To really be successful with our own businesses and jobs we must eat healthy, exercise and get plenty of rest and keep your body hydrated.    Sadly sometimes even when we do these things, our bodies fall prey to illness.  One illness that is very debilitating and not widely understood yet is CFS  (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome).  It is an illness that delivers crushing fatigue.  Due to this illness the sufferer may not be able to do even the smallest things in life that others take for granted everyday.

To help keep yourself healthy get on a healthy lifestyle maintenance program, to help motivate you …educate yourself about illnesses such ad CFS.  Your efforts are well worth it to help avoid such debilitating illnesses.

Learn more and help spread the word. get involved to help others find a cause and cure.  Check out the video called “What Would You Do?”

We hope you will enjoy the demo and have fun creating some interesting effects.

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/1269-Web-Design-Tips-Combining-jQuery-Effects-and-Plugins-For-A-Great-Marketing-Effect

Our owner Diane W. is a mentor for the FIRST Robotics Program.  She has been mentoring for 7 years for the program. She will be creating e-Learning for FIRST Robotics and her team, the Highland High School Robotics Team in Gilbert, Arizona.

We wanted to post some blogs from time to time to discuss some of the awesome software that has been donated to the team to use.  Quite a few companies have donated software to help Diane facilitate her vision.  Her vision is to create e-learning classes to help students to learn new skills, or to brush up on skills that they may have missed because they couldn’t attend a meeting due schedule conflict. 

Diane wanted to help ensure that a student wouldn’t miss a critical skill if they had a schedule conflict or were sick.   This would help free up mentors to be working with the group while a student catches up on a missed workshop.  “Our build session is only 6 weeks long,  it’s not a lot of time to brainstorm, design and build a robot.”  The schedules get extreme and conflicts inevitably arise.    The e-learning program will help solve some of the schedule conflicts and missed skills issues.  We also will have a great way to track our students progress.  We will have our e-learning loaded into an LMS (Learning Management System).  The learning management System keeps track of student info, student progress, testing results and reports all the information back to the administrator.  We will have safety classes on place to ensure that the students learn basic safety skills.  We will also track their progress to ensure they pass the course and issue a certificate of completion.

Please check out a list of our fine sponsors:  (We urge you to visit their websites and start using their tools)

• Harbinger Group (Raptivity and Elicitus)  http://www.harbingergroup.com/
• Flypaper                        www.flypaper.com
• Articulate                      www.articulate.com
• Presentation Space   www.presentationspace.com
• DIY e-Learning           www.diyelearning.com
• e-Learning Brothers  www.elearningbrothers.com
• Coggno                            www.coggno.com
• Rapid Intake                 www.rapidintake.com

We also will be discussing some of the other awesome tools that were donated for our team to use, that can help your business to be more productive.

• Wufoo                 www.wufoo.com                 Form creation software for your website, with loads of additional features like payment integration, reporting and more.
• MailChimp        www.mailchimp.com        e-mail campaign manager.
• Artist Valley    www.artistsvalley.com     Icon Collections.
• Footage Firm   www.footagefirm.com      Stock video footage.

As a computer user and consumer you really need to be aware of what is happening, and how to try to prevent these things from happening to you.

Be very suspicious of emails that you get that sound too good to be true! Also keep track of emails that you send. If you get reply emails to individuals and companies you have never sent to, be very suspicious.

Often someone using Phishing emails (trying to get your personal informationn from a fake email. A fake email may be made to look like it is from your bank, Paypal, Ebay or other company that you may be inclined to trust. The email may be titled something like “Your account will be deactivated unless you update your information” or “Your account has been suspended due to fraudulent activity, please update you’re information” there are as many different titles as there are users on the Internet probably.

The point is, pay very close attention to who this email is from, look for typos, also if you take your mouse and hover over the link in the email- look at the link, it is usually something strange, it is not pointing to the official site its is supposedly representing.

Another good practice: If you DO NOT use Compass Bank, Bank of America, or whatever company the email supposedly represents, then trash the email immediately or if your email provider has a way of marking an email as a possible phishing scam, mark the email.

Here is some really good information on how to try and avoid different types of fraud presented by the FBI.

Here is a large set of resources on Internet Fraud presented by USA.Gov.

If you feel you have been sent a fraudulent email or have been a victim of Internet fraud you can contact the Internet Crime Complaint Center

Also to help avoid fraud in your personal and business dealings, make sure you shred EVERYTHING , your unused information and old documents, everything you will throw out. Get yourself a good shredder. The smaller the pieces the better and usually try and get a cross cut/confetti cut shredder, they are some of the best.

Go to Staples.com for lots of useful security Information and to access your security risks and vulnerabilities. You can also sign up for Privacy Guard a valuable service to help protect your information. Or use LifeLock.com, another top notch company to help you protect your valuable information.

Here are a few good books: Scam Proof Your Life

Here is a good Identity Theft Prevention video presented by Staples: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHu6PlSFYsc

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHu6PlSFYsc]

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