By Brett Israel
OurAmazingPlanet
updated 12/28/2011 3:45:21 PM ET

The Red Sea has a new inhabitant: a smoking island.

The island was created by a wild eruption that occurred in the Red Sea earlier this month. It is made of loose volcanic debris from the eruption, so it may not stick around long.

According to news reports, fishermen witnessed lava fountains reaching up to 90 feet (30 meters) tall on Dec. 19, which is probably the day the eruption began, said Erik Klemetti, a volcanologist at Denison University in Granville, Ohio.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45807839/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/smokin-hot-island-rises-depths-red-sea/#

The best comment for this article:
"Dibs, My island. Called Dibs." Moheeheeko

And does anyone here have a device that uses them?

Hubby's place of employment was clearing out stuff that hasn't sold and he brought home four memory cards. One is a 4GB flash compact disk that will fit my Nikon D70, but the other three are SanDisk 4GB Memory Stick Pro Duo and we don't have anything that uses those.

(Unless there is some adapter that will let my old Sony HandyCam use them instead of the original memory sticks that we never used anyway...)

This story made the national news:
Arson suspected in post office fire
By the CNN Wire Staff
updated 10:32 PM EST, Sun December 25, 2011
(CNN) -- Investigators suspect arson in a fire that heavily damaged a small post office in rural western Nevada Sunday morning, a U.S. Postal Service spokesman said.
Investigators found anti-government graffiti on the walls and bullet holes in the building, Capt. Mark Reagan of the Sierra Fire Protection District said.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/25/us/nevada-post-office-fire/


But another PO arson barely made the local news:
Christmas Day Arson at the Tallahassee Centerville Post Office?
Tallahassee, Florida - December 26, 2011 -
A fire at a Tallahassee post office may not have been an accident.
Fire officials were called to this post office around 1:30 on Christmas Day and what they found is suspicious.
Fire officials say the post office was closed for the holiday, but a pile of mail was left burning in the middle of the floor.


There are major differences - the Nevada arson fire started outside the building and there was other damage, grafitti and bullet holes, that were not found at the Tallahassee PO.

I can't remember a single other arson incident at a post office and here are two on the same day. If there was a third incident I would be more concerned.

What is the status on laying off postal workers? I know it was delayed until after the first of the year but are there workers who will not have a job next week that are taking their frustrations out on the facilities?

According to the video it only takes one but it takes much longer than you'd expect!

I think there was a kill to one side of the watering hole. Now the lions are flat out sleeping and a little jackal is scoping out the situation. I don't think the lions will be happy if that jackal wakes them up!

http://www.africam.com/wildlife/nkorho_pan_webcam

I wasn't the one who asked but coincidentally the evening that thread was posted, hubby told me he had to take something to a potluck at work. I made rollups after reading the thread and a bunch of different of recipes for them on Allrecipes.com. And after evaluating what was in my refrigerator.

I ended up with two kinds: Ham and Swiss cheese on sundried and basil tomato tortillas with chive cream cheese. Turkey and Swiss cheese on spinach tortillas with sundried tomato cream cheese. I wanted to add some vegetables, but hubby vetoed all my suggestions. I tried to talk hubby into other kinds of cheese, but he didn't like that idea, either.

The chive cream cheese was just fresh chives cut up (with scissors) into whipped cream cheese. The sundried tomato came from a bottle of sundried tomato spread that I mixed with the cream cheese.

The roll ups looked great, they were easy to put together and I can see making other varieties for other events. Everybody liked them and even if there were leftovers, we wouldn't have minded eating them.

Thank you!

This display is so off the mark on what I was taught Christmas was when I was a kind. I am sad to say that it is in the town near where I live and that is apparently has won awards and has been "featured" on Good Morning America.

Warning - the stupid burns!



Edited to fix title.

Ancestry.com New York

"Several New York repositories have formed a partnership with Ancestry.com to digitize family history records and make them available on line for free. The list of records available is located in the bottom right corner of the Ancestry.com New York web page. Descriptions of the records as well as the holding organizations are provided through the links and logos on the Ancestry.com New York web page."

Directions for how to sign up and access the records here:
http://www.archives.nysed.gov/a/research/res_ancestry.shtml

This is not a one time deal - it is a regular agreement for the repositories involved.

I have set up my own websites, did the HTML and CSS myself, but have not actively maintained or updated them since I have no new content to post.

My husband met the owner of a local store and they desperately need a better, more active website. Right now their site is bland, badly laid out and the only active pages are a list of news letter links and a contact link that automatically opens an email program.

The owner wants a way to sell her goods on the internet and needs a more actively maintained web site. Selling the goods is not too hard - I have already located a place where they list items of that type and provide links to the items from major web vendors such as Amazon and other large sellers. For a small business, I think this is a better way than trying to hawk the goods at an individual site that will not have the huge exposure. Listing the items is also easy - the site allows uploading Excel spreadsheets and the owner already keeps her inventory with Excel.

I'm tempted to charge her a one time fee to set up her business at the site, upload her inventory, work with her employees on how to maintain the listings and walk off.

As far as maintaining the web site, I think it would be a PITA to keep after them to provide content. Looking at what they are doing now, issuing a printed and PDF newsletter at irregular intervals, I expect trying to generate content will be worse than pulling teeth. Frankly, I think they would do better to use their newletter to create the front page for the business and provide a link to the storefront that could be set up with the seller I mentioned above.

My main questions are - how much should I charge them as a consultant fee for finding the online seller site and how much for my time to set up their storefront and to train them to maintain it? And do you agree that maintaining the regular website would be more trouble than it's worth, no matter what fee they would be willing to pay? Especially since this is NOT something I want to do on a regular basis!

It does not look as though any threads from DU2 were imported into the new Ancestry/Genealogy Group. I know I posted at least one thread in the old forum in the last week or so and it is not in the new group. There are only five threads now in the group and I am pretty sure they are the ones posted in the beta testing period.