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Filed under: Aftermarket, Audi

The Audi R8 is undoubtedly awesome. It is also undoubtedly low, as in to the ground. Not low enough to prevent you from getting around, but you pay close attention anytime the word “driveway” comes up. Cargraphic has engineered an airlift system to address the issue that can raise the car 72 mm (2.8 inches) in 15 seconds. The best part about it is that it doesn’t alter the dynamic performance of the car’s suspension.

The airlift places small bellows on the upper spring cup of the suspension. When the bellows aren’t inflated, the mounting point is rigid, so the suspension responds as normal. With the compressor, the total weight is just 3 kilos, and there are no hydraulics or fluid to deal with. And the system comes with a remote control, in case you want to show off your additional three inches when you’re not in the car. Full details are in the press release after the jump, and in the gallery of high-res images below.

[Source: Cargraphic]

Continue reading Cargraphic brings Airlift system to Audi R8

Cargraphic brings Airlift system to Audi R8 originally appeared on Autoblog on Sat, 19 Dec 2009 14:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Good news for HTC Touch Pro 2, Diamond 2 and HD users.

Cobaltikus has discovered how to access the ZoomBar.

TouchLockPro *FREE* version 2.9 is the first locking solution, which uses this for unlocking the phone!

 Try the amazing *FREE* TouchLockPro version 2.9, which is different from the other locking solutions.

Featuring:

• No foreground window, like other solutions
• BattClock
• Supports a lot of sensors for locking/unlocking
• Very, very small in memory (38 Kb) and resource usage
• And now also supports the ZoomBar for unlocking via triple touch, slide left or right

Try *FREE* TouchLockPro version 2.9, more information and download here and discover the amazing ZoomBar unlock.

This post was submitted by ZuinigeRijder.

Sometimes information leaks in strange ways, especially about Windows Mobile.  Be it leaked ROMs or job postings, or projected work lists, as in the case of Crispin Porter, who published a picture of their real-time job management system, which also just happened to show two assignments, one for a phase 2 Windows Phone banner on the 4th January, and the other for a Windows Phone 03 Media refresh on the 8 January.

Windows Phone ads have been seeing pretty high media rotation in the UK, but unfortunately do not seem to show much about what makes Windows Phone attractive for a Windows user, such as Windows Live Messenger clients or push Hotmail.

Do you think Microsoft could advertise better?  Let us know in the comments below.

Gizmodo via WMExperts.com

To Our Clients, Colleagues and Friends, 

· Here’s something weird:  2009 will be the first year ever in which more cars were sold in China than in the United States .  Maybe what’s so shocking is that it’s not shocking.· Here’s a list of the biggest bank failures of the last few years and how much they cost the government.

And no need to write us that we forgot Washington Mutual.  They were sold to JPMorgan Chase before actually failing and costing the FDIC money.· If you’re a Texas Rangers fan, you’re in for a real treat with your new starter, Rich Harden.  Harden has averaged 9.35 strikeouts per nine innings over the past seven years, best in the majors.  He’s injured a lot, but when he’s healthy, he’s dominating the way Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson once were.  When he was with the A’s , he’d throw pitches that started off as sliders and ended up as curves or fastballs that morphed, midflight, into change ups.· We wrote about the net yield on the credit card yields after charge offs, and we should have noted that this is the gross spread and isbefore overhead such as mailings, salaries, rent etc.· An interesting benefit to real estate bubbles is that during them, a fair number of developers take great risk in developing projects that no sane person would ever build.  And they find lenders to go along with their dreams. As a result, we get some unusual and often fun things after the bubble bursts.  One interesting such project is The Shire, an Oregon development with fake thatched roof homes modeled on the hobbit villages in Lord of the Rings.  The Bank ( Umpqua ) and the builder have lost money on it, but at least the community will have an interesting neighborhood for years to come.· One of our disappointments is seeing how few mortgage banking companies have an annual Plan and Budget.  The budget can have much less than a dozen assumptions, and if you set up your spreadsheet properly, you can change assumptions throughout the year as your business changes.  In many cases, it’s the CFO who fails to produce a budget, but in other cases, and it kills us to say so, it’s the senior management or ownership which fails to demand one.· Wasn’t it Martha Stewart who said you should bake cookies simply to create a wonderful smell in the house?  We have a better idea.  Bake yams and your house will smell better than cookies.  Speaking of smells, we were asked recently what we thought was the worst thing about the sixties.  It took us half a second to answer the question, and the worst thing about that decade was, in one word, Patchouli Oil  Well, two words. (It’s pronounced puh-choo’-lee oil.)· We just watched a demo for DataQuick’s Collateral Validation (CV) and it impressed us as  more sophisticated than the many automated valuations we see.   Although CV can be used as an AVM, it was apparently designed to test other valuations (appraisals, BPO’s, AVM’s) to let lenders know if the value is supported.  It comes up with valuations based on 4-5 different appraisal methodologies, reviews them all, and comes up with its own valuation.  We also liked that they also show you a price you’d get if you had to sell the property very quickly, kind of a fire sale price. You’ll find DataQuick on the internet somewhere,· The University of Texas football program took in $87 million last year, $20 million more than 2^nd place Ohio State .  That’s a lot of ticket sales and sponsorships!  · Here’s an interesting video of the always amazing Chinese acrobats: http://amazingacts.blogspot.com/2008/07/dont-try-this-at-home.html  Any country whose people are that disciplined has to be taken seriously as a world power.· Attorney Dave Medlin helped lots of you negotiate your way through the jungle  of repurchases, but he’s also a great mortgage banking attorney in general. He’s also a funny guy.  The coffee mugs with his firm’s logo on them look pretty ordinary till you look on the back.  There, it lists important phone numbers:  California Governor’s Office (916-445-2841), The White house (202-456-1414), The Vatican (001-39-6-6982), and finally, Medlin & Hargrave (510-832-2900).· The three principals at Garrett, Watts are Presbyterian, Jewish, and Catholic.  And during this Christmas season, it occurs to us that everything that makes Western civilization great is the teaching of those three religions.  
Moses and the ancient Hebrews created the idea of the rule of law, without which we’d be living in a Hobbesian world where  “there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no culture, no knowledge, no arts, no letters, no society, and continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”   Hobbes thought that it was the Leviathan (i.e. the King) who kept us from living in a state of nature where might made right, but he was wrong.  It’s the rule of law that civilizes man, not kings or Presidents.
It was Martin Luther, the first Protestant, who really conceived the idea that the individual mattered. Before the Reformation, the people could only speak to God through the Priests. Luther thought individual men could have a direct relationship with God, and whether or not you believe in a God, this was a revolutionary idea, the idea that each man mattered as an individual.Finally, Christ’s teachings defined the role of compassion as a prerequisite for any civilization. Has there been a more powerful statement in the last 5,000 years than “Love thy neighbor as thyself”?If you think about it, these three lessons apply to believers and atheists alike, and they all helped create the Western concepts of freedom and democracy.  Our culture could not exist without (a) the rule of law that Moses brought us, (b) the value we place on the individual over the State, and (c) the fact that we’re all in this together and that we must care about our fellow humans.These were the great lessons of these three great religions, and what better a time than the Christmas holidays to remember them.Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah.Garrett, Watts & Co.  Free to read:  Board Decisions, by Joe GarrettHelping mortgage lenders increase revenues, control costs, and better manage risk.

• Mike McAuley      ([email protected])
• Corky Watts         ([email protected])
• Joe Garrett         ([email protected])

In this special edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our weekly newsletter, we summarize our end-of-year series profiling the best web products of 2009. We also carried out a Reader Poll this week, asking our readers to select their favorite products of the year. We present the results of that poll here.

Finally, this week we announced our 6th annual Best BigCo award. Read on to find out which big Internet company impressed us the most in 2009.

Sponsor

Order The Real-Time Web and its Future

If you think Twitter is big, get ready for the real-time Web by reading The Real-Time Web and its Future. We conducted interviews with 50 companies and innovators in real-time technology.

“The report is excellent – a great synthesis of why the real-time Web is different, what changes, what doesn’t and what the industry needs to do in order to press forward.”
– John Borthwick, CEO, Betaworks

“It blew our minds… inspiring.”
– Favit

“Recommended.”

-Hewlett-Packard Official News

We’re flattered by the initial praise. You can download the report, take a look at the Table of Contents and this sample chapter, and keep an eye out for the 2-report package that allows you to save money on previous reports when you buy our latest installment.

The print version is coming soon!

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Reader Picks: Best Web Products of 2009

This week we ran a reader poll, asking for your votes on the top Web products of the year. Thousands of you voted for up to 10 products, from a list of 100 selected by the ReadWriteWeb authors over December.

The poll has now closed and we’re pleased to present the ReadWriteWeb community’s Top 10 Web Products of 2009.

Here is the final top 10:

1. Twitter

2. Google Chrome

3. Google Maps

4. Facebook

5. WordPress

6. iPhone platform

7. Google Apps

8. Adobe AIR

9. Hulu

10. TweetDeck

For more analysis, read our announcement post.

Best BigCo 2009

In one of ReadWriteWeb’s longest-running traditions, every year we review the top Internet companies and their impact over the past 12 months. This week we announced the 6th annual Best BigCo, a.k.a. big Internet company. In 2008 the Best BigCo went to Apple, due largely to the iPhone and App Store. Facebook won in 2007, Google in 2006 and 2004, and Yahoo! in 2005.

For 2009, the ReadWriteWeb team chose Google as our Best BigCo.In our top 100 products list for 2009, seven Google products made the cut:

• Android platform
• Google App Engine
• Google Apps
• Google Chrome
• Google Maps
• Google Search Options and Rich Snippets
• Google Voice

And we didn’t even include Google Wave, its biggest launch of the year. We think Wave has a lot of potential, but it’s clearly at the experimental stage still. The web browser Chrome was probably the Google product that had the biggest impact this year.

Read more about Google and the other nominees…

Best Web Products of 2009

In what’s become an annual tradition, every December ReadWriteWeb selects the best Web products of the past year. In a series of 10 articles, we examined the top web products in categories ranging from consumer web apps to RSS and syndication platforms.

Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2009

We kicked off the series with a look at the top mobile web products of the past year. This is a subjective list of editorially selected products, but one which includes some of the biggest names in mobile web applications for 2009.

Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2009

Every year at ReadWriteWeb, we look at hundreds of new web apps aimed at everyday users. Occasionally, we come across a service that stands out from the pack because it offers a novel solution, disrupts the way incumbent market leaders do business or changes the way we experience the Web. Here is our list of the top 10 consumer web apps of 2009.

Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2009

2009 has seen a lot of Semantic Web and structured data activity. Much of it has been driven by Linked Data, a W3C project which gained momentum this year. The 10 products we’ve picked out for this end-of-year review are ones that have done interesting things with data. Connecting to other data, building new applications with data, sharing data, and more.

Top 10 International Web Products of 2009

Thriving tech communities exist around the globe, from Toronto to Tel Aviv, and the success of internationally-based web products serve as a reminder to all of us that innovation knows no borders.

Top 10 RSS & Syndication Technologies of 2009

The web isn’t about pages any more. Now it’s about streams, feeds and syndication. Only one service makes a repeat appearance this year.

Top 10 Enterprise Products of 2009

2009 may be remembered as the year that enterprises truly understood the importance of social software. This was manifested by the rise of enterprise collaboration services, cloud computing technologies and the growing importance of mobile technologies for the enterprise.

Top 10 Internet of Things Products of 2009

2009 has been a turning point for the Internet of Things, when real world objects (such as lights, cars and packages) get connected to the Internet. This trend has added a significant amount of new data to the Web, so for that reason alone it is an important development.

Top 10 Real-Time Technologies of 2009

The real-time web was hot this year and it’s likely to become a standard expectation on sites all around the world next year. We’ve tracked this trend extensively with a face-to-face summit of industry leaders and an 84-page research report on The Real-Time Web and Its Future.

Who were the big movers and shakers in real time this year? Check out our list of the top 10 to find out.

Top 10 Startup Products of 2009

There were a ton of great products launched in 2009 by big companies and startups alike, but in this post we focus on the best products released by startups.

Top 10 Web Platforms of 2009

2009 has been a big year for mobile and real-time technologies, which is reflected in our selection of the top 10 Web platforms of the year.

That’s a wrap for another week. Enjoy your weekend everyone and happy Christmas!

Discuss

Climate activists arrested by the Danish police. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/TerraViva

By Stephen Leahy

COPENHAGEN (IPS/TerraViva) There is no Copenhagen climate treaty. History was not made here and no deal was sealed.

After two years of intense negotiations by 194 countries, what is abundantly clear is the enormous divide between the rich and poor countries. Poor countries want deep cuts in emissions by the industrialised world, and the latter continue to resist significant cuts and legally binding targets.

Despite the enormous pressures, high expectations and last minute efforts by 128 heads of state, all that emerged is a vague agreement of sorts called the “Copenhagen Accord”.

“Sealing the deal” on a new climate treaty has been postponed for at least a year. (more…)

As the year winds to a close, it’s time to start looking ahead to 2010’s conferences and events. As always, you can download the entire event calendar in iCal format or import it into your Google Calendar. You can also import individual events using the link beside each entry. This events guide is a weekly feature here on ReadWriteWeb. We publish it every weekend, as good a time as any to review your conference plans.

Know of an event taking place that should appear here? Let us know in the comments below or contact us.

Sponsor

11 January 2010: Nashville, Tennessee

Social Fresh Nashville

This is the social media conference that comes to you. Social Fresh is a one-day, case-study-rich conference targeted for marketers. Social Fresh Nashville will have 30+ speakers, including Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer, Gavin Baker of Ruby Tuesday and John Andrews of Collective Bias (formerly of Walmart).

ReadWriteWeb readers get a 15% discount with the code “RWW15”.

14 January 2010: Palo Alto, California

The Founder Showcase

The Founder Showcase, by TheFunded.com, is an open startup pitch and networking event that highlights the newest cutting-edge businesses and helps innovators gain traction among the Silicon Valley elite. On Thursday, January 14th, 10 of the most promising early-stage companies, as selected by over 13,000 registered Founders and CEOs on TheFunded.com, will present to an audience of over 300 investors, founders, and members of the press. A panel of experts will critique the pitches, and an open ballot of those in attendance will determine the Founder Showcase Winner.

ReadWriteWeb readers receive a 10% discount when registering, just use discount code “RWW”.

26 January 2010: San Francisco, California

Catalyst Conference

Vator.tv , a leading platform for entrepreneurs and innovators to broadcast themselves, and provider of news and information through VatorNews, and Girls in Tech, a social network enterprise focused on education and empowerment of influential women in technology, are seeking five women-led startups across any stage to present at the Catalyst Conference on January 26, 2010 at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. To be one of the five, join the Catalyst competition today and win the chance to present.

27 – 28 January 2010: Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Enterprise Social 2.0: Rip or ROI?

This senior executive event will bring together decision makers from the Top Fortune companies to discuss innovative strategies on how to maximise business performance through social media engagement. The event will include keynote speeches, best-practice presentations as well as interactive discussion sessions.

The summit will provide excellent opportunities for you to hear international experts discuss best practices on how to drive business performance using Web 2.0 and social media. Key issues to be discussed include:

• How to integrate social media programs successfully into business strategies?
• Building business momentum, visibility and market growth through social media
• Measuring success and influence using metrics and analytics: what are the tools and techniques
• Integrating viral marketing and social media into traditional marketing mix
• Developing and activating audiences using social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs

1 – 5, February 2010: New York City, Berlin, London, San Francisco, Toronto, São Paulo

Social Media Week

The second annual Social Media Week conference will explore the profound impact that social media has on culture, business communications and society at large.

The conference is designed as a series of localized events, which city partners are responsible for organizing. Programs will span a variety of formats, ranging from talks and panel discussions, to interactive workshops, seminars and networking events. Registration will open in January 2010 and the majority of events will be free thanks to the global sponsors and event partners.

You can find more information at http://socialmediaweekny.com.

4 February 2010: San Francisco, California

Vator Splash

Vator.tv, a leading platform for innovators and entrepreneurs to broadcast themselves, is holding its inaugural Vator Splash event on February 4, 2010 at the Cafe du Nord in San Francisco. Catch onstage presenters: Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, Smule CEO Jeff Smith, August Capital VC Howard Hartenbaum and Google Ventures VC Bill Maris. Ten promising startups will also get to present onstage. Enter the Vator Splash competition if you want to present.

ReadWriteWeb readers get a 25% discount on their tickets using the code VatorReadWriteWeb.

8 February 2010: Tampa, Florida

Social Fresh Tampa

This is the social media conference that comes to you. Social Fresh is a one-day, case-study-rich conference targeted for marketers. Social Fresh Tampa will have 30+ speakers, including Chris Barger of GM, Maggie Fox of Social Media Group and John Andrews of Collective Bias (formerly of Walmart).

ReadWriteWeb readers get a 15% discount with the code “RWW15”.

10 February 2010: New York City

Online Community Unconference East

The Online Community Unconference East is a gathering of online community professionals – managers, developers, business people, tool providers, investors – to discuss experience and strategies in the development and growth of online communities. As we have found with our past events, the best source of information on all of these challenges is other knowledgeable practitioners. The event runs from 8 a.m.-5 p.m. at the Digital Sandbox.

11 February 2010: New York City

NYC Venture Capital and Angel Showcase

FundingPost is hosting a VC showcase where 20-plus VC funds and angel groups will be exhibiting their firms during a great cocktail party setting. Each fund will have their own table setup for the sole purpose of meeting great new companies.

Additionally, there will be an optional pitching workshop from 2:30 p.m. to 4:45 p.m. The cost to participate in the workshop will be $400. This workshop includes the $125 ticket to the event, and a 1/4 page listing in the Venture Guide Magazine. This event is sponsored by Credit Suisse, and takes place at One Madison Avenue, from 6-9:15 p.m.

18 February 2010: Silicon Valley, California

Future of Funding

Active limited partners, top rated venture capitalists, and successful entrepreneurs are invited to Silicon Valley on February 18, 2010 to discuss the Future of Funding. The venture capital bubble has burst, and change is coming. Now is the time to have a constructive dialog about the future with all of the stakeholders at the table.

Don’t miss the opportunity to partake in this exclusive event hosted by TheFunded. Please visit www.futureoffunding.com to see speaker and event details.

ReadWriteWeb readers use the code “RWW” and get 10% off.

15 – 16 March 2010: London, England

2nd Annual Social Networking World Forum — London

The 2nd Annual Social Networking World Forum takes place at the Olympia Conference Centre in London. The two-day event features four dedicated conference streams:

1. Social Networking World Forum
2. Enterprise social media
3. Social TV World Forum
4. Mobile Social Networking Forum

The event features key speakers from global brands, organizations, social networking publishers and developers, pioneering social media leaders, top agencies, content producers, and more.

• Full workshop program within exhibition area
• Evening networking reception
• Pre-show online meeting planner for delegates
• Free pass for exhibition only

11 May 2010: San Francisco, California

FinovateSpring

FinovateSpring 2010 will again showcase the most cutting-edge financial and banking technology innovations to Silicon Valley and the world. With Finovate’s signature mix of short, fast-paced onstage demos (no slides are allowed) from handpicked companies and intimate networking time with their executives, this conference packs a ton of unique value into a single day.

Come see the cutting edge of banking and financial technology and network with hundreds of the leading financial executives, venture capitalists, press, industry analysts, bloggers and fintech entrepreneurs. Early bird registration rates are available.

5 October 2010: New York City

FinovateFall

FinovateFall will return to Manhattan on Tuesday, October 5 to showcase dozens of the biggest and most innovative new ideas in financial and banking technology from established leaders and hot young companies. The Fall event is the original and largest Finovate and features a single day packed with our special blend of short, fast-paced onstage demos (no slides are allowed) and intimate networking time with top executives from the innovative demoing companies.

FinovateFall is a unique chance to see the future of finance and banking before your competition and find the edge you need in today’s market. Early bird registration rates are available.

Download this entire events calendar in iCal format.

Discuss

With so many bugs and exploits plaguing the gameplay, Infinity Ward has been trying to keep up with patches to fix the game right up. Community manager Robert Bowling Tweets again, letting fans know that another patch

The name’s Yukon Cornelius, chump, the greatest prospector in the North. So back off, lesser prospectors. This here’s my claim. Don’t make me smite thee with my stop-motion pick ax.

In this week’s episode of the Yahoo! Fantasy Freak Show we discuss Arian Foster(notes), holiday travel, Steven Jackson, swine flu, Sherm Lewis, Knowshon Moreno(notes), the proper application of the scorpion death lock, Jason Campbell(notes), cyclonic vortices, the blizzard that’s burying the East Coast, and various other subjects that should be of interest to the fantasy community.

It seems like a lot to cover, but it’s all in there. We also reviewed the upcoming matchups and answered your sit/start questions, per our usual.

Hit the links below. Listen up.

Fantasy Freak Show, Part I / Download

Fantasy Freak Show, Part II / Download

Fantasy Freak Show, Bonus Time / Download

Guest contributor: Karen Collins, M.S., R.D., C.D.N.
Karen Collins holds a B.S. degree from Purdue and an M.S. degree from Cornell, both in nutrition. When she’s not writing or speaking, she conducts a private nutrition practice in Jamestown, New York.

According to those employed in the business of coupons, spending 10 minutes a week clipping and organizing coupons can save people an average of seven dollars per week; spending 20 minutes can save us up to $19 per week. Some surveys, however, suggest that coupon clippers don’t necessarily save money compared to the time they put in or to those who shop without coupons.

If you buy more highly processed, less nutritious foods because you have coupons for them, are the coupons helping you or hurting you? Take a few minutes to review whether you are using coupons to your best overall advantage.

Would I buy it anyway?

A common way of calculating money saved by using coupons is to compare the full-price total of items in a grocery cart to what you spent after using coupons. However, if you chose a higher-priced brand than you normally buy just because you had the coupon, or even bought a snack food that you wouldn’t ordinarily buy at all, you haven’t really saved money.

Do I want two?

Many coupons now offer savings only when you buy two of a particular item. For foods like spaghetti or canned tuna that you can store for extended periods, these coupons make sense. However, studies show that the more we stock up on some snack foods, the more we eat them.

So even though buying two containers of ice cream, cookies or chips should last you twice as long as one package, two may go as fast as one — and that may be the opposite of your healthy eating resolutions. If having two of something in your cupboards is not best for you, forgo the coupon and just purchase one.

Cheaper than generic?

Sometimes the brand name grocery item brings something special not found in generic versions, but in many cases, generic foods are the same. Check the price of the brand-name product after deducting the coupon value and compare it to the generic and store-brand versions. Often the coupon doesn’t bring costs down to the latter level.

Cheaper than homemade?

Many coupons apply to convenience mixes and foods that cost considerably more than the simple raw materials you need to make the rice, potato or casserole dish yourself even though doing it takes no more than five or 10 extra minutes.

A box of plain rice or pasta plus a jar of herbs may cost more than the mix. But the herbs will last a long time, and overall it’s far less expensive to season your own foods than pay for a mix. If your homemade version also allows you to use a whole grain, less sodium or a healthier kind of fat, it’s hard to consider the processed mix with a coupon a better buy.

Is it the right time and place?

To maximize the money you save using coupons, use them when the products are on sale or a featured savings item with your shopper’s card and in a store that doubles coupon values. In order to take advantage of this, you need an organizational system to file a stash of coupons for foods you use frequently in a way that you can pull out the one you want quickly when you see that the product is on sale.

Is it helping me eat healthier?

Check the websites of companies that produce the nutritious foods you use most often. You may find coupons there or have the chance to sign up for newsletters with coupons you would not otherwise receive. Use money saved with coupons to buy the foods that generally don’t have coupons and that are lacking in most of our diets — more vegetables and fruits.

(This article was provided by the American Institute for Cancer Research in Washington, D.C. A registered dietician is available to respond to questions about diet, nutrition, and cancer at the free AICR Hotline at 1 (800) 843-8114 during business hours.)

From the RSS feed of CalorieLab News (REF3076322B7)

Does clipping coupons help or hurt healthy eating goals?

Filed under: Etc.

General Motors gave Santa a sleigh with OnStar and a reindeer monitor. General Electric must have seen that video and said, “Hold on a second,” because they created a sleigh for the big red man with icephobic coatings, self-powered OLED lighting, ceramic matrix composite blades, GE sodium batteries, Trip Optimizer, and a 500GB holographic disc that holds 200 DVDs worth of information.

Santa’s suit gets in on the Iron Man act, too, with a wearable RFID sensor hidden in the fringed getup as well as a wireless medical sensor, because Mr. Kringle’s Body Mass Index is out of control. And since elves are notorious worriers, they get Asset Intelligence Tracking Tech to keep Santa on the radar and out of Vegas.

But for all that, GE didn’t include a blue button so the kiddies could keep track of him…

[Source: GE via Carbon Fiber Gear]

Continue reading Santa gets new super sleigh thanks to GE

Santa gets new super sleigh thanks to GE originally appeared on Autoblog on Sat, 19 Dec 2009 12:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

from freedom, 19 December 2009: “In a unanimous statement issued on Friday 18th December the Governments of the world gave the go-ahead to runaway climate change. That’s about it from Copenhagen. There was no target for reducing carbon dioxide emissions, no limit to the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, nothing more than a pious wish that average global temperature should not rise more than 2 degrees above pre global warming levels…” more

Magie de l’internet…quand on cherche,on trouve! Sur le nouveau site officiel de la Giulietta,une seule photo de l’intérieur,que vous trouverez avec quelques illustrations dans la partie précédente.

Et pour compléter le tout,les voici les photos du tableau de bord.Comme noté dans la partie précédente,il y aura certainement quelques détails qui changeront en dernière minute,mais vraiment très peu de choses.

Notez le bandeau peint,gage de variété de choix

Levier court,commande DNA,Alu et éclairages rouges,la Giulietta annonce la couleur…

C'est dans cette zone que Sergio Marchionne aurait demandé quelques menues modifications de dernière minute ayant trait à la qualité perçue…

Compteurs enchassés en fûts,dans la tradition Alfa.

Pour le reste des dernières infos concernant la belle italienne,rendez-vous en première partie –>ici

Nouveau: pour profiter facilement et rapidement des notifications de nouveautés sur le site,pensez à vous abonner via Twitter.Chaque modification,nouvel article ou nouvelle vidéo sur notre chaîne Youtube,fait l’objet d’un Tweet immédiat!

Ahh the weekend. For those in Japan, their PS3s must be running non-stop with Final Fantasy XIII. I can imagine them smiling all by themselves heading home on the commute. Lucky them. In the mean time, there’s

I went through bought camp during the summer of 1979.

This always amazes people for some reason…maybe I just don’t look the type. However, I did  it, I graduated, I lived to tell the tale.

Me. Ft LeondardWood 1979. Check out the 2 M-16s I was packing!

There is one thing you should know.  Boot camp meant 15 – 25 mile forced marches with packs on our backs. It meant sleeping in tents, eating C- Rations, going through the gas chamber and coming out with eyes and nose running. Boot camp was lousy food, being screamed at all the time and pushups. LOTS of pushups… but it did NOT prepare me for parenthood.

I can shoot an M-16. I can shoot and M-16 from the hip on rapid fire. I can throw a hand grenade and blow up a tank. I can low crawl through mud, scoot underneath barbed wire while being shot at, and jump into foxholes. With all these wonderful abilities parenting should be a cinch. It isn’t.

None of that prepared me for nights of holding a sick baby while he threw up all over me…and not minding it a bit.

None of that helped me to not cry when I had to give my son blood thinner shots twice a day when he was 2.

None of that helped me to understand how to make my teenagers feel better about themselves when other kids were mean.

And none of that helped me to know how to be a cool mom…not interfering when not necessary, fiercely protecting when it was necessary.

No matter how many books you read, no matter how much you think you know, parenting is harder than it looks. It is easy to look at someone else and think that they are not doing something right but not so easy when you are doing it yourself.

This may sound prideful but after having eight children I don’t tend to take advice from young adults who have one or two toddlers. I smile, I thank them, and I try to remember how knowledgeable I was at age 30.

The only way I know to raise kids successfully is to walk it. Take it one step at a time. Pray a lot. Make decisions based on each unique situation…and never give up.

Maybe boot camp did prepare me after all.

image: marye audet

Post from: Blisstree

Boot Camp Didn’t Prepare Me