Introduction to Feng Shui
by Amy Stevens Adams
As a child, I can remember my Mom being concerned about the Feng Shui in our home. She would arrange the furniture to allow positive energy to flow through our house and I was always intrigued. As I grew up I kept an interest in the art of Feng Shui, but it wasn’t until this year that I really began to study it and implement it in my own home.
What is Feng Shui?
Feng Shui is the art of arranging your home (furniture, plants, mirrors, doorways, etc) to try to harmonize the flow of life-energy. The goal is to allow positive energy to flow freely through your house, and to keep out negative energy. Feng Shui can be used to help restore the positive in your life. Many issues such as health, money, relationship problems, and fear can be conquered through the use of Feng Shui. If you remove the negative energy from your home you will improve your overall life situation.
Many people know some general basics about Feng Shui; position your bed [certain direction], have running water in the form of small fountains around the house, use certain colors on the wall, etc. These generalized ideas may or may not be right for you. There is much more to Feng Shui, and it encompasses several techniques (Chinese Astrology, compass methods, form methods and divining techniques). This article will be the first part to a long series of article in which I will break down and simplify the steps to Feng Shui. This will not be advanced Feng Shui, but a beginners/intermediate level of ‘how-to’. Feng Shui can be a very overwhelming topic to tackle, and I know that personally I put off learning about it for many years because it seemed too time-consuming. Earlier this year I read the book “Feng Shui Step by Step” by T. Raphael Simons. I’m now reading the book for the third time in 5 months and working my way through all the info and ‘homework’. I’ll be using this primarily as my resource for the info I share with you over the coming weeks/months.
Be sure to check back each week as I outline the steps to creating a comfortable, positive, happy and healthy home. In the meantime, if you plan to follow along at home be sure to get a good compass (preferably one marked with degrees). This will be crucial to successfully arranging your home. I will be using the compass on my new iPhone 3GS since it has everything I need in a compass. So if you also have the newest iPhone then you’re all set, just set it to ‘Magnetic North’ (click the ‘i’ in the lower right hand corner to set).
Here is a tip you can implement right away;
Feng Shui Tip #1
Don’t store anything under your bed. Items under your bed will trap energy and allow it to stagnate, your body then absorbs that negative energy while you sleep. Even if you have items neatly stored, remove them- your health will improve!
See you next week with more Feng Shui. 
-Amy Stevens Adams of Cape Cod Branding
iPhone 3GS Frozen! How To Fix
by Amy Stevens Adams
This evening, shortly after completing my article on the new iPhone 3GS, “Apple iPhone 3GS- First Impressions” and giving it glowing reviews, my phone powered-down and locked up. This is an issue that I have encountered in the past with my iPhone 3G, and usually I could resolve the problem by either plugging in the phone, or holding the Sleep button until it gave me the ‘shut down’ screen.
This time it was different. My 7-hour-old iP had completely shut down and nothing I did could revive it. I tried syncing it and got an error from iTunes saying the device couldn’t be recognized. I tried connecting it to a power source. I tried holding the sleep button for close to a minute with no resolution. Finally I just waited to see if it would wake up on it’s own, but after 30 minutes I decided to call Apple support.
As expected on ‘iPhone Day’, Apple was swamped. After a 42 minute call (more than half of it spent on hold), we had it fixed. The solution was simple once we knew what to do… hold down both the sleep button on the top right and the Home button (the round one in the middle) at the same time for several seconds until the phone turns on.
Sleep & Home buttons highlighted in green
I held the two buttons down approximately 20 seconds, so it takes a while- be patient. Once the phone came back up I connected it to iTunes and had to restore it to my backed-up file (“asa | boston iPhone” is the name of mine). If you have more than one iPhone on the same iTunes be sure you choose the correct backup file from the dropdown box. It took about 5 minutes to download the latest OS again, then sync it to my phone. In the end it took about 15 minutes to get my phone ‘healthy’ again after reviving it with the two-button-trick.
Apple was unable to tell me what had caused it to freeze, but they said to try the two buttons at the same time if it happened again. For some people you may not even have to restore the phone, Tech Support told me that often that alone will bring the phone back up without any further action required.
Hopefully this solution works for you if you encounter the same problem. Despite it’s occasional hiccups, I would never give up my iPhone.
-Amy Stevens Adams of Cape Cod Branding
Apple iPhone 3GS-First Impressions
by Amy Stevens Adams
Today the new Apple iPhone 3GS was released, and John & I headed to our closest Apple store first thing. The store in Hingham, MA was only mildly packed. We had expected the line to run right out the door (an expectation formed because of what we both went through last summer to get our iPhones), but it wasn’t nearly as bad as we had planned for. All in all, we waited about an hour and the purchase and set-up was seamless. As always, Apple is a pleasure to do business with.
On the way home I played around with my new 32GB white iP, and have a few initial impressions to report. In this article I’ll touch on;
1. Speed
2. Compass
3. Video
4. Syncing for the first time with my Mac
5. Using dual iPhones on one iTunes account
First, I am impressed by the speed of the internet. I was clicking through webpages almost as fast as I do on my home internet connection. It seems to be about twice as fast as the previous generation. I had also noticed the same thing when I switched from my 1st gen iPhone to the 3G last summer. However, it appears to be spotty. When we were in Hingham (and close to Boston) it was very fast. Now that we’re home on Cape Cod it seems to be moving a bit slower. I’m not sure if it’s the location or just that the cache is starting to fill up on the new iPhone. However, it is still noticeably faster.
The Compass feature is very, very cool. It allows you to set for either ‘magnetic north’, or ‘true north’ and shows exact degrees, in addition to your current latitude and longitude. It was only a month ago that I looked all through the compass apps available for the iPhone hoping to find a good one. However, none worked well (per the reviews) because the iP didn’t have magnetic capabilities. I came very close to purchasing a $30 compass at LL Bean… so glad I didn’t! It is much better to have one device that does everything I need, rather than littering a junk drawer in the kitchen with seldom-used gadgets. This is why Apple is the best, they anticipate what you’re likely to need and build it in to the iPhone. If you’re wondering why I care so much about a compass, it is because of the Feng Shui I have been implementing in our new house. In the next month or so I intend to write an article on some of my new-found Feng Shui tips, so check back if that topic interests you.
The video capability rocks. In the camera app you can switch between camera and video mode. I immediately started recording to try it out. Here’s the scoop, once you’ve recorded a video you can replay it and slide between frames. At the top of the replay is an image slider with still frames. You can slide to the part where you want to start watching, or move the beginning and end edges of the frames to ‘trim’ the video and edit it to only include the parts you want. Plus, right from the iPhone you can email the video or upload it to YouTube. I recorded 5 minutes of video and it takes up 135 MB of space.
Syncing for the first time is a breeze. If you are a first-time iPhone owner, just follow the prompts in iTunes. It will ask you to enter your phone number, nickname your phone, and log in to your iTunes account (or create an iTunes account if you don’t already have one). If you are replacing an existing iPhone it will ask you the first time you connect it to your mac or pc if you want to use the backup of your old iPhone. In my case, it asked if I wanted to register a new phone number, or if I wanted to use the backup of “Amy’s iPhone”. If you are replacing an old iPhone, then choose to use the backup. This will import all of your data and settings to the new phone. Once complete there literally shouldn’t be any other changes you’ll need to make, it is THAT smart.
For me, I was adding a second iPhone to my account. This new iPhone will be used for business only and will I still retain my previous iPhone 3G for personal use. So I selected to register a new phone number. It walked me through the steps just as if it was a new account. I named this phone “asa | boston iPhone”, and entered my phone number. I then chose the info I wanted to import onto this particular phone, which for me was my contact book, some music, my downloaded (third party) apps, and only my business email account and work calender. Now I have an iPhone that syncs with just selected, work-related info.
Once I was done, I disconnected it and plugged in my old iPhone. iTunes recognized it as “Amy’s iPhone” and still retained all of my sync options for that phone (ALL of my music, photos, personal email accounts, Apps, contacts, bookmarks, etc). Now I can switch between the two iPhones on my iTunes and it will recognize which phone is connected and what options I want for syncing info.
All the new features, paired with the new capabilities from the OS 3.0 update that came out yesterday and this phone is indispensable. To read more about the free OS updates and get our opinions, read John’s article “If You Can’t Get A New iPhone 3GS…”. In it he discusses the coolest of the many cool new features.
In the end, it was more than worth it to get the new iPhone 3GS this morning!
-Amy Stevens Adams of Cape Cod Branding
