A. Constrictive pericarditis
B. Dilated cardiomyopathy
C. Hypersensitivity myocarditis
D. Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy
E. Restrictive cardiomyopathy

The correct answer is E. What links rheumatoid arthritis (RA) to restrictive cardiomyopathy? Amyloid! Long-standing inflammatory conditions such as RA are associated with deposition of a form of amyloid known as AA (amyloid-associated protein), which may involve kidneys, heart, liver, skeletal muscle, and skin, for example. Amyloid deposition in the myocardium results in decreased compliance and impaired diastolic filling, i.e., restrictive cardiomyopathy. The myocardium has a rigid and waxy texture. This form of amyloid, as well as any other biochemical form, can be visualized on tissue section by staining with Congo red, which acquires a characteristic apple-green birefringence under polarized light.

Constrictive pericarditis (choice A) is due to any pathologic process that results in fibrous thickening of the pericardium, with resultant impaired compliance. Clinically, therefore, this condition manifests with a picture similar to restrictive cardiomyopathy because of impaired diastolic filling. Constrictive pericarditis is usually caused by previous episodes of acute pericarditis, especially hemorrhagic, suppurative, and caseous pericarditis.

Dilated cardiomyopathy (choice B) is characterized by massive ventricular dilatation and may be caused by genetic alterations, myocarditis, toxic insults (alcohol), metabolic disorders (hemochromatosis), etc. Most cases are idiopathic. The main pathophysiologic alteration is impaired contractility.

You may be tempted to think that this patient is prone to developing hypersensitivity myocarditis (choice C), but this form of myocardial disease has been reported after treatment with some antihypertensive agents, antibiotics, and diuretics — not with corticosteroids or NSAIDs. Furthermore, myocarditis manifests acutely with arrhythmias and heart failure, and chronically with dilated cardiomyopathy and congestive heart failure.

Most cases of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (choice D) are familial and due to mutations in one of the genes encoding proteins of the sarcomeres, most frequently β-myosin heavy chain. This form of cardiomyopathy leads to asymmetric hypertrophy of the left ventricle, with predominant thickening of the interventricular septum. In this case, too, impairment of ventricular compliance is the basic mechanism leading to reduced diastolic filling and heart failure.

Titles are probably the most important part of you page. By using appropiate titles you can be sure that the user knows where he is and what he can do in your blog. Just look this real example:

meyerweb.com
mezzoblue § design, typography, and the web: live from vancouver, b.c., canada

You only need a few seconds to write a good title and your will really improve the site.
Meta information

The meta data suplies information about the document you are designing. If you will like to learn more about the meta-information here you can find everything you need to know. Anyway, here’s you have the meta data tags that I think you should always have:

<meta name=”author” content=”Your name” />
<meta name=”description” content=”description of the site” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”keywords here” />

Finally here you can learn how to use the robots meta tag, a way to indicate to visiting search engines robots if a page should be indexed.
A Favicon

This is not such an important thing, but everything helps when you are trying to improve your site. All you need to create your favicon is this tool.

Once you have uploaded your icon to your server you only need to place this tag in the head of the document:

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”favicon.ico”/>
And of course, your stylesheet

If you will like to know more about the stylesheets and why you REALLY should use them, please take a look to our resource directory, into the css related and the tutorials categories

Design tutorials are always welcome, but it is much better if they do the work for you. Thats what Eris has done: the best weblog template collection I ever seen, so far, and not only because they are nicely designed but also because you get complete templates (main page, comments, etc.), and not only that, you can also customize them. Please take a look a them.

I discovered Eris because of this post in The Beautify designer’s forum. Eris talked about the design of this site. I think Eris is probably right about the colors that I chose, which are not the best choice, mainly because the combination may be not readable for colorblind Internet users.

I remember that I once saw a tool that was created to help designers avoid these kind of problems, but even so, I really dont know much about this topic.

Would someone be interested in sharing information about it in this site? It would be greatly appreciated.

Once a upon a time the W3C started to organize all the mess everybody called the internet, one of the many things they recomended was that every document should have a DOCTYPE, the bad thing, nobody listened. We all remember that era; thankfully, today a lot of people are moving towards standards, giving the DOCTYPE the importance it deserves.

The Basics
The DOCTYPE declaration should precede any markup in your page. Actually, in XHTML documents, this declaration follows the XML prolog, which is the first tag inside our pages. But wait, before you type in the XML prolog consider that older version of Netscape Navigator and, believe it or not, recent versions of Internet Explorer choke on the prolog. We strongly recomend skipping the prolog, don’t feel bad, the W3C has made its declaration optional.

Ok, show me how. It easy, just put any of the following DOCTYPE declarations at the top of your document.

For HTML 4.01 you can use the following declarations:
For strict HTML documents
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd”>
For HTML transitional
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd”>
For HTML frameset
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd”>

For XHTML 1.0 you can use any the following declarations
For XHTML 1.0 strict documents
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>
For XHTML 1.0 transitional documents
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
For XHTML 1.0 frameset documents
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Frameset//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-frameset.dtd”>

For XHTML 1.1 documents
Use this declaration
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd”>

Options, options, so many options. If you want to start authoring web documents that are standard complaint, you can start nice and slow with XHTML transitional documents, but thats a whole other topic, stick around we will write about that also very soon.

Now if you wish to convert an existing HTML, one of those 1999 sites, you wish to keep using tables for layout, don’t care too much for semantics, then the logical step is HTML transitional, also consider your motivation to learn a new skill, this is very important.

Let’s look at it in more detail
Transitional Sites (XHTML Transitional)

These are the kind that forgive your misadventures in HTML code, they let you mix presentation markup with content, there is not a strict separation between them. Also you can still use deprecated elements and attributes like the target=”_blank”, you can apply presentational markup on certain elements, like tables, and it’s cells.

Also, you can still use tables to format your website, that is something that you should not do if you wish to author strict standard oriented website, remember that tables are meant to display tabular data.

There nothing wrong about transitional website, as a matter of fact, they are standards complaint, so do not despair, go ahead and try it, get some experience and then go ahead and dive into strict waters.
Strict Sites (XHTML Strict)

Well just by the name you know things are a little bit different than, transitional, well, actually, are a lot different. First of all, there is no mixing presentational markup with XHTML, for instance, no bgcolor attribute, no FONT tag, basically, all presentation should be done through a Cascade Style Sheet, also, you should stay away from using tables as a tool to give your site a certain look and feel, tables equal tabular data. Also there are stricter syntactical constrains.

The main thing you must always remember is, separation of content and presentation, slowly but surely you will gain the hang of it and you will never want to go back.
By now you can make a wise decision on which type of standard to use, as I said at the beginning of this article, it depends.

In the next article we will see more details and differences between them, also, we will be posting a quick guide on how to convert your HTML document to XHTML. See ya in the next article!

The author has used CSS 3, so you can expect browser incompatibilities, but is a nice way to see the beautiful things that we are going to be able to do once CSS 3 support becomes a standar feature in all the browsers.

Designating offsite links tutorial

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Both of the above answers are excellent advice.
If you were to ask a wine expert what the absolute, overall “best” wine was, they would tell you no such thing exists. There are many excellent wines, each with their own unique qualities and taste.
So it is with knives.
What I tell all of my employees is that there is no magic in a knife. It’s just a hunk of steel with a sharp edge, the magic is in the user’s hands.
There is no sense in buying an excellent, expenisve knife for your friend if that person does not know how to sharpen it properly, or have access to someone who can. All knives will need sharpening, and the cheap-o ones that claim you don’t have to, are just hacksaw blades in a handle.
Knives are also a bit like shoes, either they fit you–your hands and style– or they don’t. You need a bit of knowledge and experience when picking out expensive knives.
I hope this helps somewhat

We currently have laminate, and it works fine, except we would like
something a bit more resilient to heat if we can, but laminate and
concrete are a bit over our budget…and they aren’t soemthing I want
to DIY.

Restaurants use stainless, and we like the look…but we aren’t exactly
sure where we can find a manufacturer of a custom-sized countertop.
Is this something that anyone here has had done before? What does it
cost, where do we start on finding someone who can do this kind of work
locally?

————————

Uh, if laminate and concrete are over your budget, custom-sized stainless steel countertop is
way, way, way over your budget. It’d be hard to find a more expensive
top. It’s not terribly hard either. It’ll take the heat, but you’d
better be OK with the “patina” of scratches you’ll have.

Quartz and granite are good for heat, but they’ll be more expensive
than laminate, too.

they display a large board in the window of each car stating £99 per week, below this is the screen price & the APR.

i’m not supporting carcraft i just think that they do get bad press when simialr stories abound regarding most bad credit car dealerships.
there used to be a white handwritten price u could sometimes see in the corner of the screen,that was base price. it is actually still on my daughters jimny from 2 nearly 3 years ago.

at then minute the reps are struggling with customer numbers down but according to direct cars they have been the same.it could be worth a 10 minute to see what deal u can get.
(find a car u like elsewhere – take the details with you & then haggle).

i’m not supporting carcraft i just think that they do get bad press when simialr stories abound regarding most car dealerships.