Life Companion

A  Brief History of Fountain Pens While the earliest record of a fountain-like pen dates from the 10th century, fountain pens as we know them today didn’t exist until the late 19th century. In 1884, an American named Lewis Waterman patented the first practical model after supposedly having a sales contract ruined by a leaky precursor. Before Waterman’s version, fountain pens were plagued with ink spills and blots, and were unreliable and inconvenient. The main problem of earlier fountain pens centered on airflow — there wasn’t enough. Fountain pens work by managing the rate at which the ink flows through the pen. When the pen is held at an upright angle, ink from the reservoir is drawn downward by gravity, and goes through the feed and to the nib in a controlled fashion. Unless air is brought into the reservoir to replace the ink as it is used, a vacuum will build up that stops the flow. Waterman solved this airflow issue by cutting a series of three f...

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Administrative assistant positions are found in almost every industry. Whether it’s finance, mining, legal, film, and/or retail, this position can be extremely demanding, and definitely deserves some recognition. Some might believe that being an administrative assistant is easy. That’s not the case, administrative assistants work extremely hard. They are educated individuals, who have charming personalities, and can pretty much do anything. 1. They Can Be Forced To Deal With Difficult Personalities Most administrative assistants have had to deal with a lot of personalities coming in and out of the office space. Generally, these people will be pleasant, while others will be ticking time-bombs throbbing with compressed anger, ready to unleash on the polite administrative assistant. When dealing with a difficult personality, admin staff usually have a witty charm about them. They can help the heated individual calm down and gain confidence in the company once again...

1.  Slice Do you find that the speed, efficiency and convenience of online shopping can be outweighed by the time consuming nature of tracking and receiving those deliveries? If you do then the Slice app can take the hassle out of your online shopping by automatically tracking them on your behalf and sending real-time updates. 2.  Amount This single clever little app can take the stress out of your cooking, shopping and even the calculation of your fuel consumption. Okay, so maybe it cannot take all the stress out of these activities, but you can use it to quickly and easily convert a whole host of different units for you and access vital data. 3.  Waze Traffic can be the bain of our lives, as it makes us late for our meetings and, lets face it, it can leave us feeling more than just a little frustrated . Well not anymore as, thanks to Waze, you can join forces against traffic with your local community by easily sharing real time...

Do you like to save money? Dumb question, right – you work hard for your money, so you want to keep as much of it as possible. There are plenty of ways to save money without spending hours to do so. Here are 20 simple mini money saving hacks that can help you save a lot. Let’s get straight to the point and start saving… 1. Put your savings on auto-pilot You can automate just about everything; and you should. It takes a lot of weight off your shoulders and frees up your time. Saving is easy to automate with online banking – simply set up an automatic transfer from your checking to your savings each month… Or try  Digit ! Digit is a free tool that automatically transfers different amounts from your checking account to your savings. It’s an intelligent tool that knows when you can and can’t afford to save; but don’t worry, if for some reason Digit causes you to overdraft by taking too much, they will fully reimburse any fees and charges (though it’s so smart I’ve never eve...

Editor’s Note: In his Memorabilia , Xenophon, a student of Socrates, shares a dialogue between Socrates and one of Socrates’ disciples named Epigenes. On noticing his companion was in poor condition for a young man, the philosopher admonished him by saying, “You look as if you need exercise,   Epigenes.” To which the young man replied, “Well, I’m not an athlete, Socrates.” Socrates then offered the following response. Just as much as the competitors entered for Olympia. Or do you count the life and death struggle with their enemies, upon which, it may be, the Athenians will enter, but a small thing? Why, many, thanks to their bad condition, lose their life in the perils of war or save it disgracefully: many, just for this same cause, are taken prisoners, and then either pass the rest of their days, perhaps, in slavery of the hardest kind, or, after meeting with cruel sufferings and paying, sometimes, more than they h...

Hobbies aren’t just something that a man should do when he’s bored and doesn’t have anything else on the task list; they should be an integral part of how he spends his time. While leisure time is often equated with simply lying around and doing nothing, great men throughout history have filled those seemingly empty moments with activity. Men like  Winston Churchill , who declared that “one ought to have two or three hobbies,” actually felt more invigorated by doing  something  with his free time rather than nothing: “It is no use saying to the tired ‘mental muscles’… ‘I will give you a good rest,’ ‘I will go for a long walk,’ or ‘I will lie down and think of nothing.’ The mind keeps busy just the same. If it has been weighing and measuring, it goes on weighing and measuring. If it has been worrying, it goes on worrying…It is useless to argue with the mind in this condition…A gifted American psychologist has said, ‘worry is a spasm of the emotion; the mind catc...