Archive for March 21st, 2011

Happy Hour at Restaurants

Happy Hour at RestaurantsHappy hour at restaurants  is not really about home maintenance, but it is all about saving money so we thought that we would include this post on our blog. Many people are going on vacation in the spring and in the summer and although a vacation can be expensive, there are ways to control or decrease your costs.

One of those is to take advantage of Happy Hour offers at restaurants  when you go out for dinner. This approach may not appeal to everyone, however if you are looking for an inexpensive meal and do not mind eating early, you can save a lot of money and still have a nice time out with the family and friends. Prices can be half price for drinks or food or even for both at some locations. These deals can really make a huge difference in the cost of eating out.

Happy Hour at Restaurants – Times

Many restaurants experience a slow period from about 4 pm until 6:30 pm in the afternoons. After 6:30, more people will typically show up for dinner and have their evening meal. Many restaurants have decided to offer happy hour during this slow period in order to fill their restaurant and generate additional revenue as well during a period that typically would not make much money for the restaurant.

Every Body Wins

Customers get better deals on booze, which are often half price and also on smaller meals that are discounted or also at half price. Sometimes you must eat in the bar area, however there is nothing wrong with that since there is more going on in the bar area anyway. sometimes drinks will be at the regular price and appetizers will be half price or vice versa.

The restaurant makes money in a period that would otherwise be slow and they can keep their staff working longer as well so the staff makes more money and they make more tips. So really it is a good deal for all concerned.

In addition, patrons may be willing to try a restaurant during happy hour, find out that the enjoyed the menu and the ambiance of the restaurant. Returning patrons end up driving the overall business activity up and increasing revenues.

Not All Restaurants Offer Happy Hour

Every city has them, but not all restaurants offer happy hour every day or even at all. You have to look for them and watch for them. We will often go up to a receptionist in an area were there are a lot of restaurants and ask if they have a happy hour. If they do, great if not, we try some other place and they learn that customers are looking for deals and maybe they will get the idea to also offer a happy hour.

Some places have one specific day, such as wing Tuesdays, or even during football games. Once place we went to had beer on half price as long as there was a football game playing on TV. Great way to watch the game at a great location. Another location we visit has draft beer for $2 and pizza at the regular price on Mondays only. This is an excellent example of enticing your customers to try your pizza while having a beer and then those same customers may return on other days since they enjoyed the food so much.

Save Some Money

Check them out and save some money. You and your significant other can go out more often with the money you save. That always goes over well ! It is an evening out with no meals to cook and no dishes to wash which has many other advantages. We always enjoy going to happy hour and trying new restaurants. It helps us decide if we want to try their main courses at some future point.

There have been several locations that we would never go back to based on the poor food offered during happy hour. Or sometimes even the service we received from the staff. This is a great way to check these places out. You have to be careful when you order because not all items on the menu are included as part of the happy hour prices.


Is It Safe to Use Cellphones?

Is It Safe to Use CellphonesThis is a re-post of an article, which we felt would be interesting to many readers.  Is It Safe to Use Cellphones? Bottom line is, manage and limit your use of cell phones until the experts finally can come to a conclusion. Remember they said that cigarettes would not cause cancer and now it is a proven fact! Everyone is protecting their positions and avoiding admitting any obligation because of the money involved.

Is It Safe to Use Cellphones?

OTTAWA-Devra Davis recalls the moment six years ago when the seeds of her cellphone safety campaign were laid.

She was visiting her son and daughter-in-law, enjoying the sight of her grandson crawling on the floor. At one point he encountered a cellphone, reached for it and put it to his head. For most people such precocious conduct would earn an indulgent smile.

Davis, however, “shrieked, ‘no, no.’ My daughter-in-law looked at me like I’d lost my mind and asked what was the problem. I explained that you don’t want a microwave-emitting device next to a child’s brain.”

The shriek — perhaps an overreaction — was based on the American epidemiologist and toxicologist’s growing knowledge of the dangers of cellphone radiation.

That awareness has in recent years made Davis one of the foremost critics of the phone-making industry.

A Pending Health Crisis

She believes cellphone radiation is a pending public health crisis that, if not checked, will see a surge in brain cancers within the next decade.

“I am deeply concerned about the experiment we are conducting on our children and grandchildren,” says the author of Disconnect: The Truth about Cell Phone Radiation, What the Industry has Done to Hide It, and How to Protect Your Family. “People are putting iPhones that play white noise under the pillows of babies to help them sleep. iPhones and babies are a horrifying combination.”

Davis, who worked for many years at the United States National Academy for Sciences, where she founded the Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology, and, more recently, was director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh’s Cancer Institute, will be in

Davis, who has established the Environmental Health Trust, a non-profit organization that researches public health issues, acknowledges that cellphones already come with warnings that say users shouldn’t hold them on their bodies or next to their heads. But she points out that those warnings are buried deep in the fine print. People only find the warning after they’ve purchased the gadget.

Health Bills

Coincidentally, New Democratic MPP France Gélinas early this month proposed exactly that in a private member’s bill in the Ontario legislature. The would-be legislation flies in the face of claims by Health Canada, which sets the standards on cellphone safety, that Canadians need have no concerns about using the instrument.

Health Canada bureaucrats know not what they do, says Davis. “The whole area is a complex one of science and engineering, and most people, including physicians, politicians and those who set the standards, are ignorant about it. Yet they make recommendations about how to deal with this issue.”

To be sure, Davis admits that “the majority of human studies of cellphones and brain cancer find nothing.” But that, she says, is largely because of the limitations of studies themselves.

Brain cancer can take 40 years to develop after the first exposure to radiation, Davis says. All of the human studies of which she’s aware, including the Interphone study done a few years ago by the World Health Organization, only collected data on people who’d developed brain tumours between 2002 and 2004. It also defined a cellphone user as someone who made one call a week for six months. Even so, the WHO study concluded someone who used a cellphone for half-an-hour every day for 10 years had double the risk of developing giloma, a form of tumour that grows on the side of the head where the cellphone is commonly placed.

Assumptions

Davis argues that such assumptions about cellphone use are clearly inadequate considering the ubiquity of the gadget. Also the fact that many people, including children and teenagers, use their cellphones every day for hours on end.

A cellphone is basically a two-wave microwave radio that operates at the same frequency as a microwave oven. Digital signals are sent and received by antennas of the backs of the instruments. Nowadays, most everyone is exposed to cellphone radiation; worldwide cellphone subscriptions are in the five billion range.

Davis is particularly concerned about children’s use of cellphones. The depth of cellphone radiation penetration into the brain largely depends on the age and health of the person. Children are more vulnerable than adults because their skulls are thinner, allowing digital signals to penetrate deeper. They also have more fluid in the brains; the more fluid the easier the transmission of microwave radiation.

But, as Davis points out, industry safety standards for cellphones are based on now obsolete analog phones. Used about six minutes at a time by a user who was assumed to by a six-foot-two-inch man weighing some 200 pounds and with an 11-pound head. Not toddlers or tweens, who, as it seems, are perpetually attached to their gadgets. Hence exposed to constant low doses of microwave radiation.

Microwaves were long thought to be benign since as a type of non-ionizing radiation they weren’t sufficiently strong to removed electrons from atoms. Nevertheless, recent experiments suggest microwaves can do damage at the cellular level.

Damage to Sperm

“We now know that cellphone signals can damage sperm,” says Davis. “Studies have been done on sperm taken from healthy men. When sperm is exposed to cellphone radiation it dies three to four times faster than if it hasn’t been exposed.”

Similarly, studies on rats suggest a connection between exposure to cellphone radiation and mental functioning. Rats trained to find their way through a maze to a food source suddenly lose this ability. They can’t find their way back to the food,” as Davis puts it — after prolonged exposure to cellphone radiation. That, she says, suggests their memory was affected by the radiation.

All this leads Davis to worry that unless people are better informed about the hazards of cellphone use, and start to take precautions with the gadget — everything from using hands-free to keeping it away from you body by storing it in backpacks or purse — they may well pay a steep price later in life. Already, she says, “we are seeing cases of young men with brain tumours now showing up who have used cellphones exclusively for 10 or 15 years.”

“I fear we are watching an epidemic in slow motion.”

Dr. Devra Davis’s cellphone dos and don’ts

  • When talking try to keep your cellphone away from your body as much as possible. Store it in a backpack, purse or satchel.
  • Use a speaker phone or a wired headset. But don’t make the mistake of having the phone on your bod. It defeats the point of using the headset.
  • If you must carry it on your belt, turn the keypad toward your body. The antenna, in the back of the gadget, faces away from you, thus lessening the radiation dosage you receive.
  • Keep your cellphone away from you when you sleep. Don’t place it next to the bed or under the pillow.
  • When you don’t need it, turn it off, or at least place in airplane mode.
  • Pregnant women should avoid having a cellphone near their abdomen.
  • Encourage children to text rather than talk on a cellphone. In any case, children should only use a cellphone next to their heads in emergencies.
  • Don’t use a cellphone for conversations lasting more than a few minutes.
  • Switch sides in which you use a cellphone to spread out your exposure.

For more information about cell phone safety and cell phone insurance, click here.

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Buying Hardwood Flooring

Buying Hardwood FlooringAre interested in installing hardwood flooring in your home? It is a good idea that you  search many different suppliers, comparing quality and pricing. You can find everything you need with one hardwood floor provider. However you are taking a chance on paying too much. Some of the larger stores will have the largest inventories of hardwood flooring with great prices and quality. They have many different types of flooring available. They are often backed with a satisfaction guarantee. If you are not in a huge hurry, sometimes you can pick up sales. Sales can save you hundreds or thousands of dollars depending on quality and the size of the floor you are covering.

Buying Hardwood Flooring – Varieties of Hardwood Flooring

Hardwood floors come in many different forms and varieties, each with their own benefits. Wood flooring may be unfinished or pre-finished. Most people settle for pre-finished flooring these days. The width of the floor boards can vary with strip, plank or parquet flooring. Also, there are a large number of wood species that can be used. Each kind of wood comes with its own characteristics and grades. We chose our flooring based on what we liked in terms of color, texture and the overall look that the floor would contribute to our home. To some extent we matched it to our existing decor as well. We did not want have to change many things in their home.

The variation in flooring doesn’t end there as there are various cuts, finishes and recycled or reclaimed woods. There is a lot to consider when finding ideal flooring. However if you shop around you can usually find something that meets your requirements and will not break the bank.

Alternatives to Hardwood Flooring

As an alternative to hardwood flooring, laminate flooring should be looked at. Laminate flooring is not true hardwood but is made from a dense fiberboard covered in a patterned paper layer under high pressure. You can tell the difference between laminate flooring and true hardwood flooring. The knots and grain patterns of the wood will be repetitive and this surface does not age in the same way as real wood. The advantages of laminate are essentially in cost and durability. Laminate is resistant to denting and stands up to high traffic areas.

It is important to note that you generally cannot refinish laminate flooring in the same manner that you would refinish hardwood flooring.

New Style Hardwood Floors

A relatively new style of floor you can find with many suppliers of  hardwood floors is bamboo flooring. Bamboo is extremely strong, durable, dimensionally stable and environmentally friendly. It can be re-grown quickly with little fertilizer. You will find low prices on all of these flooring types at Lumber Liquidators hardwood floor.

Many flooring companies will provide samples that you can take home and visualize what your new floor will look like. Sometimes even with a sample it is still really difficult to get a good idea of what the floor will look like once it is installed. In some cases the hardwood flooring store may be able to arrange for you to see another customers home with the same flooring. Many customers are more than happy to show off their homes when they have just acquired a new hardwood floor. If you are fortunate enough to be able to take advantage of an offer like this, always be very complimentary. Thank the owners for their time and allowing you to take a look inside their home. They are going out of their way to let you view the final results so it is the time to show your appreciation.

One of the important things to do as well is to talk to your friends and colleagues who may be able to give you tips on buying hardwood flooring, pricing and installation. Readers are welcome to leave their comments about their experience with hardwood flooring to help our readers.

For more details about hardwood floor selection, click here.

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High Performance Tires

In the early 1980’s Goodyear Tire prepared a few high performance tires for high performance cars, mostly the Chevrolet Corvette. The tire’s roots were based in formula one racing which demanded a tire that could withstand high speeds for an extended period and deliver excellent traction at those speeds. The tire’s design was very different from most passenger car tires and was an overnight victory with devotees of the race car.

The tire featured a low profile side wall, large tread blocks for good dry traction grip, a very stiff sidewall and a nylon cap over the steel belts to hold the tire together at high speeds. The tire received a unique sidewall rating and it was designated with a “V” which meant the tire had been safely tested in the laboratory to stay together at speeds as high as 149 mph. This is the first time the high performance tire was made in America and they were here to stay in America.

Cost of High Performance Tires

This tire was an instant hit and were also very costly, even by today’s standards. It was not uncommon for them to cost over $200.00 each. This was an immense price for a tire considering the average tire cost around $45.00 at the time. Even today, high performance tires are much more expensive and consumers are still being hit with a surprise when it comes to replacing their tires.

Since then however, the high performance tire has made its way onto almost every modern car. This is because automobile manufacturers found that high performance tires helped cars handle better. They corner better, stop better, steer better, were safer and worked well with anti-lock brake technology. These tires also appealed to the public’s imagination and romance. Many people wanted to have high performance tires. Because it made them feel a little better than the average driver who just drove his car on regular tires.

Touring Tires

During this time tire manufacturers began to produce a multitude of intermediate high performance tire known as “touring” tires which were designed to accede to high performance demands and lessen ride and wear issues. Within a few years, there was an entire list of high performance tire categories. Which include Ultra-high performance, performance, touring, cosmetic performance, touring performance, etc.

As technology advanced, automobile manufacturers began to equip nearly everything with a performance tire. Even the mini van because of one simple reason. They help sell cars because they are attractive. Also because of the benefits they add to the cars steering and braking.

The problem of this was that a consumer would buy a family sedan. Then end up unexpectedly having to pay up to $700 dollars for replacement tires. Performance tires in Canada are even more expensive with the same tires costing up to $300 more for a set of 4 tires.  This creates problems because consumers don’t want to pay. Because they don’t believe they are “performance” drivers. So, instead of replacing them, they end up driving on bald tires.

But the fact is that we are all performance drivers. Everyone profits from performance tires. They are safer, stop better, react quicker, steer better and are less likely to blow out on the highway. They react and work better with modern car systems. It is a good idea to look into getting performance tires, if not for your flashy sports car, at least for your own safety.

For more sports car information, click here.

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