Tracy Roelle

Learning About Watch Repair There are a lot of basic tools available that are used in repairing watches. The starting tools are a pair of good tweezers and screwdrivers. The other essential tools that normally come in handy are :

a good lamp,
a comfortable working area( generally a table)
cleaning solvents,
oil,
a knife,
toothpicks,
versatile adhesive material,
special stones for sharpening your screwdrivers and tweezers,
a set of measuring tools
And don’t forget the emery cloth which is a must have in a toolkit.

If you are passionate on watch repair then don’t forget nippers, punches, pliers of different shapes and sizes, hand pullers, a demagnetizer and also a watch case opening and closing tools. There are some more specialized tools like the truing caliper and a timing machine and a polisher and also a lathe if you take up watch repair seriously.

Here are a few tools that are explained in detail

Tweezers: it is a good idea to start with a style 2 or 3 tweezers because they are easier to handle and you can use them on delicate watches as well. Nonmagnetic tweezers that are manufactured by the Swiss are rated the best as they will not rust nor will they have any delicate steel parts of the watches sticking to them. The demagnetizer will help you in case such a problem occurs. The tweezers should be sharp and parallel, otherwise even a little bit of extra pressure will see the delicate parts jumping out of your tweezers. A fine stone can be used to sharpen your tweezers.

Screwdrivers: this is an important tool in a watch repairman’s kit as it plays the important role in dismantling and re-fixing the delicate and minute parts of a watch. The Swiss screwdriver is a safe bet because they have revolving tops that are easy to use. If you find them expensive or if they do not fit in your budget try the French screwdrivers they are too are good. India and Pakistan also manufacture screwdrivers that are pretty cheap but don’t forego on the quality.

Cleaning solutions: a good commercial solution, preferably waterless is recommended during watch repairing and cleaning. Most of these cleaning solutions contain carcinogens that can be harmful to your health. Peg wood sticks also known as toothpicks are useful to clean the jewel holes in old pocket watches. Nowadays you get ultrasonic machines and other cleaning machines. That will assist you in cleaning the dirty parts and all you have to do is examine the clean parts and re-fix the watch. Care should be taken while cleaning as the parts may be old and delicate.

Oils: Oil plays a very important role during the cleaning process. These oils are exorbitant but they generally depend upon the size and category to the watch. The first breakthrough in synthetic watch oil was developed by Elgin. These oils are not available in the market today. Moebius which is a Swiss company is known to make very good synthetic as well as natural oil that aids in watch repair process.

The list is never ending as new and more polished tools are being innovated practically every minute but these should do for the newbies.

https://www.watchtool.co.uk/watchmakers-tool-kits-c-353.html?osCsid=7e72d831355ab9bcdb3e8d54a2d79b3b gives you the complete lowdown on what tools you need to have your own watch making hobby.

See also 4 MEC

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EarningsBingMusicFacebookSkypeIPOM&A & VCAll Topics »MobileBlackBerryFacebook Twitter Alerts & RSS Amazon Cuts More Affiliates To Avoid Sales Tax
Comments (0) Text Size: A A Print (PDF) Email Share Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) understandably doesn’t want to charge state sales taxes—and to avoid doing so, it’s loose thousands of marketing affiliates who link to Amazon products on their sites in exchange for a cut of sales. (See examples of links to the left.) The company stated Monday that it had terminated its affiliate program in Rhode Island, because a new law there would require companies to collect sales taxes if they have marketing affiliates based in the state, according to the WSJ. That follows a similar move by the company in North Carolina on Friday. Amazon is also fighting a third law in New York.

It’s likely that the cuts of affiliate programs will only accelerate, since several other cash-needy states, including Hawaii and Connecticut, are considering similar laws in order to raise funds. It’s unclear, though, how much revenue Amazon stands to lose, since the company doesn’t break out how much it makes via the affiliate programs.

Citigroup Analyst Mark Mahaney states that even if Amazon can avoid collecting sales taxes in the short term, the “long-term trend will be towards sales taxes.” Some consolation for Amazon, however: In markets where Amazon does collect sales taxes, the company has nevertheless seen consistent growth, Mahaney says.

The Wylie has signed a deal to bring the e-book editions of 20 classic titles, including Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, exclusively to Amazon’s Kindle Store for two years, the company announced Thursday.

Publishers were, unsurprisingly, less than pleased. Today, Random House declared in a statement that the trade publisher would “not be entering into any new English-language business agreements” with the agency, which represents such illustrious authors as Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie, “until situation is resolved.”

“The Wylie Agency’s decision to sell e-books exclusively to Amazon for titles which are subject to active Random House agreements undermines our longstanding commitments to and investments in our authors, and it establishes this as our direct competitor,” a spokesperson for the publishing company said.

The problem is that it’s still unclear — at least to Random House — who has the rights to publish the electronic versions of older titles, whose contracts don’t specify those rights because e-books simply didn’t exist when they were drafted. Random House sent a letter to literary agents in December 2009 asserting ownership of those rights, citing clauses in older agreements that grant the company to publish texts “in book form… in any and all editions.”

Agents and authors were surprised to receive the missive, given the outcome of a lawsuit between Random House and RosettaBooks LLC in 2001. According to the WSJ, Random House tried to prevent the latter from selling the e-book editions of works by William Styron, Robert Parker and Kurt Vonnegurt Jr.; the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled in RosettaBooks’s favor, claiming that Random House’s earlier contracts didn’t cover e-books. A federal court of appeals affirmed the decision.

The Future of E-book Distribution

The latest dispute between the Wiley Bureau and Random House is, then, just one in what promises to be a long line of disagreements — and not just about older titles. Perhaps inevitably, authors and their agents will increasingly make deals directly with the likes of Amazon and Barnes & Noble’s e-book division to distribute the electronic versions of their work.

Several, including Stephen King, already have. The bestselling suspense author released his most recent novel, Blockade Billy, as an e-book one month before releasing the hardcover version in the U.S. and Canada. He also distributed a short story, “UR,” exclusively through the Kindle Store in February 2009, shortly after the Kindle 2’s release.

Most recently, widely read Japanese author Ryu Murakami revealed his plans to publish his next novel on the iPad, stepping around his publisher and securing a greater share of the sales revenue in the process. According to Fast Company, publishing houses typically offer authors and agents 25% of the net proceeds of e-book sales. By releasing his novel directly in Japan’s App Store, Murakami and his partners will receive up to 70% of sales proceeds; undoubtedly, bestselling authors could negotiate with Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc. for even more lucrative deals.

It thus makes sense that authors and literary agents wouldn’t want to fork over e-book rights to their traditional publishers, when they could potentially profit more by making deals directly with e-book retailers. And traditional publishers are of course worried, as e-book sales are making up an increasingly greater share of overall sales; earlier this week, Amazon revealed that it is now selling more e-books than hardcover books.

What This Means for Consumers

In the end, however, it’s the consumers who will suffer most. While it’s great that 20 works of classic contemporary literature are now available in electronic format for Kindle owners, it’s not so great for those with a Nook, or one of Sony’s or Borders’s low-priced e-readers.

Unless different arrangements are made, consumers can anticipate a frustrating future in e-book purchasing, in which popular titles and authors are made available only on certain platforms — at least until a set number of duplicates are sold or period of time elapses, at least. Amazon and its ilk will offer increasingly competitive deals to secure top selling authors, and users will have to toggle through an array of apps and devices to download the books they are looking for.

As Devin Coldewey of Crunchgear cheekily suggests, consumers may return to the “portable, DRM-free, region-agnostic” paperback for convenience’s sake.

Who do you think is in the right here, Random House or the Wylie Agency? Do you think the dispute and other recent developments bode well or poorly for the future of the publishing industry? Share your thoughts in the comments.

[img credit: quinn.anya]

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audiobooki

This days im interested in IM

The Six Guidelines that Teaches How to Become a SEO Expert

Do you think brain surgeries are hard? Well, SEO is much more difficult to understand than a mere human neurological organ. To master yourself in the art of SEO, it requires numerous years of practice. Even if you are a
 master once, not sharpening your skills time to time will definitely get you rusty. The search algorithms change all the time and you have no idea what the search engine developers are up to. You must always keep your head in the game or else this is going to not only be harder than a brain surgery, but might even go out of this world and become something of a black magic, where you have to bring back a person to life.

Now, you have to understand that no one is really each expert in this field of SEO. Like I have said, because of this ever-changing nature, it is difficult to develop expertise. So, if anyone's working for a client, you probably don't want to get their website thrown into the “sandbox.” Sandbox is a term used in the field referring to the black hole of websites. Which simply means that the website will never ever be found. That's why you have to make sure you do not make a stupid mistake, or it's going to be a very bad situation for everyone, especially you.

To prevent making mistakes I'm going to introduce to you the six guidelines that you should all keep in mind in practice.

Number one.
For minimum of a year, administer a minimum number of five websites. Linking them together is not a good idea. They should be completely separate, making no possibilities of contaminating one another.

Number two.
Take a scientific approach to your problems. Try to come up with your own theories and techniques. Test them out, note the results, make changes, test it out again, and just keep doing that. Observe how the search engines are working to bring up your websites and try to incorporate that to your SEO techniques.

Zombie meat beef jerkey

Lisa Katayama at 8:21 AM Wednesday, May 26, 2010

You can now buy dried zombie meat at your local convenience store in Japan. The packaging claims it contains blue flesh aged to perfection in the graveyard.

via Pink Tentacle

MINNEAPOLIS — A Minnesota woman who became severely ill with an E. coli infection from a tainted hamburger has reached a settlement with the meatpacking arm of agribusiness giant Cargill Inc., both sides announced Wednesday.

Stephanie Smith, 23, of Cold Spring, and Cargill the terms of the settlement were confidential, but that it will provide for Smith's care throughout her life. The former children's dance was left paralyzed, with cognitive problems and kidney damage.

Smith became ill in 2007 after eating a patty produced by Cargill Meat Solutions Corp., a Wichita, Kans.-based unit of Minnetonka-based Cargill Inc. Her E. coli infection led to kidney failure. She went into seizures and was kept in a medically induced coma for three months.

Smith's battle to recover was the centerpiece story last year in a New York Times series that won a Pulitzer Prize. The story spurred several members of Congress to demand better enforcement of food safety laws and a pledge from Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack for stepped up efforts to fight E. coli contamination. The story traced how the beef trimmings that went into her hamburger came from four plants in the U.S. and Uruguay, and that while such scraps are particularly vulnerable to contamination, many companies including Cargill did not normally test them prior to grinding.

Her Seattle-based attorney, Bill Marler, stated Smith's case continues to generate public and industry discussion about the importance of superior food safety.

“Stephanie's tragedy has taken on a life of it's own, and hopefully it will continue to focus people on why food safety is so important,” Marler said.

Cargill acknowledged responsibility when it first learned of her injuries and has been providing financial help to her and her family, the joint statement said. Cargill stated it “deeply regrets” her injuries, and that it has invested more than $1 billion in meat science research and new food safety technologies to eliminate E. coli and other sources of food-borne illnesses.

“Cargill continuously invests in food safety technology,” stated Mark Martin, a spokesman for Cargill Meat Solutions. “There certainly are things that have preceded the situation with Stephanie Smith, things that will continue to evolve into the future. Food safety – as you can being an agriculturally based company for much of our business – is a top priority and always will be.”

Neither Marler nor Martin would comment on the terms of the settlement, which still requires court approval. And Marler declined to allow Smith or her mother to comment. He they wanted to keep her focused on rehabilitation.

So anyway. After having a very emotional chore taken care of today and realizing I was a good three or four hours ahead of schedule, I decided on impulse to see a movie, to just escape for a whiel. It was either Nightmare again or The Losers, and I went with The Losers, since it's got a shorter shelf life in theaters.

I loved it. I just loved it. It had flaws, but there was so much about that film that I just adored. I had forgotten that Peter Berg co-wrote it; I wasn't too surprised, though, I love most of his stuff. (The Rundown is another big favorite of mine.) The critics are giving it a hard time, but I think it's great. Go see Nightmare first, but then see this.

Awesome.

PS: I'm officially in love with Jeffery Dean Morgan now, btw. Not quite enough to watch Grey's Anatomy, but it makes me more eager to get caught up on Supernatural. (I'm only halfway into S1.)

Stephen loves to work with people individually whenever possible .  At each workshop, he asks an attendee to join him onstage as he finds out through a process of discovery what they like to do and what their interests are. In Beaumont, it was lovely Gwen.  And, although she started out a skeptic, she ended up having a multitude of interests that other people would LOVE to find out about- online!

i found those photos. Nice right ?

For the novelty analysis it is irrelevant that, for example, Franklin and Polnerow might be “combined” to produce all four features: The test requires that all features be described in a single document.  Since the test was not met here, the patent was deemed novel.

1-Click and Obviousness
“Obviousness” is the other test that relates to “prior art.”  The obviousness of the 1-Click patent was not analysed in the re-examination, but it bears some consideration as it seems to be one of the main objections made online.

Obviousness talks to the inventiveness of the alleged invention: the invention must be non-obvious in order to be patentable.  Unlike in the novelty analysis, the obviousness analysis does combine the elements of the “prior art” to determine the “state of the art.”  So the fact that Franklin and Polnerow, taken together, described many of the key features of the 1-Click patent might be relevant.  However, this is not the only factor considered.  If a particular combination of features was non-obvious at the time the patent was filed, the patent might still be granted.

In the American ruling that upheld the 1-Click patent, the judge held that the patent was valid because it marked a departure from “conventional wisdom”, maximized the number of transactions while minimizing consumer anxiety, and was hailed by industry analysts as “legendary” and “seductive innovation” (paras. 34, 35, 41).  Moreover, both sides’ technical experts acknowledged that they had never conceived of the invention (para. 36).  In other words, 1-Click was non-obvious because the business community recognized the 1-Click system as such.

It should be noted that the inventiveness in the 1-Click patent was not the technology per se.  That is, the inventiveness did not lie in the use of cookies to pass an identifier to a server that stored the shopper’s personal information.  Rather, the inventiveness lied in the method of doing business in that way in the first place.  Indeed, when assessing the 1-Click patent the Canadian Patent Appeal Board held that “the ’single action ordering’ aspect of the inventive concept would not have been obvious”, even though “there is nothing inventive about the particular use of the cookie or identifier, as claimed” (para. 101).  However, the Board ultimately rejected the patent because business methods are generally considered unpatentable in Canada (para. 140).

The Real Issue: Business Method Patents
The real issue, then, lies with the patentability of business methods.  As mentioned, the 1-Click patent was rejected in Canada because business methods are generally not considered patentable subject matter.  U.S. decisions indicate that business methods are patentable, but that may change with the Supreme Court’s upcoming decision in Bilski.  The Canadian decision advocates that the technological aspect of the 1-Click patent is already obvious, while the business method aspect is not.  Thus, if the court in Bilski holds that business method patents are invalid, then the American 1-Click patent would likely be invalidated for obviousness.

Posted in Electronic Processes, IP, IP Course Topic, Innovation, Internet, Patentability, Patents, Technology

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I have photoshop and aperture… but have not figured out how to use it yet… I have iphoto which allows me to do some fix up and it's easy enough for the time being…

I've tried using photoshop a few time but it's a lot to figure out and I have not found the time as of yet.. However, I do intend on doing so…

I am glad to hear that it can be saved… at least some what…

I was reading up on RAW and Jpeg… so to clarify something about RAW… if I take photos in RAW form I will need to take all my pics in pure manual format and any retouching needs to be done with a program on the computer, including all compressions etc… correct??

Greg: can I e-mail you the pics? I can send one that has not been worked on and the other in it's original form… that way maybe you can tell me what I have done right or wrong… greatly appreciate it.

In a nutshell, this tumblr site is just a pretty may to see my google reader shared items. Pretty much all of the things you see here were not written by me, but they're posts/quotes/images/etc that I find interesting, and you might too.

Find my main interweb site at matstace.me.uk

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Aloha from Hawaiimode!