My Monthly Charity for January 2009 will be the Center for Disability Services of NY. The Center for Disability Services focuses on providing services to individuals with disabilities and chronic medical conditions to help them lead a healthy normal life.

“To enable and empower people, primarily those with disabilities, to lead healthy & enriched lives.” – Center for Disability Services Mission

Serving the Capital Region for over 65 years they provide a variety of services to over 15,000 individuals in Upstate New York.   The Center for Disability Services is important to the local community because the services they provide are unique and can’t be found anywhere else to help those who need it.

For the beginning of 2009 I had the pleasure selecting the charity for Tastefully Driven’s Commerce with Conscience program and I chose the Center for Disability Services which led me to choose them for My Monthly Charity January 2009.

Learn how you can help through the Center for Diability Services website or visit our Commerce with Conscience page and learn how making a purchase through Tastefully Driven can help.

“Your support truly makes the Center the place where people get better at life.”
Center for Disability Services

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Happy Chinese New Years to all.  May the year of the Ox bring a change for the better in our struggling economy.  Hopefully the Ox is a sign that the Bulls will be returning Wall Street.   I wish everyone a healthy and prosperous 2009.

Gung Hay Fat Choi

Wishing you Prosperity in Cantonese

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I saw an awesome post about the change that has come to America as we transition to our 44th President of the United States of America regarding  Whitehouse.gov on Gizmodo,  “The White House Websited:  Today vs. When Bush Took Office“.  In the post it had a screenshot of the the WhiteHouse.gov in 2001 compared to 2009 and you can see how far web design has come.

I decided to take it one step further using the Wayback Machine (cool site that archives websites all the way back to 1996) and taking some screenshots of WhiteHouse.gov from the Clinton Administration through to the current new Obama Administration.

1998

1999

2000

2004

2008

2009

Pretty cool to see how much web design has changed since the late 90’s.   If you haven’t been to the new WhiteHouse.gov website, it is a wonderfully designed site that is worth taking a gander at.

I welcome the new Obama Adminisitration and embrace the change.

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Over the holidays I picked up the Copag EPOC plastic playing cards, which are available in the Tastefully Driven Game Store, and  they are simply amazing all around.

The first thing that catches your eyes about these cards is that they have an all black background that you can’t ignore.  I’ve personally never seen black playings cards before, so this definitely caught my attention.  Beyond the black design the EPOC cards have a very slick index and suit design.  The suits and index layer over the darkness with a vibrant red for hearts and diamonds and a contrasting bright white for clubs and spades creating an artistically designed deck of playing cards.

Not only is the design amazing, the make and feel of these plastic playing cards are of the highest quality.  The first thing I said out loud when I got my first touch of these cards was “Wow”.  I was so amazed by how great the cards felt I had to show everyone I knew and get their reactions. The reactions I got were a lot similar to mine, booyah I wasn’t going crazy thinking how awesome these cards were.

Copag cards are high quality and beautifully designed and I would expect nothing less from a leader in card manufacturing.    Copag cards has definitely proved itself to me after I got  my first deck in comparison to other plastic cards and paper cards that I’ve had, bar none .   Go check out other Copag cards available at Tastefully Driven.

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Adam is on vacation this week and it’s my pleasure to guest post for him this week.  I wrote a post about the online holiday shopping season and here’s an excerpt from the post.

“For us at Pure Adapt the 2008 holiday shopping season was a solid one and we finished the year strong despite the abysmal economy. We were prepared this year with a full fledged marketing plan for the 2008 holiday season and it paid off.”

View the complete post of 2008 Online Holiday Shopping Season in Review on Adam’s Blog.

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In May of 2008 I wrote a post about the hard time I had signing up for online storage Xdrive and it’s become one of my most popular posts to date.  As an update to that post, Xdrive will be closing down on January 12, 2009.

I received a good amount of comments on that post and slowly there were whispers that they may be closing down.  Those whispers would later become true and there was no reason to sign up for a dying service.  The horrible thing about this is my post was acknowledged by Xdrive and they replied to me by saying that they were working on a new registration process.

Xdrive made it simple enough to get your files by offering you a zip file of all your files after you login, but the zip file took a while to be created.  I was able to get all my Xdrive files but the overall experience with Xdrive was not a pleasant one at all.

Good Riddance to Xdrive

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