WHO CREATED THE GAME FARMVILLE AND WHAT IS THE GAME ALL ABOUT?

Farmville was created by a company called Zynga Mark Pincus is the founder and CEO of Zynga and he is from New York.


FarmVille is a farming social network game developed by Zynga. It is available on the social-networking website Facebook and as an App on the Apple iPhone. The game allows members of Facebook to manage a virtual farm by plowing land, planting, growing and harvesting virtual crops, harvesting trees and bushes, and by raising livestock. FarmVille started as a clone of the popular Farm Town, which also featured on Facebook in June 2009, but has since grown to be the social network's most popular application, with over 62 million active users and over 24.6 million Facebook application fans as of September 2010. Ten percent of all Facebook users play it. Despite this, Farmville is still classed by Zynga as being in a "Beta Testing Stage", with "all of [their] players ... currently considered Testers."
On February 4, 2010, Microsoft's MSN Games also launched FarmVille on its website, requiring a Facebook account but not a Windows Live ID in order to play the game. On June 7, 2010, at Apple's WWDC, the CEO of Zynga announced that they were porting FarmVille for the Flash-less iOS platform. It was later released on June 23, 2010 for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.



WHAT IS FARMVILLE ALL ABOUT?
Gameplay
Upon beginning a farm, the player first creates a customizable avatar which may be changed at any point. The player begins with an empty farm and a fixed starting amount of "farm coins", the primary currency in the game. Players also earn XP (experience points) for performing certain actions in the game such as plowing land or buying items. At certain XP benchmarks, the player's level rises. As the player obtains more items and progresses through levels, crops and animals become available to them via the "market" where items can be purchased using either farm coins or "farm cash". Farm cash is earned by leveling up, completing offers or microtransactions

Crops
The main way a player earns farm coins is through harvesting of crops. The player does this by paying coins for plowing a unit of land and for planting crops, such as tomatoes on it, finally harvesting them after a certain amount of time has elapsed. The amount of time it takes for it to mature and how much money it yields when harvested is dependent on the crop planted and is noted on its entry in the "market" dialog.They will wither,or they will be of no use when time has elapsed.to determine how much time,multiply the time with 2.5n (for eg-crops which take 8 hours to grow will wither after 20 hours as 2.5*8=20). However, a player can use farm cash to purchase an "unwither" to rejuvenate the crops or can use a biplane with "instant grow" to cause crops to be immediately available for harvest. Although the biplane can be purchased with coins, this special feature is only available for farm cash. As a player levels up more, crops with a higher payoff and economy will become available.

Livestock and other plants
A player may also buy or receive from friends livestock and trees or bushes, such as cherry trees or chickens, which do not wither but instead become ready for harvest for preset amounts of money a set amount of time from their last harvest.
Social interaction
Like most Zynga games, FarmVille incorporates the social networking aspect of Facebook into many areas of gameplay. Players may invite their friends to be their neighbors, allowing them to perform five actions on each other's farms per day by "visiting" it. Neighbors may also send gifts and supplies to each other, complete specialized tasks together for rewards, and join "co-ops" - joint efforts to grow a certain amount of certain crops.

Gifts
Neighbors may also send gifts to each other in the form of mystery gifts with expensive, but random items, special deliveries with building supplies, or by choosing a particular item to send. They cost the sending user nothing.

Decorations
Decorations can be purchased in the market for coins or cash or can be sent in the form of free gifts.Decorations include many items like buildings, hay bales, fences, nutcrackers, gnomes, flags, topiaries, etc. There are sometimes limited edition items depending on the theme such as a Valentine's Day theme, halloween theme, winter theme, etc. Decorations also give experience points (xp) depending on the cost.

Controversy
Accused scamming
FarmVille had offered users "farm cash" for completing various advertising surveys or signing up for services: for instance, the player would get some virtual currency for signing up for Netflix. However, FarmVille has been accused of scamming its users through misleading offers, such as filling in bogus survey or IQ tests which in fact subscribe the users to an unwanted service which appears on their phone bill or sending them advertisements through email. In a video posted November 9, 2009, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus says "I did every horrible thing in the book too, just to get revenues right away. I mean we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this Zwinky toolbar which was like, I don't know, I downloaded it once and couldn't get rid of it," in regard to criticism about business practices. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch accused Facebook of allowing Zynga's FarmVille to continue these practices because a great deal of the money it gets from such leads is reinvested in ads inside the Facebook network. In response to this negative publicity, Zynga removed all virtual cash offers on 8 November 2009 only on those pages on the main farmville.com website, but at least since July 12, 2010, farmville.com has still offered its virtual cash. Players accessing the game from within Facebook also may see these offers.
More recently, Zynga has been accused of sharing information with advertisers and other internet tracking companies about their users, however, Zynga had denied these accusations.

Originality
FarmVille has also been criticized for being "almost an exact duplicate" of its previously released competitor Farm Town.

Critical reception
In a December 2010 interview with Gamasutra, game designer Jonathan Blow criticized FarmVille for being designed to create an atmosphere of negativity, requiring an unprecedented commitment to the game, and encouraging users to exploit their friends.

Awards
FarmVille won an award at the Game Developer's Conference for the "Best New Social/Online Game" in 2010.

WHO INVENTED THE GAME OF FOOTBALL?

By Football if one means Soccer as it is more popularly known, then the game is said to have a history dating back thousands of years. There are records of a game called Cuju played in China about 4000 years ago which resembled football in some ways. In fact there have been mentions of a game somewhat similar to football being played in various parts of the World throughout history. The Greeks, the Romans, the Mexicans, the Japanese and the Eskimos have all played a game involving the use of their legs, a spherical object and in some cases a goalpost at some time or the other in their history. However, the place that is credited to be the birthplace of modern day Football are the British Isles with records of matches being played between different villages in the middle ages. In fact a recent discovery of a book written by a Scottish teacher, David Wedderburn way back in 1633 describes in detail a match of football played in Aberdeen, Scotland. According to another story a game closely similar to Rugby was already being played at the Rugby School in 1823 when a player William W Ellis ran the ball into the net thereby giving birth to another form of football better known today as American Football. The date for the start of modern American Football though is said to be 1876, invented by a man named Walter Camp who had supposedly heard the Ellis story.
Great Answer Not Helpful Report
Mahendra 4 years ago

FACEBOOK... AN INVENTION OF TODAY

Facebook is a social networking website launched in February 2004 and operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Users can add people as friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by workplace, school, or college. The website's name stems from the colloquial name of books given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the US with the intention of helping students to get to know each other better. Anyone age 13 or older can become a Facebook user.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It later expanded further to include (potentially) any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The original concept for Facebook was borrowed from a product produced by Zuckerberg's prep school Phillips Exeter Academy which for decades published and distributed a printed manual of all students and faculty, unofficially called the "face book". The website currently has more than 400 million active users worldwide.
Facebook has met with some controversy. It has been blocked intermittently in several countries including Pakistan, Syria, China, Vietnam, and Iran. It has also been banned at many places of work to discourage employees from wasting time using the service. Privacy has also been an issue, and it has been compromised several times. Facebook settled a lawsuit regarding claims over source code and intellectual property. The site has also been involved in controversy over the sale of fans and friends.
A January 2009 Compete.com study ranked Facebook as the most used social network by worldwide monthly active users, followed by MySpace. Entertainment Weekly put it on its end-of-the-decade 'best-of' list, saying, "How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers' birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?"
There have recently been reports of Facebook proposing an initial public offering (IPO). However, Zuckerberg stresses that it will not be for a few more years, and the company is in no need of additional capital. Also, some analysts fear the Facebook IPO might be a particularly weak one.

WHO INVENTED AROMATHERAPY?? PART 2

Essential oils are the fragrant, highly concentrated natural constituents that are found in plants. They are what give the plant its characteristic odour and contain the healing power of the plant from which it was extracted. When used correctly, essential oils bring a wide range of health benefits since unlike modern drugs, they have no side-effects.

The essential oils are located in tiny secretory structures found in various parts of plants; leaves (eucalyptus), berries (juniper), grasses (palmarosa), flowering tops (lavender), petals (rose), roots (angelica), zest of fruit (orange), resins (frankincense) and wood (cedar).

How are they extracted?
Mostly, essential oils are obtained by steam distillation although other methods are used. Citrus fruits are cold pressed by mechanical means, and the oil from delicate flowers is obtained by a more sophisticated method that produces what is known as an absolute. This is because delicate flowers can not withstand the high temperatures needed for steam distillation.
After extraction, the resulting essential oil is a highly concentrated liquid that contains the aroma and therapeutic properties of the source from which it came. Nothing should be added or removed from this oil if it is to be used in aromatherapy. To achieve maximum therapeutic benefits, essential oils should be exactly as they came from the still, so to speak.

Standardised oils
Some industries process essential oils in order to make them meet a required odour or flavour 'profile'. To achieve this, synthetic chemicals are added to the oil and often certain unwanted non-fragrance components are removed (rectification). This 'standardisation' is common practice in the perfumery and flavour industries in order to maintain absolute consistency in fragrance or taste, but totally unacceptable if the essential oil is for use in aromatherapy. To us, this is adulteration - not standardisation.
Adulterated essential oils may often smell acceptable to the untrained nose, but because they are extended with synthetics or diluted with vegetable oil it makes them extremely poor value for money. Not only that, but if an essential oil has been standardised, adulterated or adjusted in any way it simply will not be effective.

Look for purity
This is why you should always buy essential oils from long established and trusted aromatherapy suppliers who specialise in clinical grade oils and not the more common commercial grade. To meet the high quality for aromatherapy, an essential oil should be extracted from a single botanical species that has been botanically authenticated, and derived from a known country of origin.
To be 100% pure, nothing should be added or taken away from the oil after extraction. To enable us to meet this requirement, every essential oil supplied by Quinessence has been analytically tested for purity using Gas Chromatography/Mass Spectrometry (GC/MS) to establish its purity. This is why all our oils are guaranteed to be pure, natural and unadulterated.

The science bit
The chemistry of an essential oil is extremely complex, and a typical example of oil will contain an elaborate mixture of aromatic constituents such as alcohols, aldehydes, esters, ketones, lactones, phenols, terpenes and sesquiterpenes that combine to produce a unique set of therapeutic qualities.
This complex mixture of natural chemicals is what makes essential oils such effective healing agents; for example eucalyptus oil is refreshing and invigorating - plus it is a very powerful antiseptic agent. This means that essential oils can be used in a variety of ways in aromatherapy to promote physical and emotional health and well-being.

Health benefits
Essential oils possess a wide range of healing properties that can be used effectively to keep you in the best of health as well as looking good. These health-giving benefits include improving the complexion of your skin by stimulating cellular renewal, balancing roller-coaster emotions and fighting bacteria, fungi and other forms of infection. Essential oils have an almost endless list of therapeutic uses.
But only by using essential oils of the very highest quality can you be sure of achieving text-book results. Although cheaper essential oils may appear to save you money, they will certainly not deliver the results that you are entitled to expect. Therefore you will have wasted your hard-earned cash.
Quinessence are committed to supplying only the very finest, organic essential oils produced from ecologically grown products. We work closely with farmers to ensure that our essential oils are produced from plants that have not been subjected to the use of pesticides or herbicides.
To guarantee this level of quality and purity, every essential oil is subjected to the most searching analytical procedures, including GC/MS chromatography.

(THIS INFORMATION FROM QUINESSENCE ESSENTIAL OILS WEBSITE. PLEASE NOTE, IT IS USED IN OUR SPA IN BELIZE AND MEXICO. PREHISPANICO IN CHETUMAL, MEXICO AND PREHISPANIC, COROZAL IN COROZAL TOWN, BELIZE)

WHO INVENTED GOOD CHEER??

I haven´t a clue but I believe we all have it inside of us. So, today I wish to send some good cheer out to all my readers. I am back. I have returned. I need good cheer and I know you are all there. So, here´s hoping this year will look on us kindly. I love you all.

Brenda

HE IS THE REASON FOR THE SEASON

At this time of the year, with pain in my heart and tears in my eyes at the loss of my best friend and soul companion, I reach out across the miles to greet all my blog readers. I promise to return in the new year with a vigor and the passion I once had. Now I wish to thank you for your support. MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!! GOD BLESS AND KEEP YOU ALL WELL.

ABEL MARTIN LOPEZ RODRIGUEZ

Nov 14, 1955 to Oct 18, 2009

Dear Abel, you were the best teacher and lover of life I have ever known. I will love you always, cielo. Y sabes que? T.A.

REST IN PEACE, BABY