Happy New Year!

Blogging... Retirement... Friends... Me...

I have to admit I am a total "dunce" when it comes to the "blog thing". I want to learn and I will, but right now I really don't know what I'm doing!!! So I will just do some "blah blah" and see where it goes from here.

Every morning when I get out of bed, I slide the window open, no matter how cold it is, and take a deep breath to see what the day is going to smell like. I immediately feel grateful for my good health (just the fact alone that I am able to breath is wonderful!!) and the beauty of nature. I started this routine without even realizing it and as I have grown older I have become much more aware of how lucky I am to have all that I have. To many folks it would seem like not much, I'm not rich, or beautiful or shapley or brilliant. But I am soooo lucky to have myself as my own best friend. I take the best care of myself that I can, I pat myself on the back when I do good and yell at myself (very gently and in private, that is) when I don't do so good. I watch for danger for myself as well as those around me, I try to take care of people that seem to need me to take care of them, I try to help those that need some help and respect the privacy of those that don't.

When I began my "so called" retirement several years ago, I felt like I had given all that was necessary to the world out there. I was ready for a rest!!! Then I found myself trying to find ways to make a little extra $$. I worked on Ebay, I crocheted and sold my works, always trying to make a little extra. My son put me in touch with a friend of our family and from there it's history. I work for a great group of folks who have organized themselves into an outstanding "National Internet Business Directory" called USCity.net and it's been history for me!!! Keeps me current and got me to the "blog place" too.

I don't do politics. I hate arguing and put the TV on mute if someone starts. I make my own decisions about who is right and who is full of it, and try not to push those opinions on those around me.

Road Rage scares me, infuriates me and disgusts me. To me it's the easiest way to get killed, either by crashing or sending your blood pressure off the charts.

I fell in "one sided" love a couple of times in my life. You know the kind where you can't eat or else you’re eating the wallpaper off the walls!!! Both of them turned out very bad. One of them I married, the other I didn't. I will never fall in love like that again. Very painful.

I love my "quiet time", my "alone time" and my "private time". I'm very protective of it and cannot help my irritation when it's disturbed, especially when I have been doing way more than necessary for the people around me. I like my own company, probably more than I should.

Friends. Wow, have I had some friends/pals/buds/sisters in my life!!! I could tell you stories that would make you think that we probably should all be institutionalized. My friends have been the one true joy in my life that rarely ever failed me. Years later, even though we have parted ways and live in different places, when we talk we laugh. Always a "belly laugh", always!!! Always a shoulder to cry on, and an ear to bend, someone who understands!! My gal pals have, many times, been a life line for me while I was going through the labors of living.

Some time I would like to write about being a parent. It won't be "gushy" and "wonderous", but it will be factual and very scary. It's been many years and it still scares me to death!!!! I'd also like to write about my mom. How she helped to bury her son. How strong she is, even though she would like the world to think she is totally helpless!! I'd love to write about my grandson too, but that would definitely bore anyone and everyone, as he is wonderful, perfect, handsome, brilliant, blah blah blah!!!

So it goes for now!!!
Hugs, Lynda

Be Thankful You Can Make A Difference

Hi Happy Thankgiving to everyone from

all of us here at uscity.net!

I am getting excited about having a lot of my family around me tomorrow. My son works at a restaurant, so he will be working a double shift and one each - niece and nephew - will be working at Disney. But I should be surrounded by lots of love and fun. My sister-in-law and nieces and nephews on my hubby's side are busy taking care of my newest grand-niece, "Cami" a beautiful, dark haired beauty who arrived yesterday! So they will be staying 'down south' this year.

Just wanted to share some "thankfulness thoughts" with you all.

I am thankful for all the love I have in my life - from family, friends and people I don't even know.

If you haven't said "I love you" to someone today, do it! (If you have... do it again!)

I am thankful that I CAN make a difference - and so can YOU.

Not only that but you have an obligation to make that difference, even if it as simple as volunteering once a month or smiling at someone lonely.

I am thankful for leaders who can remain focused with their eyes on social justice; those who motivate people and orchestrate programs to help others less fortunate than ourselves.

Let somone who motivates you know they are appreciated.

I am thankful for everyone who has helpled me in trying times and for those that have led me in the right direction.

Thank someone special in your life.

I am thankful that, unlike most of the people of the world, I have so much: a safe place to sleep at night, a car to drive, all the modern conveniences such as refrigerators, stoves, air conditioning, access to health care, computers, sound systems - things that we often take for granted.

Stop for a minute and think about all the people all over the world that do not have these things.

Traditionally, Thanksgiving is a day in which we gather to reflect on our bountiful blessings.

This year, perhaps we should begin the celebration by reflecting on those things that might not be so obvious because, ironically, they are sometimes too obvious to see.

Love to all,
Pam

USCity.net Employee Blogger Returns

OK – Yeah I know I have been very negligent in keeping my blog up and apparently from what I have seen, good bloggers blog at least once a week and some of them do it every day. So I am not the best blogger in the world, but here are my reasons (read ‘excuses’): I work 40+ hours a week. I am on the Community Thanksgiving Committee. I am helping to try and start a homeless coalition in our area. I run a youth group that meets once a week and does community service and fundraisers on weekends. I am married with child. I help with the care of my mom (Doctor’s appointments, banking, etc.) and my mother-in-law. I teach Sunday School... well, you get the idea.

My boss just sent me a link to another blog that mentioned uscity.net, and I am not sure but I think it was a subtle hint. Like “where are the blogs you were going to do every week?” He is too nice to come right and say “You dropped the ball” but I did. And I apologize. ‘My bad’ as my 18 year old son would say. Of course, I have also asked other employees to help out – but so far only two have responded! (not so subtle hint to Mary, Rusty, Carol and Sue!)

So what has been going on around here and in my life for the last month, you want to know?!? Right?

At USCITY.NET things are going along pretty much as usual, we are working right now on weeding out some dead and nearly dead links. We have added some great new categories:

Camcorder - Career:Training - DSL - Loans:Student

- MP3 Players - Special Event -

Our reciprocal program has really taken off and keeping Kristina busy. We seem to be on an uphill swing as far as new signups are concerned, so our marketing department is happy.

Also, I just got back from a WOW (Women On Waves) cruise with some of my friends to celebrate my fiftieth birthday! More about that later...

I would like to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving, too!

New Weather Page

We are excited about our new updated weather page at uscity.net. It is really cool. We have all been checking it out and so far, everyone loves it! I love the satellites – the looping so you can get an idea of how the storm or weather system is moving and how fast it is coming towards you. The animated pages are excellent.

Everyone here agrees that one of the most important and probably will be the most used feature is at the top of the page where you can type in a city or zip code and get the current conditions, and a forecast for that area. Carol can’t wait to use this when she goes on vacation. Just type in Honolulu and find out what it will be like when you get there. (just kidding, she isn’t going to Hawaii … yet).

Kristina was impressed with the projected path of Tropical Storm Ernesto which was headed our way yesterday. There was an hour by hour projected path that was great. We are all very happy with this new updated version of our weather page – and you can click on a link at the top of any of our uscity.net pages to get there. Go check it out and let us know what you think!

And while you are there, this would be a great place to just let us know what you think about our site in general. We are always looking for ways to update it and make our site the best directory we possibly can.

Miss Pam

My View of How It All Began

This is actually a reprint of something out of Miss Pam's blog, but I have had a couple of people ask about it, so here it is on the "official"uscity.net employee blog spot:

It has been a crazy week – our assistant database manager - went on a cruise and I have been doing her work and mine too. She is the best – and I realized this week how much she does without ever making a big deal of it. Thank You Carol ;-) I love you!

As I promised when I started this blog, here is a little bit about…



My View of How It All Began

This began as the brainchild of our founder, Rusty Crawford – who I like to refer to as the ‘father’ of USCity.net. He is a genius who always seems to be one step ahead of everyone else I know. He taught himself basic programming language in the early 1980’s. About ten years later, Rusty taught himself HTML and Perl coding, Rusty started building websites for businesses in and around Volusia County, Florida.

That was when he came up with the idea for a local county-oriented business directory called Volusia.com (incidentally, that is where I first started working with Rusty and his wife, Mary). At Volusia.com we listed local governments, schools, wrote histories of the area towns and answered numerous emails about the area.

At the time, Yahoo only linked to Volusia.com, our information site, but would not link to any of our business sites. So sprang the idea of a nationwide directory of the United States.

And this took a LOT of preliminary preparation. One of the aspects I was involved with was finding and typing in the names of every county, city and town in the United States. I know there was a lot of programming and behind the scenes work then, but I really don’t know what all was involved then.

I know that he wanted a ‘G’ rated directory that would allow smaller ‘Mom & Pop’ businesses to be found on the web along with the larger companies like Disney, Dell and Sharper Image.

I believe that Rusty, his wife Mary, Sue and I were the first four employees. With a lot of trials and tests, we finally got it! We got our second server, dedicated just for uscity.net in 1999 and went online (we now have 25 servers).

In the beginning, much of the coding and data entry was done 51 times – once for every state and Washington D.C. Often that process fell in my lap and I sometimes felt a little bit like a robot. One compliment I remember Rusty giving me was calling me up one night and asking me if I was working or not, because he thought another computer was trying to get into our site. I told him "NO, it's just your human robot working away!"

We took every effort to make USCITY.NET a safe place to browse and shop (and still do!) and we added information that would be helpful to our users along with businesses, both local and national.

We all work very hard to bring you to bring you the best directory in the United States.

Everyone in our company takes pride in their work and we all want this to be a directory that is practical, easy to use and helpful to our visitors.

We welcome comments and suggestions to make your experience even more pleasurable.We all work very hard to bring you to bring you the best directory in the United States.

My Gym is Closing!

When I learned that the Leach Center would be closed for the next two weeks, I was crushed. What was I to do; two weeks without a gym workout, how was I to thrive?

See, the Leach Center is the student gym at Florida State University, and being the exercise nut that I am, I wasn’t quite sure what to do.

But than I realized, about 3 or 4 months prior to my present upset, I participated in a 5k race, and came in 2nd (out of the girls participating) with a time of 20:03 (meaning 20mins and 3seconds). For my placement, I received one Free Cici’s Pizza Dinner (that I still have yet to use), and a 3 months membership to Women’s World.

Women’s World was the ticket to my gym crisis. I figured, I would go and they would have exercise classes and maybe some dumbbells. That would do for the next two weeks. To my surprise, though, it was a ‘fully-loaded’ gym; I really love this place. Not only do they offer classes and dumbbells, but also they have treadmills, elliptical machines, bikes, and a few other cardio machines; they have a sauna, a tanning bed, the typical exercise machines and so much more.

I didn’t think things could get better than the Leach, but Women’s World may have just done it for me. Although, I don’t think I will renew at the end of my 3 month period, due to the student gym, after school, I will need to have a gym membership somewhere. And wherever my life may ‘run’, I hope it has a Women’s World Gym.Kristina

I enjoy working out and being physically fit -- and that translates to not only being physically healthier but I also receive the benefits of a better attitude and mental alacrity in all aspects of my life: my sports, my education and my work here at uscity.net.

A Great Way to Babysit - Cruising

Hello Everyone!

My name is Kristina Mangiafico and I attend Florida State University. GOOO BOBBY!! Football season's coming up, and what an exciting season it will be. I can not wait for the festivities; it is probably the most exciting thing about the college experience. It really brings the student body together. Besides football, I participate in intramural sports like kickball and softball, and I play club soccer for FSU. As if studying, football, intramurals, and club soccer, aren't enough, I also hold down a job. I work on-line for Uscity.net, which is an internet business directory for the US. Check It Out!

MY VIEWS ON CRUISING:
If ever you have the opportunity, you should take a cruise. This year, I have been fortunate enough to have been on three; my first being in March during spring break. The second cruise I convinced my family that it was the best way to vacation. They bought it, and loved it. Finally, the third for the year, was just two weekends ago, and this opportunity was given to my in a very strange situation. My sister and I were invited by my aunt and uncle to go to the Bahamas via Carnival Cruise Line, if we babysat their two boys. For all those babysitters out there, I think you would have to agree this is the best location for a sitter job.

All three cruises were great. I traveled on both Royal Caribbean and Carnival Cruise Ships, and I have to say I enjoyed Royal Caribbean’s service a little better. They seemed to have more activities going on for the “days at sea” (this is where you spend the entire day cruising without stopping). The activities are hosted by the cruise employees and involve group and individual activities. I try to participate in everything offered, in order to make the most out of the cruise. Besides that they were equally relaxing and equally stuffing. And when I say stuffing, I mean there is enough food on these ships to make you feel like a stuffed turkey when you leave.

This type of vacation is the perfect getaway, because you really do getaway. It’s a transport to paradise, and I hope that everyone gets the opportunity to experience it whether with family, friends, co-workers from uscity.net, or to baby-sit your cousins.

Space Shuttle – Fourth of July – Category Clean Up

We hope everyone had a safe and happy Fourth of July. I must be getting old - I didn’t see any fireworks this year (not even on TV), and didn’t really miss them. My family and I DID see a beautiful shuttle liftoff over the blue skies of Florida Fourth of July afternoon. This was the first-ever space shuttle launch on Independence Day. We wish the crew Godspeed and a successful mission.

We have been busy here at uscity.net cleaning up our directory. This has been causing some errors to our visitors, but it is necessary to keep our directory up to date and to get rid of unneeded categories. We first started creating categories in the late 1990s and some of the categories still had no links in them last week. We decided that if no one had signed up in over five years, it was probably best to just get rid of that category. To make the directory more manageable and easier to use, we are cleaning it up. We apologize to everyone who has been getting errors from this process.

Earlier this year, we got rid of several categories that were not really consistent with our “G” rating, such as gambling and alcohol sites. We also took out categories such as “Surveys and Polls” as we found that the most of the links in this category required someone submitting their email address, these types of sites frequently sell their email lists and these are often misused by spammers.

Our first priority is making this the best directory we can, so we deleted several categories last week and have also added a few throughout the last month.” How do we decide what categories go in?” you ask… Sometimes we get suggestions from members as to what to add. One of our interior decorator members suggested a Faux Finishing category and we thought that was a good idea, since adding it a few weeks ago, we have had several companies and decorators sign up under that category. One of our employees thought we needed a Digital category, and after adding that – the directory grew with additions in that category too. We also found that several subcategories would make finding what our visitors want easier, so we added Audio, Camera, Products and Software as subcategories under the main category of Digital.

Another way to make our directory easier to use is by adding subcategories and we recently added a bunch of subcategories under Restaurants.

In March, we took our Home category, which had well over 100 links in it and added several subcategories. This makes it easier to find something for the Kitchen, the Bedroom and Bathroom or the Yard.

Other recent additions:

Maternity
Car Loan
Computer VoIP

We always welcome suggestions for making us better and easier to use, so just leave a comment if you have one for us.

Miss Pam

Jennifer's First Blog

So, it looks like I may be the first one to blog on our new employee blog page! I’ve never done this before, and I’m not very good at writing about myself, so cut me some slack! J

For starters, my name is Jennifer, and I am a junior at UCF. I live in Orlando with 3 guys in one apartment. YES, please feel bad for me that I am the only girl in this apartment! I think I’m the only one who knows how to clean around here! I am majoring in elementary education, and have about a year or so left until I finish. When I first moved here my plan was to obtain a degree in Chemistry, and to go on and get my doctorate in Pharmacy. WOW! How things can change! After failing my first Chemistry class, I decided that Pharmacy was probably not a good idea for me, and I changed to elementary education. I am so glad I did, because I love every class, and I can start interning this year. I will be doing that with Pam’s sister, Donna, who was my 5th grade (and favorite!) teacher. She will be an excellent teacher to intern with since she is so creative and has great teaching skills and ways of working with children. I can definitely learn a lot from her. And, along with changing majors, I also decided to move back home when my apartment lease is up in August. I can take all of my education courses at UCF in Daytona, plus I will be saving at least $500.00 per month in rent! It will be a bit of a change since I have been living on my own for the past year, but I really believe it is a change for the better.

Well, that’s me in a nutshell! That’s my life, crazy as it is, but I love every minute of it!

Now, all about USCITY.NET - aren’t you really curious as to how I got started here?! I bet you are!! :)
Here it goes: When I moved to Orlando, I had a really hard time finding a job in this huge town. After about a month, I finally got a job on International Drive at a big tourist shop selling helicopter flights to people who wanted to see all of Orlando from up above. Sounds cool, right? WRONG! It was the worst job I could ever imagine! You wouldn’t believe how rude some people can really be! Not to mention the shifts were 12 hours long! I was calling my mom every night crying and crying because I hated it so much. After about a month or so of that, she remembered that Carol told her that she and Kristina were working for Pam at USCITY and that they both loved it so much because it was an at home job and perfect for college kids like Kristina and I. That’s when my mom called Pam, and asked her if there was room for me at this company. And, sure enough there was, and here I am today!! YEAH! Thank you Pam and USCITY! You saved me from the worst job ever! I can’t tell you how much I have appreciated this job! College can really take up a lot of your time, and having a job like this makes the ride so much easier and smoother since I easily work around my classes and homework that gets piled up.

I enjoy the job I do here very much. I’ve really learned a lot about the internet business and how we function since I’ve started working here. I hope by doing this blog, all of us employees will be able to share ideas and different ways of doing things with each other.

I look forward to reading about everyone else, too!

uscity.net blogging on the way....

blogging from uscity.net is on the way! invites coming soon, fellow employees!

Love to all,
Pam