While practicing the art of Aikido at Aikido Academy, following the teaching of Christian Tissier Shihan, I decided to create a web page illustrating the Aikido techniques. I have also included some famous quotes of the founder of Aikido, O'Sensei Morihei Ueshiba (1883-1969).

This web page can be found here.

There are 1,440 minutes in every day. Schedule 30 of them (2% of the day) for physical activity!

Regular exercise is a critical part of staying healthy. People who are active live longer and feel better. Exercise can help you maintain a healthy weight. It can delay or prevent diabetes, some cancers and heart problems.

Most adults need at least 30 minutes of moderate physical activity at least five days per week. Examples include walking briskly, mowing the lawn, dancing, swimming for recreation or bicycling. Stretching and weight training can also strengthen your body and improve your fitness level.

The key is to find the right exercise for you. If it is fun, you are more likely to stay motivated. You may want to walk with a friend, join a class or plan a group bike ride. If you've been inactive for awhile, use a sensible approach and start out slowly.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Source: nlm.nih.gov

The British Library has posted a part of its Greek manuscripts online in an effort to digitize and better preserve important ancient documents. The manuscripts which include more than a quarter of the library's archive are now available online at bl.uk/manuscripts as part of the British Library's most important collections outside Greece.

The library houses more than 1,000 Greek manuscripts, over 3,000 Greek papyri and a collection of early Greek printing, which can provide scholars with literary, historical, scientific, religious, philosophical and artistic information on the Eastern Mediterranean in the Classical and Byzantine periods.

Source: presstv.ir

An ideal candidate conducts a research on companies before submitting a resume for a job opening. However, in cases such as increased unemployment, job seekers may also apply to less preferable positions. Common steps for research should be finding out more about the role described in a job posting and basic information about the company, such as target groups, what they do and how they do it. Additionally, it is really helpful obtaining information from current and/or former employees. Unfortunately, in Greece there is not enough information from websites on the Internet, such as glassdoor.com, indeed.com and jobvent.com for US companies, so another source could be the company's financial statements, if they are available.

A company employs an interviewer in order to find qualified applicants that meet the specified requirements for a certain job opening. On the other hand, an applicant tries to reveal the competitive advantages in order to leave the best possible impression so as to make the company's representatives want to proceed with employment. During this procedure, from the initial contact to the final feedback, apart from the applicant, the interviewer is also evaluated, along with the company's image and professionalism. As a result, it is critical to assess the skills of staff responsible for interviews from a quality perspective, either for prospective employment or for a future job opening.

Some basic areas that need to be assessed are:
- Job description: Is it clear enough and informative?
- Pre-interview: Does the company send a confirmation message upon submission of the resume? Is the company flexible for scheduling the interview date?
- Interview: Is the company's representative on time, properly dressed, adequately prepared and aware of the applicant's name? Is the whole communication smooth, organized and focused on the requirements of the position? Does the whole environment, inside the company, reflect its mission? Was a certain task assigned as a further step towards employment? If yes, this task should not be directly related to the company, as it is supposed to validate the applicant's overall knowledge. Were contact details given for any further clarifications?
- Post-Interview: How long does it take to hear back from the company for the interview's result? Did they communicate via e-mail or telephone? How did you feel at the end?

These indicative points should always be considered for ensuring a robust business relationship.

Since Apple didn't include the functionality for SMS delivery reports in iOS 4.1, the only way to manually fix this issue is to include some characters at the beginning of each text message.

According to your provider, in Greece, the following characters should be typed:
- Vodafone: *# (asterisk, number sign)
- Cosmote: *0# (asterisk, zero, number sign)
- Wind: *NOT# (asterisk, NOT, number sign)
- Q: ! (exclamation mark)

Note: The whole message should be written written with the Latin alphabet (Greeklish) in order to receive the delivery report.

Scientists relied on "defanged" version of HIV virus to treat a teenager with a genetic blood disorder.

The 18-year-old suffered from the inherited condition beta thalassemia and required monthly blood transfusions from the age of three. He felt ill and drained of energy because his system could not produce red blood cells due to a faulty haemoglobin gene, reports the Daily Mail.

The only known cure was stem-cell transplantation, but few patients are able to find a suitable donor. Now scientists have found a new potential cure using gene therapy, according to the journal Nature.

The team, led by Marina Cavazzana-Calvo of the University Paris-Descartes, extracted haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) from the young patient's bone marrow. These are the cells that go on to produce all types of blood cell. The cells were mixed in a test tube with an engineered version of the HIV virus that carried the correct version of the haemoglobin gene.

The patient had chemotherapy to destroy his remaining stem cells and then the treated cells were injected into his system. Within a year, the teenager was able to stop receiving blood transfusions. Although he is mildly anaemic he has remained stable for 22 months since then.

Study co-author Philippe Leboulch of the Harvard Medical School said the treatment had been "life-changing". He added: "Before this treatment, the patient had to be transfused every month. Now he has a full-time job as a cook." (Agencies)

Source: NewsofAP.com

If you are using a Microsoft Windows x64 operating system (Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2), along with Kaspersky security software (Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2011 or Kaspersky Internet Security 2011), you have probably faced an issue with Windows Picture Viewer, at which you experience unresponsive Windows while opening image files, having Kaspersky software running (KAV 2011 or KIS 2011).

In order to permanently fix this issue, if you use KAV 2011, go to "Settings > Detected Threats and Exclusion Rules", click "Settings" (under Exclusions) and add dllhost.exe in the Trusted Applications, which is located both in "C:\Windows\System32\dllhost.exe" and "C:\Windows\SysWOW64\dllhost.exe".

Today, I upgraded BlogEngine.NET from version 1.4.5 to 1.6. In addition, I moved the blog database from VistaDB 3.3.1.54 to SQLite using the respective ADO.NET provider, which was downloaded from here.

For the upgrade, I followed the instructions provided on Al Nyveld’s post.

Note: I apologize for any deleted comments while trying to reduce the large number of SPAM comments.

While trying to make an in-app purchase I got the message: "This is not a Test User account. Please create a new account in the Sandbox environment.". This probably occurs only in jailbroken iPhone devices.

In order to solve this problem I performed the following steps:
- deleted AppSync package from Cydia
- rebooted the iPhone device
- uninstalled the application (in my case it was Ultimate Notifier)
- reinstalled the application

While trying to implement a TaskDialog in WPF, I came across a set of code samples for .NET FrameWork 3.0 in Microsoft's website.

The executable that is needed is the one named "CrossTechnologySamples.exe". The VistaBridge project, which is included, contains the necessary library, written in C#, that wraps the required Win32 functions. Apart from the TaskDialog, classes for other dialogs are also provided.