S2Systems » admin

In Search For Details About Inexpensive Shed Plans?

admin — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 11:49:35 +0000

In pursuit of shed plans? There are a lot of of us, who would have burnt up a lot of cash and energy on building sheds, wooden projects. There may be a lot of work needed in it. We would need to get an individual who can sketch the plan first. Then someone who may give the architectural pattern for the shed with all the technical information. We need to determine on the materials and the quantities necessary. Then once we do get down to constructing the shed, we find that the dimensions have gone incorrect and we have to do it throughout again. Now, there isn’t a need to fret about all those methods anymore, if you are in search of constructing a shed. There is a e book obtainable on-line that has more than 12 thousand shed building plans. No matter could be the goal of your wooden project, there is a plan out there in the e book, shed plan elite. The author offers step-by-step guides for building the shed. He has taken care of each little element and so guards you from all the concern. exhaustive blue prints are available and hence you do not must go round fishing for an architect. All that is out there in a vocabulary that anyone can comprehend. He makes it quite simple and extremely easy. From now constructing sheds ought to be fun and never a irritating experience

Employers Can Terminate Employees For Medical Marijuana Use, In Oregon

admin — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 11:28:31 +0000

The Oregon State Supreme Court recently issued a decision in Emerald Steel Fabricators v. Bureau of Labor and Industrial Relations (Oregon, April 15, 2010), which addressed whether employers could terminate an employee for using medical marijuana.

The court’s decision? Yes!

Oregon has joined California and Washington in ruling that employers can terminate employees for using medical marijuana. The rationale is that while statutes decriminalizing the use of marijuana for medical purposes protects employees from criminal prosecution, the same laws do not prevent employers from terminating an employee for violating a company’s anti-drug policy.

In addition, the employee in question was also found using medical marijuana in an illegal manner anyway.

atlanta homes & lifestyles: the app

admin — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 10:37:02 +0000

The fact that I write a blog does not mean that I am a particularly “tech savvy” person. I actually am being pushed into this new world kicking and screaming. It’s mainly my dear husband Steve that pushes me to explore all things tech, especially if it has an “i” in front of it. His latest gift to me: the ipad.

For the last few weeks my ipad has been sitting on my desk. Every once in a while I would press that little button and look at my email or go on the internet to visit a blog. But this weekend something changed. Steve showed me the Atlanta Homes & Lifestyles Magazine App.

This app displays past issues on shelves and allows you to purchase past issues for $.99 each.

I can bookmark articles that I love, and I can take pictures of the images that will then be saved in my iphoto. All I have to do is press the power button and the home button to take a screen shot, and it saves the image in my iphoto library.

I took pictures of these images of Architect Keith Summerour’s own home from the August 2009 issue.

I also bookmarked the article in my favorites.

The image quality on the ipad is amazing. It’s so much easier to carry around my ipad than all of my past Atlanta Homes & Lifestyles Magazine issues!

To learn more about their app, check out this post on the Atlanta Homes & Lifestyles blog.

Do you have an ipad? If so, I’d love to hear about your favorite design apps!

Tom on Tour: Dissecting Ben Curtis

admin — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 14:58:05 +0000

The media fly. Tom drives. The media sleep in hotels. Tom sleeps in his car. The media sit in the media center. Tom walks the course. It’s the PGA Tour, seen and written differently. Following are a few observations about Ben Curtis from Tom’s e-book on the 2010 Shell Houston Open.

By Tom Collins
Special to ARMCHAIR GOLF

DUE TO THE LAYOUT of the course—which is a nice way of saying it’s a long walk to get to 89 percent of the holes here—I wanted to follow a group teeing off of the first hole and simply walk with that group for the duration. When I reviewed the tee sheet and the clock on the wall, the decision was relatively simple.

I didn’t want to deal with the crowds following Phil [Mickelson] and I didn’t want to watch the ridiculously slow pre-shot routine of Michael Allen, so that meant following the group in the middle of these two opposing forces: Will MacKenzie, Chez Reavie, and Ben Curtis. Although I’m familiar with Curtis after his stellar play last week at Bay Hill and his 2003 Open Championship win, I didn’t know anything about MacKenzie or Reavie—and that’s just the way I like it.

Later …

Ben Curtis has a half-moon cookie swing. That’s the best way to describe it. The backswing and follow through are two different colors of the same baked good. Whereas his backswing is crisp and his wrists set themselves quickly to bring the club back to parallel, his follow through is more of a lazy, sweeping motion. His swing almost slows down as it progresses, and he finishes high, almost to help the ball into the air. Obviously, when his timing is on, he’s REALLY ON. You can’t win an Open Championship, besting the greatest players in the world, without a good swing.

Later …

Watching each player warm up to tee off of the 8th, I couldn’t help but wonder about the look that’s always plastered on Curtis’ face. As a professional golfer, his eyes and facial expressions make him look like a super-nice guy, perhaps even a bit of a push-over. He always looks like he’s just waking up or squinting like the Godfather. If he were a hitman making contract kills, the look he has on his face right now would be the scariest thing I have ever seen in my life.

And later still …

Ben Curtis made a par, but I almost fell asleep when I tried to watch him. He takes as much time over his putts as Jeff Maggert does for every shot. Come on Ben, there’s no coffee around here for 1,000 yards.

US Researchers Aim to Improve Air Conditioning Efficiency

admin — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 07:39:37 +0000

A team of researchers from the Palo Alto Research Center have been hard at work on a new thermoacoustic cooling technology that could reduce air conditioning power usage by 50%. With a prototype currently in production and plans to have the technology ready for the market within the next few years, the researchers hope to eliminate upwards of 10% of the United States’ energy usage.

Air conditioning maintenance account for approximately 25% of home energy usage, a figure that’s made up primarily of air conditioning systems in the ultra-hot Southern states. South-western states such as California, Nevada, and Arizona are known for their extreme temperatures, with daytime heat regularly exceeding 110 degrees Fahrenheit.

With standard air conditioning systems only approaching 12% total efficiency, the new technology could be a much-needed boost to systems’ value. With the recession still affecting employment and income for many families, a large amount of people are cutting down on air conditioning usage to escape a high power bill.

However, while air conditioning is often seen as a major expense, it’s rare to find inefficient modern units. The majority of air conditioning complaints come from those with ageing air conditioning installations, or households that operate their systems inefficiently.

Even so, any developments towards greater energy efficiency are great progress. The United States currently generates upwards of 600 million tons of carbon dioxide. The Palo Alto Research Center aim to use their technology for reducing carbon usage, with targets of under 300 million tons per year.

A Masters in Education Rounds Out My Resume

admin — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 06:49:06 +0000

The work world is certainly competitive at the moment; people are getting laid off from positions they have held for years and the job market is flooded not only with people who have just graduated but also those who have been in their careers for some time and are suddenly finding themselves out of work. I graduated in May with a degree in elementary education and like the rest of my fellow graduates found myself facing a tough economy and cold job market. I was not able to find a position. There were many teachers who may have at one time considered retiring at the end of the year but, nervous about economic conditions, decided to hang in there for awhile in their job. So there were fewer positions that were open for new teachers.

I’m not sitting around though. I am all registered to substitute teach throughout the year which will be great and give me a chance to get to know several districts nearby me. I have also decided to take the time to go after my Masters in Education. Getting my masters was always something that I intended to do and this seemed like a better time than any so I decided to seize the opportunity. But I didn’t want to go back to the classroom and commit my days to traveling to campus when I could conceivably be called in to substitute. The answer was to enroll in an online Masters in Education program that would allow me to complete all my work and studying at my home computer where I was comfortable and during the times that were convenient for me.

The online Masters in Education program is the very best use of my time this coming school year as I get my foot in the door and round out my resume.

Web services

admin — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 10:45:14 +0000

Web services are typically application programming interfaces (API) or web APIs that are accessed via Hypertext Transfer Protocol and executed on a remote system hosting the requested services. Web services tend to fall into one of two camps: Big Web Services^[1] and RESTful Web Services.
“Big Web Services” use Extensible Markup Language (XML) messages that follow the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) standard and have been popular with traditional enterprise. In such systems, there is often a machine-readable description of the operations offered by the service written in the Web Services Description Language (WSDL). The latter is not a requirement of a SOAP endpoint, but it is a prerequisite for automated client-side code generation in many Java and .NET SOAP frameworks (frameworks such as Spring, Apache Axis2 and Apache CXF being notable exceptions). Some industry organizations, such as the WS-I, mandate both SOAP and WSDL in their definition of a web service.

Web services in a service-oriented architecture.

Web API is a development in web services (in a movement called Web 2.0) where emphasis has been moving away from SOAP based services towards Representational State Transfer (REST) based communications.^[2] REST services do not require XML, SOAP, or WSDL service-API definitions.

Web APIs allow the combination of multiple web services into new applications known as mashups.^[3]

When used in the context of web development, web API is typically a defined set of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request messages along with a definition of the structure of response messages, usually expressed in an Extensible Markup Language (XML) or JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format.

When running composite web services, each sub service can be considered autonomous. The user has no control over these services. Also the web services themselves are not reliable; the service provider may remove, change or update their services without giving notice to users. The reliability and fault tolerance is not well supported; faults may happen during the execution. Exception handling in the context of web services is still an open research issue.

The W3C defines a “web service” as “a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. It has an interface described in a machine-processable format (specifically Web Services Description Language WSDL). Other systems interact with the web service in a manner prescribed by its description using SOAP messages, typically conveyed using HTTP with an XML serialization in conjunction with other web-related standards.”^[4]

The W3C also states, “We can identify two major classes of web services, REST-compliant Web services, in which the primary purpose of the service is to manipulate XML representations of Web resources using a uniform set of “stateless” operations; and arbitrary Web services, in which the service may expose an arbitrary set of operations

Celebs Picnic and Play for Pediatric AIDS

admin — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 10:57:00 +0000

Celebrities and their kids came out in force Sunday to support the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation‘s Celebrity Picnic: A Time for Heroes.

Held at the Wadsworth Great Lawn in Los Angeles, families moved from station to station — hosted by Disney, 77kids, Oopsy Daisy and Michael Stars — enjoying music, crafts, carnival games and storytelling. All in all, the event is expected to have raised over $1.3 million towards eradicating pediatric AIDS.

At left, Jaime Pressly and her son Dezi James, 3, wave goodbye after a busy day filled with fun.

The actress is celebrating life as a newlywed — she married lawyer Simran Singh in Sept.

Gold demand means price has more upside

admin — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 09:01:31 +0000

A decade ago, there was “literally one pallet of gold” in JP Morgan’s vault, says Neil Clift, the bank’s managing director. But these days it’s a “very, very different story”.

Banks and security firms are building more vaults; vault staff are working six days a week; and armoured lorries to move gold into bank vaults have been run off their wheels.

In May, says Javier Blas in the FT, the daily average amount of gold moved by London banks hit 24.7 million ounces. That was a 55% month-on-month increase and the biggest jump since the London Bullion Market Association began keeping clearing records in 1996. Around 250 million ounces, or two years’ mined supply, is stored in London.

Physical gold is “being sought more than ever”, says Peter Hambro of Petropavlovsk. That is due to a sea change in the gold market. For the first time in three decades, investors are driving demand by snapping up coins and bars that are typically stored for the long term…

Investment demand is set to hit another record high next year, says the World Gold Council. No wonder. Western economies are drowning in debt and will be tempted to take “the path of least resistance” by inflating debt away, says Tim Price of PFP Wealth Management.

With mine production peaking a decade ago, as John Baron notes in Investors Chronicle, there’s still plenty of upside.

ELEC To Take Up Rulemaking On Use of Campaign Funds for Legal Fees

admin — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 10:35:19 +0000

On January 20, 2009, the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission (ELEC) is going to formally propose rule making clarifying the rules regarding the expenditure of campaign funds on legal fees.

Clearly, in light of more sophisticated campaigning and the rules governing the same, the expenditure of campaign funds on legal fees is permissible in many circumstances, but not all. The involvement of lawyers to provide guidance on ballot access issues, campaign finance, on election day and in recounts or election contests is commonplace in the post Bush v. Gore environment.

This proposal would explicitly exclude the use of campaign funds for legal fees and expenses relating to the “criminal defense of a candidate or officeholder, including defense in a criminal inquiry or criminal investigation, and defense of a criminal indictment or other criminal proceeding.”

This rule making arises from now-convicted former New Jersey State Senator Wayne Bryant’s advisory opinion request filed in January 2008, in which ELEC held that the use of campaign funds for legal fees and other expenses in connection with Bryant’s defense of a criminal indictment, is not an “ordinary and necessary expense” of an officeholder and therefore is not a permissible use of campaign funds. On December 4, 2008, ELEC’s advisory opinion was affirmed by the Appellate Division. See In Re Election Law Enforcement Commission Advisory Opinion No. 01-2008 (A-2816-07T1).

What About Others Who Spent Campaign Funds On Legal Fees for Their Criminal Defense? According to the Star-Ledger: Former state Sen. and Newark Mayor Sharpe James (D-Essex) and former Sen. Joseph Coniglio (D-Bergen) did not ask for ELEC approval when they dipped into their own campaign accounts to fight corruption charges. ELEC has not filed complaints against James or Coniglio. Frederick Hermann, ELEC’s executive director, said today he could not comment on either case. But he said ELEC will “review the decision in terms of possible future commission action.”