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Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Jackson's life was sad and tragic: Obama
Obama's condolences came one day after Jackson died at the age of 50 from an apparent cardiac arrest. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters that he discussed the death with Obama.
 | "He said to me that, obviously, 'Michael Jackson was a spectacular performer, a music icon'," Gibbs said. "The president also said ...'aspects of his life were sad and tragic'," Gibbs said. "His condolences went out to the Jackson family and to fans that mourned his loss," he added. Gibbs said he was unaware of whether Obama called the Jackson family. Jackson's sudden death has generated worldwide grieving for the icon who dominated the music scene in the 1980s and into the following decade. The US House of Representatives held a moment of silence at the beginning of its session Friday. |
Swine flu toll in India hits century, 109 affected
New Delhi: Five more people, including a 12-year-old girl, tested positive for swine flu Tuesday taking the total number of cases reported so far to 109, the health ministry said. At least 70 patients have been discharged after being fully cured.
"A total of 739 persons have been tested so far of which 109 are positive for Influenza A H1N1. The situation is being monitored," a health ministry statement said.
The ministry said that 211 out of the 739 people were identified through entry screening, 27 through contact tracing and the rest were self reported.
"Of the 109 positive cases, 70 have been discharged. Rest of them remain admitted to the identified health facility," it added.
Of the five new cases, two were reported in Bangalore, two in Mumbai and one in Delhi. The two cases in Bangalore are a 38-year-old woman and her 12-year-old daughter. Both of them had returned from New Jersey June 25.
In Mumbai, one of those who tested positive for swine flu is a 30-year-old man who travelled from London. The other is a 28-year-old man who flew in from Chile via Johannesburg.
The patient in Delhi is a 55-year-old man who had returned from Sydney.
According to World Health Organization, 116 countries have reported 70,893 laboratory confirmed cases of influenza A (H1N1). There have been 311 deaths.
"A total of 739 persons have been tested so far of which 109 are positive for Influenza A H1N1. The situation is being monitored," a health ministry statement said.
The ministry said that 211 out of the 739 people were identified through entry screening, 27 through contact tracing and the rest were self reported.
"Of the 109 positive cases, 70 have been discharged. Rest of them remain admitted to the identified health facility," it added.
Of the five new cases, two were reported in Bangalore, two in Mumbai and one in Delhi. The two cases in Bangalore are a 38-year-old woman and her 12-year-old daughter. Both of them had returned from New Jersey June 25.
In Mumbai, one of those who tested positive for swine flu is a 30-year-old man who travelled from London. The other is a 28-year-old man who flew in from Chile via Johannesburg.
The patient in Delhi is a 55-year-old man who had returned from Sydney.
According to World Health Organization, 116 countries have reported 70,893 laboratory confirmed cases of influenza A (H1N1). There have been 311 deaths.
Telecom regulator issues regulations for number portability
New Delhi: India's telecom regulator Tuesday issued draft regulations for mobile number portability (MNP), highlighting the rights, obligations and duties of service providers.
MNP allows users to switch operators without changing numbers.
"The draft regulations lay down the business process for implementing mobile number portability," the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) said in a statement here.
The guidelines have highlighted subscribers' eligibility for porting - switching operators without changing number - as well as the rights, obligations and duties of operators - both donors and recipients.
A donor is the operator from whose network the subscriber exits and the recipient is the user's new service provider.
According to the draft, a subscriber would be "eligible" to make a request for "porting" only after using his network at least 90 days.
The recipient operator, within five days of receiving a written request, has to carry out subscriber verification for acquiring the new user.
Once verified, the request will be forwarded to the donor operator for seeking its clearance.
Upon receipt of the porting request, the donor operator will verify and in turn communicate the details to the MNP service provider within two working days.
TRAI had first floated the consultation paper on MNP in July 2005 followed by the regulator submitting the recommendations in 2006 to the Department of Telecom (DoT).
Subsequently, DoT issued guidelines last August and envisaged geographical division of the country into two number portability zones, each consisting of 11 licensed service areas.
In March, two MNP service providers were selected - one for each zone - Syniverse Technologies (in north and western India) and MNP Interconnection Telecom Solutions (for east and southern India).
TRAI has sought comments from the stakeholders on these draft regulations by July 14.
11 Useful SpeedLinks for Blogger Users
Here are some of the best tutorials and sites for Blogger users which have caught my attention this week:
1. Customized Feedburner Subscription Box After reading a thread on the Blogger Buster forums about customizing Feedburner's email subscription box, Doug Cloud has written an excellent tutorial to explain how he created a version to match his template design using Photoshop and CSS styling. If you haven't already visited Doug's blog, I really do suggest you pop over to see a beautiful Blogger powered design...
2. Add Yahoo! Buzz Buttons to your Blogger template Over at Woork, you can read how to add Yahoo! Buzz links to your Blogger template to benefit from this new social bookmarking system. While you're there, check out the amazing new design!
3. Utilize Blogger to reduce email overload
As part of an article explaining methods of reducing email overload, Digital Inspiration suggests using Blogger! I won't explain the details here as the post itself is an excellent read :)
4. iBlogSpot with Lifecast (iPhone App Review)
Over at The Blog Herald, you can read a review of Lifecast: an iPhone application for those using Blogger.
5. Weebly (An alternative to Google Pages)
As many of you may be aware, Google Pages will be phased out by the end of the year. So if you're looking for a free alternative host for your scripts and template files, Weebly is an excellent option. (Thanks to Fernandoo1 for the tip!)
6. Wowzio Widgets
Alisha of the Wowzio team let me know about this new service which automatically produces useful widgets for your blog based on the content from your blog feed. It certainly seems easy to use, and you can preview your widgets right away.
7. Show the current date in your blog
Over at ThemeLib, you can find a useful tutorial to display the current date in your blog with only minor tweaks to your template.
8. Show off your followers (new feature for Blogger)
I'm dying to try out this latest new feature for Blogger, but my dashboard hasn't been updated yet! If you'd like to know more, head over to Blogger Buzz to read this introductory post.
10. Ratings Widget for Blogger (With Popular Posts Widget for your Sidebar)
Although Blogger has recently introduced "star ratings" for our posts, this still lacks a fundamental function which I'm sure we'd all love to use: a popular posts widget for to showcase the most popular posts as determined by our readers.
Yellow Turnip has developed a ratings widget which you can add to your template with ease. There's no need to register, AND you can use a popular posts widget too!
11. Blogger Showcase
This Blogger powered site showcases the best of Blogger designs and is well worth a visit just to see how well it's been designed! You can vote for your favorites and submit your own designs for consideration:
Create Tag Cloud For Your Blog
You may have seen "tag clouds" in other blogs which feature keywords from the blog posts in a cloud format. These are different to "label clouds" which are constructed of the labels you use for your Blogger posts. You can see an example of a "tag cloud" I constructed for Blogger Buster here:
I created this tag cloud for free over at ZoomClouds, which allows you to customise the size, colour scheme and included tags of your cloud. To create a tag cloud for your own blog, here's what you'll need to do:
1. Head on over to ZoomClouds and create your free account. This will allow you to use the tag cloud service and store your designs on site.2. Now it's time to create your first tag cloud! Sign in to your ZoomClouds account and click on "create cloud|" near the top of the page.
3. Give your cloud a name and description, and submit your RSS or Atom feed. For Bloggers this will either be "/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss" or /atom.xml" at the end of your blog address (eg: http://yourblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss).
4. Select how many days worth of content you want to include in your cloud. The maximum will depend on how many posts are included in your feed, so you may want to consider changing your feed settings if you want to include all of your posts in the tag cloud.
5. Click "create cloud" to create your cloud based on these settings.
6. You can then view your cloud with the default ZoomClouds design to see how it can look. To change the appearance of your cloud, click on "design" near the top of the screen and choose your settings, including border colour, fonts and more. You can save multiple templates of the same cloud here too.
7. To get the code for your cloud, click on "design" and scroll down the page a little until you see the code box. Select all of the code (Ctrl+A) and copy to your clipboard. You can then insert this into your blog template where you would like it to be displayed.
8. If there are tags in your cloud which you would prefer to be left out, you can choose this by clicking on "Filters" near the top of your ZoomClouds dashboard and adding each unwanted tag in the box supplied. Similarly, you can also add tags that you want to be included in the cloud which aren't yet featured.
Tag clouds could be used instead of label tags in your blog, or indeed as well as labels, since they are a reflection of your post content, rather than the labels you give to your posts. Example usage would be in a sidebar widget, though you may also want to consider featuring one at the top of your posts (see this post for a tutorial), or even in a blog post as I have done here!
Technorati Tags: tag+cloud | blog+tags | labels | zoomclouds | free+widgets
Change the Title Tags for your Blog
This new tag is already installed for new blogs (or if you change your existing template to one of Blogger's default ones).
However, if you have customized your template or uploaded a third party template, you will need to change the original <data:blog.pageTitle/> to the new <data:blog.pageName/> tag for this change to take effect.
But don't worry: this is REALLY easy! Here's what you have to do:
- Go to Layout>edit HTML in your Blogger dashboard.
- Search for this tag:
<data:blog.pageTitle/> - Replace this tag with the following:
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "index"'>
<title><data:blog.title/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/></title>
</b:if> - Save your template! (See, this is an easy hack!)
Once you've changed this tag, you'll see that on post pages, the default [blog name] page title format for your post titles in the browser window will be replaced solely by your post title instead.
This will increase the chances of your posts being picked up in search engine results for keywords which appear in your post titles (and can ultimately help draw more targeted traffic to your blog.
I hope this little trick will be useful to you all! And for the Blogger team (if you're reading this): Thank you!
Albert Einstein' words
'Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character' - Albert Einstein
The Japanese have always loved fresh fish. But the water close to Japan has not held many fish for decades. So to feed the Japanese population, fishing boats got bigger and went further than ever. The further the fishermen went, the longer it took to bring the fish. If the return trip took more time, the fish were not fresh. To solve this problem, fish companies installed freezers on their boats. They would catch the fish and freeze them at sea. Freezers allowed the boats to go further and stay longer. However, the Japanese could taste the difference between fresh and frozen fish. And they did not like the taste of frozen fish. The frozen fish brought a lower price. So, fishing companies installed fish tanks. They would catch the fish and stuff them in the tanks, fin to fin. After a little thrashing around, they were tired, dull, and lost their fresh-fish taste. The fishing industry faced an impending crisis! But today, they get fresh-tasting fish to Japan .
How did they manage? To keep the fish tasting fresh, the Japanese fishing companies still put the fish in the tanks but with a small shark. The fish are challenged and hence are constantly on the move. The challenge they face keeps them alive and fresh!
Have you realized that some of us are also living in a pond but most of the time tired and dull ? Basically in our lives, sharks are new challenges to keep us active. If you are steadily conquering challenges, you are happy. Your challenges keep you energized. Don't create success and revel in it in a state of inertia. You have the resources, skills and abilities to make a difference. Put a shark in your tank and see how far you can really go!
How did they manage? To keep the fish tasting fresh, the Japanese fishing companies still put the fish in the tanks but with a small shark. The fish are challenged and hence are constantly on the move. The challenge they face keeps them alive and fresh!
Have you realized that some of us are also living in a pond but most of the time tired and dull ? Basically in our lives, sharks are new challenges to keep us active. If you are steadily conquering challenges, you are happy. Your challenges keep you energized. Don't create success and revel in it in a state of inertia. You have the resources, skills and abilities to make a difference. Put a shark in your tank and see how far you can really go!
Importance of Breakfast
VERY IMPORTANT!!!
Be patience and read the complete mail...
"Importance of having Breakfast"
Breakfast can help prevent strokes, heart attack and sudden death. Advice on not to skip breakfast!
Healthy living
For those who always skip breakfast, you should stop that habit now! You've heard many times that "Breakfast is the most important meal of the day." Now, recent research confirms that one of the worst practices you can develop may be avoiding breakfast.
Why?
Because the frequency of heart attack, sudden death, and stroke peaks between 6: 00a.m. and noon, with the highest incidence being
between 8: 00a.m. and 10:00a.m.What mechanism within the body could account for this significant jump in sudden death in the early
morning hours?
We may have an Answer.
Platelet, tiny elements in the blood that keep us from bleeding to Death if we get a cut, can clump together inside our arteries due to
cholesterol or laque buildup in the artery lining. It is in the morning hours that platelets become the most activated and tend to form these internal blood clots at the greatest frequency.
However, eating even a very light breakfast prevents the morning platelet activation that is associated with heart attacks and strokes. Studies performed at Memorial University in St.Johns, Newfoundland found that eating a light, very low-fat breakfast was critical in modifying the morning platelet activation. Subjects in the study consumed either low-fat or fat-free yogurt, orange juice, fruit, and a source of protein coming from yogurt or fat-free milk. So if you skip breakfast, it's important that you change this practice immediately in light of this research. Develop a simple plan to eat cereal, such as oatmeal or Bran Flakes, along with six ounces of grape juice or orange juice, and perhaps a piece of fruit. This simple plan will keep your platelets from sticking together, keep blood clots from forming, and perhaps head off a potential Heart Attack or stroke. So never ever skip breakfast
between 8: 00a.m. and 10:00a.m.What mechanism within the body could account for this significant jump in sudden death in the early
morning hours?
We may have an Answer.
Platelet, tiny elements in the blood that keep us from bleeding to Death if we get a cut, can clump together inside our arteries due to
cholesterol or laque buildup in the artery lining. It is in the morning hours that platelets become the most activated and tend to form these internal blood clots at the greatest frequency.
However, eating even a very light breakfast prevents the morning platelet activation that is associated with heart attacks and strokes. Studies performed at Memorial University in St.Johns, Newfoundland found that eating a light, very low-fat breakfast was critical in modifying the morning platelet activation. Subjects in the study consumed either low-fat or fat-free yogurt, orange juice, fruit, and a source of protein coming from yogurt or fat-free milk. So if you skip breakfast, it's important that you change this practice immediately in light of this research. Develop a simple plan to eat cereal, such as oatmeal or Bran Flakes, along with six ounces of grape juice or orange juice, and perhaps a piece of fruit. This simple plan will keep your platelets from sticking together, keep blood clots from forming, and perhaps head off a potential Heart Attack or stroke. So never ever skip breakfast
Hope u wont skip break fast!!!!
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