• Home
  • Blog
  • Archives
  • Links
  • About
  • Guest Blogger
  • Contact

Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto

  • Home and Lifestyle
  • Recreation
  • Health Fitness and Beauty
  • Entertainment
  • Web and Technology


You are here: Home / Archives for Shopping / Services

Ultra Hal – make your computer talk and understand commands

October 25, 2007 by Tricia

Did you hear the news? Ultra Hal, created by Zabaware, won the grand prize for “most human” computer of the year – this means that they’ve basically created the Smartest artificial intelligence software ever. The award was given out at the 17th annual Loebner Prize Competition for Artificial Intelligence.

Their software gives your computer a personality with the ability to speak and understand the English language. Of course this means that when talk to your computer it really can talk back!

If you’d like to try the Ultra Hal Assistant 6.1 software you can download a free 30 day trial at the Zabaware website.

Zabaware’s Ultra Hal software won the “most human” computer of the year in the 17th annual Loebner Prize Competition for Artificial Intelligence (AI). The contest was held in New York City hosted by philanthropist Hugh Loebner.

The Loebner Prize is an annual competition where software programs attempt to convince human judges that they are actually people. The format of the competition is called a Turing Test. In a Turing Test a judge talks with 2 “entities” simultaneously through a text-based instant messaging system. One entity is a human and the other is a computer. It is up to the judge to decide which is which by typing questions to both entities and receiving answers.

Zabaware is an Erie, Pennsylvania based company that specializes in artificial intelligence technology. The company’s mission “giving your computer the power of thought” once considered a futuristic pipe dream is becoming a 2007 reality.

It is one thing to talk to your computer it is quite another to have a conversation where you are exchanging information and the computer learns and utilizes the information in the future. Zabaware’s Ultra Hal technology and its associated brain are currently doing just that. The software can give your computer a personality using AI technology, speech recognition technology, and real-time animation. It can be used as an entertainment program, a companion, or an office assistant. It learns from conversations and evolves and improves the more it talks with a person. In addition to chat it can perform useful functions such as remembering and reminding of appointments, keeping an address book, dialing phone numbers, launching program, and more.

Zabaware’s Ultra Hal software runs on most standard Windows computers. The artificial intelligence software is available for download at www.zabaware.com as a free 30-day trial.





Filed Under: Computers, Cool stuff, Internet, Services, Shopping, Software, Web and Technology Tagged With: 30 day trial, A.i., animation, artificial intelligence, award winner, companion, computer, english, office assistant, Software, speech recognition, talk, tech news, Technology, Ultra Hal, Ultra Hal assistant, understand, won prize, Zabaware

Turn your photos into beautiful canvas prints

October 17, 2007 by Tricia

brilliantprints-logo.jpg

Have you ever taken a photo that you loved so much you thought that it might make a beautiful painting?

I’m sure most everyone has a photo at home that they’ve thought about enlarging in order to turn it into a beautiful wall hanging. Perhaps a photo of your children when they were young? The happy couple on their wedding day? A beloved parent or grandparent?

Well, if you happen to live in Australia you might want to visit Brilliant Prints. This family-owned canvas printing company can turn your photos or digital images into beautiful canvas prints in as little as three to four days.

As some of you might remember I turned one of my own photos into a lovely canvas during the summer. Mine wasn’t done by Brilliant Prints, but I am very happy with how my canvas turned out and I’d recommend that anyone who’s ever wanted to turn a photo, a slide, or some form of digital artwork into a canvas print do so. My canvas hangs in my dining room and I see it every day. I love it.

0006.jpg Your canvas prints might look like this in one of your rooms.

You can turn your images into square, rectangular or panoramic canvas prints in sizes ranging from 11″ x 14″ to 101″ x 203″. That’s quite a range of sizes isn’t it?

Brilliant Prints uses quality materials. They use a fine American-made 100% cotton canvas for all of their canvas prints. They also use ink that has been tested for it’s longevity and that is said to provide 75 years protection against fading. The frames that your canvas will be stretched on are quality profiled meranti stretcher bars.

One of the final processes in the creation of your canvas is lamination. Did you know that some Canvas Print companies do not laminate their canvas? The lamination process is very important as it will help to protect your canvas print from damaging moisture, mould, dust and abrasion. Brilliant Prints uses a high quality laminate from America on all of their canvas prints.

I think the prices are quite reasonable. A 12″ x 12″ square canvas print only costs $58. A full list of their canvas printing prices is available on the pricing page.

Included in the price of each canvas is any resizing of your image that might be necessary, conversion of color photos to sepia or black and white if desired, emailed proofs that will show you how your finished canvas will look, plus any editing of the photo that’s necessary including color correction, enhancement, and dust removal or repair of your image. There are no extra charges for digital images, but if you send in a photo, slide or transparency there will be a low cost scanning charge.

The process is very simple. Well, the customers side of the process that is.

Simply send your photo, slide or digital image to Brilliant Prints. If your images are already in digital form you can simply email the company your photos. Don’t forget to include information about what size canvas and other options you might like to order. They also have an FTP option if your digital images are too large to send by email. Photos, negatives, transparencies and slides can be mailed to Brilliant Prints.

Once Brilliant Prints receives your images they will take a look at them and see if they can successfully create the canvas that you ordered. It all depends upon the quality and resolution of the images as to whether they’ll be able to enlarge the photo well enough to create the desired canvas size. They will then contact you and let you know what they can do for you.

The folks at Brilliant prints will keep in touch with you through the whole process of creating your new canvas print. As I said above they’ll email you proofs of what your canvas will look like before they begin the process of creating the canvas.

I love this companies guarantee. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a guarantee quite like it, nor one that would ensure customer satisfaction so completely. This is their guarantee:

“You don’t pay a single cent until you receive your prints and are completely happy. We will gladly send you prints from your own images without upfront payment! If you are not truly, absolutely, 100% delighted with your prints then contact us and we will arrange for them to be returned. We will even pay the return freight.

It doesn’t matter whether the problem was your fault, our fault, an Act of God, or the fault of the bloke at the post office. It doesn’t matter if you change your mind, decide you don’t like the picture, or have just divorced the husband / wife in the photo. Unless you are happy, we are not happy. No conditions, no small print. “

Isn’t that a great guarantee? You don’t pay a cent until you are completely satisfied. There is absolutely no risk to their clients.

If you enjoy photography and want to create a great photo that you can eventually make into a canvas print you might be interested in visiting the learning center at Brilliant Prints where you can learn about how to compose photos better, how to edit your digital images and if you are an enthusiastic amateur or professional photographer you can learn more about how you can become successful commercially.

Now I know that I have quite a few readers from Australia. Visit Brilliant Prints and see how they can help you turn your fabulous photos into lovely canvas prints for your home or perhaps as a gift for someone you love.

Filed Under: Art, Cool stuff, Decor, Family, Gifts, Home and Garden, Home and Lifestyle, Home Decor, Photography, Recreation, Services, Shopping Tagged With: Australia, beautiful, Brilliant Prints, Canvas Prints, color, cotton, custom, digital photos, email, enlarge photos, Family, family photos, gallery wrap, gift, Gift Idea, home, information, laminated, lamination, mural, panoramic canvas prints, photo, photo editing, Photography, photos, photos to canvas, picture, portrait, prices, protect, quality, quality canvas, quality ink, rectangular canvas prints, resize, shipping, slides, Square canvas prints, transparancies, wall hanging, wedding photo

How many of you have dated someone you met online?

October 12, 2007 by Tricia

I was just thinking about two of my friends that I haven’t seen in a very long time. Funny that both of them now live on the other side of the country in Vancouver yet they don’t even know each other.

I was thinking about them in part because I haven’t seen either of them for quite a while and also because I was reading a story about the increase in online dating and how many people are having success with it and as it turns out both of my friends ended up meeting the men they eventually married through online dating sites or communities like Meet You Later. I’m not sure if that was the one, one of them used or not. Don’t quote me!

I think they are the only friends of mine that I know of who ended up marrying a person they met online, but I know several men and women who regularly meet others online and then in real life and begin dating.

I wonder … how many of you have met someone through the internet, not necessarily a dating service, and started dating or even married?

Again I need to find a non-ajax poll to use on this site. If anyone knows of a good one that doesn’t slow down site load I’d love to hear about it.

Filed Under: Culture, Home and Lifestyle, Internet, Recreation, Relationships and Dating, Services, Socializing Tagged With: dating, dating service, friend, friends, funny, Internet, life, live, Love, man, married, meeting, men, my friends, online, Online dating, person, reading, real life, real world, service, sites, Vancouver, women

Automate your workplaces time and attendance calculations

October 4, 2007 by Tricia

If you own or manage a business you might be interested in taking a look at Kronos Automated Time and Attendance software.

The old saying “Time is Money” certainly applies when it comes to managing your employees attendance records and overtime hours.

Kronos’ Time and Attendance software will not only save you some money by eliminating the need for paper time sheets or other products that you must purchase regularly in order to keep track of your employees work hours, but it will also decrease the time spent calculating each employees hours and attendance. This would free up the business owners time or the employee hired to do this task and allow them to be more productive in other areas.

I know when I’ve worked for companies that manually calculated each employees hours and pay there were always errors. There were forgotten overtime or allowances for working a certain amount of hours, sometimes days that I had worked were skipped and went unpaid, and vacation pay was occasionally incorrect as well.

All of these payroll errors just make more work for the person manually calculating the timesheets and cause employee frustration.

Kronos has created four different Time and Attendance software programs.

One of the programs is named “Workforce TimeKeeper” and it’s a web-based application that will allow businesses to eliminate errors that are often associated with tracking a companies workforces time and attendance.

The second program is called Timekeeper Central and it’s a client-server solution that’s been designed to help small companies manage, collect and distribute time and attendance data automatically.

Then there is the Kronos iSeries Timekeeper which is a time and attendance application for the IBM iSeries platform.

The final time and attendance solution developed by Kronos is called webTA. This program supports the federal governments unique time and attendance requirements.

As you can see Kronos has created software that will suit any business or organization whether large or small. Each of these programs have been designed to give a business better control over labor costs. The automated system will also allow businesses to apply pay and work related policies consistently across the board.

These seem like great time and attendance keeping solutions to me and I’m sure it would alleviate the headache of manually calculating time sheets for a lot of companies if they were to look into the Kronos Automated Time and Attendance software.

Filed Under: Computers, Services, Shopping, Software, Web and Technology Tagged With: abscence, attendance, attendance records, automated software, business, calculations, company, data, employee, employees, government, help, Kronos, Kronos iSeries, manage, manage time, organization, overtime, paid, payroll, payroll errors, productivity, Products, program, record, save money, Software, support, system, time, Time and Attendance, time cards, timekeeper central, timesheets, Unique, vacation, webTA, work hours, Workforce timekeeper

DTIDATA Specializes in Hard Drive Recovery

September 28, 2007 by Tricia

I frequent quite a few forums and it’s not uncommon for me to read posts regularly about someones computer breaking down or how they got a virus and can’t boot their computer anymore or worst of all how they heard funny noises coming from their computer and then their hard drive suddenly failed.

Did you know that when you hear strange sounds or a clicking noise coming from your hard drive that it’s probably best to shut down your computer and not attempt any recovery attempts? You can end up causing more damage to your hard drive if you continue to run it when it’s in a degraded state. Doing this could make your data unrecoverable!

If you suspect that your hard drive isn’t working properly and could fail or know that it’s broken thats the time to get in touch with a hard drive repair specialist.

DTIDATA specializes in Hard Drive Recovery. Their staff of engineers keep themselves up to date on the latest technology related to hard drive data recovery. In fact, their R&D team is responsible for developing new recovery technology so you can rest assured that when you have your hard drive repaired by DTIDATA they are using the latest and likely best techniques available.

DTIDATA has a class 100 clean room that they use for all Hard Drive Recovery. This will help ensure that no dust or particles will get into your hard drive as they work on retrieving your data.

Once you send your hard drive to DTIDATA for Hard drive recovery and it’s received by the company they log it into their database and assign a case number. They then send you a message that includes your case number so that you can track your hard drives recovery.

One thing that I really like about this company is that they don’t charge any diagnostic fees. If they can’t recover data from your hard drive there’s no charge, in fact they don’t charge you at all unless they recover 100% of your data. That’s how confident they are in their service.

Hopefully your hard drive continues to work well for a long time to come, but if you ever do need to have your hard drive repaired or have the data recovered remember DTIDATA.

Filed Under: Computers, Data Recovery, Data Storage, Services, Web and Technology Tagged With: articles, company, computer, forum, forums, Tech, Technology

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • …
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
  • …
  • 40
  • Next Page »

Connect with Us

  • Facebook
  • Flickr
  • Instagram
  • RSS
  • Twitter

Categories

Sites of Interest

Useful Links

Eavestrough Cleaning Toronto

Shopping

Gifts, Gadgets,
Books and More!

Recent Posts

  • Is your home well insulated or do you have energy leaks?
  • Pet Safety Tips
  • Top 10 Most Fundamental Yoga Poses For Beginners
  • Will My Interior Décor Stand The Test Of Time?
  • Outdoor Furniture- Spicing Up Your Backyard
  • Ensuring You Have A Good Experience Staying At Hotels With Children
  • Mother’s Day Cookies

Recent Comments

  • Bill on Top 10 Most Fundamental Yoga Poses For Beginners
  • [bonus]old school new body-f4x workout on Why does my husband always bring home the wrong stuff?
  • Rodhe Stevens on 5 Little Known Secrets To Finding Cheap (But Durable) Furniture
  • Julia Carlson on How To Install A Mosaic Tile Kitchen Backsplash
  • Humane Raccoon Deterrent Idea on Helped save a baby raccoon last night

Subscribe


Subscribe to our RSS Feed It's FREE!

Subscribe to Tricia's Musings by Email It's FREE!


Follow me on TWITTER

Find us on Google +



Find us on Facebook



I have two mottos-
1. Live life to the fullest; and
2. Don't have any regrets.

Get More Traffic

Visitors since 2006

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

Search this site

Tags

blog blogs camera Canada Chris computer crohns dinner dog Family flower flowers Food friends funny garden Gardening Green Thumb Sunday Health and Fitness Health Fitness and Beauty holiday home Home and Lifestyle house husband IBD Inflammatory bowel disease Internet Music neighbors pain photo photos plants puppy Shopping sick sleep spring Toronto TV Video visit website Wordless Wednesday

Blogs I Visit

  • Get WebStyle
  • Casual Slack
  • Home and Garden Diva
  • LifeCruiser
  • Rick Mercer

Copyright © 2025 · Lifestyle Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in