Credit: http://www.thehealthword.com/

A couple of years ago I found myself unemployed in the middle of a retrenchment-inducing economic downturn. Jobs were scarce, my nearest and dearest were severely affected and I went from being a well-fed, middle-upperclass LSM 10-er to yet another person without a job or an income. I tried a number of things to make ends meet, but there was little interest in professional PowerPoint design or graphic work at the time. Things started to get a little dire.

I’d always loved to write and eventually decided to give it a bash. God alone knows how I landed my first client! I had no formal training or experience-just a fortunate ability to string together a sentence, the willingness to do the best I could with what I had, the initiative to educate myself with the resources available to me, and perseverance, perseverance, and more perseverance! I now write regularly for blogs and websites based all over the country and absolutely love what I do. The flexibility, freedom, and nature of my work make my career (for the most part!) a joy. And I’m finally doing professional PowerPoints again too. Bonus!

This Spring season and this month mark the happy anniversary of my foray into freelance writing freedom. I don’t know how long it will last and the “road” has been more of a 4×4 track, but I am so abundantly grateful to all the amazing people who’ve made it possible for me to achieve even this small goal. (You’re awesome)!

What do September and the Spring season mean to you?

It turned out to be 8^th, which still meant that I owed Sergei a beer. However, most interesting where some other results of the research we both did later that evening… Ok, fine, the truth is we did the research the next day.

Russian is spoken by about 150 to 200 million people, but when one goes up the list, until the second most spoken language, one gets to around 350 million, depending on where you check. After that, the number one language is Mandarin, with almost 3 times that: estimated at anywhere between 850 million and 1 billion!

Another strange thing, is that with all the attention given to French, it is way down on the list by any interpretation, and yet still quite widely spoken. German, too, is not much of a contender for the top 5 by a long shot. Yet Portuguese, with mainly Brazil helping it along, is quoted in some places as having over 200 million speakers.

Why do these statistics and numbers mean anything? Well, for one, why are we not teaching any of these top languages in our schools? Other than English, I haven’t heard of any young people getting Spanish or Arabic, Hindi or Mandarin lessons. Are we setting ourselves up for Europe with our German, French and Italian classes?

What one also has to remember, is that to actually get to these numbers, there is a lot of speculation, and also many assumptions are made. Suffice to say though, that if you speak even three of the top five languages, you have doors opening up to you almost anywhere. Are languages the main ingredient to living a global life?

While alot of people either hate or love the cover, I think most people will like these cool (less shocking) photos from inside the September issue of Rolling Stone

Are you a fan of True Blood?
What did you think of the bloody Rolling Stone cover?

It will be both a observation Tower, and a welcome sign for the visitors arriving by air and by sea at Rio de Janeiro, where the Olympic Games 2016 will take place.

The project is from Zurique, and utilizes solar energy during the day with its solo power panels, to pump the sea water as seen in the model.

The movement of the water will be also utilized to turn the turbines and produce the power to work the system at night time.

In the Solo City Tower is the Cafe anfiteatre, auditórium, shops etc. e lifts will take the visitors to the top, where the view will be fantastic, and bungee jumping will have a special platform.

Do you avoid black cats? Do you believe that if you break a mirror you get 7 years bad luck? Are you afraid to open an umbrella in a house or walk under a ladder? Does the number 13 make you feel very uneasy?

If your answer is yes to the above questions then you must really be freaking out thats its Friday the 13th today *grins*.

I did a little google search for facts, myths and origins about the number 13. As expected, plenty of info came up, like……

Did you know that:

• For centuries people have had a fear of the number 13? (Random fact alert: the fear of the number 13 is called Triskaidekaphobia.)
• Apparently millions of people stay off work on friday the 13th
• In many hotels/skyscrapers there is no 13th floor and most airplanes have no seat No. 13 (weird, huh?)

Personally, I’m not superstitious at all (I don’t really undertsand how some people are?) and the only “Friday the 13th” that scares me a bit is the movie.

Are you superstitious?

Click below links to read other posts by Brazen:

• Ode to scarves
• Style crush: Olivia Palermo
• Virtual Styling
• Bewitching black lace
• Hot heels
• Winter wear wants
• Oh so stripey

Anyway, take a watch, it’s quite cool:

Innovative none-the-less.

[Thanks Ross via]

Check it out:

It’s these machines:

Yup, you know what I’m talking about don’t you? There’s one in Stadium on Main, in Claremont, under Tiger Tiger ;)

“At the Black Hat hacker conference Wednesday, Jack demonstrated two exploits on stage that allowed him to pull off that mythical bits-into-Benjamins stunt: One of the exploits allows anyone to unlock a panel on ATMs, insert a USB key, and overwrite the machine’s firmware to take control of the ATM and output cash. Another method allows him to remotely access a machine over the Internet and eject money, or even record a history of users’ credit card and PIN numbers as they’re entered and send them back to the hacker.”

Brilliant, I love these blackhat tricks! You can read the full story on Forbes!

[Thanks Ruark]

The premise behind the application is that it will act as a personal magazine, reading in your information from Facebook, Twitter and other social meda sites. Pretty cool idea isn’t it? Anyway, due to the huge number of people downloading the application, the server’s have crashed.

Flipboard CEO, Mike McCue said:

“Since we launched, we have been allowing waves of new users in for setup on a first come first serve basis. This has been problematic due to the sheer number of people trying to get setup at once. To solve this, we have put an invitation system in place. A new version of Flipboard (ver 1.0.1) has been approved by Apple and will be available in the App Store shortly. This version enables people to reserve a setup slot and to enter their email address so that we can notify them once their slot has opened up.”

It must be an amazing feeling to see so many downloaders, but an awful feeling to see that you can’t provide for all of them. So often it’s launches like this that make or break a successful application, let’s hope in this case that it’ll not break them.

Here’s a video of the application if you’re unsure of what it does:

You can try get the application from the appstore, here.

Ferrari world abu dhabi will host a number of attractions, including rides for children of all ages, providing the complete Ferrari experience: over 20 state-of-the-art attractions, each designed to bring to life a different part of the Ferrari story, including the world’s fastest rollercoaster, travelling at speeds exceeding 200 km/h and emulating the thrilling sensation of being in a Ferrari F1 car, or the g-force experience taking passengers on an adrenaline-pumping ride up over 62 m, through the roof and back down again.

The park is located on yas island – set to become a global tourist destination with a wide range of accommodation and entertainment facilities – on the north east side of abu dhabi’s mainland. Abu dhabi, at the crossroads between europe, asia and africa, was chosen as the ideal location to build the ferrari theme park, motor sports being extremely popular in the united arab emirates. Ferrari world abu dhabi will offer a unique and intensely fun way, together with a wide variety of italian delicacies, and of course unique shopping experiences.

[Thanks Mark]