| Call 4 Action: Veteran says power outage ruined appliances
Miguel Guillen is a disabled Vietnam Veteran who recently returned from San Antonio after undergoing a Triple Bypass Surgery. But his arrival home, wasn't very comforting, because a power surge ruined many of his electronics and appliances. "It could've burned my house, it could've done more damage with my family here," he said. The power surge not only cost him a lot of headaches it cost him and his family to lose a lot of their belongings. "We lost three air conditioning units, two DVD players, a microwave, several televisions, the refrigerator and a freezer" said Guillen's son Inocencio. "Ceiling fans went out, and light bulbs broke." The bigger problem, however, is getting the power company to help him pay about $3,000 worth of losses and repair costs.
Samuel David Schoolfield put his family first
SAMUEL DAVID Schoolfield didn't hesitate to give his last dollar to any one of his children who needed it to pay for some activity or buy necessities. "He believed that his family was always first in his life," said his daughter, Janie L. Schoolfield. Sam held numerous jobs during his lifetime, sometimes working two at a time to support his family. He was a hard worker and his employers recognized his abilities with frequent promotions. He died Feb. 6 at the age of 80. He lived in Wynnefield. The seventh of 12 children, Sam was born in Pocomoke City, Md., to William Schoolfield and the former Estella Cropper. The family came to Philadelphia when he was a child and he attended Overbrook High School. He enlisted in the Navy as World War II was ending, and wound up serving in the South Pacific and California.
Hotels joining in green wave
In case you haven't noticed, hotels are going green, doing their part to be ecologically friendly. You might call it the Al Gore effect, although the movement began before An Inconvenient Truth won an Academy Award and its star won a Nobel Prize this year. The green efforts go further than asking guests to use towels and bed linens more than once (as they do at home), to conserve water and avoid flushing more detergent-laden water into sewers. It's also more than replacing incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs in guest rooms. Other green initiatives are more subtle - things a guest might never notice: recycling, low-flow faucets and showerheads, water-saving toilets, and the use of products that don't harm the environment or contribute to global warming.
A blog about technology from BBC News
They see themselves as passive conduits, like a road network or the postal system. The global record industry has been quick to back the government's proposal. "It is simply not acceptable for ISPs to turn a blind eye to the piracy on their networks which is at such a rate that there are 20 illegal music downloads for every legal track sold," said John Kennedy of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industries. Digital rights activist will be outraged by this move, I'm sure. Monitoring our internet traffic will have huge privacy issues. No-one can deny that the scale of copyright theft is mammoth. A cursory glance at a website like The Pirate Bay revels thousands of films, TV programmes, albums, software programs etc being shared across the net.
Central Florida Winter Park owes its ambience to wealthy Midwesterners
The tour boat glides past lavish lakefront homes as the guide recites the names of notable past and present occupants: Walgreen as in drugstores, Sinclair as in oil, Horace Grant as in the Chicago Bulls and Orlando Magic. We might have been cruising past the genteel mansions of Lake Geneva, Wis., if it weren't for the Spanish moss hanging from the cypress trees and the alligators lurking in the reeds. The simple pontoon boat ride seemed typical of a Midwestern lake resort. If you think of Central Florida as all theme parks and tourist attractions with little history and culture, Winter Park will surprise you. Though only 30-40 minutes up I-4 from Walt Disney World, this city of 28,000 seems a world apart, a world with several Chicago connections. In the early 1900s wealthy Northerners came to Winter Park by train to escape the harsh winters back home, just as they escaped to Lake Geneva to flee the summer heat of Chicago.
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