Towson University

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One of my good friends and I were talking last night about blogging and I would like to bring you guys and gals in on the conversation. We have both been blogging for a long time and we really enjoy the freedoms allowed by blogging when it comes to what you choose to write about. It is also nice how much freedom you can afford to those who choose to respond to your posts. If you want to you can choose to create a blog designed to be a kind of message board, or you can choose one like mine where you lovely readers come and hear my thoughts without much chance for recourse. I am not uninterested n your thoughts, I just have a lot to say and little time to pour over what others have to say. Those who really have something to say to me will contact me directly.

My friend does the same thing and he runs an eco-friendly blog at midbodyplanet. His blog is all about health, wellness, and ecologically conscious products. We were talking mostly about those before mentioned items, but we also thoughts that we should both drop some plugs for our friends who runs blogs elsewhere online. The first is one of my buddies who runs an online gambling blog at www.mygamblingthoughts.com. Here he basically can give some thoughts and strategies on various gaming techniques and styles. Then the other plug is for one of his friends who writes at technology blog at technologicalthoughts. At this site my friend discusses the newest technologies and actually last week he was talking about the newest gaming systems which I thought was interesting since I haven't played video games in like ten years.

Anyway, I guess that I wanted to write this today because I don't know a better place to gab about my love of blogs other than on my own blog so I hope that you guys and gals can share in the love and make your own blogs some time soon so we can all share in the groove. Happy blogging and happy fall semester.

I just discovered something interesting today while surfing the web that I had never noticed before. You know how there are lots of people now who are getting in to blogging and things like that, obviously since you are reading mine. Anyway, as with my little blog here where I talk about just about anything I can think of to share with you all, there are others out there who are also talking about anything and everything. There even other people on this very network who choose to sort of specialize, unlike my self, in some very specific topic and really stick to theme for their blog. Today I was looking and found an education blog, rehab blog, and a home improvement blog right here on our own server. These are obviously students who are very interested in their areas of study to the point where they feel the need to bring us all in as much as possible with their expertise.

Online there are tons of people doing the same things. Experts and amateurs in all areas of thought are speaking and sharing ideas in attempts to get ahead through this wonderful thing that we call the internet. When I did my looking just yesterday I had already found those within our own network so I was inspired in my searching. I found three sites that are very similar to those in our own server which are just from a different perceptive from ours. They are at the sites educationthoughts, www.drugaddictionthoughts.com, homeimporvementthoughts if you want to check them out and let them know that I'm giving them some props for their hard work. That is what this is all about I believe. Now if you all go and check out their stuff and post then we can have a nice dialogue between us and then draw our sites and readers all closer together. If any of you are so inspired to create you own blog space out there or already have one going, please let me know and I can try to mention you here and bring you in to my little circle and make it that much bigger.

A friend of mine went away to college in LA and I think that he has really gone over the edge. He was raised in a very strict household with parents who were very religious and they really kept a tight hold on him when he was growing up. He wasn't allowed to do anything growing up. He was not allowed to have or even attend parties. He couldn't even go to a school dance. He was not allowed to date. His life was a little bit too restricted if you ask me. When he got accepted to a college he couldn't wait to get out on his own. He knew he would be able to make his own choices and do things his way and it was a very exciting time for him. Well, I spoke to him a few times and I knew that he was partying way more than he was studying. It sounded like drugs and alcohol were consuming his life. I spoke to him about this but he didn't listen. One night he was at a party and apparently had been drinking everything and anything he could get his hands on and using blow which only made matters worse when he decided to take a ride over to his girlfriend's house and ran a red light. He killed two people that night and needless to say he was arrested for driving under the influence and for 2 counts of vehicular manslaughter. It seems that he must have had a really good attorney and since he had a clean record they sentenced him to 2 years in a California alcohol rehab followed by another stint in mens rehab in California for a grand total of 4 years. He will go through both treatment programs one for alcohol abuse and one for the cocaine use and then they will re-evaluate his progress to determine if further treatment is necessary. The saddest part is that he still has not told his parents about his situation, and I am not really sure he ever will. I just can't imagine being in this type of situation and not being able to tell your parents, but he is truly afraid that they are going to disown him, and I don't think that he could deal with that right now.

He calls me pretty regularly to talk, and I am doing my best to try and provide him with some much needed counsel. I am just glad that he is finally getting some much needed help.

Running your own business can take a lot more work than people realize. As a small business owner, I want to make the most out of my business, but getting our name out there and our business off the ground has been a daunting task. I guess when I was first starting out, I thought that if I had a good product and a reasonable price, I would have a successful business, but it requires much more than that. Running my own business has found me in charge of everything from the actual running of the business, to being my own accountant, advertiser and sales person. I never realized how much of my time and money was actually going to have to go into making a success out of a good idea. Well, finally it is starting to pay off, however finding a way to get the most for my money has not been easy.

The actual running of the business has been going pretty smoothly and I am finally getting the hang of the book keeping, but I am still working on getting my business name out there. I live in a small community, and in talking to one of my customers, he suggested promotional gifts. He explained to me that I could give gifts, like coffee mugs, t-shirts and umbrellas to my customers for free with my company logo and phone number printed right on them. He said by doing this I would improve my customer retention (everyone likes to get something for free) and I would get free advertising for the merchandise price. People would carry around my items and other people would see my company name everywhere. I told him I really did not have a lot of money to invest in it, and he told me about a site online where I could get small items, even just pens that would do the same thing for me. He said it was really a lot more reasonable than I would think, and its purpose was 2 fold. He said he tried it with his business and found an extreme increase in business in about a month or so.

Well, he was right and the site he told me about had some really neat items. I can't wait to start giving the stuff away. It will be so much easier than me having to go out on the off hours and try to drag in some business.

Water damage restoration is the worst. A week or two ago we had a really bad thunder storm. The electricity went out and a tree fell on our fence, and the rain was terrible. Luckily our basement was fine and no water got in, but the day after the thunder storm I went to two of my friend's houses and both of them had really bad water damage in their really nice basements. My friend Dan's family had to have their carpet ripped up in almost all of the rooms in the basement (I think their exercise room was the only one left with carpet, but even that was fanned down and smelled really bad) and a lot of their furnished had to be taken in to be restored from the water damage. Their video games that were on the bottom shelf of their entertainment center all got ruined including their complete system, which is worth hundreds, probably even thousands of dollars. It is such a pain in the butt when something like this happens and your basement floods. Their pool table had to be restored as well and they had a jukebox that got ruined. It's sad because a lot of their storage was also in the basement in a closet and pictures from their childhood were soaked and ruined.

My other friend Jenn, who lives about 2 blocks away from Dan had pretty much the same things happen to her, but thankfully most of their valuable stuff was up higher. They had to take out a lot of their carpeting as well (which can get to be really expensive) and the bottoms of their entertainment center and shelves had to be professionally fixed. Several years ago this happened to us and we had to tear apart our basement after we had just gotten everything put in. My parents were so upset because we had just moved there and installed carpeting and bought new furniture and put a really cool bar in, and then s thunderstorm came and flooded the whole basement and everything had to be ripped out and we had to deal the basement and start all over again.

Water damage is the worst kind of damage that can happen really. Not only are things wet, but they smell after a day or two which makes your whole house smell and if it isn't fixed properly it can get moldy and eventually make people sick.

This week is move in week for my friends and I and we are all just going crazy with how much stuff we have to get done before classes start. We have a little under a month hot make sure we have everything in order for the fall. We have been trying to get the house and our finances in such a flow that we won't have to think much about that in the fall at all when we have bigger problems to deal with. For now though we are right in the thick of weeks of organization, cleaning, and job finding. I have already gotten my job back from last year so I don't have to look very far, but so far I am the only one to have gotten a job already. For this week my task for the house is to find us a good Baltimore internet service since we have never had to buy it ourselves before. This will also be my first time doing any kind of product research like this so I am interested to see how I do and if I manage to find anything significantly better than other plans.

This is our first year of living off campus and we are all really excited. Last year we all met each other because we lived on the same floor in our dorm. We talked about this plan all spring and just before we all left for break we looked, and found, this apartment. Now we have six guys splitting a three bedroom apartment with a basement and it is going to be a blast having all of us together without all of the strict rules of the dorms. We're all musicians so it was a big problem for us living in the dorms because we couldn't play any music after eleven louder than headphones. We would resort to going a couple blocks away to a park to play acoustic at night but that got old fats when the park seemed to get more dangerous with the weather changing. Now our little home will become something special, I can feel it. We are all going to try our best to make this the best arrangement possible and make some beautiful music come out of it while we're here.

This week is move in week for my friends and I and we are all just going crazy with how much stuff we have to get done before classes start. We have a little under a month hot make sure we have everything in order for the fall. We have been trying to get the house and our finances in such a flow that we won't have to think much about that in the fall at all when we have bigger problems to deal with. For now though we are right in the thick of weeks of organization, cleaning, and job finding. I have already gotten my job back from last year so I don't have to look very far, but so far I am the only one to have gotten a job already. For this week my task for the house is to find us a good Baltimore phone service since we have never had to buy it ourselves before. This will also be my first time doing any kind of product research like this so I am interested to see how I do and if I manage to find anything significantly better than other plans.

This is our first year of living off campus and we are all really excited. Last year we all met each other because we lived on the same floor in our dorm. We talked about this plan all spring and just before we all left for break we looked, and found, this apartment. Now we have six guys splitting a three bedroom apartment with a basement and it is going to be a blast having all of us together without all of the strict rules of the dorms. We're all musicians so it was a big problem for us living in the dorms because we couldn't play any music after eleven louder than headphones. We would resort to going a couple blocks away to a park to play acoustic at night but that got old fats when the park seemed to get more dangerous with the weather changing. Now our little home will become something special, I can feel it. We are all going to try our best to make this the best arrangement possible and make some beautiful music come out of it while we're here.

I am the kind of person who is very interested in knowing what is really going on around them. As a student this can be a very good and very bad asset. I tend to look at things very intensely and at that I can sometimes get off topic for far too long and miss the point of what I am doing. I imagine that some of this has to do with my personality and some of it may have to do with the climate in which I was raised. My parents very highly stressed the importance of having a great education and thus made sure that I knew everything I could on a topic. The are very proud people, my parents, and thus they always wanted me to make sure I was the most well read and the most well informed person in any room. This also coupled, I believe, with the popularity of the internet at my school which gave each of us laptops for our class work. The internet has become a system that functions as a giant market for goods and services throughout the entire world. As an individual it is a platform through which you can buy and sell just about anything you have or wish to have in a relatively quick pace. This has been a great advantage for those people within the world community who have grown tired of advertisements and commercialization of every aspect of life. Trading will always be important in every society, but the marketing tactics have begun to shift over in to something a bit more human and much less totalitarian in nature. Online marketing, as I have found in my own searching, has changed drastically as a result of a demographic shift away from advertisements to a more individual basis. Now tactics such as search marketing have begun to grow in pace and effectiveness. These new tactics are just meant to link consumers with their products in ever increasing speed, without all of the jargon and empty language.

I think that because of these two factors, I have grown to see the world as a place, like the internet, where answers can simply be plucked from the sky and understood completely at a moment's notice.

I read a story the other day of a persons father who battled prostate cancer for many years. This battle with cancer taught so many lessons to both the father and the writer, and became a defining experience for both of them. It was quite touching. I thought about my own life, and realized that neither my parents nor I had such a moving, emotional battle with cancer that I could write about. I realized, however, that my mother still has a life-defining experience, although it may not be cancer. My mom has been struggling to keep her weight in check for almost two decades now.

Our basement at home is filled with used fitness equipment: elliptical trainers, ab rollers, treadmills, and other strange contraptions. You could call these machines as the fallen warriors in my moms battle with weight gain. Growing up, I remember my mom always purchasing items from a catalogue or from TV. One month would be filled with shipments of weight loss pills while another would be marked with stacks of frozen low-fat dinners in the freezer. 10-minutes-a-day workouts, low-fat chocolate cakes, fitness centers, jazzercise, and even belly vibrators my mom has tried them all.

Overall, my moms weight has not changed too much. Although it hasnt gotten much better, it hasnt gotten much worse either. I really think there is probably a larger issue with contentment and self-image going on, but in the meantime, I really would like my mother to get sound advice about how to live a healthy life. Ive been helping her lately to get good weight loss tips. I dont think all diet plans and techniques are bad. But there are many bad ones out there. My mom would agree, but you shouldnt buy the first brand of weight loss pills that claim to burn off all fat without you having to change your diet whatsoever. You really need to get good weight loss tips from a source that doesnt have an ulterior motive in offering these tips, and who knows what they are talking about.

My mom still tries various weight loss techniques nowadays, including weight loss pills, but she does so differently now. She carefully considers the expertise and motives of each of these weight loss organizations. She knows that there may be no single magic method, but by considering helpful weight loss tips, her battle against weight gain will yield fewer casualties and more victories.

Creating your own website is a bit more complicated than you might think. Sure there are the easy user friendly programs that make setting up your own website fun and easy. Then there are the marketing aspects of the website which add a little bit more complicated process to the site. You need to have a well marketed website with lots of traffic which means more money for you and obviously that is what we all want. So that's it, all you have to do to get up and running? Well, not exactly. In addition to the initial set up and maintenance of your site and of course the marketing and driving in of traffic, there is one very big factor that you should consider and that is the security of your website, especially if you think that you are using a secure shopping cart and checkout. You see, the hackers know just how to break through the PHP security and get into your site. They are especially good at hacking into the shopping carts and checkouts in websites giving them easy access to your customer's personal information and credit card numbers. This can be pretty frightening as a small business owner, the idea that someone else could hack into your site and do harm to one of your customers is very disturbing, especially if the customer thinks that you are the one running around abusing access to their information, that could be deadly to your business.

Don't worry there is hope for keeping your website secure and safe from hackers. Web application security can keep you one step ahead of the hackers and keep your customer information confidential. Using web application security can allow you to sleep at night knowing that your website will not be invaded while you sleep as some poor unsuspecting customer is entering his information into your website thinking it is secure, while someone is lying in wait to rip them off.

I know you thought you had everything covered, but believe me, without a web application security system on your site you are vulnerable.

I started a new job this week and one of the benefits is that they offer a gym membership at a very low price. The gym is actually on the grounds and I went today for the first time and was the only one there. It was cool because I got to put up the stereo and do my own thing without any interference. It also has a pool on grounds for the whole family! I used to work out a lot, about four times a week and am only lifting about one third of what I used to, so it was kind of depressing, but I will get there! I need to fix my diet again and lose some weight. I am looking into diet pills and there seems to be a lot out there on the market. Some have really great products at great prices and some are higher priced but seem like they might be better, so I ordered them. I am looking into dropping about twenty pounds and then putting it back on in muscle form. I can use the diet pills to lose the weight while eating better and exercising. There is also a product called hydroxycut, this is a name I have heard of and find it to be an interesting product especially for losing weight and replacing it with muscle. Hydroxy cut states it is the number one seller in America. Because I am new at this job and I feel comfortable with my appearance it is making it an easier transition than at my last job when I went from having a good body, hurting my back and losing all of my muscle and gaining twenty pounds. Now it is a new beginning for me and a new start. I guess I would recommend diet pills and hydoxycut for anyone in my position. I had a serious injury and now am trying to work out again for the first time. I used to be all natural, but now could use some help. The first few weeks will be very light lifting, not like I have a choice. The diet pills I ordered should be here I about a week and I will have to wait until next week to order the hydroxy cut. I can only budget so much money for these items, at least for now. I cannot wait to see the results from theses products and am taking a picture of myself tomorrow and will compare it six months down the road. Wish me luck!!