Enhance your vision with the Acer AL2251W! Incorporating the latest LCD technology, the Acer AL2251W offers the best visibility, performance and unprecedented value. With its fast response time of 5ms, the Acer AL2251W brings remarkable display quality to your desktop!

Dynamic Gaming and Entertainment Display.
The wide-screen Acer AL2251W is a dynamic gaming and entertainment display solution, integrating the latest technologies for high-speed gaming with high color saturation and razor sharp details.

A Closer Look

 

Features

• Anti-reflective coating
• VESA wall-mountable
• Kensington lock slot
• Fully automatic auto-tune feature
• TCO’99 certified
• Friendly OSD user interface
• PC and Mac compatible

Best Deals:
TigerDirect $348.99
PC Connection $291.19

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The most revolutionary aspect of Illustrator is the introduction of its Graphic Symbols tools. These tools reduce file size and benefit manageability in much the same way that symbols are used in Flash. Beyond that, the tools make image repetition much easier and cut down the number of steps that are needed to do the same thing manually. Any object or group can be quickly turned into a symbol, and accessing it for reuse is as simple as selecting your symbol in the Symbols palette. Updating a symbol automatically updates every instance of that symbol in your document.

Eight new symbol tools on the toolbar help you manage and create quickly and easily. The Symbol Sprayer tool works very similarly to the Graphic Hose in Painter, quickly applying several instances on your artboard. Attributes such as size and angle can even be controlled by a pressure-sensitive tablet.

Once applied to the artboard, the other symbol tools can be used to modify the instances. Quickly change the rotation, distribution, size and position of each of a group of instances—the tools are impressively intuitive. The Symbol Stainer tool applies a raster-like colorizing effect to your symbols, and the Screener tool applies eraser-like transparency effects that would make you swear you were working in Photoshop. Plus, you can use the Symbol Styler tool to apply preset or user-created styles in varying amounts to your symbols!

Of course you have the option to break the link between placed symbol instances and the original if you wish to modify the objects without making a global change, but this means you lose the benefit of smaller file sizes or being able to make global symbol changes.

The applications for these tools are wide and varied. Not only do they make for efficient and small files, but they also open up new creative possibilities.

Installing the symbols couldn’t be easier, drag and drop the symbol file into Illustrator. The symbol is then opened inside of Illustrator and you can save the symbol to a symbol library by clicking on the symbols palette then click the small triangle button which opens a options menu for the symbols. The last option in the menu is to save the symbol library once you select save a window will open up to the default symbols folder inside of Illustrator, give it a name and press save. That’s it! Now the symbols can be selected from the same menu by selecting the open symbol library and selecting the library that you would like to open.

We have gathered free symbols from the web and have them here for you to download. There are many different symbols available from Christmas Lights, Cell Phones, Aqua Orbs and Credit Cards just to name a few. As we find more symbols we will post them for here for everyone to download and use. Get creative with these symbols and send us your artwork so we can showcase it here on Blogtology.

The Symbols

[download#7#nohits]

 

[download#8#nohits]

 

[download#9#nohits]

 

[download#2#nohits]

 

[download#10#nohits]

One of our readers submitted his Illustrator Artwork:

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Tax time is one of the worst times of the year for freelancers. There is a strange fluctuation of work at this time, depending on the nature of the freelance work that you do; many freelancers experience either a surge in work or a drought at this time. The former makes it difficult to focus on doing your own taxes. The latter makes you have to work double-time to find work and makes it hard to think about paying out more money if it turns out that you owe the IRS. By the time that you sit down to deal with your taxes, it’s probably late in tax season and you want to just get the whole process over with. At the same time, you don’t want to rush through your taxes and miss some of the great deductions that are available to freelancers.

If it’s that time of year for you and you want to know where to start with your freelance business tax deductions, go through the following checklist to get many of those deductible expenses easily organized:

• Think of the items that you use daily for your job. Many of these are deductible. Your computer (including software and Internet), pens, postage, packaging and shipping supplies, business phone line, fax costs, business banking fees … anything that you use every single day as part of your business may be a business expense so make yourself a list.
• Now think of the one-time or irregular expenses that you used in your business in the past year. Books that you bought to learn more about the job that you do, work-related magazine subscriptions, websites that you signed up for to search for jobs, classes that you took for freelancing, networking or association membership fees that relate to your business.
• Consider your transportation costs. You may work from home but you certainly have to sometimes go somewhere for your job. Maybe you have to do on-site or in-library research, perhaps you attend occasional meetings, maybe you took a trip that you used in your work. All of these may be deductible business expenses.
• Figure out if you had any work expenses that fall in to the category of business gifts. If you sent out Christmas cards to your clients or if you covered lunch when you met with a new project partner, those might be deductible expenses.
• Look around at where you work. If you have an office set up in your home, you can actually deduct a portion of your home mortgage and utility costs as part of your freelance business expenses.
• Finally, look at personal expenses that may be deductible from your business. The biggest one in this area is your health insurance; if you are privately insured, this is deductible from your freelance income.

Tax time can be a hectic time of year for freelancers but it doesn’t have to be stressful. Stay organized, make lists for each of the above categories and set aside a full day of work just to deal with your taxes. Before you know it, the season will be over and you can go on to earning the money that you’ll need to figure out at this time next year!

Any suggestions, ideas? Feel free to comment on this article!

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Adding color to your webpage scrollbar adds a little flavor to your page. It also gives you the power to match the scrollbar with your website’s design colors! Now there are different parts to the scrollbar so please take a look at the diagram below:

Now that you have an understanding of the different parts of a scrollbar it’s time to add the necessary code to colorize them! Place the following code between the <head> </head> tags on your page:

<style type=”text/css”>
body {
scrollbar-3dlight-color: ;
scrollbar-arrow-color: ;
scrollbar-DarkShadow-Color: ;
scrollbar-Face-Color: ;
scrollbar-Highlight-Color: ;
scrollbar-Shadow-Color: ;
scrollbar-Track-Color: ;
}
</style>

You can use either a hex value or the name for the color of your choice. Just type either the hex value or name next to each part of the scrollbar. For example, if you want the arrow color to be white it would be:

scrollbar-arrow-color: white; (name)
scrollbar-arrow-color: #FFFFFF; (hex value)

NOTE: Scrollbar colors do not work on all browsers.

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If you work from home either full-time or part-time, you might find that you have trouble keeping yourself on task. For some people, this is an all-around problem but for most of us, there are just one or two things that really get us off track. Identifying that these things are problems for us and then choosing to do something about the problem can help get us back on task and able to work from home more efficiently. This leaves us more time to actually enjoy doing the things that we do from home that aren’t work. Separating work tasks and other home life in this way can make it much easier to enjoy the benefits of working from home.

So, the first step is identifying what it is that takes you away from the tasks at hand. Even if you don’t think that you have a huge task management problem, you should spend a day paying close attention to what you do with your time. You’d be surprised at how much productivity is lost each day by getting sidetracked while you’re trying to get work done. Make mental or actual notes about everything you do during one day of working from home and pay attention to how much time is spent on each. Then you can ask yourself if you really need to spend your time in that way.

For me, there were two big distractions which were constantly taking my mind off of my work focus: email and IM. I had my instant message programs running all day and had them set so that I would receive notifications every time that I received new email. This seemed great because if a client needed me, they could hop online and ask me a quick question and get an immediate response. I thought that it was benefiting my business. But then I realized how many times I ended up embroiled in IM conversations that went on longer than they needed to or caught up answering email that was more personal than work-related. More than this, I realized that even quick disturbances would cause me to lose focus and I’d have to take time to get back on track.

Even after I’d realized that this was a problem, I kept it up for awhile, because I genuinely believed that there was work I’d miss out on if I wasn’t getting immediate notifications. Finally, I set up a new email account and gave the address only to the few clients whose work was important enough to warrant taking time out of my day to give them attention. I then set my IM to only notify me when that particular account received email. I was able to stay on top of those important tasks without compromising the rest of my work day.

For some people, IM and email are not the problem, but most people who work from home have the distraction that regularly gets them off task. The phone is it for some people; it rings and they feel like they have to answer it and then they get sidetracked. For others, it is family knocking on the door or friends who show up in the middle of the day to “grab a quick bite�. And of course, the self is sometimes the biggest enemy to staying on task; you get up and wander through the house, look out the window, make something to eat, check the TV really quickly.

Whatever your distraction is, the first step is to identify it. The next is to commit to changing it. And then you can put the plan into action by eliminating the distraction. This can mean turning off the IM programs or the phone, setting appropriate boundaries with family and friends or absolutely insisting to yourself that you stay on track for a certain amount of time. Being organized with your time, sticking to commitments you make to yourself about when certain things will get done and rewarding yourself by making your “at home free time� completely work-free will all lead to a more positive and more productive work-from-home environment.

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The number of freelancers has gone up considerably just in the last decade as a direct result of the new possibilities available in terms of remote communication. With rapid internet, IM group chat capabilities, eFax options, and the popularity of jobs which can be done virtually (such as blog writing or graphic design consulting), the work opportunities for freelance employees have become widespread enough to be keeping plenty of professionals happy in their self-employed careers. Amazingly, despite how common it is today for people to do freelance work either part-time or full-time, the freelancer’s job is one which is often not taken seriously by others. One of the most frustrating experiences as a freelancer can be when the work already done is not taken seriously enough by the client to be paid out regularly and in a timely manner.

Unfortunately, there are many people out there who continue to believe that freelance work is somehow less professional than in-office work. Because of this, many clients and employers take the attitude that they don’t need to compensate you enough or on a regular basis for the work that you have done. Other times, because of the sometimes laidback approach that the freelance relationship takes, the lack of payment can be just an oversight from the client. As you struggle to get your bills paid, this can be a trying experience. But, the good news is that it’s surprisingly easy to get paid for your freelance work if you make a few changes to your approach.

First of all, the change needs to start with your own attitude towards your work and your money. Many freelancers have an internal voice (or an external one!) telling them that they don’t do “real work�. If any little part of you believes this, you aren’t going to present yourself in a way that demands to be paid on time and enough for the work that you are doing. Do whatever it takes, whether it’s getting external validation from a mentor in the field or saying meditational affirmations each day, to make sure that you actually internally feel that your work is valuable and that you deserve to be paid for it. This internal feeling will shine out through you and actually alter how others deal with you in terms of making your payments.

Secondly, present yourself as a professional. It can be tempting to have a casual connection with the people you do freelance work for. This is especially true if you are working primarily online because of the more casual nature of email and chat conversations in comparison with in-person meetings. However, if your clients see you as their friendly email buddy, they aren’t going to feel compelled to rush to pay you. Make sure that your online persona is professional. Do this in little ways as well as big ones. For example, use a screen name and email for your work which isn’t cutesy; sure “hott_writer_lady� is what your friends know you as online but your client is a lot less likely to take your work seriously with a screen name like that one.

Presenting yourself professionally also means being organized and invoicing your clients regularly. Act as if you are the accountant you would pay if you could afford to hire one. Set aside a particular day of each month, such as the 1st, to invoice all of your clients. Use a professional template which includes the date that the work was done, the assignment, the rate and the total owed. Send this out to each client who owes you money every single month. If you have a client who is often late in paying you, you can add a “Date Due� line on your invoice and mark it “Past Due� when it has not yet been paid. This gets the attention of a surprising number of clients and really limits the amount of people who are not paying you in a timely manner.

If you really have difficulty getting paid as a freelancer and you aren’t able to put in the organized, professional persistence to make sure that you’re getting your money’s worth, you might want to consider hiring a professional to handle the money end of your work. Since you probably only need someone one or two days out of the month, this is unlikely to cost you an excessive amount of money and can actually increase your profits because you’ll be getting paid by clients and won’t be spending time on hunting down money.

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WordPress Plugin for Bengali WordPressians allows you to write in Unijoy, Phonetic and Plain English mode.

Category Order by Usage allows you to order categories based on the number of posts that they contain.

Login Anywhere allows you to insert a login form anywhere in your blog (header, sidebar, etc.) by adding a function call to wherever you want the code to be generated. If the user is logged in, it will give them the option to logout.

Trackback List creates two functions that can be used to display the list of sites that link to your post (or page).

With FAQ-Tastic you can make single page FAQs or an index Page with a question list linking to answer Pages.

Enhanced Contact Form adds a contact form to your site. Inbuilt spam protection and ability to send CCs.

NoIndex Feed prevents Yahoo! and Google from indexing a feed by adding a noindex meta tag to a feed.

Mint Popular Posts uses information recorded by the Mint stats program (paid) to output a list of the most popular posts.

post2pdf converts all your posts in pdf files ready to download.

Comment Email Responder provides a simple method to automatically email commenters whenever the blog’s administrator responds to their comments.

Comment Rankings displays stars in a post’s comments next to the comment’s author. Each star represented 10 comments that the author had made on the blog so far.

List Subpages with Description lists a WordPress Page’s subpages in an unordered list with a description of each one.

Block Countries uses the IP2Country database to easily enable you to block certain countries from your blog.

Availability Calendar and Booking Management provides property booking management functionality to the administration area of WordPress and can output a fully customisable availability calendar, as well as public and private RSS and iCal feeds.

DF FileConf is a plugin to be used when you are moving your blog to a different url. DF FileConf prevents the configuration update until you are confident that your changes are correct.

hiClip Webcam Plugin allows you to record and publish video/audio with your webcam in WordPress admin panel. (Page in German)

DDay allows you to set unlimited event countdowns to or countups from an event. (Page in French)

It’s come time again to do your taxes and you’ve discovered a pleasant surprise which turns out to be something of a mixed blessing. Although the bulk of your income comes from your “regular� job, when you sat down to look at what you earned this past year, you were surprised to see that you actually made some money from the freelance work that you were doing. This is thrilling! As you look at the numbers, you begin to daydream about eventually quitting your “real� job and doing freelance work full time.

But eventually, you pull yourself out of your daydream, look at the mess of papers on your desk and realize that you have an issue to deal with. That issue is your taxes. More specifically, the issue is whether or not the freelance work that you used to do as “just a hobby� is now considered a freelance business. What you hope is that it is. Either way, if you earned money from freelancing, you have to count it as income on your taxes. But if your freelance work has crossed the line from hobby and can be considered a business, then you can also deduct some expenses on your taxes. That’s when you know you’ve made it as a freelancer!

So how do you know if the government considers your freelance work a hobby or a business? It’s kind of an iffy situation because it doesn’t come down to how much you earned from the work or whether you worked elsewhere fulltime. It’s a lot vaguer than that. But what it boils down to is that your freelance work is considered a business if you approach it as a business. This means that if you regularly apply for paid writing jobs, keep invoice sheets and organized records of your work and income and have set financial goals for yourself, then you consider your freelance work to be a part-time business and the government will as well.

So what if you haven’t done those things? Well, if you aren’t applying for paid jobs, then you can’t consider yourself a business. But if you do regularly apply for work, even if you don’t get it too often, then you’re trying to run a business and you can probably prove that. The best thing to do is get organized about your work. Keep records of where you apply and what jobs you do. Even if you only do a little bit of freelance work now and then, if you keep clear records and you make an effort to earn more income this year than next, you’ve got business written all over you. Not only does this mean that you can deduct normal business expenses from your taxes but it also means that the thing which was once your hobby is going to keep earning you more and more money as a business. How exciting is that?

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The World’s Most Advanced Keyboard.

PerfectStroke key system for the ultimate keyboard feel. Bluetooth wireless and Li-Ion powered. Stylishly sleek with its elegant charging base and backlit controls, the diNovo Edge makes a bold statement.

An ideal partner for any high-end computer, the ultra-slim Logitech diNovo Edge delivers the ultimate in feel and response. The revolutionary TouchDisc with hyper-speed scrolling and pixel-perfect control makes trackpads obsolete. A slim recharging base doubles as a keyboard stand. Work longer thanks to the
longer-lasting Li-Ion batteries, and more securely via Bluetooth wireless technology. Combine it with the world’s most advanced mouse, the Logitech MX
Revolution, for a premium desktop experience!

Premium Navigation Experience

The navigation features of the diNovo Edge keyboard are carefully designed to deliver premium performance, whether with a PC in the office or in the living
room — using Windows XP, Windows XP Media Center Edition, or the upcoming Windows Vista operating system. For example, the keyboard has a special start
key that launches the Vista start menu, and an F-key search button provides one-touch access to Vista´s search feature.

The keyboard includes the first-of-its-kind touch-sensitive TouchDisc, which enables people to scroll and navigate a graphical user interface without having
to reach for a mouse — perfect for leaning back from the desk, for making a small adjustment when working at the desk, or for using a media PC in the living
room. Moving a finger up and down or across the disc moves the cursor on the computer screen, and moving the finger in a circular motion around the perimeter
of the TouchDisc enables people to scroll horizontally and vertically through documents.

Located above the TouchDisc, the keyboard´s touch-sensitive volume slider makes it easy to quickly adjust the computer´s volume. And on the left-hand side
of the keyboard, three zoom buttons — zoom in, zoom out, and 100 percent view — enable people to navigate and edit digital photos with ease. A pointer button,
used with the TouchDisc, enables two-hand navigation.

The Ultimate Typing Experience

With the diNovo Edge, each keystroke feels fluid and stable with Logitech´s PerfectStroke key system, featuring precision micro-scissor mechanisms that
distribute force evenly across key surfaces. On many keyboards, when pressure is applied to a key´s edge, the key sticks and requires more force to engage. On
the diNovo Edge, whether one pushes the center of the key or one of the key´s edges, the keystroke feels the same. Logitech also has carefully calibrated the
tension and travel required for keystrokes, optimizing each specification to deliver the best performance.

Advanced Wireless Technology

With Bluetooth wireless technology, the diNovo Edge can connect directly, without the included USB micro-receiver, to PCs that have built-in Bluetooth technology. For computers without built-in Bluetooth technology, people need only plug in the micro-receiver to a USB port to connect the keyboard to the PC; the keyboard and receiver are pre-paired during manufacturing so that they automatically connect when plugged in.

Bluetooth wireless technology provides the keyboard with a longer range (up to 10 meters, or 33 feet) than for many cordless keyboards — important for use
in the living room.

Stylish Recharging Stand

The rechargeable diNovo Edge comes with a stylish stand that serves as both a recharging station and a display base; when inserted in the stand, the keyboard
rests perpendicular to the desk, showing off its slim design and freeing up valuable desk space. A two-hour charge yields up to two months of battery life.

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The best areas to place advertising can vary from page to page and it depends on the type of content and layout you have. But one element that all websites have in common is a header and it’s the first thing that visitors usually see. For that reason, it’s a great spot to place advertisements.

If you’re following the new trend to lay out your site with CSS, you’re not using tables. So how do you position the ad in a specific area? Let’s learn how to absolutely position an ad!

STEP ONE

Let’s say we have a header image that’s 800 pixels wide and 140 pixels tall. (The following image isn’t that size as you can tell but let’s pretend!)

STEP TWO

We’ll place it in a div called header and make it the background image. The CSS for that would be as follows:

#header {

height: 140px;

width: 800px;

background-image: url(images/header.gif);

position: relative;

}

The XHTML for that would be as follows:

<div id=”header”></div>

STEP THREE

Let’s say we have an ad that’s 234 pixels wide and 60 pixels tall. I want to place it in the bottom left corner of the header. I don’t want it to be right against the border so I want a bit of space in between the left and bottom sides.

STEP FOUR

We’ll place the advertisement in a div called ad. The CSS for that would be as follows:

#ad {

height: 60px;

width: 234px;

position: absolute;

left: 10px;

bottom: 10px;

}

The XHTML for that would be as follows:

<div id=”ad”></div>

Now let’s bring it all together by placing the ad inside the header:

<div id=”header”>

<div id=”ad”></div>

</div>

So how does it work? Good question. Let me point out the details of the CSS that makes it work:

#header {

height: 140px;

width: 800px;

background-image: url(images/header.gif);

position: relative;

}

#ad {

height: 60px;

width: 234px;

position: absolute;

left: 10px;

bottom: 10px;

}

Notice that the ad’s position is set to absolute and the header’s position is set to relative. What that means is that we want the ad to be absolutely positioned relative to where the header is.

We said the header was 800 pixels wide and 140 pixels tall. That means that the width of the header starts at 0 pixels and ends at 800 pixels. The height starts at 0 pixels and ends at 140 pixels.

Because we set the ad’s position of left and bottom to 10 pixels, the ad is positioned 10 pixels from the left and 10 pixels from the bottom of the header! Need a live example, check out the ad inside the header on this page!

NOTE: The options you have to position are top, right, bottom, and left. So if you wanted to position the ad in the top left, it would be top: 10px and left: 10px.

Go have some fun absolute positioning!

Any suggestions, ideas? Feel free to comment on this article!

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