Wayne Curtis - of Hillhurst Mortage, a CPA company

A quick shoutout to my accountant. Hoping to increase his pagerank:
Wayne Curtis at Hillhurst Mortgage

Wayne is reachable at
Hillhurst Mortgage
1662 N. Hillhurst Avenue, Suite A
Los Angeles, CA 90027
Telephone 323.522.1020

Wayne Curtis - of Hillhurst Mortage, a CPA company

A quick shoutout to my accountant. Hoping to increase his pagerank:
http://vertabrett.com/wayne.curtis-hillhurst.mortgage.com.htm

Wayne is reachable at
Hillhurst Mortgage
1662 N. Hillhurst Avenue, Suite A
Los Angeles, CA 90027
Telephone 323.522.1020

Wayne Curtis - of Hillhurst Mortage, a CPA company

A quick shoutout to my accountant. Hoping to increase his pagerank:
http://vertabrett.com/wayne.curtis-hillhurst.mortgage.com.htm

Pale Blue Dot

Sometimes I feel important, like I will make a difference. Then I read this:

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

<from Wil>

Simple enough to save a dollar today

David turned me on to The Simple Dollar

23 good ideas to clean up and save/make money. I've held onto some old VHS movies for almost a decade now, even though some of them have never been watched!

4. Purge a media collection.
Many people have a large collection of some media type or another, whether it be book, CD, DVD, video game, or whatever. Spend several hours purging the collection and selling the excess on eBay or your selling site of choice. This can easily absorb a pair of weekends, but you’ll usually wind up with a lot of cash and more room simply by getting rid of things that you’ll likely never look at again.

In that tone of voice,

Some insight to Google Fascinating

This document is a guideline for translating according to the Google style.
Overall Translation Guidelines

It is very important to us that all translations maintain the appropriate Google tone. Our site in English is written in a tech- and web-savvy, upbeat and friendly style. We want all our non-English content to reflect this style; however, we recognize that what is considered polite and appropriate varies by culture. Therefore, we want the translator to understand the English content and style first, and then rewrite it such that the tone is maintained within the framework of the particular language/culture.
General rules:

1. Don't use a heavy, staid, or arrogant tone; translations should be upbeat and friendly
2. Avoid awkward or unprofessional wording
3. Try to capture the essence of the message. Don't translate literally or word-for-word.

Specific Guidelines

1. Do not translate proper names or product names. Examples of these include "Google" and "SafeSearch".
2. Google has a function, "I'm Feeling Lucky" that presents a particular translation challenge. The function takes the user immediately to the first result for a search -- so, a user selects "I'm Feeling Lucky" when they are willing to take a chance that Google's first result will be what they are looking for. The phrase in English has a specific tone -- daring, confident, and playful. This has been a hard phrase for people to translate. If you can't come up with a way to translate this phrase while preserving its tone just leave it in English.