Diabetes.  Usually described as a metabolical disorder causing high blood sugar levels, is a health condition shared by approximately 7.8 percent of the population or roughly 24 million people.

Manny Hernandez has a bilingual blog also and his efforts combine his talents with those of the needs of others.   Manny is the President of the Diabetes Hands Foundation and of TuDiabetes.com.  He is a happily married man with a son that cheerfully displays his wife’s art on his blog too.  

I was diagnosed with diabetes in late 2002 (initially diagnosed and treated as type II) and formally starting shooting insulin (effectively called a "type I") in 2003. I got on the insulin pump (Minimed 515) in July 2005. I am constantly working on exercising more: that is my constant struggle. In 2007, I learned that I actually have type 1.5 diabetes!

Since September 2007, I started writing a monthly column called "Hola Diabetes" for dLife in English and Spanish, aimed at the Latino community. In May 2008, I started writing the column "Diabetes Hacker" in MyDiabetesCentral.com.

Help Manny Hernandez fulfill his fund raising requirements by watching and contributing to his diabetes fund raise initiative as seen in the video below:

Find more videos like this on Tu Diabetes - A Community for People Touched by Diabetes

He is well underway to raising the amounts needed and you can help in this fight.  Visit Manny’s site by going to his blog here or contribute to his efforts by making a donation as little as $5 dollars. 

Come on, –what else did you need the extra money for?   Living? Entertainment?  Technology?  How about a good cause! 

If you are a healthy individual, thank goodness for that.  Yet, if you are a person with diabetes, like Manny says, "you are not alone."  Join his growing community and communicate with the group.  Manny’s blog is all about social media, books, and music.  Oh yes, and as a fellow Latino, Mr. Hernandez is Venezuelan too. 

The future of teleconference is moving into a concept called Telepresence as inspired by Cisco systems. Watch this video demonstration as John Chambers, Chairman and CEO of Cisco demonstrates the power of Telepresence.  Watch how he brings up his colleague Martin De Beer three dimensionally and instantly onto the stage.

Martin is in California while John is in India.  Yet you wouldn’t notice and think he was on stage since the image is not stuttering, blurry, fuzy or delayed as you would expect in video conferencing.  Telepresence is opening a new experience in teleconferencing because it does allow people to communicate, almost as if they were in front of each other, while still being thousands of miles away.

Right now this is probably a big business tool but its nice to see this happening because eventually it filters down to consumers over time. Its almost like being "beamed down" like they do on Star Trek although its just a hologram right now. Talk about opening up the imagination to what is possible.

For those aspiring work at home persons or especially internet marketing aficionados, this would not only make their job easier but also much more entertaining.  All they have to do now is figure out how to make it cheaper.  Personally, I’d prefer using this device as opposed to a web cam any day.  I just don’t know if I would place this in the technology category alone.  

I don’t know how detailed you are about your website or its optimization needs, but there are tools out there for whatever the need may be.  In this case, I am referring to GoingUp.com.  GoingUp.com brings a unique twist to website optimization by putting there money where their mouth is when they talk about HTML validation.  You see, a lot of SEO recommendations say "make sure your website is XHTML compliant" but they don’t tell you where you’re sight has issues.  The GoingUp.com/Analyzer does!  It gives you a complete and specific line by line play of every line of code in your website that needs attention.  Using this method, you can literally make all your XHTML errors disappear if you are at least basically familiar with code (although I personally think this area is really for intermediates and above). 

Nonetheless, if you ever wondered if the way you entered a line of code works or not, this analyzer will tell you.  When I ran it on my site I found over 100 errors that I had not even considered like abandoned/open/orphaned tags.  Unless you do this with a regular editing program like HTML Toolkit or something similar, you can find yourself missing some of these once in a while, especially if you are a novice at code and are using programs or plug-ins to help your site execute what you want it to do.  There tools are powerful.

Website tools have come a long way as search engines continuously change their search algorithms.  But companies like GoingUp.com are leaving companies of days old in the dust.  They have tag generators and SEO optimizers that really get down to the details way beyond anything I’ve ever seen before.  And these guys even offer a free plug-in of their own that will install into your WordPress, Blogger, or Joomla folders, for on the fly statistics. 

I highly recommend that you give GoingUp.com a try and a visit.  I’m still in wow.

Bersa Discos

Give a listen to this up and coming duo: Oro 11 and DJ Shawn.  As founders of a new record label Bersa Discos, they have brought about a resurgence in an old time honored genre: cumbia!  But its not the 100 year old cumbia of yesteryear, its a new genre themed style mixing cumbia with hiphop, electronica, and baile funk.  

The Return of Cumbia

Argentina is experiencing a resurgence in Cumbia and this new combination of old and new is bringing Bersa Discos to the spotlight with their eclectic style.  You sometimes think you are listening to Reggaeton with a bit of a bump, and then it takes a swing back to a Cumbia tempo.  

Their first release album includes songs like Bussabuss Cumbia and Lloviendo Cumbia.  You can find their music at MySpace by visiting their page here.  Don’t forget your roots and –careful, it’s an addictive beat. 

Bersa Discos

Dale un escuchaso a este y próximo dúo: Oro 11 y DJ Shawn.  Como fundadores de un nuevo sello discográfico Discos Bersa, ellos le han dado lugar a un resurgimiento a un honrado estilo de tiempos viejos a la cumbia.  Su género estilo mezcla temáticas de cumbia con hiphop, sonidos electro, y baile funk.
 

El regreso de la Cumbia

Argentina está experimentando con un resurgimiento en Cumbia y esta nueva combinación de lo antiguo con lo nuevo es con lo que Bersa Discos esta en el centro de la atención con su estilo ecléctico.  A veces se piensa que está escuchando reggaetón un poco molido, y luego se da la vuelta a un tempo de salón y cumbia.

Su primer lanzamiento del álbum incluye canciones como Bussabuss Cumbia y Cumbia Lloviendo. Usted puede encontrar su música en MySpace visitando su página aquí.  No se olvide de sus raíces y - cuidado, es un ritmo adictivo.