What is the hottest pet right now? Apparently all the rage right now is Teacup sized Pot Belly Pigs. Teacup size? Yes, that’s right. Here are a few pictures of them. They are also called “micro mini pot belly pigs” or just “micro minis”. The bottom line is that they’re actually a mini version of the pot belly pig.

They are so small, how could you not love them? Certainly there may still be issues with your local laws and regulations, as some cities do not allow you to have farm animals. Some draw the line at what they call “split hooves”. Any animal that has “split hooves” like a pig, a goat, a sheep, aren’t allowed as pets.

Would you like to have a teacup potbelly pig as a pet?

As you might imagine (well, as I might imagine, actually), I know that here in Texas our air conditioning unit, the HVAC unit is definitely something that costs us a lot of money in electric bills every month. Granted, there are a few months each year when we are actually able to open up our windows and air the house out a bit, and not rely on air conditioning or the heat.

Technology is getting closer and closer to making sense when it comes to our electric bills: you can now get what is called “solar assisted” air conditioning, and I hear that Lennox is one of the first companies to actually offer it.

Why didn’t they think of this before? We have had solar power for a while now, but we actually now can power our air conditioner (well, at least partially).

Business Continuity Planning, in business, is the creation and validation of a practiced logistical plan for how an organization will recover and restore partially or completely interrupted critical (urgent) functions within a predetermined time after a disaster or extended disruption. The logistical plan is called a business continuity plan.

On August 27th, Business Continuity Management experts will discuss trends in the profession and explore an advanced three-in-one approach to business continuity management. You can register for this August 27th webcast: http://www.archer.com/events/webcasts/bcm.html

Archer Technologies provides out-of-the-box GRC solutions that provide the foundation for a best-in-class enterprise governance, risk and compliance program. Archer Technologies offers many different types of solutions for business, including Compliance Management, Vendor Management, Threat Management, Policy Management, Risk Management, Business Continuity Management, Audit Management, Incident Management, Enterprise Management, and Asset Management enterprise solutions.

Alright, someone just sent me a photo of this one handed cutting board that is really for Swedish Chefs. But I think I could definitely use it to multi-task. How about fixing some dinner and cutting up the chicken while you Tweet on Twitter?

I know that this thing is really for those who cannot steady themselves the right way to use “normal” cutting board. Seriously, if you need one of these you should stay away from sharp knives altogether, especially if you are using a normal cutting board.

If you know me or have seen me in person you probably know that I love to eat great food: and if you give me something like this one handed cutting board so I can tweet and cook dinner, well, watch out!

WikiCity has launched a new type of online community — localized content serving over 22,000 cities, towns, and villages across the U.S. — created by, controlled by, and edited by local citizen journalists.

WikiCity is a project designed to make communities accessible, defining each not just as a dot on a map or a collection of statistics, but as a chorus of raucous, opinionated citizens falling in love with their hometown all over again. Much like Wikipedia, WikiCity is a free wiki, and anyone can contribute. However, WikiCity is different because it is designed to promote local community, commerce, tourism, and everyday life within the towns it serves – thus welcoming content that it typically not suited for Wikipedia.

Local businesses, blogs, and community organizations are encouraged to contribute articles for their organizations which, if written in an objective and unbiased tone, can be a very effective online marketing tool. An extensive series of help articles explain how wikis work and make it easy to add or edit any of WikiCity’s 12 million pages.

Founded in late 2008 by Pat Lazure and Rohit Keshwani, WikiCity provides unique local content on places, events, and people who would be of interest to those associated with any of its 22,000 U.S. towns.
WikiCity is located at www.WikiCity.com.

There’s a new movie by Pixar and Disney called “Up!”, which is about a guy who uses thousands of balloons and lifts up his house.

Here are a few of movie trailers, there are also free tickets available if you go to a Home Carpet One location.

“Up,” the latest lovely fantasy from the artists at Disney’s Pixar animation, it’s a truly fantastic adventure — a lighter-than-air daydream about a cranky widower (the voice of Ed Asner), a chubby boy and their amazing journey.

No matter what else is released this year, at least one Best Animated Feature nomination — if not the winner — is already picked out.

“Up” has a delightful prologue, set in the ’30s, and the sort of slam-bang chase scene at the end that used to mark the “Wallace and Gromit” stories. It’s a delight much throughout.

What’s true genius, though, is a sequence about four minutes in, where Carl and Ellie — the children at the beginning of the film — grow up, get married and grow elderly. It’s pure, visual filmmaking, without a word spoken — the haunting music of Michael Giacchino — and it’ll be talked about the way the first half-hour of “WALL-E” was discussed.

The story — from co-director Bob Peterson, who also wrote “Finding Nemo” — has the elegant simplicity of a children’s image book, . Forced to leave his house, a lonely retiree decides simply to take it with him. So, after tying thousands of balloons to it, they flies off to Peru — not realizing, unfortunately, that they has an 8-year-old stowaway on board, intent on earning his Wilderness Explorer badge.

The rest of this movie isn’t at that perfect peak, but it’s still great fun and inventive animation. Unlike most cartoons, which go for cutesy caricature, this one is practically a geometry lesson; ornery elderly man Carl is all squares and rectangles, pesky pudgy Russell a rolling mass of circles and ovals.

For those of you still feeling sore over your disappointment in elderly man california Jones from last summer’s Crystal Skull movie, Up is here to soothe your pain. finally the movie about a geriatric explorer we’ve been waiting for!

Ed Asner provides Carl’s voice and young Jordan Nagai does Russell’s, and they’re both effortlessly believable. Delightfully different, . I mean, look at them. A grumpy elderly man and a chunky Asian-American kid — these are not a big studio’s typical heroes.

Carl always promised Ellie that he’d take her to Paradise Falls, the remote South American location where Charles Muntz disappeared to, vowing seldom to return unless they could prove the elusive giant bird they had discovered was for real. Life, however, gets in the way, and flash forward to elderly age, where a senior Carl has lost his wife, progress is threatening his home, and the world has lost most of its magic. than give in or give up, Carl attaches a ton of helium-filled balloons to the house they shared with his wife, to lift it off the ground so that they can float it down to Venezuela. Only wrinkle: he’s accidentally taken pudgy Wilderness Scout Russell (Jordan Nagai) along with him. The boy is a motor-mouthed helper whose help is generally more of a hindrance, but whom Carl is stuck with nonetheless. Both of the fellows have abandonment issues, and they are going to need one another if they’re ever to get over them.

I’m not joking. It struck me about 2/3 through this new Pixar outing, a extraordinary and smart amalgam of comedy, adventure, and some heart-rending pathos. The hero of the film, the older than dirt, loveable curmudgeon Carl Fredricksen (voiced by Ed Asner), is living the childhood dream of somebody who ever watched an action serial or dreamed of visiting faraway places in search of wonder. That was his dream, , and the movie even tells us so, opening with the childhood version of Carl oohing and ahhhhing over the newsreel reports of the ups and downs of zeppelin-flying, canine-loving explorer Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer). The desire for thrills in distant lands also bonds the boy with Ellie, a gap-toothed girl (voiced by the director’s daughter, Elie Docter) who grows in to the love of his life.

The two put the elderly house down in the proximity of Paradise Falls, though on the wrong side of the ravine. Thus, they are tasked with dragging it to the right spot before the balloons lose their buoyancy completely–and therein begins the adventure. extraordinary birds, talking dogs, and dusty elderly secrets wait for them in the jungle. So does humor, smart concepts, and more tricky twists than most studios can squeeze out of an entire summer. Pixar always manages to wring the most out of every film. , they should teach a class. they even manage to do it without resorting to cheap pop culture moments that have long passed their sell-by date or treacly song and dance numbers. Seriously, Pixar, teach a class! The other guys need your help!

Directed by Pete Docter (Monsters Inc.) with Bob Peterson, both of whom also get writing credits, Up is a movie that would take pages to explain, and even then, I’d not have covered it all. Nor will i have done it–or you–justice. It’s best to go to the theater, get comfortable, and let the movie run. It’s a film so daring, so surprising, each new unpredictable turn makes the adventure all the more thrilling. Which is exactly the point of the movie–be prepared for whatever may come and do your best to enjoy it when it does. This means the nice and the bad, the funny and the sad. In fact, the first ten minutes of Up features a number of the most endearing and heartbreaking material I’ve seen in lots of a year. If you don’t have a lump in your throat when Carl takes his single chair out on his porch, you might as well get up and go, the rest of it is going to be wasted on you.

like all the Pixar films, Up is preceded by a short subject cartoon. Peter Sohn’s “Partly Cloudy” is as cleverly designed as the main feature, and often as funny, but it is riddled through with the “awww” factor. The story follows a merry band of storks back to the skies where benevolent clouds make little puppies and kitties and other newborns for them to deliver. Of work, somebody also has to make the dangerous kids, the little alligators and the like, and it’s from that notion that Sohn creates this endearing comedy. Less a gutbuster than some previous efforts, but no less memorable. (Sohn is a first-time director, though moviegoers do know him as the voice of Emile in Ratatouille.)

As always, the animation in Up is flawless. Pixar has gotten so nice at what they do, it’s ceased to need the viewer to stop and marvel at their artistic efforts. The magic is engrossing, the curtain is seldom visible. Well, except for the 3-D. I’ve already grown tired of this fad, I’ll admit. Sure, it looks fantastic, and thankfully, it’s used sparingly in Up, but there’s times where it’s much flash, where the story gets run off the road because I’m busy looking at the passing scenery.

I know beating the Pixar drum is becoming the predictable move anymore, but the animation studio makes it easy by making their movies so undeniably nice. they could easily coast at this point, and it would be as easy to take them for granted, but one seldom gets the impression that the team has opted for the simple solution. Every frame of Up is thought through to the finest detail, and every behavior, be it human, dog, or what have you, carefully observed and replicated. The story is massaged in such a way that all of the required elements are in place, but so that the functionality is seldom obvious. Above all else, the folks putting it together seldom forget that entertainment is job one. Up is wonderfully inventive and original, crackling from start to finish with the same spirit of daring its characters are meant to find in their travels. I suppose you could not like it if you wanted to, but why would you need to?

Pixar has always been in the business of telling human stories. Woody and Buzz were toys, but their struggles with friendship and their fears of obsolescence were instantly relatable. The Incredibles may have been superpowered but their insecurities were all real. Ratatouille’s Remy the rat embodied every underappreciated artist, Marlin the fish every overprotective brother, and WALL-E every hopeless romantic.

In their latest venture, Up (in theaters May 29th), Disney/Pixar finally sheds these anthropomorphic and archetypical avatars to tell the story of Carl Fredrickson, an elderly man who lived a average life. After his wife passes away, they decides to realize their dream of moving to the wilderness of Venezuela, and so attaches a kaleidoscopic squadron of balloons to his house to float up and out of his urban environs. Of work, unbeknownst to him, they has himself a stowaway in the form of a chipper young Wilderness Explorer named Russell.

they make it to South America, but must trek through the jungle and mountainous terrain to make it to Paradise Falls, on top of which Carl and his wife always hoped to live. On the way, they find themselves embroiled in scads of adventure of the deliciously pulpy variety, with sneering villains and giant dirigibles, but even as the story gets increasingly outrageous and the action more intense, the characters remain firmly grounded in reality. they are beset by packs of vicious dogs, dangerous thunderheads and a series of precipitous heights, but the real obstacles they must overcome are those of loss, abandonment and fear. Carl is one of the most three-dimensional 3D-animated characters ever put to screen. That, and the fact that much of the violence is surprisingly un-cartoony, provides the film with a few moments of genuine peril.

Up is above all a film that revels in visual storytelling. Like Pixar’s previous robotic protagonist, the young Carl at the start barely speaks, and an early wordless montage guides us through his entire life with tremendous poignancy and economy. The premise and locales permit for some breathtaking imagery of the helium-buoyed house floating across azure skies and over jutting geological landscapes. six times people start talking, the humor is enjoyable and the voice-work all top notch. Ed Asner imparts his character with a Lou Grant lovable gruffness, while Jordan Nagai’s lack of professional experience helps to give the young Russell an endearing layer of believability.

The odd couple humor and the never-too-late moralizing one would expect are there, but, as per usual with Pixar, things are much more complex and satisfying than at first glance. The house, at first a symbol of untethered possibility and hope, quickly becomes a burden, loaded down with nostalgic and metaphorical weight as Carl gradually realizes that achieving his lifelong dream may not be as important as the life they spent dreaming it and the people they dreamt it with. Co-directors Pete Docter (Monsters, Inc.) and Bob Peterson provide some emotional moments, but they always feel more genuine than saccharine, and while it is easy to identify early on the talismans that will later be reaped for full sentimental effect, by the time it reaches that point, it’s been earned.

Admittedly, a number of the action scenes are not as exciting as, say, those in The Incredibles, but that is kind of the point. Here, a life of exploits and derring-do is no more valuable than one of picnics and morning rituals, and if you are so focused on what you are going to do, you tend to lose sight of what you’ve already done. Up is a vibrant and adventurous film that, all the while, advises us on the unexpected beauty of mundanity and the fact that home has little to do with location.

Has there ever been a company with Pixar’s unqualified success rate?

brilliantly , their secret seems to be as straightforward as the projects are complex: they simply refuse to underestimate their audience.

While their latest achievement can’t one-up “WALL-E,” it offers soaring highs that are bound to enchant viewers of any age.

Where most animated films pander to children and wink at adults, the Pixar geniuses assume we’re all equals, and equally deserving of the best they can generate.

In an exquisite montage, they watch Carl and Ellie grow up, fall in love, and settle down. But their fairytale romance includes some real heartbreaks, and unfulfilled dreams.

From title to trailers, “Up” appears to be light as air. But there’s an unapologetically dark streak to this story, which begins when two young adventurers meet in the 1930s.

Carl travels by air, and like the rest of the beautifully-rendered 3-D images, his takeoff is worth your ticket price alone. Affixing thousands of multihued balloons to his house, they lifts off and enters the sky, only to discover a stowaway: Russell (Jordan Nagai), a neglected 8-year-old who could use a brother figure.

Saddest of all is the day Carl (voiced by Ed Asner) is left a widower. To honor his beloved, they decides to visit South America, as they’d always planned.

The dogs belong to Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer), an explorer obsessively determined to capture the bird. As soon as you see this adorable creature, you’ll understand why Russell refuses to let that happen.

Being a cranky loner, Carl has no use for company. Russell, however, isn’t the kind of kid to take a hint. six times in South America, they’re beset by a pack of furious dogs hunting a rare, ostrich-like bird.

Every detail, from the hairs on Carl’s chin to the lovely, lingering score, has been tended to by a Pixar perfectionist.

Filmmakers Pete Docter and Bob Peterson find a near-ideal balance between sweetness and sentimentality (though parents should definitely take that PG rating to heart).

If there’s any oversight, it’s that girls will find themselves curiously underrepresented in yet another of Pixar’s grand adventures.

The company does such an extraordinary job making movies for everyone. Shouldn’t they be about everyone, ?

Lead Maverick, Inc. has launched new company brand called “Ecordia”. This new brand name serves as the master brand for all of the company’s SEO content optimization products.

“We are very excited about our new Ecordia brand,” says Sean Jackson, CEO of Ecordia. Sean continues, “This master brand name serves as a focal point for our company’s content optimization product line and provides a unique position for our company within the search engine optimization (SEO) industry.”

The new Ecordia brand name will be used throughout the Ecordia content optimization product suite including:

Ecordia Content Hub – a content distribution system for the creation, publishing and management of search engine optimized (SEO) content. Ecordia Content Optimizer – an SEO content optimization analysis tool that optimizes content prior to publishing. Ecordia Search Tags – semantic search terms that are added to large websites to improve the “findability” of content in search engines.

The company is still incorporated as Lead Maverick, Inc. and will not change the legal name of the business. References to Lead Maverick on the web are in the process of being updated.

In addition to the launch of the new Ecordia brand, the company also announced the release of version 3.7 of its Ecordia Content Hub. This new release includes integration with the ShareThis API as well as several improvements to the user interface.

www.Ecordia.com

Bunchball, a marketing technology company, announced today a significant expansion of its leadership team with the addition of Amy Richards as Senior Vice President of Product Marketing, joining from Google; and David Tyler as Senior Vice President of Sales, joining from WeeWorld. The company, which this month moved into more expansive offices in Silicon Valley, is experiencing rapid growth and continues to attract and retain talent as it expands, despite the challenging economy.

An expert in publisher monetization through her work at Google, Yahoo!, MatchLogic and Excite, Amy Richards has been instrumental in building businesses that have shaped the evolution of online advertising since its inception. Amy’s work in crafting solutions for publishers and advertisers is exemplified by her leadership in introducing the DoubleClick Ad Exchange to the publisher market, achieving quick adoption of the first ever premium ad exchange and driving a shift in the way publishers manage their ad revenue streams. Acquired by Google in 2008, the Ad Exchange is now a primary strategic focus for the company.

Prior to that, Amy led the development of advertising solutions for Yahoo!, positioning the company as the industry standard for connecting marketers with audiences during its most successful era in display media sales. In years prior, Amy brought technologies and insights to publishers in strategic roles at MatchLogic and her own consulting practice. Designing advertising and inventory programs at Excite, Amy was vital in scaling the ad sales business from three search engines to the single largest distributed content network on the Web.

DeepDyve has released a trio of free tools that allows you to add powerful search capabilities for a more compelling user experience. The tools announced today complement the company’s recently announced suite of Publisher tools which utilize DeepDyve’s search technology to make publisher content more findable from anywhere on the web.

DeepDyve’s new tools enable websites and bloggers to quickly and easily display related articles and search results directly within their sites and blog posts. Visitors can now discover new, authoritative information seamlessly as they read and browse through websites that utilize DeepDyve’s technology. The following tools can be implemented simply by copying/pasting a few lines of code into the site, or by installing a WordPress plug-in:

The More Like This Content API automatically displays results from DeepDyve that are similar to the information displayed on the current page. It is designed for use by any website that would like to include a ‘related articles’ functionality, regardless of whether their content has been indexed by DeepDyve. To implement the API, go to:

DeepDyve’s Content Highlight Widget enables websites to integrate search with their users’ normal reading and browsing behavior. Visitors can highlight any block of text up to 5,000 characters in length, and run that selection as a query with a single click. To learn more, please visit: www.deepdyve.com/corp/widgets/highlight_widget

DeepDyve’s WordPress plug-in allows bloggers using this popular platform to automatically include links to related articles directly in their blogs. The plug-in utilizes DeepDyve’s “More Like This” technology to use the text of the blog as a query and return relevant search results. Visitors will benefit as they get additional information to further explore a topic and find more value in the blog that they are reading. For more information, please visit: http://www.deepdyve.com/corp/widgets/wordpress

All of the tools announced today are available for free. Interested parties are invited to learn more about these products by visiting www.deepdyve.com/corp/widgets

With Edward Liddy’s announcement late yesterday that he will step down as the interim CEO of AIG as soon as a successor is found, the question on everybody’s mind is, “Who, in his/her right mind, would actually take the helm of the insurance giant that is still struggling to survive after its near collapse just eight months ago?”

“It will probably easier than people think to find a successor,” said John A. Challenger, chief executive officer of global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.  “If Liddy was there to stabilize the ship after it nearly sank, then the next person will have the task of rebuilding the company’s reputation and profits.  There are people out there willing to take on that challenge.”

“Whoever takes over will have a lot of issues to address.  At least one lawsuit as already been filed, and more are sure to come; the company remains under the thumb of the federal government; and, worst of all, it is still deeply mired in a crisis of trust,” said Challenger.