Mendez, who has been in the news a lot lately for his ground breaking work in Neurosurgery, [developed here in Halifax] is going to implant a computer in Corinne's back that will interrupt the message of pain as it is sent to my brain, he will then give her a remote control and Corinne will be able to use it to send a different message to her brain. Apparently Corinne will feel a buzz that she can increase or decrease to mask the message of pain. The white noise will drown out the pain.

Sounds amazing doesn't it ?

Her surgery will be divided into 2 parts:

The first will last a minimum of 2 ½ -3 ½ hours. For this part Corinne will be AWAKE (!) this is when they will be mapping out which nerves are controlling which part of her feet, so Corinne will need to be able to concentrate and tell them.

For the second part, Corinne’ll be asleep, that is when they run very fine wires up her nerve core of both legs and put the computer control inside her. It will be placed into the side of her abdomen. Corinne will then go to recovery and later to the the Neurosurgery unit.

• The next day Corinne will be taught how to use a remote control that will control the base computer. When she has extreme pain Corinne will increase the impulse that is sent by the computer. This message is sent 900 times faster than the pain message, therefore it is supposed to interrupt the pain and send a buzzing sensation instead.
• If all goes well Corinne will leave the hospital on ½ of the morphine and other pain medications that she is currently on and will have a plan for tapering down and hopefully completely off about 5 medication that Corinne has been taking .
• Corinne will likely be discharged the second or third day and will soon be able to resume going to CURVES and even into the pool at the rehab for my Physiotherapy.

Sounds exciting doesn’t it ?

The biggest worry that the medical team has is the risk of infection. Because Corinne has been on steroids for over 11 years and is now diabetic it takes her longer to heal so Corinne will start on IV high dose antibiotics as soon as she arrives in the hospital and can expect to continue on a low dose for at least a month after.

So that‘s the scoop for now. Her surgery is scheduled for 7:30 am so I should know by 1.00 – 2.00 pm how things went & will pass on the news as soon as possible once I've heard.

Monday will be a long & stress filled day but there are no options & the success with this new procedure has been remarkable so I'll be crossing my fingers for the next 24 – 48 hours.

For more info on the amazing research being done in Halifax click on .....

DR. IVAR MENDEZ

As a clinician, Dr. Ivar Mendez is pioneering the use of robotics in neurosurgery. As a researcher, Dr. Mendez is breaking new ground in the field of neurotransplantation. At Canada’s only Cell Restoration Laboratory, Dr. Mendez is working to answer questions posed by neural transplantation teams around the world - where to transplant the cells, how to improve their survival, how to transplant the cells without damaging the brain and, most recently, which other types and sources of cells may offer even greater possibilities for neural transplantation and with fewer disadvantages.

As one of the founders of the Brain Repair Centre, Dr. Mendez has developed a world-class collaboration of researchers and physicians all working towards treatments and innovative solutions to diseases and injuries of the brain and spinal cord.

At the Brain Repair Centre (BRC), researchers from a wide variety of disciplines work together to develop new treatments to overcome the debilitating effects of neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, and Parkinson’s disease, ALS, stroke and spinal cord injury. BRC researchers have access to state-of-the-art facilities, including a 4 Tesla research MRI with the capacity to image patients, and basic science laboratories dedicated to the development of therapies for neurological diseases.

DR. IVAR MENDEZ 

• Dr. Mendez is Chairman of the Brain Repair Centre and is a Professor in the Department of Surgery (Neurosurgery), and Professor in the Department of Anatomy & Neurobiology at Dalhousie University. He is Director of Research with the Department of Surgery, and Director of Canada’s only Cell Restoration Laboratory.
• As a clinician/scientist, Dr. Mendez’ research focus is in functional neurosurgery, neural transplantation, stem cells and robotic neurosurgery.
• Dr. Mendez and his team performed the first remote robotic tele-mentoring neurosurgery in the world between Halifax, Nova Scotia and Saint John, New Brunswick – 400 km away.
• Dr. Mendez has invented a system for transplanting healthy cells into the brain. The system consists of a specialized piece of equipment called a transplantation cannula and micro-injector device. The Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre has patented this device for transplanting new cells into the brain as a restorative therapy.
• Dr. Mendez has been recognized by his peers nationally and internationally. He has won a lengthy list of awards including:
• the Murray L. Barr Junior Scientist Award,
• the Young Neurosurgeon Award,
• the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada Medal Award in Surgery,
• the William P. Van Wagenen Fellowship of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons
• and the Discovery Centre’s Award for Science and Technology (Professional of Distinction).

 

Technorati Tags: Brain Repair Center,BRC,Dr. Ivar Mendez,Corinne Harland,Halifax

Retailers Explore New Ways of Being Paid

E-Commerce Report

New York Times - Nov. 24/07

By BOB TEDESCHI

Published: November 19, 2007

A DECADE ago, PayPal was best known as the payment method of choice for Beanie Babies purchases on eBay. This holiday season, it could pay for a diamond ring on the online jeweler Blue Nile.

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Stuart Isett for The New York Times

Darrell Cavens, senior vice president for marketing and technology at Blue Nile, an online jeweler that is offering discounts to PayPal users.

Blue Nile and several other high-end Web retailers are introducing discount promotions with PayPal, now a subsidiary of eBay, in hopes of attracting consumers who are willing try methods other than credit cards to pay for their online purchases.

Retailers are also looking to PayPal — and competing credit card alternatives like Google Checkout and Bill Me Later — to help them lower credit card processing costs. In tighter economic times, retailers say such savings can mean the difference between a profit and a loss.

“Merchants are definitely focused on generating more volume for alternative payments in the holiday season,” said Bruce Cundiff, an analyst with Javelin Strategy and Research, a consulting firm. “It comes down to changing consumer behavior.”

That, Mr. Cundiff and other analysts said, is where the Blue Nile promotion comes in. Starting Nov. 26, customers who buy with PayPal will save 20 percent on their purchases, with a maximum discount of $50. More than 15 merchants, including BarnesandNoble.com and SharperImage.com, will follow suit. Other sites, like Shoebuy and Zales, will offer other discounts and shipping promotions to PayPal customers.

Mr. Cundiff said PayPal was the major reason that credit card alternatives have gained roughly 14 percent market share.

PayPal said about 150 million people and an undisclosed number of merchants “in the hundreds of thousands” use its service. The subsidiary’s revenue jumped to $470 million, an increase of 35 percent in the most recent quarter over the same period a year ago.

Only in the last year has PayPal become popular enough to use on Blue Nile, said Darrell Cavens, senior vice president for marketing and technology at the online jeweler. “They’re not so alternative anymore,” Mr. Cavens said. “It’s becoming mainstream.”

Blue Nile offered the PayPal option to its customers in October, but he declined to say how many buyers had used the service. “But we’ve certainly seen much higher sales through PayPal than I had expected,” he said.

PayPal has lots of competition from Google Checkout and Bill Me Later, among other companies.

Michael Kirkland, a Google spokesman, said Checkout would soon announce holiday promotions similar to those offered by Bluefly, Buy.com and other merchants during the back-to-school shopping season. At that time, the merchants provided free shipping and other discounts for Checkout’s customers, Mr. Kirkland said.

Bill Me Later, which allows merchants to extend short-term credit to customers, has enjoyed similar growth. Gary Marino, chief executive of Bill Me Later, said more than 700 companies offered the company’s service, more than twice last year’s figure.

“There’s a bit of a herd mentality when it comes to this,” Mr. Marino said, “but it seems to be working well for us.”

The big question for retailers that take the time to try alternative payment services is whether customers who opt for Bill Me Later or PayPal would have otherwise bought the goods anyway with their credit cards. If that is the case, money saved on payment processing fees is not necessarily enough to offset the time and expense of changing a Web site’s payment technology.

Mr. Marino, though, contends that Bill Me Later delivers new, wealthy customers. The average yearly income of a Bill Me Later user, he said, is $75,000, well above that of the typical Internet shopper.

Alternative payment companies can charge less for processing fees than credit card companies partly because they spend much less on marketing. Frank Sui, an analyst with Deloitte Consulting, said companies like Pay Pal, Bill Me Later and Google Checkout spend less than $5 to acquire each new customer, compared with more than $250 spent by credit card companies. Mr. Sui said credit card companies have also struggled to invent new services at the pace of their more nimble Internet competitors.

Still, the traditional credit card companies are not idle. MasterCard, for instance, is working with PayPal. The companies said that this week, they would announce a service called PayPal Plug-In, allowing PayPal users to shop with any merchant that accepts MasterCard. The service, which PayPal has tested for much of the last year, requires users to download a software application.

Michael J. Wagner, chief executive of eToys, the online toy retailer, said he had resisted offering PayPal and other services. Now, a month after the company began to use PayPal, the service accounts for nearly 9 percent of the Web site’s purchases, with no discounts or other promotions to entice customers.

“We’re truly surprised, and very pleased with it,” Mr. Wagner said. PayPal transactions cost eToys at least 0.3 percent less than those processed by credit card companies. And PayPal does not require eToys to compensate the company for fraudulent transactions, as the major credit card companies do, he said.

“So we’re a big supporter of these other payment methods,” Mr. Wagner said. “Somebody has to keep the MasterCards and Visas honest.”

Has Rupert Murdoch Been Reading RWW? News Corp Rumored to Buy LinkedIn

The back door strategy works again....

clipped from www.readwriteweb.com Written by Richard MacManus / November 22, 2007 / 0 comments At the risk of reporting rumors (ahem), I can't resist making a note of this one. For the past couple of weeks we have been analyzing LinkedIn and comparing it to Facebook. When I say 'we', I mean Bernard Lunn. But it's a topic a few of us have written about in the past here at RWW. Bernard wrote a post at the end of last week entitled LinkedIn and The Future of Business Networking. In that post he listed ways that LinkedIn could take advantage of the relatively untapped business networking market. Has Rupert Murdoch Been Reading RWW? News Corp Rumored to Buy LinkedIn Some of the feedback on Bernard's post suggested that it's Facebook which will take advantage of business networking opportunities, moreso than LinkedIn. So at the beginning of this week, we ran a poll asking: In 6 months time, will you have more business contacts in Facebook than LinkedIn? The poll is still running (see bottom of this page)

The Laws Of Web Design

http://ejoh.zmolklife.com/2007/11/18/the-universal-laws-of-web-design/
Published November 18th, 2007

It is my hope that you will find these laws of value. Some of them have been taken from programming laws but as you will see they apply to web design as well. I have ever since I read Murphy’s laws on programming wondered if there are something similar for web design. When I looked it up it turned out it didn’t. A search on Google would only return one article and that couldn’t be reached anymore.

Laws are always fun and I will add more as soon as I come up with them. I do, however, hope that you will help me come up with suitable laws so I wont have to do everything on my own. Any law you submit will off course be credited and published with a link to it’s source.

Anyway, here is the current list of web design related laws:

First Law On System Planning:

· Everything that can be changed will be changed until there is no time to change anything again

The Law of Detail by Carl Drott.

· Nothing is so simple that there is not a stupid way to do it

The Laws On Your Client’s Behavior

· Your client always thinks he knows more about web design than you do

· Your client never knows their or their site’s own good

· No matter how thorough you test your application, when you make your first live install at the customer’s site, it will break

· A site cannot be designed without a purpose and content and your client will give you neither

Hofstadter’s Law

· A task always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

Murphy’s Law On Web Design

· Anytime things appear to be going well, you have overlooked something

· You always find any bug in the last place you look and when you’ve found them they’ll appear somewhere else

· You will not find the most annoying bug until you’re heading home from work

· 90 % of the time developing is taken by correcting bugs

· A website is always “under construction”

· The web site will always crash just before the backup is about to be done

· Don’t schedule a vacation to begin right after a release (by Lemming)

· Every project will take at least twice as much time as expected even if you expect it to take twice as much time from the beginning.

· That gorgeous shade of green on your home laptop will look AWFUL on your work PC (by Rachael)

· If everything looks fine in IE it’ll look horrible in FF and vice versa (by Rachael and Amelie)

· It’s impossible to do it right from the start (by Vera)

Wienberg’s Law (general law but applies to web design too)

Progress is made on alternate Fridays.

Metadoktor’s Law of Spelling

· If it can be misspelled, then it will be misspelled

Emil’s Principles

· The most loved design are the ones that don’t exist

· Making a perfect website is not possible as long as its’ intention is to be used

· A design only feel new the first time you look at it

· Unlike how things work in programming every problem is a bug not a feature

· You’re never paid enough money for listening to your client

Emsz‘ Law on Self Criticism

· No matter what your visitors say about your layout, you’ll still find it hideous

Golub’s Laws of Computerdom

· Fuzzy project objectives are used to avoid the embarrassment of estimating the corresponding costs

· A carelessly planned project takes three times longer to complete than expected; a carefully planned project takes only twice as long

· The effort requires to correct course increases geometrically with time

· Project teams detest weekly progress reporting because it so vividly manifests their lack of progress

Glaser’s Law

The cost of a complex system is very, very real

Mitch’s observation

95 percent of the functionality will take 5% of the time to program, and the other 5 % - that which we call “the exceptions” - takes 95%.

Know your neighbourhood ... Facebook Demographics

2/3 female thats better odds than POF!

clipped from midnightexcess.wordpress.com [Update: before you get too far into these numbers, you might like to check out this updated post, which gives a more accurate breakdown of genders - the country totals remain the same] Out of interest I went through the Facebook ad platform to pull together some stats on relative numbers of members from each country. Not surprisingly, the US represents over 40% of the total membership at just over 18 million. Some surprises though (at least to me), with Turkey in 5th place. There’s quite a heavy bias to the ladies too, with female members making up just over 63% of the total population. I’m not able to see what criteria FB uses to present these numbers, so these may be members with just a basic profile, or those who have also filled in some additional personal details too. Full picture is below. Click on the image to open up so that you can see all the data. Exercise for the Reader: Facebook Member Stats

Ampache and Amarok getting their groove on

Ampache developer Karl Vollmer and Amarok developer Nikolaj Hald Nielsen recently stuck their heads together and came up with an Ampache API for 3rd party application access to the Ampache music server and a Service for Amarok2 that integrates this API. Pure awesomeness ensues! :-)

read more | digg story

Top 12 Sites for Web Design Inspiration, Guides and Resources

Whether you are a professional or amateur web designer, or simply enjoy amazing web designs, these are great resources to browse and bookmark. This collection covers various design styles, guides and tools as well as free fonts, stock photographs and vector images. Organized by category, this is a must-bookmark collection. Enjoy!

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Why You, Too, Should YouTube

The benefits of marketing yourself on YouTube... YouTube (and Blogger, for that matter) are owned by Google. And guess who indexes metadata and content to the biggest search engine in the world before it even appears on the web?

read more | digg story

And the beat goes on....& on....&on

More static on the Facebook vs THE WORLD Written form a rather armature point of view but he dose make his point.

clipped from digg.com Open Social and the Future of Social Networking There has been a lot of talk around the web on why OpenSocial is just not open enough ( here, here and here). But for now lets rest the speculation of all the bloggers aside and have a look at the emergence of all theses platforms. It all started when facebook launched it platform (F8) at a conference earlier this year. This allowed developers to Submitted: 1 day 11 hr ago, made popular 1 hr 40 min ago Submitter: joey86   (news: submissions, diggs, comments) Topic: News » Technology » Industry News Source: createlf.no-ip.biz Share: Share Bury It: Bury OptionalDuplicate Story Spam Wrong Topic Inaccurate OK, This is Lame Favorite: Favorite?

I agree whole heartedly with the sentiments of the dmiessler.com blog ...the world has changed and its time to make this simple move either that or rebuild the keyboard to allow a single keystroke entry for the www.

clipped from dmiessler.com It's Time to Drop the "www" It's no longer necessary to use "www" when referring to websites. It's a waste of storage, a waste of ink, and it takes 2-5 times as long to pronounce as saying the domain by itself. Enter no-www. No-www is an initiative to make all websites accessible from both the http://www.example.com/ and http://example.com/ forms of their names. The reason behind it is to standardize domain names providing web content and to avoid typing unnecessary letters. -- Wikipedia The reason for using the "www" hostname prefix when entering websites is now a matter of history. It's old. Deprecated. Outdated. Antiquated. Like websites that only work in Internet Explorer, sites that break when you use the domain alone should be firmly encouraged to join the 21st century. It's wasteful to type, and it's cumbersome to pronounce. Consider that it takes nine syllables to properly enunciate three characters.

The Future The Future The Future....

Everybody tries t be the 'south sayer on the mountain top' who picks the winner in all new developments but is there ever a true winner? Linkedin & Facebook are two different applications in the general area of soft networking.... one is totally business orientated and the other is definitely more social.
Winner implies a battle between equals & there are so many differences in how they function that these are not comparable as far as I'm concerned

clipped from www.readwriteweb.com Written by Bernard Lunn / November 16, 2007 / 11 comments In the heyday of the Facebook hype (it seems so long ago now!), Facebook was going to eat LinkedIn’s lunch. Based on recent experience, I don’t think so. I recently had reason to use LinkedIn seriously, using my existing network to tap into a market that I had not previously been exposed to. I had not used LinkedIn since the early days, so this was my first serious update. LinkedIn and The Future of Business Networking I have NOT used Facebook seriously. I registered out of curiosity about the phenomenon and found that the only network I could join was based on zip code - and that was useless. Then Read/WriteWeb set up a group on Facebook, but I looked once and left. When I want the Read/WriteWeb network, I go to the site itself

The Future is NOW!!!

Any good Tech Business knows that the most important strategy is to decide well in advance who's going to buy you out and keep that relationship growing. In my world its referred to as the back door strategy. Facebook & Microsoft have long had that relationship ..... here's proof.

clipped from money.cnn.com Microsoft signs two-part Facebook deal An equity investment and an expanded ad deal bring software's giant and the Net's darling even closer together. By David Kirkpatrick, Fortune senior editor NEW YORK (Fortune) -- With its $240 million equity investment announced Wednesday, along with a commitment to expand its pre-existing relationship as exclusive third-party representative for advertising on Facebook, Microsoft has cemented its connection to the company Silicon Valley is obsessed with. In a way nobody has seen since the early days of Google (Charts, Fortune 500), the collective attention of Silicon Valley is focused on one company. Facebook has everyone riveted for two reasons. First, it seems to represent the future of the Web because it is such an elegantly-designed way for individuals to connect with each other. The socially-networked Internet is what techies see as the next thing and Facebook is the standard-bearer. October 25 2007: 8:15 AM EDT

PayPal ?????

clipped from money.cnn.com Meet the PayPal mafia An inside look at the hyperintelligent, superconnected pack of serial entrepreneurs who left the payment service and are turning Silicon Valley upside down. Fortune's Jeffrey O'Brien reports. By Jeffrey M. O'Brien, Fortune senior editor (Fortune Magazine) -- A door opens, and a blond man appears in a white jacket with large buttons. "Good morning," he says. "Peter's in back. Make yourself comfortable in the dining room. I'll be serving breakfast shortly." Holy cannoli. Peter Thiel has a butler. The 40-year-old entrepreneur runs a $3 billion hedge fund. He's the founder of a new venture capital firm that's the talk of Silicon Valley. He's got an early $500,000 stake in Facebook that's now worth about $1 billion on paper. The man has bankrolled everything from restaurants to movies and is lauded by many as some kind of free-market genius. He drives a half-million-dollar McLaren supercar. And now a butler.

These are a great resource for any written project .... take a look

clipped from www.makeuseof.com 3 Excellent Sites to Get Free Document Templates Nov. 6th, 2007 | by Aibek | 1,508 Views Once in a while we all need some kind of document, it may be a business plan presentation, rental contract, non-disclosure agreement, or even a name change request form. In most cases, Googling the document may ultimately get you what you need, but it’s both time consuming and frustrating. Below, I want to go through 3 excellent resources that can provide you with any professional document or form template for free. (1) Docstoc - Extremely useful community-powered service for sharing all kinds of business document templates. If you need a professional document, Docstoc is the first place to check out. Whether it’s a legal document, a business form or whatever is out there. Docstoc was launched just recently but already counts over 65.000 user-submitted documents, covering legal, business, financial, technology, and education areas. For all Docstoc features and video demo check out Docstoc profile here.

Proof that the tide has turned....

clipped from gigaom.com As Online Advertising Grows, The Question Is How Much Is Too Much? Written by Om Malik Wednesday, November 7, 2007 at 11:45 PM PT This being the week of ad:tech, news of online advertising has dominated the conversation: from MySpace’s hyper- targeted ads to Facebook’s new ad system to broadband advertising systems introduced by companies such as AnchorFree. The advertising, of course, is becoming social, mobile, and behavioral. If you take all this into account, and juxtapose it against the recent eMarketer’s forecast — U.S. online advertising nearly doubling from $21.4 billion in 2007 to $42 billion in 2011, representing about 13 percent of the total ad-spend — what you get is a pretty decent context for the ongoing battle amongst Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo (YHOO), phone & cable companies, wireless carriers, Facebook, MySpace (NWS) and countless other startups.

oh to be young again....

Stuff I Wish I Knew When I Was 16

By Awesomeology on Oct 23, 2007 in Awesome Links

The following comes from a comment from username qgyh2 on Reddit. The question was basically “I’m 16…What did you wish you knew at my age?” Here’s qgyh2’s phenomenal answer…

1. Enjoy your youth, don’t wait till body parts fall off/stop working/have to be removed. In other words, have a LOT of sex. True, you probably will be able to have sex as you grow older, but you will be limited by age, strength, and pliability. Also, your choice of hot partners decreases as time goes.
2. Have fun, because by the time you are older, everything you want to do which constitutes fun will be either illegal, immoral, or downright stupid. Note: There are some things you can put off till later. For example, if you have a favorite TV series which you want to watch, but don’t have much time, its better to concentrate on your studies now because ten years later, you can buy the HD DVD and watch that TV series you missed on your brand new 300 inch TV (DRM permitting).
3. Be careful of cigarettes, alcohol, don’t overdo anything. They can make you end up in hospital. Which is, in some cases, worse than death. Look after your body. Don’t do things that make it worse off, after all, you only have one body - try not to abuse it too much as, when you are older, health tends to become the number one issue. And, the way things are going, pretty soon nobody will be able to afford healthcare. If you must experiment with drugs, try less harmful drugs, not the ones which can kill you, and make sure you do drugs in a safe responsible manner, with someone you can trust near you. Or, better yet, just don’t do drugs/don’t drink (excessively). As crazy as it may seem, this is probably the best attitude you can take, after all, the less chemicals you stuff into your body, the better. Your liver, for example, will thank you if you stay clear of alcohol.
4. BE CAREFUL OF DEBT: When you are young, you tend to think “hey, I’ll be rich when I’m old, so no problem. Thing is, when you are older, it sucks to have a ton of debt and belong to banks. You wind up having to make twice the amount of money you need to live - as half your earnings go to pay debts. never ever spend more than you earn - never have a negative net worth
5. Think about your old age. You will, eventually grow old. So, save money, invest, and so on.
6. Be nice to people around you.. family members… siblings.. friends. Later on, when you are old, you will need them.
7. Make good friends. Hang around smart intelligent educated ‘moral’ people. Form networks - these networks matter to get jobs, etc. Remember, 90% of the good things you get in life (jobs, stock tips, hot dates) will be informally, via your network of friends/colleagues.
8. Plan your life actively. If you want to have kids, realize that each kid will need anything from half a million to a million bucks. So first, earn shitload’s of money, otherwise, don’t have kids. The biggest problem with being young is that one tends not to ’see’ the future, assuming that it will take care of itself. Not necessarily. **Yes you will probably keep living but your quality of life will be deeply impacted by the choices you make
9. Try to recognize trends - see what careers, technologies, ideas are ‘hot’ and learn about them. Surf reddit a lot. It’s a great place to pick up new ideas
10. As far as education goes:
    1. FIRST, Choose your career Try to decide as early as possible, the career you want. First research it out fully. Talk with people in that field. Try to find the newest trends, and do a college degree in those areas. These days, you have to specialize to an extreme level. So choose your field and specialization wisely.
    2. read (learn new things everyday)
    3. try to grasp the overall big picture in everything you study. This is better than studying specifics, as when you ‘understand’ a topic you are better off than just knowing specific facts.
    4. study something you like. Pick careers in areas you like.
    5. plan in advance. Select your career with a lot of careful thought, because it’s hard to change careers.
    6. try to have a working knowledge of everything around you - i.e. if you have a car, have a basic understanding of automobiles. If you have a computer, know how computers work, how to fix them, etc. Extend this general idea to everything around you. It’s better to know a little bit about everything than be a specialist in one thing (except as far as careers go where you probably will have to specialize)
    7. Get to know your lecturers/professors. Chat with them occasionally, participate actively in class. They will appreciate you for this and tend to be more generous when grading your work. Ask questions, after all, thats what you are paying for. Get the best out of your education.
11. Don’t let anyone convince you to do something you don’t want to do. Choose your friends wisely. Remember, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.
12. Stand out in a positive way. among friends, peers, colleagues, be the one who is remembered (in a positive way!)
13. Invest in people. Develop good friendships and relationships - But choose the people you invest in, wisely. By invest I don’t necessarily mean money, it could be time, help, whatever.
14. Buy smart: Before you buy anything, first research your options. e.g. if you are buying a car, buy one that will last you at least a few years. This saves you money. if you are going to buy a TV, spend a week and research options available, technologies etc.

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Here is one for the body watchers.... and help the Burn Treatment Society

These guy's are off to Les Vegas for a week of competition and sun. Hopefully they will be successful and bring home more than new sun tans

clipped from www.combatchallengehalifax.com Halifax's finest is proud to present our first ever calendar - 2008 is going to be a hot year! The 13 men who grace the pages of this calendar took their shirts off to raise funds for the Nova Scotia Burn Treatment Society and the Halifax Combat Challenge Teams. Nova Scotia Firefighters and the Burn Treatment Society continue to advance their mission of educating, healing and helping victims of burn injuries. The Society, with the help and participation of firefighters throughout Nova Scotia, hold special fund raising events each year. The proceeds from these events are used to fulfill special requests from the two burn treatment centers in Nova Scotia, Camp Connect, and Burn injury support groups. With your support, we can make a difference in the lives of injured Nova Scotians. The Halifax Fire Fighters Calendar can be purchased for $10 on-line, and during various Combat Challenge events. Contact Us: info@combatchallengehalifax.com