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Motorized Paraglider Plows into Crowd in Heber, Utah

Mike Daniels — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 20:30:23 +0000

more about "Motorized Paraglider Plows into Crowd…", posted with vodpod

Motorized Paraglider Plows into Crowd in Heber, Utah

Mike Daniels — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 20:29:00 +0000

more about "Motorized Paraglider Plows into Crowd…", posted with vodpod

President Obama’s Speech to Students Released

Mike Daniels — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 17:50:00 +0000

This speech sounds like it’s going to be a pretty good one for students. Every student should hear this, it should first come from the parents but if they can’t hear it from them first, good for President reaching out. The “instructions” for students when they first released the idea of the speech were somewhat concerning. The Obama admin needs to remember to think about all scenarios. Should be a good speech though, here’s a copy of his address to the students.

It airs tomorrow Tuesday September 8th. It airs at 12p.m. EDT. You can find it on whitehouse.gov/live or on C-Span TV. Here is the speech below.

——-

Prepared Remarks of President Barack Obama
Back to School Event

Arlington, Virginia
September 8, 2009

The President: Hello everyone – how’s everybody doing today? I’m here with students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. And we’ve got students tuning in from all across America, kindergarten through twelfth grade. I’m glad you all could join us today.

I know that for many of you, today is the first day of school. And for those of you in kindergarten, or starting middle or high school, it’s your first day in a new school, so it’s understandable if you’re a little nervous. I imagine there are some seniors out there who are feeling pretty good right now, with just one more year to go. And no matter what grade you’re in, some of you are probably wishing it were still summer, and you could’ve stayed in bed just a little longer this morning.

I know that feeling. When I was young, my family lived in Indonesia for a few years, and my mother didn’t have the money to send me where all the American kids went to school. So she decided to teach me extra lessons herself, Monday through Friday – at 4:30 in the morning.

Now I wasn’t too happy about getting up that early. A lot of times, I’d fall asleep right there at the kitchen table. But whenever I’d complain, my mother would just give me one of those looks and say, “This is no picnic for me either, buster.”

So I know some of you are still adjusting to being back at school. But I’m here today because I have something important to discuss with you. I’m here because I want to talk with you about your education and what’s expected of all of you in this new school year.

Now I’ve given a lot of speeches about education. And I’ve talked a lot about responsibility.

I’ve talked about your teachers’ responsibility for inspiring you, and pushing you to learn.

I’ve talked about your parents’ responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and get your homework done, and don’t spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with that Xbox.

I’ve talked a lot about your government’s responsibility for setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren’t working where students aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve.

But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.

And that’s what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education. I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself.

Every single one of you has something you’re good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That’s the opportunity an education can provide.

Maybe you could be a good writer – maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper – but you might not know it until you write a paper for your English class. Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor – maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine – but you might not know it until you do a project for your science class. Maybe you could be a mayor or a Senator or a Supreme Court Justice, but you might not know that until you join student government or the debate team.

And no matter what you want to do with your life – I guarantee that you’ll need an education to do it. You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You’re going to need a good education for every single one of those careers. You can’t drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it.

And this isn’t just important for your own life and your own future. What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. What you’re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.

You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.

We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that – if you quit on school – you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.

Now I know it’s not always easy to do well in school. I know a lot of you have challenges in your lives right now that can make it hard to focus on your schoolwork.

I get it. I know what that’s like. My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn’t always able to give us things the other kids had. There were times when I missed having a father in my life. There were times when I was lonely and felt like I didn’t fit in.

So I wasn’t always as focused as I should have been. I did some things I’m not proud of, and got in more trouble than I should have. And my life could have easily taken a turn for the worse.

But I was fortunate. I got a lot of second chances and had the opportunity to go to college, and law school, and follow my dreams. My wife, our First Lady Michelle Obama, has a similar story. Neither of her parents had gone to college, and they didn’t have much. But they worked hard, and she worked hard, so that she could go to the best schools in this country.

Some of you might not have those advantages. Maybe you don’t have adults in your life who give you the support that you need. Maybe someone in your family has lost their job, and there’s not enough money to go around. Maybe you live in a neighborhood where you don’t feel safe, or have friends who are pressuring you to do things you know aren’t right.

But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life – what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home – that’s no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude. That’s no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. That’s no excuse for not trying.

Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up. No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.

That’s what young people like you are doing every day, all across America.

Young people like Jazmin Perez, from Roma, Texas. Jazmin didn’t speak English when she first started school. Hardly anyone in her hometown went to college, and neither of her parents had gone either. But she worked hard, earned good grades, got a scholarship to Brown University, and is now in graduate school, studying public health, on her way to being Dr. Jazmin Perez.

I’m thinking about Andoni Schultz, from Los Altos, California, who’s fought brain cancer since he was three. He’s endured all sorts of treatments and surgeries, one of which affected his memory, so it took him much longer – hundreds of extra hours – to do his schoolwork. But he never fell behind, and he’s headed to college this fall.

And then there’s Shantell Steve, from my hometown of Chicago, Illinois. Even when bouncing from foster home to foster home in the toughest neighborhoods, she managed to get a job at a local health center; start a program to keep young people out of gangs; and she’s on track to graduate high school with honors and go on to college.

Jazmin, Andoni and Shantell aren’t any different from any of you. They faced challenges in their lives just like you do. But they refused to give up. They chose to take responsibility for their education and set goals for themselves. And I expect all of you to do the same.

That’s why today, I’m calling on each of you to set your own goals for your education – and to do everything you can to meet them. Your goal can be something as simple as doing all your homework, paying attention in class, or spending time each day reading a book. Maybe you’ll decide to get involved in an extracurricular activity, or volunteer in your community. Maybe you’ll decide to stand up for kids who are being teased or bullied because of who they are or how they look, because you believe, like I do, that all kids deserve a safe environment to study and learn. Maybe you’ll decide to take better care of yourself so you can be more ready to learn. And along those lines, I hope you’ll all wash your hands a lot, and stay home from school when you don’t feel well, so we can keep people from getting the flu this fall and winter.

Whatever you resolve to do, I want you to commit to it. I want you to really work at it.

I know that sometimes, you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work — that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star, when chances are, you’re not going to be any of those things.

But the truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject you study. You won’t click with every teacher. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right this minute. And you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.

That’s OK. Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who’ve had the most failures. JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected twelve times before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, “I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

These people succeeded because they understand that you can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time. If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave. If you get a bad grade, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying.

No one’s born being good at things, you become good at things through hard work. You’re not a varsity athlete the first time you play a new sport. You don’t hit every note the first time you sing a song. You’ve got to practice. It’s the same with your schoolwork. You might have to do a math problem a few times before you get it right, or read something a few times before you understand it, or do a few drafts of a paper before it’s good enough to hand in.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it. I do that every day. Asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. It shows you have the courage to admit when you don’t know something, and to learn something new. So find an adult you trust – a parent, grandparent or teacher; a coach or counselor – and ask them to help you stay on track to meet your goals.

And even when you’re struggling, even when you’re discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you – don’t ever give up on yourself. Because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.

The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.

It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.

So today, I want to ask you, what’s your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What will a president who comes here in twenty or fifty or one hundred years say about what all of you did for this country?

Your families, your teachers, and I are doing everything we can to make sure you have the education you need to answer these questions. I’m working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books, equipment and computers you need to learn. But you’ve got to do your part too. So I expect you to get serious this year. I expect you to put your best effort into everything you do. I expect great things from each of you. So don’t let us down – don’t let your family or your country or yourself down. Make us all proud. I know you can do it.

Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.

Play any song in the world FOR FREE with Grooveshark

Mike Daniels — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 05:28:26 +0000

If you spend any time on the Internet and love music listening to music at the same time, Grooveshark is for you. It is pretty sweet. I found it awhile ago and well thought you should know about it too. It’s a website setup to play any song anytime and for free. You can send links to the 100% legal music, you can also embed the song on your website.

If you sign up for a free membership it even allows you to make play lists and queue. So the next time you have a minute head over to www.grooveshark.com. Thoughts or comments, leave one below.

p.s. You can also follow them on Twitter. @Grooveshark

CVS is “Going Green”

Mike Daniels — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 03:29:11 +0000

So my friend and I are headed to CVS to get some stuff. He drives a Toyota Prius Hybrid. We pull up to park and low and behold, they have not just one spot, but several spots for “Low emitting or Fuel-efficient vehicles”. Jackpot. So if you were staying up late at night wondering if CVS is environmentally friendly, or at least concerned about the environment, they parking spaces sure do say say they are.

7 Hour Energy…really?

Mike Daniels — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 03:17:29 +0000

So I’ll admit it. I’ve used the 5 hour-energy little shot drinks. They work. It is not an endorsement I’m just saying they work. I’m a good driver, but I can’t stay away. I never have been able to. If I have a 5 hour energy drink I’m good to go.

So I’m at the store the other day and see a new product, 7 hour energy. It stops me dead in my tracks and I take a second glance. 7 hour energy, really? I mean is that even safe. Who needs it and why?

So if you need it, it is out there. And if you use it, comment below and tell me why!

Facebook Lite

Mike Daniels — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 07:35:33 +0000

lite.facebook.com

Facebook is asking a select group of users to try out their scaled down version of Facebook. It’s a slimmed down version of Facebook and from the look of it, appears to have the infastructure of FriendFeed.

This is what the Beta Tester message reads:

We are building a faster, simpler version of Facebook that we call Facebook Lite. It’s not finished yet and we have plenty of kinks to work out, but we would love to get your feedback on what we have built so far.

The URL for the feature is http://lite.facebook.com

Who is turning on Fox News Channel…

Mike Daniels — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 05:05:18 +0000

Below are the Neilson Cable News ratings from the night of August 10, 2009. Monday night, Bill O’Reilly found the numbers pretty exciting. His “Talking Points” off the top of the show this week were about the ratings. (I’ve embeded it at the bottom of this post) Here are the ratings. What do you think is driving viewers to watch? (Total disclosure, I interned for The O’Reilly Factor during the Summer of 2005 for three months.)

CABLE NEWS RACE
NIGHT OF AUG 10, 2009

FOXNEWS O’REILLY 3,814,000
FOXNEWS HANNITY 3,118,000
FOXNEWS BECK 2,417,000
FOXNEWS GRETA 2,388,000
FOXNEWS BAIER 1,988,000
FOXNEWS SHEP SMITH 1,833,000
MSNBC OLBERMANN 1,243,000
MSNBC MADDOW 1,082,000
CNNHN GRACE 875,000
CNN KATHY GRIFFIN 810,000
MSNBC HARDBALL 710,000

New Google Search Engine: ‘Caffeine’

Mike Daniels — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 19:30:26 +0000

It’s supposed to search better, faster and more thouroughly. It’s also supposed to index the web better. Check it out for yourself by clicking here http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

http://www2.sandbox.google.com

Here’s the official release from Google:

Help test some next-generation infrastructure

To build a great web search engine, you need to:

Crawl a large chunk of the web.
Index the resulting pages and compute how reputable those pages are.
Rank and return the most relevant pages for users’ queries as quickly as possible.

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.

Some parts of this system aren’t completely finished yet, so we’d welcome feedback on any issues you see. We invite you to visit the web developer preview of Google’s new infrastructure at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and try searches there.

Here’s how to give us feedback: Do a search at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and look on the search results page for a link at the bottom of the page that says “Dissatisfied? Help us improve.” Click on that link, type your feedback in the text box and then include the word caffeine somewhere in the text box. Thanks in advance for your feedback!

Eunice Kennedy Shriver Dies at age 88

Mike Daniels — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 10:27:18 +0000

The news just coming in, according to Fox News Channel Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Founder of Special Olympics, Dies at Age 88, Family Says. DEVELOPING…

FROM BNO NEWS: http://news.bnonews.com/tbq2

From the BNO Newsroom.

CAPE COD, Massachusetts (BNO NEWS) – The woman who helped found the Special Olympics in the 1960s and the sister of former president John F. Kennedy, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, died on Tuesday morning, her family said. She was 88 years old.

“It’s hard for us to believe, the amazing Eunice Kennedy Shriver went home to God this morning at 2 a.m. [local time],” Shriver’s family said in a statement. “She was the light of our lives, a mother, wife, grandmother, sister and aunt who taught us by example and with passion what it means to live a faith-driven life of love and service to others.”

Shriver died at Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, Massachusetts, surrounded by her family. Near her at the time of her death were her husband, R. Sargent Shriver; her five children: Robert “Bobby” Sargent Shriver III, Maria Owings Shriver, Timothy Perry Shriver, Mark Kennedy Shriver and Anthony Paul Kennedy Shriver, as well as their spouses and all of her nineteen grandchildren.

Shriver was, besides being the younger sister of the late President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the founder and honorary chairperson of the Special Olympics, and executive vice president of the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation. “She has been a leader in the worldwide movement to improve and to enhance the lives of individuals with intellectual disabilities for more than six decades,” said Kirsten Seckler, who is a spokeswoman for the Special Olympics.

Shriver was born on July 10, 1921 in Brookline, Massachusetts. She was the fifth of nine children of Joseph P. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Standford University along with numerous other honors and awards. In 2006, Pope Benedict XVI bestowed upon her the title of Dame of the papal Order of St. Gregory the Great.

This breaking news story will be updated. Refresh for updates.