Antoni Atex's Blog

Valentine's Day Ideas

2010-02-14T03:43:00.000-08:00

Valentine's Day is one of the most romantic days in a year. So it is natural that each one of us wish to celebrate this day uniquely. But the question arises as to how to celebrate this wonderful day in a special way. Your Valentine's Day must be remarkable and should leave an unforgettable impression in the mind of your beloved. Use your own romantic and thoughtful ideas for creating a unique Valentine's day celebration. There are ample valentine ideas and tips but the first and foremost thing to be kept in mind is to create the love ambience around you and your beloved. Your valentine day gift to your beloved need not be expensive but it should be straight from the heart.

If you are aspiring for an exquisite Valentine's Day then just go through the touching valentine ideas or tips to make an ideal valentine's day.

A simple 'I Love You' with a kiss can set an awesome mood for a Valentine's Day.
Decorate his/her house with hearts, bows and ribbons.
Make arrangements for surprise flower bouquets.
Cook a dinner for two and decorate the room with heart-shaped candles.
Gift him/her with velvet full of fresh Valentine day's chocolates.
A romantic note asking him/her to be your valentine.
Send sweet love quotes.
Make your own Valentine's Day card which expresses your feelings.
Create a scrapbook 'recollection collection' and fill it with love letters, photographs, cherished mementos, etc.
A CD of his/her favorite songs.
A jewelry gift is awesome. A heart shaped locket for the lady love and a silver bracelet for him is just perfect.
Plan a special dinner for him/her either in a garden or a boat. A candle light dinner is just unforgettable.
Pamper your sweetheart by gifting her a spa session.
Pot a plant that will grow and loom for her.
Spend loads of quality time with him/her and clandestine visits to romantic gateways.
Gift him/her a nice cell phone for keeping endless communication.
Gift her a beautiful evening gown or apparel.
Dance with your valentine on Martina McBride's 'Valentine'.
Include a chocolate dessert in your romantic dinner.
Create a love song CD full of Valentine's Day songs.
Send flowers at workplace or home to him/her.
If he/she loves gadgets then gift a digital camera.

Source : my dear valentine

How To Choose A Christmas Gift For A Man

2009-12-16T07:38:00.000-08:00

I am sick of the marketing of Christmas, and I bet that you are as well by now. Oh, I know, people have talked to death about commercialism and consumerism and such, but these are not the things that anger me the very most. No, not at all. What angers me most is the way that our rigid roles are reinforced by the ways that people market their Christmas gift ideas. This, they will say, is the right Christmas gift for a man, that the right Christmas gift for a woman, and the other, the perfect Christmas gift for a teenager – as if the whole personality of someone could come down simply to their gender and age. Let me say this plainly now, and not be misunderstood: there is no ideal Christmas gift for a male. They may tell you that a Christmas gift for a man is a pocket knife, or a new tie, or a war book, but all of that is hogwash. The only perfect Christmas gift for a man is the gift that that man wants, and men are as different from each other as they are from women or teenagers.

Of course, I know that the companies market Christmas gifts for a man partly as a way to make things easy for the consumer. They want to put things that men usually want all together, so that when someone does go out and look for a Christmas gift for a man, they will see them all in one section. But beyond that, I think that the system of having men's Christmas gifts and women's Christmas gifts has a more sinister function. I think that they do it all to cement their hold over us. If a Christmas gift for a man is a pocket knife or a nice watch, then every year you have to buy all of the men in your life one of these things. And so on.

It is really every bit as sinister as all that, and I am not joking. There are people who spend years thinking about how to best market to a group of people, and this is how they think. They will try to make everyone buy the most expensive Christmas gift for a man that they can, and that way they will make more money. And money is, of course, what the holiday is all about for these companies.

Since men are quite particular to the practicality of their stuff, make sure that you give him items that the man can use. Before starting that journey of finding the perfect Christmas gift for him, make sure that you take into consideration his personal preferences or inclinations.

If you've looked all around and still can't find the perfect gift, consider a gift card. For the man that is truly impossible to shop for, let him do the shopping for himself. Gift cards are great because they give the recipient an opportunity to buy anything in the store, as determined by the value of the gift card, without spending a dime.

Black Friday Internet Sales

2009-11-26T23:55:00.001-08:00

The Black Friday Sales are a high point of the Thanksgiving and Christmas period. Creating hype with shoppers all over.

And even with this years financial climate it is no different. Store’s are getting ready for more excited crowds this year.

So if your one, who loves sitting out side the closed doors in the wee hours of the morning till opening, your in for some fun. But there are other ways of getting the Black Friday Bargains without even leaving your couch.

The Black Friday Internet Sales. Major retailers such as Dell, Walmart, Best Buys and others have some fantastic bargains on their Black Friday online sales as well.

Even computer giant Apple are having sale prices especially on their laptops, so if this year your looking for technology, this is your year!

But remember with many stores this is the only time of year that they offer such prices. So make sure to get in early.

A lot of stores sale prices have been leaked on the Internet , creating a hype among shoppers.

But if lining at the store isn’t your cup of tea, maybe you will consider shopping online. It saves time, money waiting times and the madness of in-store activity.

But research is important , either if you choose online or in-store to shop.

The store’s websites such as Best Buys are offering some great prices on TVs, DVDs and blu ray discs. You also have Target, Kohl’s, Kmart, Home Depot, Walmart and Toys R US who are offering online bargains for eager shoppers.

One of the best stores for purchases this year would have to be Walmart who are offering bargains on just about everything, but be careful if your going in-store, last year Walmart saw a Black Friday related death, when an employee was trampled by shoppers eager for a bargain. Maybe more reason to shop online.

High tech won't save the economy this time

2009-10-13T11:28:00.000-07:00

Opinion: In 1982-1983 the economy in the West was battered. Unemployment in the U.S. reached 9.7 percent. The United Nations pegged growth for developed nations around one percent. Stagnation and recession were global conditions.

But in Silicon Valley unemployment was only 7.5 percent. At the time mid-size companies there like Intel, AMD, Apple, and countless others who have since vanished were growing. Other regional high-tech centers sprouting around Route 128 in Boston, the Silicon Forest in the Pacific Northwest, and the Silicon Fen around the University of Cambridge in England were spawning dozens of small and mid-size businesses that were pushing the economy forward.

New technologies, like local area networks, were attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital. Personal computers were becoming popular business tools. Software developers had a field day with opportunities to write programs for MS-DOS, CP-M, Unix (and its many variants), VMS, and many other operating systems. High technology, as it was called then, was booming.

In fact, while the rest of the economy slowly crawled out of its hole in the 1980s, tech companies raced ahead. Even after the market crash in October of 1987 where the FTSE tumbled 23 percent in two days, the DJIA fell 22 percent in one day, and the Australian and Hong Kong markets lost a whopping 40+ percent in the month, tech companies like Lotus Development Corp., 3Com, Tandem Computers, and Digital Equipment Corp. continued to thrive. That growth continued with few interruptions throughout the 1990s.

Without that high-tech the economy the West would never have seen much, if any, economic growth throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Yes, the financial sector grew in the U.S. and Europe, but its expansion was built in no small measure on the business driven by constant mergers and acquisitions and IPOs in the tech sector. Tech has been the engine of our growth for the past two decades. But that engine is petering out.

The first sputtering in the fast-paced high-tech economy appeared with the dot-com bust at the dawn of this century. Mid-sized companies that primarily drove that growth were hit the hardest. Companies like Sun Microsystems ("We put the dot in dot-com.") suffered badly and never fully recovered. Compaq was so battered it fell into the arms of Hewlett-Packard in 2001 to save itself. Venture capital investment stalled.

After a brief uptick from 2003-2007, the tech sector is again languishing. Unemployment in Silicon Valley topped an unprecedented 12 percent in August and is likely to get worse. IPOs are at dismal levels. Venture capitalists I talk to are in despair.

Yes, yes, there are a few big bright spots - Apple, Cisco, and Google come to mind. But these few giants can't spur the overall economy. There is no longer a core of mid-size tech companies that drive growth. Microsoft and Intel, once significant contributors to the high-tech expansion only seem to grow now by buying smaller firms, then laying off all but a few engineers and sales staff, and, inadvertently, I suspect, stifling innovation to build support around their legacy systems.

Facebook, Twitter, and other social media darlings will not create the next high-tech growth engines for our economy, either. Looking around the industry, there's nothing, not even the ubiquitous iPhone, that will spur overall economic growth. High-tech's salad days are over and with them any hope for a quick end to the current Great Recession.

article source : TG-Daily

Ostrom, Williamson Win Nobel Prize for Economics

2009-10-12T08:57:00.000-07:00

Two American economists, Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson, who study the way decisions are made outside the markets on which many other economists focus, were awarded the Nobel Prize in economics Monday.

Ms. Ostrom, who teaches at Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind., is the first woman to win the prize, which, before Monday, had been awarded to 62 men since it was launched in 1969 to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Swedish central bank. The judges cited "her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons," the way in which natural resources are managed as shared resources. It is an area of research that she said was relevant to questions surrounding global warming, and suggests that decisions by individuals can help solve the problem even as governments work to reach an international agreement.

Ms. Ostrom "challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized," the Nobel judges said. "Based on numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins, [Ms.] Ostrom concludes that the outcomes are, more often than not, better than predicted by standard theories. She observes that resource users frequently develop sophisticated mechanisms for decision-making and rule enforcement to handle conflicts of interest, and she characterizes the rules that promote successful outcomes."

Ms. Ostrom, who was interviewed by phone during the announcement press conference in Stockholm, described the prize as "an immense surprise," and said, "I'm still a little bit in shock."

Her doctorate is in political science, but she considers herself a political economist.

Mr. Williamson, who is at the University of California at Berkeley, was cited for "for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm" -- the reason some economic decisions are made at arm's length in markets and others are made inside a corporation.

"The drawback of markets is that they often entail haggling and disagreement," the judges said. "The drawback of firms is that authority, which mitigates contention, can be abused. Competitive markets work relatively well because buyers and sellers can turn to other trading partners in case of dissent. But when market competition is limited, firms are better suited for conflict resolution than markets. A key prediction of [Mr.] Williamson's theory, which has also been supported empirically, is therefore that the propensity of economic agents to conduct their transactions inside the boundaries of a firm increases along with the relationship-specific features of their assets."

The economics prize is the only one of the six Nobel prizes not created in Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel's 1896 will, and is officially known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

The two economists will share a 10 million kronor prize (about $1.4 million). Ms. Ostrom said she hopes to devote the proceeds to supporting research and graduate students.

article source : wallstreet

Xerox to buy Affiliated Computer Services for $6.4B

2009-09-28T07:00:00.000-07:00

Xerox Corp. said Monday it has agreed to buy business process outsourcing firm Affiliated Computer Services Inc. (ACS) -- which has a large Colorado presence -- for $6.4 billion, or $63.11 per share.

Norwalk, Conn.-based Xerox (NYSE: XRX) said in a statement the purchase of Dallas-based ACS will make Xerox a “leading global enterprise for document and business process management.”

The merger gives Xerox an edge and growth into the $150 billion business processing outsourcing market and establishes a $22 billion global enterprise for document technology and business process management, Xerox said.

In the transaction, ACS shareholders will receive $18.60 per share in cash and 4.935 Xerox shares. Xerox also will take over ACS’s $2 billion debt and issue $300 million in convertible stock to ACS Class B shareholders.

“We’re proud of our significant profitable growth over the past 20 years and our ability to manage our clients’ operations with a global infrastructure and workforce,” said Lynn Blodgett, president and chief executive officer, ACS. “We also know that for ACS to expand globally and differentiate our offerings through technology, we need a partner with tremendous brand strength and leading innovation. Xerox offers that and more to bring our business to the next level while strengthening theirs.”

Through the acquisition, Xerox said it will establish annualized cost savings in the range of $300 to $400 million in the first three years after the transaction.

The transaction has been approved by both companies’ boards and is expected to close in the first quarter of 2010. ACS will continue to operate as an independent company and will be marketed under the brand of ACS, a Xerox Co.

ACS employs several hundred workers in the Colorado Springs area and announced plans in June to hire some 600 additional workers for a customer-care center.

ACS has more than 74,000 employees in 100 countries, and 142 customer-care centers.

Monfils Test Nadal in Primetime; Murray in Trouble at US Open

2009-09-08T21:20:00.000-07:00

I’ve emerged from meeting this afternoon to see that Andy Murray is down a set and a break at the moment to Marin Cilic. A surprise, somewhat. Cilic is playing on borrowed time having overcome a two-set hole to Jesse Levine in the second round so he should be playing loose.

Cilic has never reached a Slam quarterfinal and if he can do it here all the better. With a big, powerful game Cilic can hurt Murray especially if the Scot is plays passively by feeding balls in the middle of the court, waist high. But we are still early and once the pressure shifts to Cilic to close it out anything is possible.

Also ongoing at the moment is another 6- foot-6 , 20- year-old giant Juan Martin Del Potro who is having his way with former US Open finalist Juan Carlos Ferrero. DelPo’s already up two sets and a break and I still love his chances to get to the final here, regardless of Murray.

Here, regardless of Murray. The big match comes later this evening when I think the American viewing public will be fully introduced to my man Gael Monfils who takes on Rafael Nadal. Rafa’s ailing so I’m picking Monfils to pull the upset tonight. I think Gael’s got too much game, too much firepower and if Rafa’s not serving at 100 % the Frenchman should be able to jump all over Nadal’s serve.

For the sake of the match I do hope Rafa’s is healthy but based on what I’ve seen I doubt he’s 100% so Monfils is my pick.

Also today Jo-Wilfried Tsonga test Fernando Gonzalez in a battle of two guys who enjoyed Australian Open excellence. I picked Gonzo at the start to reach the semifinals and he’s still my pick to do it. But it’s going to tough affair and assuming Rafa’s is injured, it’s probably the best match of the day.

As for the women, if not for Serena Williams they’d be handing the US Open trophy to Kim Clijsters Saturday night. There’s really no one else left that’s going to beat her outside of Serena. Clijsters hammered on Li Na earlier this afternoon and if Serena dispenses of Flavia Pennetta tonight, which I think will happen, we’ll get that semifinal showdown on Friday.

The other semi will feature the winner of Wickmayer-K. Bondarenko and Wozniacki-Oudin. I’m going to pick Bondarenko to meet Wozniacki. I know Melanie Oudin has had quite a run, but there’s no more Russians left in the draw and I think Wozniacki is steady enough and above all can mentally handle the match and the occasion of playing under the lights to get the win.

Meanwhile, I see now Cilic is 4-1 up as Murray is in deep trouble.

more detail : www.tennis-x.com

Hungarian Rhapsody

2009-09-08T20:59:00.000-07:00

Hungarian Rhapsody: More than 6 ,000 cheered on the best amateur talent in the state at the 37 th annual State Fair Amateur Talent Contest Finals Sept. 6 at the Grandstand.

Winners were :

Open Division: First place went to Sedra Bistodeau of Princeton for her violin solo “ Hungarian Rhapsody #2. ” Stillwater bluegrass trio “ Brohan” took second place with the song “ Soldier.” Third place was awarded to Aria Stiles of Apple Valley for her violin solo “ Violin Medley.” Teen Division: Liz Redpath of Edina took first place performing vocal solo “ The Doll Song.” Second place was awarded to Nathaniel Irvin from Maple Grove who performed a vocal solo entitled “Santa Fe.” Third place went to Kirby Anderson of Eden Prairie for his guitar solo entitled “Tall Fiddler.”

Preteen Division: First place went to Julius Andrews IV of Coon Rapids for his vocal solo “I’ll Be There.” Selena Brills from Blaine took second place with vocal solo “Cowboy Sweetheart.” Third place was awarded to Little Canada’s Matthew?Wong for the piano solo “Tarantella.

more details:http://hometownsource.com/index.php

Gia Carangi | Pictures of Gia Marie Carangi Supermodel | Gia Carangi Biography

2009-09-08T19:54:00.000-07:00

Gia Carangi, Pictures of Gia Marie Carangi, Gia Supermodel, Gia model, Gia Carangi Biography, Gia Marie Carangi Photo Gallery below. Gia Marie Carangi was an American fashion model during the late 1970 s and early 1980 s. Gia Marie Carangi was born on January 29 , 1960 and died on November 18 , 1986. Gia Carangi was considered by some to be the first supermodel, although that title has also been given to others, including Janice Dickinson and Dorian Leigh. Cindy Crawford, who also appeared on the covers of fashion publications during her time, was later referred to as “Baby Gia” due to her resemblance to Carangi.

Carangi was featured on the cover of fashion magazines, including Vogue, April 1 , 1979 ; Vogue Paris, April 1979 ; American Vogue, August 1980 ; Vogue Paris, August 1980 ; Italian Vogue, January 1981 ; and several issues of Cosmopolitan between 1979 and 1982.

After she became addicted to heroin, Carangi’s modeling career rapidly declined. She later became infected with HIV and died at the age of 26. Her death was not widely publicized and few people in the fashion industry knew of it. Carangi is thought to be one of the first famous women to die of AIDS. A biographical film starring Angelina Jolie, Gia, debuted on HBO in 1998. Her father is Italian American, and her mother is American of Irish and Welsh ancestry.

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Tyra Banks real hair is center of her show

2009-09-08T18:38:00.000-07:00

Tyra Banks kicked off this season of her talk show by revealing her real hair . Banks is known for all of the wonderful, (and some not so wonderful) wigs she has always been seen in but today she decided to ditch it all and go o-natural.

Why is this such a big deal you may ask? Most people have never even seen Tyra without a wig on.

Some speculate that ever since her, friend of the show, Chris Rock sent her a copy of his documentary “ Good Hair ”, which documents why black women feel the need (or simply want) to relax their hair and/or wear a weave, as well as trying to find out were the term good hair came from, Tyra may have had a change of heart about her beauty standards.

She showed a clip from the documentry on a show she did about “ Good Hair ” were black women discussed what they considered good hair and their reasons for relaxing (chemically straightening) their hair.

But I think what really could have gotten to Tyra was the little children on that show. One woman was actually relaxing her 3 year olds hair. This woman said they would not make it for kids if it was dangerous, failing to realize that her toddler had not yet entered what is called childhood.

Another little girl that was biracial stated that people that don’t have good hair are “low class”, a term her mother had been called as a child for having African textured hair.

All of these things together might have struck a note with Tyra, or may not of had anything at all to do with her decision. Either way I say, “bring it girl”, because I still wish I could rock a fro (my hair just lays there like a semi-Diana Ross).

more details : Click Here