Nice interview and quotes.  Click here to read.

So you know I LOVE Napoleon HIll. I am working on my Thinking and Growing Rich. My goal is to manifest $480 million dollars in the next 4 years. The book says to name your price, so I named one I think would make me happy. Whatever it is. Name it. Named it. Claim it. Claiming it. Manifesting what I think.

Part of getting the money–the main part really for me is gaining my freedom. Freedom to do what I want to do from moment to moment. Feeling freedom now–what will it feel like–working at the things I LOVE to do–inventing, business, working out, personal coaching, helping people with weight loss, and this…manifesting their dreams.

I have experienced this already. Sure it sounds nuts, but it’s not really. I manifested a size 10 from a size 20 and have maintained it after seeing it in my head I made it happen. The book says this and I knew it before I read the book as I experienced it from time to time previously. You have to feel what it’s like. I felt what my smaller body was like.

I know it works. I’m now working on a size 6–ripped and lean for good.

Anyway…so far I’ve been manifesting good parking spaces. Not $480 million dollars. But it’s a start.

Alissa

These are three words that I would use to describe my life of late, since I started my travelling some weeks back my life has become a whole lot hectic and truly 24 hours is not sufficient. Am I in effective or am I overloaded? But alas the prospect of the business motivates me and keeps me going. Surprisingly the stress has not taken a toll on my health and this evening after 20 laps in the pool, I feel more energized than ever.

Hungry – after a year of hard work, the seeds that have been sown are beginning to show some promise and with Murphy as my lifelong companion everything has come together at the same time. Well I guess this is a good problem to have. Somehow with things looking up, it has made me even hungrier. Some of my closest friends know the reason, for asides from business I have nothing else to fill my mind and my heart with. Despite the non-stop pace, I still find that I drift off into thoughts of Shuying every now and then.

Tired though is the body, the mind moves on at a hectic pace. Perhaps now I am truly getting my wish of being an inventor. It is only recently that I have begun to realise my childhood dream of creating something from nothing. Piecing together many different technologies I craft my dream solution, for once not worrying about the cost. It was simply a dream come true, a chocoholics dream come true in a land of chocolate covered pavements and chocolate milk rivers.

But I do wonder ever so often, what good is success if you do not have someone to share it with. My heart still beats within the one that I love, the angel that showed me what life could be.

Whilst creating a sketch, Inventor will very helpfully automatically constrain each line, arc and point as you lay it down. However Inventor doesn’t always pick the constraint you would expect…

You can pick which constraints are inferred by right clicking whilst in sketch mode, while no command is active and picking ‘Constrain Options’ from the short cut menu.

You can ‘force’ a particular constraint by ‘scrubbing’ your cursor over the relevant geometry whilst sketching.

You can temporarily turn off inferred constraints by pressing the CTRL key as you sketch. This doesn’t effect coincident constraints, so your loops should still close…

Okay I know the world is hung up on Miley fever and I’m no exception to this rule. Sometimes in life, it’s necessary to sing “Party in the USA” at the top of your lungs but honey, lets get something straight.

Miley was quoted in Seventeen Magazine as saying the following about her new fashion line,

“We look into fashion designs very much in advance. We started the plaid shirts and the cheetah pants before people started seeing it [on runways]. When you first look at it as a designer, you think Okay, this is going to be a little crazy. But you don’t know what’s going to be in in a year like Max [Azria] does. Max looks at other designers, and you know it’s very advanced. He’s got the inside scoop.“

Miley…really?

You are not a designer, you did not invent the plaid shirt or cheetah print pants, and you should really consider listening to a Jay-Z song before you start name dropping.

In chapter 1 Nate and two others meet and discuss an isolation tank experiment that Ted Ray performed on some unwitting women.

Chapter 3 shows Nate and a coworker learning about Mind Control and using it to diagnose computer problems. Later, Nate uses some of the techniques to help people who are ill.

In chapter 3 Nate visualizes a solution to the experiments he’s conducting with his engine.

Nate’s mother’s cancer scans show up clear, in chapter 4, then disbelief returns and alters reality again.

In chapter 4 Lena and Nate discuss authors of ESP books and later have a telepathic experience.

Lena has a prophetic dream chapter 8.

Nate comes face-to-face with evil in chapter 10.

In chapter 10 Nate suspects his son has inherited psychic abilities.

20 Things You Might Not Know About COBOL (as the Language Turns 50)
by Darryl Taft

1. The name COBOL was decided upon at a meeting of the Short Range Committee of CODASYL (the Conference on Data Systems Languages) held on Sept. 18, 1959.
2. COBOL, one of the oldest programming languages, gets its name as an acronym for Common Business-Oriented Language, and is primarily used in business, finance and administrative systems for companies and governments.
3. $2 trillion is the total investment in COBOL systems.
4. Five billion lines of new COBOL are developed every year.
5. More than 80 percent of all daily business transactions are processed in COBOL.
6. More than 70 percent of all worldwide business data is stored on a mainframe.
7. More than 70 percent of mission-critical applications are in COBOL.
8. Even 50 years later, 15 percent of all new application functionality will be written in COBOL.
9. More than 310 billion lines of software are in use today and more than 200 billion lines are COBOL (65 percent of the total software).
10. COBOL is an anagram of BCOOL!
11. The Mother of COBOL, Grace Hopper, is said to have invented the term “computer bug” when a moth got stuck in her Mark II computer and she joked she’d have to “de-bug” it.
12. There are 200 times more COBOL transactions per day than Google searches worldwide.
13. COBOL is changing with the times. COBOL is being re-energized as an important component of moving businesses to the Web seamlessly and efficiently.
14. An estimated 2 million people are currently working in COBOL in one form or another.
15. The COBOL 2002 standard includes support for object-oriented programming and other modern language features.
16. Work is progressing on the next full revision of the COBOL Standard. It is expected to be approved and available in the early 2010s.
17. Though named in September 1959, the COBOL subcommittee completed the specifications for COBOL in December 1959.
18. The first compilers for COBOL were subsequently implemented during the year 1960.
19. COBOL has been fashioned for execution within framework environments such as Java and Microsoft’s .NET. Micro Focus supports object-oriented COBOL compilers targeting the .NET framework.
20. Despite years of overwhelming success running business systems, COBOL has not been without its critics. Computer scientist and Turing Award recipient Edsger Dijkstra once said, “The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.”

Link Here :

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Enterprise-Applications/20-Things-You-Might-Not-Know-About-COBOL-As-the-Language-Turns-50-103943/?kc=EWWHNEMNL09242009STR1

URL : http://www.flashgame-girl.com/Puzzle-board/Garden-Inventor.html

Game description :

The goal of the game is to kill the creeps before they reach the end of the maze. In order to stop the garden pest you have to build defense gadgets along the way of the invaders. Defense gadgets will fire automatically once the creeps enter the firing range of the turret. When you kill pests you receive small amounts of money, which you can use to build more defense gadgets.

Game controls :

Use mouse to interact.

Thomas Edison is known to be a gallant gentleman who is known best for creating a lot (I mean A LOT) of inventions. But some strongly disagree. I am one of them. Thomas Edison might not be such a “amazing inventor” as you think.  Sir Humphry Davy and Sir Joseph William Swan are both two great inventors that also contributed to making the light bulb, but they were not credited to the light bulb. Instead of being a inventor, Edison was more of a business man. He hired people such as Tesla and took advantage of them, and later lied to them after using their ideas.

Later in life when Tesla was working for Edison, and asked for his pay of $50,000, he simply told Tesla, “When you become a full-fledged American you will appreciate an American joke.” Tesla immediately resigned, and later on, before his death, Edison said that his biggest mistake was not appreciating Tesla’s work. Yet, I don’t think Tesla ever forgave him, as he was the only man to have a negative comment on Thomas Edison in a Times Magazine article.

“Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search… I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.” Nikola Tesla

But no matter, what he was – inventor, fraud, or businessman, Thomas Edison will be remembered with respect.

My opinion sure might be way different from yours or might be the same, but in conclusion, I don’t really care! Its okay if you think Edison is amazing!

Links – The Scientists, Wikipedia

APPLE CAN NOT PATENT THE IPOD..
SOME WAYS ITS SAID WITH ALL THE MONEY MADE
I HAD A SIMILAR CONCEPT AND PROPOSAL THAT THEY USED
THANKS TO AN INVENTOR THAT FILED IN 2002 IT CAN NOT HAPPEN
TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK OF THIS ISSUE??

Okay, so everyone wants to make as much money with as little effort as possible. Right?  Well its not going to happen unless you start investing in lottery tickets and still its a long shot.  Inventing is no different, as you and I know, painfully, that after much time, planning, and effort to take this new idea off of the drawing board and into Walmart there are road blocks, scratch that, their are holes and gaps the size of the Grand Canyon.  After much time planning you come to find your idea is already taken in one form or another.  Time to start over.

Always do patent searches and google searches on things before they get rolling it will save you much heartache for sure.  There are many more pieces of the puzzle to start off with like, who is your target consumer, why do they need your product, how much are they willing to pay for this product.  Most of the time people buy things for pain or pleasure and these are the easiest things to sell.  Maybe your just a tinkerer and like to imagine things then make them real, whatever the situation check and make sure the idea is not already taken because, sadly, most likely it is.  To give an example I had an idea for a pole that would assist in the hanging of Christmas lights, after hooks were installed on the coping of the roof.  I had that erratic hearbeat and ambition to get things moving so I did a quick google search and WHAM!  It was taken!  I couldn’t believe it, it seemed like such an original idea.  Just goes to show you its hard to be original with 7 billion competitors.

So this is Stage One, if you have this completed, stage two is a drawing and prototype.  The easiest way to get this done is to have someone do it for you, so you can move on to your other inventions.  These are the guys I use ……….. and the best part is the sign up is free and consultation is free.  Be sure to check back as I will be updating on a step-by-step plan on how to get your product placed in stores like Walmart, CVS, and Target.

Agent Andy. I got about $1million dollars worth of advice yesterday from Andrew Abrams yesterday. Truly a priceless 45 minute conversation. He is a designer, licensing agent, genius all around to bringing products such as mine to market. Do this Alissa!

What I took from the conversation.

My price point is too high. Will make that adjustment on the website tomorrow.

Gift show representation…HUH? Knew nothing about it, now I know something and have a contact.

Retail packaging…I knew a bit about this, but got more detailed information about showing for gift shows (spindle, J hook).

Hope. There is a market for this product. Getting out to it won’t be as hard (or as easy) as I thought.

Yay for Andy!

Much love,

Alissa

I’m often asked why I wrote The Monkeybars of Life and why it has so many pages.  I felt it was time to tell the story of some of the extraordinary people I’ve known and some of the unbelievable situations we’ve encountered. There are three themes explored in the book (1) innate creativity, (2) creativity in the workplace, and (3) estranged fatherhood. 

In chapter-3  Nate LaChae says:   “Some friends came over and they brought an African student with them. I asked him whether he felt there would ever be an African space program. When he said he didn’t think so, I asked why not. then I went OFF when he said he felt the White Man had something special in his head that allowed him to invent things and go to the moon.

The reason I was so upset is that I believe the greatness of our race will not be in the USA. It will be in Africa one day. And to hear that African student say what he said just set me off. I got up and said “Anybody that fills a thirty-five story rocket with liquid oxygen and hydrogen can go to the moon.” I told him the laws of physics work the same for everybody. Then I told him not to ever think or say what he said again. Even I was surprised at how I went off. But we’ll never even try things with the kind of thinking he had. I just want to show that God doesn’t play favorites.”

At another point, in chapter-3, Nate relates a High School  experience: “I remember how I made my first science fair rocket by soldering tin cans together. And I’ll never forget there was a kid named Rob Strom who exhibited right next to me at the fair. He had gotten permission to run his experiment at a real nuclear reactor lab. I won a third prize that year and he won a first prize. I never got over the fact that he had access to such equipment to compete with.”

In chapter-4 Nate struggles with being separated from his family and attempts to have an alternate family. “Maybe this is the way life really is, Nate thought as he sipped his wine. I had a stepfather and my mother and father didn’t know their real Dads either. I guess, we’re suppose to take care of the kids under our roof – wherever we are. I hope my kids’ stepfather is doing his job like I am.”

In chapter-5   Nate takes on more mundane projects at work and still encounters  resistance and disbelief. He is told by the IT department manager: ”Who the hell do you think you’re fooling with all this talk about AI? Even at Carnige-Mellon, it took us two years to get our Expert System running and we had the resources. You can’t possibly accomplish even half the goals in that contract using HP-Basic. That’s why I’m not wasting my time with your silly project.”

I’m most anxious to hear from others who have had  similar experiences regarding their creativity and/or fatherhood.

I wrote a note on my town website about the product. It was risky because (and I had forgotten but was quickly reminded) how touchy people are on that message board. I got my hand slapped right away for advertising there. OUCH, that stings!

The person who slapped my hand is probably right, but the way he did it. YUCK. I was so upset, annoyed, hurt I got shaken for half a day. Now I have had lots and lots and lots of positive comments from people who have tried the product, bought the product and all and one guy, who has never seen it, and may tend toward the snarky makes a comment and WHAM I hit the mat and it takes hours for me to get back up again. This ish is fragile, but getting tougher.

And then some people are NOT jerks….I did have some very good news. I’m connecting with a man (thanks Barbara!) who can help me move the business to business end of things forward. I hope to work with him to get into gift shows and make contact with corporations and other vendors/orgs who could use the product as a promotional vehicle. Every time a customer or alumni looks at their iPod they’d see the logo of that company. Pretty cool. Looking forward to that!

Much love,

Alissa

p.s. my dear friends via facebook backed me up on the jerk thing.

On November 3,^, 2009 I had the opportunity to attend a one day meeting for industry analysts at Autodesk’s Manufacturing Industry Group headquarters in Lake Oswego, Oregon.

The themes for the meeting were loud and clear:

• With Autodesk’s 9 million users, and 1900 channel partners, the company offers global solutions and has enormous financial strength.
• Autodesk’s manufacturing group’s revenue comes, surprisingly enough, mostly from medium and large customers.
• With its recent technology acquisitions and their well thought out and executed integration into the product line, the manufacturing group now has a wide breadth of solutions for digital prototyping. These span the range from concept design through design and manufacturing.
• Different than many of its competitors, Autodesk likes to sell “boxed” products, not solutions and consulting to make more incomplete solutions work.
• During the meeting Autodesk broke down their manufacturing design automation into four major areas: digital concept creation (Alias), digital engineering (Inventor, AutoCAD), digital simulation (Inventor Simulation, Moldflow, Algor), and a new digital factory offering based on NavisWorks.
• An open environment, able to read from most many CAD vendors directly and most standards formats.
• Autodesk also stressed its technology leadership, focusing on Autodesk Fusion, direct model editing capability that “unites direct and parametric workflows,” better use of screen real estate, Showcase for amazing visualization, a factory offering, and the upcoming release of Inventor Publisher.

• We hope to soon spend some in-depth hands-on with Fusion and will let you know our opinion as to exactly how integrated the direct modeling and parametric workflows are. Some of our questions are exactly how much of the direct modeling changes are captured in the history tree and whether all direct changes can be captured. More in a future blog.

Carl Bass, the Autodesk CEO, spoke about how Autodesk caused and continues to cause “low end disruption” in the engineering and design marketplace because Autodesk shipments outstrips its competitors by wide margins. He expects such disruptions to continue in modeling and simulation. Bass also speculated on the possible impact of cloud computing, both to vendors and users. Business model changes will be needed to both, including pricing for the interactive and compute intensive portions.

Our conclusions

For engineering, Inventor is very well positioned, and offers terrific value for about $7K USD. So far, many of the Autodesk acquisitions have automatically been added to the Inventor Professional version at no additional charge. Industry leading positions are evident in sheet metal design, plastic part design and analysis, mold tooling, mechatronic control systems design tools, high value simulation (once Algor is fully integrated), and rules based design (with Intent and iLogic).

In digital concept design, Alias leads the way, especially in automotive and consumer design, and is well integrated with Inventor. Recently, Autodesk introduced the first CAD/design application for the iPhone – SketchBook Mobile, costing a mere $2.99.

In simulation, with its recent acquisitions of PlassoTech, Moldflow, and Algor, Autodesk aims to have its engineering customers engage earlier in the design process and appears well on its way to doing so. Algor’s former CEO, Teresa Anania, heads up this effort, knows the customers needs, and is aggressively moving these products into the mainstream.

For the factory, Autodesk brings together AutoCAD (widely used today for plant layout, Inventor for equipement and tooling design, Revit for facility design and BIM (building information management), and Navisworks for visualization and simulation. This offering is expected to challenge the price points of competitive offerings of Dassault Systemes’ Delmia and Siemens PLM Software’s Tecnomatix.

—

I’m actually quite a funny person, witty, sarcastic, teasing…but you can’t tell lately. Heavy. I’m glad I have some friends with whom I can laugh. My cousin is number one on that list. I SO glad she is coming to New Jersey. We LAUGH all the time and she thinks I’m the most hilarious thing out there. (It helps to have a good audience!). I think we’ll do a podcast when she gets here. We say the most ridculous things when we’re together. You’ll laugh.

I could use some more joy. Joy makes it all flow. I carved out a bit of time to a little of my bible…Think and Grow Rich. I know my mind is in charge of all of this. Working on controlling that.

I used to laugh with my dad and I still can sometimes, but only one the good days, which is about 1 out of 3 for him. My poor darling dad.

Today sent a note to ilounge.com to ask them to review my product. Fingers crossed. I will talk to my neighbor tomorrow who writes about technolgy about who can review the IMP. He kindly offered to do this a month ago, but I’ve been a bit nuts (to say the least, eh?). It’s a good time as holiday shopping is just beginning. FOR REALZ I never thought I would be in a position to be getting ready for holiday shopping…from this end of thing. GET YOUR STOCKING STUFFERS RIGHT HERE! LOL.

Much love,

Alissa

This summer, I will be… Finding my princess, fighting off the baddies, and saving her from the dragon!!!

Well, not really, I think the Phineas & Ferb opening title sequence (series from Disney XD Channel) just about sums it all up:

There’s 104 days of summer vacation
And school comes along just to end it
So the annual problem for our generation
Is finding a good way to spend it

Like maybe…

Building a rocket
Or fighting a mummy
Or climbing up the Eiffel Tower

Discovering something that doesn’t exist (Hey!)
Or giving a monkey a shower

Surfing tidal waves
Creating nanobots
Or locating Frankenstein’s brain (It’s over here!)

Finding a dodo bird
Painting a continent
Or driving your sister insane (Phineas!)

As you can see
There’s a whole lot of stuff to do
Before school starts this fall (Come on Perry)

So stick with us ’cause Phineas and Ferb
Are gonna do it all
So stick with us ’cause Phineas and Ferb are
Gonna do it all!
(Mom! Phineas and Ferb are making a title sequence!)

(Lyrics courtesy of this site)

Oh, and one more thing:

Dating Ashley Tisdale

She’s so funny on the series.

Let me see a cross-comparison of me and Ashley Tisdale:

From a fashionista perspective, the blonde does really offset my black hair really well =)  And, we would have really hot kids **pouts his mouth**!

Who’s your rock star?

I like this business stuff. I have a challenge ahead of me because my product is so new (it came out of my brain, you know) I have to EXPLAIN what it is to people THEN convince them to buy it. The solution is really sort of obvious and once people see it they like it. BRILLIANT! MAKES SENSE. AWESOME. YOU’RE a GENIUS. …thanks!

Tangled cords…AHHHHHH!

Orderly cords!

IMP

It is rather genius…in it’s simplicity and functionality. If I do say so myself.

So I talk about it and it works…to educate people about it. And encourage them to solve their tangled cord problems. I’ll talk. And keep talking.

William G. Morgan (1870-1942), invented volleyball in 1895 in Holyoke, Massachusetts.

Morgan, who was born in New York, is known as the inventor of volleyball which he originally named Mintonette.

Later, Alfred Halstead re-named Mintonette volleyball because the object of the game was to volley a ball back and forth over a net.

Morgan studied at the Springfield College of the YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) where he met James Naismith.

Naismith, in 1891, had recently invented the game of basketball. During the summer of 1895, Morgan moved to the YMCA at Holyoke where he became Director of Physical Education.

In this role, Morgan had the opportunity to direct a vast program of exercises and sport classes for male adults. His leadership was eagerly accepted, and his classes grew in large numbers. He came to realize he needed a different type of competitive recreational game in order to vary his physical fitness program.

Basketball, which sport was beginning to develop, seemed to suit young people, but it was necessary to find a less violent and less intense alternative for the older members.

Morgan took some of the characteristics from tennis and handball along with basketball. Morgan liked the game of tennis, but tennis required rackets, balls, a net.

He didn’t like all the equipment, but he did like the idea of a net.

Morgan invented volleyball, which was originally called Mintonette. Mintonette was designed to be an indoor sport. Mintonette was less rough than basketball for older members of the YMCA, while still requiring some athletic ability.

The first rules required for a net to be 6 feet 6 inches (1.98 meters) high, a 25 × 50 foot (7.6 × 15.2 meter) court. Each team could have as many players as a team wanted.

A match was nine innings with three serves for each team in each inning. There was no limit to the number of ball contacts for each team before sending the ball to the other side of the court.

In case of a miss serve, a second try was allowed. Hitting the ball into the net was a fault, with loss of the point or a side-out, except in the case of a first serve attempt.

Ok, for all you iPhone users out there, you may have already seen Sketchbook, the handy little application from Autodesk.

Well, here’s a nifty video showing how you can incorporate those sketches you produce on a lazy Sunday at the bar into Inventor.

Enjoy.

Brent.

Ok, for all you iPhone users out there, you may have already seen Sketchbook, the handy little application from Autodesk.

Well, here’s a nifty video showing how you can incorporate those sketches you produce on a lazy Sunday at the bar into Inventor.

Enjoy.

Brent.