Wake up to the benefits of a midday snooze

You can gain benefits from snoozing as little as five minutes or as much as two hours. Research shows you stand to get the most out of a midday snooze if you can go through a full cycle of sleep, including slow-wave or "deep" sleep. This can take about 90 minutes. Research shows that taking a 20-minute nap about eight hours after you wake can do more for you than sleeping another 20 minutes in the morning.
Feel the urge to nap? Giving in to it can help you feel revived and more productive at work, on the road, or at home. It's an open-and-shut-eye case. Here are some tips:
Silence, please. Find a napping place free from phones, loud noises, or disruptive people.
Safety first. Nap in a safe place. If you choose to snooze in a car or in a parking garage, lock your doors or identify a napping partner who can watch out for you.
Early to rise. Avoid napping past 3 p.m. so that it won't interfere with a good night's sleep. It's best to nap according to your circadian rhythm (the body's natural 24-hour cycle), which for most of us means snoozing in late morning or early afternoon.
Waking life. Once your nap is over, take a quick walk in the sunlight if possible to reset your circadian clock.

Once Upon a Time

This is a Chinese man’s story in early America. It is the story of his family as we travel through time and follow his descendants. We see that the actions of one man may influence the rest of history, even if his actions are small.

Our saga begins with Han Zhu, immigrant from China. He travelled as a paper-back baby. The immigration papers he had were forged. In the time of American discrimination, the government put quotas on the number of Chinese allowed into the country. Eager to get into the land of promise, many Asians tried to escape the poverty of their homeland; sometimes through illegal means. In California, miners came from all over the world in hopes of striking it rich on the mountainside and bringing their wealth back home. A small fortune here might mean lifelong prosperity overseas, not just for the miners, but also for the family related to them.

Han Zhu entered the fishy pier of New York harbor to taste his first breath of American air. His passage fee had been very expensive, costing him a family heirloom, and the conditions of the ocean linear were filthy and cramped. It took several months to make the arduous voyage across the sea. The passage had not been an easy one. Some travelers had not survived the journey. How long Han has yearned to see land, his first glimpse of America, and have his dreams fulfilled. The streets of West were said to be paved in gold. Money was plentiful. Gold nuggets lined the streets. It was the land of prosperity. Everyone from his village in Shuzhuen heard of it.

When Han stepped off the pier and genuinely looked around him, he was surprised by a long line. There were many men before him. So long was the line that it went from inside the concrete building to outside, and wrapped around itself twice. The Steerage Act of 1819 sent Zhu to Ellis Island for processing. Chinese files were to be processed on all incoming passengers and sent to a far branch in Seattle, because of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1903. Some of the documents Zhu traveled with were taken from him, including personal letters from back home. Zhu did not have much with him, but his clothes and his immigration documents. The fake papers said that he was the son of Han Lao. Because of the 1906 San Fransico Earthquake, paper-back babies were common. The fire and natural disaster had destroyed many buildings and left old records untraceable.
From a man aboard the ship, Han learned that he was lucky to have lived.
“Are we going to Hawaii Mr…?” Zhu asked.

“My name is Ping Ping Lu Lu and we are going to Hawaii to work in the Volcanic mines.” He replied in a serious voice that was so different from a normal Chinese man’s.

“Okay man, I was just asking! You don’t need to be so hyper and aggressive!” Zhu replied.

Ping Ping Lu Lu walked away from Zhu and they never saw each other again.

The Da Vinci Code

Written by Dan Brown, "The Da Vinci Code" is a thriller in which the main characters must uncover clues they hope will lead them to an important religious relic. Although the book being fictional, many young and naive people have been persuaded into believing that the book's contents are actually factual. The book is one of the most successful as well as controversial novels of all time with sales of 40 million copies. Brown was involved this month in a British court battle with two historians who accused him of plagiarising their book.

The book itself revolves around the character named Robert Langdon who travels to the Louvre to discover a series of clues hidden in the Da Vinci paintings. As this novel grasped many with suspense, the Da Vinci Code has been made into a movie, starring Tom Hanks, which premieres in May at the Cannes film festival in France. The movie opens in May 2006 worldwide.

Gasper the Beluga

Each day, thousands of visitors press up against the acrylic glass at the Georgia Aquarium to watch a playful beluga whale named Gasper. Gasper takes center-stage at the viewing window, blowing bubbles and making faces at wide-eyed children who coo and laugh at him and his tank mates -- Nico, Natasha, Maris and Marina. But for the past week the front of the window has been noticeably empty. The 17-year-old male is out of public view so veterinary staff can attend to his suppressed appetite, raspy breathing and chronic skin disorder.

On Tuesday he showed signs of returning to his normal self. He'd had a good afternoon feeding and was up to his old "bubble trick."
"He's starting to feel better. So we're pleased about that, but cautiously optimistic -- the healing process takes a long time," said Eric Gaglione, the aquarium's husbandry manager, shortly after feeding Gasper. Gasper has not been especially healthy since arriving at the aquarium in October 2005. He came to Georgia from Mexico underweight and with skin lesions on his fin, tail and body. Gasper and Nico were on display at the LeFeria de Chapultepec amusement park in Mexico City, in a tank surrounded by a rollercoaster.

www.cnn.com

.tel domain name $1

The internet department now considers the .tel domain name. More and more people are beginning to use the internet as a means to communicate. People are beginning to abandon the "out-dated" technology of cell and work phone numbers. Some people even have Web pages -- through their employer or Internet service provider, or perhaps a profile or two on MySpace.

To help people manage all their contact information online, the internet agency is considering a ".tel" domain name. If approved, the domain could be available this year. As proposed, individuals could use a ".tel" Web site to provide the latest contact information and perhaps even let friends start a call or send a text message directly from the site. Businesses could use a ".tel" site to determine customers' locations and route them automatically to the correct call center.

The domain ".tel" may also serve as a place from which the various people-finding services on the Internet could pull the latest contact information as individuals move about. Now, data typically come from third-party sources like phone listings, which may be old or incomplete, particularly if an entire household is listed under one name. There's nothing inherent in ".tel" that would enable these features; rather, its aim is to create a place to which people would know to go to find contact information.