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Yesterday I got some much anticipated nail mail!!! My 2 Nail Venturous polishes I was able to snag a few weeks ago out of pure luck!!!! I was sooo excited to get them I couldn't wait for them to arrive. I love glitter, even thou removal sucks no matter how you do it lol. The 2 I was lucky to get where Burst of Blue and Sunny Floam. Please excuse any stains on my hands, I was dying hair yesterday :)
Lets start with Burst of Blue. Its a clear base jammed pack full of blue and black matte micro glitter, white and black hex and bar glitter. Its absolutely stunning, especially if your a blue fan like I seem to be lately. The application was flawless. Didn't have to dig around for the glitter. I did use 4 coats for this picture to make it super opaque.
Isn't that just absolutely beautiful?? I don't think anything could make it better!!! I had so many compliments on my nails today wearing these two colors it was insane!!
Now Sunny Floam is a neon yellow and blue matte micro glitter. I have Floam on its way to me once I get it Ill do a comparison of these two :) The application for this one was flawless as well, and I also used 4 coats.
I love how electric this color is. Its sooo bring that it actual captures in the photos for once. I cant wait to do a pedicure with this for the summer :)
Now I thought id share with you guys the cake I made for one of my best friends for her birthday. I'm soo proud of it. She asked for an outdoors cake and wanted it to be carrot flavored. I did a cream cheese icing on it. All is home made :)
Baking is a passion of mine, I love making people cake adn cupcakes for there birthday :)
One day ill have to make a nail polish themed cake he he. Now sadly I probably wont have time to post again till Sunday night as I have her birthday tomorrow and then going to see the Mother-in-law on Sunday so I hope you all have a fantastic weekend <3


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Information Communication Technology
Well resourced I.C.T facility
The Preparatory School has its own bank of 25 laptops. Pupils from Reception to Prep 4 have ICT lessons working on tasks as varied as simple keyboard skills to databases, spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations with the added assistance of a Senior School IT technician. Pupils also have full use of the lap tops across the curriculum.
All pupils enjoy the use of two up-to-date computer suites each boasting over twenty machines and the assistance of the Senior School I.C.T technician and specialist I.C.T teachers.
From simple keyboard skills
Whilst Nursery and Reception pupils learn simple keyboard skills on their class computers, pupils from Pre Prep 1 to Prep 4 spend a maximum of one hour a week in the computer suite working on tasks as varied as basic text manipulation to databases, spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations.
Each classroom is fully equipped with internet linked PCs, where staff encourage pupils to complete their own research for all areas of the curriculum. Once again the smooth transition to the Senior School is ensured.

subset: commoncrawl


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Oil sector PSU officers are on strike from today demanding an honourable wage revision. Scanning through news channels for strike news, I came across some shocker. Most television news channels are found to be conveying whatever message the govt propoganda wanted to show after garnishing it with their own masala and a bit of crocodile tears for common public. Notable among these are the self proclaimed No.1 channels like Zee news and Aaj Tak. The worst part of it is that most of the channels were actually ignorant of the reasons of the strike.
A situation of conflict got created by the strike between the officers of these premier companies of Govt of India and their controlling ministry. What resulted is a lose-lose situation for both parties. The officers association could not be taken into confidence by the PM by forming a GoM on the eve of the sheduled strike as the petroleum ministry had been making only hollowed promises over last few months. To crush, the agitation the govt unleased a propoganda to villify the oil officers. But these only worsended the situation and this where the govt lost.
The sad part of this story is that for most of us newspaper and news channels are our primary source of information. The worst is that most of us accept or tend to belief as true whatever is written in newspapers. But when you know the facts, you understand the truth behind the news. This makes you think as to how much of all the news you are fed by media for the day are true. This is making many to look for news in the net and independent blogs provides probably one of the most authentic source of information.
The malaise of the Indian media are primarily 1) Unsubstantiated news without any research and 2) Hunger for breaking news for TRP.
Many news items are written according to the handouts handed out by babus and officials holding press conferences in plush hotels. The hospitality decides whether the handouts require editing or not. I had a brief stint at handling outside pressure groups and understood that it was not my cup of tea.
The Breaking News fever of Indian media is still worse. The week after the Mumbai terror attacks, a series on terror was run in national Geographic channel. In one of the shows, they highlighted the case of how terrorists exploiting this hunger for breaking news. Months after the Mumbai attack, it is quite clear now how those breaking news and live coverage of Indian media were actually helping the terrorists. The anchors which were literally shouting to make a point that these pictures are shown live exclusively on his channel, have now gone silent. Some of these news anchors are incompetent but tries to be jack of all trade and runs shows on subject without even having minimum knowledge on the subject. Fortunately we still have a few good news channels and good newspapers which gives relatively better news, if not 100% accurate. Though most of the media are sellable, not all of them are doing yellow journalism.
As I had started with the issue of indefinite strike by all oil sector PSU, I need to let you know a few facts. It is quite obvious that the hardship caused to common man by any strike creates bad feeling for the group indulged in it. But a strike is always a last resort in a democratic country. Gandhiji started this peaceful process of hartal. One should understand that the group had exhausted all its available peaceful means to go for a life crippling strike. By this direct confontation and conflict, some of the officers had put their job at risk. 55000 others had lent their support to it. For the Govt a lot is at stake with election looming just a couple of months away. But who will gain from a lose-lose situation?


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Is Your Cat Ready For Toilet Training? Here's 5 Ways You Can Tell.
At the end of a long day, who wants to sift through a messy litter box? Certainly not me. Up until now, the litter-box has been a necessary evil, a small price to pay for our beloved companions. But not anymore. In fact, there's an underground alternative designed for those of us who are ready to kick the litter habit: toilet training your cat.


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University of Utah geologist Dr. Robert Smith updates on whether Yellowstone is about to blow or not.
HH: You'll want to listen to this, because it's really fascinating. If you caught yesterday's program, I was reading to you from Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, about the Earth, and it's capriciousness, and my discovery, to my amazement, that Yellowstone National Park is not just a wonder on the top, it's a wonder below the surface. Joining me now to go through that is Dr. Robert Smith of the University of Utah. He's also director, I believe, of the Yellowstone Teton Project. Dr. Smith, welcome, good to have you.
RS: Hi, how are you?
HH: Good. Tell us what your job is at Yellowstone.
RS: Well, I've been working at Yellowstone for about forty years as a researcher interested in working on earthquakes and the volcanic history of Yellowstone. And currently, I'm a member of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, which is a partnership between the U.S. Geological Survey and Yellowstone National Park, and me at the University of Utah. And our component is to operate the seismograph network in Yellowstone, and to operate the GPS, global positioning monitoring system network for measuring ground deformation. So my role is both in the role of monitoring for public safety, and being a scientist, I've studied the Yellowstone system for many, many years, in terms of its evolution, and it's structure, and the capability for large earthquakes and volcanic events.
HH: When was the last big volcanic bang, Dr. Smith?
RS: Well now, let me explain a little bit about the history. Yellowstone has had the now well known supereruption, if you wish. There were three giant eruptions, which have caught on as the supereruptions. The first was two million years ago, and then one at 1.2 million years ago, and the latest, 640,000 years ago. And these are giant eruptions that have never really been witnessed or documented in historic time, and these are eruptions that exploded, caused a collapse of a caldera, the ground floor of this volcano at Yellowstone, which was forty, fifty miles wide. You compare it to the caldera you see in Hawaii, these are thousands of times larger. At any rate, the last supereruption was 640,000 years ago. But since then, there's been about 30 smaller eruptions, like the size roughly the scale of the 1980 Mount St. Helens' eruption. And the youngest of those is 70,000 years. But since then, there's been, of course, a lot of smaller…there's been earthquakes, large earthquakes, in fact, some of the largest in the history of the Rocky Mountains have occurred in and around Yellowstone. And there are hydrothermal eruptions, which are eruptions of hot steam that come out of the geysers and the fumaroles. And they produce little craters, maybe a kilometer, a quarter of a mile in dimension at its largest size. So we go on a scale from big ones that happen very rarely to smaller ones that happen more frequently.
HH: Now what is the probability of another big one?
RS: Well, we don't know. Remember, we've only had three big ones, and so people say well, the last one was 640,000 years ago, and for some reason, sitting out in the public perception is that these things erupt every 640,000 years, where in fact, between the three big eruptions, the time, repeat time is about 740,000 years.
HH: So we've got 100,000 years?
RS: Well, that's if you believe it's going to happen. The problem is that we only have two times, and any mathematician will tell you, or anyone averaging their checkbook, if you only have two transactions, that's not a good number to determine a long term average. So we're not prepared to say that that's a long term number we can use.
HH: So we can camp there this summer?
RS: Well, I certainly am.
HH: All right. Well, it depends on how old you are, the amount of data I've put into that, Dr. You might just be throwing caution to the wind. Let me ask you, what have you seen recently in the seismic activity in terms of the calderas rising and falling?
RS: Well, there's two things happening. Number one, Yellowstone's been a very seismically active area since it was first discovered in the 1870's. And our monitoring systems suggest we get on the order of a thousand earthquakes a year, you know, year in and year out. In the last few years, in fact, that number has been decreasing. So on the other hand, from this new technology provided by global positioning systems, where the ones we use, not the backpackers version, but the ones we use, we can measure down to a few millimeters of changed in height. And we've discovered in the last few years that the caldera has been rising at roughly, oh, three to four, up to six centimeters per year, which is two or three times, four times the rate that it had been rising in the past two decades. So the caldera's been going up while the earthquakes have been decreasing.
HH: And so what's that tell you? Anything?
RS: (laughing) It tells us a big scientific question. And we don't really know what that means. We think it's probably…we know there's a magma chamber beneath Yellowstone at a depth of about five miles, and a magma chamber is not this big volume that people commonly think that's 100% melt, that you can row a boat around in. It's a rock that's very porous, like a sponge. And you can think of a rock containing a lot of pore spaces, and in the case of these magma chambers, 10-20% of the pore spaces have magma, I mean, molten rock. That's down about five miles. And what we may be seeing in this latest deformation, uplift of the caldera, is we're putting magma into those pore spaces. It doesn't mean there's an imminent threat of a volcanic eruption, but it's certainly telling that the process is very active, and it's very much alive.
HH: Is it possible that we would have a super volcano eruption?
RS: Well, you can't say that it's not possible, but we don't have any indications that it would be.
HH: So what would it look like? If you had a blow along the lines of the one 640,000 years ago?
RS: Yeah, if it was something that large, we would expect to see a large area of the whole Yellowstone plateau, the whole Yellowstone region, start to have earthquakes occurring over…you know, Yellowstone's 80 miles long and 80 miles wide. We would expect to see earthquakes occurring over an area of the whole caldera, and that would be, it would cover a very, very large geographic area. We would expect to see the ground beginning to deform over that whole area at high rates. We would probably expect to see changes in the chemistry of the gases that were coming out of the hot springs and the geysers. We would expect to see maybe even a temperature change. But we…and we monitor the ground motion with GPS, we monitor the earthquakes. And so because we've never observed one, you know, in historic times, in terms of understanding them, we don't know what to look for precisely, but we can scale up other volcanic eruptions.
HH: I'm talking with Dr. Robert Smith of the University of Utah. He's one of the majordomos in Yellowstone, following on my conversation with you yesterday, America, about Yellowstone. So Doc, if it did go, if we had the big one, what would the day after look like?
RS: (laughing) Well, we would be covered by a lot of ash.
HH: How far? Not me, I'm in California. Maybe you.
RS: Well, I have a home up in that country, and I'd be…we think we'd get thirty to forty feet of…well, first of all, you'd have, if you had a giant eruption, the scenario that's been predicated upon our observations is that you would have an eruption of ash and material into the atmosphere that could go as high as 60-80,000 feet, would get caught in the jet stream, and these ashes are very light. In the past eruptions, the ashes were spread out over the Western United States. It could be as deep as 20 to 30 feet over Yellowstone itself. It could be up to a foot at distances of just two to three hundred miles, like Salt Lake City. And so it could cover a large area, and this would probably occur over a period of days, because this material has to rain down over time. It doesn't happen instantly.
HH: So what would that do to our quality of life?
RS: It would really change it.
HH: (laughing) Would it cool the Earth?
RS: Well, I mean, certainly, if you put this insulating layer, a layer that would reflect the light back into the atmosphere, then there's been hypotheses that it would produce a volcanic winter equivalent, and I'm sure it would change. And we think a lot of the prehistoric changes in climate, in fact, have come from large volcanic eruptions, and depending on the amount of sulfur that gets into the atmosphere, which is the main agent that causes the reflection of the sunlight, it could certainly produce that effect.
HH: It would shut us down pretty well. Let me ask you, Dr. Smith, if you had to guess where the next major seismic event, either earthquake or volcano was going to come in the Continental United States, would it be Yellowstone? By major, I mean a 7.7, or at least a Mount St. Helens volcano blow.
RS: Well, you're talking about two different mechanisms.
HH: Yes, I am.
RS: Of course, we look at the frequency of large earthquakes. And the state that has the biggest earthquakes, and the most frequent ones is Alaska, in the Aleutian chain. And it also has the largest frequency, or the largest number of active volcanoes. That's where it would probably be, either one of those events.
HH: How about down here, in the lower 48?
RS: In the lower 48? Well, the San Andreas Fault, of course, ruptures every hundred and fifty years.
HH: How about volcano, though?
RS: Well, that's hard to say. The Cascades are probably the most likely place, because the Cascades system, Washington and Oregon, have many more. There's over a dozen of these high strata volcanoes, and we, that would probably be the next most likely. Now remember, Mount St. Helens was tiny. It's thousandths of a size of a Yellowstone eruption. So Yellowstone, and what we call the Long Valley caldera in Eastern California, Mammoth Lakes ski resort area, these are two large calderas. They erupt very, very less frequently. They're just much bigger when they do.
HH: Is the Long Valley overdue?
RS: Well, the last one was 740,000 years ago, but there was never one before it, so we don't know if there is a time we would expect the next one. But it certainly has activity much like Yellowstone. It has uplift deformation, it has earthquakes, and it's being monitored for the same reason.
HH: Dr. Robert Smith, fascinating. I've linked to your website, as well as the Yellowstone Teton Project's website. Thanks for spending some time with us today. 740,000 for the Long Valley, huh? 640,000 for Yellowstone. Think I'm going to stay in Maine.
End of interview.


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For some time, it appeared that the Chinese move into silicon PV production would ruin any chances of companies in other countries having an ability to compete in the solar electricity market. Among those almost-casualties is First Solar Inc., which was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Tempe, Arizona. (FSLR traded on NASDAQ) The Company has approximately 100 million shares of stock outstanding valued at $61.54 at close of trading 4/22/2016.
|Graphic by NREL, showing typical layers of a CdTe cell
A recent article in Chenected by AIChE describes the company and its thin-film technology for PV. see link "Last month, the Tempe, Arizona-based company (First Solar) announced it had set a new record in its research lab for cadmium-telluride cell efficiency, at 22.1 percent." Cadmium-telluride cells are thin-film (see link to NREL pdf, and photo at right)
Also, "First Solar just became the first thin film manufacturer to ship 1 GW of solar PV to India. Importantly, unlike many of its competitors, First Solar is also profitable, making $546 million in profit last year on $3.6 billion in revenue."
|From WorldAtlas, light area in center shows Tropical Zone
Solar by thin-film technology aims to capture the solar market by out-performing the silicon-based PV wafers that have a higher efficiency but much higher cost. Where land is abundant, and sunny, the appeal of thin-film PV is great. For much of the world that has such a combination of little or zero electricity presently, abundant land, and adequate sunshine, thin-film PV is attractive. This includes almost all of Africa, a large part of Brazil, almost all of the Middle East, India, Pakistan, southern China, southeast Asia, Indonesia, and northern Australia. These areas all lie within the Tropics Zone north and south of the Equator.
With affordable, battery-based electricity technology soon to be available from BioSolar and their modified polyacetylene battery, the solar PV systems can bring effective electricity round-the-clock to areas in need of electricity. see link to "This Battery Is A Game-Changer."
More on CdTe cell technology, from NREL: "CdTe-based thin-film solar cell modules currently represent one of the fastest-growing segments of commercial module production. This is due partly to the simplicity of the two-component absorber layer (i.e., CdTe contains only cadmium and tellurium) and the ability of bulk cadmium telluride source material (in the form of high-purity powders) to be reconstructed into the CdTe thin films needed to produce PV modules. During the 20+ years of research undertaken by the CdTe Group, much effort has been directed at producing CdTe structures that allow more light to penetrate the top layers of the device (the transparent conducting contacts and cadmium sulfide [CdS] layers) to achieve high efficiency. This understanding has been transferred to commercial processes for use in producing higher-performance modules."
Roger E. Sowell, Esq.
Marina del Rey, California
copyrignt © 2016 by Roger Sowell, all rights reserved


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Teaching kids how to organize their toys and actually put things away when they're done is a huge life lesson that requires a parent's patience.
One of the easiest ways to do this is to find a simple toy box with a lid. Everything goes in and the lid closes to hide any mess. Just make sure to find a lid with child-safe latches so it doesn't come falling down on little fingers.
However, if you have lots of Legos and other building toys, using drawers dedicated to just those building materials is a great idea. It's the idea of grouping like things together and then your child doesn't have to spend precious time digging the Legos out of the toy box.
If you use drawers or baskets to store your toys and books, then get in the practice of labeling each of these containers. A two-year-old may not be able to read the word Lego right now but they will get used to seeing the word and eventually will recognize the word and learn how to sound it out.


text: Where are Caroline and Lauren Today? We are in: Montenegro! Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)Like this:Like Loading... Related Author: choosingourownpath Mother and daughter, travelling the world. View all posts by choosingourownpath


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Roots co-founder, "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" band leader and "noted television scholar" ?uestlove posited a theory on Twitter recently that the cast of "Parks and Recreation" is "the Wu-Tang Clan of comedy."
He may be on to something. The Wu-Tang Clan is regarded as one of the best hip-groups ever, and "Parks and Rec" is rapidly becoming one of the better comedies on television, with nary a weak link in the show's cast.
Now, ?uestlove has unearthed video evidence to give further credence to his idea: a lost audition tape in which Wu-Tang founder RZA auditions for the role of Leslie Knope. Take a look (there's some salty language, so headphones on if you're at work).
OK, that? Just made my day. Join ?uestlove in watching "Parks and Recreation" on Thursdays on NBC. This week's episode features Amy Poehler's real-life husband, Will Arnett, and Justin Theroux as guest stars.
Follow Zap2it on Twitter and Facebook for the latest TV, movie and celebrity news.
'Parks and Recreation': Justin Theroux! Oh, and Will Arnett too.
Photo credit: Funny or Die