Brazil is fast emerging as the favored destination for picking up prime real-estate due to its still affordable costs. The most sought-after properties in Brazil include villa plots, condos, luxury resorts and lots.
Villa plots or even the high-end condos may still be a bit unrealistically priced for the majority of potential foreign buyers. But the lots in Brazil on the beach front are easy to get and are very attractively priced making it feasible to purchase them. Overseas developers will find the prices very appealing and with the country’s beach culture, lots in Brazil are sure shot winners.
Brazil itself boasts of the most amazing rainforest, a stunning coastline and a year-round supply of sunshine. Add to this the heady mix of the samba and soccer and you are all set to become a lotus-eater.
A beachfront lot can come as cheap or as reasonable as you want. The really cheap lots in Brazil on the beach will be nothing more than shacks and may also be without electricity and running water. These may perhaps be alright on a short vacation if you are on a really stringent budget and would want to live the life of a beach bum. But, for long-term stays or outright purchases, it is worth paying a bit extra for a more comfortable housing.
To purchase a property in Brazil it is advisable to liaison with a local real-estate and consultancy company since a local outfit will be able to give better guidance regarding the laws and the general planning of the purchase or rental of the lots in Brazil. A team of competent professionals with the requisite expertise in the field and the capability to handle international transactions should be hired.
The thriving economy of the country is attracting investors like magnets and the upcoming World Cup Series in 2014 is in no small measure responsible for it. Tourists are going to descend upon the country in hordes and if you are a passionate soccer fan what better opportunity for you than to book your place under the Brazilian sun by going in for those lots in Brazil. The Carnival is another eternal temptation and who knows, the coming year may just see you doing the ‘samba’ on the streets of Rio de Janeiro! So, go right ahead and book that lot in Brazil which is up for grabs before it’s too late.
About the Author
Brazil Land Consult are The Brazil Beach Lotsexperts and located in Fortaleza in the state of Ceará. If you’re thinking of Buying Beachfront Lots In Brazil, then visit our website www.brazillandconsult.com or Call us (+55) 85-3224-6659
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With the renewed interest in vinyl records, an old friend is becoming more important again- album cover art. There have been tens of thousands of album covers created throughout the years and there are some that are instantly recognized, while some remain obscure, but one thing is certain, album cover art is part of our pop culture and the rock and roll lexicon.
Let’s explore a particularly innovative British art design company that specialized in creating instantly recognizable album cover- Hipgnosis. This creative group has made album covers for some of rock’s dignitaries, including Pink Floyd, Genesis, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Yes and the Scorpions, to name a few.
Hipgnosis primarily consisted of artists Storm Thorgerson, Aubrey Powell and later on, Peter Christopherson. In 1968, Thorgerson and Powell were asked to design an album cover for Pink Floyd’s second album called “A Saucerful Of Secrets.” They completed that project and soon commissioned additional work from EMI, which included photos and album covers for Free, Toe Fat and the Gods.
Being art and film students, the pair was able to utilize the darkroom at the Royal College of Art, but after they graduated, they had to set up their own facilities and in early 1970 they rented a space and built their famous studio.
Their unique company name came from graffiti found on the door to their apartment. They liked the word because it sounded like hypnosis and they combined two somewhat contradictory terms, “hip” for new and cool and “gnosis,” which related to ancient learning.
Hipgnosis’ novel approach to album design was strongly photography-oriented, and they pioneered the use of many innovative visual and packaging techniques. In particular, Thorgerson & Powell’s surreal, elaborately manipulated photos that utilized innovative darkroom tricks, multiple exposures, airbrush retouching, and mechanical cut-and-paste techniques were a film-based forerunner of what would, much later, be called photoshopping.
“We were self-taught,” writes Powell in the book,” For The Love Of Vinyl.” “What we did was come up with ideas based on the music. The design ideas were poorly sketched in the early days and required a lot of accompanying blag to be understood. Our usual strategy was to talk the job through with each other and then use photography as a means to express it.”
Hipgnosis got their real big break in 1973 when they were hired to do the cover for another Pink Floyd album, “Dark Side Of The Moon,” which is one of the most recognized album covers in the world. After the success with the Floyd cover, they were in high demand and soon took on jobs for Led Zeppelin, Genesis, UFO, Black Sabbath, Peter Gabriel and The Alan Parsons Project, to name a few.
Peter Christopherson joined the company in 1974 as an assistant and later on he became a full partner. The firm employed many talented assistants, of particular note were freelance artists George Hardie, Colin Elgie, Richard Manning and Richard Evans.
Another interesting side note is that the company did not have a set fee for designing a particular album cover, instead they asked the musicians to “pay what they thought it was worth,” a policy that would occasionally backfire according to Thorgerson.
Let’s explore some of the stories behind the album covers:
Pink Floyd- Dark Side Of The Moon (1973)
Probably Hipgnosis’ most famous work, the album was originally released in a gatefold LP sleeve designed by Hipgnosis and bore Hardie’s iconic refracting prism on the cover. Inside the LP were two posters, one bearing pictures of the band in concert with the words PINK FLOYD broken up and scattered about, and the other being a slightly psychedelic image of the Great Pyramids of Giza taken on infrared film. The album was also the first Pink Floyd album to have picture labels on the record where it depicted a blue prism with black background and the credits written either in grey lettering (European issues) or white lettering (US and Canadian issues). Also included was a sheet of stickers of the pyramids.
The album is the third best-selling album of all time worldwide (not counting compilations and various artists soundtracks), and the 20th-best-selling album in the United States. Though it held the #1 spot in the USA for only one week, it spent a total of 741 consecutive weeks-over fourteen years-on Billboard’s list of the top 200 best selling albums, longer than any other album in the history of music.
Led Zeppelin- Houses of The Holy (1973)
The concept for the cover was taken from Arthur C Clarke’s Childhood’s End. It is a collage of several photographs which were taken at the Giant’s Causeway, Northern Ireland, by Aubrey Powell. The two children who modeled for the cover were siblings Stefan and Samantha Gate. The photo shoot was a very frustrating affair and took ten days. Shooting was done first thing in the morning and at sunset in order to capture the light at dawn and dusk, but the desired effect was never achieved due to constant rain and clouds. The photos of the two children were taken in black and white and were multi-printed to create the effect of 11 individuals that can be seen on the album cover. The results of the shoot were less than satisfactory, but some accidental tinting effects in post-production created an unexpectedly striking album cover. The inner sleeve photograph was taken at Dunluce Castle near to the Causeway.
Jimmy Page has said that the album cover was actually the second version submitted by Hipgnosis. The first, by artist Storm Thorgerson, featured an electric green tennis court with a tennis racquet on it. The band was furious that Thorgerson was implying their music sounded like a “racket”, the band fired him and hired Powell in his place.
Atom Heart Mother- Pink Floyd (1970)
The original album cover depicts a cow standing in a pasture with no text or any other clue that it was an album from Pink Floyd, although some later editions have the title and artist name added to the cover. The concept was the group’s reaction to the psychedelic “space rock” imagery associated with Pink Floyd at the time; the band wanted to explore all sorts of music without being limited to a particular image or style of performance.
So the band requested that their new album cover have “something plain” on the cover, which ended up being the image of the cow. Storm Thorgerson, inspired by Andy Warhol’s famous “cow-wallpaper,” has stated that he simply drove out into a rural area near Potters Bar and photographed the first cow he saw. The cow’s owner identified her name as “Lulubelle III.” More cows appear on the back cover (again, with no text or titles), and on the inside gatefold. Again, an instantly recognizable cover, simple as it is.
Peter Gabriel (1980)
Peter Gabriel’s third album, it contains two of Gabriel’s most famous songs, the U.K. Top 10 hit “Games Without Frontiers” and the political song “Biko.”
This album is often referred to as “Melt” due to its cover photograph by Storm Thorgerson. The photo was taken with a Polaroid SX-70 instant camera, and subsequently modified by Thorgerson or Gabriel, and one side of the portrait of Gabriel seems to be melting; although Thorgerson does not recall whether he or Gabriel manipulated the image.
…And Then There Were Three… Genesis (1978)
A rather gloomy and dark cover; it is one that Hipgnosis was not real keen on as Thorgerson explains:
“We were trying to tell a story by the traces left by the light trails. It was a torch, a car, and a man with a cigarette. The band was losing members and there were only three of them left. The lyrics of the songs were about comings and goings and we tried to describe this in photographic terms by using time-lapse. So there’s a car going off to one side and then the guy gets out of the car, walks over to the front of it, and lights a cigarette. But as he walks he uses a torch and the car he was in leaves. There’s a trail left by the car, a trail left by him as he’s walking and then he lights a cigarette, which on the cover is where there’s a flash of his face.”
Still, whether the company was happy with the result or not, it is another amazing cover.
In Through the Out Door- Led Zeppelin
This original album featured an unusual gimmick: the album had an outer sleeve which was made to look like a plain brown paper bag and the inner sleeve featured black and white line artwork which, if washed with a wet brush, would become permanently fully colored. There were six different sleeves featuring a different pair of photos and the external brown paper sleeve meant that it was impossible for record buyers to tell which sleeve they were getting. The pictures all depicted the same scene in a bar (in which a man burns a Dear John letter), and each photo was taken from the separate point of view of someone who appeared in the other photos. In 1980 the album was nominated for a Grammy Award in the category of best album package.
Storm Thorgerson recalls the design in his book “Eye of the Storm”:
“The sepia quality was meant to evoke a non-specific past and to allow the brushstroke across the middle to be better rendered in color and so make a contrast. This self same brushstroke was like the swish of a wiper across a wet windscreen, like a lick of fresh paint across a faded surface, a new look to an old scene, which was what Led Zeppelin told us about their album. A lick of fresh paint, as per Led Zeppelin, and the music on this album… It somehow grew in proportion and became six viewpoints of the same man in the bar, seen by the six other characters. Six different versions of the same image and six different covers.”
Hipgnosis’ ideology and concepts are still being utilized and will be copied for years to come. Thankfully, these young art and photography students understood the meaning of an album cover and the art and music worlds are a better place because of their insights and talent.
About the Author
Author Robert Benson writes about rock/pop music, vinyl record collecting and operates http://www.collectingvinylrecords.com
, where you can pick up a copy of his FREE ebook called “The Fascinating Hobby Of Vinyl Record Collecting.” Have your vinyl records appraised at http://www.vinylrecordappraisals.com
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Important Internet Organizations Hacked by the Devil
According to researchers, Turkish hackers were able to vandalize international organizations’ official site that works to supervise the important routing infrastructure and control domains of the Internet.
The group named themselves as “NetDevilz”. They managed to momentarily reroute visitors to the web sites for ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) and IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority).
The researchers at zone-h.org, an organization that gather evidence of attacks which includes page vandalism and reroutes, stated that visitors who were visiting iana-servers.com, icann.com, iana.com, internetassignednumbersauthority.com and icann.net were redirected to an illegitimate website. The zone-h.org were able to get a snapshot of the bogus site and it has this statement written on it “You think that you control the domains but you don’t! Everybody knows wrong. We control the domains including ICANN! Don’t you believe us? haha (Lovable Turkish hackers group)”
IANA is the organization that is responsible in supervising DNS root zone and allocating DNS operators for the top-level domains of the Internet like .org and .com. DNS (Domain Name System) translates the URLs and domains like google.com into an IP address which is an important element of the traffic-guiding infrastructure of the Web.
ICANN supervises IANA and assigns IP address space and controls the top-level domain naming system of the Web.
Maybe, not coincidental to the vandalism, just recently ICANN was in the news voting to relax the rules in allocating and controlling top-level domains. Voting to relax the rules means that organization and other companies can ultimately take control of their own domains. For instance, ebay.com can take control of the .ebay domain and Google can run the .google domain.
Dancho Danchev posted in his blog, a Bulgarian security researcher that the hackers were also able to redirect the visitors of the site Photobucket Inc. into a German hosting service Atspace.com they redirected and used similar IP address, specifically 82.197.131.106, to redirect ICANN and IANA traffic. Some of the defacements done to the sites are still active at the moment. Photobucket still has not releases any official statement but Atspace.com already did.
The spokesman for ICANN was contacted and he was informed about the hack but he stated that he was not aware of it and will not comment until he find out more about the attack.
Zone-H has already sent an email to NetDevilz hacking group asking them on how they were able to hack the domain names. But as expected they decline to reply, so speculations are taking place that states vulnerability of cross-site request forgery or cross-site scripting.
About the Author
Ace Smith is a prolific writer touching base on topics like Technology, Travel,Health and others. For more information you can drop by his web sites that deals with: Sex Diseases , Money with Blog and Cell Phone / Telecom News.
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The car audio you use will have the definitive say in how your system will sound. There are many different types of speakers available. A single speaker can be used to reproduce the full range of sounds but it is not ideal. If the speaker is too large it will have problems reproducing high frequencies which require rapid movement of the speaker. If it is too small it will have problems reproducing low frequencies which require large amounts of air to be moved. Because a single speaker cannot reproduce all sounds accurately numerous speakers are used each of which duplicates sound in the frequency range it was designed for. A speaker called a tweeter reproduces high frequencies generally above 2 kHz.
Tweeters are small and lightweight so they can respond rapidly. Very little power is required for powering tweeters because they are very efficient. Woofers are the exact opposite because they usually require large amounts of power to really move air. Woofers are meant to produce sound at frequencies below 250 Hz and often just below 100 Hz (in the case of subwoofers). Because a woofer must move considerable amounts of air they are usually large with typical sizes of 10″, 12″, 15″ and even 18″! On the other hand tweeters are usually very small ranging in size from 1/2″ to 2″ in size. Typically, tweeters larger than 1″ in size cannot respond quickly enough to sound good and are too directional. In between are midrange speakers which handle the frequencies between the woofers and tweeters. Further separation can be done but is usually inessential and just complicates the crossover which must separate the full audio signal into multiple parts for each speaker.
Things to look for: Power Handling: Just as with amplifiers, RMS or continuous power is critical here. Some manufacturers will declare very high power handling figures but they are usually for very short peaks only. Granted music is not continuous but the continuous power handling gives you a much better impression of how much power a speaker can really handle. For tweeters and midranges, power handling is not as important since it does not take much power for them to play loudly. For woofers though a rough match should be made between the woofer and the amp driving it.
Sensitivity: This is a very important spec for a speaker. It gives you an idea of how loud a speaker will play given a certain input power. If a speaker is insensitive then it will require more power to play at the same volume level than a speaker that is more responsive. Figures between 85 dB and 95 dB at 1 watt RMS at 1 meter are general. If you use anything outside of this range you may have problems matching the output levels of the speakers relative to each other. If you’re going to run speakers off of a head unit then try to get speakers with higher input sensitivities since head units normally do not have much power.
Physical Size: You must pay attention to the size of the speakers you choose. Tweeters are very small but need to mounted where they fire nearly directly at you or they may not be heard properly. Some tweeters have better off axis response than others. If you will not be on axis with the tweeter when you audition tweeters in a store listen to how their sound variates as you move around them to see if they will work in your car. Midranges should fit in the door or dash spaces provided or you will have to do some cutting or fabrication. In general the bigger the woofer the larger the enclosure required to hold it. Some woofers are better optimized for little enclosures than others (Kicker Solobaric, JL Audio W6 for example). Make sure you have enough room in your trunk or hatchback for the woofer. Kickpanels for midranges and tweeters or coaxials typically offer superior imaging than locations in the door however the soundstage is sometimes lower than when you have the tweeters mounted high in the doors or on the A pillars.
How Do Car Audio Speakers Work? Moving Speaker Speakers are air pistons that move back (on the negative cycle of the signal) and forth (on the positive cycle), creating different degrees of air pressure at different frequencies. The amplifier (either separate or built-in your radio), produces electrical impulses that alternate from positive and negative voltages (AC). This current reaches the voice coil inside the speaker, forming an electro-magnet that will either be repelled, or attracted by the fixed magnet at the bottom of the speaker. The voice coil is joined to the cone, moving it back and forth, creating sound. The surround (rubbery circle that joins top of the cone and metal basket) and the spider (usually yellow corrugated circle joining bottom of cone to magnet) make the cone return to its original position.
About the Author
Professor Apex is an Expert In Car Audio and Mobile Video. He has more than 13 years of experience. You can find him here: Wholesale Car Audio
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