| Rabu, 06 Januari 2010 |
| Glass Mosaic Tile Art: Mixing Grout |
by: Bill Enslen
Making wonderful glass mosaic tile art is easy! Let me show you how.
The amount of grout for your mosaic project depends on two basic variables: 1) the size of your piece, and 2) the width of your joints. Obviously, smaller joints require less grout. It's important to mix more than you think you'll need to ensure you don't run out. This is especially true when using colored grout to ensure color consistency unless you intend for your piece to have varying shades of grout.
If you have a brand new box of grout, you'll probably use only a small portion of it. Don't dump the whole box into a bucket of water! If this is your first time grouting a mosaic, put what you think is enough into your mixing container and then add at least half that amount (i.e., mix about 1.5 times what you think you need). When you're finished grouting, observe how much you throw away so you can better estimate how much you'll need for your next project. (You'll learn from my eBook the approximate amount of grout you'll need for your project.)
The first rule of mixing grout is to read and follow safety precautions on the bag and then read and follow the label instructions. After reading the bag's label, go somewhere away from your mosaic so you don't splash wet grout on it while mixing (e.g., go outside or to the opposite end of the garage). Scoop enough grout powder into your mixing container. Slowly add small amounts of water and mix using a paint stirring stick. Some grout brands are "polymer modified," which means acrylic latex has already been added to the powder. If the grout already contains the additive, the bag says in easy-to-read print, "polymer modified" or similar words. If the grout doesn't already contain the additive, then you may choose to mix the grout with an admixture instead of water. As noted in the eBook, I never bother adding acrylic latex for my indoor mosaics. Plain hose water works just fine for me.
Add small amounts of water at a time and thoroughly mix it. Don't pour in all the water at once. Don't make the grout too runny by adding too much water. Take your time and mix in a little bit of water at a time. When it's almost at the right consistency, just a teaspoon more water can be too much. So, take your time.
Don't make the grout too runny. This is important so let's say it again together, "Don't make the grout too runny." I use thick, pasty grout because it's easier to wipe off without digging into the joints. The technical reason for not making it runny is that too much water makes the grout weaker and more susceptible to staining. So, thicker is better. My favorite consistency is like thick toothpaste or cookie dough (that's thick toothpaste, not runny toothpaste). Some books say to make it like pudding or mayonnaise, but that's too thin for me.
After thoroughly mixing the grout, I use the paint stirring stick to scoop some up and hold it over the container. If it drips off the stick into the container, then it's way too thin. I like it so it stays in place on the stick and doesn't droop or sag.
If you accidentally pour in too much water and make the grout too runny, simply add a little more grout powder to thicken it. Add just a teaspoon of grout powder at a time. A small amount of grout powder can change it from runny to just right. If you add too much grout, it'll be too thick and then you'll have to add a few drops of water to thin it. You'll be caught in an endless loop of adding grout to thicken it, then adding water to thin it. So, add small amounts. After your first grout job, you'll get a feel for how much to add, so it'll be easier the next time you do this.
When you get the right consistency, thoroughly mix the grout to ensure there's no remaining powder and no lumps. I like to wipe the sides of the container with the paint stirring stick to get all the powder off the sides. I don't like any unmixed powder anywhere in the container.
Remember, making mosaic art is easy. You can do it. Yes, you can!
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posted by Mr,John @ 02:47   |
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| Make Delicious Cinnamon Raisin Bread With Your Bread Maker |
by: Mary Walsh
Bread machines have become more & more popular lately. A lot of homes now are equipped with bread machines, especially with the growing popularity of bread as a healthier substitute for heavy meals.
Bread machines are easy to use and come equipped with manuals for omplete
instructions. The very first bread maker was marketed and released in Japan in 1986. It took a while before it became popular in U.S. and the U.K.
The most popular manufacturers of bread machines include Black & Decker,
Panasonic, Breville, Cuisinart, Moulinex, Toastmaster, Kenwood Limited and DeLonghi.
Bread machines usually have different cycles for each type of dough.This includes whole grain dough, straight white bread and European-style dough. But the newer bread machines have automatic timers which allow it to operate even without someone operating the equipment.
Contrary to popular belief, you could actually use bread machines to create more than just your plain loaf of bread. You could use it to create delicious bread varieties such as Cinnamon Raised Bread.
Cinnamon Raised Bread would be great breakfast accompaniments as well as perfect partners with after-meal coffee. Use your own bread maker to create tasty and delicious Cinnamon Raised Bread that you and your family can enjoy every morning.Here's a recipe to create that delicious Cinnamon Raised Bread.
You will need the following ingredients:
400 grams whole flour
2 tsps yeast
150 grams bread flour
3/4 tsp cinnamon; ground
100 grams mixed fruits/raisins
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/4 c water
1.5 tbsps sugar (brown)
1.5 tbsps oil (sunflower)
1.5 tbsps whey (powdered)
2 tbsps gluten
Get a pan big enough for the mixture and put all your ingredients inside your pan. Choose the appropriate cycle in your bread maker. Refer to your manual for this.
Place pan inside your machine then let it run continuously for about ten minutes. Afterwards, check your dough's consistency. Dough must have that sticky consistency. If consistency is not there yet, add in a teaspoon of water and cook for several minutes. Do these steps until you get the exact texture for your dough.
Since machine is automatic, it will finish off kneading all by itself then will shift to its baking cycle. After bread maker has completed its cycle, let bread cool inside your pan (10 mins.). This will allow crust to soften some more.
After bread has cooled enough, cut it using a sharp knife. Place a bit of butter on top if preferred. This bread will be excellent for serving with coffee or tea. The Cinnamon Raisin Bread will stay good for quite a few days if stored properly.
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| posted by Mr,John @ 02:41 |
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| 3 Essentials Of Marketing With Posters |
by: Lynne Saarte
What poster marketing is good at is it helps you reach out to a much larger audience in one of the most inexpensive ways, as well as in the shortest amount of time. Depending on the elements you integrate in your poster printing, your marketing campaign can very well be the most effective one for your business. As each element in your design in your posters, even if it is cheap poster printing, is significant, every one of them needs to have a part in ensuring that you get results the way you expect.
To further help you create a better poster marketing campaign; here are some of the tried-and-tested marketing strategies for your poster printing:
Do your research.
Never allow yourself to be caught unprepared and unqualified to share information not only about your product but more importantly, your target audience. This means knowing full well how to develop your cheap poster printing to focus on who your target clients are. What do they want? How do they feel about the products available in the market? Where do they go when they need solutions to their problems? What issues have not been met yet in the present market? What motivates them? What can you offer your target audience in the way of benefits? Where can you contact them? How can you reach out to them? You need to do your research in order for you to have the right answers to these questions. A well-planned and well-thought of poster design can have more positive impact to its audience.
Know what you want.
You have to be certain of what you expect from your target audience when you send your message their way. Tell them how they can get your benefits. What should they do to be able to get advantage of your offer? A marketing poster concentrated on the business aspect should always be able to convince and encourage its audience to make a purchase by its call-to-action: give you a call, visit a website, contact your sales representative, or visit your shop.
Consider a personal impact that strives for individuality.
As you think about your target clients, also consider that each of your prospect view your poster ad in a certain way. Bear in mind that the impact of your message also depends on the perspective of the person looking at it. Although there may be a group of people viewing it at one time, each individual in that group will have a personal opinion on what you have for your message.
There are still many more approaches you can apply to your own poster printing. But one thing is for sure; great poster marketing will always yield for you a strong return to your investments.
For comments and inquiries about the article visit:
http://www.printplace.com/printing/poster-printing.aspx, http://www.printplace.com/printing/cheap-poster-printing.aspx
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| posted by Mr,John @ 02:34 |
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| Get Kodak EasyShare Z885 |
by: Louise Asif
Kodak leaves style on the road and trying to find the right balance between features and price in its EasyShare Z885. This 8-megapixel camera can be found for around $ 200, and although not the prettiest Kodak on the market that offers some surprisingly robust and objective than the average.
The Z885 is clearly more oriented to the practical-minded fashion. The thick 1.2-inch-thick camera weighs 7.3 ounces heavier with an SD card and two AA batteries installed. Its controls are fairly simple, centering around a mode dial on top of the camera and a large square navigation button on the back. The menu buttons surrounding the navigation button feel a little small, but otherwise the camera interface works well. Blocks Z885, direct design highlights its most important physical attribute: his goal. The camera includes a lens of 36mm to 180mm equivalent 5x optical zoom in a bit more telephoto power for most compact cameras '3 lenses. There is no mechanical image stabilization of the EasyShare Z712 IS, but it's wider to 12x, either.
As part of the Z series of Kodak EasyShare, the Z885 is designed primarily for camera users more experienced than their SnaPSHooT average. In addition to the standard modes of automatic and preset scene is found in all EASYSHARE cameras, the Z885 is a complete program and manual shooting modes. The manual mode allows you to modify each parameter from the opening exhibition at the shutter speed and even manually focus the camera. In such a little cheap shot, the options are welcome. Unfortunately, if you want to adjust the exposure settings, you must adjust them all individually, the camera has no shutter priority modes and openness.
Kodak actually pumps the ISO sensitivity in the Z885. At full resolution the camera can shoot between ISO 80 and ISO 3200 sensitivity, an impressive range. By ratcheting the camera to 2.2 megapixels or lower, the Z885 can achieve ISO 6400 and ISO 8000 sensitivity, the highest settings we've seen in a point-and-shoot. Unfortunately, this feature only looks good on paper, and when you take the parameters of super-high ISO, noise involves both the images that you can actually see the grain in the camera's 2.5-inch screen LCD. You may not use high ISO shooting for something bigger than a postage stamp or a computer icon, and always pushing.
In our lab tests, the Z855 will be rather slow. After waiting 2.8 seconds from power on to capture his first shot, you could fire a new just once every 2.2 seconds with the flash integrated with disabilities. Curiously, we expect to 2.2 seconds with flash enabled, in addition, often the flash increases the period of at least half a second. The shutter remained only 0.5 seconds with our high-contrast target and a second with our low-contrast target, which simulate the conditions of shooting light and dark, respectively. Burst mode was surprisingly quick, taking five shots in full resolution by 2 seconds for a speed of 2.5 frames per second.
The Z885 can make beautiful images, especially at lower ISOs, but we did see some image artifacts which make some diagonal and / or curved lines look jagged. In addition, the lens of the sample was slightly out of alignment, making the lower left corner, a little weaker than the rest of the plot. Although this may sound bad, not at all uncommon to see lower prices of compact cameras and can be regarded as "within acceptable manufacturing tolerances" for some manufacturers. White Balance Automatic camera tends to create images of yellow incandescent bulbs, so you should try the tungsten setting if you do not look so hot. Otherwise, the colors seem accurate enough, and there are plenty of sharp detail for a camera of this price range.
On the surface, the Z885 produces some picture noise is surprisingly low, but higher than the ISO images is at the expense of sharpness and shadow detail. At ISO 80 and ISO 100, we saw almost no ISO-related noise. At ISO 200, which began to slide, but it takes a lot of image quality. Noise measurements at a slightly smaller at ISO 400, and we saw only a mitigation of sharpness usually small, with shadow detail remaining unchanged. At ISO 800, images take on a grainy, obviously, but still very useful, but may sacrifice a significant portion of sharpness and a much lower level of detail in the shadows at this point. ISO 1600, Kodak is committed to a large blur filter to soften the noise, resulting in a loss of sharpness and an overall decrease in dynamic range. When you reach ISO 3200 noise takes over, add a layer of grain on the results of confusion that we saw in the previous level of sensitivity scale. We recommend staying below ISO 1600 in total and below ISO 800 if possible.
With plenty of manual controls and a nice 5x objective, the Kodak EasyShare Z885 offers a remarkable performance for its relatively low price. His shooting high ISO are very poor, but the flexibility and functionality make this shooter a very attractive camera, comparable to the satisfaction of Samsung S850.
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| posted by Mr,John @ 02:33 |
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| GM Hopes |
GM hopes its Chevy Volt revolutionizes the auto industry and reinvigorates the company. Here's how GM decided to bet $1 billion on a new breed of car.
Falling market share, shuttered plants, dead brands, bankruptcy, and a government bailout — that's been the news out of GM in recent years. Yet all the while GM has been investing $1 billion in the Volt, a revolutionary car that just might help save the troubled automaker.
Big decisions come from big questions, and in 2006 a few key GM execs began posing this one: What if GM stopped thinking in terms of squeezing more miles per gallon out of each car, and instead started asking about how not to use fuel at all? Would kind of car would GM create then? The answer is the Chevy Volt — an "extended-range electric vehicle," or E-REV, that GM hopes does nothing short of revolutionize the auto industry.
The Volt, which is set to go on sale late next year, is unlike today's hybrids because of one key difference: In certain circumstances, it can get infinite gas mileage. A lithium-ion battery powers the Volt for the first 40 miles. After that, a gas engine kicks in to create more electricity to keep the car rolling. So if you recharge your Volt before you hit 40 miles, you never need to go to the pump.
This is the kind of breakthrough that GM execs hope restores the company's technological reputation — and changes the world to boot. "Basically," says Jon Lauckner, GM's vice president of Global Product Planning, "this is our version of the moon shot." As such, it could very well prove one of the boldest decisions in GM history.
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| posted by Mr,John @ 02:31 |
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| Fun and Festive Ideas For Thanksgiving Gifts |
by: Kathy Smith
American Thanksgiving all started during 1621 when Native Americans celebrated a three-day feast for surviving the country's first difficult winter. Thanksgiving today is known to be a very special holiday celebrated yearly during the 4th Thursday when autumn is at its best, November.
During Thanksgiving people usually gather, as friends or as families, and express their gratitude towards God for a fruitful year. Aside from the acknowledgements made by people during this day, another highlight of most Thanksgiving celebrations is actually the dinner you are to have during the gathering.
It wouldn't be Thanksgiving without the deliciously roasted and seasoned turkey at the center of the table. It's been a tradition for years and years to have turkey as dinner's main dish every Thanksgiving that some even call the special holiday "Turkey day."
The gathering can also be an opportunity not only for hosts but for everyone present to acknowledge their friends, colleagues, and family for being in their lives. This is an opportunity to fix conflicts you have with anyone and do some patch ups with loved ones you rarely see because of regular busy days.
It's also very common between Americans to exchange gift during this holiday to express their gratitude towards each other. They usually give out food or something they could eat for Thanksgiving dinner.
Of course, each person's tastes are different so they usually give out food that is accepted by the local community. But that doesn't stop certain people from giving out food that are exotic. Some prefer to give out home made goods, which is actually good and thoughtful. More people prefer home made goods because it's a lot more special than just buying goods from stores.
Everyone appreciates good food, even the corporate can agree to that. There's actually a lot to choose from when it comes to food given as gifts for Thanksgiving. There's a wide variety to choose from. The most popular we have is the traditional turkey. Either smoke or roasted both are equally delicious.
There's also ham, smoked or however you want it, which is ideally given along with deliciously homemade mashed potatoes and gravy, veggies, corn, or breads.
If you don't like going to your local markets, you can also order food to be delivered as gifts from the internet. You might even find a wider variety online. But before purchasing it's best to read the buyer's feedbacks on that item you are planning on buying first.
Items should have reasonable or fair prices and the quality should be in accordance with standards. If you're not sure about certain things, play safe. A trusted company will always have a lot of positive feedbacks.
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| posted by Mr,John @ 02:30 |
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| Measuring the Performance Management Department with the Dashboard |
1. What is the Dashboard Management? 2. How to measure the performance of departments with management dashboards using excel? 3. Performance measure of what is appropriate for a company engaged in the management of the national football?
Answer
1. Performance management dashboard is basically an attempt to automated performance management process through the installation of software companies designed specifically for it. Dahsboard called because of the installed software is usually similar to "dash" car. Proverbial by looking dashboard that we immediately know the condition of our cars, whether the oil had to be replaced, how much speed the rate of our current engines, how many liters of gasoline consumption per 100 km, and so on.
Performance dashboard just wanted to do something like that, through this application we can see the "pulse" of our company's performance with the automatic and real time - what level of sales of product A in every region this week, how many transactions per customers, what level of defect rate for product B, how many hours of training per employee has done, and so on.
This dashboard performance management will greatly assist the CEO and top management in decision-making process quickly and accurately. With only screen in the front desk and a few clicks, the CEO in real time easily and can monitor all aspects of the performance of each division in the company - from the financial aspects, customer aspects, aspects of business processes and aspects of human resources development. Supported by the existing analytical capabilities within the software, the CEO also immediately able to do an analysis of the correlation range of performance variables as well as its development trends, whether up or down.
2. If that company does not have the budget to purchase and implement this dashboard application, then the time it can use applications like Excel. Through this excel application, we can list the tables that contain key performance indicators series business. Example KPI tables arranged in an excel application you can download here http://www.portalhr.com/gudang/tools/login.php
3. Performance measure for a company engaged in the management of the national football (PT Liga Indonesia) may include may include the following aspects: - The number of spectators per match - Growth of revenue from live television rights - Rating direct broadcast Indonesia Super League - Scores of satisfaction audience to quality games - Brand Image - Indonesia Super League
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| posted by Mr,John @ 02:29 |
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