What Is Your Life's Blueprint?

Six months before he was assassinated, King spoke to a group of students at Barratt Junior High School in Philadelphia on October 26, 1967.

I want to ask you a question, and that is: What is your life's blueprint?

Whenever a building is constructed, you usually have an architect who draws a blueprint, and that blueprint serves as the pattern, as the guide, and a building is not well erected without a good, solid blueprint.

Now each of you is in the process of building the structure of your lives, and the question is whether you have a proper, a solid and a sound blueprint.

I want to suggest some of the things that should begin your life's blueprint. Number one in your life's blueprint, should be a deep belief in your own dignity, your worth and your own somebodiness. Don't allow anybody to make you feel that you're nobody. Always feel that you count. Always feel that you have worth, and always feel that your life has ultimate significance.

Secondly, in your life's blueprint you must have as the basic principle the determination to achieve excellence in your various fields of endeavor. You're going to be deciding as the days, as the years unfold what you will do in life — what your life's work will be. Set out to do it well.

And I say to you, my young friends, doors are opening to you–doors of opportunities that were not open to your mothers and your fathers — and the great challenge facing you is to be ready to face these doors as they open.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great essayist, said in a lecture in 1871, "If a man can write a better book or preach a better sermon or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, even if he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door."

This hasn't always been true — but it will become increasingly true, and so I would urge you to study hard, to burn the midnight oil; I would say to you, don't drop out of school. I understand all the sociological reasons, but I urge you that in spite of your economic plight, in spite of the situation that you're forced to live in — stay in school.

And when you discover what you will be in your life, set out to do it as if God Almighty called you at this particular moment in history to do it. don't just set out to do a good job. Set out to do such a good job that the living, the dead or the unborn couldn't do it any better.

If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well. If you can't be a pine at the top of the hill, be a shrub in the valley. Be the best little shrub on the side of the hill.

Be a bush if you can't be a tree. If you can't be a highway, just be a trail. If you can't be a sun, be a star. For it isn't by size that you win or fail. Be the best of whatever you are.

–From the estate of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Product placement

Product placement, or embedded marketing, is a type of advertising, in which promotional advertisements placed by marketers using real commercial products and services in media, where the presence of a particular brand is the result of an economic exchange. When featuring a product is not part of an economic exchange, it is called a product plug. Product placement appears in plays, film, television series, music videos, video games and books. It became more common starting in the 1980s, but can be traced back to at least 1949[citation needed]. Product placement occurs with the inclusion of a brand's logo in shot, or a favorable mention or appearance of a product in shot. This is done without disclosure, and under the premise that it is a natural part of the work. Most major movie releases today contain product placements.The most common form is movie and television placements and more recently computer and video games. Recently, websites have experimented with in-site product placement as a revenue model.

Firefox 3 2008 Download Day

Sounds like a good deal, right? All you have to do is get Firefox 3 during Download Day to help set the record for most software downloads in 24 hours - it’s that easy. We're not asking you to swallow a sword or to balance 30 spoons on your face, although that would be kind of awesome.
By the way, the official date for the launch of Firefox 3 will be posted here soon - so check back! Join our community and this effort by pledging today.

Fika

Fika is a Swedish verb that roughly means "to take a coffee break".
Fika is a social institution in Sweden: it means taking a break from work or other activities and having a coffee with one's colleagues, friends, date, or family. The word has quite ambiguous connotations, and can at its its extremes denote a date or a small meal with your boss. This practice of taking a break for a coffee and a light snack (some biscuits, cookies, or a sandwich) between more substantial meals like lunch and dinner is central to Swedish life, Swedes being among the heaviest consumers of coffee in the world.
Since the word implies drinking coffee, just having a sandwich would not really be fika, although these days tea or a soft drink instead of coffee is becoming more frequent. In recent years, too, fika has also come to mean simply going to a café and having a coffee with someone, though this technically deviates from the strict "taking a break" meaning.[citation needed] The word is an example of the backslang used in the 19th century – where the syllables of a word are reversed – deriving from kaffi, an earlier variant of the Swedish word kaffe ("coffee").[citation needed] The word is also used as a noun, meaning the actual event of having a fika, i.e., "a lovely fika." From fika also comes the word fik (a colloquial term for "café") through a process of back-formation. In northern Sweden and some of the more rural areas, fika is synonymous to coffee without any treats: Ta en kopp fika ("Have a cup of coffee").

Zoundry Raven

Zoundry Raven™ is our next generation WYSIWYG blog editor that makes posting to your blogs easier and faster. It's as easy to use as a word processor, plus we include simple tools to add links, tags, photos, music and video files, and more.

Disconnect Anxiety

1. 
   Strongly or somewhat agree with the statement "My cell phone goes everywhere I go?"
2. Use your wireless device "frequently" at home instead of your home phone?
   Strongly or somewhat agree with the statement "When I leave home without my cell phone, I feel cut off"?
3. Spend four hours or more using the Internet—work or personal—per day on average?
4. Used IM (instant messenger) in the last week?
5. Have a Facebook profile that you visit at least once a day?
6. Strongly agree with the statement "The world is not as safe as it used to be"?
7. Used a laptop in your living room or bedroom in the last week?
8. Text-messaged on a regular cell or sent email using a BlackBerry, Treo or similar in the evenings or the weekend in the last week?

reference:http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080312-disconnect-anxiety-a-malady-for-the-21st-century.html

World Refugee Day! 6/20

For years, many countries and regions have been holding their own Refugee Days and even Weeks. One of the most widespread is Africa Refugee Day, which is celebrated on 20 June in several countries.
As an expression of solidarity with Africa, which hosts the most refugees, and which traditionally has shown them great generosity, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 55/76 on 4 December 2000. In this resolution, the General Assembly noted that 2001 marked the 50th anniversary of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, and that the Organization of African Unity (OAU) had agreed to have International Refugee Day coincide with Africa Refugee Day on 20 June. The Assembly therefore decided that, from 2001, 20 June would be celebrated as World Refugee Day. [Note: The OAU was replaced by the African Union on 9 July 2002.]