T-Shirt Island

Life is all about choices
Michael is the kind of guy you love to hate. He is always in a good mood and always has something positive to say. When someone would ask him how he was doing, he would reply, “If I were any better, I’d be twins!” He was a natural motivator.
If an employee was having a bad day, Michael was there telling the employee how to look on the positive side of the situation. Seeing this style really made me curious, so one day I went up to Michael and asked him, “I don’ t get it. You can’ t be positive all the time. How do you do it?”
Michael replied, each morning I wake up and say to myself ‘Mike, you have two choices today. You can choose to be in a good mood or you can choose to be in a bad mood.’ I choose to be in a good mood. Each time something bad happens, I can choose to be a victim or choose to learn from it. I choose to learn from it. Every time someone comes to me complaining I can choose to accept their complaining or I can point out the positive side of life. I choose the positive side of life.”
“Yeah, right. It isn’t that easy.” I protested.
“Yes it is, ” Michael said. “Life is all about choices. When you cut away all the junk, every situation is a choice. You choose how you react to situations. You choose how people will affect your mood. You choose to be in a good mood or bad mood. The bottom line is: It’s your choice how you live life. ” I reflected on what Michael said.
Soon thereafter, I left the big enterprise that I had worked in for years to start my own business. We lost touch, but I often though about him when I made a choice about life instead of reacting to it. Several years later, I heard Michael was involved in a serious accident, falling off 60 feet from a communications tower.
After l8 hours of surgery, and weeks of intensive care, Michael was released from the hospital with rods placed in his back. I saw Michael about six months after the accident. When I asked him how he was, he replied, “If I were any better, I’d be twins. Wanna see my scars?” I declined to see his wounds, but did ask him what had gone through his mind as the accident took place.
“The first thing that went through my mind was the well being of my soon-to-born daughter,” Michael replied. “Then, as I lay on the ground, remembered I had two choices: I could choose to live or I could choose to die. I chose to live.” “Weren’t you scared? Did you lose consciousness?” I asked. Michael continued, “… the paramedics were great. They kept telling me I was going to be fine. But when they wheeled me into the operation room and I saw the expressions on the faces of the doctors and nurses, I got really scared. In their eyes, l read ‘He’s a dead man.’ I knew I needed to take action.” “What did you do?” I asked. “Well, there was a big burly nurse shouting questions at me” said Michael. “She asked me if I was allergic to anything. ‘Yes,’ I said. The doctors and nurses stopped working as they waited for my reply. I took a deep breath and yelled”, ‘Gravity’” Over their laughter, I told them, ‘I’m choosing to live. Operate on me as if I am alive, not dead’.”
Michael lived, thanks to the skill of his doctors, but also because of his amazing attitude. I 1eamed from him that every day we have a choice to live fully. Attitude is everything.

How Color Feels in the Home
It helps to choose the colors you plan to live with in your home with awareness of how different colors affect your emotional and physical states. Every color has a unique vibration all of its own, and this can significantly affect how you feel in a room.
Simple Solution:
Using this simple chart, you can choose a room’s color to be in balance and harmony with the role you want a room to have in your and your family’s life.
Red: A room that is painted red will energize, inspire activity and movement, help passion, and be powerful and stimulating. A red room can also be exhausting and overpowering, and stressful for those who are anxious. Pink is less demanding. Choosing a red bedroom would not be restful, although some red can be used to enhance sensuality. A red exercise room would be energizing! In Feng Shui, red means luck.
Orange: Orange rooms encourage happy, joyful, social gatherings. While an orange dining room or family room can stimulate the appetite, it is a great choice for such gathering places. Orange enhances parties, communication, positive feelings, and general good cheer.
Yellow: Yellow rooms inspire intellectual clarity, organization, clear-headed articulate thinking, and happy energy. Yellow is considered a color for the logical left side of the brain. Yellow is also very bright and somewhat energizing, so one needs to choose its placement with care. A yellow office might be intellectually beneficial, but not allow restful downtime, for example, so one might want to choose to include yellow accents instead of painting each wall yellow.
Green: Green rooms are very restful but combine with an energizing quality. Green is the color of outdoors, calm and active at the same time. Green brings balance and harmony to a room, and can be used as a calming place for people who are troubled or in need of refreshment.
Blue: Blue rooms are often chosen for bedrooms and meditation rooms because its cool energy is very calming, restful, peaceful, and spiritual. Blue helps inspire a quiet meditative quality, and color therapy with blue has been found to reduce blood pressure. Blue is also useful to make one to sleep.

Types of Speech
Standard usage includes those words and expressions understood, used, and accepted by a majority of the speakers of a language in any situation regardless of the level of formality. As such, these words and expressions are well defined and listed in standard dictionaries. Colloquialisms, on the other hand, are familiar words and idioms that are understood by almost all speakers of a language and used in informal speech or writing, but not considered appropriate for more formal situations. Almost all idiomatic expressions are colloquial language. Slang, however, refers to words and expressions understood by a large number of speakers but not accepted as good, formal usage by the majority. Colloquial expressions and even slang may be found in standard dictionaries but will be so identified. Both colloquial usage and slang are more common in speech than in writing.
Colloquial speech often passes into standard speech. Some slang also passes into standard speech, but other slang expressions enjoy momentary popularity followed by obscurity. In some cases, the majority never accepts certain slang phrases but nevertheless retains them in their collective memories. Every generation seems to require its own set of words to describe familiar objects and events.
It has been pointed out by a number of linguists that three cultural conditions are necessary for the creation of a large body of slang expressions. First, the introduction and acceptance of new objects and situations in the society; second, a diverse population with a large number of subgroups; third, association among the subgroups and the majority population.
Finally, it is worth noting that the terms “standard” “colloquial” and “slang” exist only as abstract labels for scholars who study language. Only a tiny number of the speakers of any language will be aware that they are using colloquial or slang expressions. Most speakers of English will, during appropriate situations, select and use all three types of expressions.

Japan prices continue record fall
Official figures showed core prices, which exclude those of volatile fresh food, fell for a sixth month in a row.
The record fall for August was due to lower petrol and other energy costs as well as weak domestic demand.
Japan, the world’s second largest economy, experienced a prolonged period of deflation in the 1990s, commonly referred to as “the lost decade”.
Lower prices may appear to be a good thing, but deflation can hamper growth by depressing company profits and causing consumers to postpone purchases, leading to production and wage cuts. It can also increase debt burdens.
The deflation comes despite recent signs of an improvement in the Japanese economy, which returned to positive growth in the second quarter of 2009, exiting a severe year-long recession.
Not to worry?
The central bank has expressed confidence that low interest rates and the stimulus packages it has already implemented will prevent deflation taking hold again.
Analysts are not so sure.
Several have said that although the impact of last summer’s spike in the oil price will lessen towards the end of the year, they expect further falls in prices.
“Reflecting stagnant retail sales, falls in prices are spreading more broadly than we had expected,” said Susumu Kato, chief economist at Calyon Securities.
“There’s a chance that deflation might continue longer than expected.”
Few economists expect falls in prices to accelerate sharply but weak domestic demand is likely to keep up the deflationary pressure.
The Bank of Japan has already forecast deflation to last until the year to March 2011 and is expected to extend its deflation forecast by another year in its next set of forecasts due out in late October.
Separately, the Japanese Finance Minister Hirohisa Fujii said that it is important not to overreact to current foreign exchange moves, which he said are within a natural “margin of error”.
The yen surged to an eight-month high against the greenback on Monday.

Jack and the Robber
Jack was a farmer’s boy. Once he drove his cart to market. He had butter and eggs to sell.
He met a woman on the way. She gave him a piece of silver for a little butter. Then he met a boy. The boy gave him a piece of silver for six eggs.
Soon Jack had plenty of silver in his pocket. As Jack went along, a man came up to him, and said, “Stop!”
So Jack stopped on the way again. The man gave him some wine. Jack drank it, and fell asleep on the roadside. When Jack woke up, his silver was not in his pocket. It was all gone.
The man was a robber, and poor Jack went home sadly.

At German Chancellor’s Side, a New Political Power Broker Emerges
BERLIN — The politician everyone was talking about in the German capital the morning after national elections was not Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose party won the most votes, but the small-party kingmaker set to solidify the chancellor’s hold on power. And soon, the rest of the world will become acquainted with the new leading figure, the Free Democrats’ Guido Westerwelle.
If longstanding German tradition holds, Mr. Westerwelle will be named vice chancellor and foreign minister in the new government, his reward for steering his free-market, pro-business party to its best result yet in a federal election.
The role of statesman, with the prospect of mingling with the likes of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and France’s foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, is one Mr. Westerwelle, 47, has spent the past several years preparing for. He has worked hard to transform his image from the fun-loving clown prince of politics, who once appeared on the German version of the reality show “Big Brother,” to that of a serious policy maker.
To judge by Sunday’s election, the operation was a success. Mr. Westerwelle’s Free Democrats emerged as the biggest winners of the day, watching their share of the vote rise by the largest amount of any party, to 14.6 percent, an increase of 4.7 percentage points over the previous election in 2005. The party rose even as Mrs. Merkel’s conservative bloc lost ground slightly with voters, pulling in just a third of the vote.
Mr. Westerwelle met with Mrs. Merkel on Monday as part of negotiations to form the anticipated new center-right government, a partnership that the chancellor had told voters she needed in order to repair the country’s economy. In a news conference, Mr. Westerwelle refused to discuss the division of top positions, including his own, saying, “It is about the right policies for our country and certainly not about these posts.”
He went on to emphasize his “very good relationship” with the chancellor. Indeed, Mr. Westerwelle, who is gay, came out in 2004 by bringing his partner to Mrs. Merkel’s birthday party, while she was still in the opposition and the year before she became chancellor.
Mrs. Merkel said that she expected the negotiations to move quickly and that she wanted the new government in place no later than Nov. 9, the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, when heads of state from around the world are expected to visit for the commemoration. But just because the two parties want to govern together does not mean it will necessarily be easy to reconcile their proposals.
“Mr. Westerwelle will strike a hard bargain when it comes to tax reform,” said a prominent conservative legislator, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the negotiations over forming the new government.
The Free Democrats’ campaign platform called for more than $50 billion in tax cuts, more than twice what Mrs. Merkel’s Christian Democrats promised. Yet, even the more modest figure could be hard to achieve without deep and unpopular reductions in social spending; deficits have soared as a result of the economic crisis and the government stimulus plan meant to combat its effects.
For many of the postwar years the Free Democrats were a swing vote in a Parliament dominated by the country’s two major parties, the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats. But the Free Democrats were out of power for the last 11 years, a stretch in the opposition that allowed the party to sharpen its stands for lower taxes and against bureaucratic red tape.
It also gave Mr. Westerwelle, the youngest leader in the history of the party, time to grow up. Before the 2002 election he set his sights on winning 18 percent of the vote, and to drive home the point he wore a pair of shoes with “18” emblazoned in the party’s trademark yellow on the soles. He also rode in a bright yellow bus he called the Guidomobile. The party fell far short of his target, earning itself just 7.4 percent of the vote and Mr. Westerwelle a reputation as a joker.
Mr. Westerwelle learned his lesson and cultivated a more serious image. His antics may have had a positive effect as well, broadening the party’s appeal beyond its traditional base among business owners by attracting younger professionals.
In addition to emphasizing the party’s trademark positions in favor of liberalizing the economy, Mr. Westerwelle also studied foreign policy, hoping to follow in the footsteps of Hans-Dietrich Genscher, a former party leader and current adviser whose two decades as foreign minister included German reunification.
“In the past few years, he has clearly been preparing himself for this role,” said Jan Techau, director of the Europe program at the German Council on Foreign Relations, where Mr. Westerwelle gave a lengthy foreign-policy address in May. But Mr. Techau described the appearance as cautious, emphasizing continuity in German foreign policy and reminiscent of the passive role for Germany favored by Mr. Westerwelle’s mentor, Mr. Genscher.
“Not living up to the country’s size and responsibility in the world is just not a sustainable foreign policy for Germany anymore,” Mr. Techau said. Although the Free Democrats have supported Germany’s participation in the NATO mission in Afghanistan, Mr. Westerwelle spoke out more strongly than Mrs. Merkel during the campaign about limiting the length of the deployment of the more than 4,000 German troops there.
While talking about nuclear weapons at his news conference on Monday, Mr. Westerwelle referred to “rearmament” when he clearly meant to say “disarmament,” and shortly afterward apologized for his exhaustion after a long election night.

Women in Colonial North America
The status of women in colonial North America has been well studied and described and can be briefly summarized. Throughout the colonial period there was a marked shortage of women, which varied with the regions and was always greatest in the frontier areas. This favorable ratio enhanced women’s status and position and allowed them to pursue different careers. The Puritans, the religious sect that dominated the early british colonies in North America, regarded idleness as a sin, and believed that life in an underdeveloped country made it absolutely necessary that each member of the community perform an economic function. Thus work for women, married or single, was not only approved, it was regarded as a civic duty. Puritan town councils expected widows and unattached women to be self supporting and for a long time provided needy spinsters with parcels of land. There was no social sanction against married women working; on the contrary, wives were expected to help their husbands in their trade and won social approval for doing extra work in or out of the home. Needy children, girls as well as boys, were indentured or apprenticed and were expected to work for their keep. The vast majority of women worked within their homes, where their labor produced most articles needed for the family. The entire colonial production of cloth and clothing and partially that of shoes was in the hands of women. In addition to these occupations, women were found in many different kinds of employment. They were butchers, silversmiths, gunsmiths and upholsterers. They ran mills, plantations, tanyards, shipyards, and every kind of shop, tavern, and boardinghouse. They were gatekeepers, jail keepers, sextons, journalists, printers, apothecaries, midwives, nurses, and teachers.

A Little Piece of Me
When he told me he was leaving I felt like a vase which has just smashed. There were pieces of me all over the tidy, tan tiles. He kept talking, telling me why he was leaving, explaining it was for the best, I could do better, it was his fault and not mine. I had heard it before many times and yet somehow was still not immune; perhaps one did not become immune to such felony.
He left and I tried to get on with my life. I filled the kettle and put it on to boil, I took out my old red mug and filled it with coffee watching as each coffee granule slipped in to the bone china. That was what my life had been like, endless omissions of coffee granules, somehow never managing to make that cup of coffee.
Somehow when the kettle piped its finishing warning I pretended not to hear it. That’s what Mike’s leaving had been like, sudden and with an awful finality. I would rather just wallow in uncertainty than have things finished. I laughed at myself. Imagine getting all philosophical and sentimental about a mug of coffee. I must be getting old.
And yet it was a young woman who stared back at me from the mirror. A young woman full of promise and hope, a young woman with bright eyes and full lips just waiting to take on the world. I never loved Mike anyway. Besides there are more important things. More important than love, I insist to myself firmly. The lid goes back on the coffee just like closure on the whole Mike experience.
He doesn’t haunt my dreams as I feared that night. Instead I am flying far across fields and woods, looking down on those below me. Suddenly I fall to the ground and it is only when I wake up that I realize I was shot by a hunter, brought down by the burden of not the bullet but the soul of the man who shot it. I realize later, with some degree of understanding, that Mike was the hunter holding me down and I am the bird that longs to fly. The next night my dream is similar to the previous nights, but without the hunter. I fly free until I meet another bird who flies with me in perfect harmony. I realize with some relief that there is a bird out there for me, there is another person, not necessarily a lover perhaps just a friend, but there is someone out there who is my soul mate. I think about being a broken vase again and realize that I have glued myself back together, what Mike has is merely a little part of my time in earth, a little understanding of my physical being. He has only, a little piece of me.

7 ways to make your laptop battery last longer
With the latest portable PCs, working on the move has never been easier, but laptops are still slaves to the National Grid.
You can do practically anything on a modern laptop, but their advanced features drain battery life to the extent that you can only get a couple of hours out of your laptop before it turns up its toes.
While battery life is a chief cause of mobile moans, it’s possible to get significant improvements by simple good practice and a few software tweaks. To help you get the most from your laptop battery, here are seven easy ways to make it last longer.
1. Dim your screen
The screen is one of the most power-hungry parts of the laptop. It takes serious amounts of battery power to keep your display looking clear and bright. Saving this power is simply a question of turning the brightness down. The screen brightness button is usually located as a second function of one of the F keys, and is represented by a little sun symbol with up and down icons. To use it, just hold down the correct function key and then choose up or down.
2. Change power settings
Windows Vista comes with some great power features, which enable you to eke out the best performance when you’re plugged into the mains, and optimise battery life when on the move. Type power options into the Start Search box and choose Power saver from the list. The Windows Mobility Center has more methods for saving battery life. These include settings for powering off the monitor and kicking into sleep mode more quickly.

3. Switch off Wi-Fi
One of the biggest battery sappers is the wireless networking capabilities built into most laptops. Wi-Fi drains the battery by constantly drawing power from the battery and, when not connected, looking for networks. When you’re using your laptop away from the grid, the likelihood is you’re away from wireless networks, so you can turn this device off. Many laptops have a function button that enables you to turn off the wireless adaptor manually to save yourself the unnecessary waste, but older laptops often don’t have this. If this is the case, just go to the Control Panel, access the network Connections menu and disable your wireless connection manually.
4. Turn off peripherals
Using USB peripherals can put a big drain on your system, because your motherboard has to power them, so unplugging everything saves juice. USB sticks, mice and webcams are common offenders, so copy all your information across and eject your devices as soon as possible, and put up with laptop track pads over your USB mouse. Many laptops have function buttons to turn off the built-in webcam, which drains the battery if given the chance.
5. Eject your disc drives
Having a disc spinning in the drive is a huge drain on resources, and many programs constantly do this. Simply eject your discs before you switch to battery power to gain vital extra minutes from your working day.
6. Invest in some hardware
Good practice can go some way to extending your battery life, but if you need to use your laptop throughout your working day, you’re going to need some help. Most laptops come with a six-cell battery, but many manufacturers offer eight- or even 12-cell optional upgrades, which can double your power. The alternative to expensive laptop batteries are products such as the Philips Portable Power Pack, which gives you valuable extra hours for all your devices. The Philips is a compact battery unit that has adaptors for most laptops and mobile phones, which is portable enough to be placed in a bag and has enough capacity to double the length of your charge.
7. Disable features
Windows Vista has some handy built-in features, but many put demands on your system that are unnecessary when working on the move. Take the simple measure of turning off Windows Aero and the Windows Sidebar when you’re on the move to make your laptop more efficient.

Colds and Age
A critical factor that plays a part in susceptibility to colds is age. A study done by the University of Michigan School of Public Health revealed particulars that seem to hold true for the general population. Infants are the most cold ridden group, averaging more than six colds in their first years. Boys have more colds than girls up to age three. After the age of three, girls are more susceptible than boys, and teenage girls average three colds a year to boys’ two. The general incidence of colds continues to decline into maturity. Elderly people who are in good health have as few as one or two colds annually. One exception is found among people in their twenties, especially women, who show a rise in cold infections, because people in this age group are most likely to have young children. Adults who delay having children until their thirties and forties experience the same sudden increase in cold infections. The study also found that economics plays an important role. As income increases, the frequency at which colds are reported in the family decreases. Families with the lowest income suffer about a third more colds than families at the upper end. Lower income generally forces people to live in more cramped quarters than those typically occupied by wealthier people, and crowding increases the opportunities for the cold virus to travel from person to person. Low income may also adversely influence diet. The degree to which poor nutrition affects susceptibility to colds is not yet clearly established, but an inadequate diet is suspected of lowering resistance generally.