During those bygone halcyon times of console gaming, when a system failed, the oft reaction was to raise one’s hands toward the sky and curse the God’s of every pantheon for having smote your system. There was little in the way of diagnostic options leaving most to wonder vainly what condition had stricken their beloved console, snatching it from this mortal coil. The power would be activated and nothing would occur and there’d be little choice beyond cursing nefarious fortune and her ambiguous design, frequently plunging into a void of existential woe. Nevertheless, with the most recent generation of consoles, there is at least some onboard indication of what evils have befallen your system, most infamously the X-box 360 and the Red Ring of Death.

One can’t help but wonder if this knowledge has been of greater use to mankind, or if the question of console demise is one best left unanswered, for where tragedy once came like a breath of wind and left as little trace, it now bears a face and a name to be loathed by mortals. Four times divided, each of the ring’s quadrants on the face of the X-box 360 displays a vibrant green hue when in good health. Nonetheless, when hardware failure or pestilence or an ancient curse has marked a console with its wicked taint, the four lights will glow a hellish fiery red to indicate the source of its ailment. The configurations of these cursed runes are telling of the specific affliction and are interpreted as follows.

When the ring is solely aflame in its southeastern most quadrant, facing the same direction as the flight from the migratory birds, the X-box 360 is then victim of hardware failure, the exact nature of which is alluded to only by the apocryphal two-digit sequence of symbols that appear upon the connected display. When the ring is cleft in twain from scalp to groin by the red hue, a great fever has taken your console causing its components to overheat.

When cloaked entirely in the Masque of the Red Death, you possibly just forgot to plug the AV cables in, jackass. Or some greater malevolence has seized some vital aspect to your console, for which you may seek the guidance of a soothsayer, an apothecary, or even… Microsoft. But seriously, just check to make sure it’s plugged in. Most feared, however, among we mere puppets on this earthly stage are the red lights that seize the ring in all quadrants save for that between north and east.

Glance but for only a moment to confirm your sickly apprehensions, then avert thine eyes for what stares back is the eye of the devil whose red gaze will indelibly sear the soul. General Hardware Failure, plight of men and Gods alike and bane of all things good and sacred, has corrupted your X-box. Abandon all hope, for even among sorcerer’s alchemy and mystic’s incantations there’s naught that men of earthly constitution can summon.

But one option remains, to relinquish your console to the ethereal high court of Microsoft or perhaps a trusted third party hardware technician whose tangible connection to the divine can provide the steel of nerve, the authority of conviction, the edge of wit, the fortitude of soul required to perform the ritual exorcism that will rid your X-box of its demons. Please allow two to three weeks for repairs.

College flags rank amongst the most collectible of memorabilia, with a wide variety of designs that reflect the distinctive heritage of each individual institution. Officially licensed college flags and pennants guarantee authentic insignia as well as top quality design, and they provide a source of earnings that goes back to support the school. You can purchase flags or pennants to hang by the door of one’s house or display in one’s garden as well as banners that may be streamed over an entrance or across the yard. Two-ply constructions allow designs to be seen properly from either side.

But most types of college flags are usually to be found at intercollegiate games, particularly football games. They are utilized by the fans to cheer on their team, and waving them is a symbol of the school spirit. One well-known activity while waving them is to sing the school’s fight song en masse. In fact, it is hard to conceive of a college flag apart from that college’s fight song. One would seem incomplete without the other.

Thus, you can find hundreds of fight songs, just as there are hundreds of flags. At times both are equally old and hallowed, and sometimes each is of vastly different vintage. The oldest fight song in generally recognized to be Boston College’s “For Boston” of 1885, but it is not certain which is the oldest college flag. Indeed, it is not certain when the tradition of college flags and pennants began, though one may safely imagine that their origins roughly coincided.

Speaking of origins, a lot of flags have changed over the years owing to cultural developments that made it unacceptable to feature mascots based on racial stereotypes or designs incorporating the old Confederate Battle Flag. Many alumni protest, but ultimately new generations of students with no sentimental attachment to old symbols make the revised styles their own.

Heard the good news that unlocked cell phones have received something of a huge nod from the American judiciary lately, thanks to a ruling that will allow the unlocking of someone’s own handset totally legal. Wireless network service providers generally lock the mobile handsets they give their subscribers so that those handsets will only operate using the provider’s network. The upshot of it all is that mobile phones are instantly made unusable whenever customers switch carriers, and so a cottage industry has developed around those individuals who wish to take their mobile handsets with them to a brand-new carrier. And right now the courts just provided this practice its blessings, but with one fatal caveat – while unlocking mobile handsets is allowed, the means mandatory to accomplish it is not!

To make money by blogging, you’ll want to find explosive niches to blog, topics people care about – lots of people. The easiest thing to do, if all you really care about is money, is to start up an MFA site. No, this isn’t a Master of Fine Arts website, but a made-for-Adsense website. A website designed specifically for Google’s Adsense program, where you place interactive advertisements that pay you for each click made on them!

Every click from a unique visitor, as determined by a unique IP address, usually. That’s why it’s so crucial to find explosive niches to blog about, because you’ll only be making money if enough folks click on the ads you put up on your site. Of course, you now come to the next problem to be solved: how to attract all those individuals?

First off, know that you’ll want to attract tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of visitors to your website – every day. That’s right; each day, your site needs to have enough traffic for you to make money, since every click will usually only yield pennies – yes, pennies! So you’ll need thousands of people clicking those ads in order to make a decent amount of money each day. That is how you blog residual cash to your business, by getting commission off of referrals!

But conversion rates, the number of folks who actually generate income for you, are generally around three percent. That means for every hundred visitors, chances are only three or four – or two or one! – will really click on an ad, netting you less than ten cents, generally. That’s why it’s so essential to find topics that will interest the greatest number of people! Blogging popular television shows is a good way to go in many instances.

Many people have heard of 3G cell phones, whether it be through advertisements or recommendations, realizing that 3G is “good” with little understanding beyond that implied fact. In fact, the 3G of 3G no contract cell phones simply means “third generation”, referring to the third “generation” or wave of scientific advances which may have upped the performance and technological capacity of cell phones and mobile devices, including CDMA and GSM standards.

Particularly, 3G cell phones are those fulfilling certain specifications allowing use of wide area voice and data telecommunication, internet access, video messaging, television – as well as most of the modern applications we associate with typical smartphones. By IMT-2000 features, to be classified as 3G, a device must provide peak rates of data transfer at 200 kilobits a second.

Before 3G cell phones, there were of course cell phones of the first and second generation. A new “generation” has become widely available nearly every ten years, each offering new frequency bands, higher rates of data transfer and non backwards compatible transmission technology. The first generation, 1G, refers to the first generation of analog based mobile phones developed during the eighties. This was replaced by 2G on the GSM standard in 1991, which was the first digital standard allowing data to be digitally encrypted for the first time.

It also offered data services to mobile devices for the first time, starting up with SMS text messaging which has become revolutionary, but also including picture messages, email, and file transfers. Though 3G cell phones are the current standard, with 4G looming over the horizon, 2G networks are still fully functional in several parts of the world.

3G cell phones first found fruition in 2003 when the first 3G network was introduced. By 2007, 200 million people had subscribed to any one of the 190 3G networks working in 40 countries. Still, only about 7% of cell phones users are subscribed to a 3G network, given that most cell phones users are in places like East Asia or the Middle East where networks are slower to roll out and technology is still a few years behind places like Europe or North America.

Set to succeed 3G cell phones, 4G is slowly beginning to find its way to the market. The 4G standard of data transfer is 100 megabits a second for users in a state of increased mobility, such as behind the wheel or on a moving train, and 1 gigabit for pedestrian or stationary users. This update in data transfer will allow 4G to improve and continue using features established by 2 and 3G, such as video calls and broadband internet access, as well as newer technologies such as streaming HDTV. For 4G, the CDMA standard is set to be left behind, in lieu of the newer OFDMA.

A recent study observed that delinquencies are down just when they should have gone up, even during prosperous times. Is this the beginning of the long-awaited recovery?

A mortgage is a loan made to purchase a house. A house is the one most expensive purchase most people will ever make in their entire lives, and often costs well over several times one’s annual income. Thus, a loan is necessary, and mortgages are usually paid back over a long length of time, typically of up to thirty years.

However, if payments are not made, accounts are considered delinquent. Delinquency is a big problem for the industry, and no more so than this very moment, in the middle of an extremely severe economic crisis. Indeed, it was mortgage delinquencies which brought on the current malaise! As payments were missed on properties that lost value, homeowners wound up owing more than their houses were worth, an untenable situation whose vicious cycle seems to know no end.

Thus it was that the slight decline in the rate of delinquency late last year caught many industry observers such as Isaac Toussie by surprise. A recent industry review found that at a time when delinquency has normally risen, even in good times, due to increased expenses associated with winter heating and holiday shopping, the rate at which mortgage payments have fallen behind has slowed down a little during the fourth quarter of 2009. Optimists hoped that this could be a sign that the foreclosure crisis may be finally attempting to timidly come around to something of an end.

Well, don’t you believe it. Consider that economists predict that foreclosures could reach their highest levels by the end of this year, especially if unemployment rates peak in the middle of the year. Worse yet, foreclosure rates will probably stay at those elevated levels as borrowers continue to struggle in places where drastic price declines have made many homes worth far less than the money owed on them. Also, the big problem is that way too many people have missed at least three payments, and these are precisely those who are least amendable to the variety of mortgage relief strategies available. These are the very people who will be going into foreclosure. In fact, many borrowers have problems that cannot easily lend themselves to tidy remedies.

Of course, there are also those economists and other such experts like Isaac Toussie who believe that the situation is still extremely grave since there are still record numbers of homeowners in financial distress. In recognition, the government has again stepped in on behalf of those with little or no equity in their homes, extending a refinancing program that has posted little progress in over a year. Many experts express skepticism. After all, it’s been well over two years into the economic debacle and still no one has any evidence at all as of yet that the end is in sight, or even could be right now.

Numbers improve, to be sure, and trendlines offer some cause for hope. And surely the proverbial sun will rise again – but in the here and now, there is a lot more “night” to get through before that “morning.”

The recent PBS/POV documentary “Wo Ai Ni Mommy” concerns the adoption of a Chinese eight year-old by an American family. More specifically, it is a movie chronicle of a somewhat handicapped older child’s integration into the social milieu of a Long Island Jewish family. Most of the documentary may be rather uncomfortable to watch, in a creeply queasy way, the cringe-worthy kind reminiscent of family get-togethers, as viewers are treated to some potentially unflattering details which jointly seem to make the case for better pre-adoption screening beforehand.

It is not known from the ninety minutes of screentime whether such matters were involved, as the filmmakers intent appears to be a simple record of what occurs in such cross-cultural/racial/national adoptions. However, even a psychological evaluation can only do so much, since it’s hard to guage the subtle aspects of human motivation, which also usually happen to be those bearing the most weight.

In the documentary “Wo Ai Ni Mommy,” one such subtlety concerns the very fact of a cross-cultural/racial/national adoption. While the Sadowskys, the American family featured by this film, were asked why they happened to choose a Chinese girl as opposed to any number of children in the United States, there was never really an answer given.

It was just love at first sight, claims the mother, which begs the question of why she had happened to choose to view Chinese babies first. And even though one with an understanding of the wider context of the popularity of Chinese adoptions in turn-of-the-century America might point out that she had several pals who had also adopted girls from China, the ultimate question of just why China, of all places, remains unanswered.

A fine look into some of the nitty gritty details of older-child adoptions further complicated by language, cultural, and even physical barriers as a result of mild disformity, “Wo Ai Ni Mommy” is heartwarming while wistful, raising many more questions than it intends to answer, in the process highlighting just how complex an adoption could be.

Museum replicas allow art lovers to indulge their fantasies with out spending a fortune. Of course, even with all the money in the world, some treasures may simply not be available for purchase, such as Greek vases of proven antiquity and aesthetic merit.

The art of ancient Greece consists of some of the most beautiful ever produced by man, and museum replicas make available to everybody a little of the joy involved in owning art.

Museum replicas are usually handmade, too, so that the verisimilitude can be strikingly inconspicuous in the case of one-to-one scale reproductions or amazingly faithful in any other proportion. This kind of a Greek vase, however, may be surprisingly affordable given the quality, so that it’s possible to own a entire collection of them, just like a real well-heeled conoisseur.

Actually, some are so faithfully reproduced as to fool even professional appraisers! For such reasons, replica Greek vases make excellent gifts too, thoughtful and possibly a bit out of the ordinary. And because they’re replicas, they are practical, able to be utilized as genuine vases.

Imagine how charming that would be, to see actual live flowers in one, as if restoring it to life after so many centuries! And of course, it’s simply fun to walk through a museum picking out pieces of which you own a copy. Having such lovely objects of art bear witness to the elegance of one’s own soul, too, expressing one’s highest hopes and deepest desires.

They also link us to a glorious golden age of Western Civilization, lending an elegant gravitas to any setting, an air of tradition and authority that feels at once austere and light. Such are the attractions of art and the potentially practical applications of museum replicas. They are joys now available for one and all.

Athletic tape is utilized by numerous athletes to help support the joints most critical to performance in their sport. It’s usually used by boxers to stiffen up their wrists, while soccer players may apply them to their knees. Weight-lifters will occasionally use athletic tape to prevent calluses from developing on their palms.

Most kinds of tape are made from cotton, with an adhesive on one side to help with binding. It was first invented by a Japanese chiropractor for therapeutic uses but is now sometimes applied in the belief that the assistance it lends will help even in the absence of injury.

The evidence on athletic tape is really quite mixed, nevertheless, no matter its widespread popularity. Many professional athletes of excellent standing seem to swear by it, such as Lance Armstrong and Serena Williams. But clinical studies have had a tough time proving substantial advantages. Could the infamous placebo effect be operating in those instances of athlete endorsement?

Making use of tape does seem like a logical thing to do. After all, how many of us have discovered on our own how good it feels to rub a pain and even grasp it tightly? Think back to the last time you accidentally bumped your wrist – hard – against something like a doorknob. Didn’t you instantly grab that wrist and, following initially massaging it a little, hold tightly for dear life?

Compression is a recognized method of protecting against or controlling swelling, and tightly binding with tape seems to conform with that understanding of how our bodies work. And perhaps therein lies its lasting appeal. It just makes so much sense! Utilizing tape feels good, and for numerous athletes that’s enough. As long as it’s not in the way or be otherwise a hindrance, the psychological pleasure of compression is good enough for most people.

Tourist traps. Created to wring every last dollar out of you. It’s as if they were thought up to ruin your vacation. And sightseeing rides rank right up there.

Take Zalman Silber’s Skyride in New York’s Empire State Building. With a name like that, you’d expect it was up there at the top, where it’s located. Instead, it’s only on the second floor. Moreover, express access to the top – for which you pay an additional fifty percent of the ticket price – is just a matter of skipping a few lines. It’s not as if you go straight to the top. You’ll still have to wait on lines, only perhaps one or two less.

And so what is the Skyride? A movie. A half-hour film. That’s it! Definitely a case where the sizzle sounds better than how the steak tastes.

But Zalman Silber redeems himself with his other attractions, the Skywalk and The Edge. The first amusement is aptly named for sure, essentially a catwalk a thousand feet above street level outside the top of the Sydney Tower in Sydney, Australia. It’s an exhilarating experience where, unlike traditional observation decks enclosed behind glass, visitors walk out onto a metal platform that juts out of the building, creating the breath-taking feeling of being suspended in mid-air!

As can be imagined, wind gusts are quite strong at such a height, and special “skysuits” cable-tethered to support structures are used to ensure guest safety. But the Skywalk is open in most kinds of weather, and available practically the whole year.

A similar attraction is The Edge at the Eureka Tower in Melbourne, Australia. This time, visitors are in a fully enclosed cube that sticks out of the building near the very top, with fully transparent glass all around – even underneath one’s feet! A really cool feature of this amusement is how everything is initially opaque, and only suddenly transparent to create an exciting sense of unexpected suspension almost a thousand feet above ground!

These two are great fun and a must for any to-do list when in Sydney or Melbourne. These are the kinds of experiences that really make vacations memorable. After all, vacations are about more than simple relaxation and getting away from work. They are about experiences – ideally, new experiences, positive experiences, unique experiences. And while such attractions as the Skywalk exist elsewhere, such as over the Grand Canyon in the State of Arizona, there’s only one such thing in Sydney and one such thing in Melbourne, offering stunning vistas outdone only by a helicopter flyover.

So beware the tourist traps and spend your hard-earned dollars instead where it would go the furthest. Patronize only those rides which offer true value for the money!