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Video games have come a long way since the days of Pac-man and Donkey Kong. And it doesn't take a hard-core gamer to know playing against or with another human is relatively more fun and exhilarating than going about it on your own. Celebrating a victory after brutally exterminating foes is much more fun when you're gloating and trash-talking with (or at) someone.

Enter Norweigan game-designer Funcom's version of the MMORPG (massively multiple on-line role role-playing game). Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures is a perfect example of what multi-player videogaming is today. The game comes as the 76^th anniversary release of the Conan franchise started by Robert E. Howard in the 1930's with his novel "The Dragon's Hour" and gained a cult-following when California's Governator played the protagonist's role on the big screen.

Set in an ancient, barbaric world chock-full of quests- from simple tasks to epic adventures, you can foray through the kingdoms of Hyboria as a rogue, priest, soldier or mage. These profiles even have sub-categories, so you can more or less let your imagination run free in this game.

True to the tradition of MMO games, Age Of Conan doesn't come free of course. One has to part with $13-$15 U.S. to be able to roam around spreading death and mayhem in the Hyborian Kingdoms. If current fuel prices have somehow found a way to restrict your entertainment budget, then knowing how to level-up quick might be a necessary asset. With the multitudes of combat variables in this massive rpg (that's where the first M comes from), having a leveling guide on hand can save you the guesswork of where and how to go about slaying antagonists for quicker level increase. You can still play the game and enjoy it without one of course. Having a good AOC leveling guide just lets you go up to level 80 ahead of your mates and earn bragging rights (and ultimately save you cash).

To find out how to get ahead of your mates and reach lvl 80 and dominate our server go to -> Age of Conan leveling guide

Flash is meant to cast an impact on the audience who want to enjoy flavours of animation. Flash deploys designs, animation and application user interface across all platforms gripping the users with rich web experience. Even the online games developers avail the assistance of flash to make the interface eye-catchy and close to real. Hence, the online flash games are objects of keen interest and addiction these days.

These days, game developers focus on the look and feel of the game so that the gamers get an ultimate thrilling experience. The more real a game looks, the more it sells. Game offers a virtual world of pleasure so that the gamers can live the moment and feel as if they are a part of that world. Gone are the days of 2D or two-dimensional games. They were replaced by the more vivid 3D (three dimensional) and flash games. Even the theme of the latest online games revolves around the real life state-of-affairs. Fun doubles up when it is more pragmatic.

Play the electrifying archery games like archery challenge and the Trojan Hero which will not let you budge from your seats. Or the spine-chilling racing games such as the Sim Taxi game, TG Motocross 2, N20 Rush and the like. These games will take over your senses quite easily and you will feel addicted to them in no time. There are many other best selling games that will be interesting and nerve-racking at the same time. The elaborate designs of these games and the daunting challenges which they offer may take hours and even days to accomplish. But one finds it really hard to wait until the next day to finish the game.

Flash games are undoubtedly one big leap of the gaming industry. The hypnotizing look of the game itself captures even those who had never been drawn towards gaming. If you are still a stranger to the fun which online flash games offers, don't be one any more because you are surely missing out the time of your life.

Prashant Dhama is an expert author. He has written many articles on Free Online Games.

Health insurance is one of the must get insurances nowadays. This is because health insurance is becoming more expensive as the cost for medical health is also increasingly becoming expensive. It is a common experience for once in our lifetime to be hospitalized or for one of our loved ones to be sick and to undergo hospitalization. This would not be too hard financially if there is just enough money to pay for the medical expenses, the problem is if you still need to source out the funds since you barely live each day with your salary. If you are the head of the family and you get sick, more trouble is to come your way. You can free yourself from this unlikely situation if you avail of an individual health insurance.

Health insurance may be provided by the state, club or the company you work for. Individual health insurance is an insurance that is meant for individuals and not groups. You have to get this type by yourself. Health insurance cover hospital expenses meaning the cost of your room and services while being hospitalized. Surgical expenses, physician's fees during office visits are also covered. Other things that are covered are prescription drugs, mental health benefits and maternity care.

Health insurance usually come in indemnity plans or managed care plans. With indemnity plans, the insurance company will reimburse the insured, what he was able to spend on. There is more flexibility with this type of plan because you can choose your own doctors and pay the expenses. You won't have to worry about going over the limit for a specified amount per day. While managed care plans in individual policy provide a broader coverage. The insurance company already chooses the hospitals and doctors ahead of time. The policy holder will just have to select from a list before availing of their health insurance.

You need to rely on your own judgment when it comes to getting an individual health insurance because your school, group affiliation or company won't do it for you. Try to find an insurance company that has a good reputation and can give you the most benefit with a low cost. You can find quotes from the internet to give you an idea of your premium. If you are in doubt, ask the insurance company questions and look for second opinions because it is your money that's going to be on the line.

Anthony Thedford has been writing information articles for years. For more information on insurance, please visit our website at http://www.infosearchlive.com/insurance/Insurance/Insurance.php

You will enjoy more affordable insurance if you are really committed to it and are willing to take the necessary steps that will ensure you get it. Here are some steps that will go a long way to cut down your rates across different policies...

1. People whose lines of duty expose to hazards get less affordable rates. You can reduce your premium if you choose another occupation that will not expose you to hazards. If your work exposes you to toxic substances, for instance, your rates will be much higher than that given to a comparable profile who probably works as a receptionist in a bank.

2. Insurance companies have unique driving courses that are meant to make you a better driver. There's a type of driving called defensive driving. Be trained in defensive driving. Defensive driving classes that are known by your insurer will certainly reduce your car insurance quote.

3. Your premium will drop if you raise your deductible for any policy you have. For folks who don't know what a deductible is, it is what you will contribute before an insurer fulfills its part. So make your deductible as high as possible but within easy reach.

4. Knowledge will determine what you can save. Knowing what is in your best interest helps you choose rightly. Furthermore, you will as well be more prepared to take advantage of opportunities as they emerge.

There are toll-free numbers you can call if you need advice on health issues. Call the National Health Information Center (1-800-336-4797) if you need advice on health matters. This will help you save on health insurance and probably life insurance too.

5. Electronic Funds Transfer, known as EFT is a smart way to lower your rate. This just means your insurance provider withdraws your premiums automatically from your account each month without sending you payment notices. This saves your insurer in many ways including removing the cost of sending payment notices and the cost associated with processing checks. An insurer gives you part of what they save by reducing your rates.

6. You might save several hundreds or even a few thousand dollars by simply obtaining and comparing quotes from at least five insurance quotes sites. You will make savings if you visit only one of such sites. But, you will get more by visiting many more. The simple reason for this is that you will be able to get quotes from a wider range of insurers thereby reducing the odds that you'll miss any great offer.

Here are great pages for insurance quotes...

InsureMe Insurance Quotes

Insurance Quotes

Chimezirim Odimba writes on insurance.

Inexperienced web site builders trying to put their site up on the Internet often get confused by the process of website hosting, even though the procedure is very simple. As long as you have some key rudimentary knowledge, it's easy to get your site up and running on the Internet.

The first step should be to know about IP Addresses.The principal function of a LAN or local area network is to interconnect a variety of computers which are confined to the same place. WAN or wide area network is a dispersed collection of LANs that have been connected together.In layman's terms, the Internet is a dispersed set of interconnected Wide Area Networks.

As is the case with every network, all the things on the Internet should have its own exclusive identity. This is accomplished with the help of IP addresses. An IP address consists of 4 sets of numbers, each one from 1 to 255, separated by periods. For example 210.204.156.183 is an IP address. This system offers us around 4.2 billion distinctive identities.

Companies that provide website hosting have their own collection of IP addresses. When you go to register for your hosting scheme then you will obtain your own exclusive IP address from within that range. Then you will see that the IP address given to you match to your individual public hosting area, which is known as your domain.

In such a scenario when someone comes into your IP address, they will land straight at your domain. For example, if your IP address is 210.204.156.183 and if you type this number into your browser's address bar, then you will enter into this web site.

In the event of your doing website hosting to reduce the overall cost of operation , budget hosting companies invariably assign single IP addresses across a large number of customers. This option is reasonable; however, one should keep in mind that the IP addresses are also used by spam filters and black lists spot offenders. Since common IP address is provided it could result in an innocent website being punished, blacklisted or blocked alongside the guilty website. In order to avoid such a hassle it is always preferable that the hosting provider always gives you your own independent IP address for web hosting.

Hosting a website is a clear-cut process, but sometimes site builders can be puzzled when hosting a site for the first time. It is very easy to host a website on the Internet if you possess certain basic knowledge. Every website hosting company owns a reserved block of IP addresses. One of these addresses will be assigned to you for your exclusive use. By checking on the details of your domain, you will find that its IP address matches up with the one obtained from the hosting company. It is always preferable that the hosting provider always gives you your own independent IP address for web hosting.

Web hosting companies are continually searching for new hosting plans and services to help differentiate them from the thousands of other web hosts. It is a difficult market to stand out in, with worldwide competition growing at an exponential rate. Hosting companies typically focus on one of the following factors to sell their hosting plans:

Server Size

Speed of the Server

Size of the datapipe

Storage Space

User Friendly Control Panels

Competetive Pricing

Over the past decade, Web Hosting companies have successfully marketed these different plans and features. But with the growth of competition, there is very little a Web Host company can do to stand out from his competitors. Like Computer hardware, Hosting has now evolved into a commodity market, making it difficult for hosting companies to charge a premium for their services. Over the last two years, Host companies have doubled and tripled the size of hosting plans while decreasing prices, in hopes of retaining their client base. This method of marketing works only to a degree, and as every Hosting Company offers larger and cheaper hosting packages to retains one's customer base, reducing prices and increasing plans will work less.

So how can a Web Hosting Provider draw in new customers while retaining the old? Hosted Applications are the next wave of services that will demand a premium, and Web Hosts are just beginning to recognize this potential. Traditionally, web hosts gave the customer space on a server to do with as they pleased. With a hosted application, however, Web Hosts provide the customer with a website as well, at no additional cost! Website builder tools were the first hosted application that Web Hosts used. They are already becoming a commodity service which customers now expect to be included in most low cost hosting plans.

The real estate industry has been a pioneer in this area. There are canned real estate websites with all the functionality a real estate agent would need for his website. All an agent has to do is enter the company name and info, and bingo, they have a great website with email forms, mls listings, school information, etc. Custom building this website would cost an agent thousands of dollars, but instead agents are willing to pay a premium price for the hosting plan that allows them to build their own website. It saves them a large upfront cost in exchange for a slightly higher monthly hosting plan payment. Almost any small business could benefit from Hosted Applications, whether it be mortgage brokers, lawyers, insurance agents, doctors, or restaurants to name a few.

DotNetNuke and Ruby on Rails are two complete development platforms that are being offered as hosted applications. Website programmers now buy DotNetNuke hosting plans to do their web development instead of loading Frontpage on their desktop and building a website. Some of the biggest markets to tap for Hosted Applications are:

-Personal Homepages: Myspace is the largest of these, but it is simply a hosted application for personal websites. Nearly every teenager and college aged person in the USA is building or wants to build their own personal web page to store and share music, pictures, videos, and games. The rapid growth of Myspace can be seen as a model for the new web hosting company. With Hosted Applications, any Web Host Provider can offer a similar package to this high growth market.

-Blogs and Forums: These are another recent example of Hosted Applications. A site like Blogdrive.com can have a team of programmers build a hosted application targeted for a certain industry, blogs in this case, and then capture most of that industry while charging a premium to do so. This certainly seems like a better approach to capturing a larger market share of the Web Hosting industry than the continual doubling and tripling of storage and bandwidth for the same price.

- Storage for digital photos, videos, and mp3 files: Mediamax, Photosite, and Zorpia.com have all tapped this market, providing digital storage for their customer's entertainment needs. There have been online drive applications developed for this area to store all of your files. These are just additional hosted application that any web host provider can offer.

In the larger picture, the software industry as a whole is moving away from applications being run on each individual user's personal computer. This model leads to large support issues and less revenue. With so many users installing their own software copy and running it on their pc, a lot of support issues are generated, because every user's pc has a different setup. If the application is run on a central server, however, and each user is given access to that server, support issues tend to fall dramatically. The software provider can also reduce software pirating, and charge the user a monthly fee instead of a onetime charge. A subscription model is very advantageous to the software industry. As software makers move toward the hosted application and subscription model, Web Hosting companies stand to gain a huge number of customers looking for these Hosted Applications. And Web Hosts can charge a premium for this service! This certainly is better than competing for commodity customers wanting to pay $5 per month for a vanilla slice of a server.

About the Author: Rachel Ringler is President of Advantage1 Web Services, Inc., which owns a network of Web Hosting Informational Websites including - HostChart.com, Reseller Web Hosting - ResellerConnection.com, Budget Web Hosting - FoundHost, ResellerForums.com, and HostingKnowledge.net. Rodney has over 15 years industry experience from programming to internet marketing.

From cars to caravans and pets to plane travel, there's an insurance policy for almost everything. Consumers are faced with a huge choice of companies offering insurance, so it's little wonder that some people don't know where to start when it comes to buying a policy.

But it's not just insurance companies who are selling insurance these days - banks, building societies and even supermarkets have all got in on the act. So where do you go to get the best deals on the most comprehensive polices?

One important resource which is sometimes overlooked is an insurance broker. Independent insurance brokers work on your behalf to find the best possible deals to suit you. They'll be able to search though the market to locate the most competitive prices available, meaning that you don't have to spend hours on the phone or online looking for quotes yourself. This can save a considerable amount of time, as insurance companies require a large amount of information in order to create a quote.

Also remember that insurance brokers are experts in their field and can therefore quickly find and compare insurance quotes. And because they are obliged to search the whole market, you can be sure that their recommendation will be the one that best suits your needs, and not biased or skewed due to other business considerations.

Another advantage of using an insurance broker is that you get to deal with a real human being. Many larger insurers have implemented automated response units to deal with requests from potential customers. Whilst this saves them money, it can be frustrating when you just want to speak to a person.

Another cost cutting measure that some insurers have been implementing is the outsourcing of their call centres to countries like India, where labour is much cheaper. However, this can cause problems with bad phone lines. Moreover, staff are not always fully fluent in English or may have a strong accent, which can make communication more difficult.

The standard advice for buying insurance and indeed buying almost anything is to shop around for the best deal. However with an independent insurance broker, you are effectively getting someone else to do all the shopping around for you; and due to the time consuming nature of obtaining insurance quotes, it can actually be more cost effective to go through a broker than to do it yourself - especially since insurance brokers have access to special rates than aren't available to the general public and can do a much better job at negotiating for discounts.

And finally, an insurance broker will fight your corner with an underwriter, should you need to make a claim - so not only can they get you the best deals, they also come with added peace of mind.

It was reportedly discovered by a Chinese emperor some 40 centuries ago. And, legend has it, the discovery was purely by accident. But that coincidental discovery has improved the health of people around the world, who have turned to green tea in particular to help soothe their pains, improve their digestion, alleviate their depression, boost their immune system, and perhaps even lengthen their lives. But what is it that makes green tea so beneficial to human health?

The Ingredients of Success

Green tea is actually made up of a variety of ingredients. These include caffeine, vitamins, minerals, and oils. However, the most important ingredients are the polyphenols, especially one called EGCG, which is believed to improve health. In fact, it is the polyphenols which make green tea so much more effective than other beverages in fighting disease and illness.

Green Tea and Cholesterol

There have been some intriguing studies indicating that green tea can be effective in the fight against high cholesterol. Specifically, the beverage reduces bad cholesterol and boosts good cholesterol, improving an individuals overall cholesterol profile.

In addition, green tea appears to lower overall cholesterol levels, helping to reduce ones risk of developing heart disease. Similarly, green tea enhances cardiovascular health by improving the consistency of platelets in the blood.

Researchers have also found that green tea appears to protect against oxygen-induced damage to bad cholesterol. Drinking green tea also seems to enhance antioxidant processes in the bloodstream.

Effect of Green Tea on Blood Fats

In recent years, much attention has been focused on blood fats and the effects of diet and exercise on their consistency. In an interesting study conducted at the Department of Public Health at the National Defense Medical College in Saitama, Japan, researchers S. Kono, K. Shinchi, N. Ikeda, F. Yanai, and K. Imanishi investigated the impact of green tea consumption on blood fats, also known as serum lipids.

The study was published in an article entitled, Tea Consumption and Serum Lipid Profiles: a Cross-Sectional Study in Northern Kyushu, Japan.

Specifically, the researchers examined the correlation between green tea use and the serum lipid concentrations of more than 1300 men who underwent retirement health exams at the Self-Defense Forces Fukuoka Hospital between 1986 and 1988.

The researchers factored out variables such as alcohol use, use of tobacco, exercise levels, body mass index, and rank. They then discovered that the more green tea a patient drank, the lower his serum cholesterol levels. Men who drank nine or more cups of tea each day had total cholesterol levels that were eight mg/dl lower than those who drank two or fewer cups a day.

The serum cholesterol levels seemed to also decrease for men who ate a great deal of rice and soy beans, and increase for those who ate more Western foods. However, adjusting for these additional diet variables did not seem to affect the correlation between green tea use and total cholesterol levels.

Additional Evidence from the Animal Kingdom

Its been said that there is a definite link between diet and exercise and coronary heart disease. Therefore, anything in the diet that improves serum lipid profiles should reduce the incidence of heart problems. Its also known that green tea contains phytochemicals that work to decrease serum cholesterol as well as triglycerides.

In one animal study, 45 rats were subjected to a variety of treatments, including green tea. The study showed that consuming green tea improved the serum lipid profile by reducing total cholesterol, bad cholesterol, and trans fats. In addition, liver fat content decreased in rats that received a large amount of green tea.

Other Positive Effects of Green Tea Drinking

The polyphenols found in green tea may have some additional positive health effects. For instance, a number of animal and test tube studies indicate that these chemicals may have a substantial anti-cancer effect, especially in inhibiting the spread of melanoma, or skin cancer cells. Green tea has also been linked to a reduction in oral cancers and dental cavities.

In addition, green tea may stimulate the production of immune system cells. As a result, it can help the body fight bacteria, leading to improved overall health. In fact, one study showed that drinking ten or more cups of green tea each day could improve blood test results, protecting the body against liver damage.

How Much Green Tea is Enough?

Of course, you might be wondering how much green tea must be consumed in order to have a positive impact on health. In Asian nations, the typical tea drinker consumes about three cups each dayenough to provide as much as 320 mg of polyphenols. Nevertheless, some studies indicate as many as ten cups each day are needed in order to really make a difference in cholesterol levels and overall health.

Possible Side Effects

It should be noted that there can be some negative side effects associated with green tea consumption. While green tea is a relatively healthy drink, those who consume several cups of it each day may experience anxiety and insomnia brought on by the caffeine found in the beverage. Drinking green tea may also lead to iron deficiencies, since iron absorption in women may be reduced as much as 26 percent when green tea is consumed with a meal.
In addition, some drugs can interfere with green teas positive effects. Therefore, before switching to a diet rich in green tea, it may be best to check with a physician to determine if such a diet is right for you.

Looking to the Future

The forecast for green tea appears to be brightas far as public health is concerned. Study after study seems to indicate that green tea can reduce cholesterol levels, combat cardiac disease, boost the immune system, and reduce the risk of cancer.

While additional study is needed in order to effectively harness all the benefits of green tea, it appears, for the moment, that simply adding a few cups of the brew to your daily diet can yield impressive health benefits.

Jon M. Stout is the Chairman of the Golden Moon Tea Company. Golden Moon Tea carefully selects the finest rare and orthodox teas, which are processed slowly and handcrafted with extreme care. At their website, you can learn more about their current tea offerings, including their exceptional green tea, white tea, black tea, oolong tea (also known as wu-long and wu long tea) and chai. Visit goldenmoontea.com for all details concerning the Golden Moon Tea Company's fine line of teas.