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JAMES WHARRAM - World famous catamaran designer.
You'd be in a minority if you've heard the name James Wharram in Cornwall, you would of course know him if you live in the village of Deveron, the riverside home home to James Wharram Designs. His fame however, is truly international and to many hardened sailors he's a living legend.
n the mid 50's, based on his research into ancient Polynesian boat design, James Wharram built the
first off-shore Catamaran in Britain and sailed it out into the Atlantic from Falmouth. While the world's yachting
community were busy dismissing such a design as a worthy sea-going vessel, James was landing
his 23'6" 'Double Hulled, hand crafted Canoe' in the West Indies. There he built a second 40' Polynesian style
Catamaran and sailed it back to the UK accompanied by two young German girls, becoming the first to
sail a catamaran across the North Atlantic
These amazing Trans-Atlantic crossings and the follow up
best seller "Two Girls, Two Catamarans" has etched the name 'James Wharram' into the annals of
yachting history.
James Wharram Designs range from simple economical out-riggers that the hobbyist can construct in a week, to the 63' Wharram Flagship, the impressive 'Spirit of Gaia'. (below).
The Gaia, is a Pahi 63 model; most of James' designs have hard to pronounce names and are based around the ancient polynesian sailing rafts of the south Pacific. Whole communities would spend months at sea on such crafts, where, they not so much traveled the oceans as lived 'at one with it'. The great distances between the Islands of the South Pacific that defined there cultural domain made sea life as much a part of their everyday reality as their time spent on dry land; groups of families, pets, livestock, musicians, actors and often chiefs - small self-contained drifting communities spread across a vast region of the South Pacific: they were true sea-people.
One of James' earlier periodicals was in fact called 'Sea People' a term that is not fully understood until you live the experience. A core principle behind the Wharram approach to catamaran design is his concept of flexi-space - minimal baggage, maximum utility. The psychological aspects of long term sea habitation and the sociological complexities of long term sea residency as part of a group is a subject close to James' heart. To sail with him is a unique experience, to live aboard with him is when you really meet his true spirit, for although he's as down to earth as you'd expect from a Taurean raised in the North of England, a man who has worked with wood for nigh on all his life, his true spirit is never more alive than when he's living 'within' the mysteries and romance of the ocean. His common entourage of 'naturalist' female companions encapsulates the true ethos of the Polynesian sea people's ancient and simple life style. A lifestyle who's whole dependence and security is based on understanding 'from the soul' what makes an ocean crossing vessel as 'at one' with the ocean as much as its inhabitants are. Two inseparable qualities of true Sea People.
The Tama Moana - Child of the Sea.
James and his partner Hanneke Boon visited the remote Island of Tikopia a few years ago. The people of Tikopia live a self-contained lifestyle on their tiny island a hundred miles from their nearest neighbour. While they still have traditional fishing canoes, ocean crossing vessels were no longer around. They have to rely on a three monthly deliveries from a container ship for external supplies. Their survival for thousands of years has relied on a micro- maintenance system where every plant and living species on the island plays a unique 'role' in supporting the community. At one point in their recent history all the pigs on the island were killed after a meeting between the four chiefs decided it was more sustainable to source protein from fish and preserve vegetation on the island.
Hanneke Boon, on returning from Tikopia, and while recovering from an operation, had a vision to design an ethnic craft based on a museum piece she found in New Zealand, the last remaining Tikopian canoe capable of ocean crossings to the sister Island Anuta 90 or so miles away. And so the Tama Moana was born.
The Tikopia Project was launched in 2006 to raise funds to build the 'Child of the Sea' for the Tikopians, it has been a successful project so far with plans on target for 'the Child' to return to its Polynesian parent homeland some time next year.
The Wharram website


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Happiest Mom-to-Be! Seattle Studio Maternity Session!
THIS is why I do what I do! I couldn't wait to come into the studio to this lively and gorgeous soul. It's been 11 years now of photographing mamas and dads-to-be in the studio and it is always the most joyous interesting time. AND YES.. that is a backbend… and YES this is pretty much her due date. What a powerhouse of love Lael is and Jason is a perfect match! I am thrilled to be photographing their wedding come July. <3 <3 <3
If you are looking for a maternity session this spring… don't forget about my amazing spring special! I have a few more spaces left! I am celebrating over 7 years of being a full time in my studio, photographing individuals, infants, children, and families.

subset: commoncrawl


text: Request a replacement bin All bins can be replaced if they have gone missing or have been damaged. If you are the 1st occupier of a new built house you can also request a full set of bins. Larger green bin information can be found on our FAQ page. You can buy an additional brown bin (£25 per year) by using our request an additional brown bin form. Request a replacement bin Household recycling & waste Absorbent Hygiene Products collection serviceBins for new build propertiesBulky household waste collectionsClinical household wasteCompost binsContamination in binsFind your bin collection datesHelp with your binsHigh winds and adverse weatherMissed binsRecycling centresRecycling pointsReduce, repair and reuseRequest an additional brown binRequest replacement binsWhat goes in my bins? ▼ Show related pages


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Design P8.928mm Outdoor Rental Dance Floor
1.Put the Dance floor hard Mask to LED cabinet, and put led cabinets into ground, make the fast connections by side locks fast, screen can be working as Dance Floor. Load Weight 330kg/Cabinet.
2. P8.928mm Indoor&Outdoor Rental Dance floor with die casting Rental cabinet.
3. More application, Dance floors ,rental led display for TV show,background, Stage etc.
Add: 7th JunXing Industrial Road,LingWu Industrial Park,HuanGuan Road,Guanlan Town,Baoan District, Shenzhen, China.
Email: email@example.com
Mr. Michael Chang
Tel: +86 755 6660 5668
Fax: +86 755 6167 3308
What's APP-1: 0086-13715003940
What's APP-2: 0086-17097320420
Send us drawings or sample for inquiry. Contact now!
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This article is a special report published in Waste + Water Management Australia – August 2013.
Premier Waste, a young, go-ahead Melbourne waste collection company, started in 2007 and now operating out of Braeside and Broadmeadows to cover anywhere in Melbourne with a fleet of more than 16 front-lift and rear-load vehicles, have recently proven the reliability, effectiveness and productivity of using iPads for paperless run-sheets.
Premier Waste plugged into the new cloud route scheduling and mobile solutions from Wastedge.com in July 2012 and rapidly rolled out iPads in rugged protection cases to all drivers. The integrated smart mobile apps from Wastedge now give mobile field staff realtime communications for job-list updates or late additions, while at the same time showing dispatchers where drivers have been and where they are up to on a route.


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Bad news is that a power cable fell out of the back of Livinghistory.ie's server, so we were down for a few hours. Ooops, sorry about that.
But, here is some good news; coolest thing I've seen in a while;
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/ ... e-see.html
All 6700 buildings that we know of from Ancient Rome, in Google Earth. Wow. If only we had the data for Irish monuments, we could add it in a similar way.


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From your luxury hotel in Nara, you'll be perfectly placed to discover the first capital city of Japan and its near endless choice of treasures. There are eight UNESCO World Heritage Sites here – each one a crown jewel in the country's extraordinary legacy.
Japan's 8th-century capital boasts a wealth of World Heritage sites.
Things to do
At the heart of Nara's many attractions is the Daibutsu, or Great Buddha. Housed in a soaring temple, the Buddha looks down over a peaceful park, filled with greenery and tame deer – a perfect escape for a relaxing walk. The finest garden in Nara can be found at Isui-en.
History is all around in Nara, where a luxury boutique hotel becomes an exclusive base for exploring 1,300 years of Japanese culture. Nara was the capital of the country between 710 and 784 and these years are now known as the Nara period. The city's temples are a stunning legacy of this era, and hint at Nara's ancient power and prestige.
Naturally you can indulge in fine dining at your hotel and in numerous exclusive restaurants around the ancient city. But take time to explore the atmospheric little cafés and thatched teahouses.
Over 1,000 deer roam Nara Deer Park's 1,250 acres of verdant landscape. They're tame enough to eat from your hand.
Top tip from SLH
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Clinical Trials
Phase 1 trials
They are usually small trials, recruiting only a few patients. The trial may be open to people with related cancers. If laboratory testing shows that a new treatment might help treat cancer, phase 1 trials are done to principally find out the safe dose range, what the side effects are, how the body copes with the drug and hopefully if the treatment reduces the cancer. Patients are recruited slowly onto phase 1 trials. So although they don't recruit many patients, they can take a long time to complete. In a phase 1 trial, you may have lots of blood tests, as the researchers look at how the drug is affecting you and change doses. They also look at how your body copes with, and gets rid of the drug. They record any side effects. People taking part in phase 1 trials may have advanced cancer and have usually had all the treatment available to them. They may benefit from the new treatment in the trial, but many won't.
Phase 2
Not all treatments tested in a phase 1 trial make it to a phase 2 trial. These trials may be for people who all have the same type of cancer, or who have several different types of cancer. Phase 2 trials aim to find out If the new treatment works well enough to test in a larger phase 3 trial and investigates which types of cancer the treatment works for, more about side effects and how to manage them also about the best dose to use. Although these treatments have been tested in phase 1 trials, you may still have side effects that the doctors don't know about. Phase 2 trials are often larger than phase 1. There may be up to 100 or so people taking part. Sometimes in a phase 2 trial, a new treatment is compared with another treatment already in use, or with a dummy drug (placebo). If the results of phase 2 trials show that a new treatment may be as good as existing treatment, or better, it then moves into phase 3. Some phase 2 trials are randomised. This means the researchers put the people taking part into treatment groups (arms) at random.
Phase 3
Phase 3 trials may compare a completely new treatment with the standard treatment, different doses, or ways of giving a standard treatment. Phase 3 trials usually involve many more patients than phase 1 or 2. This is because differences in success rates may be small. So, the trial needs many patients to be able to show the difference. Sometimes phase 3 trials involve thousands of patients in many different hospitals and different countries. Most phase 3 trials are randomised. This means the researchers put the people taking part into treatment groups ('arms' of the trial ) at random and each group gets a different treatment to enable comparison. In some cases, where your WM progresses whilst on a trial you may be switched to another arm. It is becoming less common for trials to have a placebo arm (no active medication) - one of the reasons for patients opting not to take part.
Phase 4
Phase 4 trials are done after a drug has been shown to work and has been granted a licence. The main reasons for running phase 4 trials are to find out more about the side effects and safety of the drug, what the long term risks and benefits are and how well the drug works when it's used more widely.
Trials are well documented, but they tend to open at different times in different centres as they get local approval, and we want to be able to give both doctors and patients up to date information so welcome further details and feedback from Doctors. The latest trials are listed on the gateways below - clinical trials.gov in the USA is the definitive. In this case enter 'waldenstrom', then look through the list. Once you select a trial, after all the technical data there is a drop down list of locations on the left. Some are more informative than others. If you join WMUK you will get regular updates on new trials in our newsletters.
Gateway Sites
Details of most trials can be found at http://www.clinicaltrials.gov This is an American site, but lists worldwide trials for WM and is the most comprehensive, but is not always fully updated. You may have to dig down under the locations dropdown to find more local detail. In the past UK WM patients have crossed the Atlantic to take part in USA trials, particularly at Dana-Farber (Boston) . This is a challenging option, and needs to be well financed!
There is a very good discussion about trials on the Cancer Research UK website Cancer Research UK - trials Their list of trials is not always up to date, however. There is also an EU trials site www.clinicaltrialsregister.eu/ctr-search/search?query=waldenstrom and a UK clinical trials gateway at UK Gateway. The Lymphoma Action have a good trials gateway, which is more up to date than most - it's at https://www.lymphomas.org.uk/lymphoma-trialslink/about-lymphoma-trialslink
If you have any problems then please contact us and we will try to help locate a trials doctor contact. Normally their contact details are on their hospital websites.


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Hello everyone I hope everything is going well for you all!
We went to the lot this weekend and met with the builder. They are pouring the foundation on Tuesday and it will have to cure for a couple of days. Then they take the forms off and start to frame. We are deciding on front doors now as well as the roof and siding…the things we need first after framing . The roof we will probably chose easily because we loved the roof we had on our house that we just sold.
I know I am behind as far as fall decorating goes. My friend Audrey, loves fall and holiday time as much as my husband and I do. We love it for the same reasons. The fall season has a certain feeling to it, a certain smell. We enjoy the baking and being with good friends and family! Each of us loves to decorate our homes to make it cozy and comfortable and ready for celebration.
She was kind enough to let me have access to her fall items, which are plenty, to help decorate her home.
I thought I would start by showing her mantle area. She has a beautiful mantle to start with and a wonderful collection of doilies. In her collection I found these spider web doilies and decided to put a large one on top of her mantle for a base. I mentioned to her that I need to get some more of these for our new home, LOL
My hubby, Audrey and I made a few stops at the local garden centers. I was looking for plain small white pumpkins, unfortunately, these did not exist this year in our area of NJ. Next year, I am going to find them online if possible. They are my favorite variety and I have noticed that we haven't been able to get the smaller version for a couple of years now.
I used light orange pumpkins for the center as you can see and added smaller pumpkins around and added candlesticks for height and placed smaller ones on top. I also took pumpkin figurines she had in her stash and placed them around and scattered bottle brush trees. I absolutely love bottle brush trees!! I then used an apothecary jar and a small dessert domed dish with various items.
Next to the mantle there are three stacked tables where we placed one of her small trees. Audrey loves everything acorn. Since I have known her, I have really fallen in love with them as well. I have a similar versions in my small collection that I use on our Christmas tree.
I am Linking to:


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About us
At the TALIS Project Association and the TALIS Research Group we are a group of teachers and researchers, mostly from the University of Valencia, although teachers from other universities such as the Queen Mary University in London are also present. Experts in managing social projects, both about Social Action and International Cooperation for Development, and tourism and translation professionals are part of both teams as well. Also involved are students of the University of Valencia and other people from society in general who have decided to collaborate with this project.
This is why we define ourselves as a project with an interdisciplinary, interuniversitary and intersectoral approach, as we also promote the involvement of other kinds of entities, such as private companies and NGOs.
All of us share a solid commitment to education, to research and to building a fairer world according to the principles of Sustainable Human Development. In addition, we believe that these goals will be easier to achieve if we work together, join forces and generate synergies between different profiles: teachers, research teams and students; universities and primary or secondary schools; public entities and private establishments; non-profit organisations and companies…
We operate in a network with other universities and educational institutions with whom we have established collaboration agreements, such as:
Plus, we have organised joint activities with other universities and educational institutions such as:
- Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis (Francia)
- Lycée Pierre-Gilles de Gennes en Cosne Sur Loire (Francia)
- Universidad de Islandia en Reikiavik
- Universidad Federal do Amazonas en Manaos (Brasil)
- Universidad de Ciencias Aplicadas de Oulu (Finlandia)
- Universidad Nacional de Trujillo (Perú)
- RDT Professional School en Anantapur (India)
- Universidad César Vallejo de Trujillo (Perú)
- Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência y Tecnologia do Rio Grande
- Conservatorio de Bamako (Mali)
- Escuela de primaria Indielu, Kalaban Koro (Mali)
- University of Western Macedonia (Grecia)
- University of Nicosia (Chipre)
- Conservatorio profesional de danza de Valencia (España)
We develop joint projects with social institutions such the VOCES Foundation and the Ayuda en Acción Foundation, and we have also undertaken one-time activities with other entities like Unicef, the Proyecto Solidario Foundation, Observatori del Refugi or UN-I-MÓN. To know more about these social projects, please visit our Cooperation section.
We try to promote cooperative work, so we have established collaborations with private companies like Vaughan Systems, Dualbooks, JPM Ediciones, STIGA or Banco Mediolanum.
More than 50 people are part of the TALIS team, and all of us are dedicated to this project as volunteers. If you want to know more about us, do not hesitate to contact us through our general inbox email@example.com. If you are interested in any specific topic, you may prefer to contact the person in charge of that field:
María Alcantud
General Coordinator of the TALIS Project
Olga Mínguez
Communications Coordinator
Ana Alcaraz
Coordinator of the TALIS Project Association
Sergio Maruenda
Translations Coordinator
Llanos Godes
Management Coordinator
Xavier Mínguez
Training Coordinator


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Found a term on the site but don't see it defined here? Help us build our glossary! Glossary @ Google Drive.
Ancient Heroes: Also called the Iroidas. People born in Vega with the reincarnated souls of the leaders of the last era of the Ancient Vegans. They possess powerful magitech relics and are usually charismatic people, and can be affiliated with the Resistance, with Sin, or as neutral parties.
Ancient Vegans: The nymph-like race of people who inhabited Vega before Sol Humans moved in. They vanished from Vega 4000 years ago, leaving behind the Revolutionary Starseeds and many mysterious ruins and relics. Unknown to modern researchers, the name of the Ancient Vegan people was the Tulpa.
Arcadia Station: One of the largest space stations in Vega, and also the seat of the Vegan government. Most of the time it is in orbit around Hippolyta, but it can travel across the system. Arcadia Station is the home of Empress Sin, as well as her government and her chief engineers, scientists, and personal guard.
Asteroid Senshi: Also called the Mystes. A group of senshi who emerged from the shards of the Mithras starseed when it was shattered 4000 years ago. They are the senshi best suited to explore ruins, and so Sin is seeking them out for her own gain.
Cavame: Orphean Spam. Probably tastes like salty, rotted fish unless you are Orphean, and then it suddenly tastes like a delicacy. Modest Proposal is one of the most popular varieties of cavame available.
City Sectors: Most major cities are zoned into different districts based on different industries and social needs. They will have financial districts, manufacturing and trade districts, educational, cultural, and residential zones. In many cities, these are given color and gem designations so that they are clearly recognizable.
Coppelia: A cybernetic humanoid created using the mind and body of a living human. Coppelias are the foot soldiers of Sin's regime, acting like soldiers, spies, and guards. A person may volunteer to become a Coppelia, and they are given a ranked position, license to keep their original apperance, and their original memory. Many Coppelias are not volunteers though, and those people are completely renovated and their memories rewritten.
Cyanean Belt: Also called the Gades or The Clashing Rocks. The Cyanean Belt is the asteroid belt of Vega, between Heracles and Ida. It consists of debris, lost comets, and a few dwarf planetoids. Though nobody knows this presently, the Cyanean Belt was made when the planet Mithras was destroyed 4000 years ago.
Dreamscape: The realms of dreams, composed of the dreams of every sleeping person in Vega. The Knights of Elysium travel in and protect the Dreamscape, where they may observe and transverse in the dreams of people.
Folk: The middle and lower classes of Vegan society. Though they make up the vast bulk of the Vegan population, they have been losing more and more rights, voices, and benefits as Sin endures on the throne.
Gentry: The ruling class of Vegan society. Though Vega was designed to be a monarchical democracy, a majority of the Gentry families pledged their loyalty to Sin in return for expanded rights over law and rule. While most Gentry are enjoying the benefits of Sins rule, some Gentry are secretly funding Resistance causes.
Gloriana: A now-defunct cruise liner, meant to be the grandest ship of the Astraea class of the Thalassa Line. After terrorists loyal to Sin destroyed the ships engines, the shipyard around it was shut down and the ship was left to the elements until the ship and shipyard were purchased by a young Penthesilean heiress. The Gloriana is now being fixed up to fly again by the Revolutionary Senshi in secret.
Gray Plague: Medical name, Melanoferrophagic Fever. Also called, Vitales Blood Fever, Gray Death, and the Fades. A virus that breaks down the melanin and iron in the human body. The first stages of the disease appear to be nothing more than a persistent fever and a mild stomach flu. After 48 hours, the fever gets worse and the afflicted takes on a distinctly grayish pallor. Their hair and irises begin turning gray and the afflicted becomes lethargic. Oftentimes, a loss of appetite and dehydration are reported, as well as anemia, photosensitivity, chills, and severe sunburns. Death can take up to 90 days, depending on the severity. There is no known cure and even the few records of Ancient Vegan medicine which mention a similar disease report no cure. The best doctors can do is treat the symptoms, but this is generally a simple delay of the inevitable.
Heaven: Also known as the Heaven Protocol. Coppelias who reveal that they are empathizing too much, or remembering their true past life, are seized by the authorities. Other Coppelias are told that their comrade is going to Heaven, where they can relax and enjoy rewards for their service. In truth, nobody knows what this actually means, except that none of the taken Coppelias ever return once they are taken away.
Henshin: The process of tapping into the full power of ones starseed, or in the case of Knights, tapping into the power of their unconscious Knight self. Usually this results in costume change and a boost of raw power, as well as access to more powerful magic spells.
Henshin item: The conduit by which a Sailor Senshi accesses the full power of their starseed. For Revolutionary senshi, this appears as a pocketwatch or compact while Asteroid Senshi have a piece of jewelry with a compass motif on it. Iron Angels henshin by directly accessing their Crystal, which is embedded in their bodies.
Iron Angels: Sometimes also called Sins's Angels or Crystalline Angels. The Iron Angels are specially talented Coppelias who were granted an artificial Sailor Crystal by Sin. Iron Angels are each the Guardian of a planet, and can declare martial law and command soldiers there.
Knights of Elysium: Also called the Oneiroi. Founded by Helios, this team had inherited the powers and duties of a dream guardian. Knights are sleeper agents who live normal daily lives, but operate as guardians at night unknowingly.
Makaiju Tree: Once called the Doom Tree, Makaiju trees are space-travelling and form a symbiotic relationship with the ecosystem they put roots into. They give life to the Makaiju people, who cannot live for long periods of time without their tree. A Makaiju tree is hidden within the jungles of Heracles.
Neuron Staples: Conduits attached to the nerves of Coppelia which serve to moderate the thoughts of the Coppelia - it patches the persons real memories and instead makes the brain believe in a new version of their memories. It is also the source of the personality shifts present in Coppelia. Neuron staples are not a perfected technology, and may weaken given enough time or willpower, allowing wisps of the Coppelias real memories to leak through.
Orihimite: A very rare mineral only found in Vega. The government has been known to seize whole tracts of land and cities in a radius near an Orihimite discovery. Orihimite is known to be used as a source of electrical energy, but it seems to have some mysterious powers that resonate with Sailor Crystal and magical energy.
Orphan Farms: Orphan homes, originally set up by the Cynthion government to teach children trades or agriculture, to prepare them for adult life. Now, Orphan Farms are more or less places to get cheap labor and hide orphans from Folk families or political orphans and other undesirable youngsters. The conditions are usually horrible and dangerous and only 72% of the orphans who enter the Farms survive to adulthood.
Pirates: Sometimes also known as Raiders. Pirates are groups who capitalize on the increased lawlessness of Sins regime. They operate from any size from lone wolfs to a whole fleet, and while some of them are benevolent and respect the Folk, some are ruthless and care nothing for anyones well-being (except their own).
Platinum Gnostic Crystal: The Imperial Crystal which Phoebe was born with. The Platinum Gnostic Crystal was forcibly removed from Phoebe by Sin, who uses it to transform herself into Neo-Queen Cybele. While it is a powerful source of magical energy, the full range of abilities tied to the Platinum Gnostic Crystal is still unknown.
Psionic Academy: A school, usually State-sanctioned, for the training and education of people with Psychic Talent. The majority of Psionic Academies are based on Penthesilea, the most famous being Empress Su-en Academy (formerly St. Serenity Academy), Imperial Institute of Psionic Sciences (formerly Institute for Psychic Studies at Ephesia) and Nostradamus Conservatory of Indira City.
Relic: A weapon or object with magical qualities. Relics used by Senshi and Knights tend to be magical constructs, while Ancient Hero relics are magitech, and requires energy to use.
Resistance: The umbrella term for the counter-Imperialist movement opposed to Sin and her regime. The Resistance may take different names depending on the region they operate in, and some Resistance groups are more ruthless than others. It is currently unknown if there is a leader of the whole Resistance movement.
Revolutionary Senshi: The planetary senshi for the Vegan system. Unlike most other senshi, the Revolutionary Senshi starseeds are highly adaptable, and evolve powers suited to protecting their senshi, such as emphasizing disguise and guerrilla warfare.
Ruin: A historical temple, fortress, or castle which was sacred to the Ancient Vegans. While there are many minor ruins dotted all over Vega, there are some more important ruins on the planets, moons, and asteroids which harbor magitech and secrets from the Ancient Vegans. A World Egg is also protected within the major ruin of each planet.
Sailor Senshi: A person who possesses a starseed or starshard, which transfers magical guardian abilities to the person. Sailor Senshi have at least two spheres of influence, which are types of magic specific to that Senshi mantle. A Sailor Senshi is either born with their power, or else inherits it from the previous holder of that mantle.
Society of St. Serenity: Named for the First Queen of the Cynthion Empire (canonized by most ecclesiastical groups by 3329) and referred to as S-Cubed for short. This group is perhaps the most organized of the Resistance groups, though still fractious.
Starseed: A cosmic magic which attaches to a persons heart, giving them the abilities of a Sailor Senshi. Vegan starseeds have some unique features, such as being able to evolve new abilities under stress, and more of a flexibility in passing on the starseed from one person to the next.
Starshard: A fractured piece of a starseed. The starseed of Sailor Mithras, for example, was broken into multiple starshards. In some cases, as with the Asteroid Senshi, starshards can grow and offer the abilities of a Sailor Senshi to its holder.
Tachyon Web: An electromagnetic forcefield which blocks all communication and travel in and out of the Vega system. Sin erected the web 8 years ago, to prevent the Sol army from rushing into Vega.
Underworld: The world of the dead - or more accurately, the waiting realm for the dead. A departed person spends about ten years in the Underworld before they pass on to another unknown fate. There is no division of good or bad, only the peaceful and the wrathful dead. Sailor Orpheus possesses a power that allows people to visit the Underworld.
World Eggs: Magical shells which protected the Revolutionary Senshi starseeds for the 4000 years since the Ancient Vegans disappeared. Not all of the powers of the Ancient Vegan starseeds have been transferred to the current Revolutionary Senshi, and that remaining power is with the World Eggs, which are hidden in the ruins of each planet.


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This one kit does it all…
- Repair & Recolor everything you'll need. All you need to do is choose your color.
- No color mixing: Our colors are ready-mixed for you, no messy mixing. Every color is custom mixed as your order is processed.
- Works on: Coated or Protected Leather, Coated Aniline Leather, Bi-Cast Leather, Bonded Leather and Vinyl.
Please read our "About Bonded Leather" page)
- Dries into a flexible Satin finish. See our Clear Coat page for other available top coat finishes.
- Features: Water-based – Outstanding durability – Superior flexibility – Natural look and feel – Exceptional adhesion
- Ease: Cleans up with water – Easy to use – No chemical smell
- Repair: Pet damage – Wear – Fading – Cracking – Cuts – Tears – Cigarette burns and more!
- Recolor: Stains, scuffs, faded and worn areas..even change colors.
- Suitable for Use On: Furniture, auto interiors, shoes, purses, briefcases, equestrian leather and much more!
- Safe for Use On: Vinyl and all leather except for suede or Nubuck.
1 – Color Flex in our Satin Finish – Bottle contains (5.1 oz /150 ml)
1 – Repair compound – Jar contains (1.5 oz /44.3 ml)
4 – 5″ x 7″ Alcohol Towels
1 – Foam sponge applicator
1 – Disposable paint tray
1 – Application tool (palette knife)
2 – Sub-patch (2-3/4″ x 4-1/2″)
2 – Sandpaper (2-3/4″ x 4-1/2″)
Step-by-step instructions
Preval Sprayer
If your prefer to spray on our Color Flex, you can use a Preval Sprayer. It's a portable aerosol unit that attaches right to our 5 oz bottle. Sorry but we don't sell these because they cannot be shipped by air and we only ship Priority Mail. They can be purchased at most hardware stores.
Air Brush
If you already own an air brush, you can use it instead of the sponge if you prefer spraying on the Color Flex.
Estimating coverage can be tricky. Much depends on the condition of the surface the Color Flex is being applied to and the color itself. For most small projects our 5.1 bottle is more than sufficient. A good comparison that most people would be familiar with: A typical 12 oz aerosol can holds approximately 3.4 oz of color, the rest is solvent and propellant.
Lighter colors (colors that contain white) will cover better than colors that contain more transparent tints like red. Shades of red typically require more applications. We double the tint base to combat that but please be aware that shades of red may not cover as well as the stated areas below.
One 5.1 oz bottle of Color Flex
Same color or similar – 1 coat covers approximately 14 sq ft – or two front seats of a car or one large arm chair
Change color – 2 coats covers approximately 7 sq ft
Shelf Life:
Store in a cool, dark place with the lids tightly fastened. Make sure that the edges of the containers are clean and free of any debris. Stored properly, products should last for several years without degrading. If the Color Flex thickens, you can add some Clear Coat to it to bring it back to its normal consistency. If air gets to the repair compound, it will cure making it unuseable so keep it tightly closed.


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NLS serves its patrons through a network of cooperating libraries. Your local network library can help you sign up for free special-format library service, assist with issues concerning equipment, suggest and locate titles of interest to you, and help you receive access to the BARD (Braille and Audio Reading Download) website and app. All of these interactions can be done remotely, via telephone, fax, postage-free mail, or e-mail.
All network libraries provide access to NLS-produced braille and talking books and magazines, which they circulate via postage-free mail. Some libraries have additional collections, including large-print books and described DVDs. Contact your library today to find out what services they can offer you.
You may call 1-888-NLS-READ (1-888-657-7323) and be connected with the library serving your area or use the form below to find a library serving your area.


text:
bridal collections
Welcome to my fellow
Freebird paperie custom designs
Your wedding is such a momentous day in your life, and the months leading up to it should be stress free. With this in mind, Freebird Paperie strives to give you exactly what you want without adding more to your plate.
Do you have a totally unique design in mind? Something that is customized specifically to your dream wedding? For an estimate on a custom-designed invitation suite, click below to schedule a free consultation.
Click here to find out more about the design process, start to finish.
Freebird Paperie Collections
The pre-designed collections that Freebird Paperie offers will display your mutual style and give your guests a sneak peek of what is to come. Paired with high-quality paper and printing, you are sure to be delighted with the finished product. While these suites give you an affordable stationery option, they are also fully customizable. We will work with you to adjust colors and wording to achieve something truly yours.
Thinking about working with Freebird Paperie on a custom or pre-designed collection but want to see the papers, inks, printing methods, and general beauty of the invitations yourself before making the jump? We understand that! To order a packet of samples, please click here!
If you place a wedding collection order over $500 with Freebird Paperie Graphic Design, the $15 charge for the sample pack will be removed from your invoice!
Products offered:
Serving the US & beyond!
Email: email@example.com
Phone: 570.847.4159
Address: 292 Peach Orchard Rd.
Middleburg, PA 17842
1 Timothy 2:4 - "God our Savior desires all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth."
Site design by Freebird Paperie. Businesses, inquire about website quotes here.
Site design by Freebird Paperie. Businesses, inquire about website quotes here.


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Organic Dye.
There has been a glut of blackberries over the fields, and there is still more coming.
I've been freezing them ready to make indulgent comfort crumbles this winter.
I find I'm becoming even more increasingly aware of the seasons, and doing as much as I can to lower my carbon footprint, and make the most out of what nature gives us.
I don't know if this is an age thing, or the fact that with more time on my hands now (since my kids are at school) I've just slowed down to breathe.
Anyway, I just love my textiles, and I'd been reading up on natural dye's, so I thought I'd have a go at dying some linen scraps I had left over with some of my glut of blackberries.
Now I did a lot of winging it! lol and it turned out alright!
I'm not saying it's the right way nor the easiest, but here is how I made my dye, and dyed my linen.
In a pan I put two good handfuls of berries and covered over with water till they where just submerged, then I added 2 cups of table salt.
I brought this up to the boil, then turned the heat right down and left for an hour.
Every so often I mushed the mix with a potato masher.
A layer of salt crystals formed on the top but it gets strained so I didn't worry too much.
Turn off the heat and leave to cool, then strain into a jug.
Now I used raw natural 100% linen, the only thing I did to it was put it under the tap for a minute so it was completely damp.
I put it in half way as I just wanted to see what it did, and left it for an hour.
I thought i'd sling some little tied ones in while I waited.
Meanwhile i boiled up a salt water solution and let it cool, then after an hour, I took my fabric out of the dye and dunked it into my salt solution.
I've never read about doing this but I thought it couldn't hurt.
Apparently salt is the fixative to blackberry dye, so I figured if I had lots it would work! lol
It did!
I'm so chuffed, I'm going to have a go at making something now, maybe I'll make a linen cushion and give it a nice ombre blackberry dye.
What do you think?
If you are a curious creative or a craft lover, then please join our forum 'Creative Nest' at the top of the blog.
Emma x


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Liv Tyler Has a Sci-Fi Moment at Sundance
Liv Tyler is having a sci-fi moment.
On Saturday, her new film, "Robot and Frank," which takes place in the near future with mechanical robot helpers, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and at a dinner celebrating the movie at the Grey Goose Blue Door on Main Street, Ms. Tyler said her next project, "The Side Effect," combines science fiction and horror elements.
The film is to be directed by Ti West, who gained something of a cult following for his 2009 retro horror flick "The House of the Devil."
"I loved that movie," said Ms. Tyler. "It has so much texture."


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Soon after the Plaza Mayor is built in Madrid, its model is taken up by other cities, even those most distant from the capital. The Plaza de la Corredera in Córdoba is the only quadrilateral square in the south of Spain and Andalusia. Its aspect is owed to the architect Antonio Ramós Valdés of Salamanca. In 1683, on the spot of an esplanade, where, throughout time, one found a Roman circus, and then a trading area in the Muslim period of the city, he builds a giant, semiregular quadrilateral, yet somewhat smaller than the one in Madrid.
After being built, the square was used for various purposes, from temporary trade fairs to arena for corridas, from where the current name originates. In the shops beneath the arches on the ground floor lie the so-called esparterías shops that traditionally sell objects braided from vegetal fibres. For almost a century now, antique shops can also be found here.


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Scaling Agile in a Mainframe Product Development Organization
Agile transformation in any organization will go through myriad of challenges that involves people, existing organization culture, technology/domain etc. Instead of seeing these challenges as obstacles, if you view them as opportunities to grow and improve, transformation will be more impactful and long-lasting. If neglected, the very same obstacles would severely damage the motivation and trust of employees.
In this experience report we would like to walk you through the agile transformation journey in a Mainframe product development enterprise by unraveling the challenges and the remediation steps that has helped us in keeping this journey alive. Specifically we would like to touch upon
- Self-organizing teams
- Resistance to change
- Culture shift
- Lack of role clarity and
- Effective R&R in agile space
- Unit test automation
- Continuous Integration
Along the presentation we'll highlight few anti-patterns and the effects of ignoring them.
Outline/Structure of the Experience Report
- Agile transformation journey - 20mins
- Key challenges and complexity that includes technology/domain
- Anti-patterns and the remediation steps
- Exclude managers from the scrum team
- Product owners shouldn't prioritize technical debt
- Increase the sprint duration from 2 to 4 weeks because the story cannot be broken
- Postpone refactoring
Learning Outcome
- Few Do's and Don'ts in the Organization Change Initiative
- Learn the disadvantages of functioning in long iteration cycles despite market constraints
- Gain insight on why you should not exclude Functional Managers from scrum team given that many mangers come from a product competency who can help shape products better
Target Audience
Senior Management/Leadership team, Agile Coach, Scrum Master, POs and team members
Technical committee member for Grace Hopper Conference 2013
Participated in Grace Hopper Conference 2013 and conducted a technical panel discussion titled "Frame the Cloud"
Summary on Grace Hopper Conference 2013 website
schedule Submitted 5 years ago
Public Feedback
- By Tathagat Varma ~ 4 years ago
Pooja - do you ahve real-world stories where you find some of these anti-patterns and how did you address or resovle them? In tis conference, we expect attendees with reasonably good agile experience, and ideas like yours, as much interesting and relevant they are to the attendees, we expect them to kind of know them even before they sign up. They are looking for ideas and insights on how various practiitoners have dealt with some of these problems. I would like to see a deck, even if a strawman, where you have outlined your presentation and talked about some of these issues and how did you address them.
- By Tathagat Varma ~ 5 years ago
Pooja - in addition to my earlier question, can you guys convert this into a 20min experience report? If yes, please make the necessary changes to your proposal so that review panel could take a call.
Hi Tathagat,
Based on the feedback I received from you and Ravi, I'm planning to convert this to a 20min experience report. I'm working on it and will make necessary changes to the proposal.
Thank you for providing valuable suggestions,
- By Ravi Kumar ~ 5 years ago
Hi Pooja,
The proposal outline looks interesting and have to agree with you that ignoring or hiding the challenges is going to hurt even more. In my experience much of the challenges are due to a combination of things such as people, organization culture, technology and domain. In your response to Joel, you did mention about the 3 significant challenges and the anti patterns that are affecting transformation. We are narrowing down on accepting some of the best proposals and I think this certainly has portential for the final cut. Here is what I suggest
- Convert this presentation to a 20 min experience report as recommended by Tathagat.
- Discuss briefly about the organization context where the agile tranformation initiative is unertaken.
- List the challenges that also higlight the complexity of the technology/domain etc.
- Discuss 3-4 anti patterns and the remediation steps if any you have taken.
Get back to us on what you think.
Hi Ravi,
Thanks a lot for the valuable suggestion.
I think, by converting this to a 20 mins experience report, we can keep it short and crisp. The outline you suggested is of great help, I will structure the content around those lines and resubmit the proposal.
We have re-worked on the proposal based on the suggestions/comments and brought in some more changes since we feel they are appropriate. The points below highlight the rational
- The talk is based on an agile transformation journey in a Mainframe products enterprise which comes with its own set of challenges that we wanted to highlight
- The Organization Change effort that was involved was a big undertaking and hence we wanted to bring in a senior executive to share the experience. We will now have our Sr. Director, Mainframe Business as a co-presenter.
- The title and the outline of the talk has been changed which resonates more with the enterprise mainframe practice.
We would like to keep the talk at 45 min given the changes in the updated proposal. If for any reason you would want us to share just the 20 min experience report then we would have the following outline
- Organization context – 3 min
- Key challenges and complexity that includes technology/domain - 5 min
- Anti-patterns and the remediation steps - 12 min
- Exclude managers from the scrum team
- Product owners shouldn't prioritize technical debt
- Increase the sprint duration from 2 to 4 weeks because the story cannot be broken
- Postpone refactoring
We are in the process of creating the slides for the talk which will need few more days. We will upload a draft version for review at the earliest. Please share your comments/decision.
- By Prasad ~ 5 years ago
Also it will be a fit in Agile lifecycle theme than in Scaling agile..
- By Jerry Rajamoney ~ 5 years ago
Thanks for the topic. Do you share more concrete points to support your topic content?. They could be pointers to techniques / models / etc. Also adding some real time scenarios will really help.
Hi Jerry,
I'm converting this proposal to a 20min experience report. I'll make sure that it contains real time scenarios to support the content.
- By Kavitha Tumuluri ~ 5 years ago
Hi Pooja,
Wonderful presentation. I am running a very Agile project in our company "Office 365 roll out to the entire organisaiton".
With the experience of rolling out this project, the critical factors that were a priority are:
- Are your Managers / Teams bought into the idea of working in Agile mode?
- Is your Team / Managers enabled to work in agile mode?
- Do you reward individuals or teams?
Once we bought the entire team to the same thought process, the rest was easy and now Godzilla becomes a tame chimp.
-Kavitha Tumuluri
Hi Kavitha,
Thank you for reading through the abstract and providing your insights.
It is heartening to know that you have successfully rolled out an agile project in CA Technologies.
Like you mentioned, enabling the team to work in agile mode is extremely important. Unless we sow the right seeds, we cannot expect to reap benefits.
It is not enough to have our team go through class room trainings because agile is not a programming language. It is the way we need to think, the way we need to see and comprehend.
They need to see value in the transformation and understand how they are going to benefit from it.
- By Steve Ropa ~ 5 years ago
Hi Pooja,
I like what you say here. Coupling your proposal with your answers to Joel really give me a feel for where you are headed. I actually wonder if putting some of that answer into your proposal body might cause more people to take a closer look.
Hi Steve,
Thats a great idea! I will add some of the content from my answer to Joel into the abstract. That will definitely give the right perspective.
Thanks for the suggestion,
- By Joel Tosi ~ 5 years ago
Hi Pooja,
This is an interesting idea. I would want more detail though - the description of how you are doing the session is just an outline without much detail. The questions you start off with in the abstract don't necessarily seem to correlate to your outline or your learning outcomes. Could you please help me understand that a little clearer as well.
Also, the link to your slides goes to something on cloud computing. Perhaps that link is wrong?
Hi Joel,
It is encouraging to hear that you found our idea interesting.
Let me start by explaining how the outline, questions and learning outcome are connected to each other.
Outline talks about the 3 significant challenges that most of the organizations face during their agile journey
- resistance to change
- lack of role clarity and
- effective R&R in agile space
We intend to drive the presentation by questioning some of the practices we follow which ultimately point back to the 3 challenges that are mentioned in the outline. Learning outcome also conveys the same.
I would like to elaborate by connecting the outline, questions and learning outcome using an example. One question is, are we rewarding a team for consistently improving their work culture and product quality or are we rewarding an individual for performing a heroic task? This question connects back to the third challenge we mentioned in the outline about effective R&R. We feel that rewarding an individual for the wrong values instead of rewarding a team for little improvements is an anti-pattern which will cause irreparable damage. Along the presentation we'll highlight few more anti-patterns and the effects of ignoring them which is the 'learning outcome' of this session.
I hope this gives you an idea of how the presentation is going to flow. If there is anything more you wish to know, we'll be more than glad to provide the details.
About the link to the slides - We are still working on the slides for this presentation, so we uploaded something I presented at the Grace Hopper Conference in 2013.
People who liked this proposal, also liked:
Yuval Yeret - Navigating the "Scaling Agile" landscapeYuval YeretEnterprise Agile Coach and CTOAgileSparks
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Scaling Agile is the hot trend these days. There are various options people are currently using to scale agile across their organization ranging from the trendy SAFe through the evolutionary Kanban all the way to classic LeSS. As an enterprise agile coach with straddling both the Kanban and SAFe worlds with experience helping various global enterprises to be more agile at scale I have a wide perspective of the agile scaling approaches landscape which I will share in this session. Together we will look at the various leading approaches to Scaling and understand how they compare, where each is appropriate, how to mix and match them. We will also spend some time discussing change management/implementation aspects of using the the various approaches and how to move through the selection, kickoff, stabilization and recharge phases and ideally move to improve mode at some point.
Ravindra Chebiyam / Serajul Arfeen - Mobile to Mainframe: Application Development and DevOps in the Application EconomyRavindra ChebiyamSr. Director, Software EngineeringCA TechnologiesSerajul ArfeenSr. Engineering Project ManagerCA Technologies
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Agile delivery at the speed of business requires a seamless integration of Application Development, Delivery, and Operations.
We would like to present a fresh perspective of DevOps initiative and how it integrates with agile based development of mobile and web based applications.
In today's world of Application Economy, enterprises are rapidly developing mobile and web applications to stay competitive.
In this process, they are required to interact with the backend "system of record".
Large enterprises utilize mainframe at the heart of the dynamic data center as backend system of record.
This integration of agile-based mobile app development dependent on mission-critical mainframe-based operations is driving the importance of DevOps initiatives within the application development organizations.
Vijay Bandaru - Scrum Master Experience ReportVijay BandaruAgile CoachIVY Comptech
schedule 5 years agoSold Out!
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Experience Report
This presentation brings a different perspective for the Scrum Masters and helps them to become more powerful Scrum Masters through their enhanced soft skills. I am going to cover how the teams evaolve, how the change is resisted, how the teams behave, how Scrum Master can handle all these effective to make the teams deliver working software every sprint continuously.
The information explained below is from my experience as Scrum Master and Coach. Below are the points that will be covered in the presentation:
Primarily I am planning to cover the anti patterns that will push the teams back and where the Scrum Master can support the teams with his knowledge, experience and interpersonal skills. For example please find below some scenarios:
1. In effective sprint planning: Team might miss some of the tasks while doing the sprint planning part 2 so they will anyway identify them during the development of the stories so these tasks take additional time which is not budgeted. So they will have to miss some stories which will impact the sprint goal. So I encourage the scrum masters to collect all such unidentified tasks on a separate colr sticky notes and during retrospective discuss with the team to see how much % of the capacity is gone for that tasks. At the same time are there any tasks in that list can be repeatable tasks (Eg: Code review) so this will help the team to come up with a tasks checklist which will help the teams to do effective sprint planning part 2
2. Partially ready stories pushed into the sprint: Sometimes product owners push the stories that are not fully ready and the team cannot say "No" in this case either the story gets changes during the sprint or it cannot be finished due to unknown factors. So Scrum Master to encourage the team to have a proper DOR (Definition of Ready) and get a working agreement between the PO and team so that they will work around it whilst they understand "Responding to change over following a plan"
3. Cross functional behavior: Team generally does not want to become cross functional because they are fine with what they are. Scrum Master has to bring a change in their thought process and get them agreed to become cross functional. For this it takes time so SM has to also manage the management expectations with respect to set the expectation in the dip in productivity
4. Pale retrospectives: This is another area where Scrum Master has to provide support to teams and get the liveliness and make the teams high performance teams
5. Timeboxing: Most of the teams do not respect this important guideline. Again SM has to get the importance of this characterstic in to the teams and get them aligned towards this. So there are some examples which I can quote such as if different people arrive at different timings, how much time is wasted and how many times we need to recap on the points already discussed, how much gap created etc
6. Stop starting and start finishing: This will cover to complete the stories/tasks that you are working before you pick up something. In general the teams pick up many items at a time and complete them close to 100% but not 100% so this will impact the sprint goal. In such case the SM has to provide inputs to the team to pick as few as possible but close them as soon as possible so this way the value delivery at the end of sprint is guaranteed
7. Lack of importance for quality: In the hurry of completing the stories the team at times give less or no importance to the quality. So the probability of escaped defects or getting rejection for the stories is high. So the Scrum Master has to educate the teams to strictly define/refine/follow the Definition of Done for each story. I saw many teams having their DOD in the tools like VersionOne but not infront of their eyes.
8. I know when I see it: Information radiators. This will be the key for the teams to adjust their pace as per the principle #8. So creating big visible information radiators and updating the underlysing details frequently will bring attention in the team and they naturally tend to adjust their delivery mode as per the requirement
Jeff Lopez-Stuit, CEC - Exploit Core Agile Practices at the Program LevelJeff Lopez-Stuit, CECSr. Enterprise Agile ConsultantSolutionsIQ
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Core Agile practices establish visibility, remove impediments, and promote collaboration at the team level. Standup meetings, physical task boards, and focus on clearing impediments are well known practices to keep a team focused on the work, and establish a sense of flow towards frequent, tangible, and sustainable results.
What about an entire program, when a large number of teams are involved? How can a large organization exploit the same core practices when there is highly interdependent work, and when there may be hundreds of people involved? How can Scrum be used to improve delivery times, increase quality, and promote sustainable development at a program level? How the can practices provide executive leadership the visibility they need into program progress?
This workshop will introduce valuable, proven Scrum practices for large programs. Among the topics that will be discussed are:
What program management challenges are ripe for improvement through Agile practices?
The Program Impediment Board: Visible impediments, dependencies and milestones at a program level
The Program Stand-up: Lightweight activities to promote visibility, clear impediments and collaboration across the program
What does it look like when it's working?: Improve delivery time, increase quality, and establish collaboration across the organization.
Sophie Freiermuth - Integrating UX into the Agile Development Cycle - A case study over 3 projectsSophie FreiermuthAgile and Lean UX Consultant - UX DesignerBaguette UX
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Case Study
User Experience design is a product design discipline which sits throughout a product's lifecycle, from inception to development to maintenance and all the way to retirement. Waterfall enabled the discipline to have ample time and produce extensive design, in a "big design upfront" approach which rarely involved technical capabilities, and resulted in difficulties in build. The adoption of agile by product development team has offered UX a unique opportunity to work in a much more joined-up manner, and expend the design into the development, enabling the entire team to react to change.
As a UX designer, I have over the last 7 years developped a solid appreciation of working embedded in an agile development team, and would like to share my experiences through 3 specific projects, sharing my learnings to help development team on-board the UX practitioner, their tools, practices and skills.
This session will be a case study over 3 projects, highlighting the learnings and steps of the integration of UX into the development cycle. I'm taking Alistair Cockburn's sequence of SHU-HA-RI to detail the progress of my practice and will pay great attention to sharing sufficient context that my experiences and outcomes can be translated to your own projects and team setups.
Sachin Natu / Naresh Jain - Death of Inspection: Reincarnation of the Testing CommunitySachin NatuSr. Manager QAIDeaS a SAS CompanyNaresh JainFounderXnsio
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Case Study
Adopting agile development practices and continuous delivery is becoming a norm in the software industry. Time to market and frequent releases have drastically reduced time available for regression testing. Inspection is considered wasteful. Faster feedback cycles during development is crucial. These have created lot of challenges for testing community, which traditionally relies on manual testing assisted by UI based test automation.
This is an experience report of transforming testing practices across organization, which decided to embrace Agile. Today our testers are not trying to find defects, instead they collaborate with product management and developers to prevent them in the first place. In fact, during the appraisal process, the defects found by them is ignored, instead we focus on how much time they are able to dedicate to collaboration and exploratory testing. The boundaries between developers and testers have faded away and today quality is whole team's responsibility.
We started with less than 20% of our testers with automation skills (mostly UI automation) and rest of them relying on manual testing. However, today, all our testers practice BDD. They have picked up Java & Groovy programming skills. They are able to contribute Workflow tests, Integration tests and Business Logic Acceptance Tests. Early collaboration and pairing is the norm. By the time developers are done with their tasks, all checks are already automated and hence we are able to deploy software every fortnight to production.
Are your testers finding it hard to make this transition to an Agile mindset? This session will give you some concrete ideas based on our transition at IDeaS.
Naresh Jain - Techniques for Effectively Slicing User StoriesNaresh JainFounderXnsio
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AT: make sure your users stories don't get in the way.
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Based on working with distributed teams over the years, we discovered some distributed Agile patterns. Some of them got blogged from time to time. Those already available in form of blogs are as follows:
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- Local Retrospective
- Agile way of documentation
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- Chain-Link Pattern
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Sriram Narayan - Big AgileSriram NarayanDigital-IT Mgmt. ConsultantThoughtWorks
schedule 5 years agoSold Out!
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Good engineering practices and fail-fast, iterative, low-ceremony processes help achieve team level agility. They are necessary but not sufficient to scale agility across the IT organization. In this talk, I'll address what else is needed and why. In particular, I'll address:
- Why plan-driven IT projects are a bad idea why we need value-driven projects instead
- Why a matrix org is a bad idea for IT and why we need cross-functional teams instead
- Why IT budgeting needs to change from being project-based to being team-capacity based
vinaya muralidharan / Sutap - The Snowball Effect - From Team Kanban to Enterprise Kanbanvinaya muralidharanAgile CoachFiservSutapAgile CoachAmdocs
schedule 5 years agoSold Out!
20 Mins
Experience Report
About two years ago, we embarked on our journey towards Agility and Kanban was our vehicle.
But Kanban had people worried.
How can we not have detailed plans?! How can we limit WIP when we have so many things to work on?!
We have due dates to meet! And so on.
We would like to share one of the approaches that we adopted to help move the change along.
In addition to focusing on the Kanban implementation at the project levels, we adopted another route – to work through the individuals and the teams – a grounds up approach. We encouraged people and teams to use Kanban boards to manage their daily tasks.
You have difficulty in managing personal stuff? We'll help you manage better!
You have issues in managing team level priority? Look what we did within our team- we have a Team Kanban and we are now much better organized!
One by one we saw people getting interested. The movement gathered steam - we worked directly with a handful of people and they in turn got their peers onboard. And we saw various flavors like Personal Kanban, Team Kanban cropping up all over the place – even in our Travel Office and Corporate Office. What this did was give people a safe, controlled environment to experiment and learn in.
As they got used to the ideas of limiting WIP, pulling work, visualizing work and "stop starting, start finishing", it gave them the confidence to work this way at the project level too. And it made our lives as change agents just a wee-bit easier!
We welcome you to come hear our story about nurturing the change towards Agility by making it a grass roots movement.
A brief introduction to Amdocs - Amdocs is a leading provider of Customer Experience systems and services in the telecommunications domain, typically doing large scale transformation projects.
Lance Kind - Using Fiction to Motivate ChangeLance KindChief Comic Book Scientist and Agile ConsultantA-Noir Consulting
schedule 4 years agoSold Out!
45 Mins
Since the late nineties, the Agile books in the non-fiction aisle have steadily increased in number. It's common to see a book or three about Agile on a colleague's desk. It's also common to see such a book look practically new, the book spin showing no sign of having been opened. Non-fiction books are great at providing bullet points of things to do and reasons why. But non-fiction books are poor at:
- inspiring,
- creating emotional attachement (so the reader finishes the book),
- creating a full sensory environment for the reader,
- describing a holostic environment, or
- 'intriguing' a reader who is un-interested in the topic.
(This bullet list above is a good example of how non-fiction can excite thoughts who already know the story behind the bullets, but doesn't inspire much if the reader hasn't any context or background.)
Fiction is well positioned to do the above because its number one job is to give pleasure and entertainment. It can't be successful if it can't do this. The oral tradition of fiction has been part of human culture for millions of years, since a Cro-Magnon passed on a story to another, and upon re-telling some details were forgotten and the storyteller had to make them up. Fiction is in fact is the most successful format for culture change as this is the format of the world's religious works and is responsible for guiding or changing the behaviors of billions of people. The CIA and the Pentagon use fiction to develop scenarios which are used to create simulations to test preparedness.
What force could be stronger than fiction for giving an individual the courage to initiate an organizational change in the face of uncertain co-workers and often antagonistic corporate environment? What tester, developer, PM, director could not use the courage of knowing a "David verses the Goliath," "Legend of the IpMan," or "V for Vendetta" to not only understand the bullet points, but to have the stedfast to sustain in the face of resistance because they believe in the change as if they've lived that life, due to reading stories which placed them in one or many virtual versions of that world.
Jeff Lopez-Stuit, CEC - The Exorcist Was a Lean Planning MasterJeff Lopez-Stuit, CECSr. Enterprise Agile ConsultantSolutionsIQ
schedule 5 years agoSold Out!
20 Mins
Pecha Kucha
How can teams that have to deal with large, complex legacy systems get through planning and get to work? The title character of the classic American horror film, "The Exorcist" was a master at this..
Pecha Kucha Talk Summary:
- Introduction: Creating understanding through conversation can be very difficult for teams dealing with complex, legacy systems.
- Introducing Regan McNeil: Poor Regan McNeil was starting go insane, but a team of doctors and specialists in close, face-to-face collaboration, couldn't solve her problem.
- The Exorcist: The Exorcist knew how to have just enough conversation to get to work, so his team could deliver the value everyone had been working and praying for.
- Summary: "In life, understanding is the booby prize". Sometimes the quest for understanding can be an impediment to delivering value. Having faith in self-organization, sometimes its best just to get to work.
- Introduction: Creating understanding through conversation can be very difficult for teams dealing with complex, legacy systems.
Sneha Kadam - Lean MachineSneha KadamBusiness AnalystThoughtWorks
schedule 5 years agoSold Out!
60 Mins
After revolutionizing the automobile industry, Lean principles have been successfully applied to different knowledge areas including software development. This workshop is intended to master Lean concepts like Waste, Push&Pull systems, systems thinking, Kaizen etc. & practicing cross-functional collaboration, self-organisation and safe-fail experimentation! In this interactive game, the participants will work in a small production lines, experiencing problems and applying Lean practices to overcome them.
Vasco Duarte - #NoEstimates - How to improve software development predictability and profitability by focusing on what mattersVasco DuarteManaging PartnerOikosofy
schedule 5 years agoSold Out!
480 Mins
Stop wasting time and money
#NoEstimates is an approach to software development that arose from the observation that large amounts of time were spent over the years in estimating and improving those estimates, but we see no value from that investment. Indeed, according to scholars Conte, Dunmore and Shens [1] a good estimate is one that is within 25% of the actual cost, 75% of the time.
This is the same as saying: give us your money, we promise not lose more than 25% of it (with a 25% probability that we will lose a lot more). We don't find that acceptable or productive for our industry. There must be better ways to manage software and product development.
In this workshop we will review and analyze why we do estimates and how we can improve software and product development while reducing the time and money invested in estimating.
Lance Kind - LEANing To Continuous DeliveryLance KindChief Comic Book Scientist and Agile ConsultantA-Noir Consulting
schedule 4 years agoSold Out!
45 Mins
Transforming an organization's delivery model from quarterly or monthly releases to continuous delivery requires changes in requirements gathering, development, QA/ testing, and operations. Lean principles are a powerful guiding light into discovering what problems need to be addressed and how to get started. In this talk, I will describe how Lean principles can be applied to achieve a transformation to continuous delivery, and then provide a cycle model. At the end of the talk, is a workshop where the attendees will apply the Lean Principles to the cycle model and then analyze their own project for how to improve toward continuous delivery.
Everyone will learn more than one new way to examine their project.
Sophie Freiermuth - Prioritizing user stories: using value to users as a key criteriaSophie FreiermuthAgile and Lean UX Consultant - UX DesignerBaguette UX
schedule 5 years agoSold Out!
60 Mins
Product development in agile is always at risk of favouring velocity and developer's skills.
Favouring velocity means that when it's time to select stories, the team will elect to do many short stories to keep velocity on the rise, or stable.
Favouring skills mean that easy implementation may be selected, or sometimes tricky solutions which will give the developper the satisfaction of solving a difficult problem.
The outcome of the story's execution and value to users is an important criteria, and I'd like to introduce you in this session to a technique that helps prioritize against two sets of criteria: technical difficulty and value to users.
Using Personas, a tool from product design which I will explain, and a simple grid, this technique makes prioritization incredibly easy - which then enables the team to focus on getting stories done, rather than figuring out which stories.
Vijay Bandaru - Lean and Kanban Implementation from TrenchesVijay BandaruAgile CoachIVY Comptech
schedule 5 years agoSold Out!
20 Mins
Experience Report
I was part of a Large Scale Agile transformation in my organization and I was one of the Agile coaches there. As part of transformation we have created LeanOps teams to manage the technical debt, production incidents with a focused concentration. This article covers the following:
- Why the trasnformation required?
- What are the structural changes implemented?
- LeanOps inception
- Lean Ops working Model
- Challenges with the LeanOps
- How we addressed those challenges?
- Goal oriented approach
Saket Bansal - Are we becoming profitable with agile?Saket BansalLead TraineriZenBridge
schedule 5 years agoSold Out!
45 Mins
Why organizations are adapting towards agile? Is it to get most out of their resources or is it about doing the right thing?
Traditional mind set of achieving high productivity and using resources efficiently does not change easily, even when organization moves to agile they remain more and more worried about the team velocity. When I meet agile practicing companies or I attend event on agile I find that most of
the focus is on delivering product backlog efficiently. We see lot of talks on how to make team more self-organizing so that they can do the things faster. Even after moving to scrum or agile we keep ignoring the warning
"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be
done at all." —Peter F. Drucker
When most of the organization starts with agile they takes it as an engineering process, and most of the team focuses too much on velocity, while to get maximum out of agile we need to look at Enterprise Agility, we need to look at an organization's entire value stream—from idea to implementation, from concept to consumption.
My talk would be focusing on need of organization agility and will introduce one of the monitoring tool "Life Cycle Profitability "which can help organizations in getting answers of questions like :
- Should we delay the release by one month to fix the defects ?
- Should we reduce the cycle time by adding one more team?
- Should we delay the release to add functionality?
- Should we delay the project by one month to get more innovative ?
Life Cycle Profitability is based on principle "Take an economic view" introduced in book:The Principles of Product Development Flow , Donald G. Reinertsen . In my talk I will be showing how we can convert proxy variables like cycle time , velocity , technical debts into Life Cycle Profit.
I presented part of this concept in one of the conference and got good response, but I will create fresh presentation for this talk, since this time I will put more focus on expanding the model to calculate the Life Cycle Profit.
Lance Kind - Integrating the BDD process with ScrumLance KindChief Comic Book Scientist and Agile ConsultantA-Noir Consulting
schedule 4 years agoSold Out!
20 Mins
Lightning Talk
How to effectively use Behavioral Driven Development in your Scrum process, from idea inception, backlog grooming, to Sprinting, and Sprint Demonstration.
Michael Harris - Agile Competency Development For EnterprisesMichael HarrisPresident & CEODavid Consulting Group
schedule 5 years agoSold Out!
45 Mins
For agile to work at scale in enterprises, there needs to be clarity around the hierarchy (or lack of hierarchy) of roles across teams and products to ensure sound governance and, perhaps more importantly, to offer career (and salary!) progression. This presentation will propose a competency-based approach for the development of skills and competencies of the workforce, and thus creating a sustainable transformation in an enterprise. We will include experiences of implementing those components of the proposed model that have already been tried and tested. Feedback will be sought from the participants.


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Nishnawbe-Aski Police Service
|Nishnawbe-Aski Police Service
|Agency overview
|309 Court Street South
Thunder Bay, Ontario
|Elected officer responsible
|Agency executive
|Official website
The Nishnawbe-Aski Police Service (NAPS) is the police agency for Nishnawbe-Aski Nation (NAN). The agency has 134 First Nations Constables who have the powers of police officers in Ontario. They are assigned to 35 detachments in NAN communities. Mr. Terry Armstrong was appointed Chief of Police effective September 3, 2013.
NAPS is the largest First Nations police agency in Canada and the second largest in North America. NAPS is responsible for a jurisdiction that includes two-thirds of Ontario, a land area approximately the size of France.[2] NAPS receives 48% of its funding from the government of Ontario, and 52% from the government of Canada.[3]
The Nishnawbe-Aski Police Service was formed on January 14, 1994 through a tri-partite agreement between the governments of Canada, Ontario, and the Nishnawbe-Aski Nation. The primary goal of the agreement is the establishment of an aboriginal agency to provide efficient, effective and culturally appropriate policing to the Nishnawbe-Aski communities.
The first phase of the agreement began on April 1, 1994 and lasted four years, when all First Nation constable positions were transferred from the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) to NAPS. Phase two began on January 1, 1998 when Wahgoshig, Matachewan, Mattagami, Brunswick House, Chapleau Ojibwe, Chapleau Cree, Constance Lake and Aroland First Nations were transferred.
The Nishnawbe-Aski Police Service gained responsibility for the OPPs Northwest Patrol Unit on June 1, 1998, excluding the communities of Big Trout Lake, Weagamow, Muskrat Dam, and Pikangikum. An Operations Transition Committee was formed to oversee the transfer of administrative and operations matter between NAPS and the OPP. The transition was complete on April 1, 1999.[2]
Many NAPS detachments fail to meet national building codes and many officers live in crowded conditions or lack residences in the communities in which they serve. On February 25, 2008 Chief Jonathan Soloman of Kashechewan First Nation gave the Government of Ontario 30 days to start relieving the situation or he would pull his community out of the NAPS policing agreement.[4] On March 26, 2008, Chief Soloman extended the deadline after receiving indication that the Canadian and Ontario governments were interested in resolving policing issues in NAPS-served communities.[5] A new policing agreement was reached in 2009 but funding for infrastructure shortcomings remains unresolved.
Out of 35 detachments, only the Moose Cree First Nation detachment meets building codes.[6] A fire at the Kashechewan First Nation detachment on January 9, 2006 killed two persons held in the lockup and severely injured an officer during a rescue attempt.[7]
The Kasabonika First Nation detachment was closed in early February 2008 as it lacked running water and relied on a wood fire in a 170-litre drum to heat the facility. Holding cells lacked toilet facilities, requiring detainees to use a slop bucket. Prisoners now must be flown to Sioux Lookout, costing as much as $10,000 per trip.[8]
NAPS has an annual budget of $23,000,000,[9] and the estimated cost to replace or renovate ageing detachments would cost approximately $34,000,000.[8]
A Sacred Calling[edit]
A Sacred Calling is an 18-minute documentary which focuses on the difficulties of policing remote NAN communities in Northern Ontario which are compounded by insufficient funding. The documentary was made by Deputy Grand Chief RoseAnne Archibald, who hopes the film will get attention from the federal and provincial governments to help rectify the situation.[10] The film shows officers living in motels, and using wood blocks to hold inmates in their cells.[6]
Detachments are located in 35 communities.[11] NAPS headquarters is located at 309 Court Street South, Thunder Bay. It has regional offices in Cochrane, Sioux Lookout and Thunder Bay.[12]
The Nishnawbe-Aski Police Service is governed by a board consisting of a representative of each Nishnawbe-Aski Nation Tribal Council. An independent review board ensures accountability to the communities.[13]
- Ford F-Series pickups including F-350
- Dodge Charger cruisers
- Ford E-Series vans
- Chevrolet Tahoe SUV - used by K9 unit
- Pilatus PC-12-45 - operated by Wasaya Airways
- Ford Crown Victoria cruisers - former
- Chevy Yukon SUV - former
- Constable
- Detective Constable
- Sergeant
- Detective Sergeant
- Road Sergeant
- Staff Sergeant
- Administrative Sergeant
- Regional Inspector / Regional Commander
- Deputy Chief
- Chief of Police
Special Units[edit]
- Guns and Gangs Unit
- Provincial Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy
- Sexual Assault Classification Unit
- Drug Unit
- ^ "[1]", Nishnawbe-Aski Police Service Retrieved November 8, 2013.
- ^ a b Nishnawbe-Aski Police Service History. Retrieved February 18, 2008.
- ^ "Kashechewan to stay with NAPS, negotiations positive", CNW Group (April 17, 2008) Retrieved April 19, 2008.
- ^ "Aboriginal territory can't go on with medieval police detachments: chiefs[permanent dead link], The Canadian Press (February 25, 2008) Retrieved February 26, 2008.[dead link]
- ^ "Kashechewan extends deadline as NAPS heads back to negotiating table", CNW Group (March 26, 2008) Retrieved March 26, 2008.
- ^ a b Burkowski, Peter. "NAN seeks help for 'policing crisis'", The Chronicle-Journal (February 4, 2008) Retrieved February 18, 2008.
- ^ "Ontario Regional Chief challenges federal and provincial governments to respond to the First Nation policing funding crisis", CNW Group (February 4, 2008) Retrieved February 18, 2008.
- ^ a b Puxley, Chinta. "Reserve closes 'dangerous' police station", The Toronto Star (Retrieved February 4, 2008) Retrieved February 18, 2008.
- ^ "Acute NAPS housing shortage may rob north of police services[permanent dead link]", TBSource (February 12, 2008) Retrieved February 18, 2008.
- ^ "Documentary draws attention to NAPS underfunding[permanent dead link]", TBSource (January 16, 2008) Retrieved February 18, 2008.
- ^ Nishnawbe-Aski Police Service Detachments. Retrieved February 18, 2008.
- ^ Nishnawbe-Aski Police Service Contact Information. Retrieved February 18, 2008.
- ^ Nishnawbe-Aski Police Service Police Services Board. Retrieved February 18, 2008.
External links[edit]
- Nishnawbe-Aski Police Service
- "A Sacred Calling" Documentary video. Retrieved 2010.05.21


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The Town of Wilkeson, Washington, has supported the project through the provision of land to host the skate park, as well as through the ongoing support of the Town Council.To find out more about this lovely and historic town nestled in the foothills of Mount Rainier, visit their website.
The project is organized with the support of the Foothills Rails-to-Trails Coalition, a registered 501(c)3 charity that exists to assist Pierce County communities in the creation, maintenance and usage of a connected system of non-motorized trails for healthier people from Mt. Rainier to Puget Sound. The Bacon & Eggs Skatepark stands alongside the trail in Wilkeson, Washington. By partnering with us, the Foothills Rails-to-Trails Coalition ensures that donations to the project are tax-exempt.To find out more about the Foothills Rails-to-Trails Coalition, visit their website.
The project is organized with the support of Grindline, which provides a bridge by connecting local youth who have a passion for skateboarding with a community's goal of providing a safe, durable park. Grindline produces the most innovative, original skatepark designs out there today – building custom recreational experiences for skateboarders and residents alike. Grindline is skater-owned and operated so as life-long skateboarders, Grindline can translate the needs of local skaters into a skatepark design that works for them now and into the future.To find out more about Grindline, visit their website.


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In the evening of September 8, CNS issued an announcement that a strategic cooperative framework has been signed with PEARSON education, the largest education group in the world. Deep cooperation will be conducted regarding to teaching materials of primary education, digital education products, international education and so on. According to analyst, the most leading digital education solutions in China and the world is a common goal of both sides. As cooperation moving forward, their cooperation on capital also worth expecting.
PEARSON is the largest and best education publisher in the world with 60% income from digital publication of textbooks and services. And China has become its third largest market and Chinese is the second largest group of its employees. CNS, a company made the earliest investments and input into online education in China, built a joint venture with HUAWEI on January 19 in 2011, namely, Tianwen Digital Media Group, with a registered capital of 320 million RMB.
It can be seen from the cooperation that their aim is to set the benchmark for China's online education. First, they seek cooperation on developing digital education theories and building standards, which will help China's education and publication march forward faster and better at the top level. Second, they target at primary and middle school textbook market. CNS enjoys abundant clients and distribution channels while PEARSON boasts advanced philosophy, framework, textbooks and resources. Third, they will work out the most leading digital education solutions suitable for China and the world. Fourth, they also discuss about cooperation in international market, and face the possibility in capital cooperation.
Under the framework, CNS will utilize its advantages and influence in Chinese market, acting cooperation agent and popularize PEARSON's renowned educational products, include but not limited to textbooks, teaching materials, assessments and training methods in English, science and other subjects. Besides, new powerful brands and products could be made at the same time. Taking advantage of CNS's experience and resources in domestic education, combined with PEARSON's experience in establishing international standards of education and digital education, original edition textbooks will be imported, textbooks and teaching materials be tailored for Chinese market, leading brands for education be created. What's more, cloud platform will be formed for integration of good quality resources, services and products such as application of big data, digitized products, STEM, international assessment system of English, teaching staff training. Tianwen Digital Media Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd, located in Longgang district of Shenzhen city, is a service provider that can radiate other regions. As for international market, both sides should develop a new mode for capital cooperation. Support will be provided for innovative projects in educational sector through using capital leverage and feeding information and experience. An inclusive and visionary layout responding to domestic and international related businesses' further development requirements will be arranged. For example, an online system for international high school study that synchronized with that in US and UK.
Analysts point out that online education market worth 90 billion RMB in 2015, 200 billion RMB in 2017. The cooperation between CNS and PEARSON right before the outburst of the market stands as an important coordinate for digitized Chinese education, and marks a jumbo player entering in the market.