IMPORTANT INFORMATION

The 2024 OFFICIAL MASTER LIST: https://tinyurl.com/w54yupwe

Saturday, March 23, 2013

A to Z Tip: Timing is Everything


This post is brought to you by Cindy Dwyer, another A-Z expert. Please welcome her – I found her advice really helpful even though I'm MST in the U.S.  She brought up some questions I hadn't even considered.


Like many bloggers, I have a full-time day job to support my writing habit. I leave the house at seven in the morning and get home at around five or five-thirty. So during the A to Z Challenge, I schedule my posts to go live in the wee hours of the night. This gives me several advantages. 

Since I sleep with my laptop next to the bed -- and really, who doesn't? ☺ -- when my alarm goes off at 6:00 a.m. EST, I can check to make sure that day's letter made it safely through the cyberspace gremlins before I even roll out of bed. If I don't fix any problems then, they stay broken until after dinner because, sadly, I do not have an IT department. (Once, I did come home to find my cat asleep on my laptop, but that wasn't quite what I had in mind when I wished I had help staying on top of the technical aspects of my website.)

Another great thing about posting early is that during those ten hours I'm gone, other A2Zers can be reading and commenting on my post. I do try to log onto my website during lunch to answer comments and visit a few blogs from the list. But on crazy days when I can't, at least my blog is current with that day's letter.

Even if you do have the entire day free to write your post, you still need to account for time zones. The A to Z Challenge attracts participants from around the world. Remember, New York is five hours behind London and sixteen hours behind eastern Australia. 

Say you live in California and have a habit of blogging after dinner. At 7:00 p.m. PST, it's two o'clock the following afternoon in parts of Australia, where people may have already posted "I" before you've had a chance to update your "G" post to "H". 

If you want your friends Down Under to read your letter of the day before they go to sleep, you really need to activate that entry before 8:00 a.m. EST.

And the opposite is true for bloggers on the other side of the world -- you may want to schedule your posts for a little later in the day to avoid appearing a letter ahead of the western hemisphere.

I'm curious to hear from prior A to Z participants. Did you try to post at the same time each day? Did the differences in time zones make you feel like you were always a little ahead (or behind) everyone else? 

These are excellent questions, and I'm curious how our international participants handle this issue.  Please speak up!

~Tina, very grateful for Cindy's excellent advice

Friday, March 22, 2013

A - Z "ing" through the A - Z Challenge



Ambitious beginnings
Cruising diligently
Exciting entertainment
Fantastic, golly-gee!

Heaven help us, hurry!
Inspire impressive jaunts
Kindly kick our kiesters
Lending labor, not laments


Motion mild manners
Never needing nasty names
Oppressing only captchas
Picky pop-ups in a frame

Quintessential quest
Quantificates rebuttals
Snatching snobby snaglines
Tried and true with titles



Useless unanimity
Verociously vivacious
Waging without weakness
XXVI – not one word less

Yin and yang have yielded
Zipping zigzags zestily
April’s Blogging Challenge
Is the testament, you see!



Brought to you by M.J Joachim.  Find her at Lots of Crochet Stitches


Photo credit:  Badges courtesy of A – Z Challenge and Charmaine Clancy
©2013 All Rights Reserved

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Cryogenics: Can We Live Again In The Future?

Robert Ettinger, founder of the cryogenics movement, has died (at least for now) about eighteen months ago at the age of 92. Cryogenics is the process of freezing your head or your entire body in hopes science will one day figure out a way to bring you back from the dead. Ettinger will join his two wives (what was he thinking???) and his mother in frozen limbo. 

The facility is in Clinton Township, Michigan. Over 100 human corpses are floating in the gentle giant capsules filled with liquid nitrogen in hopes of one day living again. Nobody knows for sure whether we can ever restore consciousness frozen bodies, but cryopreservation is a phenomenon present in the animal kingdom and effective medical technology. 

Many livestock have developed tricks to survive temperatures below zero degrees Celsius, accounting and after periods of paralysis caused by frost. And scientists have made important progress in freezing living tissue and even of whole organs for medical purposes. 

The minimum price that the airline claims for his services is 28,000 dollars. Other organizations charge for customers and amounts up to $ 200,000 and offers the possibility of "neuroprezervării" instead of full body freeze, freezing heads may require only interested in the idea that personality and memories are stored in the brain and loaded into a computer or an artificial body in the future. 

One obstacle to overcome is frozen ice crystals within the bloodstream are very sharp. They can actually cut tissue and blood vessels, causing sever damage that make it difficult preserving vital parts of the human body. 

Question: Do you think this process of cryogenics is actually a possibility? Can we freeze our heads or bodies in hopes that one day technology will enable us to one day live again? 




Stephen Tremp, author of the BREAKTHROUGH series, has a B.A. in information systems and an MBA degree in global management. Stephen has a background in information systems, management, and finance and draws from this varied and complex experiential knowledge to write one-of-a-kind thrillers. His novels are enhanced by current events at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERNand other scientific research facilities around the world. These potential advances have the ability to change the way we perceive our universe and our place in it! 

You can visit Stephen Tremp at Breakthrough Blogs
BREAKTHROUGH and OPENING can be downloaded:  Kindle for $.99  through this weekend!

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