Life And Times 2

Donora Harley-Davidson Dealership: A Piece of Hog History

2007-10-22T11:07:00.000-07:00

Donora, PA - Harley-Davidson Dealership

The second family owned Harley-Davidson Dealership in the United States was in Donora, Pa. The first one, I am told was in San Francisco, CA.

The Harley-Davidson historical site is located at 1380 Meldon Ave, Donora, PA 15033.

Below is a picture of James Cerini at the front of the original shop. James Cerini recently purchased the original building, with plans to make the old historical building into a Harley Davidson museum. The outside of the building still has the familiar Harley-Davidson signage, with a bench in front that reads, "84 Years Of Friendly Service." The inside of the shop has numerous historical pictures, original cabinets, glass display cases, shelves, emblems, and parts bins. The floor is original wood, oil soaked, that is worn from years of foot traffic and motorcycles.

The shop area has tools strewn about, with a frame of a motorcycle in the middle of the floor, next to a hoist for lifting. The Service Department doors still look of years gone by. If only the walls could talk, I am sure there are thousands of stories about the old shop. James told me when I visited him, "Excuse the mess, I just purchased the place and there is much cleanup needed. Everything as you see it, is pretty much how it was left." Even though the shop was cluttered, the ambiance was perfect and took me back in time. With some cleanup, it will make a memorable site. I can picture James giving a tour, with him telling the stories from behind the counter.

James had numerous stories about the pictures on the walls, with some of the earliest ones going back to the early days when the shop was first opened back in 1920, when two Italian immigrants, Ernest and Olivia Cerini opened the Harley-Davidson shop in a small schoolhouse in Donora, PA.

I am not a Harley-Davidson owner, but I know several of my friends that are, and I am sure they, and tens of thousands of other Harley-Davidson motorcycle owners and enthusiasts, would love to visit and relive a piece of Harley-Davidson history.

So, next time when you are in Southwestern Pennsylvania, lookup James Cerini, and get a tour of the old Harley-Davidson Dealership in Donora.

View Larger Map

The new Cerini Harley-Davidson Buell Dealership is located at 4325 State Route 51, North Rostraver, PA 15012, and is owned by James Cerini's cousins, Eric and Ernest R. Cerini.

Business Marketing Solutions by Jim Warholic

Donora Before and After Clean Air Standards

2007-08-06T15:39:00.000-07:00

What's the Life and Times About?

Well, this reminds me of my days growing up in rural Pennsylvania, just outside Donora, PA. Although the picture presented at the top of the page is not exactly like anything of a farm house seen back in Southwestern Pennsylvania, the image still brings back the thoughts of the homestead.

I was born a decade after the Donora tragedy that sparked today's clean air standards laws.

What Happened in Donora

Beginning the week of October 23rd, 1948, Donora and the entire Pittsburgh area were experiencing foggy weather. A weather phenomenon called an inversion, in which a warm air mass traps cold air near the ground, had also set in over Donora. The inversion contributed to a deadly smog which lingered over Donora from October 28th through the 31st, containing extraordinarily high levels of sulfur dioxide, soluble sulfates, and fluorides. According to the PA Bureau of Industrial Hygiene, such contamination of the atmosphere was caused by a combination of the zinc smelting plant, steel mills' open hearth furnaces, a sulphuric acid plant, slag dump, and coal burning steam locomotives and river boats. The inversion helped to keep the pollutants close to the ground where people inhaled them. At least 17 people were killed within a 24-hour period, and nearly half the population of Donora experienced varying degrees of illness, such as sore throats, irritation of the eyes, nose, and respiratory tract, headaches, breathlessness, vomiting and nausea. Another 50 residents would perish over the course of the next month from lingering health damage.

by Rachel Filippini, GASP Executive Assistant
Group Against Smog and Polution

Here is another article concerning the fluoride fog cloud that had formed because of the temperature inversion.

The "Donora Death Fog"

Horror visited the US Steel company-town of Donora on Halloween night, 1948, when a temperature inversion descended on the town. Fumes from US Steel's smelting plants blanketed the town for four days, and crept murderously into the citizens' homes. If the smog had lasted another evening "the casualty list would have been 1,000 instead of 20," said local doctor William Rongaus at the time. Later investigations by Rongaus and others indicated that one-third of the town's 14,000 residents were affected by the smog. Hundreds of residents were evacuated or hospitalized. A decade later, Donora's mortality rate remained significantly higher than neighboring areas.

The "Donora Death Fog", as it became known, spawned numerous angry lawsuits and the first calls for national legislation to protect the public from industrial air pollution.

A PHS report released in 1949 reported that "no single substance" was responsible for the Donora deaths and laid major blame for the tragedy on the temperature inversion. But according to industry consultant Philip Sadtler, in an interview taped shortly before his 1996 death, that report was a whitewash. "It was murder," said Sadtler about Donora. "The directors of US Steel should have gone to jail for killing people." Sadtler charged that the PHS report helped US Steel escape liability for the deaths and spared a host of fluoride- emitting industries the expense of having to control their toxic emissions. (A class-action lawsuit by Donora victims families was later settled out of court.)

This article appears in the Fall 1998 Earth Island Journal
by Chris Bryson
See the story at www.fluoridation.com

So, it is wise to remember the past, so we can make positive changes for our future good.

Jim

Americans Love The Internet

2006-09-25T18:16:00.000-07:00

40 Million Americans Use The Internet To Hang Out Or Have Fun Every Day

According to the:

PEW INTERNET PROJECT DATA MEMO

On any given day, about 40 million internet users go online just for fun
or to pass the time.

The internet is increasingly a place where Americans just hang out. Surfing the Web has become one of the most popular activities that internet users will do online on a typical day. Some 30% of internet users go online on any given day for no particular reason, just for fun or to pass the time. PDF

It should come as no surprise that the Internet is used for fun. With the proliferation of videos, bloggers, news providers, gamers, and social networks such as MySpace, is it any wonder that we are spending more hours online just to have fun? Broadband users are much more likely to go on the Internet to have fun as compared to their dial-up counterparts.

Instead of going down to the local neighborhood corner to hang out, we now have our young and old people hanging out online. I guess this is the new "Happy Days."

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Super Glue With Internet SuprGlu

2006-08-10T08:57:00.000-07:00

Internet Super Glue - aka SuprGlu

Do you spend a lot of time on the Internet? Do you have a number of favorite places to visit Online? Are there a large number of Blogs in your Blogosphere World? Whould you like the news all in one place?

Now, there are more ways to stay on top of new articles, all in one place, as new articles are published online. RSS and Atom XML feeds have been around for awhile. News Readers such as Google Reader provide an online software to allow you to subscribe to unlimited XML feeds and read them whenever you desire. Google Reader has a great interface for being able to subscribe to new feeds and it is tied into your online Google Gmail account.

Other Creative Ways of Keeping Up With Life And Times

SuprGlu - SuprGlu is a type of Super Glue for the Internet. It is a type of permanent Online reader with a Blogging style to it. Essentially you create a free online account and subscribe to different feeds. Then as a website with an XML feed, newsfeeds, or blogs ares updated, the new postings come into a users SuprGlu area, formated in a customized format. SuprGlu has a large number of built in templates that can be changed on the fly. One of the really cool features about this is readers can publish comments right on your SuprGlu place. You could share your place with a select small group of people or make it a public place for anyone to comment on any article that is published online. Check out jimwest.suprglu.com for an idea of what can be done with this powerful online program. Stay up to date with Life And Times XML Feed. Add it to your SuprGlu account; and while your at it feel free to add some of our other Internet Marketing XML Feeds that are published online.

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The Branding Iron

2006-08-09T10:34:00.000-07:00

Times are a Changing.

In the Wild Wild West days of yesteryear and still today we have a branding mark that gets burnt on the side of cattle to represent who they belong to. Well, in much the same way cattle are branded, companies are branded on the Internet by the Search Engines. There are many business factors including: Internet marketing, online advertising, web branding, and ethical search engine optimization techniques you can do to change and improve your brand image.

Many companies are sitting on the sidelines and doing nothing to improve their brand images. Many large corporations as well as Small Businesses, I would have to say, do not pay attention to how their websites show up in the search engine results pages. If some of the Presidents and CEOs of these large organizations were to look closely at their own companies, through the eyes of the search engines, I think they would see their company's brand image in a totally different light.

The Internet is here to stay. The impact the Internet has on B2B and B2C commerce can not be denied nor can it be understated. Consumers are flocking to the Internet to verify best pricing on products, find sources for services, direct purchasing from websites, evaluating new software products, shopping for cars, and even shopping for homes online. Businesses are having their purchasing managers, buyers, and engineers search the Internet for OEM suppliers, products, and services. Yes, no matter if a business is considered B2B, Business to business or B2C, Business to consumer, the impact the search engines have on Corporations or Small Businesses brands and sales is immense.

Evaluating Brand Image Online

The process of evaluating the brand image is not difficult. It is rather easy to look at the Search Engine results and determine if the displayed snippet from the website is a good brand image or not. It is important to understand a company's target market along with proper insight into what marketing strategies would like to be accomplished online. The difficult part is improving the brand image over the long haul. Search Engines continually update and improve their algorithms which can result in displaying the B2B or B2C website in the search engine results in a different light. It takes vigilance from someone that understands how the interaction between the various website html components affects the various snippets of information that are displayed in the search results.

As the brand is evaluated online it is necessary to tweak the Brand Image whenever required. Sometimes simply viewing the snippet of information from the business website in the search engine results is enough of a hint to make minor changes to the web page for improving the results. Other times it will require extensive redesign of the pages or the entire site to help improve the branding results in the search engines.

For more information on branding visit Branding Matters. Subscribe to our Free Newsletter, with information about B2B and B2C Internet marketing, online
advertising, web branding, privacy, ethics on the Internet, search engine optimization, technology, and more. Read the online newsletter: Does Branding Matter To Your Business?

The MyBlogsky Story

2006-08-08T00:31:00.000-07:00

Not since the last power outage about one month ago has one of the blogging services been online. I was testing the myblogsky.com service out for about four months when all of a sudden when Myspace.com went down because of a power outage and the myblogsky.com service also went down. There were many individual blogs at myblogsky.com. The Life And Times blog url was located at jimwest.myblogsky.com. However, the service never came back online and the only thing that shows up is an Index of parent directory, dated 08-Jul-2006 01:13. Fortunately I made a backup of the posts and will be re-posting them here.

I was wondering if anyone else has a story to tell about this particular blogging service. What is the scoop. Are they ever going to come back online?

I ended up porting the template to the blogger.com service. This took a little bit of work and there are still a few issues with the template that I need to adjust, but for the most part it functions the way I intended it to.

Here is what Google currently has stored for myblogsky.com. There are approximately 12,900 pages from the site in the cache.

FYI

If you would like to try to recover any of your posts, you might want to look at the Google Cache of your particular blog. For example: Google has stored in their database jimwest.myblogsky.com By simply doing a search using the following syntax: site:jimwest.myblogsky.com you can view everything that Google has stored for that particular site. Then simply click on the cache link and you can copy the information directly from the display. Not sure how long the cache will remain but if you can get to it now, save the text in notepad for each posting. Then once a new blog is created simply re-post the information. Some of the pictures that are posted in the blog postings will also display if the pictures are hosted elsewhere. If they were uploaded to myblogsky.com, you may be out of luck.

Good luck on your recovery.

Writing Effective Online Ads

2006-08-07T23:15:00.000-07:00

Creating a Good Banner Ad

In the Online world writing ads is only half the battle. Designing a good banner ad can be a time consuming job.

Considerations of what the message is, the subject matter, understanding of the target audience, what needs to be said in the ad, color schemes, fonts, graphics, and how it should be laid out and displayed are all important considerations for an effective advertisement. There has to be a good balance between getting the attention of a person, rather than irritating a website visitor with an excessive amount of motion in the ads themselves.

Some websites go overboard on the amount of Flash in Online Ads. The amount of repetition movements, or repeated text displays in a GIF animation file, for an effective online advertisement can be limited to three to five reps, depending on the
situation.

Sometimes, the advertisement develops into an ongoing process, whereby the ad itself has to go through many rewrites before it is acceptable. I am reminded of the Go Daddy Girl story about how Bob Parsons and the Go Daddy company had to go through
many rewrites of their television commercial for the Super Bowl. They ended up going through a dozen or more takes, with different ideas, storylines, and actual advertisements before the Network would allow their commercial to run at the Super Bowl.

For more information about online advertising visit http://advertising.pwebs.net

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Welcome to Life and Times

2006-08-07T22:17:00.000-07:00

We certainly live in interesting times.

The times are changing faster than anyone can stay on top of. With the
power of the Internet, technology, and software; people can communicate
like never before. Staying on Top of the Internet is key for B2B, B2C, and C2C businesses today. There is one caveat in
all of this Internet technology. It still comes down to the power of the written word.

We have all heard the commercial that states, "The power is in the
words you use." Well, that is more true today then ever before.

There are wonderful and imaginative websites that really have a lot of
creativity built into them, but are lacking in the branded message
being portrayed. Simply put, the marketing and advertising message is
lost in the graphics of the website. Companies spend thousands of
dollars to look pretty on the Web but no one can find them. Graphic
artists can manipulate Photoshop and Flash programs like it is the back
of their hands, but they have not been taught the number one rule on
the Internet.

Be Found Online

Yes, that is the number one Internet rule, to be found online.

For more information on this Internet rule visit: blog.pwebs.net/marketing.htm

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