text:
Calling as follows
Visual Studio 2010 SP1, Win32.
Code: Select all
#include "ps2000.h"
m_handle = ps2000_open_unit();
if (!m_handle)
return false;
char infoString[30];
short infoLength = 0;
short desiredInfoLine;
desiredInfoLine = PS2000_DRIVER_VERSION;
ps2000_get_unit_info(m_handle, infoString, infoLength, desiredInfoLine);
Steps to reproduce.
Create new c++ project.
copy and paste in the code I have above.
Insert breakpoint on the ps2000 line call.
step over that line and it stops execution and debug mode just returns.
For me, just before the call, handle is always 1.
Is there bad documentation for this call in the developers guide? (which doesn't mention that the caller is responsible for allocating the response string (as you can see, I am), and also doesn't mention what the limits on the size of that string should be)
I've really taken all paths to resolve this one and am clueless.


text:
For the Lonely (A Valentine's Day Post)
You see, not everyone has a someone. Not everyone is happy. When we celebrate love, we forget that some haven't found it. That's why I'm writing this. For the lonely. I hope this encourages the single people out there. Continue reading For the Lonely (A Valentine's Day Post)

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Jib ratchet parts
After going out for the first time this season (about a month ago) I found one of the Jib ratchets doesn't ratchet. There looks to be a cam missing inside. Any ideas where I can get a replacement?? Do I need to replace the whole mechanism?? Also found both blocks are loose and they won't tighten down from the topside. Guess we will be cutting some foam. FS 1385
Corsa, I purchased FS1468 this summer.
Submitted by dennjarta on Fri, 10/06/2006 - 15:13.
Corsa, I purchased FS1468 this summer. With the boat I received a box of parts that may include the jib winch you're looking for. Give me an email address and I will send you a photo. Dennjarta


text:
2008 - MPS Founded by Dr Gareth Stockman and Dr Graham Foster
The WaveSub was originally invented after a detailed study of the requirements for an improved method of wave energy extraction and understanding the problems preventing devices reaching commercialisation.
MPS quickly raised sufficient capital to develop and test a small-scale model of their WaveSub.
The first WaveSub patent was filed in July 2008 and following this a thorough review and benchmarking exercise was carried out. The result was that the WaveSub offered substantial advantages over existing devices and the decision was made to form a company to develop the WaveSub.


text:
Recently, the Brewers Association rolled out a new marketing campaign called "Take Craft Back" which purports to be a crowdfunding effort to buy AB InBev. While they are only $2.5 million to their $213 Billion goal, the movement is gaining steam and national attention. Here's the video that launched the campaign:
After watching this, is there any question as to the seriousness of this venture? It's exceedingly clear from not only the video but also the website that this is a marketing campaign meant to further the conversation about how Big Beer is buying up craft breweries which in turn creates more obfuscation in the marketplace and ultimately whittles down choice in the marketplace. One of the best lines on their website reads, "It only seems impossible if you really think about it." Which is funny AND true.
Let's be clear, the Brewers Association doesn't really expect to raise the money needed to buy a company that would be unlikely to sell even if the money was raised. Also, doing some simple math shows that we would have to raise 1 million per day for the next 583 years to reach that total. So, yeah, it's not happening. That didn't stop some people who didn't watch the video, didn't go to the website and didn't read most articles about it from spouting off their opinions. These are from the American Home Brewer's Facebook page in the comments of the video after it was posted:
"This still doesn't offer anything. What does a pledge ACTUALLY do? How will you collect? What's to say AB would ever even accept an offer or allow this to happen? Why should homebrewers be in charge of this and not breweries?"
"This is stupid and a waste of time. And if this did succeed, who is self-appointing to be the board, CEO, CFO, etc. what is the end game plan?"
"What in the hell? Where does the money go when they don't get enough? Who is getting rich here?"
This guy, however, gets it:
"Society has done gone and lost its chill… This tongue in cheek campaign catches fire in a matter of hours and responses range from skeptics crunching numbers to marketing geniuses explaining how this won't work…
Financial geniuses: Would a limit of $1,000 pledges be put on this campaign if it was serious?
Marketing gurus: Count the shares, count the comments, count the likes…BA is WINNING!"
People wondering about where the money is going, how it the buy-out will work etc. are missing the mark. Once again, it shows how people only read the title of a post, article or video and are more than happy to barf their outrage all over social media. It's unclear what possesses people to comment on something they didn't read/watch, especially when they want to bash it. In this case, if they just took a minute to go to the website, it would be extremely clear that this is a marketing campaign aimed at getting attention and bring awareness to the issue at hand. They aren't taking credit cards for pledges, there are jokes all over the site, and the video is dripping in satire.
In the end, the "Take Craft Back" campaign is doing its job. Not only is the beer community talking about it (New Belgium, Stone both shared and posted about it) but it's actually getting national attention in publications like the Chicago Tribune, Men's Journal, Forbes and more. To outline how important this is to the cause, don't look any further than a recent interview with a MillerCoors executive where he waxed poetically about the craft beer industry. Pete Marino, the head of Tenth and Blake (MillerCoors craft beer division) was interviewed about the state of craft beer. While that alone is an eye-roller, his comments were interesting in the wake of this Take Back Craft Campaign.
"It's no longer good enough to brew an interesting beer, throw a catchy name on it, throw it on the shelf and expect it's going to sell. So you've got to start thinking about awareness. You've got to start thinking about building and driving a brand."
Well then, good job, Brewers Association, because this campaign is all about building awareness. While he was speaking about bringing awareness to a specific brand, it's not a stretch to apply this mindset to awareness on the topic of independence vs. Big Beer. When asked if he thought that the BA's Independence label is effective he said:
"Is there some small percentage of consumers that are going to be seeking that? I'm sure. But the overwhelming majority I don't think are going to care. They want a good beer drinking experience from brands they can identify with."
Does this "overwhelming majority" not care because they just want a "good drinking experience" from brands that have a large marketing budget or do they not care because they don't even know about the issue? With the help of this marketing campaign, maybe more people will become aware and start to think about which companies they support. The more info that gets out to the average drinker, the more likely they are to care about what happens in the craft beer industry. The rest of the article is rife with big beer talking points (people are tired of too many choices, branding is going to win in the end) so it's definitely worth read. In the meantime, I pledged $1000 and got a sweet koozie out of it. Totally worth it.


text: Walk into Miami's Vice. No, really, walk on in. Because you won't find any hard-core scenes on a flat-screen TV or even a table full of dildos waiting for you up front, but a wall of tasteful, film-noir pinups separating customers from the merch. That's exactly the kind of discreet touch that sets Miami's Vice apart from its competitors. This adult store carries the crème de la crème of pornography. First, this kink is green, thanks to solar-powered panels on the building. The friendly, uniformed staff members have extensive knowledge of what they carry, and the whole place is clean, with no creepy viewing booths or glory holes. There are leather recliners in case you get exhausted from checking out the ridiculously well-stocked boutique. The clothing wall has a large assortment of lingerie, frilly things, and corsets of all colors; a moderately sized selection of shoes; and a section of men's underwear. There's a fetish room and multiple walls arranged by categories such as bachelorette, candy, body wands, incense, vibrators, and tons of other unmentionables. There's also a DVD room, with a larger selection than most adult stores, arranged by category with decently priced films and discount rates. If you're more into touching than watching, Miami's Vice carries high-end toys — you know, the kind that usually sell for upward of $200 and don't even come with batteries? They're on sale here. There's even a free gift-wrapping station so customers can bundle their sexy goodies. Don't miss Wednesdays, when ladies receive 20 percent off everything in the store. If all of that isn't enough to draw you into this sex shop, it's one of the few in Miami that carry edible condoms. Feeling dirty never felt so classy.


text:
Monday, January 25, 2016
diy mini envelopes
4 comments :
I just started a blog and I'm already having the same time problem! Fortunately there will be another holiday soon :)ReplyDeleteReplies
I love your blog!! And yes, looking forward to the next holiday :)Delete
Hey Jordan,ReplyDelete
those envelopes are way too cute! and I really dig your journal too, it's so pretty!
I'm not a blogger, so it must be even harder to manage time with that additional work! But it's also hard for me, a busy student, to find some free time. So I usually don't study at home at all, I always go to the library. When I have to study a lot I'll usually leave the library at 8p.m., at home I'll just relax and be creative until I go to sleep. It really helps me a lot to divide work and play physically :)Replies
Yes, I think I need to start going to the library more! I get too distracted when I try to study in my room, and then I don't have time for anything else!Delete
I'm glad you like the envelopes! :)


text:
The Prova is a Corpus melee weapon unlockable through Energy Lab Research in the Dojo that are commonly used by the Prod Crewmen. It is also the preferred backup weapon for all humanoid Corpus units in the event that they become disarmed by any means.
|Manufacturing Requirements
|Time: 24 hrs
|Rush: 35
|Market Price: N/A
|Blueprints Price:15,000
|Energy Lab Research 3,000
|Time: 72 hrs
|Prereq: Fieldron
|x1 x3 x10 x30 x100
This weapon deals Electricity damage.
- Specializes in Electricity damage, making it effective against Robotic and Machine enemies.
- Priority of Electric damage can be changed by using an Electric Damage Mod ( Shocking Touch / Focus Energy / Voltaic Strike) allowing you to combine Elementals without hindrance.
- Can use the Prova-exclusive Static Discharge mod.
- Slow attack speed.
- Ill-advised to use this against crowds of enemies.
- Electricity damage suffers reduction versus Alloy Armor.
- Damage cannot be increased with Slash, Impact or Puncture mods.
- Low critical chance.
- Prova, compared to Prova Vandal:
- Lower base damage (35.0 vs. 48.0)
- Lower status chance (10% vs. 20%)
Weapon LoadoutsEdit
- See Category:Prova Build to see how players mod this weapon.
- See Category:Prova Guides for guides on how to use this weapon effectively.
- For more general help with weapons, you may wish to browse Category:Weapon Guides.
- The Prova has one of the highest damage reduction on blocking of all melee weapons, capable of reducing 85% of incoming damage from the front.
- The Prova shakes the screen violently while blocking, which may be disorienting. This same oddity is shared with the Fragor and the Scindo.
- The Prova is a Machete.
- Unlike the Prova Vandal, the regular Prova does not have a guaranteed Electricity procs on its slam attack, instead basing it off the weapon's status chance with a radial knockdown occurring the rest of the time.
- On Jump attacks, the Prova releases six small streams of electricity that each travel outward lead by a sparking orb. This purely cosmetic effect is not shared with other pure Electricity type melee weapons like the Plasma Sword, Lecta and Serro. This effect however is shared with the Amphis, which only deals Electricity status proc on its jump attack.
- Prova is Italian for "evidence" or "proof", which in turn is derived from its Latin equivalent proba.
- John Prodman in The Index wields a Prova as his signature weapon.
Prova Skins
Patch HistoryEdit
Update 20.7
- Fixed disarming Corpus Power Carrier resulting in their Provas floating outside of their hands.
- Prova is now eligible for Conclave.
- Added new mod for the Prova: Static Discharge.
- Fixed missing charge animations in Prova attacks.
- Switched the Prova to use Machete animations and finishers
- Prova Weapon model updated.
Updated Prova- Waiting on further positive reports beyond an updated icon. Results of reports: icon has been updated, rest remains to be added.
Last updated: Hotfix 184.108.40.206
See AlsoEdit
- Prod Crewmen, the Corpus units who use the Prova.
- Prova Vandal, a unique Prova for The Gradivus Dilemma event.
- John Prodman, whose signature weapon is the Prova.
|Weapons • Damage • Compare All • Cosmetics
Community content is available under CC-BY-SA unless otherwise noted.


text: 7 things to look for at #MBAAnnual17 Mortgage October 17, 2017 RSS FEEDLeave a Comment on 7 things to look for at #MBAAnnual17 Flickr/Janelle NivensSlide 1 of 9 Industry participants are heading to Denver for the 2017 Mortgage Bankers Association Annual Convention Expo seeking clarity and direction on many hot topics. In the 10 months since President Trump was inaugurated, the much-hoped-for lucidity and clearness in policy and regulation from Washington has not materialized. A discussion about nascent tax reform effort and the future of the mortgage interest deduction joins sessions on topics that have been hanging over the industry since the Obama administration such as secondary market reform and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's enforcement powers. Affordable housing, especially with the upcoming changes to the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, is another area attendees are seeking intelligence on how to survive and thrive. Mortgage lenders are also looking for tips and ideas on how to stay competitive as their customers are turning to online resources to research and apply for loans. On Saturday, before the convention officially opens, the MBA is hosting a day-long Summit for Women in Real Estate Finance. The final day, Wednesday, features the regulatory supersession, while at the same time there is a discussion about fintech in the mortgage industry. The convention is taking place in what has been for some time one of the nation's hottest housing markets. Home prices in Denver rose 8.3% year-over-year in August, the second most among major U.S. cities, according to CoreLogic. Here are seven hot topics for convention attendees to put in their calendars to seek out at the show. And take a few minutes to say hi to the Blue Bear standing outside the Colorado Convention Center. next


text:
**Warning: this could be seen as another 'sick kid blog', which according to my husband, I post way too much about sick kids**
Evan is fully recovered from his latest round of pneumonia, and had a visit with the doctor this morning resulting in a clean bill of health. Eric has also been pretty healthy, except for a cough and runny nose/eyes which I blamed on the sudden warm weather that showed up earlier this week. Then his breathing started to get a little heavy after doing absolutely nothing strenuous and didn't seem to get any better after the nebulizer. After a story I'll post separately, we decide it's better to get him checked out and, lucky lucky, get an appointment for late afternoon with THE doctor. When I say THE doctor, it's because he's the reason the practice is so popular. He's old school, doesn't mess around, and whatever his diagnosis is, you're confident that's what it is because he's so confident.
Eric and I show up for the 4:40 appointment armed with snacks and toys galore, preparing for the worst after Evan's 4-hour visit last week. Wasn't too bad of a wait and the doctor comes in and does his thing...listening, diagnosing, explaining treatment, writing prescriptions. All the while, Eric is sitting on my lap drooling like crazy, flipping through books before requesting another from the giant basket they keep in each exam room. He's babbling the whole time "mommy...daddy...baby...puppy...cat" and I'm trying to keep him on each page a little longer, asking where thing are and what noise different animals make. The doctors stops all his writing and looks over and smiles and says "thanks...I'm enjoying this...it's really great to see how you're taking this time and just enjoying it with him and mothering him and reading to him."
I could continue about how great the rest of the night was, despite a trip to CVS, an awful dinner at Popeye's and TWO nebulizer treatments, but I'm still just too darn proud of myself for being a good mom and having a (almost) complete stranger recognize it.
Almost forgot the picture, I'm on such a cloud!


text: You successfully predicted 0 players in the starting XI and substitutes, earning you 0 points in the Lineup Prediction League. You received 0 bonus points as you predicted all substitutions when less than 3 subs were used. Bonus points may still be applied after the match if you correctly guess all substitutes.


text:
Phone: 1-617-401-8149
Fax: 1-617-606-5019
Email: firstname.lastname@example.com
Or leave a message with a formal purchase
order (PO) Or credit card.
|Catalog No.
|Product Name
|List Price (US$)
Low or no specific binding to any human sample.
Humanized Variable regions.
Conditions of optimal Recombinant Human IgG4-S228P Isotype Control Antibody performance should be determined experimentally by the investigator.
Price/availability/specifications subject to change without notice. Unless otherwise indicated, our catalog and customized products are for research use only and not intended for human or animal diagnostic or therapeutic use.
Phone: 1-617-401-8149
Fax: 1-617-606-5019
Email: email@example.com
Or leave a message with a formal purchase
order (PO) Or credit card.
Isotype control antibodies are used as negative controls of primary antibodies to check presence of non-specific binding to FC receptors on the cell surface, other cellular proteins, carbohydrates, and lipids. Thus, the isotype control antibody normally matches the host species and isotype, including light chains (such as human IgG4 S228P kappa antibody), concentration, and conjugation format of the experimental primary antibody. The ideal human IgG4 S228P isotype control antibody has low or no specific binding to any human sample, and humanized or completely human variable regions in addition to the human IgG4 S228P constant regions.
Isotype control antibodies are frequently used in IHC and Flow cytometry experiments.
PA007128: Recombinant Human IgG4-S228P Isotype Control Antibody
The recombinant human IgG4-S228P isotype control antibody was produced in CHO cells.
Purity: >95% by SDS-PAGE under reducing conditions
Endotoxin Level: Less than 1 EU/ug of protein as determined by LAL method.
Shipping: The product is shipped with ice pack. Upon receipt, store it immediately at the temperature recommended below.
Stability & Storage: Use a manual defrost freezer and avoid repeated freeze-thaw cycles.
1 month from date of receipt, 2 to 8°C as supplied.
3 months from date of receipt, -20°C to -70°C as supplied.
Other Recombinant IgG Isotype Control Antibodies:
Recombinant Human IgG1 Isotype Control Antibody
Recombinant Human IgG2 Isotype Control Antibody
Recombinant Mouse IgG1 Isotype Control Antibody
Recombinant Mouse IgG2a Isotype Control Antibody
Recombinant Mouse IgG2b Isotype Control Antibody
Recombinant IgG Fc Proteins:
Recombinant Human Fc Protein (IgG1)
Recombinant Human Fc Protein (IgG2)
Recombinant Human Fc Protein (IgG4)
Recombinant Mouse Fc Protein (IgG1)
Fc ELISA Kits and Reagents:
Human Fc ELISA Kit
Mouse Fc ELISA Kit
Human Fc ELISA Reagent Kit
Mouse Fc ELISA Reagent Kit
Protein A, Resin, Columns, and ELISA Kits:
Recombinant Protein A
Protein A Affinity Resin
Pre-packed Protein A Column
Protein A ELISA Kit
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Use of this website means that you have read, understood, and accepted the Syd Labs Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.


text:
Published on June 15th, 2013 | by Henri0
Track down roof leak one step at a time
Q. I read with interest your article "Roof Ventilation Retrofit", which I found through the JLC [Journal of Light Construction) Newsletter. As I have a current roofing issue, I Googled for your contact information and found your blog. I would like to get your independent advice before I talk to a contractor.
The semi-contemporary house has a traditional attic on the eastern part of the house and cathedral ceilings on the west. The original roof (GAF Timberline, 340 lb shingles) was installed in 1981 and performed without any noticeable problems, except for the gradual wear of the shingle grains. In 2005, I had the 24-year old roof replaced as a precaution. It was a clean re-roofing job. The decking was found to be in good condition, except for some loose nails.
Owens Corning 50-year architectural shingles were selected, with added attic ridge vents. (The contractor also installed ridge vent for the cathedral roof.) Ice and water shield were specified at leading edges (6 ft) and 15 lb felt for underlayment for the remaining roof. Chimney flashings were replaced, but not the wall flashings.
Around 2009, during a heavy rain storm, I noticed some water dripping from the window frame in the master bedroom. When I tried to contact the roofing contractor, I found that his numbers were disconnected and that he had moved out of state. I climbed onto the roof to inspect; did not see any obvious problems with shingles or flashings. However, I suspected the problem to be with the flashing at the headwall. This flashing had not been replaced with the re-roofing; the workers simply pushed the new shingles under the original flashing. I caulked the joint from the roof to the vertical wall and for some time the problem seemed to be fixed.
More recently, there was occasionally some water dripping again at the same location at the MBR window frame. On a warm day, I smelled some musty odor in the loft area. (Location 5 on the cross section sketch) Also, the Sheetrock on the head wall at the joint to the roof felt warmer than the rest. I removed a lamp at this wall and traced the smell coming from inside the wall, which could be mildew. I concluded that the head wall flashing needs to be replaced and the headwall opened to investigate. However, before I do this, I would like to have your expert advice and recommendations.
Enclosed is a cross section sketch for insulated roofs and walls and provision for ventilation. All cathedral ceilings have R-30 Fiberglass bat insulation installed between rafters, with a vent channel against the roof deck. Roofs have 2ft overhang and continuous soffit vents. The attic section has wall vents at both ends. Ridge vents were added in 2009 with the re-roofing.
The MBR roof connects to a head wall, which has 4 awning windows. Therefore, even with venting channels in the cathedral ceiling, possible vent air flow through the head wall to the ridge vent is blocked by the awning window framing, except at the center and the two ends of the wall. Some air may find its way through gaps to the ridge. But, this roof section is essentially unvented, did perform OK with the original roof, but is troublesome since the re-roofing.
I enclose a sketch of the concept for installing a new head wall flashing. As a minimum, I expect to remove the siding and Styrofoam and install new underlayment and seal with tape around the windows. I also intend to remove the sheetrock at the inside and remove the insulation to inspect the cavity and remove any mildew which might be present. I wonder if I should seal the area where the roof rafters join with the head wall framing with closed cell foam?, or even fill the head wall, which consists of a number of small cavities, entirely with foam?
A. Thank you for the two sketches, which makes it easier to visualize the situation.
Looking at the cross section of the wall where the leak occurred at the window head in the master bedroom during a heavy rain storm, it is possible that wind-driven rain penetrated the head flashing of the window, if it was not properly installed. Unfortunately, common practice is to install the head flashing over the housewrap or felt paper, when it should be behind it.
More recent leakage under different conditions adds another element to the puzzle. The musty odor you smell on warm days, combined with a warm drywall, tells me that there has been leakage through the ridge vent, which the roofer installed in 2005. If the ridge vent is not externally-baffled (like Shinglevent II), it may have ingested rain and possibly snow over the past eight years, which would drip down the headwall, wet the insulation, negating its R-factor — thus the warm wall in warm weather. The water would be absorbed by the framing at the bottom of the headwall. The musty smell may be a warning of decaying framing.
Your thought that the leakage may be occurring at the joint of the headwall and the cathedral roof of the master bedroom is unlikely, in my opinion. Any leakage taking place in that area would have to run down the entire length of the rafters without wetting the drywall ceiling — an unlikely scenario since you have told me that the vapor retarder of the fiberglass insulation is Kraft paper.
Kraft paper is a relatively ineffective vapor retarder with many joints, which raises the potential for condensation on the sheathing of the cathedral ceiling running down to the joint with the outside wall into which it drips down until stopped by the window headers.
I suggest that you open the area where you smell the musty odor to determine if there is soaking insulation and structural damage that needs immediate attention. I do not think that you need to replace the flashing at the bottom of the headwall unless further investigation points out that there may be a contributing problem there.
As to the cathedral roof ventilation being interrupted by the four windows in the headwall on its way to the ridge vent, there should not be any air flowing through the fiberglass insulation in a wall, as it diminishes its R-factor. The joint of the rafters and the headwall should be tightly sealed. What should have been done by the roofer is to install Air Vent Inc.'s Flash Filter Vent to allow proper venting of cathedral roof, which is not taking place now.
The top ridge vent is also not allowing proper ventilation of the long main roof because it is short-circuited by the soffit vent of the 2-foot overhang on the other side of the peak. Air, like water, seeks its easiest travel paths. The intake at the overhang soffit vent is exhausted through the ridge vent, affecting negatively any ventilation from the soffit vent at the base of the long and relatively shallow roof pitch.
And if the top ridge vent is not externally-baffled, but internally-baffled or not baffled at all, precipitation intrusion is possible — and likely — especially with such short distance, which may encourage weather intrusion through the soffit vent and add to the water that may leak down the headwall.
An externally-baffled ridge vent deflects the wind over the ridge vent, increasing the draw of intake air from the lower soffit vent following the Bernoulli Principle. Internally-baffled vents do not allow this principle to work, as the exhaust feature of the ridge vent is halted. They may lessen the chance of weather penetration, but even that is not absolute.
You had no problem with the original roof without a ridge vent because you had no ridge vent and no air circulation in the headwall. The installation of a non-externally ridge vent changed the dynamics of the functioning of the envelope by allowing airflow — albeit very slow airflow — through the headwall insulation if the joint of the headwall and roof rafters is not effectively sealed.
I also would not apply Styrofoam or any other hydrocarbon rigid insulation in contact with asphalt-impregnated felt paper; the petroleum distillates in the felt will attack the rigid insulation and damage it. Housewrap would be better. Or use polyiso rigid insulation.
If you do any siding removal and repairs, I would suggest that you introduce a rain screen behind the siding, using Benjamin Obdyke's Home Slicker, which also comes with integral Typar housewrap. Be sure to follow the directions to make sure that the rain screen is properly screened at the top and bottom in order not to allow insect intrusion.
I hope you find this helpful in attacking the problem at its source and finding no need to undo and repair things that should not be needing repairs until proven otherwise. Take it one at a time.
Please let me know what you find as you undertake the repairs, and if my conclusions are correct. It's always possible to miss something when not on the spot looking at the problem.by


text:
SIG published its first Corporate Responsibility Report, introducing the company's commitment to go Way Beyond Good by giving more back to society and the environment than it takes out. We asked Fiona Dowson, Senior Sustainability Advisor at Forum for the Future, to review the report and she shares her views in this guest blog:
SIG's 2016 Corporate Responsibility Report is the company's first, but it is robust and well supported with external verification. It is clear from the report that SIG is both ambitious and organised – a great combination which is enabling the company to take significant steps forward on its sustainability journey in a short time.
It is particularly good to see the strong net positive commitment and the importance placed on becoming a successful, net positive business from the very top of the business. Through its innovation programme, SIG is making headway in developing more sustainable packaging solutions and is aiming to deliver a 100% renewable pack by 2020.
Great driver
SIG has an opportunity to leap-frog many continuous improvement steps – and avoid the investment these may involve – if the company integrates its 'Way Beyond Good' ambition effectively into its innovation approach. Its ambition to supply the most sustainable food and beverage packaging on the market by 2030 will also be a great driver of innovation that seems likely to underpin the success of the business in the long term.
SIG is exploring opportunities to reduce the life-cycle impacts of its packaging. While its packs are made largely from renewable wood, the small amount of aluminium used as a barrier material has been identified as a significant source of environmental impact. In response they have created the EcoPlus pack which avoids the need for aluminium altogether – a solution which in the long-term could eliminate its use of aluminium and the associated impacts. The company is also exploring a sustainable certified supply of aluminium to mitigate value chain impacts from the use of this material across their existing product portfolio in the shorter term
"It is particularly good to see the strong net positive commitment and the importance placed on becoming a successful, net positive business from the very top of the business."
Another strong point is the commitment to significant sustainability improvements across the value chain – from sustainable sourcing of raw materials to efficient use of SIG's filling machines and end consumers' ability to recycle packs.
The commitment and progress towards sustainable raw materials sourcing is something to be proud of, for example, the industry first of sourcing all packaging board, the key raw material used to make its packs, from FSC™-certified forests. Its commitment to encourage customers to label packs with the FSC™ logo will also help to make this approach more mainstream and raise consumer expectations.
By taking this wider view across the value chain, SIG is opening up new opportunities to deliver on its commitments. Bringing a good awareness of value chain impacts into SIG's innovation will no doubt drive more sustainable product developments in future, delivering benefits that will be valued by its customers and end-consumers alike. The company could also consider opportunities to eliminate carbon emissions from its raw materials supply chain.
Rigorous science-based approach
SIG's plan to set science-based targets in 2018 for reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, including scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions, is a brilliant sign of the company's commitment to becoming a net positive business and to taking action that is appropriate to the scale of the global climate challenge we face. Targets set using this rigorous science-based approach aim to maintain temperature increases below 2 degrees. Leading businesses like SIG could consider going even further by setting targets based on the 1.5 degree warming that the Paris Agreement on Climate Change acknowledged as more desirable. Delivering such a goal is a challenging prospect for any business because it would require radical carbon cuts within the next few years but is a potential driver of innovation and business value and is well aligned to their 'Way Beyond Good' ambition.
It is commendable that SIG is being fully transparent about where its impacts are and what data is being reported. While it will still be useful to show year on year trends within the existing set of sites that are reported on, the next step is to include all sites in its reporting, including the New Zealand paper mill, and put in place clear plans to reduce emissions across the whole business. We would also like to see stronger performance in its reduction in energy use per pack in the future, particularly once the new heat and power plant, installed at the Linnich site in 2016, is fully operational.
Decoupling growth from emissions
Achieving renewable power at all production and assembly plants from 2017 is an important step towards driving the urgently needed decarbonisation of our economy.
"We would also like to see stronger performance in its reduction in energy use per pack in the future, particularly once the new heat and power plant, installed at the Linnich site in 2016, is fully operational."
It is part of SIG's path towards decoupling growth from emissions, which we agree is the right path to be on. An even bigger step would be looking to go beyond sourcing 100% renewable energy for its plants to start generating more energy that the company needs to help society transition to a radically low carbon future.
Overall, SIG demonstrates many of the qualities that we at Forum for the Future encourage businesses to adopt – qualities which can underpin successful business strategy and sustained performance. They have laid the foundations for their net positive journey and I look forward to seeing how they build on these, accelerate progress on this journey and address their most material issues with bold actions that are proportionate to the scale of the sustainability challenges we collectively face now and increasingly in the future.
What do you have in mind regarding your or our responsibility ambitions? Write us an email, leave a comment or give us a call.


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FTSE hits 10-month high as gilt yields go negative
The FTSE 100 rallied yesterday following Bank of England governor Mark Carney's speech pledging more monetary stimulus to the economy.
The FTSE 100 rallied yesterday following Bank of England governor Mark Carney's speech pledging more monetary stimulus to the economy.
The blue-chip index rose to end the day at 6524.30, a 144 point rise. The level marks the highest since August last year.
In the speech yesterday, his second since the UK's vote to Brexit, Carney signalled that the bank will cut interest rates or restart QE this summer, following the UK's decision to Brexit.
However at the same time gilt yields went negative. A gilt maturing in March 2018 traded at -0.0003 per cent.
The shift came as markets now expect interest rates to fall to 0 per cent, with negative interest rates not ruled out.
Mitul Patel, head of interest rates at Henderson, says: "The gilt market has responded strongly to Carney's speech, and as a result we now have the first negative yielding gilt in the UK.
"The market now expects interest rates to fall to close to 0 per cent, and whilst Carney has previously stated a dislike of negative interest rates, nothing can be taken off the table.
"Carney also intimated that the Bank of England will look at other tools at their disposal. This almost certainly includes quantitative easing, via the gilt markets and potentially via the corporate bond markets."
Howard Archer, chief UK and European economist at IHS Global Insight, says: "There seems little doubt that part of the Bank of England's package will be to cut interest rates from 0.50 per cent to 0.25 per cent.
"While there is a possibility that the Bank of England could eventually take interest rates down to 0 per cent, we are far from convinced that they would do this and we doubt very much the Bank of England would take interest rates into negative territory."
Archer adds that he expects the government to extend the Funding for Lending Scheme and may return to QE, with stock purchases of £375bn.


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My Top 5 Favorite Christmas Posts
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Mad Scientist Cupcakes with "Brain" Buttercream Frosting
DIY Moon and Bats Throw Pillow
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In this dynamic logic maze game, you have to get the green sliders to drop through the center exit hole in the grid without letting any of the blue sliders fall through. To make it trickier, each tilt of the grid must be a full tilt – so all circular tokens must slide completely from one side of the grid to the other. The 40 Tilt challenges are exceptionally clever, and the sliding action provides a unique hands-on play experience for all ages.
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DIY garden ideas: flower pots and chairs made recycled tires
In this article, we'll give you some great DIY garden ideas to make flower pots and chairs using old tires. These ideas are environmentally friendly because you already use old tires that are actually harmful to nature. Many people want


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Dodgeville, WI
As the largest community in Iowa County with 4,692 residents, Dodgeville is a great place to visit and to live. The City has a historic and charming downtown. Dodgeville is now famous for being home to the corporate headquarters of Lands' End. They have lots of parks and campgrounds to enjoy the great outdoors! No matter what the season, there is no better place to be than Dodgeville. Dodgeville can boast the presence of three beautiful state parks – Governor Dodge, Tower Hill and Blue Mounds State Park, as well as Blackhawk Lake, another site for camping, hiking & fishing. Local shops and restaurants provide a great place to meet, shop and eat ensure City is truly a great place to live, raise a family, work and play.


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How do I change my mouse on my ASUS model X401U from finger mouse to remote mouse? How do I change the mouse on my ASUS model X401U , from finger touch mouse to remote mouse?????
Do you mean from touch pad to a conventional mouse? If so you just obtain a USB mouse and plug it in, installing any software provided. Some folk disable the touch pad afterwards so that it doesn't start moving things if you accidentally touch it but that is optional.
Always pop back and let us know the outcome - thanks
I agree with Derek the usb mouse will work as soon as plugged in, you can use the FN button & F9 i think on your model to turn off the touch pad , it saves you knocking or moving it by accident whilst typing with your mouse
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Lab Culture is ASLM's magazine for laboratory medicine in Africa. Dedicated to bringing timely, informative, inspirational articles relevant to the unique challenges faced by African laboratories, Lab Culture seeks to be Africa's premiere resource for laboratory professionals and other stakeholders working on or with the continent. Published four times a year as a digital edition, Lab Culture includes features on critical aspects of laboratory medicine and best practices in resource-limited settings, success stories from the continent, industry news, and more.
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About Emmanuel Academy
Is to provide excellence in education, practice and quality standards in health care, and advocate for access for affirmative, cost effective health care.
Emmanuel Academy of Business, Healthcare, and Technology offers a quality standardized curriculum that meet the needs of the clients within the healthcare system. The program is registered as a Private Career College under the Private Career College Act. 2005.
Personal Support Workers are trained to give significance and meaning to the lives of their clients as they deal with the effects of aging, injury or illness.


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(List compiled by Andrew Dominguez. Data sourced from Finviz.)
Europe finds itself in the "worst of all worlds," writes Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of The Telegraph. Unlike the US, where a political battle over the debt ceiling is merely a distraction from positive economic indicators, Europe is mired in a complex economic predicament that will almost certainly result in "the first sovereign default in Western Europe since the Second World War".
Evans-Pritchard argues that the EU's latest attempt at a Greek bailout is a case of too-little-too-late, and will likely spread, in some undesirable form, to Spanish and Italian financial markets.
And it seems that one possible remedy for the situation – using the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) bailout fund as a market guarantor/lender-of-last-resort – is largely unachievable because European legislators have gone on holiday.
He believes that the ongoing debacle stems both from the ineptitude of certain EU governments and "German, Dutch and Finnish unwillingness to face up to the implications of [the Economic and Monetary Union]."
In other words, a possible collapse of the Euro common currency could probably be staved off if Germany and other well-off Eurozone nations chose to support it. Unfortunately, they seem unsympathetic to the troubles of their Southern neighbors.
Evans-Pritchard is concerned that the events in 1931 leading up to the Great Depression could be repeating themselves. However, he believes that the US, with the help the Fed's foresight, could possibly withstand a European meltdown despite its own debt troubles.
Still, he warns: "If both [Europe and the US] go down together, buy a shotgun and prepare for 1932."
Are you concerned about the health of Europe and European companies? To help you come up with your own ideal investing strategy, here is a list of European companies that have been battered in the stock market over the past month. Do you think these stocks should be avoided? Or do you think investors are undervaluing them?
Analyze These Ideas (Tools Will Open In A New Window)
1. Access a thorough description of all companies mentioned
2. Compare analyst ratings for all stocks mentioned below
3. Visualize annual returns for all stocks mentioned
List sorted by share price performance over the past month.
1. Vistaprint N.V. (VPRT): Business Services industry with a market cap of $1.15B. Share prices have fallen by 43.11% over the past month. It is an online provider of coordinated portfolios of customized marketing products and services to micro businesses worldwide. It offers a range of products and services ranging from printed business cards, brochures and post cards to apparel, invitations and announcements, holiday cards, calendars, creative design services, copywriting services, direct mail services, promotional gifts, signage, Website design and hosting services and e-mail marketing services. Its Internet-based order processing systems receive and store tens of thousands of individual orders on a daily basis and, using algorithms, organize these orders for production and delivery to its customers.
2. Alcatel-Lucent (ALU): Communication Equipment industry with a market cap of $9.4B. Share prices have fallen by 29.69% over the past month. It is engaged in mobile, fixed, Internet Protocol (IP) and Optics technologies, applications and services. It is a partner of service providers, enterprises, industries and governments worldwide. It operates in three business segments: networks, applications, and services.
3. ASM International NV (ASMI): Semiconductor Equipment & Materials industry with a market cap of $1.54B. Share prices have fallen by 26.62% over the past month. It designs, manufactures and sells equipment and services to its customers for the production of semiconductor devices, or integrated circuits. It is engaged in the wafer processing and assembly and packaging market segments. The wafer processing production systems perform processes on round slices of silicon, called wafers, which are 200 millimeters or 300 millimeters in diameter. Assembly and packaging production systems then assemble and connect one or more known good dies in a single package, to form a semiconductor device that will perform calculations, store data and interface with its environment.
4. NXP Semiconductors NV (NXPI): Broad Line Semiconductor industry with a market cap of $4.96B. Share prices have fallen by 21.85% over the past month. It provides High-Performance Mixed-Signal and Standard Products solutions. NXP's product solutions are used in a wide range of automotive, identification, wireless infrastructure, lighting, industrial, mobile, consumer and computing applications. It is engaged with original equipment manufacturers worldwide and over 58% of its sales are derived from Asia Pacific (excluding Japan).
5. Allied Irish Banks plc (AIB): Foreign Money Center Banks industry with a market cap of $2.11B. Share prices have fallen by 21.82% over the past month. It conducts retail and commercial banking business in Ireland. It also provides corporate lending and capital markets activities from its head office at Bankcentre and from Dublin's International Financial Services Centre. It also has overseas branches in the United States, Germany, France and Australia, among other locations.
6. Aixtron SE (AIXG): Diversified Machinery industry with a market cap of $2.73B. Share prices have fallen by 21.17% over the past month. It is a provider of deposition equipment to the semiconductor and compound-semiconductor industry. Its technology solutions are used by a diverse range of customers worldwide to build advanced components for electronic and opto-electronic applications based on compound, silicon, or organic semiconductor materials. Such components are used in fiber optic communication systems, wireless and mobile telephony applications, optical and electronic storage devices, computing, signaling and lighting, displays, as well as a range of other technologies.
7. Danaos Corporation (DAC): Shipping industry with a market cap of $482.87M. Share prices have fallen by 20.89% over the past month. It is an international owner of containerships. It is engaged in acquisition and operation of vessels. As of May 31, 2010, the Company had a fleet of 45 containerships aggregating 193,629 twenty foot equivalent units (TEUs). As of May 31, 2010, these customers included China Shipping, CMA-CGM, Hanjin, Hyundai, Maersk, MISC, United Arab Shipping Company (UASC), Wan Hai, The Containership Company (TCC), Yang Ming and ZIM Israel Integrated Shipping Services.
8. STMicroelectronics NV (STM): Broad Line Semiconductor industry with a market cap of $7.2B. Share prices have fallen by 18.87% over the past month. It designs, develops, manufactures and markets a range of semiconductor products used in a variety of microelectronic applications, including automotive products, computer peripherals, telecommunications systems, consumer products, industrial automation and control systems. Its products include discretes, microcontrollers, Smartcard products, standard commodity components, micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) and advanced analog products, application-specific standard products (ASICs) and application-specific standard products (ASSPs) for analog, digital, and mixed-signal applications.
9. Veolia Environnement S.A. (VE): Waste Management industry with a market cap of $11.63B. Share prices have fallen by 18.61% over the past month. It is a provider of environmental management services, which include water and wastewater services, environmental services, energy services (excluding the production, trading and sale of electricity, other than production through co-generation) and transportation services. Its clients include a range of public authorities, industrial and commercial services customers, and individuals worldwide. It provides drinking water to more than 80.4 million people and treats wastewater for 58.5 million people in the world, processes nearly 68 million tons of waste.
10. Navios Maritime Holdings Inc. (NM): Shipping industry with a market cap of $437.72M. Share prices have fallen by 15.98% over the past month. It is a global, vertically integrated seaborne shipping and logistics company focused on the transport and transshipment of dry bulk commodities, including iron ore, coal and grain. It has two business segments: Vessel Operations and Logistics Business.
Interactive Chart: Press Play to see how analyst ratings have changed for the stocks mentioned above. Analyst ratings sourced from Zacks Investment Research.


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i asked my friends on facebook to recommend wedding musicians, bands and dj's in maine. here are their recommendations. follow this link for an awesome list of the best maine wedding bands.
dj jon the BEST dj in all of maine (and maybe everywhere else, too)!
kat logan & jim loney (i can't find another website for them - see video above)
denny breau and paul mellyn (i think they play together sometimes)
the mallett brothers not sure they do weddings but their alt-country, foot-stomping rock is all that!
dan giroux entertainment services
tattoo (not sure they would come to maine but they're really good)
big chief and the continentals
cozmik zombies awesome rockabilly rock
peter miles excellent guitarist and singer
opus trio great for ceremony music
maine bella musica string ensemble
Marcel Gagne – Steppin' Out DJ Services – (207) 353-5414 (207) firstname.lastname@example.com is who we used for our wedding and he was great to work with!
maine music there are two volumes of music from maine musicians, you might find one you like
downeast dance network scroll down to see the listings
who have you hired for your wedding music? i'd love to add some names to this list. let me know if you would recommend your musicians or dj.


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I've never really cared all that much for books.
For the last 30 years or so, since I moved out of my childhood home in Brooklyn, I've rarely kept more than three dozen books in my apartments. As soon as I find myself with more than that, I start selling them to used bookstores or giving them away to enemies. Since 1979, I've moved about 25 times, often from one side of the country to another, and it became just too much of a pain to schlep tons of books every couple of years. It's easier to be peripatetic when you travel light.
So I don't buy many books: maybe three or four a year at most. The only hardcover books I've purchased since 1990 were required law school texts. Most of the time, when I tell authors whom I know that I'm going to "get" their latest volume, what I really mean (and here I am outing myself) is that I'm going to borrow the book from the public library.
Don't get me wrong: as a kid, I was crazy about reading from the first time my mom read me Little Golden Books like The Poky Little Puppy and The Tawny Scrawny Lion. As a teenager, I'd spend a good chunk of my money on Bantam or Signet paperbacks for 25 or 50 or 75 cents. I loved literature and all kinds of nonfiction and always wanted to publish my own work.
Back then, books were the only delivery devices available for the long works of writing I liked to read. To me, their importance—sentimental and otherwise—lay in the content, not the package.
Now approaching senility, I've come to perceive books as sentimental artifacts of a pre-digital age whose value is mostly related to literary prestige. I expect devices like the Kindle and others to remove what is for me the last major advantage of books: their portability.
Part of my view stems from the fact that although Books in Print lists me as the author of a dozen titles, I've never written a single book in my life.
No, I'm not confessing to wholesale plagiarism. (I'll take the fifth on retail penny-ante plagiarism.) Or to having a ghost writer. (The only ghosts I'm acquainted with are the ones I watch on my cable-less 13-inch TV screen.) All of my books of short fiction are short story collections compiled from stories I'd previously published in literary magazines ("little magazines," as we called them before the Punic Wars), anthologies, and later, webzines.
So I'm just an accidental author.
Thirty years ago, I signed a contract for my first book with a small New York trade house with offices on Union Square without having tried to get it published. Instead, after seeing one of my stories in a college litmag, the president of the company contacted me to ask if I had a manuscript to submit.
I wrote back saying I assumed he was looking for a novel, but unlike most humans capable of typing, I had not written one. I didn't want to write one, either. (I never have tried.) I did have over a hundred stories in places like Nausea Review and Street Bagel but was pretty sure he wasn't interested in that. And they were all mixed up, one story written a week for years, with no thought of any unity.
Undaunted by what he called my "diffident" reply—I had to explain to my parents, with whom I lived, what diffident meant after my mother remarked he couldn't be much of a publisher if he didn't know how to spell the word different—the publisher told me to send all my stories in print and his editor would go through them. I sent Xeroxed copies of the pages from the magazines and anthologies in their varied typefaces and formats, along with manuscript pages of the 30 or so stories that had been accepted but not yet published in periodicals. Somehow the editor—the 23-year-old son of the publisher (later a screenwriter, film director, and novelist)—helped me turn that mess into a collection titled With Hitler in New York.
My next three hardcover books were published the same way. Small press publishers or editors queried me, I sent a bunch of published stories, never a manuscript, and they made collections out of them.
By 2000 the first three books, all published before 1984, were out of print or in a limbo state, not officially OOP but not really available. Around this time I started hearing about POD—print-on-demand—books.
Now I may not be much of a book buyer, but I'm cognizant that my luck in getting books published got me a lot of cred that I couldn't have managed otherwise. I got reviewed in the trades, lots of big-city and small-town newspapers, literary magazines, and even Rolling Stone (which produced a quote on my Hitler that all my publishers since have flogged to near-death). My hardcovers were in libraries all over the country. I got invited to book-and-author luncheons; became a member of the Authors Guild and PEN (back in the day when you had to have penned "at least two books of literary merit"); became the subject of entries in Contemporary Authors, Contemporary Literary Criticism, and the Dictionary of Literary Biography.
The Silicon Valley Diet, my fifth full-length collection of stories, a trade paperback original published in 2000 by a Los Angeles small press, was the first one I compiled by myself—although the stories hadn't been written as a part of any book and some were published decades before others.
Hypocritically, I did enjoy being an author even if I rarely contributed to the royalties of others by buying their books. (In my defense, I advised everyone I knew not to buy my own last hardcover book because the 150 pages in it weren't worth the $24.95 price; spendthrift strangers fooled by a nice notice in The New York Times Book Review were on their own.)
Learning about POD companies like iUniverse, AuthorHouse, and Xlibris, I assumed they were essentially high-tech vanity presses that would publish anyone who plunked down what seemed like exorbitant fees. The only difference: the digital technology avoided the expense of large print runs since new copies of a book were printed one or two or ten at a time when an order for them came in. I am as vain as the next guy, especially if he makes his living in the theater, but I had no interest in being a vanity press author.
But then the Authors Guild announced its Backinprint.com program, in association with iUniverse, to bring back members' out-of-print books in cheap paperback editions. In my local Barnes & Noble in Florida, I found copies of Backinprint.com books by William F. Buckley (Blackford Oates stories), Mary McCarthy (criticism) and Thornton Wilder (Theophilus North, a novel I loved when it was first published and which I'd last read in a 1974 grad school course on Modern American Fiction).
I was impressed enough to get my first book from 1979 published with Backinprint.com/iUniverse. There was no upfront expense or much work involved for me except getting verification of my book's OOP status (this involved tracking down representatives of my publishers or their successor companies or presses) and sending two copies of each book to be destroyed by iUniverse as they photographed/copied them for the new versions. The only charges were for the copies I myself ordered with my author's discount.
Over the next few years, I got the other three hardcover collections—Lincoln's Doctor's Dog, I Brake for Delmore Schwartz, and I Survived Caracas Traffic—out in Backinprint.com editions. Some people might find the books unattractive. As Dan Wickett wrote in a 2005 Conversational Reading post for which I was interviewed:
While I do not have any of the original versions of the three books by Richard Grayson that I have copies of the backinprint.com versions of, I am sure the individual pages look better in the originals.
The reason iUniverse needs two copies of the original OOP books is so they can copy them. That is exactly what the pages of the stories remind me of in the POD versions—photocopies. As one who used to make copies of stories and, in some cases, entire books, back in my college days, I am sadly very familiar with the appearance of such. The type jumps from the pages with that look of ink and not type. While I don't have copies of any of Grayson's hardcovers, I do have a paperback copy of his story collection, The Silicon Valley Diet, published by Red Hen Press. Page by page, this book has much more of a book appearance than the three Backinprint.com books. The type print looks like type and not ink.
Beyond that appearance issue, the binding appears secure, flopping the book down at the page one stops at doesn't seem to do any damage to the spine, but I must admit, I'm a bit overly careful with my books while I read them. The covers are of the type that once you begin reading the book, or set it down in that tent fashion one or two times, the covers will flare out at the edges, not my favorite to be sure, but the Backinprint.com books aren't the only paperbacks that do this.
So, if copies can still be found, sometimes cheaper than the Authors Guild versions, why would an author go through the regaining permissions, and everything else that goes with the Backinprint.com process? For Richard Grayson it was simple. "I could have paid more to get something other than their non-uniform cover and I could have paid to have an author photo, but basically I was just trying to keep the work in print to have a record that the books existed."
My other goal, just as important, was getting the books in digital format. (All were originally composed on the typewriter; only the last book of the four, published in 1996, had a manuscript in a word processing file done after the fact.) Originally, the books were to be made available as PDF files for anyone to download from the iUniverse/Backinprint.com online bookstore. I also submitted them to Google Book Search with the idea that anyone would be able to access the entire book, but Google too later switched to limited page views—to my dismay. The annual low-two-digits royalty checks I got from iUniverse for the few copies sold were not as important to me as making my work available to more readers.
By this time, I much preferred seeing my stories online rather than in print. I had basically stopped submitting to print periodicals, leaving those to younger writers who needed the greater prestige (ha!) for their "careers." At this point, never having made more than a pittance from my stories, I viewed myself as a hobbyist who wrote to escape the pressures of a demanding career in another field.
Webzines had brought me a much larger audience; often people who'd never read a literary magazine would write me after discovering my stories from a Google search for terms like "Biscayne Boulevard," "Vietnam moratorium," or "fuckbuddies." Submitting to webzines was easier and more pleasurable, as the response time and time to publication was much faster, sometimes as soon as days; the last story I had in a dead-trees quarterly took over two years from acceptance to print.
And, in what might seem paradoxical, the online works seemed more "permanent" than those trapped within the pages of an obscure print periodical. Try to find a 1970s copy of Street Bagel, Texas Quarterly, or Transatlantic Review with one of my stories. I've totally lost several of my old stories because I can't find copies of the magazines they appeared in.
Nevertheless, when I had a big batch of stories out in webzines during a bizarre burst of late-middle-age mania, I tried to get a book of them published—partly as a souvenir, partly because as a child of the 1950s, I'm still reflexively in thrall to the siren of book publication. Over time, I had a bunch of new stories mostly about my native Brooklyn, which in my decades-long absence had suddenly gone from being considered a bathetic backwater to a cool place for writers and artists. In 2005, five of my online stories were selected as Notable Stories of the year at the StorySouth Million Writers Award contest, and one of them was a finalist.
So that year I began querying small presses (I knew enough not to bother literary agents or commercial publishers) about my "collection." Over a couple of years, I contacted most of America's established presses, many hot newer ones, and some totally obscure ones whose editors didn't know how to use apostrophes. Nobody was interested.
Having worked for the Fiction Collective (now FC2) for years after it started in 1974, I had no compunctions about subsidizing my own book publication. Indeed, my friend Rochelle Ratner—the widely published poet, novelist, and longtime American Book Review editor whose decades-long career and tragic death a couple of months ago were utterly ignored by litbloggers—used to say that the dirty little secret of American small presses was author subsidy.
I myself had turned over a $5,000 fellowship from the Florida Arts Council to the press that published my 2000 paperback collection, which managed to get good reviews in Publishers Weekly and elsewhere. I'd used other state grants to finance three of my four fiction chapbooks (the other was paid for by a grant from the NEA to the publisher).
But at this point I was semi-retired and didn't want to spend thousands of dollars to publish my book. Just then Lulu came into my life.
Lulu is not a rich benefactress but a North Carolina-based technology company whose CEO is Red Hat co-founder Bob Young. As Peter Wayner wrote in a 2006 New York Times article, "Technology Rewrites the Book":
Lulu.com is a combination printer and order-fulfillment house that prints both color and black-and-white books, takes orders for them and places them with bookstores like Amazon.com.
Lulu works from a PDF file, an approach that forces users to rely on basic word processors or professional design packages. If this is too complex, Lulu offers a marketplace where book designers offer their services. Lulu does offer a special cover design package that will create a book's cover from an image and handle the specialized calculations that compute the size of the spine from the number of pages and the weight of the paper.
A 6-by-9-inch softcover book with 150 black-and-white pages from Lulu would cost $7.53 per single copy.
A Wikipedia entry on the company summarizes the debate whether Lulu is a vanity press or represents a different publishing model:
While some commentators have described Lulu as a variation on traditional vanity press publication, or perhaps simply as a more respectable version, others have described it as sitting somewhere between a vanity press and a traditional publishing company. For example, David Rani notes that, unlike vanity press publishers, Lulu doesn't charge authors an upfront fee, but also notes that they don't offer editing or sales promotion—services that mass market publishers, such as Random House, offer their authors. Thus he determines that they come somewhere between the two. Linda Stilborne, however, states that Lulu is "not exactly" a variation of a vanity press, reporting that authors will find Lulu "affordable" and "books that are not worth reading still won't sell." In "Click Lit—There Are No More Excuses for Unpublished Authors," The Times (UK) denies that Lulu is vanity press, stating that it is "a collision of the web, new printing technology and a universal yearning to vent and dazzle." On the other side of the debate, many (including Larry Finlay, managing director of Transworld Publishing) point to the lack of "editorial arbitration" and thus define Lulu as vanity press. Lulu themselves go so far as to deny that they are a publisher at all, describing themselves as a "technology company."
My first experiment with Lulu took place in the fall of 2005. I decided to try to make a print volume out of "Diary of a Congressional Candidate in Florida's Fourth Congressional District," my 2004 recurring feature on the McSweeney's website. The writing I'd put in the "book" had already gotten past a gatekeeper, McSweeney's online editor John Warner, who usually made some changes to make my work more intelligible. Although it was already available in full online, I thought a book version might make a nice souvenir, and, more importantly, it was something I could try fairly easily.
The Lulu website's content creator took me through all the steps of publication, from choosing a book format (paperback, 6-by-9-inch, perfectbound) and uploading my manuscript, consisting of three Word documents (the text from McSweeney's; the front matter—title page, half-title, publication data page, acknowledgements, dedication, etc., along with a prologue I'd taken from another online article on my teenage involvement in politics; and the back matter—my bio note and blank pages). Lulu turned it into a PDF file and we selected a pre-existing cover design from their free library. I also created front and back covers with their template, selecting from their cover fonts (somewhat limited in both size and typeface; totally limited as to cover placement for both title and author's name) and priced both the print and downloaded editions.
Within 10 days of ordering the first print "version," I got a copy in the mail.
I can remember, in May 1979, seeing my first book for the first time. My editor called me to say that copies had come in, and I drove from my family's house in the outer reaches of Brooklyn to the publisher's office in Manhattan. My immediate reaction upon seeing a copy: "It looks just like a real book!"
"We've cleverly disguised it," my editor assured me.
With my Lulu book, it did sort of look like a real book, only cheesier. Part of that was that I knew less about book design than your average Jack Russell terrier, and part of it was the same POD flaws evident in the printing of my iUniverse/Backinprint.com books noted by Dan Wickett.
I went through various versions, correcting typos, tinkering with the format so that I avoided problems. Eventually, satisfied it wouldn't get much better, I "published" it.
At present, Lulu offers three different levels of distribution services, called Lulu Marketplace, Published By You, and Published By Lulu (formerly known as Global Distribution). I did my congressional diary with the last so that it had an ISBN number, unlike the Lulu Marketplace books. Though both were only available at the company's online bookstore, for me an ISBN meant the book was "really" published.
Last year, after I created two more Lulu short story collections I decided to spring for the more expensive Published By You option for the Diary book. This let me get my own ISBN prefix, a notable difference. Although in the previous Lulu books I'd listed each as published by Dumbo Books, with a street address in Brooklyn, these books used Lulu's ISBN prefix, making it the publisher of record.
To publish the books with my press's own ISBN, I needed to raise the price to get distribution by Amazon and other online bookstores, as well as any brick-and-mortar bookstores foolish enough to order copies. Unlike most publishers, Lulu's distribution service does not accept returns of unsold books from bookstores. In addition, the wholesale discount is much smaller than most bookstores are accustomed to—50 percent is normal for most books, but Lulu gives as little as 5 percent at typical quantities of less than a hundred.
One of my two 2006 POD books, Highly Irregular Stories, was a compilation of my four fiction chapbooks published between 1978 and 1989, one of which the New York Times Book Review called "a cross between Hemingway and Dick and Jane." The other, And to Think that He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street, was a collection of newer, post-2000 online stories, mostly about Brooklyn.
As far as I know, the only bookstore that ordered some of my Lulu books was Powell's Books, which took one of my 2006 short story collections after I emailed them the review the book got from Kirkus Discoveries.
Oh yes, Kirkus Discoveries. Some will say that's a vanity review service, and I'd say they're right. For a fee (recently raised from $350 to $400), Kirkus Discoveries will assign a POD (or small press or OOP) book to the same reviewers it uses for the "legit" (and separate) Kirkus Reviews and publish the review on their website—unless the author or publisher, appalled by a horrible notice, decides to kill the review before it appears online.
Coming in to an unexpected windfall, I decided to blow it on trying Kirkus Discoveries. What mollified me—somewhat—was that they did publish some bad reviews and others that were quite mixed or damned with faint praise.
Back in the late 1970s and 1980s, I got devastatingly snarky notices from Kirkus Reviews. The first one, the first bad review of Hitler I'd come across, which I discovered on my own in the public library after my publishers tried to hide it from me, put me to bed for the rest of that Sunday—until around dinnertime when I got up and called my editor to tell him to send me all reviews, good or bad, saying "I eat Kirkus Reviews for breakfast."
He complied by promptly mailing a review from the Minneapolis Tribune in which the writer claimed that my "cornucopia of crap" was the worst book he'd read in his entire life. Eventually, in the 1990s, I got a nice review from Kirkus.
The Kirkus Discoveries reviews of my Dumbo Press/Lulu books, easily emailed from their website and sometimes mistaken even by newspaper book editors for Kirkus Reviews notices, had great quotes that really helped get other reviews. I can't know if the payment influenced them, but on the other hand, everything in each of the POD books I've published had previously been accepted by an editor. And to me, the Discoveries reviews are at least as valid as the rave reviews that bloggers give their friends' books.
My POD books got me reading gigs, a good review in at least one newspaper (The Philadelphia Inquirer, thanks to then-book editor Frank Wilson), nice reviews in websites, like the Hipster Book Club and Florida Book Review, reviews by some bloggers, and the listing of each of the two books on a "2006 best books list" on two websites (one selected by a person unknown to me).
Did the books sell many copies? Nah.
The book based on the McSweeney's feature sold the best, maybe 35 copies, probably because I really tried to get my friends to buy it, because the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call wrote an article about it, and because people mentioned in my real-life chronicle wanted copies of a book with their name in it.
The short story collections have sold fewer than 15 copies each. They've each also sold a few "copies" of the downloads of the PDF file available at a nominal price. I've gotten a couple of very small royalty checks from Lulu.
But then, I've never done this for the money. I would just like people to be able to read my stories if they want.
I intend eventually to do for the two 2006 story collections what I did for my candidate's diary from McSweeney's,: get Dumbo Books ISBNs for them so they can be sold in places other than Lulu's website. I'll probably change some things. Each has already gone through numerous versions, and the books have even had different front and back covers. What became really interesting to me during the process in which I created version after the version of the book—correcting typos, making editorial changes, taking out stories and putting others in, changing the order of the stories—was that POD books are infinitely malleable. What if there are 200 slightly different versions of a book? (Don't tell the ISBN people or they'll freak out!)
I'm currently in the process of publishing (with a Dumbo Books ISBN) a new collection of stories, a mixed bag published over three decades in litmags such as California Quarterly and Bellingham Review and websites such as 3:AM Magazine and Pindeldyboz, which I've titled Who Will Kiss the Pig?: Sex Stories for Teens. I've already gotten Gawker to write something appropriately snarky about the book.
Just last Friday, after my third round of proofreading and tinkering with the design (I've learned a lot and enjoyed the DIY process)—I ordered a new "version." It was manufactured and shipped in four days and should be here in another couple of days. Just as Lulu's manufacturing and delivery process has become appreciably speedier over three years, technology has improved POD books' appearance to where their pages and binding and design are pretty much indistinguishable from books printed the old-fashioned way. Assuming I find no problems or errors with the new edition, I'll go to Lulu's website and approve it for final publication and distribution.
Back in the 1970s, the author and editor Judith Appelbaum used to say that some books people think are published are actually "privished"—that is, so few people got to read them or know about them that they are effectively limited to a private audience. Perhaps you think my books are being privished. I call them published.
Eventually, as print-on-demand technology improves in quality and costs shrink, trade publishers will probably rely on POD for all their books, just as some academic publishers have begun to do. Trade publishers waste a lot of money (and trees) by publishing copies of books, even bestsellers in fourth or fifth editions, that never get sold; no matter how many print runs, publishers always seem to have books left over. After my first book was remaindered I bought 400 copies of my first book for a nickel a copy, then discovered the cost of storing them was so expensive that I ended up throwing dozens of copies into a Miami dumpster.
Now I order one or two copies of my book at a time and don't have to worry about them cluttering up my apartment. Who needs unnecessary books? And what books are really necessary? Not mine, I'll admit.
Would I recommend Lulu to a young, ambitious literary writer who can't get her book manuscript accepted by a trade publisher or small press? For a novelist or a memoirist, definitely not. For a poet, why not? For a short story writer, it depends. In all cases, I'd probably say that they have the time to wait; it's unclear to me whether publication by POD companies like Lulu can hurt those writers who will actually expect to go on to have "careers."
That said, nearly all POD books are absolutely dreadful, published—or privished—by people who can't write much better than the students in remedial writing classes I've taught over the years. Most serious literary writers don't want to be associated with that kind of crap.
On the other hand, for an older writer like myself who's been through trade and small press publication and essentially has nowhere else to go if he wants a book published—also, recall that a major newspaper called my first book crap anyway—POD books from Lulu and similar companies seem like a good deal.
And some younger writers—like all human beings save (at this writing) Hillary Clinton—will eventually deal with repeated discouragement by lowering their career goals. After years of rejection, they too may join those of us who have succumbed to the inevitable and have become, to our horror and amazement, POD people.
Richard Grayson is the author of Highly Irregular Stories, With Hitler in New York, The Silicon Valley Diet, and other books. A retired teacher and lawyer, he divides his time between Brooklyn and Phoenix.
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I do love a wedding at Wiston House in Sussex and Rebecca and William had just the most gorgeous summer's day wedding at this stunning estate in West Sussex. I love being booked as a Wiston House West Sussex Wedding Photographer because it's an exceptionally friendly and well run venue that really goes the extra mile for its couples! It was also lovely to have the wedding ceremony at St. Mary's in Thakeham, a beautiful rural church in the Sussex weald. And the vicar there was just a class act, a real witty man who had a wonderful message in between having the church congregation in stitches.
The other great thing about being a Wiston House West Sussex Wedding Photographer is the sheer grandeur of the surroundings with its epic Great Hall and the stunning grounds of which I have still not fully explored even though I have covered a number of weddings at Wiston House now! And the light that day was just perfect for my style of fine art wedding photography.
What I really liked about Rebecca and William's day was how relaxed everything was, right from the bridal preparations right through to the swinging party at the end of the day, it was truly a joy to be at their wedding. With a wedding party full of character, humour, but also a great deal of heart, it meant there were no shortage of real genuine moments to capture right through the day. And you have to see the photos from the speeches, there were some really classic moments there.
If you are looking for a Wiston House West Sussex Wedding Photographer do get in touch, I'd love to hear about your plans, but in the meantime, here are some of my favourite photos from Rebecca and William's wedding.
The Grand Hall at Wiston House really is a sight to behold. I have seen this hall laid out a few different ways but each way has a real wow factor with its amazing frescos and the view looking down from the Minstrel's gallery really have a wonderful view of how fresh and gorgeous Rebecca and William's decor choices were.


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Welcome to Surf Camp Search, the free online search engine with hundreds of free listings of surf camps for kids. If you've ever wanted to learn to surf or looking for a summer camp that offers surfing, you're in the right place. Have a great time this summer at surf camp!
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
SummerCamps.com's Summer Surf Camp Compilation
There's lots of summer camp-specific search engines online. SummerCamps.com is one you might want to visit if you haven't seen it before. Here's their surf camp page for your reference.
Posted by Los Angeles Summer Camps at 1:18 PM
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