This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Hiltons of Branson. All opinions are 100% mine.

I’ve talked about it before and now is as good a time as any to talk about it again as spring rolls in with some hopefully nicer weather this year…. but Branson, MO. is one of the best family destinations to get to on a budget. Whether you want to enjoy the great out doors, take in a show (or two or three) or hit the outlet malls for some amazing shopping, Branson seems to have something for everyone in your family.

For instance you can stay at the Hilton Promenade at Branson Landing and be only a stones throw away from Lake Taneycomo, award winning golf courses or the Theatre district. Not to mention that you’re a mile from City Center where you can catch shows from the Acrobats of China, Amazing Pets or the Osmonds (or even the Oak Ridge Boys!).

In addition, the Promenade is having some awesome deals on packages at the moment in case you and your love need to get away for some R&R (before school lets out for the summer).

Or maybe you need a place for your company retreat or conference. The Hilton Branson Convention Center. Not only are you in the middle of the action, but the executives can ink out deals on the course while their spouses soak in the luxury at the spa. Its a win win for everyone isn’t it?

If you’ve never been to Branson before, now seems like the perfect time to fit in a trip, doesn’t it? What show’s are you going to take in?

In college one of my professors likened government to sausage making. No body likes watching the sausage being made, but they like the end out come (most of the time). I’m not sure its going to be the case with the current round of Health Care Reform being pushed on the people. I’m not arguing that nothing needs to be done. The opposite is true. We do need to do something about health insurance and the rising costs. But it needs to be done right.

Using the method of reconciliation to pass reform or laws of this nature can only have a bad outcome. Can you imagine if the founding fathers voted to approve the Constitution of the United States and signed it before it was written? What if your professor gave you a grade before you took the test based on past performances?

In either of those cases, you’d be unhappy. We wouldn’t have the country we have today and you probably wouldn’t get that B you needed to keep your passing grade would you?

According to Jamie Dupree the bill they’re trying to pass in the house this week is little more then a place holder. Text that says, we’re going to do something about Health Care, but we need to make it look like we’re taking action on this now.

That doesn’t fly to me. Its amazing that MORE THEN HALF of the people polled this past weekend oppose the current form of Health Care Reform thats being attempted in the House and Senate, yet the people WE CHOSE TO REPRESENT US don’t seem to care and are plowing ahead with their plans.

Let your Representatives know that they NEED TO REPRESENT YOU! and not pass a bill simply because its what they (or the President) want to do. Let them know that what you think matters and that they are acting on your behalf, not whats best for them.

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of LeapFish Inc. All opinions are 100% mine.

When the internet first started making its rounds, websites were horrible things. Bright colors, bad lo-res images and static content made up the bulk of what we could view online. I’m a guilty as the next guy as some of my first websites were terrible.

As is the natural progression of technology though, things changed. Sites became more fluid. Database driven. Code progressed to the point where a website will tell you the weather in your location with out you having to do anything other then open the web page. News is streamed from media sites and iReporters like you and I every second of every minute. Often times, thanks to facebook and twitter, news of a tragedy (or a triumph) hits the web and is widely known before traditional media can get it out there.

The net has gone from being a static, immovable object to a fluid work of art (some times a train wreck) that we’re constantly plugged in to. Search engines like google and leapfish have a harder and harder time coming up with ways to track and catalog twitter updates, facebook streams, youtube videos. Things that are constantly changing and in a lot of ways the challenges of the new web presented in the video are harder to over come as the web becomes more real time and less, this is what was.

How are you going to adapt? How are you going to become realtime?

Just a quick update, there are a bunch of discarded worm eggs in the bin as well as a bunch of new eggs. The yellow ball in the center of the photo is a worm egg.

Zac Brown Band has been making a name for itself on the music scene the past year burning it up with hits like Chicken Fried that helped the band garner “Best New Artist” at the 2010 Grammys.

According to the Bands Website they’ve been around since at least 2008 when they released their first album “The Foundation”. Chicken Fried was the first single off that album and spent some time at number one on the Billboard country chart.

What I like about this song is simply everything. If you haven’t heard it you need to give a listen to the song that helped set this simple Georgia band running. You can download it today for $0.27 at Amie Street, so what are you waiting for?!?

So its been a week since we began our adventure in red worm composting with G’s Girl Scout Troop. I wasn’t too sure about this as it all seemed too much to handle however it’s actually quite easy now that things are going along.

The bin is in the dining room (which has become Girl Scout Headquarters in our house) and I was worried that you’d be able to smell the decaying materials, however it smells no worse then being outside after a light rain with the smells of earth, leaves and more which is apparently the way it should smell. The reading I’ve done on the subject all points to the bin maintaining a nice earthy smell and we have that.

I was worried that the bin wouldn’t work right, but again, it seems to maintain itself very well (and after all, it should as this occurs in nature right?). If the odor from rotting food gets too strong, don’t add any food, add some more bedding and some more topsoil (that will help speed along the decomposition. If its not earthy enough, add more organic waste to be decomposed and turn the bedding over (turning the bedding is simply mixing it to break it up and allow the air and other material to get in).

I have been checking the bin nightly to make sure that its maintaining a good level of moisture and I find that I do need to spray the top layer a bit with a squirt bottle to moisten the top of the bedding, but the inside seems to be fairly consistent still. We’ve noticed the worms being a little more active and still alive which is a good thing, if things are going well we should expect to see worm larva sometime in the next week with new worms appearing shortly after that.

To this point we’ve added egg shells, orange rinds, coffee grinds and filters (they’re both very good for the worms and they actually help to even out the acidity of the compost), cooked carrots, green beans and broccoli. On the whole everything seems to be agreeing with the worms. Its pretty cool to be able to open the bin and see the ecosystem as it works. I’ll keep posting weekly updates along with photos as the project proceeds, so check back weekly.

It intrigues me that when I check my stats for the site, the post I did on the coolest trophy ever when I talked about the trophy I won when my little silver piece of wood took first at the District Pinewood Derby. There wasn’t much to it, and we never were able to repeat the magic we had with that car. Maybe it was because it was our first attempt at a pinewood derby car, or maybe the countless hours spent shining the finishing nails used as axles.

When it came to building the car, we chose a shape that we thought would work well. Kind of a wedge shape with a concave back end to it. The bottom was flat, working its way up. I can remember spending hours (ok, maybe not hours, but to this seven year old it seemed like forever) sanding the wood, drilling holes for the fishing weights, painting and sanding again until the car was smooth. Almost magic like.

We added the wheels with their polished nail axles and added graphite to them so they’d spin even faster. One of my favorite things to do was put the nail in the drill with the wheel on and hold the wheel as we spun the nail adding graphite to help it run fast and smooth.

The finished product wasn’t like the car the boy makes in the Subaru commercial which is rather box like, but like something out of speed racer. I placed second in the Pack, which was good enough to go to the District race where I finished first. It was fun and I still have that trophy, the car is somewhere too, though its missing the wheels.

Ok, so I missed it again by a day, but I’m making it up to you with THIS AWESOME COVER of Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy by Wakey!Wakey! which you can grab for FREE from AmieStreet for a limited time.

Wakey!Wakey! is a group from NY with a very unique sound that makes their work more then worth listening too. The cover of Crazy is pretty amazing as are the rest of the tracks on their Live album. I highly suggest you pick it up today before its gone!

And if you have any other AmieStreet artists that you think we’d like please let us know.

So this is probably the coolest most useful thing I’ve seen at ThinkGeek lately. If you’re like me, you’re constantly looking for the right kind of network cable to connect a switch, hub, firewall, ip camera, computer, whatever to your network. Sometimes you need a straight thru cable, sometimes you need a cross over and recently, I even needed to create a T1 cable to hook a new router to our PBX system here at the office. Fortunately, I know how to wire cable, but if you’re in a hurry or you don’t want to bother, the Universal Network Cable is the one tool you NEED in your tool box.

I came across this baby in my email today when the overlords at TG decided to share the love. With a spin of the dial you have:

• ROLLED: Connect a host to a Cisco router or switch
• CROSSOVER: Communicate directly between computers without a hub or switch
• STRAIGHT-THROUGH: Use as a standard RJ45 patch cable
• ATM/LOOPBACK: Test if a network card is working by checking for link lights with no need for a hub or switch
• T1: Connect to DDS lines / T1 trunk lines

Thats FIVE cable combinations in one little bundle. The time alone saved by using this as opposed to having to search for the right cable is immeasurable, now you can look like the SuperHero you are to everyone in your office as you whip out the Ultimate Network Cable and patch the network to save the day.

Oh, and if you think fast, you can save $5 off orders of $25 or more or $10 off orders of $40 or more when you vote using the CODES IMAPC to vote for Birthday Boy Michael Dell, IMAMAC for Steve Jobs or TUXFTW for Linus. Show your support and help decide the leader in computing at the same time!

I talked about earning with Sponsored Tweets back in November and I’ve been using their site for a while. Through it I’ve made about $35 just by tweeting, something I do anyways every day. I can’t tell you how nice it is to make money doing something I was going to do anyways and I still want to urge you to SIGN UP WITH SPONSORED TWEETS. Its a good way to generate revenue (or if you’re an advertiser to reach a new market) online and its easy.

Today, I wanted to let you know about some of the new “enhancements” that have been made to the sponsored tweets site. Most are for advertisers like the use of ClickForensics to make sure that the click thru’s you’re seeing are legit or the new ability to “Bench” a certain member if you don’t like the results (or if they’ve tweeted too much for you lately). Also added for the Advertisers are some new reports. Advertisers now get a great high level overview of their clicks. This will detail when the clicks happened, how many were considered invalid and more. Invalid clicks won’t show up on the graph, and won’t count towards the total clicks for this opportunity. Advertisers can even drill down and see the referrer for clicks on their offers.

Don’t fret though, Tweeters are also going to see some of the benefits such as a change to the user dashboard that now shows you revenue generated, missed and from referrals right above available posts. They’ve also made a ton of improvements behind the scenes that iron out a ton of bugs and other creepy crawly’s that were bogging the system down.

If you haven’t had the chance yet, stop by SPONSORED TWEETS and sign up today, it costs you nothing as a tweeter and you have everything to gain. If you’re already using Sponsored Tweets, let me know how you’re doing with the program and what you like about it (or hate about it) and we’ll see if we can’t get some more improvements made!