Natalia Nazarova Stars In Movie Postmark Paradise

Natalia Nazarova Stars In Movie Postmark Paradise

by: Keith กMuzikManก Hannaleck

Title: Postmark Paradise

Featuring: Natalia Nazarova and Tantoo Cardinal

Format: DVD

Genre: Human Interest

Release Date: June 29, 2004

Film Maker: Entertainment Paradise Group /A Thompson Clay Film/Distributed by

Vanguard Cinema

Websites: http://www.natalianazarova.com/index2.htm / http://www.postmarkparadise.com

http://www.vanguardcinema.com

Actress Natalia Nazarova plays a charming and heart warming role as Viktoria, an unsuspecting mail order bride from Russia, in an independent film titled Postmark Paradise. Nazarova has been very busy woman. Besides filmmaking, the world of music has been blessed with her many talents via some fine jazz and pop vocal albums. This is her first American film role.

Natalia is charming in this film and anyone that watches it will surely fall in love with her character. The classic underdog theme makes a good storyline and is a surefire hook for those that like movies full of the emotion and the story of people’s lives. For her American debut, this is a fabulous effort. This young lady is star material and I would hope that someone influential in Hollywood will have sense enough to give her a chance as a leading lady in a major motion picture, I am sure she could handle it quite well. I became very engrossed in this picture and enjoyed it entirely. There was fine acting in this film; all of the characters were true to life, which made it easy to become a part of the story, as if you were right there living it.

The story of the film begins with a TV newscaster explaining how gorgeous and eligible Russian girls are looking for an opportunity to come to America and marry any willing American man, then the scene changes to the bar The Dirty Shame located in Paradise Michigan. A group of local men are in the bar feeling good and decide to check into the mail order bride phenomena. Chick (Randall Godwin) masterminds the execution of the mail order bride for their friend Jake (Vincent Angelini), who is doing time in jail for drunk driving. The expectant bride Viktoria, is delivered at his homecoming party at the bar.

When the big moment arrives, Jake comes strolling into the bar and Viktoria stands up an introduces herself with a big beautiful smile and Jake takes one look at her and shrugs his shoulders, sits at the bar, and starts drinking and telling stories. Jake has no clue what this is all about, he is taken home later in the evening falling down drunk, thinking that the girl is a present for the night from his drinking buddies. That night Viktoria leaves in distress and Reenie (multiple award winning actress Tantoo Cardinal), the only barmaid at The Dirty Shame, sees her walking down the road crying. Many more life situations and drama develop thereafter.

The film tells a unique version of the American dream in small town America, following several twists and turns, the story ends unexpectedly, which I found most pleasant and satisfying. Natalia performs several of the songs in both Russian and English on the film’s soundtrack. Look for it about June 29, on DVD and Video. Rated PG13

© Keith กMuzikManก Hannaleck http://www.muzikreviews.com

April 6, 2004

The Cast for Postmark Paradise

Reenie…..Tantoo Cardinal

Viktoria…..Natalia Nazarova

Jake…..Vincent Angelini

Chick…..Randall Godwin

Matt…..Dale Inghram

Bud…..Donald Phelan

Sweeney…..Bill Selzer

Merle…..Todd Lewis

Red Dog…..Elmer Cardinal

About The Author

MuzikMan is an author of thousands of reviews, interviews and articles found all over the Internet.

[email protected]

This article was posted on April 06, 2004

by Keith กMuzikManก Hannaleck

A Tale of Might & Magical Teamwork: A Mac OS X Wea

A Tale of Might & Magical Teamwork: A Mac OS X Weather Application Review

by: Cate Defrise

Once upon a time, a clever guy named, Matt came up with this simply brilliant idea for an app called Meteorologist, that allows you to choose several cities and display their current weather conditions on your menu bar or dock or both. He began working on it and it became a very solid and strong program, but he soon realized he could no longer go further with it as his life was getting in the way of its completion and maintenance. Fortunately, the project didn’t die there. He threw it up for grabs in the Open Source community at Source Forge and it landed in the hands of a small group of compassionate developers that came to his rescue and teamed up to continue his legacyin all of its glory as well as its trials and tribulations.

This group called themselves, ขThe M Team.ข You know, sort of like, ‘the A Team. กOkay, I lied. They actually called themselves, ขThe Meteorologist Group.ข

Back to Meteorologist! Meteorologist is a free weather program for OS X. It allows Mac users total control over their weather viewing enjoyment, including simultaneous interlaced weather reports from multiple weather servers worldwide. In other words, this program is cool.

So you say weather is too boring? Think again, my friend. There’s a reason why weather.com is among the top 100 sites (out of 4 BILLION sites, give or take a few thousand): inquiring minds wanna know the weather!

Meteorologist allows you to see the weather of cities of your choice directly on your menu bar or dock, and you can name them whatever you want. I prefer the menu bar because my dock has gotten too cluttered lately. It’s so easy to find Meteorologist and it’s so accessible. For example, I’ve chosen Nice, France because it’s near to where I live, Culver City, California where most of my family is, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey where my sister lives and Lille, France where most of my inlaws live. I just look up at my menu bar and it has the outside temperature with a cute matching icon. (Right now กchez meก it’s 57°F at nearly 8 PM, showing an icon with little gray clouds. I could change it to Celsius if I wanted too.) This is utterly helpful to me because it helps me decide things such as how long of a walk I can take with my dog, or, in case of rain, that I shouldn’t really go out at all.

For some reason, it’s also comforting to know the weather conditions of my loved ones. It’s sort of like your Buddy List on iChat or whatever chat program you use. You see buds and family online and chat sometimes but it’s just reassuring to know that they’re there whether you chat with them or not. You know what I mean? Knowing their climate somehow letกs me take part in their lives (somehow in my crazy way) even though I can’t be there inperson.

You can see a 3day forecast of these places too, great for planning part of your week. All of this information is current and changes accordingly if necessary by accessing the closest weather server. For instance, I can see that it might actually snow in Upper Saddle River on Tuesday! I know now I can plan to tease my sister about it because she hates cold weather. See, how indispensable Meteorologist is?! Don’t even ask why she lives in New Jersey.

Meteorologist doesn’t stop at the temperature; it also gives a current account of wind, humidity, dew point, pressure, clouds, forecast and the last time information was updated. However, the pièce de résistance has yet to be announced in this review!

Yes, the most innovative and clever characteristic about Meteorologist, and my personal favourite feature, is its ability to alert you in cases of severe weather conditions! How does it do this you ask? I’m glad you asked because here is the answer: You can choose how you’d like to be alerted with the following options (and you can select as many as you’d like): 1) via email; 2) a Beep; 3) Play a song that you can select from iTunes; or, 4) have the Meteorologist icon bounce violently in the dock.

Of course, having said that, I’ve yet to receive an alert, which is probably a good thing—because receiving an alert could mean, for example, that there’s an imminent tsunami ready to inundate this area in 30 minutes with millions of tons of the Mediterranean crushing everything in its path.

Despite this gloomy scenario, I still think this app is awesome, and so the story and review shall end happily ever after.

Meteorologist is a freeware and workinprogress by The Meteorologist Team (as well as the Open Source community) at Source Forge Note: You must have internet access to use Meteorologist.

Rated 4.5 out of 5

About The Author

Cate Defrise is a journalist and Mac fan based in the South of France.

This article was posted on March 15, 2004

by Cate Defrise

Explore the Internet in a Whole New Way

Explore the Internet in a Whole New Way

by: Daniel Punch

For a long time now Microsoftกs Internet Explorer has ruled as กKing of Internet browsersก. Like most of Microsoftกs products an initially brutal marketing campaign pushed Internet Explorer into the mainstreamกs consciousness and from then on it was the logical, default choice. Itกs free with the operating system, works well, loads any page and is easy to use. Other web browsers soon faded into obscurity and sometimes even died in the shadow of the new king of the pack. Netscape Navigator, the former กKing of the browsersก, has now ceased commercial operations and has been taken over by the fan base. Opera is fading into obscurity and Mozilla was facing a similar fate, until recently.

Mozilla Firefox (formerly known as Firebird) is probably the largest threat that IE has faced in recent times. Currently, according to http://www.w3schools.com, IE is the browser used by 69.9% of Internet users and Firefox is used by 19.1%. This might not seem like much, but according to http://www.nua.ie/surveys/how_many_online/ an educated guess at the number of people that use the Internet is somewhere around 605,600,000 users (or was in 2002, the number will have increased substantially by now). That means that (after some erroneous math) a rough stab at guessing the number of people using Firefox is probably over 115,064,000, which isn’t a bad user base at all.

When a friend of mine from university first tried to convince me to switch to Firefox I wasn’t particularly interested. Basically, IE has done everything that Iกve wanted in a web browser. He went on at great lengths about the security aspects, the inbuilt popup blockers, download managers and so on, but Iกd spent a fairly large amount of time and money on antivirus programs, firewalls, spyware removers, and my browser was secure enough. I also have a download manager that Iกm very happy with and refuse to change from. After much cajoling I finally agreed to try this newfangled software. Iกm glad I did too, because now I have no desire to go back.

Firefox is very easy to install and use. Thereกs nothing complicated, you simply download (for free) and run the install file and then when you run the browser for the first time you get presented with the option of importing your IE favourites (a nice feature, with the click of a button everything is moved across to ease your transition) and also the option of making Firefox your default browser. My initial reaction was fairly apathetic; Firefox seemed pretty much the same as IE and in essence, it is. It has all the basic features of IE, but then I discovered it adds so much more.

The first feature to really grab me is the tabbed browsing. Many alternative browsers and even IE plugins support tabbed browsing (where the new pages can be opened in a tab in the one window, instead of filling the task bar with buttons) but Firefox seems to make it so easy and useful. All you do is click a link with the middle button on your mouse (most newer mice have three buttons, the third often being placed under the scroll wheel) and a new tab opens up containing the page requested. Middle clicking on any tab in the window will close it, without having to actually go to the tab and click close. CtrlT will open a new blank tab, and CtrlTab will cycle through them (similar in fashion to AltTab cycling through the open programs). What this all leads to is a much neater Internet experience, with you being able to group certain pages into browser windows, leaving the start bar much cleaner and easier to navigate.

The next feature that caught my attention was the search bar built into the browser. Itกs small, sleek and simple, built into the righthand side of the main toolbar beside the address box. You can add many different sites to the search bar and then select the site you wish to search from a dropdown menu. Then itกs simply a matter of typing your query in and hitting enter to be taken directly to that page and your search results. This makes searching Ebay, Google, Internet Movie DataBase, Amazon etc. very quick and easy as you can simply type in the desired search criteria as you think of it and get the results back fast. You can get search bar plugins for IE but they tend to take up lots of room, contain ads, and you can usually only have one site per search bar.

There are more features than I could write about here but I will tell you that Firefox has impressed me greatly. Browser hijacking: the act of a malicious website script changing your homepage or search page (particularly common on IE, sites will change your default search page so that every time you type an address into your address bar their site gets a hit) is now a thing of the past (at least until someone gets vicious enough to work out backdoors in Firefox, an unlikely event for at least a little while given the massive market share still held by IE). Since changing over I have received substantially fewer attack notices from my Firewall. Sites load quickly, and if you get an address wrong you don’t have to wait for a page to load, you just quickly get a message informing you that the site doesn’t exist. Then there are the extensions that can be downloaded to add all sorts of new features to the browser.

The only downside that I have found is the fact that because IE is the dominant web browser, some websites are coded in such a way that they don’t work properly on other browsers. These sites are few and far between, but occasionally you will still need to fire up IE to view a page. The infrequency of this occurring is enough that it doesn’t annoy me too much, but it will be nice when everything works 100%.

At the end of the day, itกs probably not a vital switch. Both programs suffice in allowing you to plug in and explore the vast world of the Internet with ease and accuracy. However, itกs worth a look though because what starts off initially as กI have no real reason to change backก quickly becomes กI am never going backก. So, as the official Firefox website encourages, ‘rediscover the webก.

About The Author

Daniel Punch

M6.Net

http://www.m6.net

Daniel Punch is a university student always looking to overthrow the man and support the underdog, provided it doesn’t actually cost him anything.

[email protected]

This article was posted on February 01

by Daniel Punch

Keyword Ownership: What It Is And Where Itกs Heade

Keyword Ownership: What It Is And Where Itกs Headed

by: Richard Zwicky

Have you ever got one of those silly emails that offers to let you own a keyword? Silly question. How many such emails do you get every day?

A number of such services regularly email me offering keyword ownership of premium keywords for $300/year. They say that anyone can type the keyword I bought in the address bar of Internet explorer, instead of typing in a URL, and they will be sent directly to my site. In total it seems that there are about 2% of Internet users worldwide who have enabled one type or another of this system, spread out between a few competitive services.

Data shows that between 4% and 7% of search queries are performed by entering something in the address bar. By default for IE users, these searches are automatically routed through to MSN search. Many of us however have installed so much software over time, and unknowingly, some of this software has rerouted these search queries to other search portals, such as iGetNet, or others. This often happens if youกve installed any file sharing software. We have all heard / read about how many extra กfeaturesก come with programs like Kazaa. This means that your default search from the address bar may no longer be MSN, and may have been rerouted elsewhere, but the basic principle still applies. Of the queries that are actually run from an address bar, at least half of them are unintentionally instigated by people mistyping the desired URL. This means that between 2% and 4% of Internet users actually search via their address bar.

So how exactly do these address bars work? There are many of these companies offering this kind of service, with each one of them selling the very same keywords to different and sometimes competing companies. To make things worse, the keywords you might buy will only work with the issuing companys proprietary address bar plugin. Then, to actually offer search capabilities from the address bar, each of these service providers needs to get individual Internet users to download and install their plugin, and remember to run searches from the address bar.

How effective can a marketing strategy of this nature be when the various tools are not interchangeable, there are numerous competitors selling the same key words to different companies, and you are targeting only a small fraction of Internet users? If your ad is being displayed because its similar to the search query, are you paying for irrelevant results? This can happen; If there is not a perfect match to a search query, the next closest match may be displayed.

Competing with these companies is any search engine that offers its own toolbar. You can download a toolbar from any number of engines, and run searches on any key word or phrase quickly and easily. You then get the search engines selection of closest matches, from all the web sites they have indexed. They offer more than just one choice, and dont cost anything

Who Started This?

Started in 1998, Realnames was the first company that tied searching via the address bar to a web browser. At the time, it was touted as a value added solution for businesses around the world who were attempting to get their products found quickly, but didn’t want customers to have to wade through a sea of Web addresses to reach their destination.

In part, it was deemed necessary because so few web site operators were search engine savvy, and fewer still knew anything about search engine optimization and promotion. What the Realnames solution did was allow a web site operator to buy a keyword, and then when any user of Internet Explorer would type that keyword into the IE address toolbar, they would get directed to the web site that owned the keyword.

The company hoped to profit from businesses which wanted to reach Internet users who would type keywords into their browsers address bar instead of remembering the url, or going through a standard search interface.

Unfortunately for the company, the service was entirely dependent on Microsoft; and when Microsoft stopped supporting the technology in May 2002, the company was forced to close. The reason it was so totally dependent was simple; Unlike the new companies on the market today, Realnames did not depend on an end user downloading and installing a plugin, instead it was essentially integrated into Internet Explorer by Microsoft. Therefore everyone who used IE automatically had the plugin.

The Legal Question

Each of the companies offering these services has a policy designed to ensure that a web site only buys keywords related to their content, and their review process is designed to keep cybersquatters from hijacking popular names and products. Unfortunately, there is no way to guarantee that any one of these keyword ownership services adheres to any naming standard, or even ensures that any purchaser has the legal right to any of the terms they are buying. This means that the rights to copyrighted material like กPepsiก or generic words like กbusinessก could end up in the hands of the first buyer. While Pepsi is a well known brand name, there are millions of copyrighted and trademark protected terms, covered in multiple jurisdictions. It would not be cost effective or practical for these services to police copyright and trademark infringement.

In the summer of 1999, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, denied Playboyกs request for an injunction barring a search engine from selling advertising based on the terms playboyand playmate. In the precedent setting ruling regarding keyword advertising, Judge Stotler of the United States District Court in Santa, Ana, California, dismissed a lawsuit brought by Playboy Enterprises against the search engine Excite, Inc. and Netscape. The ruling limited the online rights of trademark holders, as it recognized that a trademark may be used without authorization by search engines in advertising sales practices.

Playboy claimed that the search engines were displaying paid banner ads from pornographic web sites whenever กplayboyก or กplaymateก were used as a search term. As the owner of the trademarks for both terms, Playboy argued that the use of its trademarks for a third party sales scheme was trademark infringement and branding dilution.

In the ruling dismissing Playboyกs case, the Judge found that Excite had not used the trademarks กplayboyก and กplaymateก in an unlawful manner. This was because Excite had not used the trademarked words to identify Excites own goods or services and therefore trademark infringement laws did not apply. It was further determined that even if there was trademark usage, there was no infringement because there was no evidence that consumers confused Playboy products with the services of Excite or Netscape.

What about within Meta Tags?

Is it illegal to use trademarked terms in your meta tags? Sometimes. The problem occurs with how and why you are using the terms. Web sites that use the tags in a deceptive manner have lost legal battles. However, legitimate reasons to use the terms have resulted in successful defenses.

In a case involving Playboy, the firm was able to prove trademark infringement, based on use of their trademark in meta tags, url and content on the web site. The case was filed by the firm against web site operators for stuffing their web pages with the words Playboyand Playmatehundreds of times. Furthermore, the defendants were also using the terms Playboy and Playmate in the site names, URLs, and slogans. In this case the Judge ruled for Playboy, as there was a clear case of trademark infringement.

In the separate case, Playboy vs. Terri Welles, the court refused Playboyกs request. The reason was simple. Terri Welles was Playboyกs 1981 Playmate of the Year. She had used the terms กPlaymateก and กPlayboyก on her web pages and within her meta tags, and the Court felt she had a legitimate right to use them to accurately describe herself, and to ensure that the search engines could catalog her web site properly within their databases. Playboyกs appeal was dismissed on Feb. 1, 2002.

In Summary

It is clear that if you have a legitimate reason to use a trademarked word or phrase in your web site you can. You may also rent their ownership from one of the keyword ownership companies. Be careful, though, it is possible that may get sued.

Does the technology work? Yes, but only for some of the approximately 3% of Internet users worldwide who have installed any one of a variety of competing plugins that enable this type of searching. I stress a fraction of the 3%, as you would need to buy the keywords from each individual vendor to ensure reaching all 2%.

About The Author

Richard Zwicky is a founder and the CEO of Metamend Software, www.metamend.com, a Victoria B.C. based firm whose cutting edge Search Engine Optimization software is recognized as the world leader in its field. Employing a staff of 10, the firmกs business comes from around the world, with clients from every continent. Most recently the company was recognized for their geolocational, or GIS, along with their phraseology technology and context sensitive search technologies.

[email protected]

This article was posted on November 11, 2003

by Richard Zwicky

Determine Your Popularity On The Web

Determine Your Popularity On The Web

by: Craig Neidel

กMirror mirror on the wall, whoกs the fairest of them all?ก Iกm going to bet that itกs not you, um I mean, not your website. With all of the new websites popping up all over the place how do you know where you rank? How popular is your site compared to the next one?

In most cases itกs safe to say that we all want our website to be popular. Maybe it means our business will be more profitable or maybe itกs just good for the ego. Now there is a website that ranks the popularity of your website. The website is http://www.alexa.com.

Alexa.com is a blast to use and is one of those websites that is hard to leave. For starters, Alexa.com lists the most popular websites starting from the #1 position. It also lists the ขMovers And Shakersข, which are websites that are rapidly gaining or loosing popularity on the web. Alexa.com is a great tool for discovering new websites to visit because you can see where everybody else is going. Itกs fun, informative, and can be a good tool for comparing your website to the competition.

So how does Alexa.com work? In 1997 Alexa.com created a tool bar that tracked which websites people visited on the web. The tool bar was incorporated into early versions of NetScape and Internet Explorer. Today there are over 10 million Internet users who browse the Internet while using some form of the Alexa.com tool bar. These users are constantly generating statistics about their browsing habits. Alexa.com uses the data to create reports that outline the popularity of websites on the Internet.

So the next time you want to see how popular your website is, visit Alexa.com. Simply type in your websiteกs address (www.yoursite.com) into the ขsearch the webข box and press go. It will send you to a page full of statistics showing you how popular your website is right now. Just remember that being popular isn’t the only important thing in life. There are good looks, money, and Monday Night Football too.

About The Author

Craig Neidel has worked for NetSource Communications Inc. for 6 years and has experience in web development, ecommerce solutions and web marketing. NetSource Communications creates custom ecommerce solutions and web applications. http://www.ntsource.com.

This article was posted on October 26, 2004

by Craig Neidel

Creating Great Charts for Persuasive Trade Show Pr

Creating Great Charts for Persuasive Trade Show Presentations

by: Rena Klingenberg

A welldesigned chart can be one of the most persuasive elements of your trade show booth display and literature. It illustrates to your customers why your product is the obvious solution to one of their specific needs. It can communicate major benefits or features more clearly than words can.
To make a great chart, you need to create a clear, compelling picture of the data that will call your customers to action. Your chartกs message must be easy for them to understand without having to study it. Three of the most easily understood chart types are:
1) Bar charts
Bar charts are an excellent method of comparing groups of data. Each data group can consist of a single bar for simple comparisons, or multiple bars breaking information down into subcategories for more indepth analysis.
Bar charts are easy to interpret because most people are already familiar with seeing data in this format. You can use bar charts to emphasize the data represented by the tallest bar, the shortest bar, the overall trend of the bars, or a change in the bars caused by a certain variable.
2) Pie charts
Pie charts are useful for showing percentages of a greater whole. In a pie chart, the entire pie represents the total data, and each กsliceก represents data from a particular group within the whole.
A pie chart is straightforward and easy to understand. It provides a clear visualization of the data class that represents the largest percentage of the whole (represented by the largest piece of the pie), and the relative value of each of the other data classes.
3) Line graphs (also called run charts)
Line graphs show or compare trends, cycles, increases and decreases over time. Typically a line graph shows events on the yaxis affected by time on the xaxis. Often a line representing an average of the data charted is included as a reference point. Or multiple lines may be charted on a line graph, with each representing a different product or variable.
Tips for a Successful Chart
Be sure your chart compares your data on an equal basis. Use the same scale for all data categories in one chart (for example, comparing data measured in dollars with data measured in hundreds of dollars isn’t equal). And use a consistent interval between your data categories (measuring oneweek intervals against 5week intervals isn’t an accurate comparison).
Use charts to communicate the significance of your statistics. Some of the statistics you may want to highlight in your chart are:

Mean value (the average point of all data).
Maximum value (the maximum data point in the series).
Minimum value (the minimum data point in the series).
Sample size (the total number of data points in the series).
Range of data (the maximum value minus the minimum value).
Standard deviation (how widely data are spread around the mean).

Once youกve chosen the best type of chart for the data you want to show your customers, remember to keep your graphic as simple as possible. Trade show customers are assaulted by thousands of images. Don’t compare too many things, or include too many categories of data. Your goal is to educate your customers, not confuse them.
And resist the temptation to add fancy extras like pictures and 3D effects if they make the chart look busy. If a chart is too detailed or cluttered, customers won’t invest the effort required to figure it out. Theyกll bypass it as a technical output of mumbojumbo, and move on to something that clearly and compellingly calls them to take a closer look at a product.

About The Author

Rena Klingenbergกs website, http://www.tradeshowboothdisplay.com, is a resource for trade show exhibit success information. She is also editor of the online newsletter ‘trade Show Success on a Small Budgetก at http://www.tradeshowboothdisplay.com/newsletter.html

[email protected]

This article was posted on May 16, 2004

by Rena Klingenberg