Launching a comprehensive vehicle tracking program can put your business on track for greater efficiency, cost effectiveness, and responsiveness to customers. Your employees, on the other hand, may have a range of reactions to the idea of being tracked. It’s important that you communicate openly and honestly about the new system and address their questions and concerns directly.

Common employee concerns
Some of the most common concerns your employees might have include:

Privacy – Vehicle tracking means that the fleet operator has the ability to know where each vehicle is at any given time. This can be disconcerting for employees because they feel a part of their privacy is disappearing.

Scrutiny – Vehicle tracking allows a fleet operator to carefully scrutinize driving patterns and behaviors. This extra scrutiny is objectionable to some employees if the operator does not allow them a certain amount of flexibility in their daily activities.

Misunderstanding – Vehicle tracking often creates fear that the fleet operator will misunderstand or misinterpret tracking information that is produced. Employees worry that the tracking information will be automatically accepted without them having an opportunity for input.

Communicating about the new system
Communication is key to helping your employees understand and accept the new vehicle tracking system. Emphasize how it will benefit employees and help them do their jobs better. Also, talk about how those benefits affect the business in terms of cost savings, efficiency, etc.

Give your employees some “hands on” opportunities with the new system. Show them the equipment that goes into the vehicle and how it communicates with the fleet managers. All the while, continue pointing out how the system will help them do their jobs better and with less inconvenience.

Overcoming resistance
There will inevitably be some employees who embrace the new system rapidly and others who take a little more time to accept it. There will also be a few who remain resistant no matter what you say or do. In these situations, you need to have a step by step plan in place to deal with and overcome such resistance.

Most companies find that a graduated approach works best. Start with initial training and education about the new system, answer questions and concerns, and get feedback from employees as the system comes up to speed. Offer additional training or assistance to those who have trouble with the system or simply do not like it. Set up clear expectations right from the beginning that the system is in place to stay and that all employees are expected to use it and accept it.

Most of the time, setting clear expectations and consistently enforcing requirements are enough to get even the most resistant employee moving in the right direction. When that starts to happen be sure to recognize and praise that employee so that he or she will know that you are aware of the changes and effort they are making.

Richard Harris is a vehicle telecommunications expert who has developed an innovative vehicle tracking system.

He advises on vehicle tracking, and a range of information can be found at http://www.autoalert.me.uk/news_toc.jsp

“Dupioni”; “Faux bois”; “Intaglio”; “Pulmonaria”… Rare tropical diseases? European politicians? Expensive appetizers?

Nope, they’re paint colors! If you’re thinking of painting the outside of your house you might be wondering whatever happened to red, green, and blue!

Paint Paralysis

The dizzying array of color choices and their associated names are enough to give a homeowner a case of Chromophobia - the fear of colors. How do you decide what color(s) to use when there are so many options?

At $40 a gallon or more for quality exterior latex, you can’t afford to make a mistake. And if you don’t like the colors, your neighbors probably won’t either; colors have public impact - you’re not the only one who has to live with them. But a little research and planning can help you get started with the confidence that the final paint job is one that you - and your neighbors - will be pleased with.

Field, Trim, and Accent

An existing house isn’t a blank canvas - after all, you’re not changing the color of the roof, the brick or stone, and maybe not even the windows (if they’re vinyl or aluminum clad). Roofs and masonry walls are large areas of unbroken color and natural starting points for creating a palette.

An exterior paint scheme should be made up of at least three colors: the field - large areas such as walls or roofs; the trim - corner boards, window trim, fascias, rakes, etc.; and accent - specific elements including doors, shutters, and other architectural features.

Field colors make up the majority of what you’ll see on the house and will lead you to the choice of trim and accent. Are you trying to make your house look a little more prominent on the street? A lighter field color will make it look larger; a darker color will visually shrink it. “Unattractive” elements - gutters, downspouts, etc., should also be painted the field color to help them “disappear” into the background.

But it’s the trim color that can make or break the scheme. Painting the trim the same color as the field can work in some cases, but it can also give the house an “unfinished” or “wedding cake” look. Darker trim - especially around the windows - can cause a “frame” effect, where the windows look like pictures hung on a wall. Keeping the trim lighter than the field is almost always a safe bet.

The accent color is where the excitement is. Once you’ve chosen an attractive combination of field and trim, make it “pop” with an eye-catching accent color. It’s a tool to give life to an otherwise muted color scheme and draws attention to the important features of the house. The front door, shutters, and the windows frames (not the trim) are good places for accent colors. Windows painted with accent and trim colors together can be the most interesting part of the composition.

Choosing a Paint Scheme

The two most important considerations in choosing a color scheme are the architecture of the house and the neighborhood context.

Historic architectural styles, for example, look best in their original color schemes, although these can vary quite a bit. Original Colonial and Colonial Revival homes were often quite colorful on the inside, but less so on the exterior. Often they were painted in a single color for the field and trim, with a second color for an accent. Combined with prominent red brick chimneys and a brick or stone base, the effect is a three-color scheme.

Victorian homes - often referred to as “painted ladies” - sometimes showed off six or more colors of trim and accent. Making that look good today takes the services of a color specialist and a lot of time. But a similar effect can be had with as little as three colors if they’re well placed on the house.

The Craftsman style of the early 20th Century sported a darker, earthier color scheme using deep browns, greens, and reds. The current popularity of the style is making more homeowners consider richer color schemes for their homes.

Take cues from the other houses in your area - a house should have its own personality and style, but houses don’t look good in “party dress” all the time.

Final Coat

Whether you’re comfortable with choosing colors or not, you have several resources that can make the decision much easier. Many paint manufacturers have produced pre-selected color palettes arranged by architectural style or color range that specify compatible field, trim, and accent colors. They’re available at paint and building supply stores and most are very well done.

Many paint companies have online paint selection programs that suggest proper color combinations - some even allow you to preview colors on photographs of real houses, or on a digital photo of your own home. Sherwin-Williams.com and Lowes.com both have excellent online tools.

Plan ahead, be bold in your color choices, and use paint company resources. But don’t ask for red, green, or blue in the paint store - they won’t know what you’re talking about!

Richard L. Taylor, AIA is a published author and recognized expert in Residential Architecture. He is President of Richard Taylor Architects, a 5-person firm in Historic Dublin, Ohio. Residential Architect - Luxury Home Plans

Many people want to build muscle but don’t know what to do. In this guide you will get seven exercises that when you do them together in one work out it is the fastest way to build muscle.

For this exercise to successfully build your muscle fast you need to do the exercise as followed:

-For the first 2 weeks only do the cycle twice. Do each exercise with no more than 30 seconds of rest in between. Once you have completed one cycle rest for 1 to 2 minutes and then finish the second cycle.

-After the first 2 weeks you should become comfortable with the workout and should increase to three cycles rather than two.

-It is important that you do each exercise with appropriate weight and when you are to move onto more weight you should only increase the weight by 10% or less.

Below are the 7 exercises that are going to be the fastest way to build muscles.

1. The first exercise you should do is bent-leg knee raises. You do these by lying on your back, relax your head and neck, and place your hands on the floor near your butt. You will need to place your feet flat on the floor. To do this exercise you need to lower your abdominal muscles so you can raise your knees towards your rib cage, and then you will slowly lower your feet back to their original position. You will need to do this 12 times per set.

2. This exercise is called the V-Up. To do this you lie on your side with your body in a straight line and your arms folded across your chest. You will need to keep your legs together as you lift them off the floor towards your top elbow that your are also raising toward your hip. You should do 10 reps of these on each side and should feel a contraction in your obliques.

4. This next one, the Bridge, is part of the palates program. You will need to get in the push-up position but with your elbows bent. It is important that your body is in a straight line and pull your abdominal in. You should start with doing 20 seconds while breathing steadily and move to doing about 60 second sets later. You should do 1 or 2 reps.

5. This next exercise, tricep pull downs, are an easy exercise. You will need to get to a tricep pushdown machine. To do this exercise you bring the bar to directly at your waste with your elbows against your side. Push the bar down until your arm is extended but not to the point that you lock your elbows out, and then go to the return position. You should do 10 reps of these.

6. Leg extensions are done by sitting on a leg extension machine with your feet in the bads, lean back slightly, and lift the pads to where your leg is extended. Do 10 reps of these as well.

7. You can do bicep curls with either a dumbbell or a barbell. Hold the barbell in front of you, curl the weight toward your shoulders, wait for a second, and then return to the starting position. Do 10 reps of these as well.

If you do these seven exercises together you should see that this is the fastest way to build your muscles.

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Good house design takes its form in part from the forces that act on it. Climate and weather are two of the strongest form-makers (there are no igloos in the tropics) since houses must be designed and built to repel the damaging effects of the world we live in. Mother Nature is always trying to tear our buildings down.

Climate and weather also affect the comfort of our homes, and cause us to seek out ways to maintain the temperature and humidity of our homes within tolerable levels. A great deal of design effort is devoted to keeping the heat in or keeping the heat out, depending on the climate and season.

This Old House

At times throughout American history, the forms of our homes have reflected - to greater or lesser extents - our ingenuity in making our homes’ internal climates more comfortable.

Settlers in the Deep South built deep porches around their low-slung homes to shade them from the harsh sun and to create a reservoir of cooler air that could be drawn into the house.

New Englanders built compact homes with small windows to shield them from winter winds and to hold in as much heat as possible. And prairie homes, often built of stacked sod, were half-buried in the earth to even out the temperature swings and to protect them from the frequent violent storms that sweep the plains each summer.

Simple and effective strategies like these were necessary because fuel for heating homes was limited. We created houses that conserved resources; we didn’t know how not to.

That changed with the era of cheap and plentiful electricity and natural gas for home heating, and with the introduction of the first air conditioners for private homes in 1928. Suddenly, houses didn’t need to respond to their environment; any home could easily be kept as warm or as cool as desired using mechanical means regardless of the weather outside. Little thought was given to energy conservation strategies until the early 1970s, when the cheap energy we’d taken for granted became suddenly very expensive, and the climate-ignorant houses we’d built for decades became expensive to heat and cool.

That 70’s Show

But then a very cool thing happened. Architects and builders across the country began to revive the “lost art” of designing homes that responded to climate and weather. Ancient ideas like earth-sheltering and thermal massing were used again. New passive-cooling strategies and unique ideas like the Trombe wall were invented.

And most interestingly, the houses using low-energy techniques took on new, exciting forms. Suddenly there was something else out there beside Old World inspired design. It was a fun time full of invention and experimentation.

But that era was short-lived. By the mid-1980s fuel was cheap again and energy-efficient unique home design was all but forgotten.

Back To The Future

So it’s no surprise that we now find ourselves having come full circle, with rising energy prices and a revised interest in home energy efficiency. It’s a critical concern in a time when some studies show residential buildings consuming up to 21% of the nation’s energy.

Today’s home energy efficient strategies are different than they were 30 years ago, however. Today the focus is on technology rather than on design. New materials are techniques have been developed that make otherwise climate-insensitive home designs (and there are plenty) better stewards of the energy they need to maintain human comfort.

Technical solutions can be expensive, however, since they demand that common building materials perform at a higher level. Windows have “high-tech” glass with low-emissivity coatings, Argon gas-filled spaces, and up to three sheets of glazing. Heating systems are running at higher efficiencies, and may come equipped with programmable thermostats and insulated ductwork. Solutions like these do conserve energy and are important components in any home but the technology crutch shouldn’t be leaned on too heavily. We also need better design.

Designer’s Challenge

What if, instead of spending hundreds of additional dollars on high-tech glazing to keep the sun’s heat out, we more carefully located our windows to avoid direct sunlight in the first place? What if we used elements of the house itself to shade those windows from heat radiation and UV rays?

Suppose we took better advantage of the ground’s relatively stable temperature to stabilize the temperatures in our houses, rather than exposing every square foot of a home’s exterior surface to the elements? Instead of constant mechanical air conditioning to remove heat and humidity, why not try opening windows onto shady porches and let the breeze cool the house?

And what if we opened our minds a bit - stopped thinking so much about fashion and resale value - and allowed the forms of our houses to be shaped more by how they respond to the climate and the environment we live in?

The surprising result might be interesting and beautiful homes that cost very little to heat and cool - just like the old days.

Richard L. Taylor, AIA is a published author and recognized expert in Residential Architecture. He is President of Richard Taylor Architects, a 5-person firm in Historic Dublin, Ohio. Residential Architect - Luxury Home Plans

You’ve done it. You finally sat down and built a great website. But regardless of how great it is or how proud you feel about it, you still want traffic – you want other people to visit your website and perhaps even earn some money from your website. The all too familiar question of ‘how do I drive traffic to my web site’ is the key question on many an internet marketer’s mind.

Web site traffic is the crux of any online business. Building a great website has very little to do with having a great online business and in the end it all boils down to traffic. It definitely is not a case of ‘build it and they will come’. Getting traffic to your site is requires time, money and work and it is not really something that happens overnight.

Fortunately there are many ways with which you can drive traffic to your web site – some more effective than others. Here are 5 proven strategies to get traffic to your web site:

1. Directory Listings:

Internet directories are still a very popular form of information gathering (and listing) for both people and search engines. There are literally thousands of directories online and chances are that there will be several directories in your niche. The biggest one is Yahoo’s Search Directory and for a one off fee you can buy a listing for one year. It is essential that you get your site listed on as many credible directories as possible.

2. Buy Ad Space On Other Web Sites:

In any niche there are usually a few authority sites which tends to dominate that niche. Often these sites will sell advertising space. This can proof to be a very wise investment as your presence on such an authorative high traffic site can land you a lot of traffic.

3. Google Adwords:

Google Adwords is by far the biggest advertising network on the internet. With Adwords you can bid on keywords in your niche and pay only when someone actually click on your ad. Adwords has become quite competitive and you have to learn the finer ‘ins and outs’ if you are going to succeed. Nevertheless, it is a great source for cheap traffic.

4. Publish Your Content:

By allowing other website owners and Ezine publishers to republish your articles, audio or video clips, you can get a lot of traffic with back links from these publishers. Ezines and website owners are constantly looking for fresh new content and landing yourself a spot in a 100,000 plus subscription Ezine can really boost your traffic significantly.

5. Get Involved In Community Sites

Community forums and Blogs have become a big thing online. Like in the ‘real world’ people tend to group together and find other people who share their interests. By getting involved on these forums you can establish yourself as an expert in your field and get traffic through the back links in your forum posts. This traffic tends to be highly targeted and every once in a while a forum topic can become very popular – meaning a lot of traffic back to your site. And it’s all free.

Next time you are faced with the big question of ‘how do I drive traffic to my web site, just pick one of these five ideas. They are proven ways of getting traffic and most of them are free or very inexpensive. The golden rule is to try and do just one thing everyday to get traffic to your site and over the course of a year you can build a monster.

Article by Sincere-Advice.com

If you found this information useful and you would like to learn more bout some of the most effective strategies for driving traffic to your website, visit Sincere-advice.com/web_site_traffic.html for more information.

Although we are beginning, largely as a result of education, to detect more cases of prostate cancer in their early stages, unfortunately all too many cases are still not being detected until they are quite advanced.

Advanced prostate cancer refers to a cancer which has spread outside of the prostate gland itself and is divided into stage 3 cancer, in which the disease has spread into the pelvic tissue surrounding the prostate gland, and stage 4 cancer, in which the disease has spread, or metastasized, into other areas of the body, typically being carried by the lymphatic system.

Although not easy, stage 3 prostate cancer can often be treated quite effectively and it is possible to cure prostate cancer in stage 3. Once the disease has reached stage 4 however it becomes very difficult to cure and, while a cure is sometimes possible, treatment (typically the removal of the testes, to starve the cancer of testosterone, and chemotherapy) is generally aimed at managing the condition by slowing the progression of the disease and providing the patient with the best possible quality of life.

To this end, recent clinical trials have been examining the use of a drug called Pertuzumab and initial results suggest that this drug may well be effective in extending the life of many men suffering from advanced prostate cancer.

Amongst a small study group of men with advanced prostate cancer the use of Pertuzumab was shown to stabilize the disease for varying periods of time and, overall, extended the 12 month survival rate of the group as a whole to nearly 75%, which compared favorably to the expected survival rate without treatment of less than 50%.

Pertuzumab is a form of monoclonal antibody which is produced in a laboratory and is designed to seek out and bind with specific cells. In the case of prostate cancer Pertuzumab is designed to seek out a protein known as epidermal growth factor, which plays a significant role in the growth of prostate cancer cells.

Monoclonal antibodies are not new and can be used alone or to carry drugs, toxins or radioactive material directly to the site of a tumor. Each antibody is designed to seek out specific cells and a number of monoclonal antibodies are already in use treating cancers, while others are in development or undergoing clinical trials.

The use of this form of targeted therapy is evolving rapidly in the management of cancer patients in general and it is hoped that with further development this will become a significant form of treatment for advanced prostate cancer patients.

ProstateCancerExplained.com provides information and advice on a wide range of prostate problems including the symptoms and treatment of an enlarged prostate and the continuing search for an effective advanced prostate cancer cure.