History Of Virginia

Hi All,
This Joseph Miller was born in 1781 in Virginia (Jefferson) and had a son named Joseph Miller;born 1804 (ish)also in Virginia. son Joseph had a wife, Sarah Gordon. They settled in Kentucky. I can't find anything on Joseph Sr. except possibly an army enlistment record in 1814. This record says he is dark eyed, dark haired and dark skinned. If this record is indeed his, son Joseph is recorded as white. I just want anything on this man if anyone can help. i don't even have a wife for him. thanks!

By Marcus Sheridan, www.PoolSchool.us 

In my many meetings with pool customers that have moved to Virginia and Maryland from the Southern States I often get asked this question: Why are there not more fiberglass pools and fiberglass pool companies in Virginia/Maryland??...Well, I wish there were more fiberglass pools in the area, but up until recently, this oddity was absolutely accurate.

Fiberglass Pools first found their home in Virginia in the Virginia Beach area. Although there are many reasons for this, the most likely is that Va. Beach is close to Nags Head and other parts of North Carolina, an area where fiberglass pools have been entrenched for quite some time. Plus, with sandy soil conditions ideal for fiberglass, Virginia Beach was a natural start.

When my two business partners and I started our swimming pool company in 2001 in the Richmond Va. area, we thought we were going to do like most other pool companies in the state and build vinyl-liner pools, the most popular style of pool in Virginia and Maryland up to that point. But after we did our first couple of pools, we realized something that would reshape our company, and ultimately reshape the swimming pool industry in Virginia and Maryland. What we found is that people are looking for 3 main things when considering the purchase of an inground pool. #1: They want low maintenance. #2: They want the pool to last a long time without big repair issues down the road. #3 They want a pool that will look nice in their backyard, not something that looks cheap or modular.

Understanding this allowed us to realize that fiberglass swimming pools would be the wave of the future in not just Virginia and Maryland, but the world for that matter. It was at this point, roughly five years ago now, that we decide to committ ourselves 100% to the growth of the fiberglass pool industry through education and innovation.

Since that time, and now over 500 pools later, fiberglass pools have become the norm in such cities as Richmond, Fredericksburg, Waldorf Maryland, Northern Virginia, etc..With our continual efforts to educated the inground swimming pool consumer through our expansive website(www.Riverpoolsandspas.com), company DVD, and other tools, we are now helping our customers to be, literally, some of the most informed swimming pool shoppers in the country. We hope the rest of the industry will share our desires as well in these important endevours. 

Baseball History

Sunday was Flag Day, but the President has declared this entire week Flag Week.  In respect to that... I give you this..

 

By the way.. where's the flag?  Monday still has it.  He was offered a million bucks for it but declined and also has refused requests for it to be displayed at the Hall of Fame.  Other nuggets, according to a USA Today article two years ago:  Why did these protesters, William Thomas, 36, and his 11-year-old son run onto the field to burn the flag? They were arrested and fined $60. Monday said he never was interested in asking. Attempts to locate Thomas, or to determine whether he's still alive, were unsuccessful.What happened to the photographer, James Roark, of the now-defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner , who shot the only photo of the incident? Roark, whose photo was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, lost his job, became a night cook in Portland and was beaten and killed outside a restaurant in 1995. He was 49.

Does winning matter in Major League Baseball?

June 16th, 2009     by ddeal    

Recently Forbes updated its ranking of the most valuable Major League Baseball teams from a financial standpoint.  The top 5 teams — the New York Yankees, New York Mets, Boston Red Sox, Los Angeles Dodgers, and Chicago Cubs — had zero World Series appearances in 2008.  But we should not be surprised.  Relying on a successful product on the field to obtain financial success is a risky strategy.  Superstar players win batting championships by getting on base only a third of their at-bats.  The The New York Yankees, arguably the most successful team in baseball history, haven’t won a World Series since 2000.  The Atlanta Braves defined the standard for excellence in the National League in the 1990s yet struggled with fan indifference.

No, success in Major League Baseball is all about locking in lucrative media deals and providing an experience (not necessarily a great product) for fans and corporate sponsors at the stadium.  Going to a ball game really isn’t much different than going to a rock concert anymore with exploding scoreboards, slick merchandise, and an element of theater keeping fans entertained.

As we all know, the baseball world has been rocked by allegations of abuse of performance enhancing substances by its marquee players, which calls into question the validity of their successes and their teams’ successes.  In other words, fans are probably not getting an authentic product on the field, anyway.  But really, do the fans care?  Banning beer sales from Wrigley Field or removing the swimming pool from Chase Field would be far more damaging to the future of the Chicago Cubs and Arizona Diamondbacks than substance abuse scandals.

Baseball, as it turns out, is just one more option in a world awash with video games, personal devices, a proliferation of TV channels, and many other forms of consumer experience.  Competing to win is one thing; competing to survive financially is a different beast altogether.

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Invention History

Spark

An inventor-entrepreneur confronts product pirates

By Eva Winger

Editor’s note: Spark is a regular feature for 2009 that chronicles the product-development journeys of three women inventor-entrepreneurs. This story appeared in our June 2009 issue.

In three years, Julie Austin has sold more than 300,000 Swiggies, wrist water bottles that keep your hands free while exercising.

Since we launched our year-long series Spark in January, regular readers have experienced some of Austin’s ups and downs - including when she had to air freight a load of Swiggies in time for the Dublin marathon. Miscommunication with her Chinese-based factory forced the rush shipment and killed her profit margin.

Despite such set-backs, Austin is making a living off Swiggies, which is a sure sign of success.

Yet success can breed its own problem: infringement.

“Boiled down, infringement is stealing,” Austin says. “For an inventor committing years of hard work and money to grow a business, and to have this happen, is a nightmare.”

Curious one day to see how Web search engines rank products, Austin searched Google using the terms “wrist water bottle.” She found a knock-off of her patented product floating on the screen of a Chinese factory’s Web site.

“Not only did they have a picture of my product,” says Austin, “but they shamelessly stole my exact pictures and copy from the Swiggies’ Web site.”

Months before, Austin had exhibited at a gift trade show in Hong Kong to find international distributors. She says she was careful to show samples only to bona fide representatives.

She suspects an attendee stole a sample. Soon an unauthorized manufacturer was selling Swiggie copycats online.

She had her attorney, Melissa Dagodag of Los Angeles, send the factory a cease-and-desist letter. Yet Swiggies’ imitations kept appearing on other factory and promotional-product Web sites.

“Usually these promotional-product companies are not to blame because they are unaware that they are buying infringed products,” says Austin.

She sent a list of alleged infringers to Google, Yahoo and other search engines. That, too, proved unsuccessful.

Austin discovered the best strategy was to contact sourcing-directory Web sites such as Alibaba.com or TradeKey.com, which match inventors with reliable overseas factories.

On both these sites, Austin found forms to fill out and file a complaint against an infringing company.

“It’s a good idea to get to know a couple administrators at these sourcing sites,” she says, “so they know who you are and what your mission is.”

Austin succeeded in removing infringers from Alibaba, Oursbiz, Tootoo, b2bfreezone and other Web sites.

“I learned that even if a patent is only applicable in the U.S.,” she says, “infringers are violating the law if they sell the copies on the Internet” and can be removed.

Austin recommends visiting www.ip-watch.org, which offers news and analysis on international intellectual property policy and infringement.

She’s also created www.infringerblacklist.com, dedicated to fighting infringement.

Austin also recommends researching a factory’s capabilities and asking for references to determine its reliability. For history on particular individuals, Austin suggests using people-search site www.PIPL.com.

She admits she failed to conduct background research on one culprit with whom she had signed a contract. She later learned this person has been scamming inventors for years and is in contempt of court for patent and trademark violations.

“If only I had taken this simple step,” she says, “I would have found out that this guy had a pattern of starting and dissolving companies, and bilking inventors out of money.”

E-mail Eva Winger at TheInventorChronicles@live.com

Outside Advice

Stephen Albainy-Jenei is a patent attorney with Frost Brown Todd and editor-in-chief of Patent Baristas, an intellectual property news and commentary site on patent and IP issues in the biosciences. He offers the following insights on Austin’s infringement experience.

If your product is patented, file a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission or ITC. While the ITC does not award monetary damages for infringement, it can issue an exclusion order to block importation of infringing goods into the United States.

The process is known as a Section 337 action and it’s the fastest way to obtain injunctive-style relief to quickly block the product from the domestic market. An ITC’s exclusion order goes to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which bars imports of infringing goods at the border.

The ITC conducts Section 337 investigations (named for the section of the law) into allegations of unfair trade practices. While there are many types of potential unfair trade practices, about 90 percent of Section 337 investigations concern patent infringement.

A patent-based Section 337 investigation is an adversarial proceeding where both parties serve discovery and participate in the hearing. All defenses that are available to a district court patent defendant can be asserted by an ITC respondent.

On the upside, one study has shown that Section 337 complainants have a win rate of 58 percent - higher than district court plaintiffs. It’s also relatively fast. The parties typically take part in an evidentiary hearing in about eight months and a final judgment is entered in 15 months or less.

A couple of weeks ago, Wiley asked if I'd like a review copy of Dan Bricklin's 'Bricklin on Technology' book. Normally, I'd say "not on your Nelly" because I know what a chore book reviewing can be. However, I was at the West Coast Computer Faire in March 1980 when Bricklin collected his first award for VisiCalc - the pioneering spreadsheet for the PC. I was also a fairly avid user of his 'Demo' program a few years later. Even though I don't think we met, (unless it was in Zaragoza a couple of years ago), I felt connected, not least because I also developed and published PC software for many years, but without his degree of visibility or success.
When the book arrived, I winced because it's more or less 500 pages long. Unless you're a commuter or you don't get much sleep, how do you find time to read that much?
Anyway, the book was enjoyable at a couple of levels and a disappointment at another. Enjoyable because it peeled off and examined the layers of thinking that went into various products and issues. Bricklin leaves no stone unturned in his pursuit of insight. The transcript of an 85-minute interview with wiki inventor Ward Cunningham is a classic in this respect. (It was 37 pages.) I'd rather Bricklin had identified and pulled out the key elements but then, I suspect, this would have been an editorial step too far for him. He would have had to impose his own interpretations on the conversation, rather than laying it out in full in front of his audience.
You will get insight if you read this book. Insight into what brought us to where we are and a few glimmers into how we might get to where we're going.
The other enjoyable bit for me, which you won't all share, is that I've met (albeit fleetingly) many of the people mentioned in the book, worked with many of the products and written about many of the issues. Bricklin and I even started programming at the same time - early 1966, and we've both tried to take the user perspective in our work. The book triggered many long-dormant memories and reawakened many old feelings, especially in the late 70's/early 80's as we all groped our way through the chaos of the emerging microcomputer/PC business. This is not really a reason for buying the book because Bricklin's chosen subjects seem, in the main, to be serendipitous. A comprehensive history book it is not, although it is a useful addition to the history of the IT world of the late 20th century.
The book is a compilation of old blog posts, essays and transcripts of recordings, loosely arranged around topics which Bricklin finds important, all topped and tailed with narrative from the perspective of 2007/8. As he says in the conclusion, "On any topic you can explore deeply and find nuance", which more or less sets the tone for the book. He does dig deep, he records faithfully and, at times you want him to make his point more quickly. But maybe that's not what he's trying to do. Perhaps he's trying to help the reader understand the nuances, so that they can move forward with their own thinking. I don't know.
Most of his topics have some resonance today, although much of the writing has been overtaken by events or absorbed into the mainstream. The chapters will give you a clue: What Will People Pay For?; The Recording Industry and Copying; Leveraging the Crowd; Cooperation; Blogging and Podcasting; What Tools We Should Be Developing?; Tablet and Gestural Computing; The long term; Historical Information about the PC; Interview with the Inventor of the Wiki; and VisiCalc. It's a ramble round the industry and round the inside of Bricklin's head. His invention of VisiCalc gave him a passport to go where he likes when he likes and meet who he likes. And that's what he's done and, in this book, shared it with us.
My approach, if you're thinking of buying it, would be to say "I'm getting a good 300-page book, I'll just need to pick which 300 of the 500 pages are of most relevance to me." It's a bit like his approach to software - give the user the tools and let them choose how best to use them.

Amazon is selling it in the UK for £10.99