It’s called Ovi and as far as I can tell it’s a simple application download. It’s a navigation map application so you can get easy driving or walking instructions.

I checked it out yesterday at maps.nokia.com and it works for most of their cell phones, but naturally, it doesn’t seem to work on my older 2007 Nokia smart phone.

My phone still works great and I got it for free in a marketing promotion … but lately I have been thinking of getting a newer phone so I can take advantage of some of the cool applications like this one.

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2. I think I need a new printer
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I tried running the alignment feature but it didn’t help so now I’m trying to decide if I should spend money on ink for a machine that might not work properly or if perhaps once it has fresh ink if it will suddenly start working properly again. What do you think?

In the meantime I’ve been looking around online for a printer with features that I like. Our current one is a scanner, copier, fax machine and printer. I’d love to get another one that has all of those features. I don’t fax often, but I’m sure if I got a printer without a fax I’d suddenly need to fax out a signed contract or something.

One printer that caught my eye was the tm-t88iv It’s a thermal printer so it’s way more than I need for my home office, but it sure looks nice. I think I’ll be sticking to traditional models for now.

Any printer suggestions or any idea as to how to solve my printers alignment problem? It’s an HP BTW if that’s important.

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My husband and I haven’t been on a real vacation in ages. We always had an excuse for not taking a vacation – we were both working shift work and our schedules didn’t correspond for even a weekend get away, we didn’t have the money for a holiday or who will take care of our pets?

Enough excuses! I need holiday! Even if it’s only a few days away from home.

We live in Toronto so it’s easy enough to go just about anywhere we want. I’d been thinking of taking up one of those hotel deals in Niagara Falls for a weekend. Some of the hotels there are pet friendly so we could even bring our dog! Or maybe look into booking a new york cheap hotel for a weekend, well, if we could get a cheap flight to New York I mean.

I’d love to go away to the Caribbean or Mexico for a week or two, but I don’t think we can swing that right now … so maybe one or two short trips away will have to do. I’m sure it will help!

Do you go on holiday during the winter or in early spring? Doesn’t it help break up those winter blahs?

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I made a bio and in it I list that I’m an ER nurse. I didn’t get too many followers at first via listing that fact, as more people decided to follow me because I’d listed gardening and photography and dog owner in my bio as well.

Lately though I’m getting a lot of friend requests form RN organizations, fellow nurse and even some medical travel types of businesses.

I don’t talk about being a nurse on my blogs or on my Twitter account very often – mainly because I’ve been on medical leave from my work for about five years now due to Crohn’s disease. I’m sure I’d talk more about it if I were back to working regular shifts.

I do like connecting with fell ow nurses on Twitter as I can keep up on some things that are going on in the field. Even though most of my Twitter nurse friends are in the US and I’m in Canada there are a lot of similarities in our practices.

Do you connect with people in your profession or via things you’ve listed in your bio on Twitter?

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I don’t think anyone likes having a cold, but I haven’t had one for about fifteen years and I guess the fact that I haven’t had to go through this at least once a year has made it even harder to bear now that I do have a head cold. LOL

I blame my brother! He was here just after Christmas and he was supposed to be over his cold, but it came back just as he arrived and about two weeks after he left to go back home both my husband and I started getting the sniffles.

So I guess I’ve had the sniffles for two weeks, but my cold started to really get bad not this past Monday but the Monday before that. I spent all of last week in misery. My cold was so bad! My nose wouldn’t stop running. I think I used about three boxes of tissues last week – enough to cover all the tile in my kitchen I think! Yeah – gross.

Now this week my symptoms are better than there were last week, but I’ve got a cough and I’m starting to have bad fevers so I’m wondering if my cold is going to turn into bronchitis or pneumonia. God I hope not!

I always get really sick for about a month when I get a cold. Like I said, my husband had the sniffles too and then his cold symptoms got worse for about two days and then he was pretty much over it except for some minor sniffles.

I’ve been taking decongestants and even tried using a nasal spray last week (the nasal spray didn’t help so I’m not using it now). The medicines didn’t help much at all.

How do you handle a cold when you get one? Do you take medications and then feel a lot better after a day or so, or area you like me and stay sick for weeks?

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I can’t wait!

Our Samsung DLP is dying. I guess I’m lucky that I have a husband that believes me when I tell him something isn’t working or is acting funny … why? Well our TV started acting up about a month ago. Of course the picture only froze and went to black and white pixilation after midnight when my husband was already asleep in bed.

I look up the problem on the internet and discovered that it’s probably the DMD board that’s causing the trouble. Unfortunately that will cost us about a thousand dollars to fix and we’ve already put more than enough money into this TV in the six years that we’ve owned it. So at my word that our TV is dying my husband and I went out and bought a new Plasma TV.

However, if my husband wasn’t sure about the problem our DLP has, he’s sure of it now. At about 7:30 this evening the TV screen froze and my husband finally got to see the problem himself.

Anyway … we hope to pick up our TV on Friday evening – or Saturday morning. It all depends on our friend with a truck.

Once we get the new TV I’m going to have fun playing with it. It’s a very thin Plasma (a Samsung 8 series) and it comes with all the bells and whistles. I believe it even has built in wifi. If it does great, because we have a network set up with our Linksys router. Who knows, maybe next week I’ll be typing out these posts using my new TV as a monitor? LOL

Do you have a Plasma? We thought about getting an LCD but we really liked the picture quality of the Plasma and they apparently last as long as LCD’s so as far as I can tell it comes down to a matter of preference and of course how bright the room that you’ll be putting the TV in is. Our living room is on the north side of the house and it’s never very bright so we think the plasma will be fine.

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Yes, you guessed it – my husband and I bought a new home theater system and we spent several hours trying to set it up. It didn’t help that the instruction manual was missing key parts and named items on the receiver that aren’t there!

It’s not the first home theater we’ve installed. Nope … You see back in 2004 when we got our DLP HDTV we also purchased a home theater system for the TV. That time around it took us over a week to get the TV, DVD players (we have two), a 200 CD multiplayer, and the cable HD box set up and attached to the home theater and working properly.

As luck would have it … our first home theater system broke down about two years ago and we didn’t get it fixed nor did we replace it … until now that is. You see our lovely DLP TV seems to be dying (the picture freezes – sounds like and expensive DMD board problem) so two weeks ago we went out and bought a new Plasma TV. Naturally as our luck would have it, the TV isn’t in stock so we’re still waiting for it to arrive.

In the mean time we decided that since we’d gone out and bought this expensive HDTV it’d be a good idea to have a working Home Theater system to go with it. So we purchased a Yamaha receiver, speakers and subwoofer.

Yesterday we decided to start hooking up the new system to the old, and still barely working TV. At least less things to try to figure out once we got the new TV right?

After a few hours we had our old multiplayer CD working – but only the front speakers were working. The TV didn’t produce sound from the home theater system. At that point we decided to pack it in and try again today.

It took a few more hours of work this afternoon, but now the TV, DVD and CD player all work with the home theater. Ta Da! I can’t believe it took that long … it felt like a job! Maybe we can list it on our resumes? LOL

Have you had trouble hooking up a home theater system to an HDTV? How long did it take you to complete?

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When fat is  stored in the body resulting in the skin appealing lumpy and uneven, you are likely to suffer from cellulite. It is often called orange peel skin,  resembling the look of skin being pinched. In general, cellulite is more commonly found on the hips, buttocks and legs, more than other parts of the  body.

The difficult truth about cellulite is that it is made up of exactly the same kind of fat, or ‘adipose tissue’, as any  other. Adipose tissue  sweeps up fat that the body wants to store as an extra amount of energy. When the  blood is exposed to a high concentration of sugar for a very long time, coming from calories, the body stores this in adipose  tissue.

What gives cellulite its characteristic appearance is the fact that the adipose tissue almost squeezes itself in between the  rather stringy connective tissue that makes up the skin. It is a little bit like butter being squeezed through a  knitted sweater. The butter will come squeezing through the various holes in between the strands of wool and you’ll get an  effect very like cellulite in the body.

It particularly affects women because we put on fat in a totally different way to men. In men, adipose tissue settles more around the waist and abdomen, as well as close to internal organs.  Women however, tend to build up adipose tissue around hips and thighs, and this is more likely to create visible  cellulite. Also,  the adipose tissue squeezes through connective tissue if it is more elastic, and sadly as we all get older, our connective  tissue tends to loosen up.

But enough of the science – how to get rid of Cellulite?  The key is simply to lose weight and there are two main ways to do this. Firstly, use up more energy than you put into your body as calories. It is useful  to exercise, as using up energy is only one result of exercising. The metabolic rate in your body will increase with aerobic exercises done regularly,  resulting in using up more energy stored in the body. It also helps improve muscle tone.  As working  the muscle fibres in the skin results in tighter muscles, cellulite will become less visible.

Losing weight can also be achieved by making sure your blood sugar levels are stable,  when avoiding eating all those lovely sugary things we like so much. To achieve this, it is best to  stay away from foods containing lots of sugar, French fries, white bread that has been processed, noodles, rice and alcohol.  As the body needs blood with a high concentration of sugar to be able to store fat, it will be  physically impossible to gain weight.

Massage and creams that hydrate the skin are also used often. T hese will have the effect of swelling the skin around the cellulite to temporarily reduce the lumpyness associated with  it. There is no long-lasting substitute for a low-calorie, low sugar diet that is fairly high in protein, fruit  and vegetables however. Treating cellulite is the same as treating any other fat in the lobby – the only ways to fight it are exercise and diet.

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1. Video games improve strategic thinking. Unusual is the video game that does not need the player to decide plays two or three steps ahead of the immediate situation. With constant play, players quickly learn the advantage of strategic thinking and they start to apply it to actual world opportunities.

2. Video games can help improve problem solving skills. Although the same could be said about any game, video games have proven in study after study to improve problem-solving skills. This is due to most games being centered on a problem and the challenge it presents a play to solve it. In onlyone game, a gamer can be required to solve up to a hundred different problems.

3. Video games improve hand and eye coordination. If you are skepitical about this, simply pick up a video game controller and attempt to move around the game. Maneuvering the game controller requires the same or better skills then it requires to manipulate a mouse around a computer screen.

4. Video games facilitate quick decision-making. One quality of video games that lends to quick decision making is its impromptu situations. There is always the element of surprise around the corner and it makes games intriguing to play. To win players need to make intelligent decision quickly.

5. Video games feed the imagination. We don’t really understand the argument against things like television, videos, and gaming where people use the lack of imagination to support their part of the debate. Some people claim that video games take away from the imagination because games supply the mind with things instead of encouraging the mind to come up with these things on their own. Bear in mind that these are the same people who say a stack of blocks is sufficient to grow a child’s imagination. Of course we couldn’t disagree more. The imagery in video games only fuels the imagination and gives it a spring board to form new possibilities that might not have occurred otherwise.

6. Video games are also a great way to encourage exploration. In role playing games, the players must learn to leave the known path and explore the unknown. Players must open doors never knowing what lies behind them. They have to enter areas of the game without knowing the consequence. And they have to interact with characters that they’ve never met before. Inside these particular kinds of games, the opportunity to gather up the courage to explorer unknown territory isn’t just available, it’s required.

7. Video games will reinforce memorization. Another feature of video games is its strong influence on memorization. The terraine represented in some video games is extremely large, however accessing the maps can be disruptive to the game. To make up for this, gamers will memorize a portion of terrain and the tasks required to get to certain areas.

8. Video games teach consequence. Video games, like computer games, operate off an action/reaction principle. Do something, and the game will react. This is a great opportunity to learn about consequence – whether this opportunity is experienced from a gamer’s point of view or a programmer’s point of view.

9. Video games teach endurance, patience, and dedication. No great game can be conquered in a day. Some of the top video games can take weeks or months to complete.

These are just a few of the eductional opportunities hidden away inside computer and top video games. With closer exploration, we are positive you will find more then hours of fun and amazement.

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WEIGHT

It is often misunderstood that, while diamonds are measured in carats, gold is measured in karats. This is an indication of the purity, rather than a measure of the weight or the size. Rings made of 14k gold actually consist of 14/24 pure gold which makes it about 58% pure. Platinum’s purity hase a measurement scale between 900 and 950 out of 1000. This translates to a 950PT wedding ring being 95% pure platinum.

Note that the remainder is often comprised of chemically similar though equally valuable metals. While lower numbers can be found, they won’t be found in fine jewelry wedding rings.

A diamond, by contrast, is measured in carats (ct), ranging from near zero and up. 1 carat = 200 mg, a measure of mass. A diamond that is less than one eighth of a carat is considered a chip. Partly, the reason is the difficulty of faceting and polishing such a small stone in order to bring out a diamond’s effects.

A diamond that isn’t fully faceted or properly shaped is known as a “chip.”. They can result from accidents or the crystal structure that makes cutting and polishing nearly impossible. But the smaller the stone, the more difficult this becomes. So, most chips are in the range stated.

The Cullnan diamond, weighing in at about 3106 carats, is the biggest individual gem-quality diamond ever discovered. It was cut down into the egg-shaped stone that sits in the scepter of England, itself about 525 carats.

But there are many other factors that influence the cost and look of a fine diamond intended to sit in an engagement ring or wedding band.

CLARITY

A diamond is judged by professionals on how ‘clear’ it is, and the stone is then placed into a category.

FL, IF – Flawless, or Internally Flawless represents the highest grade in this area. Such stones are extremely rare and hence invariably very expensive.

VVS1, VVS2 – These ratings represent a diamond which is only ‘very very slightly included’. ‘Included’ means, essentially, occluded or cloudy. Inclusions of non-diamond material or structure are responsible for lack of perfect clarity. Despite the ominous sounding word, these gems are very high quality. The flaws can only barely be seen under 10x magnification.

VS1, VS2 – Very Slightly Included ratings represent high quality stones. No flaw is visible to the naked eye.

SI1, SI2 – Slightly Included gems contains flaws that are visible under 10x magnification and may just barely be seen by those with very sharp eyes. Beyond having good eyesight, though, one needs to know what to look for. Generally, non-experts won’t notice much of anything.

I1, I2, I3 – These are mediocre quality stones that may still look very nice. But they have visible flaws when one looks closely that will reduce the brilliance of the stone’s appearance.

COLOR

Clarity is actually a separate measure from color. Diamonds are usually considered a colorless stone, but diamonds come in a wide variety of colors. Fashions change and in one era what might be considered a flaw will be highly valued by the next generation. The color is produced by small ‘impurities’ mixed into the carbon structure that makes up diamond.

A 200-carat blue diamond in the Smithsonian (the Hope Diamond), for example, is valued not only for its unusually large size. Its rare and pure color is also a significant factor.

Blue, pink and yellow are among the most common colors found in ring stones.

D stones are completely colorless and correspondingly rare.

E diamonds are also considered colorless. Any impurities are in trace amounts detectable only by experts with special tools. Still very rare.

F are also graded colorless, but a slight color may be seen by an expert.

G-H are near colorless. Non-experts can detect some shading if they look closely, but these can still be high quality diamonds.

I-J Near colorless diamonds in which the color is slightly detectable. Still a very good value.

K-M are stones in which the color is highly noticeable. Observe, though, that these ratings are for diamonds that are ranked according to how little color they have. As a result, many will find a yellow diamong quite beautiful.

What’s important is to have the color be uniform. Small spots of color are still considered a flaw by most everyone. Of course, that too is simply a matter of taste and some future trendsetter may decide such diamonds are worth even more.

CUT

It is challenging to give a ranking to the quality or price of a diamond based on the cut of the gem. This is due to the fact that detemining the “best” cut is really a matter of personal preference. The different cuts – round, oval, square, princess – are all equally beautiful and choice simply depends on personal preference. Other common shapes are the Marquise (a type of elongated stone), the Pear, Emerald cut, Trilliant (a wedge shape), Radiant, Cushion and Heart shaped.

Diamon experts have much more specific criteria and will evaluate the different angles and the facet numbers. The Radiant, for example, has 70 facets while the Trilliant has 25 on the crown and 19 on the pavilion. But these details need not concern wedding ring buyers.

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