Happy Halloween!

We here at uscity.net wish all of you a very Happy Halloween. Here are some tips for making tonight a treat for all of us:

If you are driving:
1. Watch for children darting out from between parked cars.
2. Watch for children walking on roadways, medians and curbs.
3. Enter and exit driveways and alleys carefully.
4. At twilight and later in the evening, watch for children in dark clothing.

If you are a parent or guardian:
1. Make sure that an adult or an older responsible youth will be supervising the outing for children under age 12.
2. Plan and discuss the route trick-or-treaters intend to follow. Know the names of older children's companions.
3. Instruct your children to travel only in familiar areas and along an established route.
4. Teach your children to stop only at houses or apartment buildings that are well-lit and never to enter a stranger's home.
5. Establish a return time.
6. Tell your youngsters not to eat any treat until they return home.
7. Review all appropriate trick-or-treat safety precautions, including pedestrian/traffic safety rules.
8. Pin a slip of paper with the child's name, address and phone number inside a pocket in case the youngster gets separated from the group.

The Costume:
1. Costumes should be loose so warm clothes can be worn underneath.
2. Costumes should not be so long that they are a tripping hazard. (Falls are the leading cause of unintentional injuries on Halloween.)
3. If children are allowed out after dark, outfits should be made with light colored materials. Strips of retroreflective tape should be used to make children visible.
4. Face Design Masks can obstruct a child's vision. Use facial make-up instead.
5. When buying special Halloween makeup, check for packages containing ingredients that are labeled "Made with U.S. Approved Color Additives," "Laboratory Tested," Meets Federal Standards for Cosmetics," or "Non-Toxic." Follow manufacturer's instruction for application.
6. If masks are worn, they should have nose and mouth openings and large eye holes.
7. Accessories Knives, swords and other accessories should be made from cardboard or flexible materials. Do not allow children to carry sharp objects.
8. Bags or sacks carried by youngsters should be light-colored or trimmed with retro-reflective tape if children are allowed out after dark.
9. Carrying flashlights will help children see better and be seen more clearly.


What the kids should know:
1. Do not enter homes or apartments without adult supervision.
2. Walk, do not run, from house to house. Do not cross yards and lawns where unseen objects or the uneven terrain can present tripping hazards.
3. Walk on sidewalks, not in the street.
4. Walk on the left side of the road, facing traffic if there are no sidewalks.

Before and After:
1. Give children an early meal before going out.
2. Insist that treats be brought home for inspection before anything is eaten.
3. Wash fruit and slice into small pieces.
4. When in doubt, throw it out.

BOO!

UConn - Wrestlemania - Stevie Wonder

Attention UConn Basketball Season Ticket Holders: UCONN baskeball tickets on sale at noon today. Steve Wonder and Trans-Siberian Orchestra have added more shows which means more tickets available. Wrestlemania XXIV pre-sales begin on Wednesday. Check out all the entertainment in your area by just clicking here.

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 news 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

Raves About the USCITY.NET News Videos

As a student and a person with two jobs, I do not get a whole lot of time for at home television. This is my situation: I am a student at Florida State University; I work for uscity.net, and also at a family medicine office in Tallahassee. I’m practically never home unless I’m sleeping. I’m not a “News” kind of a gal, but when you get tid-bits like, “Did you hear Britney shaved her…,”Popcorn…lung damage...”, “Don’t buy your sister a Barbie...poisoning…”, you sort of wonder “Huh?”

Having a job that uses the internet a lot, and always being on my laptop for school, I soon learned of the New Video News link at Uscity.net. It is by far my favorite link; I can watch the news at any wifi location I’m at with a click of a button.

Using my “handy, dandy” laptop, I can watch the news I want to watch. When the page first opens, there is a list of US news feeds, but if you scroll down to the blue, underlined subjects this link offers so much more. You can watch news feed in Health, Science, Business, World, and the list goes on. It is extremely user friendly. The video feed has been so fabulous for me that I have used one of the Health video feeds as a supplement for a class presentation.

Whether it is business or pleasure, I highly recommend that everyone check the Uscity.net News link out!

Kristina

Our New ‘Giving’ Category

Giving Category

Seeing former President Bill Clinton on the Oprah Winfrey show gave me the idea to add a Giving category to uscity.net. He just wrote a whole book about what each individual can do as their small part. I believe that we can change the world by giving and plus it makes you feel good too. So, hopefully soon, we will have some great new links for everyone to click on that will show you ways that you can help and make a difference. Remember, each of us can contribute and change the world. It doesn't have to stay crazy like it is now. Only we can change it. So please - Give, give and give some more, of your time, your love and even your money.

Mary

Note from Pam: We also recently added Kiva – a non profit organization that extends small loans to entrepreneurs around the world. When we checked this site out, we were happy to find an internet café that needed a loan, we thought that since serving internet users is our business, this would be a good match for us. We wish Kiva and all the worthy small business owners good luck in their ventures. And thanks to Kiva for making it so easy.

Today's Ticket Update:

Spice Girls coming to Chicago and Boston – Bostonians and Chicagoans, the girls announced this morning the fantastic news that The Return of the Spice Girls world tour will be visiting both US cities in 2008. Boston concerts are at TD Banknorth on Jan. 30th and the DCU Center, Worcester, on the 31st, while the Chicago concerts are at the United Center on February 14th and 16th. Get ‘em soon - click here!

Have a Great Day All!

New News Videos

A cool new feature to our site is the news video page, which you can access from our front page (just click on "news" near the upper right top of the uscity.net front page).

To find the news videos that you want to know about, you can choose from US, local or world news, business news, politics, health, science or entertainment. And each of these categories has subcategories to help narrow down your search. I like to read up on the "environmental" news, which is a subcategory of "Science". These videos are short and to the point. You watch only the news you care about, and you watch it when you want to.

As my friend Donna, who admits to being addicted to these, says: "I love choosing the news I want, watching it when I want and not having to sit through 20 minutes of stuff I don’t want or need to know about. I like the videos, it is much better for me than just reading it online or in the newspaper. This beats all other types of news media I have encountered.”

So, go check out our newest feature: USCITY.NET NEWS CENTER

Happy News Gathering!

World Series – Boston Cream Pie and Rocky Mountain Oysters

Click anywhere on this post for ticket info and everyone enjoy the Series!

I must admit I’m not a big sports fan, especially just watching sports on TV. I do the Super Bowl thing because I love to eat and it’s a great excuse for making and eating finger foods that I am much too fond of.

BUT, it’s official now, according to my Boston friend Beverly (we call her Boston Bev) who came in glowing at church tonight and shouted “How ‘bout those Red Sox?!?!”

I knew that Boston had won their division (or is it called league??) but wasn’t sure about the other side -- she, however, let me know EXACTLY what was happening! They are playing a new team called the Colorado Rockies. She tells me it is the Old Timers vs. the New Kids on the Block.

So, I decided to check out our tickets sales and see if they were up yet, and THEY ARE!

You can buy tickets now for the World Series, so check them out now – because they are HOT! HOT! HOT!

You can even buy tickets for The Rockies’ first games of 2008.

I will watch some of the series, I am sure – after all, I am an American with a husband who will be screaming at the TV and we all know what quality time there is to be had in front of TV with your man watching one of his favorite sports…

Now, for my part, I guess it will be making typical ballpark food – hot dogs with chili, soft pretzels and of course, peanuts and Cracker Jacks! And maybe some Boston cream pie or Boston baked beans in honor of my friend, Bev’s team.

But then I thought about Denver, and, well. the only specialty food I can think of from Denver is those Rocky Mountain Oysters…. Hmmm… I wonder if my cousin, John, the butcher has any bull testicles lying around…. Nah, we’ll skip that at have some Rocky Mountain Coors instead!

Hospice

We are pleased to announce that we have added a new category for Hospice organizations around the USA. If you are part of a Hospice organization or know of one in your area, please submit their website to us via our “reciprocal link” sign up. The Hospice sites do not have to add a link to us – we are doing this as a service to the communities they serve.

Adding a Link:
From the uscity.net front page , go to your state, using either the map or the drop down box in the upper left hand corner.

Once you are in your state, go to the Hospice category – you can either type “hospice” into the Search Categories box or just scroll down til you get to it.

Check to see if your hospice site is listed yet and if not, click on “ADD YOUR SITE”

Follow the directions from there. When you get to the keywords part, please type in COMMUNITY SERVICE and any other keywords you would like. If you have any problems, feel free to email us at link@uscity.net and we will be happy to help you out!


Tickets Update:
Shows on sale today include Stevie Wonder, Barry Manilow, Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, U.S. Open of Supercross in Las Vegas, Disney's High School Musical, John Mellencamp, Monty Python's Spamalot, Trans-Siberian Orchestra. Check these and thousands more out here. http://tickets.uscity.net/

Tickets Update

Tickets Update from USCITY.NET:

As a new service to the users of our directory, we will keep you posted on upcoming news about tickets to concerts, sporting and theatrical events nationwide.

Philadelphia 76ers tickets go on sale Friday - Additional Rascal Flatts shows including MSG go on sale Saturday - Two shows each for Barry Manilow and Too.- AMA Music Awards at Nokia LA Live goes on sale Monday - Duran Duran's Broadway run goes on sale this weekend - R. Kelly has a few small south eastern shows scheduled on sale Saturday.


About 2,000 tickets to upcoming Hannah Montana concerts scheduled for St. Louis and Kansas City available to the public – 1000 additional tickets will be available at face value for the Dec. 3 Kansas City concert and 1,000 more would be available for the Oct. 18 St. Louis concert. St. Louis tickets will go on sale at 10 a.m. Oct.13 - Kansas City tickets at 10 a.m. Oct. 20.

New uscity.net Blog

Good Morning!

uscity.net has created this new blog to keep everyone informed on what's happening here at uscity.net.

We will also post ticket updates for our partner site - uscity.net ticket sales.

I hope everyone enjoys our new blog and please feel free to email us - contact@uscity.net - with any comments or suggestions to make us better.

Love to all,
Pam