I recently planned our drive up the California coast using my wireless internet Stockton connection. There are a few things in California that I have yet to see. This past summer, my husband and I found ourselves with some time on our hands. We decided that we were going to spend a week driving up the California coast. I did a lot of research on the internet before we planned our trip. There were some things that I knew that I wanted to see, but also some things that I wasn’t familiar with that I learned about over the internet. I wanted to visit Big Sur and the Redwood Forrest. Something that I learned about on the internet that I wanted to visit was in San Simeon, California. It is the Hearst mansion. It was built by the media mogul in the early 1920’s. It is a truly impressive compound. One thing that is really impressive about it is all of the European artwork and architectural antiques that are housed there. Most everything that decorates the amazing mansion was imported to America and bought at auction houses in New York.

Eventually I saw one that seems to be good carpet cleaners (http://www.thesteamteam.com/). I think I heard about them before. Probably I saw some review or a blog post somewhere. I noticed that they also do other sorts of cleaning and pet odor treament.

I don’t own a dog so definitely my car isn’t soiled with dog hairs and dog smells. But it’s nice to know that they can also handle it when needed.

At least I don’t have to mess around with my car carpet. It’s nice to be able to delegate such tasks to somebody else. Well, I could be cheap and do it myself but I suppose my results would not be as great as the pros. Plus I don’t clean my auto carpet that often so, I think paying somebody to do it would be a better so I can just more time with my family.

First I needed a drain claw home depot yesterday so I got one. Then a few months ago, we need a replacement for one of our living room chairs so we got this cool looking eggplant chair. That piece looked lovely in our living room. The dark shade really plays a good contrast on our lighter colored walls.

Now on to our cleaning stuff. I’ve been putting this off for too long. We haven’t had our carpet cleaned for a while and why I could just dial in one of those carpet cleaner services out there, I think in the long run, it would be wise just to invest in an electrolux carpet cleaner and just save some bucks and do the cleaning ourselves.

Then lastly, it’s time to de-clutter our tables and workarea. I bought some of these 3×5 envelopes to organize our receipts and bills and those small paper stuff that needs organizing. It’s nice to separate all these receipts into categories so it’s easier for me to have an envelope for entertainment receipts, car receipts, house repair receipts, shopping receipts..etc. Good for tracking how much we spend on each expense category.

“Underwater mortgages are mortgage arrangements that effectively leave the owner with more debt on the property than the current market value. – Wisegeek”

Typically this happens when a homeowner uses the same home to have a 2nd or 3rd mortgage coupled with the value of the property going down. I guess this would mean there will be a lot of foreclosures in San Diego in the next coming months.

In the light of these events, the Matt Battiata and the Battiata Real Estate Group will host an event called “Seminar for Upside Down Homeowners” at 5 convenient San Diego County locations Tuesday, November 15 through Saturday, November 19.

Here are the dates, times and locations:

Tuesday, Nov 15 Carlsbad: Carlsbad Resort by the Sea @ 6pm
Wednesday, Nov 16 Escondido: California Center for the Arts @ 6pm
Thursday, Nov 17 Mission Valley: Courtyard Marriott Mission Valley@ 6pm
Friday, Nov 18 Chula Vista: Chula Vista Comfort Inn 632 E St @ 6pm
Saturday, Nov 19 Del Mar: Del Mar Hilton @ 12 Noon

Guest post written by Emily Rogerson

When I sent our oldest daughter off to a college in the northeast, I thought that she would be fine. But I guess that she and I have both realized how much colder it can get up there! When she came home for fall break a few weeks ago, she told me that she was going to need a much thicker coat!

We went shopping at our local mall, but after finding just a few so-so options, we decided to go online with our wireless internet Greensboro to see if we could find anything better that way.

We did find some really cute options that were also heavily lined. I was surprised to find a good puffer coat with some good structure. We even found one with a belt! She was grateful and so was I that we were able to find her a heavy coat. Now I won’t have to worry about her freezing up there when she’s trying to get to class and the library to study! Besides, who can concentrate on studying if your teeth are chattering?

One of the early cloud hosting I’ve encountered is from Media Temple. Nowadays there’s a lot of choices. I had experience in using rackspace cloud and it’s ok. Not bad at all, but not cheap either. The only problem I’ve encountered is that in rackspace cloud, I’m getting a lot of akismet false positives. The reason is that the remote IP address being detected is not the IP of the visitor. It’s the IP address of rackspace cloud’s load balancer.

Another important thing to consider is the control panel. I’ve used both plesk and cpanel. My personal choice is cpanel. It’s such a great control panel together with WHM.

Last is support. I have used shared hosting before with very lousy support. It was one of those ultra-cheap hostings run by amateurs. Eventually those aren’t really good choices. Price isn’t the only thing that matters. Peace of mind that websites and servers are up 99.9% and day to day problems will be taken cared of is what ultimately matters.

A couple of years ago, probably it was (2003-2005), I once the telephone companies offered their first decent internet service, I jumped in. I think the speed back then was about 384kbps. Still slow compared to today’s standards but hey, it was a huge leap from the old 56k dialup speed.

Today, I got a good dsl connection at about 2Mbps. Not bad but still not the greatest. Even cable companies now offer cable internet so it is no longer the turf of telephone companies. I believe cable internet can deliver services at much higher bandwidth since a typical cable can handle different video channels at the same time in the same cable connection.

The latest I think are the fiber optic connections. With a fiber optic connection, it uses light to send those one’s and zero’s at a faster rate. The speed of light is about 300,000 kilometers per second. Just imagine how many individual “bits” of data can you squeeze in that connection. Plus if you have like 1,000 strands of optic fiber in one cable, that’s huge!

I did some research about a week ago and the country with the fastest internet connection is Korea. They’ve probably laid down some of the best/fastest infrastructure. That’s some big investment. But I guess it’ll pay off since they can do a lot of things faster.

A few months ago, we had an event in a local mall where we would show off some of the robotics projects we have. There’s one project from our friend Henry which is really a crowd favorite. It’s a robotic rover similar to the Mars rover.

The nice idea was that the batteries used were digital camera batteries. What we like about it is that such batteries have more capacity and therefore the rover can operate longer than the usual NiMh batteries.

To be able to “tap” into the terminals, what Henry used were screws. He lined up 2 screws so it lined up perfectly with the battery terminals, so the battery “sits” on top of these 2 screws which act as the positive and negative terminal. Then wires or connections come from those 2 screws to power the main board of the rover controller. Cool Idea.

Typically, a digital camera battery uses Li-ion which can store more energy per weight than nicads or NiMh. Typical Nikon EN EL9 batteries have 7.4V and has a capacity of 1000mAh.

My husband is a captain in the Air Force and we found out last week that he will be stationed at Shepard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas. When we got married, I knew that we would be stationed at different bases in the United States and I was fully prepared to be an army wife. However, I am totally unfamiliar with Texas, so I’ve already started to try to figure out how to set up our utilities once we get there. I found out from another Air Force wife that I can go to Texaselectricityproviders.com to set up fixed-rate energy, which could save us some money. I also found out which cell phone carrier has the best service for the area in which we will be living. At least those are two things I will not have to worry about once we get there. It will probably be hard to move to each new base while we are an Air Force family, but I have learned that the other Air Force families are a great support system and will help to make each move go smoothly.

We all know that there are risks to smoking. A lot of people have tried quitting smoking but their hands and lips aren’t ready for the sudden withdrawal of a cigarette. It’s a habbit and your body is still craving for that physical sensation of a cigarette. Fortunately, there’s a good way to “fill” in that crave, the electronic cigarette.

The e cigarette as fondly called by many is an electrical device that mimics the way a cigarette works. It has the same physical appearance, and it even has “smoke” or mist that you can inhale. I believe it uses some sort of ultrasonic device to vaporize a glycerin based liquid solution.

An electronic cigarette, or e-cigarette, is an electrical device that simulates the act of tobacco smoking by producing an inhaled mist bearing the physical sensation, appearance, and often the flavor and nicotine content of inhaled tobacco smoke; though lacking its odor, and intended to omit its health risks. The device uses heat, or in some cases ultrasonics, to vaporize a propylene glycol- or glycerin-based liquid solution into an aerosol mist, similar to the way a nebulizer or humidifier vaporizes solutions for inhalation.

I think smokers who are serious in quitting, this electric cigarette is a powerful tool and serves as an inbetween device that they can use to attain that ultimate goal of not smoking at all. I have many friends that tried the abrupt approach of just quitting and they keep on coming back. However, with this device, they can gradually “phase out” their craving for smoking.