Author: signordal

June is National Oceans Month! Covering over 70 percent of the…

signordalLeave a comment

June is National Oceans Month! Covering over 70 percent of the planet, oceans are vital to our climate, food supply and way of life. Wherever you live, everyone is connected to the ocean. Interior is a principal steward of America’s oceans, Great Lakes and coastal resources. With 88 ocean and coastal parks and 183 marine and coastal national wildlife refuges, there are countless ways to experience our country’s waters, marvel at its unique wildlife and explore its maritime heritage. Photo of a whale breaching at Kenai Fjords National Park by Kaitlin Thoreson, National Park Service.

House with Beautiful Views Over the Mountains in Bombay Designed by SPASM Design Architects

signordalLeave a comment

This project consists of two houses built over the same plot of terrain, of 1,142 meters squared, as requested by the client in order to house families from Bombay and strip them away from the noise and bustle of the city proper. It’s located in Alibag, Maharashtra, in India, which is a region that receives a large quantity of rain between June and September, and is characterized by its humidity..

More…

Michaelis Boyd Designed an Amazing Hotel in New York City, USA

signordalLeave a comment

The Williamsburg Hotel – so named after the neighborhood in which it is located in Brooklyn, New York, USA – was designed by the London-based architectural firm Michaelis Boyd. It began opening in phases in January 2017, and will be finished some time later that same year. The hotel will offer a rooftop pool, a water-tower bar with stunning views over the skyline of New York City, as well as..

More…

How To Maintain Your Privacy Online

signordalLeave a comment

Threats to online privacy seem to grow every day so make sure you know how to protect yourself. There are a lot of things you can do to stay safe online. Unfortunately, not all of them are guaranteed to work.

Clearing your browser history, for example, can’t really do anything. Installing an ad blocker won’t get the job done, too. If you really want to protect your online privacy, here are the things you need to do.

Use secure passwords and usernames

It seems so convenient to just use the same usernames and passwords for every site. That way, you can remember them even without writing things down.

But, consider this:

If you use an easy-to-guess password for your social media and use the same one to log in to your bank, you’ve just made it super easy for someone to gain access to your bank account.

To protect yourself, choose passwords that are at least eight characters long and make sure they contain different types of characters. Use numbers, capital letters, lower-case letters, and symbols. Change your password for every site you frequent, too.

Use a password manager

The next step in password protection is to use a password manager. It’s an app that can generate crazy-long passwords that you couldn’t possibly remember. It encrypts not only your password but also your security questions and their answers, your credit card numbers and their PINs and other vital security information.

Now, all you have to remember is the password to your password manager.

Don’t click on the link

You know better, right? So, why do you click on those links you get on your email?

Usually, it’s because the email came from someone you trust. However, what if your friend clicked on a malicious link? Your friend’s entire address list could have been hacked and that includes you.

As much as possible, don’t click on suspicious links, even if they came from people you trust.

Lock down your social networks

Sure, those warnings that pop up on Facebook every month or so about how the platform is going to steal all your data are indeed trollish. But, even though they’re fake news, they actually have a point.

You need to lock down your social media privacy settings which are often defaulted to Public. This setting means everyone can see everything on your wall.

For your online privacy, change your settings to Friends. If you should unlock a single post to Public, make sure you haven’t inadvertently opened up your whole account to the world.

The bonuses here? Real life bad guys can’t see when you’re away from home to break in and steal your non-virtual stuff and your bosses and ex can’t see what you did on the weekend.

Look for a secure connection

When you’re about to log on to a site, take a look at the URL. Does it say “http” or “https”?

That “s” stands for “secure” and it means that your data (including your username and password) are being encrypted as they travel back and forth across the web. This is particularly vital when you’re making online purchases or handling other financial transactions.

Often, you’ll see a padlock icon next to the URL to confirm the secure connection. While you’re at it, secure your own devices by setting and actually using the lock screens on each device.

Block cookies

It’s so cute when a brand you’ve shopped with sends you just the perfect ad, isn’t it? Except, it’s not so cute after all.

That brand or advertiser found you by attaching cookies to your browser and now they’re following you — and not in a good way. In some cases, they can even follow you from all your devices to keep track of your online behavior.

Block those third-party cookies. The advertisers will still be able to track the pages you visit, but they’ll have to work a whole lot harder to do it.

Use a VPN

A VPN or Virtual Private Network is probably one of the best and simplest ways to protect your online privacy. With a VPN, your data is encrypted so your internet service provider can’t see your internet usage — and neither can anyone else. VPNs provide protection against hackers and they keep your surfing safe when you’re using Wi-Fi.

Use Tor

Head to Tor to anonymize your IP address automatically. With Tor, your browsing experience becomes private — well, as private as you can be, given that you’re still on the internet. It can hide your information from hackers who want your identity, corporations that want your money and data and government that wants who even knows what.

There are a lot of dodgy people on the internet. Don’t let them into your virtual home. Take these basic steps today to protect and maintain your online privacy.

The post How To Maintain Your Privacy Online appeared first on Dumb Little Man.

http://ift.tt/2svglAf

June 5th

signordalLeave a comment
Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.

http://ift.tt/1md8RX7

The Mighty Franks

signordalLeave a comment

Michael Frank’s childhood was more complicated than many. Although relatively privileged, it was also somewhat fraught, colored by two very different forms of bullying — one in school, the other at the hands of a doting but overbearing aunt who played an outsized role in his upbringing. In this vividly written coming-of-age memoir, he makes it clear that it’s taken most of his life to get over it.

When he was eight, he overheard his aunt tell his mother how much she adored him — “beyond life itself” – before adding, “I wish he were mine.” Nearly half a century later, Frank recalls that he could “feel the weather in the room change.” After a pause, his mother replied diplomatically, “I wish you had a child of your own.”

The aunt was Harriet Frank, Jr., who with her husband, Irving Ravetch, was part of the successful screenwriting couple whose many movies include Hud, Hombre, The Long, Hot Summer, and Norma Rae. Harriet -– called Hank or Auntie Hankie –- was the older sister of Michael Frank’s father, Marty. In addition — here’s where it gets complicated – her husband, Irving, was the older brother of Mike’s mother, Merona. On top of this, the author’s maternal and paternal grandmothers -– the mothers of both his parents and his aunt and uncle -– shared an apartment in their last years, although not altogether happily. When it came to family ties, the Franks were lashed together as tightly as sailors bound to the mast.

Michael was the oldest and most artistically inclined of Marty and Meron’s three sons. Harriet and Irving had no children but a seemingly endless supply of disposable income, time, and energy. The two Laurel Canyon households were within walking distance of each other, facilitating the further blurring of boundaries.

But Hankie — according to her nephew’s unforgettable portrait — ignored most boundaries, particularly those that impeded her wishes. She was an “impossibly glamorous woman” who was also often just plain impossible. She had strong opinions about everything. She loathed mediocrity, laziness, and “mo-derne” design, and she considered Brahms the last top-rate composer. Her style was formal and brisk. A shopaholic who bought more antiques than she had room for, her “decorative fervor” extended to hotel rooms, summer rentals, and her relatives’ homes, whether they wanted her bounty or not. She was generous to a fault – always bestowing largesse with strings.

Frank, singled out and pulled into her orbit when he was a small boy, at first reveled in “the force of her attention…My aunt was the sun and I was her planet,” he writes. He was wooed by her lavish presents and intoxicated by “her talk, which was like an unending river emptying itself into me.” He absorbed her many edicts, including “Less is not more; more is more” and “Make beauty whenever possible.” He read and read from her approved list of great books – excellent training for his eventual job as a book critic for The Los Angeles Times — and memorized “yards of Shakespeare.” His aunt and uncle’s eccentric Hollywood Regency house was “a little bit fake and a lot fantastical, like a movie set,” but with four walls. It was, he writes, “the central school of my youth, the school of culture, aesthetics, literature, music, movies, architecture and design.”

But all that glittered was not gold. His parents decried his aunt and uncle’s unequal treatment of their three sons, but had little success in getting them to mitigate their favoritism. It took Frank years to realize that his family’s situation was “not remotely normal.”

The Mighty Franks chronicles this fascinating family’s indirect route from poverty and pogroms to the land of movie stars and backyard swimming pools, along with Frank’s difficult path to self-definition and the painful repercussions of pushing back against his aunt – who turned 100 this year — as she became more difficult. The shadow at the heart of this memoir is the emotional cost of suffocating love — ties that bind but also choke.

Revisiting the scene of his childhood, Frank reflects: “My parents and my surrogate parents, my parents and their siblings: each pair represented two different worldviews, two different paths through experience that had intermittently been aligned but more often were set against each other, toggling, or torquing, between the reasonable and the dramatic, the ordinary and the magical….” Standing midway atop the hill between the two houses and worlds between which he had been pulled off-balance in his youth, he comments, “it was as if I were standing on my own personal equator.”

Heller McAlpin will discuss The Mighty Franks with Michael Frank at Barnes & Noble on Manhattan’s Upper West Side on Tuesday, June 6th at 7 p.m.  More info here.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2sG90wP

Stop Dreaming and Start Creating Your Week

signordalLeave a comment

You’re reading Stop Dreaming and Start Creating Your Week, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

I used to regularly dream about the concept of making my life an “achievement”. But it turns out that it just left me daydreaming most of the time, debating the various what-ifs years from now.

So then I started thinking about living my life like it was going to end in six months. Scary I know — but it worked; I took more risks, went on more adventures, and became a little happier for it too.

But even then, I knew it wasn’t quite right. The fear of missing out, as opposed to the love of creating my life, was what was driving my behaviour.

There had to be a better way.

So I started thinking about the concept of creating my week as beautifully as I could. Through the lens of Monday to Sunday, I didn’t have too much space to daydream.

If I wanted to play an instrument, I had to dedicate a day to it. If I wanted great relationships, I had at least meet two to four friend friends each week. If I wanted to be the kind of person that reads, I had to read a book each week. If I wanted to be a competitive footballer, then I had to find a way to play football every week.

You Can Make The Future Seem Less Intimidating

Everything broken down into a week felt lighter. The heavy shoulders I slumped to work with vanished slowly. I felt more enthusiastic, made more plans, took more action, and I was exhilarated by life, in the present. 

All I was doing was creating my week as best as I could, and leaving the rest to the universe.

Don’t get me wrong, even with this mindset; there were still some rough weeks. Weeks where I felt my life was in tatters and nothing was working. But come to think of it, it was only ever because of outside circumstances. A bad breakup, an argument, a money issue, and so on. – otherwise everything improved drastically.

What I Eventually Realized

Changing your week to reflect your ideal life can happen right now. Your week is a meaningless, empty canvas. But with your brush, you can stroke the flames of your life into ecstasy. Just like a painter, you can create a masterpiece.

You will always lead your life between Monday and Sunday. If you don’t at least try to create the most epic week possible now with what you have, you’re going to be less likely to create an epic life.

Creating your week is an art, but an art that has no completion. It’s continually in motion, either for the better or, the worse, because time moves forward whether you do or don’t.

If you keep stroking that paintbrush into your week (your canvas), you will be continually morphing, adjusting, learning and growing. If you continue stroking new colours into your life, you’ll be improving on the little imperfections, learning from the mistakes, and moving forward.  

There will be weeks where things don’t work out the way you want, but because you have a weekly context, you’ll be less perturbed by a bad day. Embracing the week will allow you to have better emotional resilience.

The World Has Fooled Us

Outside sources have plodded up ideas into your mind from a young age about what you could be and or even what you should be. The underlying assumption behind the question: “What do you want to be when you grow up” is: you need to fit into a standard to feel worthy.

This lodges itself in the bottom of our hearts and minds.

We’ve Let The World Define Our Standards of Success

The whole way success is viewed is backwards – a lot of what we’ve learnt is plain wrong. Instead of predominantly focusing on achievement as our metric for success, we ought to focus on designing our week – because that’s where our life is lived. We can experience the good life right now, in this week! But we don’t – because we think we need to climb mountains before we arrive.

And while it is helpful to dream about the future on occasion so that we can feel a little more inspired, what’s even more rewarding is: living from a place that allows us to be inspired each week. Every Monday, we get given a series of days that will never replicate themselves again. 

Let’s make the most of it.  

My Last Words

If you’re a creative and interested in learning how to improve the way you live your week, read my free book on Spiritual Productivity.

  • You’ll learn about how to split up your day into four chunks, so you worry less about external influences.
  • You’ll discover the small hacks that will take your creative work on your PC to the next level.
  • And much more…

 Samy Felice is a writer who is passionate about unique ideas related to living a meaningful life. His Free Book explores ways people can make success easier.

You’ve read Stop Dreaming and Start Creating Your Week, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

http://ift.tt/2rAbjTa

Stop Dreaming and Start Creating Your Week

signordalLeave a comment

You’re reading Stop Dreaming and Start Creating Your Week, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

I used to regularly dream about the concept of making my life an “achievement”. But it turns out that it just left me daydreaming most of the time, debating the various what-ifs years from now.

So then I started thinking about living my life like it was going to end in six months. Scary I know — but it worked; I took more risks, went on more adventures, and became a little happier for it too.

But even then, I knew it wasn’t quite right. The fear of missing out, as opposed to the love of creating my life, was what was driving my behaviour.

There had to be a better way.

So I started thinking about the concept of creating my week as beautifully as I could. Through the lens of Monday to Sunday, I didn’t have too much space to daydream.

If I wanted to play an instrument, I had to dedicate a day to it. If I wanted great relationships, I had at least meet two to four friend friends each week. If I wanted to be the kind of person that reads, I had to read a book each week. If I wanted to be a competitive footballer, then I had to find a way to play football every week.

You Can Make The Future Seem Less Intimidating

Everything broken down into a week felt lighter. The heavy shoulders I slumped to work with vanished slowly. I felt more enthusiastic, made more plans, took more action, and I was exhilarated by life, in the present. 

All I was doing was creating my week as best as I could, and leaving the rest to the universe.

Don’t get me wrong, even with this mindset; there were still some rough weeks. Weeks where I felt my life was in tatters and nothing was working. But come to think of it, it was only ever because of outside circumstances. A bad breakup, an argument, a money issue, and so on. – otherwise everything improved drastically.

What I Eventually Realized

Changing your week to reflect your ideal life can happen right now. Your week is a meaningless, empty canvas. But with your brush, you can stroke the flames of your life into ecstasy. Just like a painter, you can create a masterpiece.

You will always lead your life between Monday and Sunday. If you don’t at least try to create the most epic week possible now with what you have, you’re going to be less likely to create an epic life.

Creating your week is an art, but an art that has no completion. It’s continually in motion, either for the better or, the worse, because time moves forward whether you do or don’t.

If you keep stroking that paintbrush into your week (your canvas), you will be continually morphing, adjusting, learning and growing. If you continue stroking new colours into your life, you’ll be improving on the little imperfections, learning from the mistakes, and moving forward.  

There will be weeks where things don’t work out the way you want, but because you have a weekly context, you’ll be less perturbed by a bad day. Embracing the week will allow you to have better emotional resilience.

The World Has Fooled Us

Outside sources have plodded up ideas into your mind from a young age about what you could be and or even what you should be. The underlying assumption behind the question: “What do you want to be when you grow up” is: you need to fit into a standard to feel worthy.

This lodges itself in the bottom of our hearts and minds.

We’ve Let The World Define Our Standards of Success

The whole way success is viewed is backwards – a lot of what we’ve learnt is plain wrong. Instead of predominantly focusing on achievement as our metric for success, we ought to focus on designing our week – because that’s where our life is lived. We can experience the good life right now, in this week! But we don’t – because we think we need to climb mountains before we arrive.

And while it is helpful to dream about the future on occasion so that we can feel a little more inspired, what’s even more rewarding is: living from a place that allows us to be inspired each week. Every Monday, we get given a series of days that will never replicate themselves again. 

Let’s make the most of it.  

My Last Words

If you’re a creative and interested in learning how to improve the way you live your week, read my free book on Spiritual Productivity.

  • You’ll learn about how to split up your day into four chunks, so you worry less about external influences.
  • You’ll discover the small hacks that will take your creative work on your PC to the next level.
  • And much more…

 Samy Felice is a writer who is passionate about unique ideas related to living a meaningful life. His Free Book explores ways people can make success easier.

You’ve read Stop Dreaming and Start Creating Your Week, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

http://ift.tt/2rAbjTa

“There is in man a deep so deep it is hidden even to him in whom…

signordalLeave a comment

philosophy drops http://ift.tt/2qVwLzY

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” – Albert…

signordalLeave a comment

philosophy drops http://ift.tt/2st9JCh