jamers

My strangest dream was what you might call a nightmare. It is the only time I have ever been really scared even after waking up. In fact, I had to wake one of my room mates to make sure I was really awake it freaked me out so much. It was one of those dreams where you start to realize you are dreaming and when you try to wake up you can't, when you try to speak you can't then you start to panic and try very hard to concentrate and yell to get someone to help you and nothing comes out. I did notice after trying a few times that if I tried to yell I think I was hearing myself moaning. I have one of those micro cassette recorders and if I were having recurring lucid dreams I would have it set to voice activation and place it beside my bed each night to see if I can record anything interesting. Anyway, not that it matters much what it is about since the feelings are the same when you realize you are dreaming or sleeping and cannot wake yourself but this is what mine was about on this particular night. My bedroom has a huge bay window with flower beds in the front yard below. In my dream I am laying in bed and hear something... no not really hear, more like I sense something is digging around in the flower bed so I look over to the window and I can't see anything from bed so I try to get up and realize I am stuck in place. *BLEEP*, that's scary when you can't move and there are intruders lurking about. Well, I don't remember ever actually seeing anything and the best recollection I have of the scene in my bedroom was not really accurate because it seemed as though I was looking up at the window wishing I could get up to look outside and confirm if there was someone or something in my flowerbed below my window. I must have been trying to wake myself for a long time because when I finally woke up I was wet from sweating in my bed. Of course there was nothing to see outside and I went to wake my room mate to make sure I was really awake. I look back and wish I had gone outside the next day to look at the flower bed but I never did do that. I have had dreams like this before in which I could not wake up and it does cause some panic when you realize you are sleeping yet cannot wake up. This time was different because of the sounds or the feeling that something was outside under my window. I wait until this point in my story to reveal that there was a feeling that it was no racooon out there. In fact my feeling was that there was some alien being out there scratching around under my window. So now you can really relate to the level of panic I must have felt at that time. Not that there was anything sinister or dangerous about the incident at all. Simply the unkown can be extremely frightening, apparently. So, in pondering these types of dreams I am starting to think about telepathy and things like the frequency with which our bodies electrical impulses are operating at and it makes me wonder about a few things. Could it be possible that during our unconsious times at sleep, daydreaming or meditating etc. that our minds might be in a better state for sending and/or receiving some kind of communications be they intentional or not? Other questions that comes up are somewhat spiritual. Do people who seek enlightenment through meditation and various healing arts experience a similar state of mind? If you can then carry this state of mind at all times and still function in your daily activities would this be a step in the evolution of the human psyche? If so, could this state then be induced artificially and on demand with either drugs, sound waves, electrical impulses or some other method? Answers to these kinds of questions may be found in talking with people who have devoted their lives to practicing healing arts such as yoga and various forms of meditation. Devi Tide, the Head of the Sufi Healing Order in North America has spoken (among other venues) at the Harvard Mind Body Institute promoting Sufi Ideals of inter-religious harmony and personal transformation. Swami-ji Sundaranand is a master yogi who lives in India near the source of the sacred Ganges River in the Himalayas. Swami-ji shares his knowledge on how to open your mind by cleansing the subtle physical nervous and spiritual centers of the body and how to balance the nervous system among other things. I mention these people because I know they have both been the subject of film maker Victor Demko from Toronto, Canada and are featured guests in his holistic health DVD series available at: http://thecenterforhealingarts.com/view-sample-clips.php A truly unique experience waits for those who are looking for guidance or knowledge of any healing arts. Seeing Swami-ji face to face while listening to the DVD is something else when you consider where and how he lives in seclusion in the Himalayas all the way over there in India. (I live in Canada so I would never be able to know Swami-ji or his words if not for the fact that I can get the DVD) Every 2 months there is another film created featuring a new guest on DVD. I think I am going to start using the forums at the center to post some of these questions to the community of healing arts practitioners.

I am interested to know more about your business. I used to provide customer service and IT support for several large companies and I understand some of the problems you need to overcome. What I find most interesting is with the advancement of broadband provided to end users there are more and more opportunities to work from home. Of course, many of the problems which plague even the most highly regarded call centers in the world will continue to present problems and challenges under the "nature of the beast" excuse. Probably the largest concern is how the hell to flog your employees remotely! Customer service is so competitive that there are often as many QA employees as there are front line agents answering the phones! Unfortunately when it gets to that point the executives all fear for the future of their jobs and in a panic start to find ways to monitor each phone call and have follow up interviews with QA persons to try and figure out why your consistent 9.68% sitisfaction rating dipped to 9.2% last week. They will look at things like training to try and figure out where they need to provide training to fix the problem that they keep avoiding which is sometimes as simple as investing in proper infrastructure for managing their FAQ and HELP databases with respect to how they link with the CRM and dispatching systems. Eventually they refuse to admit they need to be smart to solve the issues and start talking about outsourcing to some other country where they can have twice as many agents for the same money and they seem to respond better to the floggings too! Good strategy for you to use in establishing remote support foundation: Set up an environment in which your front line support can be constantly adding and editing support documents and eventually it will be so robust the only managing you need to do is update when a new OS comes out or report bugs as they are discovered etc. This sort of system can be made from PHP and put up on your website with or without customer login access. Plan to provide walk through support to your customers until there is such great content arranged in such an easy way as to encourage users to walk through the steps on their own. Pseudo code works well for planning the "steps to resolution flow". Soon you can realize additional revenue streams that will pop up in ways you never imagined... Say you or a customer has a flow chart style resolution wizard running and is asked to enter the MAC address of his ethernet card at some point. Rather than have them jump through the hoops to find that info. provide a link to download software that will find your MAC address for you. Get money for clicks/leads/sales or whatever you can figure out to do there. Maybe you get such a great support site working that you have better "time to resolution" than the manufacturer. These days many manufacturers are offloading support responsibilities to resellers and they are doing a poor job indeed. You will be able to leverage another revenue stream out of that target market. Imagine you get traffic of THompson Speedtouch modems users looking for problem resolution and they aren't even your customers but now that they are using your site for support they will either convert to a customer of your email services or tell someone who will become a customer or at the very least they will already have given you something by visiting, TRAFFIC. Notice from jlhaslip: Merged Posts. Board Rules Please use the Edit feature to avoid double posting.

I became certified in several Microsoft applications including Microsoft Project back when it was called Project '98. Since then I have not had a need to use it so I wonder why I was trained in the first place. Probably needed to fill a seat for the course to be full or something like that because I was in IT supoprt programming phone systems and really didn't have to do much project management beyond coordinating user moves up to a hundred or so and that required only 6 installers and me to supervise. Ironic that now I should finally find a use for the knowledge and I don't even work there anymore. I know that Project is a great tool and very robust in fact it really is overkill for most people who can get along with much less. This is likely why you will find plenty of good freeware applications out there on the internet to fill the overkill gap. Besides, I don't have a copy of Microsoft Project anyway and I'm not about to buy one.I have seen the task manager that comes with outlook and it can certainly do the job on a small scale. I would really like something in between or just a bit better than task manager alone. It would be a real bonus if I could find a program that was geared towards managing the launch of a new business. I would expect more from business planning applications in this respect. There needs to be a chronological timeline to help visualize what needs to be done at a high level like milestones and what needs to be done at a low level so every day I can look and see what has to get done that day in order to keep on schedule and not affect any milestones. Simply recording strategy in point form using a completely flat file is about as far as you can go with the business planning applications I have tried. Really this is not much better than making my own word document with chapter titles made into links in a table of contents. There needs to be a way to project the time required to do things and you need to back date some things to make sure of things like making sure you register your domain well in advance of making a webaite and marketing materials so that it will be active and it is not bought by someone else and so on. I guess task manger would be more usefull if some things were added such as nesting tasks and being able to add a timeline with various views or ways to sort the tasks.Since there are so many freeware applications on the internet I thought I would rather hear from someone who has actually gone through the growing pains already and can recommend a good program that would do the things I would like to do as mentioned above.I would be interested to hear from anyone who has actually found and used freeware software for this purpose.

Hey,How the heck do I get regular sweaty body oil out of fabric? I'v tried everything and nothing seems to work.Doesn't seem to matter if I'm cleaning my nylon Decent or my 30,000 thread count pillow cases I got for my 50th wedding anniversary I just can't get the stains out. Although once I poured Lestoil on a pillow case and let it sit for a few hours before washing it and when it came out of the dryer I could see the marks of where the lestoil was poured onto the pillow case. I can't be buying cases of Lestoil that would just be too costly and the smell is quite strong not really something you want to mash your face into at night. Can't use bleach for obvious reasons. Once I wanted to get ring around the collar out of a goot cotton Tommy Hilfiger shirt that was pure white so I soaked the collar in a strong bleach solution and the damn color came out of the crap that they put inside the collar to make it stiff. Really upsetting because I never got to wear it much and now I have to dye it on offwhite color if I ever want to wear it again.I'm seeing all kinds of junk on the shelves that looks nice with foaming bubbles and such but I want to hear from someone who knows what I am talking about and who has the answer. It's really bugging me because I have nice sheets and pillow cases that just don't have that new look anymore because they are getting a bit faded with age but they are showing quite dark with the slightest bit of body oil. Like after one or 2 nights I'm changing the sheets. Feels like a bloody hotel and I'm just one fellow in a queen sized waterbed. I could sleep one night on one side the other night on the other side and have clean sheets 2 nights in a row. I really would like to just get the pillow cases really clean. Maybe I could wash my head before bed each night but then I'd be Like Jack Nicholson in the move "as good as it gets". Good movie by the way but he doesn't address the problem of getting the damn body oils out of fabric. Try putting on a rust colored sand washed silk shirt without fisrt taking a shower and you'll see how easily the fabric darkens with body oils. Somehow silk seems to have less of a permanent stain problem than nylon ski jackets and linen bed sheets and pillow cases. Maybe this is why grandmothers sheets were always white. Easier to keep clean, just bleach the crap out of everything. Gotta love the smell of clean laundry after it hangs in the wind for a while on crisp cold days when the air is so full of oxygen you almost don't need to wash your clothes, simply hang and let the wind and oxygen work majic on your threads man.ciao

If you intend to register a trademark, there are some things to consider first.Suppose your name is "Driving eMotions".You can conduct your own search on the internet using various services.This is called common law search because you don't need to be registeredto start doing business and using a logo/slogan etc. so you end upwith someone years down the road for example... who decides theyare going to start an organization to help women in minority groupsto be more independant, they decide to pay for TM search for the name they want to use "Driving eMotions". Since you are already doing businessusing this name they will likely find you on the internet or whereverand so they will not be allowed to register. If by some accident, theyare successful in getting registered with that name then you wouldwin any court cases regarding ownership of the trademark even thoughyou are not registered simply based on "common law" that you were"actively using" the name first. Same goes for any images used suchas your logo. Copyright on the other hand comes into effect as soonas you create something so your logo should be custom designed bya trusted designer to avoid copyright infringement cases. (alternately you can try to get written permission to use the"likeness" of any published image you like and if they say no thenhave your designer start with modifications to yiour desired designuntil you are in the safe zone and have made enough modificationsto allow you to safely display the logo without the possibility ofgetting dragged into court. Although the likelyhood of getting suedfor copyright infringement is slim you don't want to be taking any chances so do the right thing there for sure.)There are plenty of things to worry about so you had better getsome kind of business plan software to help you along the way.The local bank is a good place to start or just find something online, surely there are loads of freeware out there.Complete your plan quickly like a test That is to say fill outeverything that is really hot on your mind just to get it down.Then you can start filling in the blanks as things pop into your head.Really simple version of my steps to any online business iseasier than selling lemonade on the sidewalk. Whatever youwant to do online, any subject whatsoever, you offer enoughservices or goods etc. to get loads of users coming to your site.Once you begin to have a user body reaching critical mass youcan either continue expanding free offerings and increasing usersor you may specialize and start charging user fees. Underlying rulein my mind is always have as many revenue streams as possibleand you can't go wrong. For example you may be selling videoson DVD to a subscriber base interested in yoga or healing arts andyou are so busy flogging discs you haven't explored the possibilityof somehow funneling traffic to an affiliate program with or withoutany kind of arrangement. Or, your a photographer with a nice websiteshowing cool pics and contact info. to book a gig. This is a brick and mortarbusiness using the website as a 24/7 permanent business card.What someone like that ought to be doing is studying the types ofimages designers like to use in developing graphics for websitesand with that in mind post these images in some image gallery thathas a commision type system. Market yourself all the while as theopportunity arises to paste your links or create usernames thatare the same as your website name. Little tricks like that can add upand the next thing you know you have such a massive user basethat you can start earning some ad space bucks from things like google ad space.Maybe you're a dog trainer with a nice website you got for a reallygood deal by the local website guru guy. Pretty, online businesscard. Become the authority on instructional materials, write articles, create blogs, publish newsletters... go nuts and give as much as youcan for free and build it large and they will come big time trust me.By the time I'm done, you won't be actually training the dogs butshowing people how with instructional website tutorials and peoplecan order videos so they can see you it's done instead of just reading about it.You can offer an affiliate program to entice even your competitionto promote your products. Arrange the production and drop shipmentof the goods all automated runs while you eat, sleep and ... well youget the picture right!ciao

This is about the sitepoint design contests:I entered a logo design contest once and another designer used my concept in the same contest and when I messaged him privately he immediately started with the public ranting saying things like "the CH mentioned heart..." and "my heart looks nothing like yours...".You can't make up your own rules about copyright infringement and think that if other users tolerate it then you are safe. Some day some designer is going to file charges of infringement.This is why I have stopped entering these contests. I looked at past entries and previous contests and realized some designers simply wait until a CH (contest holder) mentions in a review they are fond of a certain feature of someones entry then the bottom feeders who don't have a creative bone in their body jump up and say "I can do that" and all of a sudden they are using this as an excuse to infringe on other design concepts. Meanwhile Sitepoint has structured these so called contests in such a way that the CH is providing encouragement to expand on each others designs by giving feedback. This is ridiculous! In a contest there should be only one entry period. Once a designer is chosen then the winning concept can be developed further offline. No need for this song and pony dance of let's see how far we can string these designers along before picking one.In this contest, Loya for example stole cafemochas concept. Even though you may be first to use an apple cafemochas apple and the rest of his design was quite different from this use of the apple so I thought that was OK. Loya, however has created a problem. In my opinion Loyas entry was so similar to cafemochas it was a direct infringemement. If that entry had been selected cafemocha should file a claim in court. Loya changed it enough so it is no longer the same design. This in my opinion was still unethical because I know cafemocha has skills enough to have probably arrived at the same results had the CH just chosen to converse with him rather than with loya.Designers are tempted to build on contest entries based on the feedback of the contest holder but this invites copyright infringement. It's only a matter of time before someone gets sued. Aside from that the industry in general is moving further into outsourcing and this practice has all the small graphics shops out there asking freelancers like me to provide samples of their designs so they can judge if I would be able to satisfy their graphics needs. To these requests I usually reply by asking for a deposit so I can trust they will pay me for my work. Come on, how stupid do they think we are? It doesn't take a genius to figure someones graphics abilities based on just about any previous works. Never will I stoop to giving away design concepts to prove my abilities.I would be interested to hear from anyone with knowledge of websites whos design contest are structured more like regular contests.

16x16 px16 colorsfavicon.icoplace in website root folderdoes not always display in all versions IE but you canput the file name at the end of your URL and see it inyour browser window to make sure it is on your server(or test using a mozilla based browser)

Here is another good video with some footage I have never seen before. Wait until you see the alien reaching out from another dimnesion to grab a guy by the arm!! This is such a creepy video taken on a cell phone by 2 guys playing ball in a back alley somewhere in Mexico!! This is a good one because it touches on all aspects of recent events such as crop circles with clear messages, prophecies and Mayan calendars revealed... http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ Don't let the presentation style keep you from watching the video. You have to see the footage and following testing of the area for traces of energy fields etc. This guy was an investigative reporter in Mexico for their equivalent of the show 60 minutes so that is what he is good at, not public speaking but then I have to assume his english is a little rough around the edges. Still worth watching though especially all the fleet sightings in Mexico. I would like to hear from anyone who has found any supportive or analytical videos on the fleet sightings as this is the first time I have seen them.

Hey, you would like to hear Michael Tsarian speak on these topics. Talk about enlightening, WOW ... I feel so stupid and used I don't know where to begin. this is a site promoting one of Michaels books... much of this is discussed in the 2 hour video The Destruction Of Atlantis [Michael Tsarian] http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ in case you want a sort of description of what is in the video http://www.atlantisbook.com/ Learn where man came from and where humans came from and what is religion all about anyway. After you see this 2 hour video you are going to feel like you just absorbed volumes of information super fast. Think I need to watch it again. It has much interpretation of ancient writings and books of the bible. One of his other presentations was 3 hours long and dealt with recent events (illuminati, new world order, freemasonry...) and was very good so when I saw his name on this video I knew it would be presented in the same style. This guy is so overflowing with details of history and religion that his level of knowledge and understanding seems to dwarf that of evangelists and the like who seem to do well at memorizing scripture but offer little interpretation.

You might like this one then... I was maybe 4 or 5 years old maybe 6 can't remember. Just barely old enough to be walking to the corner store in a small town to get candy with my little sister who would have been maybe 3.. still in diapers but walking and old enough to like icecream. Anyway we are walking back from the store on a sunny afternoon each having an icecream cone but hers was melting faster than her little tongue could lick and she held it at an angle and yes the scoop fell right on the ground. She started bawling and I felt bad and gave her my icecream cone. She was given up for adoption to distant family in the states and we did not see each other for a long time. She also had a different father than I but the same Mom. Her father was never in my life, I have no idea who or where he is or ever was. Nada. So we are now adults and she tells me she had found her Dad and touched base now and then... and on one of these occasions he tells her that he recalls having a dream in which he saw 2 kids with icecream... one was crying and the other gave an icecream cone... she had never told him the story and I am not sure if he had some feeling that the dream was about her or not ...WOW

They have been trying to say hi and much much more. Research crop circles, drupa stones, cave drawings of beings and crafts the face on Mars and the Mars Earth connection etc. then rethink how can there not be alien life. It becomes obvious once you start to put things in perspective. Saying things like "why haven't they contacted us" makes no sense if you consider this: Aliens communicating with us could very well be as tricky as trying to explain something in english to a chimpanzee. If they aren't evolved enough to understand you now then wait a few thousand years and try again. This is why there are crop circles appearing in greater frequency and greater complexity. It's communication from some time or somewhere or both and to suggest in this day and age that crop circles are hoaxes simply points out that someone has not done any research.

How can anyone say PayPal costs nothing?They get you coming and going! I freelance and use PayPal to get paid for my graphics development. I notice not only the fee to accept a deposit from my clients but also a fee to move the money to my bank so I can buy groceries with it.Once I looked at the exchange rate and noticed that even though they claim to use current exchange rates they don't. I was holding a balance of 50US dollars and the canadian dollar (I live in Canada) was worth something like .96 cents US so I was excited that I would get more than 50 bucks by the time it was converted to CA. NOT!! Those buggars are ripping people off left and right and what can you do about it if you want to be doing business online as a freelancer?There may be a few options out there like egold etc. but none as common as PayPal. Maybe the next time I get some contract to design something I will ask for a cheque and let my clients mail me payment. What a drag. I wish I was a farmer instead of a graphics designer.

I'm afraid some of these ideas though sound in theory are too little too late. The economy is in a downward spiral. I think it has been let go on purpose so that we will have no choice but to accept and even welcome the Amero when it comes. (BTW they already have some minted - search that on youtube, goolge video etc. to see for yourself)NAFTA was supposedly phase 1 in bringing about a North American Union and the Amero. This is like following suit of the European Union and the Euro. Supposedly there will be four global "Unions" (EU, NAU, APEC asian thing and one other which I forget the acronym). Once there are these four in place there will be few steps to only ONE. One gov't... one currency... one religion?? This had to be done once the European Union was formed because countries like Russia and China really want to stick it to the states and are jumping at the chance to dump US dollar holdings and buy Euros.The US dollar has been doomed for a long time now. I can only say it's a good thing we can all communicate using the internet because without information sharing none of us common folk stand a chance in this new world disorder.

You certainly need to beware of changes made to websites and how those changes might affect your standings in the search engines. I recently read about someone who used a freelance site to hire people to get her website moved to a new domain and a few other additions and she was complaining that she saw a drop in sales. When she looked at her standings she was surprised to see she was no longer on the first page of results. Well, she is back on the same freelance site ready to spend more money on the first "programmer" who says they can "fix" her website so she can have her standing back in the search engines.To her I say, wait. Give time to see if your new domain will be picked up. Make sure you register with the search engnies but don't go spending money trying to vault back to the top of Google. It took time to get there in the first place and thus you should expect it will take time to get back there again.Hopefully you have been keeping records and logs etc. so you can look back and compare who your competing sites were and if you see no new sites in higher standing than where your site used to be then you need to do nothing but register and wait. (assuming the freelancers you hired didn't remove or hinder previous SEO...) If however you see new domains encroaching or surpassing your ranking then you need to investigate those sites and see if you can figure out why they are higher than you. This is easy to see if your site has simply been bumped a few spots or even pages back. It becomes more difficult if you don't even know if the new domain has been registered or crawled yet!

I agree with Spectre. There is nothing better than quality content. Basic reason for this? Google is always adjusting their methods to make sure the search results are of a high quality. SEO freaks often go overboard which is a waste of time and sometimes they simply jump the gun like a race horse that was given too much steroids.Make your site with good content that people are interested in. Then continue to expand the site adding pages every other day until you have noticed other sites linking to you. Now you can expect to see some movement in the search engines.I once created a site giving away free images to use as navigation images with no SEO at all and only a few relevant keywords in meta tags. After spending 2 to 3 months building the site with my partner we started looking at log files and discovered we had been getting about 10,000 unique visitors per month and they were staying on our site for an average 17 minutes each. This was amazing considering at the time the owner of bingo.com had been bragging in an interview that they had a stickyness factor of 11 minutes or so. If you build it they will come and keep on coming! Even 6 years after the domain expired I can still find sites with bad links to the site that doesn't exist anymore. This is why domain hounds buy up domains only to fill the slot with some search engine portal, they know there will be residual traffic leftover from when there was quality content to be had. (vultures)One of the sites that was in the top 10 tried all sorts of tricks to get back the spot that my site took. They tried taking apart pages with 20 images each and making instead one page for each graphic image. They looked at the size of our site and must have thought that size would be the only deciding factor in search engine placement. Fools, they never did back on top!You might not think much of this story until I tell you the keywords were "free buttons".I still think back to the day we saw our site on the first page of results on goolge, altavista, MSN, yahoo and even the number one spot for about 10 days on altavista. There were plenty of search results for free buttons even back then. We were number one for a while and top 10 on a regular basis out of hundreds of thousands of other web pages with very little SEO and absolutely no internet marketing efforts. Everyone else was trying to figure out how we did it, trying to get above us in the results by making links back and forth and all sorts of tricks when all they needed to do was create pages and pages of quality content.