Join Me: Be a Mentor

As a child I was very fortunate to have a family who celebrated my achievements and supported my dreams. From being a fashion designer to the next Oprah Winfrey, and every career in between, my aunts and older cousins were always in my corner.
Unfortunately, not all young people have a solid emotional support system to encourage them. That’s why I’m considering becoming a mentor. Mentors offer support and friendship to young people by encouraging and nourishing mentees’ interests and strengths. Mentoring doesn’t take the place of parenting, but draws from your personal experiences to offer a positive example in mentees’ lives.
There are many formal mentoring programs throughout the country, including one of the most popular, Big Brothers/ Big Sisters. Many mentoring programs are based in schools and local non-profit organizations. One particularly interesting mentoring initiative is Health and Human Services’ Mentoring Children of Prisoners Program. Children of prisoners are often the forgotten victims of crime, but this agency partners with community organizations to ensure that these children can build healthy relationships with adults and avoid negative influences.
You can enjoy a variety of activities with your mentee, such as attending sporting events, movies, tutoring in academic subjects, or teaching them new hobbies. However I’ve found that the most memorable times with mentors are during one-on-one chats. Aside from a criminal background check and training, there are no rules for who can be a mentor. You don't have to fit a certain mold, however some characteristics that are helpful include:
• Being accessible
• Ability to empathize
• Being a good listener
If you have time to mentor, I encourage you to join me; you’ll never know how much it will mean to them (and you) in the years to come.
Tell us about your experiences with mentoring.

Post Written by: Marietta

Firefox 4 Beta 4 Introduces Sync and Panorama

Mozilla has released Firefox 4 Beta 4, bringing two very interesting features to the table: Panorama (previously called Tab Candy) and Sync.

Panorama is a nifty visual tool that lets you overview all of your open tabs and group them into sets with a simple drag-and-drop interface. It’s activated via an icon at the right end of the bookmark bar, which takes you to your tab playground, where you can expand or delete your tab sets, create new ones and organize them around the canvas as you see fit.

I don’t see the need to organize my tabs in a way other than the default, but then again, I’m not an extreme tab user — I’ve seen people with 30+ tabs open at all times, and in such cases a feature like Panorama can come in handy.

Another interesting update in the latest beta of Firefox 4 is the inclusion of Sync, a feature that lets you synchronize your bookmarks, history, Awesome Bar, passwords, form-fill data and open tabs across multiple computers and your iPhone if you use Firefox Home. As far as security and privacy go, Sync doesn’t track your history, and encrypts all of your data before sending it to the server.

For many users, Sync is not only a wanted feature — it’s a must-have. Right now, a Firefox add-on called Xmarks delivers most of the functionality of Sync, and even brings some extra features, such as search enhancement and web discovery. But Firefox is playing catch-up here, as Google’s Chrome and Opera already have a similar feature, so it was definitely time to include something similar in the default version of the browser.

Firefox 4 Beta 4 is available for Mac, Linux and Windows users here.

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