The Refresh Orlando Heirs

Many visitors to the Pacific Northwest will be exposed to Native Indian art while touring the region, especially in British Columbia. Among this aboriginal artwork are the magnificent hand made Pacific Northwest Native Indian wood carvings by the Canadian aboriginal artists in BC. While in some of the major Canadian cities (Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal) or other tourist areas popular with international visitors such as Banff, such carvings will be seen at various retail shops and displayed at some museums as well as some public areas such as parks. Since Pacific Northwest Native Indian art has been getting more international exposure, people may be seeing this aboriginal fine art form at galleries and museums located outside the Northwest too.

As a result, many tourists and art collectors will decide to purchase Native Indian art as nice souvenirs for their homes or as very unique gifts for others. Assuming that the intention is to acquire an authentic piece rather than a cheap tourist imitation, the question arises on how does one tell apart the real thing from the fakes? It would be pretty disappointing to bring home a piece bought in Vancouver only to find out later that it isn’t authentic or even made in Canada. One would have to be careful in tourist areas where all sorts of other souvenirs such as t-shirts, hockey jerseys, postcards, key chains, maple syrup and other Canadian items are sold.

The safest places to shop for Pacific Northwest Native Indian art carvings to ensure authenticity are always the reputable galleries that specialize in Native Indian art. Some of these galleries have advertisements in the city tourist guides found in hotels. Reputable Native Indian art galleries are also listed in magazines which focus on Native art such as American Indian Art and Native Peoples. These galleries will usually be located in the downtown tourist areas of major cities or within Indian reservations. When one walks into these galleries, one will see that there will be only Native Indian art and none of the other usual tourist souvenirs such as t-shirts or postcards. These galleries will have only authentic Native Indian art for sale as they do not deal with imitations or fakes. The carvings are usually signed by the carver.

Some of these galleries also have websites so you could shop and buy authentic Native Indian carvings from home anywhere in the world. In addition to these street retail specialty galleries, there are now reputable online galleries that also specialize in authentic Native Indian art. These online galleries are a good option for buying art since the prices are usually lower than those at street retail galleries due to lower overheads. Of course, like any other shopping on the internet, one must be careful so when dealing with an online gallery, make sure that their pieces have information on the actual artist or carver to ensure authenticity.

Some tourist shops do carry authentic Native Indian art as well as the other touristy souvenirs in order to cater to all types of tourists. When shopping at these types of stores, it is possible to tell apart the real pieces from the reproductions. Authentic Native Indian carvings are carved from wood. Reproductions are made of plastic or resin from a mold will be much lighter in weight. A reproduction will sometimes have a company name on it and will never feature an artist’s signature.

An authentic Native Indian carving is a one of a kind piece of artwork and nothing else on the store shelves will look exactly like it. If there are duplicates of a certain piece with exact details, the piece is not authentic. If a piece looks too perfect in detail with absolute straight bottoms or sides like the fake totem poles shown in the previous chapter, it is probably not real. Of course, if a piece features a sticker indicating that is was made in an Asian country, then it is obviously a fake. There will also be a huge price difference between authentic pieces and the imitations.

Where it becomes more difficult to determine authenticity are with the reproductions that are also made of wood or some type of wood composite. This can be a real gray area to those unfamiliar with authentic Native Indian art. They may even have some type of tag indicating that it was hand made or painted but if there are other pieces on the shelves that look too similar in detail, they are most likely crafts produced in large quantities rather than authentic fine art originals. The authentic pieces will always be the highest priced and are usually kept in a separate shelf or wall within the store.

Clint Leung is owner of Free Spirit Gallery http://www.FreeSpiritGallery.ca, an online gallery specializing in Inuit Eskimo and Northwest Native American art including carvings, sculpture and prints. Free Spirit Gallery has numerous information resource articles with photos of authentic Inuit and Native Indian art as well as free eCards.

Operational Issues Confronting e-Business Today:
Business through the internet has expanded by leaps and bounds and continues to do so. With opening up of the world economies e-business has become truly global for buyers and sellers alike. Also keeping pace are the associated problems that are both technical and non-technical in nature. The prime concern for any e-business is secure and efficient handling of run away transaction volumes at acceptable response levels. Congested networks are causing delays, even outages. Slow downloading time is one of the main reasons potential on-line customers switch web sites. Long waiting times can prove disastrous. The web site load pattern varies from hour to hour. For example, lunch time and after hours load on an on-line super-store will be more than it is during working hours, as that is when people like to do their purchases. Unacceptable response times could result in on-line customers abandoning the cart midway and switching to competition. The varying internet networks’ bandwidths and load patterns mean response times could vary widely from place to place even for the same traffic volumes. The web sites would like to know in real time where the bottlenecks are on a regular basis. Constant monitoring is therefore a must to enable web sites identify problems and initiate remedial steps without loss of time or on-line customers. There are other problems as well. These relate to web site’s accessibility, availability, security, data integrity and dangers from the hackers. Invariably, even the best managed web sites do not know what the exact problem is and where! Until informed by a frustrated customer. Clearly, web site owners would prefer to concentrate on challenges posed by their business rather than spending time on these extraneous issues. For every web site in e-business, therefore, there is an urgent need for constant 24×7 monitoring that keeps constant vigil and reports response time delays and any availability or accessibility problem; also regularly monitoring consistency of content and protected areas for any violation.

The Dotcom-Monitor.com Solution:
The Dotcom-Monitor.com is a secure advanced 24×7 web site monitoring service that provides comprehensive web site monitoring and helps address the issues and concerns raised above. Dotcom-Monitor service keeps the web site performance informed about it’s availability, accessibility, security and content and highlights any deviations from the supplied norms. The website monitoring management studies these exceptions and takes appropriate remedial steps. That means that the applications keep running within acceptable web server monitoring parameters and therefore are more profitable. Other available services in the Dotcom-Monitor portfolio include checking of password protected sites, online form work check, verification of web site’s Digital SSL Certificate validity, providing client-side help (called Cookie support); providing detailed performance metrics; performing web load stress test by simulating upto1000 concurrent users; business transaction support; can suggests bottlenecks within applications; customer’s network monitoring and related services etc. Dotcom-Monitor can also help a new e-business prospect assess impact of varying levels of simulated load; tune up their infrastructure before the web site launch. This results in arriving at an optimum start-up solution and costly mistakes are avoided.

How Dotcom-Monitor Service Works:
It is important to know other components that makeup any website operational environment besides the site, the client and the browser that Dotcom-Monitor service interacts with. These include File Transfer Service (FTP); The Domain Name Service (DNS) that provides IP address for the site name; Telnet (Port availability); Trace Root Servers, Ping (Routers/Firewall), POP3 (email) Server etc.
Dotcom-Monitor has remote agents strategically positioned around the world each acting as an internet browser. After a customer creates an account with Dotcom he supplies URLs of his web sites to be monitored, the process starts immediately. Dotcom global agents start checking the web site(s) to ensure the web site is accessible, has proper content, and is maintaining acceptable levels of web server performance as per norms supplied. If any of these fall outside the specified parameters, the notification process starts. To take just two examples, web server performance monitoring checks the time it takes for the web server to respond to the monitor agent’s request against acceptable response time (say 5 seconds). If page takes more time to load on the agent’s browser web site is notified as a possible performance issue. For content check, customer provides a specific keyword or a phrase that network monitoring uses to ensure that the page was not altered and has proper content. This check is crucial for data base driven web sites. In case keyword is not found on the page the monitor notifies and also stores snapshot of the page for customer’s review. Similarly, sites are checked for consistency of content and for accessibility (and availability) through its world wide agents and notifies if any problem is detected. Dotcom-Monitor, therefore, provides a much needed non-stop monitoring service for smoother running of e-businesses.

About Dotcom-Monitor Company:
Dotcom-Monitor is the leader and innovator in advanced website monitoring services that ensures reputation and up-time of the e-business. Since its inception in 1998, Dotcom-Monitor has significantly helped over 2000 companies get more out of their resources; earn more customer loyalty and goodwill; earn more profits through maximizing web site up-time. Dotcom service watches e-business from outside using its global multi-pronged approach by simulating the end user actions. Dot-com ensures that the web site is open for business for 24 hours a day for its global customers. Dotcom-Monitor continues to grow its client base through its superior support services while steadily providing more network monitoring features while maintaining competitive pricing. Dotcom-Monitor was one of the first monitoring services to develop 1-minute monitoring, and the first to develop recorders that automate and simplify complex monitoring tasks.

Conclusion:
It is clear that the increasing customer preference for doing business on-line, and the rapidly expanding global e-commerce not only mean greater opportunities for e-businesses worldwide; but also, that, unless a constant global monitoring service is integral to the overall business e-business strategy, the web sites can never realize their true worth. Dotcom-Monitor.com provides just the right solution to help web sites realize their full potential.

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For many people blogging is the way in which they are able to update their web site with new information and fresh content. As such, blogs are a great way of gaining returning visitors to your web site.

However, there are other places you can post blog entries which can also affect the popularity of your web site. One such place is Ecademy.com.

Ecademy is the world’s largest online network of people in business. Once you sign up as a member you get access to the blogging system within Ecademy. This allows you to post entries to the Ecademy blog. You can post anything, as long as it is not an advertisement.

However - and here’s the important part - if your blog entry on Ecademy includes a link back to your own web site you will benefit. That’s because Ecademy is one of the world’s most frequently updated web sites; it changes every minute. As a result it is adored by the search engines who re-index Ecademy several times a day in some instances.

This means if you post a blog entry on Ecademy, include in it some keywords related to your site and have a link to your site in your signature, you will be indexed by the likes of Google. Once your link is seen within Ecademy you get a bonus benefit. Not only is your link followed through by the search engines, but because your link is on a high profile site, your site is seen more favourably.

However, you need to ensure that your entry on Ecademy is real content - no keyword stuffing for instance. If your entry is not useful it can be removed by the Ecademy staff. Even if it is allowed, Google will not see your site as important if your blog entry isn’t focused on what your site is about. But if you post entries onto Ecademy which are directly related to your web site you will see search engine benefits.

Furthermore, you’ll also see many people visit your site as a direct result of your link in the Ecademy blog. So, don’t just think of blogging on your own site; add your blog postings to Ecademy as well.

For more answers to blogging questions you can get a free guide to the Top 15 Questions About Blogging from: http://www.infoselling.com/blogging/howtoblog.htm

About the Author

Graham Jones is a psychologist who has specialized in the way we use the Internet. He is an author of 27 books and thousands of articles. He runs Infoselling.com where you can get a FREE report on how to sell your own information products, ebooks, reports and articles online.

http://www.infoselling.com