Monday, February 21, 2011

14/02 Hot girl tâm sự về ngày Valentine

Thứ hai, 14/2/2011, 13:05 GMT+7

Một bông hồng trắng bằng khăn giấy, chiếc xe đạp gắn đầy hoa, hay bài thơ của chàng "thi sĩ" vô danh gửi tặng… là những món quà đầy ấn tượng mà hot girl Midu từng nhận được trong các mùa Valentine.
> Hot girl Elly Trần: 'Không bao giờ chụp ảnh nude'/ Những clip tỏ tình ấn tượng của giới trẻ

Bao mùa Valentine đã qua nhưng đáng nhớ nhất đối với cô gái trẻ vẫn là kỷ niệm của mối tình đầu thời học sinh. Đó là vào năm học cấp 3, Midu được bạn trai hẹn đi chơi và tặng cho hộp quà hình trái tim màu đỏ. Hôm đó, cô nàng đã giận hờn, rồi nổi nóng ném món quà xuống đường và khóc sướt mướt bỏ đi. Lý do chỉ vì chàng bắt phải chờ đợi quá lâu, đến lúc "tàn cuộc" mới trao quà.


Midu cho biết, Valentine đáng nhớ nhất của mình là lần dỗi hờn ngây thơ của mối tình đầu.


Midu bày tỏ: "Nghĩ lại mà thấy buồn cười. Em rất háo hức, nên khi gặp là muốn nhận quà ngay, nhưng mãi chẳng thấy đâu. Đến khi chuẩn bị về mới lôi ra một chiếc hộp nhỏ, giận quá ném luôn xuống đất rồi khóc như mưa. Mỗi đứa đi một đường. Cuối cùng, em lặng lẽ quay lại lượm mà không cho người ta biết. Về nhà mở ra thì thấy một bông hồng màu trắng làm bằng khăn giấy kèm lời nhắn. Sau này, hễ cứ nghĩ đến kỷ niệm này lại thấy hối hận vì biết anh ấy mất rất nhiều thời gian và làm hư rất nhiều giấy mới xếp được bông hoa".

Vào đại học, Midu và anh bạn đó mỗi người một nơi. Những mùa Valentine tiếp theo, số lượng quà của cô gái trẻ tăng nhiều hơn khi cô trở thành Hot Vteen, được nhiều người biết đến. Midu cho biết, có năm cô nhận được cả một chiếc xe đạp gắn đầy hoa hồng. Quà có ghi tên người gửi nhưng cô không biết rõ là ai.

Còn bất ngờ nhất lại là Valentine năm rồi. Trước ngày lễ tình nhân một ngày, một thanh niên đến shop bán hàng của Midu và mua tất cả món đồ có màu tím. Chưa kịp lý giải về hành động khác thường của vị khách hàng đặc biệt này thì đúng vào ngày tình nhân, tất cả món đồ này được đem đến và tặng hết cho cô chủ. "Dù không phải là yêu, nhưng tình cảm của nhiều người làm mình cảm động. Em xem như đó là tình cảm trong sáng nên không băn khoăn khi nhận", cô sinh viên chuyên ngành mỹ thuật chia sẻ.


Bảo Ngọc thích người yêu tạo cho mình sự bất ngờ trong ngày lễ tình nhân.


Với hot girl Bảo Ngọc, ngày lễ tình nhân nào cũng tràn ngập niềm vui bởi nhận được rất nhiều quà, dù cô chưa có "mối tình vắt vai" nào. Ngọc cho biết, vì chưa có bạn trai nên cô và nhóm bạn gái lập ra hội những người độc thân để đi chơi và tặng quà cho nhau. Nhiều người có tình cảm với người đẹp đã lặng lẽ gửi hoa, quà kèm theo những lời chúc dễ thương. Với những tình cảm này, Ngọc chia sẻ cô cảm thấy có chút ngại ngùng vì sợ nhận quà rồi sẽ làm người ta hiểu nhầm.

Tuy ngại nhưng Bảo Ngọc không phủ nhận có những món quà tạo ấn tượng cho cô. Như chiếc gối ôm nhỏ xíu có thêu tên Bảo Ngọc mà cô nhận được cách đây vài năm. "Chắc chắn người gửi đã dồn rất nhiều tâm huyết và tình cảm của mình vào món quà này. Món quà nhỏ nhưng lại rất ý nghĩa với em", Ngọc nói.

Ngọc chia sẻ, trong ngày Valentine cô thích nhất là cuộc hẹn bất ngờ lãng mạn thay vì những món quà xa xỉ. "Nếu có người yêu, em ước gì người đó sẽ tạo cho em sự bất ngờ. Chỉ cần anh ấy đến đón và dẫn em đến bữa tiệc đã sắp đặt sẵn. Cảm giác lúc đó chắc rất giống như trong truyện cổ tích", cô chia sẻ.


Hot girl Elly chia sẻ, ngày Valentine cũng như bao ngày khác bởi cô vẫn chưa tìm được người yêu.


Khác với cảm xúc của các bạn trang lứa, cô nàng nóng bỏng Elly Trần lại cho rằng ngày lễ tình nhân cũng bình thường như bao ngày khác. Dù nhận được rất nhiều quà nhưng Elly thành thật cho biết không có cảm xúc gì đặc biệt. "Chắc bởi em chưa có người mình yêu thực sự", cô nói.

Những mùa Valentine gần đây, Elly không may mắn được hẹn hò lãng mạn với bạn bè bởi ngày này đều trùng vào các dịp cô phải đi nước ngoài tham gia chụp ảnh hay giao lưu khán giả.

Ấn tượng nhất với Elly là tình cảm của một fan Đài Loan. Anh chàng cất công sưu tập cả chục món đặc sản xứ Đài để làm quà tặng người đẹp. Anh còn dành toàn bộ số tiền tiết kiệm để mua vé máy bay đến Việt Nam trao qua tận tay. "Nghe anh ấy nói mong muốn món quà sẽ giúp em hiểu thêm về Đài Loan khiến em thấy cảm động lắm", cô nói.

Elly Trần chia sẻ, cô đang chờ đợi một Valentine thật ý nghĩa và lãng mạn khi tìm được người yêu.

Bình Nguyên

Theo dòng sự kiện:
Valentine 2011 (14/02)
Sinh viên kiếm tiền ngày Valentine (14/02)
Những nụ hôn ngọt ngào trong đêm tình nhân (14/02)
Uyên Linh tủi thân trong ngày Valentine (14/02)
Ngày tình yêu và bài thơ của mẹ (14/02)
Nên duyên chồng vợ từ mạng mai mối (14/02)

19/02 Case on Mortgage Official Is Said to Be Dropped

February 19, 2011
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles have dropped their criminal investigation into Angelo R. Mozilo, the former chief executive of Countrywide Financial, once the nation’s largest mortgage lender, according to a person with direct knowledge of the investigation.

The closure of the case after two years of inquiry follows last October’s settlement by Mr. Mozilo of insider trading allegations made by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Regulators had contended that Mr. Mozilo sold $140 million in Countrywide stock between 2006 and 2007 even as he recognized that his company was faltering. Countrywide and Bank of America paid $45 million of Mr. Mozilo’s $67.5 million settlement, and he was responsible for the rest.


19/02 Case on Mortgage Official Is Said to Be Dropped

February 19, 2011
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles have dropped their criminal investigation into Angelo R. Mozilo, the former chief executive of Countrywide Financial, once the nation’s largest mortgage lender, according to a person with direct knowledge of the investigation.

The closure of the case after two years of inquiry follows last October’s settlement by Mr. Mozilo of insider trading allegations made by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Regulators had contended that Mr. Mozilo sold $140 million in Countrywide stock between 2006 and 2007 even as he recognized that his company was faltering. Countrywide and Bank of America paid $45 million of Mr. Mozilo’s $67.5 million settlement, and he was responsible for the rest.

Without admitting or denying wrongdoing, Mr. Mozilo agreed to be banned from serving as an officer or a director of a public company.

The conclusion by prosecutors that Mr. Mozilo, 72, did not engage in criminal conduct while directing Countrywide will likely fuel broad concerns that few high-level executives of financial companies are being held accountable for the actions that led to the financial crisis of 2008.

Hundreds of billions of dollars have been lost by investors while millions of borrowers have lost their homes. Few of the people who ran the institutions that contributed to the disaster have been found liable.

E-mails and other documents supplied to regulators in the S.E.C.’s case against Mr. Mozilo showed him discussing the company’s lending practices and describing some of its loans as “toxic” and “poison.” Nevertheless, the company kept selling the types of loans Mr. Mozilo was denigrating.

The person with knowledge of the probe insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. The closing of the criminal case was first reported by The Los Angeles Times.

Even as criminal and civil prosecutors are closing investigations into financial executives, private litigation is swelling. Investors who purchased dubious mortgage securities are bringing a wide array of cases against mortgage lenders and the Wall Street firms that enabled them. These investors maintain, citing internal documents and e-mails, that those putting together mortgage securities knew that they contained problematic loans that would likely fail.

For example, a suit filed earlier this year against Bear Stearns by Ambac, an insurance company that guaranteed mortgage securities, cited an August 2008 e-mail from a former Countrywide executive. He explained to a friend that he had not recognized the financial cataclysm on the horizon because “we were having too much fun” processing risky mortgage instruments “and getting loaded on Miller Lite.”

Mr. Mozilo, the son of a Bronx butcher, started Countrywide in 1969 with David Loeb, who died in 2003; together the men built the company into a mortgage lending giant with $11.4 billion in revenue at its peak in 2006.

In his years at Countrywide, Mr. Mozilo became one of the highest-paid executives in America. From 2000 until 2008, when he left, Mr. Mozilo received total compensation of $521.5 million, according to Equilar, a compensation research firm.

Mr. Mozilo made a rare court appearance last month in a wrongful dismissal case won by Michael G. Winston, a former Countrywide executive who said he was let go after questioning the company’s practices. Observers said Mr. Mozilo was combative and defiant early in his testimony, but later looked frail and had to grasp the railing as he left the witness stand.

“All of these senior people got huge payouts and left behind the carnage, which has hurt many hundreds of thousands,” said Ted Mathews, the lawyer who represented Mr. Winston in the case.


Peter Lattman contributed reporting.

20/02 Egyptians Were Unplugged, and Uncowed

February 20, 2011
By NOAM COHEN

FOR a segment of the young people of Egypt, the date to remember is not when Egyptians first took to the streets to shake off the 30-year rule of Hosni Mubarak.

Rather, it is three days later — Jan. 28, 2011 — the day the Internet died, or more precisely, was put to sleep by the Mubarak government.

That was when some of them discovered a couple of polar but compatible truths. One, the streets still had the power to act as Twitter was unplugged. And two, the Internet had become so integral to society that it wasn’t unreasonable to consider a constitutional guarantee of free access to it.

“It felt exactly like going back in time, but in today’s world,” Ahmed Gabr, a medical student and the editor of the Swalif.net technology blog, wrote in an e-mail.

Mr. Gabr included his detailed timeline of interruptions in communications services during the protests: when service at Facebook and Twitter first became spotty, when text-messaging was interrupted.

His description for Jan. 28: “Egypt is now officially offline.”

In interviews by telephone and e-mail young Egyptians like Mr. Gabr — tech-savvy but not necessarily political — were hardly Internet utopians. They had, after all, seen firsthand how shutting down the Internet had failed to stop the momentum of the protests. But they did make a case that the Internet was an irreplaceable part of Egyptian life, especially for the young. Nothing more and nothing less.

The removal of the Internet by their government, they said, was a reminder that they were not free; not truly part of the wider world that they know so well thanks to technologies like the Web.

“Frankly, I didn’t participate in Jan. 25 protests, but the Web sites’ blockade and communications blackout on Jan. 28 was one of the main reasons I, and many others, were pushed to the streets,” wrote Ramez Mohamed, a 26-year-old computer science graduate who works in telecommunications.

“It was the first time for me to feel digitally disabled,” he wrote. “Imagine sitting at your home, having no single connection with the outer world. I took the decision, ‘this is nonsense, we are not sheep in their herd,’ I went down and joined the protests.”

For Mr. Mohamed, as for Mr. Gabr, it was like going back in time. “During the five days of the Internet blackout, I was at Tahrir Square for almost every day,” he recalled, referring to the hive of the Cairo protests. “Tell you what, I didn’t miss Twitter, I can confidently say that Tahrir was a street Twitter. Almost everyone sharing in a political discussion, trying to announce something or circulate news, even if they are rumors, simply retweets.”

Laughing at how what is old is new again, Mr. Mohamed ended this e-mail passage with a smilely face icon.The idea that the Egyptian government could simply shut down the Internet (something Libya now does periodically) was a shock to outsiders — even a bit of a technical achievement. And the decision to do it ran against the grain of what had been the government’s relatively open policy toward the Internet, said Andrew Bossone, who spent the past five years in Cairo writing about technology.

“When I went to Tunisia about a year ago, I couldn’t get onto YouTube or Al Jazeera,” Mr. Bossone said in an interview from Beirut, where he now lives. “Egypt didn’t really block any Web sites.”

He said the policy had raised expectations: “It’s not just about Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. It’s about access to this technology that everybody else has. A sense of entitlement. The idea that everybody else has it, why can’t I have it?”

Perhaps that sense of entitlement is behind the discussions that Mr. Gabr reported hearing. “Some friends are now even demanding, jokingly or seriously,” he wrote, “that a new or amended constitution should emphasize on a non-negotiable ‘right to Internet access’ for everybody.”

This comfort with a relatively free-flowing Internet was on display in 2008, when Wikipedia’s annual convention was held in Alexandria, at the new high-tech library built near where the legendary Library of Alexandria had been.

Filled with much of Egypt’s technical class, which included many women, the gathering was billed as an effort to bolster Arabic Wikipedia. The relatively low number of articles didn’t accurately reflect the importance of technology in the Arab world, the thinking went. Many Egyptians had an active, even bustling, Facebook presence, and attempts were made to organize protests at the site on behalf of bloggers who had been persecuted by the government.

Moushira Elamrawy, an advocate for free culture and free software in Alexandria, remembered the conference as a chance for the budding techie community in Egypt to meet in person. Two years later, the Internet shutdown showed the need for an independent community of technical experts to protect Egyptians’ connection to the world.

The day the Internet was shut off represented a point of no return, Ms. Elamrawy said. “It was definitely one of the most provoking things. We felt abandoned — completely isolated from the world.”

Ms. Elamrawy, who is 27 and trained as an architect but consults on development for free culture projects like Wikipedia, spoke by telephone from San Francisco, where she headed after spending the protests in Alexandria.

The protesters, she recalled, realized that in the time of darkness, it was particularly important to document what happened. They knew, she said, that at some point the Internet would be back, and people would want to know about the interim.

Ahmad Balal, a radiologist at Cairo University Hospitals who was a medical student during the Wikipedia conference in 2008, was one such chronicler. Mr. Balal wrote in an e-mail that his Facebook wall was the best way to relive what he experienced during the protests.

He had joined the protests at the start, on Jan. 25, but there is an eerie gap on his Facebook wall when the Internet was down, and friends from outside Egypt asked how he was but received no reply.

On Feb. 2, 5:18 a.m., when the Internet was back, he wrote in English, one of the few times he has: “The Internet is back to Egypt. Mr. Hosni Mubarak has offered it back to us after blocking it for only 5 days. Such a generous man!!!”

Forty-two minutes later, there appeared a photograph of a crowded Tahrir Square. The caption read, “I was there.”

16/02 New Hacking Tools Pose Bigger Threats to Wi-Fi Users

February 16, 2011
By KATE MURPHY

You may think the only people capable of snooping on your Internet activity are government intelligence agents or possibly a talented teenage hacker holed up in his parents’ basement. But some simple software lets just about anyone sitting next to you at your local coffee shop watch you browse the Web and even assume your identity online.

“Like it or not, we are now living in a cyberpunk novel,” said Darren Kitchen, a systems administrator for an aerospace company in Richmond, Calif., and the host of Hak5, a video podcast about computer hacking and security. “When people find out how trivial and easy it is to see and even modify what you do online, they are shocked.”

Until recently, only determined and knowledgeable hackers with fancy tools and lots of time on their hands could spy while you used your laptop or smartphone at Wi-Fi hot spots. But a free program called Firesheep, released in October, has made it simple to see what other users of an unsecured Wi-Fi network are doing and then log on as them at the sites they visited.

Without issuing any warnings of the possible threat, Web site administrators have since been scrambling to provide added protections.

“I released Firesheep to show that a core and widespread issue in Web site security is being ignored,” said Eric Butler, a freelance software developer in Seattle who created the program. “It points out the lack of end-to-end encryption.”

What he means is that while the password you initially enter on Web sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Amazon, eBay and The New York Times is encrypted, the Web browser’s cookie, a bit of code that that identifies your computer, your settings on the site or other private information, is often not encrypted. Firesheep grabs that cookie, allowing nosy or malicious users to, in essence, be you on the site and have full access to your account.

More than a million people have downloaded the program in the last three months (including this reporter, who is not exactly a computer genius). And it is easy to use.

The only sites that are safe from snoopers are those that employ the cryptographic protocol transport layer security or its predecessor, secure sockets layer, throughout your session. PayPal and many banks do this, but a startling number of sites that people trust to safeguard their privacy do not. You know you are shielded from prying eyes if a little lock appears in the corner of your browser or the Web address starts with “https” rather than “http.”

“The usual reason Web sites give for not encrypting all communication is that it will slow down the site and would be a huge engineering expense,” said Chris Palmer, technology director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an electronic rights advocacy group based in San Francisco. “Yes, there are operational hurdles, but they are solvable.”

Indeed, Gmail made end-to-end encryption its default mode in January 2010. Facebook began to offer the same protection as an opt-in security feature last month, though it is so far available only to a small percentage of users and has limitations. For example, it doesn’t work with many third-party applications.

“It’s worth noting that Facebook took this step, but it’s too early to congratulate them,” said Mr. Butler, who is frustrated that “https” is not the site’s default setting. “Most people aren’t going to know about it or won’t think it’s important or won’t want to use it when they find out that it disables major applications.”

Joe Sullivan, chief security officer at Facebook, said the company was engaged in a “deliberative rollout process,” to access and address any unforeseen difficulties. “We hope to have it available for all users in the next several weeks,” he said, adding that the company was also working to address problems with third-party applications and to make “https” the default setting.

Many Web sites offer some support for encryption via “https,” but they make it difficult to use. To address these problems, the Electronic Frontier Foundation in collaboration with the Tor Project, another group concerned with Internet privacy, released in June an add-on to the browser Firefox, called Https Everywhere. The extension, which can be downloaded at eff.org/https-everywhere, makes “https” the stubbornly unchangeable default on all sites that support it.

Since not all Web sites have “https” capability, Bill Pennington, chief strategy officer with the Web site risk management firm WhiteHat Security in Santa Clara, Calif., said: “I tell people that if you’re doing things with sensitive data, don’t do it at a Wi-Fi hot spot. Do it at home.”

But home wireless networks may not be all that safe either, because of free and widely available Wi-Fi cracking programs like Gerix WiFi Cracker, Aircrack-ng and Wifite. The programs work by faking legitimate user activity to collect a series of so-called weak keys or clues to the password. The process is wholly automated, said Mr. Kitchen at Hak5, allowing even techno-ignoramuses to recover a wireless router’s password in a matter of seconds. “I’ve yet to find a WEP-protected network not susceptible to this kind of attack,” Mr. Kitchen said.

A WEP-encrypted password (for wired equivalent privacy) is not as strong as a WPA (or Wi-Fi protected access) password, so it’s best to use a WPA password instead. Even so, hackers can use the same free software programs to get on WPA password-protected networks as well. It just takes much longer (think weeks) and more computer expertise.

Using such programs along with high-powered Wi-Fi antennas that cost less than $90, hackers can pull in signals from home networks two to three miles away. There are also some computerized cracking devices with built-in antennas on the market, like WifiRobin ($156). But experts said they were not as fast or effective as the latest free cracking programs, because the devices worked only on WEP-protected networks.

To protect yourself, changing the Service Set Identifier or SSID of your wireless network from the default name of your router (like Linksys or Netgear) to something less predictable helps, as does choosing a lengthy and complicated alphanumeric password.

Setting up a virtual private network, or V.P.N., which encrypts all communications you transmit wirelessly whether on your home network or at a hot spot, is even more secure. The data looks like gibberish to a snooper as it travels from your computer to a secure server before it is blasted onto the Internet.

Popular V.P.N. providers include VyperVPN, HotSpotVPN and LogMeIn Hamachi. Some are free; others are as much as $18 a month, depending on how much data is encrypted. Free versions tend to encrypt only Web activity and not e-mail exchanges.

However, Mr. Palmer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation blames poorly designed Web sites, not vulnerable Wi-Fi connections, for security lapses. “Many popular sites were not designed for security from the beginning, and now we are suffering the consequences,” he said. “People need to demand ‘https’ so Web sites will do the painful integration work that needs to be done.”

20/02 Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter

February 20, 2011
By VERNE G. KOPYTOFF

SAN FRANCISCO — Like any aspiring filmmaker, Michael McDonald, a high school senior, used a blog to show off his videos. But discouraged by how few people bothered to visit, he instead started posting his clips on Facebook, where his friends were sure to see and comment on his editing skills.

“I don’t use my blog anymore,” said Mr. McDonald, who lives in San Francisco. “All the people I’m trying to reach are on Facebook.”

Blogs were once the outlet of choice for people who wanted to express themselves online. But with the rise of sites like Facebook and Twitter, they are losing their allure for many people — particularly the younger generation.

The Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center found that from 2006 to 2009, blogging among children ages 12 to 17 fell by half; now 14 percent of children those ages who use the Internet have blogs. Among 18-to-33-year-olds, the project said in a report last year, blogging dropped two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier.

Former bloggers said they were too busy to write lengthy posts and were uninspired by a lack of readers. Others said they had no interest in creating a blog because social networking did a good enough job keeping them in touch with friends and family.

Blogging started its rapid ascension about 10 years ago as services like Blogger and LiveJournal became popular. So many people began blogging — to share dieting stories, rant about politics and celebrate their love of cats — that Merriam-Webster declared “blog” the word of the year in 2004.

Defining a blog is difficult, but most people think it is a Web site on which people publish periodic entries in reverse chronological order and allow readers to leave comments.

Yet for many Internet users, blogging is defined more by a personal and opinionated writing style. A number of news and commentary sites started as blogs before growing into mini-media empires, like The Huffington Post or Silicon Alley Insider, that are virtually indistinguishable from more traditional news sources.

Blogs went largely unchallenged until Facebook reshaped consumer behavior with its all-purpose hub for posting everything social. Twitter, which allows messages of no longer than 140 characters, also contributed to the upheaval.

No longer did Internet users need a blog to connect with the world. They could instead post quick updates to complain about the weather, link to articles that infuriated them, comment on news events, share photos or promote some cause — all the things a blog was intended to do.

Indeed, small talk shifted in large part to social networking, said Elisa Camahort Page, co-founder of BlogHer, a women’s blog network. Still, blogs remain a home of more meaty discussions, she said.

“If you’re looking for substantive conversation, you turn to blogs,” Ms. Camahort Page said. “You aren’t going to find it on Facebook, and you aren’t going to find it in 140 characters on Twitter.”

Lee Rainie, director of the Internet and American Life Project, says that blogging is not so much dying as shifting with the times. Entrepreneurs have taken some of the features popularized by blogging and weaved them into other kinds of services.

“The act of telling your story and sharing part of your life with somebody is alive and well — even more so than at the dawn of blogging,” Mr. Rainie said. “It’s just morphing onto other platforms.”

The blurring of lines is readily apparent among users of Tumblr. Although Tumblr calls itself a blogging service, many of its users are unaware of the description and do not consider themselves bloggers — raising the possibility that the decline in blogging by the younger generation is merely a semantic issue.

Kim Hou, a high school senior in San Francisco, said she quit blogging months ago, but acknowledged that she continued to post fashion photos on Tumblr. “It’s different from blogging because it’s easier to use,” she said. “With blogging you have to write, and this is just images. Some people write some phrases or some quotes, but that’s it.”

The effect is seen on the companies providing the blogging platforms. Blogger, owned by Google, had fewer unique visitors in the United States in December than it had a year earlier — a 2 percent decline, to 58.6 million — although globally, Blogger’s unique visitors rose 9 percent, to 323 million.

LiveJournal, another blogging service, has decided to emphasize communities. Connecting people who share an interest in celebrity gossip, for instance, provides the social interaction that “classic” blogging lacks, said Sue Rosenstock, a spokeswoman for LiveJournal, which is owned by SUP, a Russian online media company. “Blogging can be a very lonely occupation; you write out into the abyss,” she said.

But some blogging services like Tumblr and WordPress seem to have avoided any decline. Toni Schneider, chief executive of Automattic, the company that commercializes the WordPress blogging software, explains that WordPress is mostly for serious bloggers, not the younger novices who are defecting to social networking.

In any case, he said bloggers often use Facebook and Twitter to promote their blog posts to a wider audience. Rather than being competitors, he said, they are complementary.

“There is a lot of fragmentation,” Mr. Schneider said. “But at this point, anyone who is taking blogging seriously — they’re using several mediums to get a large amount of their traffic.”

While the younger generation is losing interest in blogging, people approaching middle age and older are sticking with it. Among 34-to-45-year-olds who use the Internet, the percentage who blog increased six points, to 16 percent, in 2010 from two years earlier, the Pew survey found. Blogging by 46-to-55-year-olds increased five percentage points, to 11 percent, while blogging among 65-to-73-year-olds rose two percentage points, to 8 percent.

Russ Steele, 72, a retired Air Force officer and aerospace worker from Nevada City, Calif., says he spends up to three hours a day seeking interesting topics and writing about them for his blog, NC Media Watch, which covers local issues in Nevada County, northeast of Sacramento. All he wants is to have a voice in the community for his conservative views.

Although he signed up for Facebook this month, Mr. Steele said he did not foresee using it much and said that he remained committed to blogging. “I’d rather spend my time writing up a blog analysis than a whole bunch of short paragraphs and then send them to people,” he said. “I don’t need to tell people I’m going to the grocery store.”

19/02 Jilted in the U.S., a Site Finds Love in India

February 19, 2011
By HANNAH SELIGSON

IN 2008, three young guys in Manhattan started Ignighter.com, a dating Web site focused on twentysomethings. They sought to set themselves apart by enabling members to set up group dates: One member, serving as a point person, could arrange a date — a movie, say, or a picnic in Central Park — with a group of other people and thereby take some of the awkward edge off of typical dates.

During the company’s first year, the three founders — Kevin Owocki, now 26, Daniel Osit, 29, and Adam Sachs, 28 — hustled to get the word out, hosting parties, blitzing college campuses with fliers and doing a big push on Facebook.

By the end of 2008, Ignighter.com had 50,000 registered users in the United States — a decent number, but not big enough to put it on the digital dating map, which is crowded with competitors.

“People just didn’t get right away what the site was when we told them about it. They thought it was a site for orgies,” says Mr. Sachs, who is in charge of business development and media relations for the site.

Then, in April 2009, while checking statistics about visitors to the site, Mr. Osit, who is in charge of marketing, noticed that there was a lot of traffic from Singapore, Malaysia, India and South Korea.

Mr. Sachs recalls: “We didn’t pay any attention to it at first. “We thought, ‘That’s interesting — now let’s plan our next event in New York City.’ ”

But by June, they couldn’t ignore the traffic from Asia — specifically India, which by then had more visitors than any other Asian country. Ignighter was gaining hundreds of users a day, mainly from New Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Chennai.

“In January 2010, we made the decision that we are an Indian dating site,” Mr. Sachs says. And now, with almost two million users — and 7,000 more signing up daily — Ignighter is considered India’s fastest-growing dating Web site.

To put it another way, it gets as many users in a week in India as it did in a year in the United States. Next month, Ignighter will open an office in India and hire a dozen local employees. The company has stopped developing its American site, though it remains online.

As funding heats up for Web start-ups in general, some investors have taken notice of Ignighter and its potential in India. This month, the company closed a $3 million round of financing. Forty percent of its investors are based in India, including Rajan Anandan, Google’s top executive in India. In the United States, Ignighter is backed by Point Judith Capital, Founder Collective and GSA Venture Partners, among others.

“Here we are, a few Jewish guys sitting in Union Square, and we might have accidentally revolutionized the dating scene in India,” Mr. Sachs says of himself and Mr. Osit. They and Mr. Owocki, who is charge of Web development and programming for Ignighter, have never been to India — though they now plan to make frequent trips there.

IT’S not all that unusual for start-ups to find that their market isn’t what they intended, said Sean Marsh, co-founder of Point Judith Capital in Providence, R.I., and an investor in Ignighter. But not all entrepreneurs choose to listen to what the market is telling them, he says.

Even though an Indian dating site wasn’t their original concept, the Ignighter founders decided to pivot at a crucial moment, he says: “You have to be flexible as an entrepreneur and bend to the market and consumer feedback.”

So how did this happy accident happen?

Mr. Osit suspects that young people in India read about the service on technology blogs like Mashable and TechCrunch. From there, it grew in part because dating in India is still in a somewhat embryonic stage. It happens in big cities like Mumbai and Hyderabad, but in many less cosmopolitan parts of India it’s still considered taboo for unmarried men and women to be seen in public together. Many couples, as they have for centuries, meet through arranged marriages that their relatives orchestrate.

But for some in this generation — those raised on a diet of MTV and social networks — there’s a desire to find new dating scripts, or just to hang out with a coed group.

The group dynamic also makes going out an easier sell to parents, who are worried about safety and propriety. That’s what led Rohan Bhardwaj, 23, to set up a profile on Ignighter last month. He works in New Delhi at Exclusively.In, an online store that sells Indian luxury goods, and, like a majority of his peers, he lives with his parents. He heard about Ignighter from his boss in the United States — the chief executive of Exclusively.In, which shares office space with Ignighter in Manhattan — and from his cousin in Canada.

Mr. Bhardwaj formed a group with two friends and, as the point person or “ambassador” of that group, asked out two twentysomething women from New Delhi. They arranged a date at a karaoke bar, and their second date was at the Hard Rock Cafe in the Saket District Center. Since then, he has gone on a couple of more dates with that group.

Mr. Bhardwaj says he isn’t trying to find a wife through the site. For him, that’s a long way off. “There’s a particular age when people have to get married, which is around 26 or 27,” he says. And he is not yet sure if he will go the traditional route to find a wife, adding that his parents are open to the idea of a “love marriage” that is not arranged.

For people like Mr. Bhardwaj, Ignighter is filling a social niche that allows them to combine social networking and offline “friending” without the pressure of the matrimonial sites that dominate India’s online dating landscape. “Group dating is a great opportunity that didn’t exist before,” Mr. Bhardwaj says.

But in a culture where dating can still be a relatively new concept, Ignighter.com’s success may depend, in part, on which way the social winds blow.

“I’m seeing the change happening. There are enough people in the new generation who want to have their own identity and meet people on their own terms,” says Sasha Mirchandani, 38, an investor in Ignighter.com and managing partner of Kae Capital, a venture capital firm in Mumbai. “If I were 27 or 28 and single, I would go online to date,” says Mr. Mirchandani, who is married.

Ignighter, unlike the matrimonial sites, puts socializing and dating directly into the hands of young people. On most of the matrimonial sites, there’s a drop-down menu for “profile created for” — which includes son, daughter, brother, sister, relative or self. When it comes to Ignighter, “as far as we know, there are not a lot of parents on our site,” Mr. Sachs said.

Matrimonial sites thrive in India. Shaadi.com and others like Jeevansathi.com and Bharat Matrimony all have millions of users. The online matrimonial industry in India is estimated to generate $63 million a year in revenue and has tens of millions of registrants, according to EmPower Research, a market research firm.

“Dating sites have not succeeded in India,” says Gaurav Mishra of the MSL Group, a division of the marketing company Publicis Groupe. “It’s either been social networking sites or matrimonial sites.” Traditional dating sites, like Match.com, haven’t taken off in India.

Mr. Mirchandani says he believes the situation is changing. “In a country of nearly a billion,” he says, “even if arranged marriages decline from 90 percent to 86 percent, that still means there are millions of people who could turn to a dating site.”

After hearing about Ignighter from friends and colleagues, Navya Shreejogi, 26, an engineer in Chennai who lives in an apartment with two roommates, logged on, created a basic profile and went browsing. She was a little disappointed. “It’s more teenagers who are still in college and just want to have fun,” she says. “The guys didn’t seem serious.”

Ms. Shreejogi, like many in her generation, isn’t that worried about meeting someone. She’ll leave that to her parents. “I don’t need to bother finding a mate,” she says. “My mom and dad have been searching for a husband for me for two years, and I have lots of friends and colleagues I can go out with on the weekend, so I don’t need this kind of site.” She also says she and her female friends are concerned about safety issues connected with meeting strangers through online dating.

Still, she acknowledges that the site could draw young people who move to a big city, like Chennai, and don’t yet have a social circle and are seeking an alternative to an arranged marriage.

Mr. Mishra is skeptical that a site like Ignighter.com can succeed. “Indian women don’t even post their own profiles on matrimonial sites; their fathers and brothers do,” he says. “So, I can’t imagine Indian women posting their profiles on a dating site, and to have a successful dating site, you need to have women.”

Still, 40 percent of Ignighter’s members are women, according to the company.

While the pace of cultural and social change may well dictate how Ignighter.com fares in India, other indicators are pointing in its favor. For one, India is a less-saturated Internet market — only a small percentage of the population goes online — making it a potentially lucrative opportunity for sites that get there early.

“If you look at it from a macro perspective, we are on the right side of globalization,” Mr. Osit says. “India is growing much faster than the U.S.” — where about three-quarters of the population has regular Internet access.

The next phase for Ignighter.com is to see whether it can be an Indian dating site based in India. All three founders agree that they can’t run the business by remote control from their office in Union Square. So each will spend a couple of months a year at the soon-to-be-opened Indian office.

“All of our decisions so far have been very mathematical,” Mr. Sachs says.

Mr. Osit adds that their biggest cultural blind spot is in understanding male-female interaction in India. “I’m sure there are a lot of subtleties there that we need to grasp,” he says.

When Mr. Osit, Mr. Sachs and Mr. Owocki go to India for the first time next month, they will set up an office, arrange for the company to be incorporated, and hire employees. But they will also see how young people interact, becoming students of the Indian social scene so they can make some decisions about the site:

Should they remove the “Seinfeld” references on the site that were meant for an American audience? Should they translate the site into Hindi? If so, how do you say “group dating” in Hindi? Should they ask users for their caste? What kinds of offline partnerships, if any, should they form? And what role should mobile devices play?

They’ll also have to navigate serious logistical issues. A case in point is that 70 percent of payments that subscribers try to make can’t be processed because of problems with the credit card system. (Members are allowed to keep using the site free when this happens but can’t send messages.) Mr. Sachs says he hopes they can work out these glitches upon their arrival.

In India, the site works the same way it did in the United States. Groups chat through messaging, and arrange to go out on dates to movies, restaurants and clubs. The median age of users is 23.5; the average group size is four people, Mr. Sachs says.

The site is still trying to determine the best pricing; a yearly subscription fee now runs $10 to $45. On the Indian version of the site, a virtual-goods marketplace is prominent, selling virtual gifts like cricket balls and naan bread — to be sent to other users as a way to flirt. “It’s been a big hit,” Mr. Osit says. “We sell about 10,000 gifts a month.”

AS for how many group dates Ignighter.com has helped to arrange in India so far, the founders don’t know. They’ll start doing user and market research later this year. At this point, it’s not clear whether many of the group outings lead to romance, but the site is clearly striking a chord.

“Young people aren’t using Ignighter.com to get married,” Mr. Bhardwaj said. They’ll still go to the tried-and-true matrimonial sites for that.

18/02 In New Hampshire, Can Bretton Woods Get Gnarly?

February 18, 2011
By BILL PENNINGTON

The Mount Washington Hotel in the White Mountains. More Photos »

FOR years, the problem facing the Bretton Woods ski resort has been entirely its own making: It is too perfect. Perfectly groomed. Perfectly contoured with rough edges softened. Perfectly positioned, shielded from wind and blessed with sun and snow. Perfectly tranquil, neither hurried nor crowded.

Skiers and snowboarders went knowing what to expect. And Bretton Woods, New Hampshire’s largest ski area and a historic vacation destination high in the White Mountains, has always delivered. No surprises.

Be careful what you wish for.

Skiers and snowboarders sometimes want a little unpredictability, and Bretton Woods — part of the only true Alpine range in the Eastern United States — is nestled among some of the thorniest ski mountains in America. Wildcat Mountain, just around the bend, is big, tough and often icy. Nearby Cannon Mountain hosted the first North American World Cup ski races in 1967, a series discontinued years later, some say, because Cannon was so difficult that the European elite preferred to stay away.

So, as extreme skiing and rogue backcountry experiences have become more popular in the last 15 years, many snow sports enthusiasts who wanted to be surprised, even scared, drove past Bretton Woods on the way to New Hampshire’s gnarlier options. Bretton Woods remained unmoved. It catered to its market: families and those who wanted a more pampered ski trip. In time, some younger voices called Bretton Woods “Medicare Mountain.”

As a New England native, I first skied Bretton Woods as a college student. After some desultory runs that failed to stir my youthful quest for danger, I soon left for Cannon and its frightfully steep slopes. Ten years later, on a return visit to Bretton Woods, I appreciated newly open terrain that zigzagged around the occasional rock outcropping, yet still found the place a bit tame. In the last few years, however, I started to hear that Bretton Woods, now linked to the famed and adjacent Mount Washington Hotel, was carefully recasting itself.

A college roommate now living in New Hampshire told me it had become his favorite winter destination.

“I’m telling you,” my friend said. “New terrain on the mountain, renovated hotel, dog sledding, zip lines, a spa, miles of Nordic skiing, even a nightclub.”

At Bretton Woods? Now this I had to see.

IF you don’t ski or snowboard and yet have heard of Bretton Woods, you probably paid attention in your high school history or economics class. In the summer of 1944, with most of the world secure in the belief that the Allies would win World War II, delegates from 44 nations convened at the mountain’s Mount Washington Hotel to try to solve a world economically wrecked by the fighting. About 1,000 people arrived at a hotel built in 1902 in the tradition of the grand late-19th-century hotels of northern New England.

The Mount Washington Hotel was, and may still be, the largest wooden structure in New England, a palace built for the rich of New York, Boston and Philadelphia. Constructed on 10,000 acres by the New York rail and coal magnate Joseph Stickney, the hotel’s Spanish Renaissance Revival exterior and French Renaissance-style interior were created by 250 Italian craftsmen lured from Boston. The Great Hall lobby has 23-foot ceilings and Tiffany stained-glass windows that also adorn the adjoining dining and meeting rooms. There is a wraparound veranda that extends for a quarter mile.

The hotel had all kinds of innovations and idiosyncrasies: Turkish baths, a squash court, boot and gun rooms, a bowling alley and billiard parlor. Thomas Edison installed the electricity and a stock ticker wired directly to Wall Street. The Italian workers, meanwhile, imparted their own old-world superstitions. The number of steps to the floors, for example, were varied — 33 to the second floor from the main registration area but only 31 steps in the south tower staircase. Why? To confuse ghosts.

The economic conference — delegates stayed for three weeks — and the international publicity it generated revived the hotel, which had been battered by the Depression. But while the meetings, which established the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and produced what is still known as the Bretton Woods agreement, revived the world economy, the post-World War II renewal for New Hampshire’s White Mountain resorts was short-lived. Soon the Mount Washington was the last of the grand hotels standing. Never open during the winter season, it endured with the help of hiking trips, summer pro tennis tournaments and waves of golfers arriving for its championship-level golf course designed by the noted golf architect Donald Ross. When the Bretton Woods ski area opened in 1973, the hundreds of thousands of new visitors to the area stayed in cozy condominiums and smaller nearby inns. By 1991, the hotel, worn and threadbare, was put up for auction.

Local businessmen bought the hotel and, six years later, took over the ski area, too. Dozens of trails and lifts were added. The Nordic trail network was enlarged, and in 1999 a winterized hotel opened for the ski season and instantly became one of the largest and most majestic ski lodges in the country.

The mountain continued to develop its reputation for having the best intermediate slopes in the East, earning a loyal following that loved to cruise the miles of genteel, groomed corduroy.

In the latter part of the last decade, and especially since the Omni Corporation began managing the property in 2009, the resort decided to reach for more. The ski area would stretch its horizons and boundaries, and the 200-room hotel would be updated in the hopes of being more than a landlocked Titanic.

I HAVE three ski-racing children, and upon arriving in northern New Hampshire in the middle of a Friday last month, there was no chance we were checking into the hotel before skiing first. Within minutes, thanks to two high-speed lifts, we were flying down the renowned Bretton Woods groomers. I immediately felt as if my memory had deceived me. No, these were not death-defying runs, but they had an old New England feel, with dips and hollows that induced an entertaining rhythm of linked turns.

We ventured over to the West Mountain trails, opened in the late 1990s, and found the long Starr King trail, which had several good drops and pitches that demanded attention. On subsequent runs, we found small detours next to Starr King that cut through the woods, like John Grave’s Glades. These were 40-second sojourns, not exactly classic backcountry, but engaging diversions that I didn’t recall from past visits. Then again, Bretton Woods has grown to 102 trails, more than doubling what it had when I first visited in the 1980s.

On the east end of the area there was also the Rosebrook Canyon Glades, and it was hard not to enjoy a Bretton Woods tradition — weaving through stands of birch and pine trees. It had not been a great week for snowfall, and yet there were a few fresh inches of the white stuff underfoot, a product of what is known locally as the “Bretton Woods flurries.” Sandwiched between two notches in the mountains, Bretton Woods’s peaks get snow even when adjacent areas do not.

“Even when the parking lot gets nothing, there will be three inches of snow up on the trail network,” said Chris Ellms, director of ski operations at Bretton Woods.

Reliable snowfall fits Bretton Woods’s unintimidating aura. As does a trail system that makes sure there are beginner routes from every lift and that every trail filters to the same base lodge so that families can congregate in the same place.

This winter, in an effort to add some spice to the trail mix, Bretton Woods opened 30 new acres of glades on Mount Stickney, a rounded undeveloped hilltop that will most likely be the site of future trail expansion. These new trails, accessible from the top of the Mount Rosebrook Express Summit quad, have a slightly remote, isolated ambience.

“It’s a throwback experience, a soft backcountry,” Mr. Ellms said. “That’s what we’re after. We’re never going to be Stowe’s ultra steep Front Four trails and we don’t want to be. But we can give more of a sense of difficulty. We can change the surroundings a little.”

One other thing the Mount Stickney trails offer: unparalleled views of a sprawling white dwelling with a bright red roof on the valley floor.

“What’s that?” my 11-year-old son, Jack, asked, pointing at the Mount Washington Hotel, which almost seemed perched between the tips of our skis as we stood at trail’s edge.

“That’s where we’re staying,” I answered.

“Let’s go there now,” he said.

No one objected. It was about 2 p.m. In the 15 years we’ve been skiing as a family, I don’t recall any of my children ever wanting to head to the hotel early on a trip’s first day of skiing.

“It looks like a castle,” Jack said.

SINCE 1902, the best seat in the house at the Mount Washington Hotel has probably been next to the oversize hearth opposite the portico entrance. Observing the arrival of new guests — part of a 109-year procession — remains an education in itself.

George Miglierini, supervisor of the laborers who built the hotel, was still on the job in 1945 when he told a Boston Globe reporter that he lamented the new kind of Mount Washington guest. “Now people must rush around and play games,” Mr. Miglierini said. “They must be kept amused every minute.”

Watching the cavalcade bursting through the Mount Washington entry on the Friday night of our visit proved that things have not changed much in 60-plus years. The roofs of arriving cars and a succession of bellmen’s trolleys were piled high with downhill and Nordic skis, snowshoes, ice skates, swimming pool floatation devices and what looked like rock-climbing gear.

It was going to be a busy weekend.

While my wife and I were sipping wine by the hearth, our children were already in one of several Jacuzzis and soon headed for the heated outdoor pool. Facials were reserved for the next day. As was a late afternoon of dog sledding. Plans were made for a Saturday-night dinner but with an understanding that several runs on the nearby tubing hill would come first. There would be, of course, more Alpine skiing on tap. And Nordic skiing for my wife and one daughter in the afternoon.

All of this had been accomplished not long after check-in with a single visit to the concierge desk, which is really more like an activities reservation center at an amusement park. At other hotels, the concierge might be arranging dinner reservations or finding show tickets. But restaurant options in the Bretton Woods area are limited, there are no Broadway shows, and the closest movie theater is about 15 miles away. No, people flocked to the concierge to make plans to get outside and ski, hike, snowshoe, climb or zip through the air attached to a wire.

Bretton Woods was once understandably worried that its image as a traditional, even timeworn, resort was snuffing out its future. Its new owners are trying to overcome that reputation by embracing the resort’s peerless location — a vast, untamed and original outdoor playground — while capitalizing upon and modernizing its past.

With this in mind there is Wi-Fi in all the rooms, flat-screen TVs and marble bathrooms. As part of a $60 million restoration project in the last three years, each of the hotel’s five restaurants and bars have been refurbished with new menus, including a pub-style steakhouse with a farm-to-table dining menu. The Cave, an underground, Prohibition-era speakeasy, maintains that hideaway ambience with a narrow, tunnel-like entranceway and a dark, distressed wood interior. It also has late-night entertainment.

But the melding of old and new may be most evident in the doors of the hotel rooms, which feature a no-touch wireless entry system in two-inch-thick original mahogany doors that have graced the rooms since 1902.

The hotel also added a 25,000-square-foot spa and a 20,000-square-foot convention center, but those additions were constructed low to the ground and at the back of the property so as not to interfere with the view of Mount Washington from any of the first-floor windows.

The result is bustle within a timelessness, and according to Larry Magor, the resort’s managing director who came to Bretton Woods in November 2009, business is up because of it: “We just kept promoting the ski area and all the other things we have to do up here. Business went up 20 percent in the first year.”

On Friday evening, I looked out toward the snowy mountains from the grand hall and saw a wedding party posing for pictures after a rehearsal dinner next to a couple gliding around on the hotel skating rink. Far off in the distance, people were returning from a snowshoeing expedition, and very near the hotel — so close I feared they would end up in the background of the wedding party photos — were three children I recognized in terry cloth robes scampering up a heated walkway from the outdoor pool.

THERE is no time to prepare for the sudden and powerful pull of six barking and excited Alaskan husky sled dogs. The driver gives a command, and with a jerk they dash away, bringing the sled to about 20 miles an hour in a few seconds. Being led through a winter landscape by a team of dogs is not peaceful like a horse-drawn sleigh ride. It is far more engaging, which seems appropriate to the place. Dog-sledding is more like a sport.

Though seated and comfortable, you watch how the lead dogs set not only the pace but also the chosen path, which is far from straight, by the way. The dogs get distracted by the things they see — deer, birds, was that a moose? — and the sled veers hither and thither. It’s part of the adventure. The dogs work in unison, and sometimes they do not. In time, you feel less along for the ride than part of the team.

In time, you also get to know the dogs, many of them rescued from shelters. You learn their names, and their personalities by watching them work. The solidarity, the cold and the mission at hand — go somewhere but get back to where you started, too — delivers its own sense of purpose. And heading back to the hotel, with the dogs in an easy canter, yields its own kind of restful calm. And in the end, you have spent another 40 minutes in the New Hampshire countryside in a way that’s different from the usual family ski trip.

It was certainly a different experience from our typical ski trips. We are that ski family marching through the hotel lobby at 8 a.m., dressed, instant oatmeal eaten, ready to be at the lifts when they open at 8:30. It’s part of the racer’s lifestyle to train early; even on vacation, we remain creatures of habit.

Ever wonder who gets those choice parking spots in the front row right by the base lodge? It’s people like us.

But our trip to Bretton Woods jarred us out of our admittedly maniacal routine. While Bretton Woods has done much to offer more diverse terrain, it does not have boundless stashes of untracked powder longing to be discovered by dawn’s early light. Getting first tracks on the steepest tracks is a big thing at other resorts; it’s not so important at Bretton Woods.

So we took it a little easier. We rose a little later (parking all the way back in the sixth row), and we once again left the mountain a little earlier for the dog sledding, the tubing and the Nordic skiing, which is not to be underestimated. With nearly 70 miles of trails, Bretton Woods has one of the largest cross-country trail systems in the East.

This is not to demean the downhill skiing at Bretton Woods. If anything, it is — to coin a phrase — perfect for the majority of family-oriented skiers. For the super-serious skiers and riders who want more consistent challenge, there are other resorts that would be a better choice.

But my family’s recent weekend is testament to how the Bretton Woods approach — call it active culture multitasking — can work even for the hard core among us. We won’t be abandoning our favorite mountains, but Bretton Woods has filled a gap in our understanding of what can make a great winter trip. We got out and enjoyed a variety of snow-related activities, and when we were done we sank into the charms of a grande dame of a hotel. It was a nice change of pace.

At some point during our visit last month, I recalled a conversation in the car from a different family excursion to New Hampshire a few years earlier. Weaving our way south after a day at Wildcat Mountain, we started to pass various other resorts. We had skied all of them.

As we passed Bretton Woods, my wife said, “And what’s this place?”

“We’ve never been there,” I said. “It’s known for impeccable grooming. Big place, good snow and just lots and lots of comfortable cruising trails.”

My wife turned to me: “And why exactly haven’t we been there?”

IF YOU GO

Full-day lift tickets at the Bretton Woods ski area (brettonwoods.com) are $37 to $76, with discounts for staying at one of the resort’s lodging properties. The price for a three-and-a-half-hour canopy tour, a series of treetop zip lines, is $99 to $110. A shorter racing zip line is $15 a ride. Reservations are suggested: (603) 278-4947.

Dog-sledding tours are about $100 for two people in a sled with each additional person an additional $32. A Nordic trail day pass costs from $7 to $17 (rental gear is available). Call the resort at (800) 314-1752 for additional information on all programs.

There are accommodations in a handful of resort-owned properties including town houses and an inn, but the cynosure of the resort is the Mount Washington Hotel, which has 200 rooms and suites. Rooms are priced from $229 to $449 with suites from $409 to $829. Lodging reservations: (800) 680-6600.

The hotel and ski area are on Route 302, about 160 miles from Boston and 350 miles — or a six-and a-half-hour drive — from New York City.

There are nonstop flights operated by US Airways and United Airlines from La Guardia to Manchester, N.H., the nearest major airport to Bretton Woods. Continental flies from Newark to Manchester; US Airways and United fly from Philadelphia.


BILL PENNINGTON is a sports reporter for The New York Times.

17/02 36 Hours in Downtown Los Angeles

February 17, 2011
By CHRIS COLIN

At Seven Grand, an upscale bar; breakfast at the Nickel Diner, on a block that was once one of Skid Row’s most notorious; pedestrian-friendly Broadway, in the heart of downtown. More Photos »

THE sprawl, the scale, all that freeway time — for many, Los Angeles is an acquired taste. But not downtown. New York-like in its density and mishmash, the long-blighted center has become an accessible, pedestrian-friendly destination in recent years; Angelenos walk around en masse, using their actual legs. The immense L.A. Live entertainment complex is largely responsible for this comeback, but the studiously vintage bars and imaginative restaurants that seem to open every other day are also part of the revival. Skid Row and the drifts of homeless camps haven’t vanished altogether, and the grittiness still varies by block. But this part of town is alive again, in ways that make sense even to an outsider.

Friday

4 p.m.
1) DO THE CRAWL

The Downtown Art Walk — a party-in-the-streets bonanza that draws thousands of revelers the second Thursday of every month — is one way to experience the area’s robust art scene. But you can do your own art walk anytime, and you should. Lured by low rents, a number of impressive galleries have found a home here, many of them on Chung King Road, a pedestrian alley strung with lanterns in Chinatown. For starters: The Box (977 Chung King Road; 213-625-1747; theboxla.com), Jancar Gallery (961 Chung King Road; 213-625-2522; jancargallery.com), Charlie James Gallery (975 Chung King Road; 213-687-0844; cjamesgallery.com) and Sabina Lee Gallery (971 Chung King Road; 213-620-9404; sabinaleegallery.com). The shows are intimate and occasionally provocative, featuring a broad array of contemporary artists: William Powhida, Orly Cogan and others. Most galleries stay open till 6 p.m.; Jancar closes at 5 on Fridays.

7:30 p.m.
2) THE CITY AT ITS BRIGHTEST


Whether you’re catching a Lakers game, touring the Grammy Museum or attending a concert at the Nokia Theater, there is always something splashy to do at the 27-acre, $2.5 billion sports and entertainment behemoth that is L.A. Live (800 West Olympic Boulevard; 213-763-5483; lalive.com). Just strolling the Tokyo-ish Nokia Plaza — 20,000 square feet of LED signage — is diverting. An array of restaurants and bars is clustered at the periphery, but as with Times Square, many visitors just prefer to stroll around this giant pedestrian zone, trying to take it all in.

10 p.m.
3) A LATE, GREAT BITE

Gorbals (501 South Spring Street; 213-488-3408; thegorbalsla.com) is one of the more fantastic — and odd — downtown dining options. The chef and owner, a previous “Top Chef” winner, is part-Scottish and part-Israeli, and his hybrid concoctions are terrific. My banh mi poutine merged Quebec and Vietnam in ways criminally neglected until now. Bacon-wrapped matzo balls, anyone? Small plates range from $6 to $16. The casual restaurant is tucked into the lobby of the old Alexandria Hotel, a well-worn but charming landmark where Bogart, Chaplin and Garbo once roamed the halls.

Saturday

9 a.m.
4) ON THE NICKEL


The maple bacon doughnut is a stand-out on the breakfast menu at the new but ageless Nickel Diner (524 South Main Street; 213-623-8301; nickeldiner.com). The rest is mostly well-executed diner food, about $7 to $10 per dish. What’s remarkable is the location — until recently, this block was one of Skid Row’s most notorious. It’s a testament to downtown’s revival that the intersection of Main and Fifth (hence “Nickel”) is now home to a place where people line up for tables.

10:30 a.m.
5) NICE THREADS

The 100-block Fashion District mixes high and low seamlessly. Though many shops sell wholesale only, you can still find a wide selection of deeply discounted designer clothes, fabric and accessories. The jumbled shops and warehouses at Ninth and Los Angeles Streets are a good place to start (feel free to bargain). And don’t miss the rowdier Santee Alley (thesanteealley.com), where cheap meets weird in a thoroughly Los Angeles way. In this chaotic open-air bazaar, energetic vendors hawk the impressive (perfect knock-off handbags) and the odd (toy frogs emblazoned with gang insignias). For a more organized Fashion District expedition, Christine Silvestri of Urban Shopping Adventures (213-683-9715; urbanshoppingadventures.com) leads three-hour romps, tailored to your particular agenda and with an insider’s radar for the best finds; the tours cost $36 a person, with a minimum of two people.

1 p.m.
6) ACCESSIBLE ARCHITECTURE

The arrival of the conductor Gustavo Dudamel at the Los Angeles Philharmonic has brought new crowds to the symphony, but the Walt Disney Concert Hall (111 South Grand Avenue; 323-850-2000; laphil.com) — Frank Gehry’s deconstructivist celebration of all that is big, curvy and shiny — deserves a visit even without a ticket. Bring a picnic and wind your way along the semi-hidden outer staircase up to an excellent city vista and rooftop garden oasis. Free guided tours and self-guided audio tours are available most days. Check first (musiccenter.org/visit/tours.html) for schedules.

7 p.m.
7) LAZY BONES

Since 2010, Little Tokyo’s Lazy Ox Canteen (241 South San Pedro Street; 213-626-5299; lazyoxcanteen.com) has been the kind of tucked-away gastropub people love to insist is the city’s best. Casual and buzzing, the bistro’s long menu features adventurous delicacies, from trotters to crispy pig’s ears to lamb neck hash. It’s hard to pin the cuisine to a specific origin, but a penchant for bold, meat-centric comfort food is evident. Get several small plates, most $7 to $15 each.

8:30 p.m.
8) PICK A SHOW, ANY SHOW

If you’re downtown for a performance, chances are it’s a sprawling affair at L.A. Live. But a handful of smaller settings offer funkier alternatives. The Redcat Theater (631 West Second Street; 213-237-2800; redcat.org) hosts all manner of experimental performances — a recent Saturday featured theater, dance, puppetry and live music from a Slovene-Latvian art collaboration. Club Mayan (1038 South Hill Street; 213-746-4287; clubmayan.com; $12 entry fee before 10:30, $20 after), an ornate old dance club most nights, occasionally hosts mad events like Lucha VaVoom, which combines burlesque and Mexican wrestling. And the Smell (247 South Main Street; thesmell.org; $5 most nights), a likably grimy, volunteer-run space, hosts very small bands circled by swaying teenagers.

10:30 p.m.
9) DRINK AS IF IT’S ILLEGAL

Was Los Angeles a hoot during Prohibition? No need to guess, thanks to a slew of meticulously old-timey new bars that exploit the wonderful history of old Los Angeles. From upscale speakeasy (the Varnish; 118 East Sixth Street; 213-622-9999; thevarnishbar.com) to converted power plant-chic (the Edison; 108 West Second Street; 213-613-0000; edisondowntown.com) to an old bank vault (the Crocker Club; 453 South Spring Street; 213-239-9099; crockerclub.com), these spiffy places do set decoration as only Los Angeles can. And fussily delicious artisanal cocktails are as plentiful as you’d imagine, most in the $9 to $14 range. The well-scrubbed will also enjoy the swanky Seven Grand (515 West Seventh Street; 213-614-0737; sevengrand.la), while the well-scuffed may feel more at home at La Cita Bar (336 South Hill Street; 213-687-7111; lacitabar.com).

Sunday

9 a.m.
10) DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH

The Bamboo Plaza isn’t as elegant as its name, but on the second floor of this run-down little Chinatown mall is the Empress Pavilion (988 North Hill Street, suite 201; 213-617-9898; empresspavilion.com), the dim sum mecca that’s lured Angelenos here since well before the downtown revival. The vast dining room holds all the appeal of a hotel conference room, but that only underscores the focus on the shrimp har gow, the pork buns and dozens of other specialties, generally $2 to $5 each. There will be crowds.

11 a.m.
11) BIG ART

That rare breed who has gone from gallery owner to director of a significant art, Jeffrey Deitch has thrilled (and vexed) critics since taking over the esteemed Museum of Contemporary Art last year. Come see for yourself what he’s done with the place, and its renowned collection, including works by Rothko, Oldenburg, Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg. The museum is spread over three locations; downtown is the main one (250 South Grand Avenue; 213-626-6222; moca.org).

IF YOU GO

Rising from the L.A. Live wattage is a gleaming new two-hotel complex, at 900 West Olympic Boulevard, part JW Marriott (213-765-8600; lalive.com/stay/jwmarriott) and part Ritz-Carlton (213-743-8800; lalive.com/stay/ritzcarlton). The 878 rooms at the JW start at $189, the 123 rooms at the Ritz at $299, and even the most basic deliver a supreme pampering.

The 24th floor of the Ritz is also home to WP24, the celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck’s take on modern Chinese cuisine.

It doesn’t gleam, but the Moroccan-themed Figueroa Hotel (939 South Figueroa Street; 213-627-8971; figueroahotel.com) reflects an equally appealing side of downtown. Every nook of the 86-year-old building features some warm and worn décor reminiscent of Casablanca, and hours can be passed at the tranquil outdoor pool and bar. Rooms start at $148.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 19, 2011


An earlier version of a map with this article misspelled part of the name of a street in Los Angeles. It is Cesar Chavez Avenue, not Sezar.

09/02 Microsoft ra Office Web Apps trên toàn cầu

09/02/2011 09:00:09 AM

ICTnews - Bộ ứng dụng Microsoft Office Web Apps giúp người dùng xem, soạn thảo và chia sẻ các tài liệu thuộc bộ Office từ bất kì đâu, trên bất kì trình duyệt nào khi kết nối Internet.

Hiện nay, bộ ứng Microsoft Office Web Apps đã được Microsoft tung ra tại 150 quốc gia. Bộ ứng dụng này dự kiến sẽ được Microsoft phát hành ra các thị trường còn lại trên toàn cầu trong tháng tới.

Microsoft cho biết chỉ trong vòng hơn 100 ngày kể từ thời điểm phát hành (vào 7/6/2010) tại các thị trường Mỹ, Canada, Anh và Ailen, Microsoft Office Web Apps đã được hơn 20 triệu người sử dụng để xem, chỉnh sửa, và chia sẻ tài liệu Office trên các ứng dụng trực tuyến. Cho đến nay, đã có hơn 30 triệu người sử dụng bộ ứng dụng này.

Các tính năng tiêu biểu của bộ ứng dụng Microsoft Office Web Apps bao gồm:

PowerPoint Web App:

- Nhúng file dạng trình bày của Powerpoint: Có thể kết xuất tài liệu trình chiếu của người sử dụng lên blog hoặc website cho phép người dùng lật trang theo một định dạng mini hoặc xem theo kiểu trình chiếu toàn màn hình.

- Chèn Clip-Art: Thêm vào các hình ảnh hoặc ảnh chụp chất lượng cao vào file trình chiếu hoặc từ thư viện ảnh Office.com với hơn 200.000 ảnh chất lượng cao, miễn phí bao gồm cả bộ sưu tập như iStockPhoto và Fotolia.

- Thêm chủ đề: Người sử dụng có thể có thêm tới 20% template ưa nhìn trong PowerPoint. Và các template này sẽ tiếp tục được bổ sung hàng tháng.

Excel Web App:

- Nhúng file excel: Có thể kết xuất tài liệu dạng bảng tính, biểu đồ của người sử dụng lên blog hoặc website. Tài liệu nhúng có thể được cập nhật toàn thời gian từ bảng tính gốc.

- Chèn biểu đồ: Thêm các biểu đồ dạng line, bar, pie, .. mà người dùng hay sử dụng trong Excel ngay trong trình duyệt.

- Đổ dữ liệu tự động: Có thể kéo thả và copy các công thức và dữ liệu như thao tác người sử dụng vẫn làm với Excel.

- Excel Web App trên trình duyệt máy di động: Ngoài việc có thể xem trên Word và PowerPoint người dùng có thể sử dụng bảng tính Excel trên trình duyệt của máy di động.

Word Web App:

In ấn từ Word Web App Editor: Người sử dụng Office Web Apps có thể in từ các chế độ soạn thảo thay cho chỉ từ chế độ view như trước đây.

Windows Live SkyDrive:

Nghiên cứu cho thấy rằng, hơn 90% các tài liệu Office trên SkyDrive là được kiến tạo từ bộ Office trên máy tính cá nhân. Do đó, Microsoft đã giúp người dùng có thể làm việc dễ dàng hơn với những file này thông qua tính năng có thể mở trực tiếp các file Office trên máy để bàn, từ SkyDrive.

Nam Phương

13/02 Yahoo! ra mắt "bản tin số" cho máy tính bảng

13/02/2011 02:55:16 PM

ICTnews - Livestand from Yahoo!, một “bản tin số” cá nhân dành cho máy tính bảng vừa được Yahoo! công bố ra mắt.

Ngày 11/2,Yahoo! đã chính thức cho ra mắt dịch vụ Livestand from Yahoo!, một “bản tin số” hoàn toàn mới đem đến cho người dùng những thông tin cập nhật nhất dựa trên sở thích của mình. Tận dụng tối đa thư viện số phong phú, bao gồm các dịch vụ như trang tin thể thao Sports, trang tin tức News, trang thông tin tài chính Finance, trang lưu trữ ảnh Flickr, trang thông tin người nổi tiếng OMG! và mạng xã hội Yahoo! Contributor Network, Yahoo! đã cho ra đời Livestand from Yahoo! để tăng cường thế mạnh khả năng cá nhân hóa nội dung của người dùng khi duyệt web. Với cách làm này thì các nhà xuất bản, công ty quảng cáo cũng như người sử dụng sẽ giảm bớt sự “nhiễu” thông tin của các trang web bằng cách cá nhân hóa phần nội dung. Các nhà xuất bản có thể tiếp cận đúng đối tượng độc giả với những nội dung đã được cá nhân hóa và định hình lại mô hình số của các trang quảng cáo.

Livestand from Yahoo! dự kiến được tích hợp sẵn trên các máy tính bảng chạy trên nền hệ điều hành iOs và Android trong nửa đầu năm 2011 và sẽ là một nền tảng có thể mở rộng cho các nhà xuất bản và công ty quảng cáo. Tiếp đó, Yahoo! sẽ phát triển ứng dụng này trên điện thoại di động và trình duyệt web nhằm mang tới những trải nghiệm có mục đích cho tất cả những phương tiện thông tin truy cập internet khác nhau.

Cũng trong ngày 11/2, Yahoo! Search Trends cũng công bố danh sách ba chủ chủ đề được tìm kiếm nhiều nhất trong dịp Valentine, gồm hoa, quà tặng và quà tặng làm bằng tay. Theo Yahoo!, hoa hồng là loại hoa được tìm kiếm nhiều nhất trong ngày Lễ Valentine năm nay, trong đó hoa hồng đen và hoa hồng xanh được tìm kiếm nhiều hơn cả.

Lê Mỹ

16/02 Trẻ em tìm kiếm gì nhiều nhất trên web?

16/02/2011 04:00:28 PM

ICTnews - Dịch vụ tìm kiếm của Norton Online Family cho thấy hơn 75% câu lệnh tìm kiếm của trẻ em trên mạng là về bài hát và nhạc sĩ.

Đây là kết quả thống kê dựa trên hơn 20 triệu truy vấn tìm kiếm vô danh của giới trẻ tại 20 quốc gia và vùng lãnh thổ trên thế giới.

Âm nhạc thống trị danh mục giải trí của lũ trẻ và nổi bật nhất chính là hiện tượng âm nhạc tuổi teen quốc tế Justin Bieber. Ở vị trí số một toàn cầu, Bieber đã giành được vị trí cao nhất trong các từ khóa được tìm kiếm nhiều nhất ở mọi quốc gia ngoại trừ Ấn Độ, Trung Quốc và Nhật Bản.

Các bài hát mà những người lớn từng yêu thích trước đây có thể vẫn rất phổ biến với lũ trẻ hơn nhiều với gì họ vẫn thường nghĩ. Đứng ở vị trí thứ hai toàn cầu, trẻ em khắp thế giới tỏ ra khá tò mò về John Lennon trong năm vừa qua.

Các bậc phụ huynh có thể bất ngờ nếu biết rằng John Lennon là thuật ngữ phổ biến ở Úc, Ấn Độ, Ireland, Ý, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore và Mỹ. Thần tượng nhạc rock cổ điển, người được tưởng nhớ với lễ kỷ niệm 30 năm ngày mất trong năm 2010 vừa qua này thậm chí còn đánh bại cả Lady Gaga, cô ca sĩ với những giai điệu và màn hóa trang khó quên (xếp vị trị thứ 3).

Những ca khúc nhạc Pop chiếm đến 13 vị trí trong số 25 từ khóa về giải trí trong danh sách trên. Tuy nhiên, những những bài hát được lũ trẻ tìm kiếm nhiều nhất lại thiên về dòng nhạc R&B, và ca khúc hit “Dynamite” của Taio Cruz là một điển hình.

Âm nhạc có lẽ chính là nguồn giải trí lớn nhất của lũ trẻ trên mạng Internet, nhưng truyền hình cũng tỏ ra không hề thua kém. Các chương trình truyền hình âm nhạc và chương trình truyền hình thực tế mang tính thi đấu như American Idol và X-Factor là hai trong số 10 show truyền hình được lũ trẻ yêu thích nhất trên Internet. Tiếp sau đó là các trò chơi tương tác trực tuyến, và Ben 10 là một trong những nội dung nổi bật nhất đối với trẻ em ở Malaysia và Hong Kong.

K.A