Fine Jewelry Forms And Functions

The visual appeal of fine jewelry has never ceased to amaze us. In fact, jewelry pieces have been objects that denote social status especially during ancient times. They have significantly shaped many traditions that we know today. From necklaces and earrings, to rings and bracelets, these adornments have provided humans with worldly satisfaction that no other material could induce.

There are many types of fine jewelry pieces to choose from. Some are used as adornments, while others are used as symbolic tokens for certain occasions. There are also pieces that are inexpensive and simple in finish, while other articles are very expensive and made from the finest materials. Some of the most popular and commonly used pieces would be discussed here to provide further understanding about their qualities and uses. Rings are perhaps the most common articles of jewelry that almost all of us are familiar with. These jewelry pieces may come in the form of plain cylindrical bands as seen from wedding rings ornamented with precious stones like diamond heart setting, spiral or serpentine coils, signet rings, and open on one side. Rings are used for differing purposes but usually they serve as symbolic tokens given during special events like betrothals and weddings, or just to highlight one's fingers. In the case of signet rings, they commonly bear the emblems of fraternal orders or other organizational insignias.

The necklace is another popular form of jewelry worn around the neck. Generally, necklaces come in four different forms: close fitting collar band decorated with precious stones or beads, chain necklace with a pendant, raw of beads in graduating sizes set in a wire or chain, and strings of different lengths of necklaces worn on top of each other. Necklaces can be created from various materials but works well with metals, gemstones or the combination of two, and they are usually partnered with pendants made from gemstones with the diamond heart being one of the most sought after pendant design. To further highlight the beauty of necklaces, they appropriately worn with dresses that have low necklines as this design helps the jewelry to become the focal point of the person's upper body. 

Meanwhile, earrings are articles of jewelry used for the ears that could be set against the earlobes or are left as dangling drops. One of the most usual forms of earrings set on the earlobes are large pearls, while popular hanging earrings are chandeliers and hoops. Traditionally, it is a requisite to have the ears pierced when wearing earrings as this practice was once considered a barbaric act. Today, earrings can be worn by means of clipping them to the ear, though the method of ear piercing is still practiced. 

The bracelet is another type of fine jewelry, worn on the arm. This large ring-like piece may come as closed band, spiral coil, open on one side, closed with clasp or flexible rings formed as links. Other than the aforementioned pieces, there are other types of jewelry that one may encounter in the market including pins, cuff links, anklets, chains, brooches, and collar buttons to name a few. Generally, there are many jewelry pieces that vary in function, quality and design; it is already up to the individual what jewelry to use in accordance to his or her desired function.

Fine jewelry like necklaces, bracelets, earrings and rings are commonly used as personal adornments. However, they can also be used to signify societal status, as a form of currency, symbolism as well as artistic display. They can be made from precious metals set with gemstones just like a diamond heart setting and may come in varying finishes depending on the wearers preference.

Team Building Event on a Limited Budget

Our client had 80 guests in Melbourne for a three day conference and on the second evening they wanted to host a team building event. We were on a very limited budget and while brainstorming cost effective team building ideas we came up with a pizza making competition.

This event provided us with the opportunity to take guests out of the hotel and place them in new and exciting surroundings.
Step one was to find the perfect venue. When working on a budget use your venue to set the scene. We found a rustic underground restaurant with a wood fired oven.
Being a weeknight we were able to hire the entire basement level at a great price. Note - Venues always want to fill their function space on a weeknight, you should be able to negotiate a better rate on a weeknight as opposed to a Friday or Saturday evening.
To start the evening off, we had the executive chef demonstrate the art of pizza making. The group were then split into teams and given the task of creating their own pizza's. This was a great way to provide a team building activity but also save money as they ate the pizza's they had made. Of course we supplied some professionally made pizza's as well!
In regard to themeing the venue, with not too much expense we transformed the space into a Little Italy. We utilised the venues free white table cloths and simply hired in red and white check table cloths to be placed over the white cloths provided by the venue.
We brought white candles from the reject shop and melted them onto empty wine bottle provided free of charge by the venue. Add some artificial grapes, again from the reject shop and presto a budget friendly and easy table decoration!
Lighting is also a great way to create effect without the expense. Here in little Italy we hired mini up-lights, when chatting to an audio visual supplier you can also ask for parcan lights. The lights were only $5 each and you get to choose what colour gel (in other words a thick cellophane cover) you would like. We chose gels in red and green placing them around the room to light the walls for a warm effect.
Our guests had a fantastic evening and as well as pizza making there was plenty of dough throwing!
Good Luck and Happy Eventing.

Kim Hesse - Managing Director of Venues 2 Events is an event manager at heart and has a crazy passion for the exciting world of events!

Venues 2 Events is a special event management company as well as an on-line venue directory. The last four years has seen Kim transform Venues 2 Events into an Industry Leader and resource for finding reputable venues across Australia. Kim believes in this Industry and hopes to share some of her passion and knowledge with you!

Promotional pens - 5 great ideas for special events.

Promotional pens are one of the most popular business gifts in the world. They range in price from pennies to hundreds of pounds and all the rest. This article will give you 5 tips for pens that you can giveaway to 5 different types of events.

The first launch of a new retail store

Promotional activities involving large crowds of people from all walks of life can be difficult to satisfy in terms of what to give away promotional merchandise. However, good quality budget pen can fit the bill perfectly because everyone uses one and no one would refuse the offer of a free one. There are thousands of fashionable, elegant, well-made pens to choose from, the most popular are those that feel comfortable and look cool.

2 A mail from a Garden Centre

Without doubt, any activity that may be related to a subject Eco friendly is on a winner in those days. Any company associated with natural products such as agricultural or food, textiles, etc. should consider offering a product or recycled eco friendly. There are hundreds of pens made from soya beans, maize starch and a lot of other recycled materials or that this type of eco-friendly pens are made of

3 The launch of a new financial product

For the more serious events, such as the launch of a new financial product, you must have a promotional pen that is in keeping with the occasion. In this case a metal pen would be appropriate especially if it is branded with laser engraving, that brings a touch of class to the finished product. Some pens can take a distinctive metal clip brings a touch more special for them.

4 The launch of a new film

Where images are important, there are many pens that are designed to maximize the area for the advertising message. Banner pens are ideal as promotional giveaways at such an event. They are designed with an internal roll-out banner that extends from the barrel. There is an automatic retraction system to launch banners are also back in the feathers floating tubes containing clear fluid for your logo or message float in

5 The signing of a prestigious contract

The obvious choice for prestigious events such as the signing of a new major contract or perhaps a visit from a VIP is the classic Mont Blanc pen. This icon of writing instruments are a cut above the competition and has been used by most governments and royal families for many years. Like the builders of the Mont Blanc as Waterman, Balmain, Cross and Parker pens offer extremely good alternative.

Quantity is never as important as the quality in order to keep in mind all the time. Always try to buy products that the customer will want to keep, which is why it is important to choose quality products instead of less than a lot cheaper .

Computer Hardware Networking - Home Networking Hardware - Hardware Networking Basics

A personal computer (PC) is a computing device which is made of many other district electronic components that all function together in order to accomplish for some useful task. We are describing computer having distinct parts that work together. Most of the computers today are modular. They have their components which can be removed and replace easily for upgrading our PC. Each components has a very specific function and having his own role in PC. You will be learning more about the components that make a typical PC, what their function is and how they work together inside the PC.

NZXT Hades PC Case Review

After working with this chassis, I can safely say that there's nothing hellish about NZXT's Hades mid-tower ATX case. It's feature rich with a good cable management design and a drive cage design built for maximum configuration options. The cooling performance is excellent, yet easy on the ears and the built in fan controllers allow the user to custom tailor the performance to suit the installed hardware. And, let's not forget the temperature monitoring feature. Widely available and priced at around $80 US, the Hades is also a hell of a deal, considering the feature set and overall quality. Read more...

SMPS

A switched-mode power supply (also switching-mode power supply, SMPS, or simply switcher) is an electronic power supply unit (PSU) that incorporates a switching regulator in order to provide the required dc output voltage.
Although the term "power supply" has been in use since radios were first powered from the line/mains, that does not mean that it is a source of power, in the sense that a battery provides power. It is simply a device that (usually) accepts commercial AC power and provides one or more DC outputs. It would be more correctly referred to as a power converter, but long usage has established the term.

Whilst a linear regulator maintains the desired output voltage by dissipating excess power in a pass power transistor, the switched-mode power supply switches a power transistor between saturation (full on) and cutoff (completely off) with a variable duty cycle whose average is the desired output voltage. It switches at a much higher frequency (tens to hundreds of kHz) than that of the AC line (mains). This means that the transformer that it feeds can be much smaller than one connected directly to the line/mains. Switching creates a rectangular waveform that typically goes to the primary of the transformer.

Usually several secondaries feed rectifiers, series inductors, and filter capacitors to provide various DC outputs with low ripple.

THe main advantage of this method is greater efficiency because the switching transistor dissipates little power when it is outside of its active region (i.e., when the transistor acts like a switch and either has a negligible voltage drop across it or a negligible current through it). Other advantages include smaller size and lighter weight (from the elimination of low frequency transformers which have a high weight) and lower heat generation due to higher efficiency. Disadvantages include greater complexity, the generation of high-amplitude, high-frequency energy that the low-pass filter must block to avoid electromagnetic interference (EMI), and a ripple voltage at the switching frequency and the harmonic frequencies thereof.

Very low cost SMPS may couple electrical switching noise back onto the mains power line, causing interference with A/V equipment connected to the same phase. Non power-factor-corrected SMPSs also cause harmonic distortion.

If the SMPS has an AC input, then the first stage is to convert the input to DC. This is called rectification. The rectifier circuit can be configured as a voltage doubler by the addition of a switch operated either manually or automatically. This is a feature of larger supplies to permit operation from nominally 120 volt or 240 volt supplies. The rectifier produces an unregulated DC voltage which is then sent to a large filter capacitor. The current drawn from the mains supply by this rectifier circuit occurs in short pulses around the AC voltage peaks. These pulses have significant high frequency energy which reduces the power factor. Special control techniques can be employed by the following SMPS to force the average input current to follow the sinusoidal shape of the AC input voltage thus the designer should try correcting the power factor. An SMPS with a DC input does not require this stage. An SMPS designed for AC input can often be run from a DC supply (for 230V AC this would be 330V DC), as the DC passes through the rectifier stage unchanged. It's however advisable to consult the manual before trying this, though most supplies are quite capable of such operation even though nothing is mentioned in the documentation. However, this type of use may be harmful to the rectifier stage as it will only utilize half of diodes in the rectifier for the full load. This may result in overheating of these components, and cause them to fail prematurely. [3]

If an input range switch is used, the rectifier stage is usually configured to operate as a voltage doubler when operating on the low voltage (~120 VAC) range and as a straight rectifier when operating on the high voltage (~240 VAC) range. If an input range switch is not used, then a full-wave rectifier is usually used and the downstream inverter stage is simply designed to be flexible enough to accept the wide range of dc voltages that will be produced by the rectifier stage. In higher-power SMPSs, some form of automatic range switching may be used.

The inverter stage converts DC, whether directly from the input or from the rectifier stage described above, to AC by running it through a power oscillator, whose output transformer is very small with few windings at a frequency of tens or hundreds of kilohertz (kHz). The frequency is usually chosen to be above 20 kHz, to make it inaudible to humans. The output voltage is optically coupled to the input and thus very tightly controlled. The switching is implemented as a multistage (to achieve high gain) MOSFET amplifier. MOSFETs are a type of transistor with a low on-resistance and a high current-handling capacity. Since only the last stage has a large duty cycle, previous stages can be implemented by bipolar transistors leading to roughly the same efficiency. The second last stage needs to be of a complementary design, where one transistor charges the last MOSFET and another one discharges the MOSFET. A design using a resistor would run idle most of the time and reduce efficiency. All earlier stages do not weight into efficiency because power decreases by a factor of 10 for every stage (going backwards) and thus the earlier stages are responsible for at most 1% of the efficiency. This section refers to the block marked Chopper in the block diagram.