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Amazon will give you credit -- in the form of Amazon Coins -- if you buy apps from the company's new Appstore Developer Select program.
The effort is Amazon's latest to kickstart its app store, as it looks for ways to encourage developers to make better tablet apps.
The program, which Amazon rolled out Tuesday, asks developers to build their apps specifically for newer Android tablets, such as Amazon's Kindle Fire line. In exchange, Amazon will promote those apps, featuring them in a special section of its app store to increase the chances consumers will buy them.
That effort, the company hopes, will also attract more developers to its fledgling platform. Amazon's app store has roughly 100,000 apps, but that figure is overshadowed by the 375,000 apps that developers have created specifically for Apple's iPad. For developers, the program means another way to get to the holy grail of app development: a way to standout in a sea of other apps.
"We've heard from a lot of developers that are not getting discovered, not only in our app store but any app stores really," Appstore Director Aaron Rubenson said. "It is still a challenge because there's a lot of high-quality apps out there."
These incentives for developers include prominent placement in the Appstore, credits toward Amazon Web Services, and advertising through its mobile ad network, which also places ads on the lock screens of Kindle tablets.
Additionally, Amazon will put the apps in the Amazon AppStore Coins Rewards category. When customers purchase apps from that category, they get Amazon Coins in return. When customers buy a "select" app or in-app item for the first time, they will receive 250 coins (worth $2.50 in credits) to use for future purchases. Subsequent select app purchases will reward customers with coins worth about 30 percent of their purchase.
Amazon will automatically enroll apps in the program if they meet its requirements. This means the app has to look good, function well on a tablet, and incorporate Amazon's developer platform features like its Game Circle leaderboard for games, or in-app purchasing.
When apps aren't optimized for devices, there are noticeable quirks that can distract users from the app's content. If an app was made for a smaller device, like a smartphone, but placed on a tablet, you may see a black border or grainy, blown up images depending the device's screen resolution.
Rubenson said many apps already qualify for the program and those developers will notice they are enrolled immediately. The other developers will see what changes they need to make to qualify. He wouldn't say how many apps fall into that category.
This isn't the first time Amazon has added incentives for consumers and app developers to help expand its collection of apps. Amazon Coins themselves are a way for Amazon to get consumers to buy more apps in its Appstore, which in turn lures developers. This also holds true for the integration of Amazon 1-click for in-app purchases. But, this is the first program with so many developer rewards. Amazon is re-sending the message that it's open for business.
Steve Felter, the CEO of game development platform GameSalad, said Amazon's Appstore is often overlooked due to the dominance of Google's and Apple's app stores. GameSalad is an Amazon partner. The company's developer tools are free to Amazon game developers until the end of November.
The promotion is meant to encourage developers to port -- a way to take apps built for one type of operating system and recreate it for another system -- their games, particularly iOS games, to Amazon's store.
Apple's App Store hosts 900,000 apps, while the Google Play Store boasts over 1 million apps.
"A lot of people get these dollar signs in their eyes and look at the (Apple) App Store and Google Play," Felter said, "but there's a lot more competition on those platforms."


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For over thirty years, historians in the United States have written about slavery in terms broached by John Blassingame's path-breaking book The Slave Community (1972). Blassingame, George Rawick, Lawrence Levine, and many other contemporary scholars brought slave culture and society to the foreground of historical writing.1 Community, after all, was a key word in the new social history. For revisionist historians "community" signaled a broad attack on a consensus history.2 In scores of community studies, these scholars showed that working people were not the acquisitive individuals of consensus history but struggled for autonomy from the transformations of capitalism and its agents by establishing broad, durable solidarities among themselves.3
Historians of the slave community found a similar pattern. They documented, in brilliant detail, the extended black family, a distinctive African American vernacular culture, a spectrum of resistance from rebellion to running away, and a humming informal economy. Based on these accounts, scholars made two broad claims. First, a universal solidarity defined the slave community. George P. Rawick, who edited the WPA slave narratives upon which much of the new scholarship drew, wrote as if the Deep South were one vast slave community from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic seaboard. "[I]n the deep South, the area of the larger plantations, [runaways] could go from slave quarter to slave quarter and find shelter and food." Second, the slave community was autonomous. Slaves devised their own family structures, an African American culture, and methods of resistance free from owners' influence. For these scholars, what defined the slave community was autonomy and solidarity.4
|Natchez District of Mississippi, circa 1840 (large version)
Attending to the human geography of slavery builds upon the slave community scholarship, and moves beyond it. Testimony in the pension files of former slaves who served in the Union Army reveals that slaves talked about their society not in terms of "community" but "neighborhood." In the Natchez District of Mississippi, neighborhood meant adjoining plantations because that was the arena of slaves' everyday routine. And if we consider slave society from this standpoint, what is most striking is not the monolithic character of the slave "community," but its plurality. Scholars such as Deborah Gray White, Brenda Stevenson, Michael Johnson, and Michael Gomez have pointed out how slave society was divided along lines of gender, between town and country, and African ethnicity.
The human geography of rural neighborhoods demarcated another faultline. Slave society was not a single community but an archipelago of many neighborhoods, each with its own history and solidarities and with complicated relationships to other neighborhoods. Moreover, slaves were compelled to share the neighborhood terrain with owners, who were inextricable fixtures here. So the categorical separation of autonomy vastly oversimplifies a complex human geography of slavery where slaves and owners were compelled to contend and collaborate with one another constantly on the overlapping, interlocked terrain of neighborhoods.
To examine how neighborhoods change our understanding of slave society, consider the ways this social terrain shaped one woman's life. Mary Ann Helam was born in Kentucky. Like thousands of other slaves during the 1830s, she was forced into the Second Middle Passage that sent over 750,000 slaves from the Upper South to the Deep South between 1830 and 1860.5 The traffic in human property continued after slaves arrived in their new locales. Recent work on the slave trade suggests that local sales vastly outnumbered inter-regional sales between the Upper and Deep South.6 Helam had one owner in Kentucky, and three owners in Mississippi. Slave trading continually brought new people in, shifted prior residents out, and put every neighborhood in a perpetual state of flux.
Kinship was the strongest tie binding slave neighborhoods. In Mississippi, Mary Ann Helam named her first-born daughter Chassy after her own mother back in Kentucky. Mary Ann and Chassy were sold together to a second owner in Mississippi. They were separated, however, when Mary Ann was sold to her third owner in Mississippi and Chassy was sold back to Kentucky. Mary Ann Helam was luckier than most newcomers to find even one familiar face in her new neighborhood. Rose Ballard, who also belonged to Helam's first owner in Mississippi, had arrived on the Brown place several years earlier. Now, Ballard could ease Helam's way into her new neighborhood.
The neighborhood, in turn, helped reconcile Helam to new family ties. In 1845 Helam's owner asked her to marry a man he had just bought, William Madison. She refused. Her owner would not take no for an answer. "I was told to marry this man by my master. I got 50 lashes on my back to make me marry him." And so she married, in a wedding at Belle Grove Church, "a colored peoples church," she noted. Helam and Madison stayed together over twenty years, until he died in the Union army in 1866. By her account, their neighbors helped turn this forced concubinage into an enduring marriage. Her friend Rose Ballard married the same day, and Helam and Madison named their son Sidney, after Rose's husband. The rest of the folks at Belle Grove that day, Helam noted, were slaves "in the neighborhood."
Slaves also made neighborhoods through struggle. Indeed, slaves struggled with owners over neighborhood space itself. Slaves constantly sought passage to adjoining places, and owners resorted to a host of instruments and agents — the whip, the ball and chain, slave patrols, overseers, packs of dogs, and passes — to control slaves' mobility and social space.
Yet slaveholders had to live with slave mobility. Enslaved teamsters carted cotton and provisions between plantation and town, usually without supervision, for days at a time. And planters knew not to provoke a contest of wills every time slaves sought to visit adjoining plantations. Slaves understood their owners' dilemma and capitalized on it, getting passes to travel in the neighborhood when they could, and traveling surreptitiously when they had to.
Slaves forged alliances along neighborhood lines. This geography of solidarity is starkly revealed in slaves' encounters with runaways. Fugitive slaves routinely lay out in their own neighborhood, where folks could be relied on for food and support. Food rations to slaves were hardly generous, so feeding runaways frequently required theft, which risked penalties ranging from a whipping to sale. Confrontations between slaves and runaways were often confrontations between neighbors and fugitive strangers. Indeed, plantation records, slaveholders' diaries, and newspapers are filled with instances of slaves capturing runaway strangers to protect themselves and their neighbors from the risks that went with harboring them. Capturing fugitive strangers drew neighborhood boundaries dramatically; runaways acknowledged these boundaries furtively, by avoiding contact with slaves outside their neighborhood whenever possible.
As a terrain of both solidarity and struggle, neighborhoods proved rough going for slave rebels seeking to muster sufficient forces across a wider geography. In the spring of 1861, as slaveholders in the Natchez District mobilized for war, slaves around Second Creek in Adams County plotted insurrection, building upon neighborhood solidarities, yet constrained by the limits of this social terrain.
Slave Neighborhoods along Second Creek
Plotters worked their neighborhood ties, especially kinship. From Brighton Plantation, the central locus of the conspiracy, Orange and Harvey, father and son, carried the planning to adjoining Waverly and Grove. Orange imagined the rebels making a circuit through his neighborhood, beginning at Brighton, then on to adjoining places, Waverly, Fair Oaks, Beau Pres, Forest, and back to Grove. These rebels made some progress in striking the necessary alliances between neighborhoods. And yet, if the conspiracy advanced along neighborhood lines, it also came undone here. Drawing slaves from other neighborhoods into the plot proved difficult.
Charles Davenport's testimony many years later in the WPA narratives offers a glimpse of what one recruiter ran up against at Aventine Plantation, on the other side of Second Creek. "One night a strange nigger come en he harangued de ole folks but dey wouldn't budge." When the sheriff rode up, the recruiter fled. He was captured and hanged the next day. On Aventine, like any unfamiliar neighborhood a rebel tried to enlist, the call to insurrection demanded slaves risk all on the word of a stranger and understandably left them unmoved. What ultimately ended the conspiracy was not divisions between slave neighborhoods but the inherent dangers of sharing this terrain with slaveholders. The risks of discovery caught up with the plotters when Brighton men were overheard by a white boy, who alerted planters to the conspiracy. A self-appointed "Vigilance Committee" crushed the revolt; at least twenty-seven slaves were hanged.
If pension-record and archival testimony offers ample evidence of slaves creating neighborhoods through everyday social relations — contending with owners and other slaves, socializing, making crops and making families — human geography uncovers some of the complexities of place-making among slaves on the ground. Scholars of human geography are interested in understanding how people turn space into place and social space into places invested with meaning.
Storytelling, for instance, is a brilliantly productive mode of place-making.7 Creating and circulating stories became an important means of making neighborhoods, as the many narratives in the pension files, gathered decades after slavery, attest.
Human geography makes much of the permeability of boundaries and the fluidity of all social spaces. In the antebellum South, the centers and margins of slave neighborhoods constantly shifted, for example, as slaves threw new land into cultivation at owners' behest, turned wild places into cotton rows, laid bare hideaways for runaways and sacred places for clandestine worship, and compelled fugitives and Christians to find new sites for these and other forbidden activities. Neighborhood was an important space in slave society, but it did not delimit the boundaries of experience.
Human geographers offer historians different ways to think about agency.8 People turn spaces into places. Historians of slavery have written reams about the agency of slaves, invariably in terms of intent. To be sure, slaves made their neighborhoods, but not necessarily because they intended to make neighborhoods. Intention is not what agency is all about. People's actions, much of the time, effect society with unintended consequences. I never found evidence of one slave telling another she was going over to the next plantation to make a neighborhood. Slaves went over to the adjoining plantation to court, or work, or worship God, or to talk, "to go visiting," as they often put it.
Human geography offers a shifting conception of space that breaks down the tired dualism between agency and structure; a false opposition that represents another bequest of the liberal intellectual inheritance. The agency-structure dichotomy insists that the autonomous individual invariably confronts the institutions, conventions, and mores of society as obstacles to be avoided, evaded, or overcome. Yet many institutions obstruct as well as enable agents. Neighborhoods facilitated slaves' social life, by demarcating arenas for courting, religious fellowship, and social solidarity. But neighborhoods also constrained social life by prescribing activities to customary places, even if the boundaries were not impermeable.9
Human geography helps us move beyond the slave community with a range of concepts premised on the give-and-take between people's everyday practices, consciousness, and society. When we consider how deeply places are inscribed on people, how deeply people inscribe themselves on places, and how deeply people's sense of themselves is informed by their inscriptions upon place, the separation between the individual and society at the crux of the duality of agency and structure ceases to make much sense. So does the notion of slaves' autonomy from owners and from slavery itself. If we take seriously how people made and remade places, often with entirely different ends in mind, we can begin to understand in new ways what slavery was like on the ground, how slaves exercised and contended for power, as well as the complex and reflexive processes in which they fashioned themselves and their society as they made and remade their neighborhoods.
This essay is adapted from Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). Thanks to Allen Tullos for his encouragement and editorial acumen.
About the Author
Anthony E. Kaye is an assistant professor of history at Pennsylvania State University, University Park. He is currently working on a book for Hill and Wang about the Nat Turner revolt of 1831 in Southampton County, Virginia.
- 1. John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979) George Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972); Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
- 2. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955).
- 3. See, for example, Herbert G. Gutman, Work, Cutlure, and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History (New York: Knopf, 1976); Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976); Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).
- 4. George Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup, 110. See also, for example, Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985); John M. Vlach, Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
- 5. Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 161-63.
- 6. Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 145, 157-73, 291-96, Appendix B.
- 7. Nicholas J. Entrikin, The Betweenness of Place: Towards a Geography of Modernity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.
- 8. Formative works in the literature of human geography include Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); David Harvey, The Limits to Capital, new ed. (1982; London: Verso, 1999); Doreen B. Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Linda McDowell, Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Yi-fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977); Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
- 9. Giddens, Constitution of Society.

subset: commoncrawl


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Photoshop Express: Adobe's New Free Web App
Adobe announced today the launch of the long-awaited Web component to its flagship digital-imaging application, Photoshop. Debuting today in public beta, Adobe Photoshop Express is a free online photo-sharing, editing, and storage site. As of its launch, users will be provided with 2GB of free storage and integration with popular Web apps such as Facebook and Photobucket. Further partnerships with sites like Flickr to come.
"Photoshop is trusted technology that has changed the visual landscape of our world. Now, Photoshop Express allows anyone who snaps a digital photo to easily achieve the high-impact results for which Adobe is known," Adobe vice president of Consumer and Hosted Solutions Doug Mack said. "Photoshop Express is a convenient, single destination where you can store, edit and share photos whether you're at home, school or on the road."
Designed to be, in part, an entry into the sometimes intimidating Photoshop, Express offers a number of tools aimed directly at beginners, including user-friendly one-click versions of essential editing tools, including cropping, blemish and red-eye removal, sharpening, and resizing. A number of other effects are also offered at launch, including sketch, pop color, and distort.
Photoshop Express also boasts a number of sharing options, including a built-in Gallery feature, slideshows, and export and import from social networking services such as Facebook. Photos need not be public, of course: Adobe assured us that the site offers a number of robust privacy options so that only the people you authorize can see your photos.
We received a briefing on the service late yesterday, and I was very impressed with what I saw. Aesthetically, the site borrows heavily from the design of CS3's Bridge app, with a clean, gray menu. The adept use of Flash on the site makes it one of the smoothest feature-rich online apps I've seen.
In ease of use, Express makes Photoshop look downright enigmatic. Tasks like red-eye and blemish reduction are easily executed with a single click. For less-intuitive features such as exposure, the app provides thumbnails of several different grades to choose from.
Between the instant name recognition that comes with the Photoshop brand and the incredibly rich tools sets it offers, this slick app has a pretty good chance of rising swiftly to the top of the online digital-imagining heap. Look for our full review soon at PCMag.com.


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SOLEX College
SOLEX College is an accredited two-year degree granting institution offering quality educational programs in Accounting, Medical disciplines and English language training. SOLEX College offers three locations in and around Chicago, USA, including Chicago Loop.
SOLEX College offers three different English language programs : 1. Regular Intensive English Program is a great mix of academic and functional English and is perfect for those students who want to get the highest quality of study in 18 hours per week. The Intensive English Program (IEP) is designed to foster the development of English proficiency in a high-energy environment; 2. Intensive English Plus Program gives students the opportunity to study in the classroom for 24 hours per week, expanding their learning to include more practice with conversational English, and grammar acquisition; 3. Advanced Studies program is for students who are interested in expanding their knowledge of English to the highest level possible. Students in this program will study great writers of this country in American Literature. Also included in the Advanced Studies program is a comprehensive and intensive preparation for the TOEFL exam, taught by quality instructors who will get students ready for university studies.
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McCloud's DSDHA scheme in Stroud approved for planning
Ecobuild is always incredibly useful for catching up with people. This year the high point was definitely being on stage (or rather on a sofa) with Kevin McCloud as part of the UK-GBC's Big Tent speaker series, orchestrated by Simon McQuirk. What struck me about seeing Kevin in action at close range was how he manages to tie together all sorts of issues and be at the same time informative and relatively jargon-free. His holistic approach to housing at Hab is all about building community and he's says it starts with landscape. Some tactics are gently subversive - planting espaliered apples trees between front gardens encourages neighbours talk to each other to sort out who gets the first apple. I tried to tease out whether there's an element of imposing sustainable lifestyles on people here; he deftly sidestepped, with the observation that, as in all communities, people are free to participate - or not.
Hab's big news is that their next development, DSDHA's 78-unit Cashes Green in Stroud, received planning permission last week. I had a quick run through the scheme with DSDHA and Luke Engleback who did the landscape work at the Triangle and is carrying on with other Hab projects in the pipeline: a 230-unit development in Swindon, three sites in Oxford and another in Stroud. It's scaling up.
Cashes Green's sloping site (3- 4 metre fall across the site) is more complex than the Triangle with many mature trees and existing Edwardian hospital buildings. Features from the existing buildings such as chimney pots, finials, quoin stones, and copings will be re-used. As at the Olympic Park, most of what is on site will remain there - if only transformed into paths, sub-base etc.
Luke explains:
The site had been an inaccessible block, fenced off, between halves of the Cashes Green community, and in opening it up there is real opportunity to combine place-making with our collective aim of promoting conviviality and a transition towards 'one planet living'. Part of the site had previously been allotments, and our plan was able to conserve as much as we could. The allotments have already been re-occupied by locals growing their own food. That was last summer and well in advance of the the contractors starting on site a couple of weeks ago. Existing plum trees with fruits of various hues are being conserved, too - they were heavy croppers last year and , I must say rather tasty!
As at the Triangle, water is handled through surface drainage via dishes channels and swales and harvested water is impounded. At the heart of the scheme, a residents' garden is bordered by small patio gardens. A surprising departure from the Triangle is key fob access to the garden for residents only. The planting is much more lush - with a series of terraces planted with a mix of aromatic shrubs and fruit plants like black currants and redcurrants. The 'borrowed landscape' of the garden is an extension of the private patios set behind hornbeam hedges and pleached lime trees. A heavily planted street is intended to help 'absorb' the cars, according to Engleback.
After the Kevin event, I was able to have a good wander. For several years running now, the UK-GBC stand has been a focal point for activity with an increasing number of its members taking adjacent stands to create a bit of a buzz. It seems to work. I couldn't resist snapping this picture of Paul King in his elevated meeting room where he reigns over the stands.
ZedFactory had its usual prominent stand, featuring its latest offering ZedLife - a foray into transport with PV bike racks and kiosks. There is a plan to prototype a kiosk in Brighton, where the recently rejected PortZed will be taken to appeal. Bill retrieved his stands from customs at 4am on the Tuesday of Ecobuild, just back from China.
During the last hour of Ecobuild 2012, it was refreshing to happen upon Liz Male PR's tea party on her Ska-rated stand complete with hanging plants. With the assistance of Grigoriou Interiors (one of the developers of Ska Rating), Liz undertook to 'ska rate' her entire stand - quite a feat for a temporary installation. Wonder how many others at Ecobuild can claim that?
Readers' comments (2)
"What struck me about seeing Kevin in action at close range was how he manages to tie together all sorts of issues and be at the same time informative and relatively jargon-free"
What struck me about when I met Kevin was his aloofness and failure to follow up on promises.
Go to Howse Graden and look for the meadow flowers. Ask a resident to see the build quality...
Ask the man with MS how his flats back door opens.....or tap flows.....
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How To Start A Blog and Make Real Money
Here's How I Built and Sold My Blog for $1 Million Dollars
So – you've decided that you want to start a blog, but you're not really sure how to proceed?
No worries – you will find all your questions answered in this friendly and easy to understand, step-by-step blog setup tutorial!
By the time you're finished reading this tutorial on how to start your own blog, you'll be able to have your site up & running in less than an hour.
Before you can create a blog you have to make sure you find an appropriate domain name and a reliable web hosting service. You have to be very careful when deciding what services to choose, as this can play a big role on the overall performance of your blog (stability, speed, up-time…). We will show you exactly where to find the best deals as we go along.
In case you are not familiar with the terms above, a domain name is the primary address of your blog , also known as the URL (www.example.com). It is essential to understand that the domain itself (although an important part of the website) does not represent the actual blog . Instead, it only serves as a pointer as to where your blog is located (Hosted).
This is where a web hosting service comes in. Web hosting provides you with the web-space necessary to support your content. It serves as a skeleton for your blog .
After you've successfully set up your domain name and web hosting service (which only takes about 5 minutes), it all comes down to configuring your blog . We will be using a free software platform called WordPress. It is a very simple platform that enables users to build professional looking blog within minutes!
Are you ready? Alright – let's get started!
STEP 1 – Choose Your Domain Name
First you will need to decide what domain name you want for your blog . Obviously, this depends on what the blog is about, whether it is a personal blog , business blog, etc.
There are no "Rules" to what domain name you should choose, but here are a few ideas that might help you choose a suitable domain:
- Try to make it relevant to the content of your blog ,
- Make it simple and easy to remember,
- Make it as short and descriptive as you can,
- Use the right extension (preferably .com/ .net / .org)
For example, if you're going to build a blog about »relationship advice«, you could pick a domain name like: www.relationshipadviceonline.com – this is just off the top of my head…
Once you have an idea of what domain you want to use, enter it into the domain name availability tool below to see if it is available.
If your first choice of domain name is already taken, you can usually just a add a word or two to the beginning or end of it.
For example, if your first choice was DogTraining.com and it was taken, you could try, DogTrainingGuide.com or SimpleDogTrainingTips.com or something like that.
Once you have found a domain that you like, you can move on to the next step.
Step 2 – Set Up A Web Host Account
I recommend using a company called GreenGeeks.com to register your domain and host your blog , they are an American company and have great services & support at a very competitive price.
So head on over to GreenGeeks.com:
Click Here Get 20% Off at GreenGeeks!
When you get there, you should see something like this:
Once you can see the screen above, click on the "Order Now" button and you will then see the page below:
You will need to enter your desired domain in the box to the left and then click "Continue". (If you already have a domain name, then enter it in the right hand side box.
Quick Tip: If your first choice of domain is not available, you will see an error message, if that happens then just keep trying different variations until you find one that is available.
Once you have found a domain name that you are happy with, you should see the Secure Order Form below. Simply fill out the Order form with all your details, and choose a suitable plan.
Quick Tip: I usually try to pay for at least 12 months in advance, not only will you save a heap of money, but you also get your domain registration for free.
So once you have chosen your plan and filled out the rest of the Order Form, click on the "Create My Account" button at the bottom.
Next you will just need to wait for a confirmation email to come through with your login details. It can sometimes take a few hours to come through, but it generally happens pretty fast.
GreenGeeks may also call you to confirm your order, they have strict security measures in place to protect you (their clients) and their network, So they will just you to confirm a few things, and you will be on your way.
Once you have received your confirmation email from GreenGeeks.com you can continue with Step 2.
Step 3 – Setting Up Your Blog
Remember when I told you that you don't need any programming or graphic design skills in order to make a clean, professional looking blog in a matter of minutes?
Well, it's all thanks to a free CMS platform called WordPress. This platform actually makes the blog for you and all you need to do is to customize it to your own preferences!
Thanks to GreenGeeks's built in WordPress installer (Fantastico), we can set up our site in less than 5 minutes. That's one more reason why I always recommend this host.
So without further ado, fire up your browser and open up the GreenGeeks Account Manager (the link is below, but you will also find it in your email).
Click Here to go to the GreenGeeks Account Manager Login
It should look something like this:
Simply enter your email and password (that will be in the welcome email you received from GreenGeeks, and then click Login to Account Manager.
Next you will see a screen where you can manager your website:
Click on the blue "cPanel Login" button.
Once you're logged in, you will be astonished by the number of features that you can use, but for now, just focus on finding the blue smiley named »Fantastico De Luxe« and click on it.
In the newly opened window, in the left sidebar under the column entitled »Blogs«, click on the link »Wordpress«.
Once you're here, there are just 3 steps to do:
1) Click on »New Installation«
2) Select your domain in the drop-down menu, leave the »Install in directory« field BLANK (this is very important!) and fill in the details (username, password, site title…)
3) Click Install WordPress!
Once you do that, you will be given some information about your database (which you typically won't need right now), just press »Finish Installation«.
See how easy that was? I told you a 10-year-old could do it! Now wait a couple of minutes and try accessing your URL, you should see a default (twenty-eleven) WP theme installed:
Congratulations, you've now got a real, professional blog !
To configure your site, type /wp-admin after your url and press enter:
Once again, you will be asked to login. Simply use the information that you chose yourself while using Fantastico Deluxe (in the previous step).
Welcome to the WP dashboard. This is the main control panel of your entire website.
Everything you will do, you will do it from here. Adding new content, images, videos, installing themes, plugins – it's ALL done in the WP dashboard.
Let us check out some of the main features of WordPress:
1) Posts and Pages
WP allows you to create 2 different types of web pages: Posts and Pages. Posts are commonly used when you wish to host a blog (instead of an ordinary website).
This means that you can have post previews on your pages, so users can click on the link to read the entire post (this is a default blog layout).
On the other hand, you can also just use ordinary pages and have links to them from your »homepage« (the first page that is displayed once a visitor comes to your site).
Either will work, however, if you're creating a blog, you will want to get familiar with posts.
2) Media
This is an area in which all of your uploaded images and videos will be stored. You can upload media either here or directly while creating a page, it's entirely up to you.
Personally, I upload my media right on the spot, and then I can review my media here.
3) Links
WP also allows you to create various link categories which you can then populate with all sorts of links of your own choosing. This tool can be very useful when creating widgets.
4) Comments
You can enable or disable for people to leave comments on your website, which is absolutely fantastic. I highly recommend you enable people to leave a comment, as it encourages them to come back and participate in a conversation – this is how you build a community!
Of course, you can also set up comment restrictions, moderation, etc – totally flexible.
5) Appearance
This is one of the best features of WordPress – its ability to change your website's look entirely in just a few clicks! There is another free tutorial on our website that goes into this in deep details, so be sure to look for it.
6) Plugins
Another brilliant feature from WordPress. If you ever need anything for your website, you can bet that there's a free plugin for it – whether it be visitor counter, image slideshow, anything!
Simply search for what you need and install them with a single click – easy peasy.
Once again, all of this and more about how to set up WordPress after the initial installation is explained in our other free website tutorials – so be sure to check them out!
We would love to hear your feedback, did you like this tutorial? is there anything you didn't understand, or needs to be explained better? We want to make this site and these website tutorials the best they can be, so we value any and all feedback from our users. Just post any comments you have in the comments form below.
Also, if you are interested in learning how to start a blog, click here.
Thanks again.
Related Tutorials


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Singer Jason DeRulo has his broken neck to thank for bringing him closer to girlfriend Jordin Sparks because the injury forced the couple to spend more time together.
Before he shattered his C-2 vertebrae while rehearsing for a tour in January, 2012, singer admits he wasn't committed to the relationship, but when Sparks dropped everything to be with him he quickly realized it was time to get serious about the romance.
DeRulo explains, "She was awesome. That was the time period when we really got close. Beforehand, I wasn't really looking for a relationship, but she literally stopped everything that she was doing and flew down to Miami and took care of me. It was amazing.
"We were just seeing each other (before) and that was cool… but I thought that was amazing."
DeRulo, who spent the best part of a year recovering, now hopes to wed Sparks and make his grandmother's dreams come true.
He tells "Access Hollywood Live," "My grandmother is 91 and she says, 'My only wish before I die is to see you and Jordin get married.'"
But he adds, "I'm not engaged as of yet, but when the time is right…"


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-Patricia H.


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Annie Goodwin née Orchard, c. 1880-1882
Opalotype (165x215mm), A & G Taylor, 63 London Road, Derby
Created from copy negative or print c.1889-1890
Image © and courtesy of Karen Cross
The following is what I originally received from Karen:
The subject is Annie Goodwin née Orchard, twin sister of my great-grandmother Fanny Orchard. They were born on 27 February 1863 at Holy Trinity, Burton-upon-Trent, Staffordshire. She seems fairly young in the portrait so it may have been her eighteenth birthday or done so her twin could bring the picture with her to Australia. My great-grandmother Fanny married Arthur John Kidd of Kings Bromley and immigrated to Queensland Australia in 1882. They lived in Emerald until her death in 1946. The photo came into my family's possession through my grandmother Edith Annie Francis (née Kidd).This vignetted studio portrait shows a young woman, probably in her late teens, with her very long hair worn loose and down at the back, a fashion which was popular for unmarried girls up to the age of about 18, but not usually acceptable for married or older women. Geoff Caulton - on his British Photo Detective web site - refers to this style in Edwardian times being called a woman's "Crowning glory." The clothing appears to be roughly equivalent to the fashions from the early 1880s.
Detail of opalotype
The soft nature of the image, an effect largely due to the white glass used as a backing and often compared to watercolours or pastels, is demonstrated well in this example. Enlargement of the image demonstrates that the photograph has not only been coloured, but also significantly retouched, with much of the texture of her hair and the fabric of the clothing having been overpainted. Her lace collar has been very thickly embellished resulting in a three-dimensional effect. She may be wearing some kind of thin silk head covering.
Opalotypes - also known as opal types or milk glass positives - were introduced by Joseph Glover and John Bold of Liverpool, who patented their invention in 1857, but a number of methods of preparation were in common use by the mid-1860s (Towler, 1866; Waldack, 1865). They were made by applying photosensitised emulsion to the surface of an opal glass substrate, usually with a gelatine binder layer. The plate was then exposed to the negative either by contact printing or by use of a specially designed copying camera, and the image developed. The surface of the print was often colour-tinted by hand, and they were often cased in the same way that daguerreotypes and collodion positive portraits (ambrotypes) had been previously. Whitman et al (2007) describe opalotypes being produced until the 1940s, although the process was never very popular, perhaps due to the relatively high cost.
Reverse of opalotype, reproduced c. 1887-1890
Image © and courtesy of Karen Cross
The back of the opalotype shows several notable features, as follows.
- It has an underlying beige-coloured patina, worn away in places to reveal the milky white, translucent glass forming the base on which the photograph was made.
- A small rectangular label is affixed to the top right hand corner of the back, inscribed "Derb 22468" in handwritten pencil, probably a negative number from the Derby branch.
- The remains of four pieces of printed trade label are affixed roughly centrally on each edge, perhaps used to hold it within a frame or mount at some stage in its history.
- At intervals around the edges are what appear to be yellowed tape marks, perhaps also used for framing or mounting, but more recently than the trade label fragments. The serrated leading edges and residue are typical of those produced by sellotape.
- Written on the patinated surface in what appears to be blue ball point pen, is: " Miss Annie Goodwin (Grandma Kidds twin Sister."
I've managed to reproduce an image of three quarters of the trade label using digital reconstruction, and this is enough to show that it was for A. & G. Taylor's branch studio at 63 London Road, Derby, operated by managing partner William Middleton, who also controlled branches in Sheffield, Nottingham, Goole, Doncaster and Barnsley. Although not definitive proof that the opalotype was made there, in conjunction with the negative number of presumed Derby origin ("Derb 22468"), one could certainly make a strong case for it.
The address of the Derby branch changed from 57 London Street to 63 London Road some time between October 1887 and October 1888, although I am fairly sure that this reflected a renumbering exercise and street name change rather than a physical move of the studio premises. It remained open until at least 1903. The Sheffield branch studio was at Furnival Chambers, 101 Norfolk Street from 1879 till 1904, while the Nottingham branch address was at 107 Parliament Street - also known as West End Chambers, Chapel Bar - from around 1882 until at least 1901. Victoria Street, Goole was home to a branch for a relatively short period between 1889 and 1891. Doncaster also had a branch at 32 Scott Lane from 1881 until 1889, and Osman (1996) records W. Middleton being a partner c. 1890. The only recorded date for a Barnsley branch (Sheffield Road) is 1904.
If one excludes Barnsley, the only period when all five remaining branches were open simultaneously was from 1889-1890. Although this dates the trade label rather than the opalotype itself, it is likely that the latter was produced around that time. The following comments were made by fellow photo researcher David Simkin, who very kindly looked the image:
The evidence seems to suggest that the photograph was originally taken around 1881/1882 in Derby (perhaps at A. & G. Taylor's studio in 57 London Street and at a later date (late 1880s/early 1890s) the image was transferred to [opal glass] by the studio that still held the negative or a copy photograph.In April 1881, at around the time this portrait was originally taken, Annie Orchard was living with her widowed mother Harriett (née Goodwin) at 185 Newton Road, Winshill, Derbyshire, on the opposite bank of the River Trent from the Staffordshire brewing town of Burton-upon-Trent. Her twin sister Fanny was employed as a nurse in the household of Robert Ratcliff - partner in the famous Burton brewing firm of Bass, Ratcliff & Gretton - and his wife Emily née Payne (my 3g-grandfather's frst cousin) at Newton Park, Newton Solney. The girls' father had died in 1866, leaving Harriet with four children under the age of six to bring up alone. Her youngest child, a boy named Samuel, died in 1871.
A number of reasons could account for wanting to transfer the image to a ceramic plaque - one that cannot yet be discounted is that Annie died young and the plaque was a sort of permanent memorial. If she wanted to send a copy of her photograph to Fanny a number of years after she had departed to Australia, why not a more recent photograph and why on a relatively heavy and fragile base? It would have been easier to send a cabinet or carte de visite portrait on a card mount. Alternatively, another relative could have brought the ceramic photo to Australia, or it could have been collected if Fanny ever returned to England for a visit to her family.
Although I've been unable to locate Annie in the 1891 Census, in 1901 she was single and living in Kensington, London, where she worked as a parlour maid for a brewery manager. It is tempting to conclude that she found this position through brewery trade contacts in Burton. Her elder brother William was still living in Winshill and working as a brewery labourer in 1891 and 1901. Her unmarried status is a little difficult to reconcile with Karen's description of her as "Mrs Annie Goodwin née Orchard," although she may well have married after 1901.
Orchard-Botham-Smith outline tree
Click to enlarge
Finally, I discovered during the course of my research that Annie's father Henry Orchard (1826-1866) was second cousin to Jacob Botham Smith (1840-1925), who featured in a series of articles on Photo-Sleuth two years ago, entitled "A mystery marriage in Barton-under-Needwood."
Annie Orchard (left), the wedding party of Jacob Botham Smith & Mary Ann Hoult (right)
Osman, Colin (1996) The Studios of A. & G. Taylor, the Largest Photographers in the World, Supplement to The PhotoHistorian, No. 111, March 1996.
Payne, Brett (2008) A. & G. Taylor of the Royal Studio, 57 London Street and 63 London Road, Derby, Derbyshire Photographers' Profiles.
Towler, J. (1866) The Silver Sunbeam: A Practical and Theoretical Text-Book on Sun Drawing and Photographic Printing, New York: Joseph H. Ladd, 5th Edition, p. 392-403.
Vaughan, Roger (2004) The Studios of A. & G. Taylor, Victorian & Edwardian Photographs.
Waldack, Charles (1865) Treatise on Photography, Cincinatti: H. Watkin, 4th Edition, p. 247-251.
Whitman, K., Osterman, M. & Chen, J.-J. (2007) The History and Conservation of Glass Supported Photographs, George Eastman House, Advanced Residency Program in Photograph Conservation, p. 25-26.


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How creative are you? That's the question that CanvasPop is helping designers answer this year at the 2014 99U Conference by Bēhance. Not only are we super stoked to be in attendance at the conference, but we're proud to have created some awesome canvas prints for their Art Director's Club Kickoff Meet & Greet as well.
The 2014 99U Conference by Bēhance brings together some of the world's most creative, and dynamic people. This year it's taking place in New York City from May 1-2. The two day event gives attendees the chance to mingle with … Read more


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Heitkamp defends gun vote
Heidi Heitkamp's office was flooded with calls from North Dakotans in the run-up to last week's high-profile vote to expand background checks on gun purchasers.
The overwhelming consensus: Vote no.
Story Continued Below
In an interview in her office this week, the freshman Democrat defended the biggest vote of her young Senate career, when she joined with three other Democrats and most Senate Republicans to oppose expanding background checks during commercial gun sales.
( Also on POLITICO: Giffords group hits McConnell, Ayotte)
"I think I always had a reputation as somebody who will listen, somebody who is pretty independent-minded but also believes that at the end of the day, you got to listen to your constituents," Heitkamp said. "In this office, the calls literally were before the last day at least 7 to 1 against that bill. This was after a series of very extensive ad campaigns done in my state saying call me and tell me to support it."
Heitkamp's opposition came after intense lobbying by President Barack Obama's chief of staff, former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly — and families of the victims from the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School last year. The vote turned Heitkamp from an unexpected victor of a 2012 Senate race to a liberal punching bag, fielding a sharp jab from Obama's former chief of staff, Bill Daley, who demanded a refund of his campaign donation.
( PHOTOS: Politicians with guns)
It all amounted to an unusual amount of attention for a woman who hailed from a town of 90 people, hadn't held an elected office for a dozen years and is so new to the Senate that she is still cramped in a small ground-level temporary office. But Heitkamp's vote last week serves as a stark reminder that Obama's domestic agenda rests largely on wooing both Republicans and red-state Democrats who are unafraid to buck their party.
Heitkamp said that she may have "disappointed" many, but she heard an outpouring of opposition back home that she couldn't ignore, forcing her to cast a critical vote against the plan.
Asked about polls showing more than 90 percent of voters supporting expanded background checks, including back home, Heitkamp doubted that was truly indicative of public opinion. She compared the polls to her improbable Senate win showing her down double digits to Republican Rick Berg just weeks before Election Day.
"That wasn't true either," she quipped.
"There was a lot of concern in North Dakota that there is always this push for one size fits all," she said. "North Dakota has one of the highest rates of gun ownership and the lowest rate of gun violence. And I think people there look at this from the standpoint that: This is my Second Amendment right. This is part of our culture in North Dakota. And they expressed those opinions to me pretty loud and clear."
Heitkamp's position underscores the fragility of the Senate Democratic majority and the constant challenges facing Obama's second-term agenda. In order to keep their Senate majority, Democrats recruited moderates like Heitkamp who could be elected in red states. But those same Democrats are hardly reliable votes for Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) as they try to usher through an agenda on guns, immigration and the deficit before the 2014 midterm elections dominate the national landscape.


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Nawal El Saadawi
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Nawal El Saadawi (Arabic: نوال السعداوى) (born October 27, 1931) is an Egyptian feminist writer, activist and physician, and an advocate of equal rights for women.
|This article on an author is a stub. You can help Wikiquote by expanding it.
- Many people think that female circumcision only started with the advent of Islam. But as a matter of fact it is well known and widespread in some areas of the world before the Islamic era, including the Arabian peninsula. Mohammad the Prophet tried to oppose this custom since he considered it harmful to the sexual health of the woman.
- The Hidden Face of Eve (1980)
- The hijab has nothing to do with moral values. A woman's moral values are reflected in her eyes, in the way she talks, and in the way she walks. They put on a hijab and go dancing, wearing high heels and lipstick. They wear tight jeans that show their bellies.
- Statement on Al-Arabiya TV (3 March 2007), as quoted in "The Hijab: Is it Religiously mandated?" by Farzana Hassan and Tarek Fatah at Islamic Research Foundation International, Inc.
Quotes about El Saadawi[edit]
- The words of 75-year old Nawal Al-Sa'dawi, Egypt's leading feminist on Al-Arabiya TV on March 3, 2007, reflected her bitterness at how the covering of a women's head has been misrepresented as an act of piety and the most defining symbol of Islam.
All Canadian women have at some time in their lives, chosen to wear a head cover. In blinding snow storms or in freezing rain, the covering of the head, irrespective of what religion one practices, is crucial to one's survival in a harsh winter. Halfway across the world, in the deserts of Arabia, whether one was a Muslim or a pagan, the covering of one's head and face was at times an absolute necessity, not just when facing a blistering sandstorm, but anytime one stepped out of the home in the searing sun.
What was essentially attire necessary for a particular climate and weather, has today been turned into a symbol of defiance and at best a show of piety by Islamists and orthodox Muslims.
There is not a single reference in the Quran that obliges Muslim women to cover their hair or their face. In fact the only verse that comes close to such a dress code is (33: 59) which asks women to "cover their bosoms".
- The Arab Spring did a great deal for women because the person who spread the word in the first place was a woman. Women participated in it; they were fully out there in the street. Nawal El Saadawi is a founding figure of Egyptian and Middle Eastern feminism who wrote a book opposing female genital mutilation (of which she is a victim). She's been banned. She's been in prison. She's now in her eighties and during the Arab Spring she was like the wise woman of Liberation Square, sitting in the middle of it as young women and young men came to her for instruction, for blessings, and so on.
But it's very often the case with revolutionary moments that women are present but then they're drummed out of it afterwards.


text:
Ten Reasons
Hire An Artist
Tom Purcell, 5/23/2006 [
For Memorial Day - Guards of Ageless Honor
Guards of Ageless Honor
By Tom Purcell
Ted Pace served his country during World War II. Now 81, he and 21 other veterans are serving more than ever.
Four years ago, Pace, a member of American Legion Post 760 in Pittsburgh, saw a problem. With Second World War veterans dying in increasing numbers, he felt more needed to be done during their funerals to recognize their military service.
Though Congress mandated in 1999 that two active duty servicemen be available to participate in veterans' funerals, Pace wanted to do more. He established a full-fledged Honor Guard, recruiting from his post, as well as VFW Post 6664 located a few miles away. Soon, 22 fellows had signed on, veterans who served in WW II, Korea and Vietnam, veterans who were eager to serve again.
This band of brothers now participates in more than 270 funerals a year -- sometimes five days a week, sometimes twice a day. They've performed services in the mud in pouring rain. They've performed during blizzards and sub-zero temperatures.
Ask any of them why they do it and you'll get the same reply: It is their great honor to serve. Their service is all the more remarkable when you consider two-thirds of them are between 75 and 89 years old.
I met these incredible fellows a year ago when my Uncle Jimmy, a Vietnam veteran, was laid to rest. When I arrived, I found them standing at attention. Their shoulders were square, their uniforms perfectly tailored, their shoes and buttons expertly polished. They carried on as though my uncle had been a general.
They saluted Jimmy when we carried his casket from the hearse into the chapel. With great precision and clarity, the chaplain, 89-year-old Gene Frediani, recited a version of a soldier's prayer:
"It is the soldier who has given us all our freedoms. It's the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press. It's the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It's the soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us the freedom to object. It's the soldier, not the lawyer, who has given us the right to a fair trial.
"It's the soldier who salutes the flag, who serves under that flag and whose coffin is draped under that beautiful flag, who has given us the freedom to comfortably sit in our living rooms each evening with our loved ones.
"Our dear comrade, Jimmy Hartner, we bid you farewell and we express our great gratitude for the part you played in ensuring us that we may always continue to have all these wonderful freedoms."
The chaplain said another prayer. Then, in perfect unity, seven riflemen fired three shots. The bugler performed "Taps." The chaplain took three bullet casings from his pocket -- casings he had buffed and polished at home -- and held them up.
"These three spent cartridges represent Jimmy Hartner's rifle salute. They are symbols of duty, honor and love of country."
He placed the cartridges into the flag, which two active-duty servicemen took great pains to fold expertly. They handed it to my Aunt Celie and thanked her, on behalf of America, for Jimmy's service. It was a powerful display that left a roomful of people in tears.
It's impossible to be cynical in the presence of these Honor Guard men. In a free society, there should be debate about when to take up arms, but there is no debate about the men and women who serve.
Such respect was denied my Uncle Jimmy when he returned from Vietnam. He never talked about his service and it soon became a part of his forgotten past. But as we laid him to rest, his sacrifice was powerfully remembered and celebrated thanks to 22 remarkable men.
This Memorial Day, as we remember those who gave their lives in service to their country, let's also remember those who continue to serve, including 22 Western Pennsylvania Honor Guard volunteers, who are ensuring that others receive the honor, dignity and respect that they deserve.
Tom Purcell's weekly political humor column runs in newspapers and Web sites across America. Visit him at www.TomPurcell.com or contact him at email@example.com.
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The 12-million viewers who tuned into the final episode of "The Sopranos" in 2007 thought there was a good chance Tony Soprano would get whacked. There was an irrefutable logic to such a denouement: the mob boss had cheated death so many times; the HBO show was done; its brilliant creator, David Chase, was a stickler for classical dramatic theory; and somehow gutting the sole protagonist like a Jacobean-Jersey tragic hero was, really, the only satisfying way to end. We all knew that.
But Chase and his writers demurred, preferring an ambivalent fade to black, offering Tony Soprano a kind of wobbly immortality. No doubt there was a desire by these over-achievers to confound expectations. But whether it was conscious or not, no reasonable person could doubt that these writers ran away from that ending because they knew that their audience did not really want to see anything bad happen to any character played by James Gandolfini, because that would be like something terrifying happening to ourselves.
Gandolfini had found himself cast in an absurdly violent universe full of potential cliches. But over eight years in his most famous role, he created a character so astonishingly empathetic, the travails of organized crime easily became a metaphor for the quotidian struggles of the middle ages of life, when one is variously whacked in the head by the demands of family, annoyances at work, aging parents and the sense of the power and possibility of youth slowly but surely slipping away.
Perhaps that's why Gandolfini's death from a heart-attack on Wednesday at the age of 51, hit so many of us so hard. It felt like the cruelty of real life had done what the writers, the surrogate gods, on "The Sopranos" knew not to do with their charge. A gentle giant had been cut down while his back was turned.
At what point an actor comes to his or her craft matters. Start out young, pretty, entitled and smug, and one can easily remain in the thrall of those deadening priorities. Gandolfini had done other things with his big hands first: bricklayer, bouncer, truck driver. And yet he'd not just fallen into the profession but had arrived by way of studying, albeit partly by accident, the acting technique associated with the late Sanford Meisner.
Meisner's method teaches an actor to live truthfully in imaginary circumstances -- it does not matter how surreal those circumstances may be. Even if a fish is singing at him or her, a Meisner-trained actor understands the importance of opening the door into a scene with nothing whatsoever prepackaged, staying in the moment, listening to whomever (or whatever) is the partner in the scene and reacting accordingly. Spontaneously. With truth as a guide.
More than anything else, that study, combined with his talent, explains why Gandolfini's scenes in all of his work always felt so astoundingly alive. It was that way in "God of Carnage" on Broadway. When Gandolfini walked out on stage, trailing the baggage of Tony Soprano along with him, he instantly served notice that the past was the past and that everything in this otherwise ordinary play was now up for grabs. One did not know how any scene he was in was going to go on this particular night. And thus routine was banished and excitement took over.
Of course, not every Meisner actor can do what Gandolfini could. Plenty of actors have rage down cold. A smaller group knows how to be lovable. Very, very few can play at the outer limits of both those extremes, allowing for a character who evokes terror in the viewer, even as she would enjoy taking him out for coffee.
Gandolfini's range was astonishingly broad and flexible; perhaps even peerlessly so among his generation of American actors. In a single episode of "The Sopranos," he could easily go from the gentle family man, puffed up with twinkly pride at his daughter's little achievements, to a cold-blooded killer with dead eyes and lips smiling at the smell of blood. How did I miss this particular trait in that preceding scene?, we all used to think every week, marveling in our living rooms at the drastic change in this hypnotic character. Well, we missed it, time and again, because Gandolfini proffered truth as the changing circumstances of life demand.
Gandolfini, it always seemed, was not much interested in real-world power, he was a private man who preferred a quiet life away from the red-carpets and the over-articulated Hollywood and Broadway players. That's another trait of those lucky enough not to find fame too young. Gandolfini's shyness was evident from his work, his ease at slipping into the moments when a kid or a wife or a neighbor had the upper-hand, forcing his characters to skulk, unwilling or unable to adequately fight back. You can that natural gentility all over his performance in the aptly titled 2012 movie, "Killing Them Softly," which could have served as his professional epitaph.
Over the next few days, the evidence likely will show, plenty of men of a certain age will schedule a long-overdue physical or a cholesterol test with their doctors, or go for a run, or pick out a lighter sandwich at the deli. Gandolfini was famous all over the world for playing an unspeakably violent mob boss, a life that most of us boring saps could not even properly imagine. Yet his death feels like we have lost one of our own, one who struggled with that which we also struggled, one who could play the competing stresses we feel every day. If he could not last, then how can we?


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At Adventist Midwest Health, we are committed to providing outstanding and compassionate care within a healing environment.
Adventist Midwest Health is an integrated health care system of outstanding quality. We work as a partner with patients, families and healers to achieve optimal health for our patients and the communities we serve. We provide unsurpassed value by using practices based on the most up-to-date evidence and by coordinating comprehensive care for every patient in a highly personal environment.
Our employees draw motivation and direction from five strongly held principles. These principles guide the manner in which we treat each other and those we serve.
Excellence: For quality care and service with optimal outcomes that seek to exceed patient expectation.
Christian Service Motivation: Offering compassion, respect, and the belief that every life has value.
Stewardship: Enhancing staff development, nurturing the environment, conserving resources, and offering value for services.
Integrity: That generates trust, and offers consistency in decision making.
Inclusiveness: Inviting and affirming people from a spectrum of ethnicities and cultures to join with us in a healthcare ministry that extends the ministry of Christ.


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SAN BRUNO, Calif. (AP) -- Wal-Mart Stores (NYSE:WMT), the world's largest retailer, says it's setting up lockers in about a dozen stores so that shoppers who order on its website can pick up their items without having to wait in the checkout line.
The test, which is being conducted in an undisclosed market, is part of Wal-Mart's strategy to offer more convenience for Web-savvy shoppers to make their purchases wherever they want.
Wal-Mart officials disclosed the test Tuesday at a media event at its company's global e-commerce offices in San Bruno, Calif., located in Silicon Valley. The test accounts for just a tiny fraction of its 4,000 U.S. namesake stores.


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If you want to limit access to a suffix without disabling the suffix completely, you can modify the access permissions to allow read-only access. In this case you must define a referral to another server for write operations. You can also deny both read and write access, and define a referral for all operations on the suffix.
Referrals can also be used to temporarily point a client application to a different server. For example, while backing up the contents of the suffix, you might add a referral to another suffix.
If your suffix is a consumer in a replicated environment, the replication mechanism determines the value of the referral setting. Although you can manually modify the referral setting, the referral will be overwritten at the next replication update. For information about setting replication referrals, see To Perform Advanced Consumer Configuration.
Referrals are labeled URLs, that is, an LDAP URL optionally followed by a space character and a label. For example:
Because space characters are significant, any space characters in the URL part of the referral must be escaped using %20.
Set the referral URL.
$ dsconf set-suffix-prop -h host -p port suffix-DN referral-url:LDAP-URL
where LDAP-URL is a valid URL containing the host name, port number, and DN of the target.
For example:
$ dsconf set-suffix-prop -h host1 -p 1389 dc=example,dc=com \ referral-url:ldap://phonebook.example.com:389/
You can specify any number of LDAP URLs.
Set the referral mode in order to make the suffix read-only.
$ dsconf set-suffix-prop -h host -p port suffix-DN referral-mode:only-on-write
To make the suffix unavailable for both read and write operations, and to return referrals for all requests, set the referral-mode to enabled.
As soon as the command is successful, the suffix is read-only or inaccessible and ready to return referrals.
(Optional) When the suffix becomes available, disable the referrals to make the suffix read-write again.
$ dsconf set-suffix-prop -h host -p port suffix-DN referral-mode:disabled
When referrals are disabled, the suffix automatically becomes read-write, unless you have disabled the suffix itself by setting the enabled property of the suffix to off.


text: Tuesday, January 10, 2012 APTA 'Joins Forces' to Support Service Members and Families Today, APTA attended the launch of a new Joining Forces initiative aimed at increasing the involvement of health care associations and the providers they represent in the identification of traumatic brain injury, posttraumatic stress disorder, and post-combat depression in military members. The initiative partners the health care community with federal agencies to develop resources and educational materials to fully engage providers in meeting the needs of the nation's service members with these conditions, and their families. APTA is 1 of only 2 therapy associations invited to participate in the initiative. At the launch, attendees heard briefs at the National Intrepid Center of Excellence from several directorates of the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury, a presentation on the journey of a wounded warrior from the battlefield to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, and took a tour of the National Intrepid Center of Excellence. A session held at the White House continued with briefs from the Veterans Administration and a strategy session to forge a plan for the way ahead. APTA also attended a preconference strategy session last night at the residence of the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral James Winnefeld. Comments How exciting to see all the new efforts for Veterans in our profession. Our PTA Program will be hosting our second annual Bluegrass Attack to help fund Transitional Housing for local veterans who are homeless. IBMA award winning Bluegrass Band Balsam Range will be the primary artist group on Feb. 25, 2012 at 7:00 p.m. in the Broyhill Civic Cinter in Lenior, NC. We are working with our local Veteran's Advocacy Council and the VA Facility in Hickory, NC. This is our second annual Blue Grass Attack. Last year's funds went to our local hospital's effort to develope a Stroke Center. I know our roots in PT are in the military, but it's great to see as we complete one War, society is supporting our returning troops. I am married to a Vietnam Vet who did not see the same when he returned to the USA. Thank goodness times have changed. Martha Zimmerman, PT, MA PTA Program Director Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute Hudson, NC Posted by Martha Zimmerman on 1/13/2012 11:30 AM This all sounds good, but I'm a disabled veteran who needs physical therapy for pain management. How can the APTA help me find what I need. Currently, I relate to the VA OPC at Travis AFB, Fairfield, CA. Posted by Doug Monroe on 12/28/2018 11:59 AM


text: We asked Makers to post photos up of their workshops, and wow, they're great! Here are a few that just came in – if you have one, fire up the camera and post yours in the MAKE Flickr photo pool! We'll pick a few over the next couple weeks and give you something neat – Link.


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Frosting on the Cake
To undertake this mission, you'll once again need to head over to Tony's apartment on Feldspar Street, at the southern end of Algonquin. When you arrive, you'll find some familiar faces in Tony's living room, doing coke and generally having a good old drugged-out time. Evan is there, as well as Rocco, Gracie, and an unknown girl. Tony, of course, is passed out on the floor. Tony wakes him up and runs his head under the water yet again, and then they go outside. Tony gets into his limousine, leaving Luis to drive around his favorite person in the world -- Evan.
Your destination is over in Broker, a pretty familiar location for you if you're a veteran of Grand Theft Auto IV's main quest. Specifically, you're headed over to the Broker Navy Yard; your GPS will bring you there easily enough. After driving with Evan for a time and finally extracting some information out of him, you'll know by the time you arrive at the yard that you're going to buy some black market diamonds for two million dollars, money which may or may not be Tony's. The deal seems to go off without a hitch, but if this seems familiar to you, that's because it is. In the other GTAIV-centric DLC, The Lost and Damned, you play this mission from another point of view. You'll see some familiar bikers sneaking around, waiting to spring on those diamonds. After the deal is done, you'll be able to spring into action, defending the diamonds from the aggressive biker gang, The Lost.
For the first part of the escape, you won't be driving. Instead, someone else will take the wheel while you expertly throw explosives out of the window towards various enemies you encounter. Don't worry about spamming explosives here, as the game appears to give you more if you need them. You won't only have twenty-five to use for the duration. Remember to throw explosives and quickly detonate them. Static targets are easy enough to destroy, but since you'll be encountering plenty of moving targets as well, it's definitely a good idea to work on timing your throws and subsequent detonations. Throw at areas where you think the enemies will be when you decide to detonate the bombs. And of course, with enemies coming near you, you can simply throw the bombs on the ground directly behind you and detonate immediately.
Eventually, things will get decidedly more complicated. When you've managed to shake the bikers, the cops show up. You'll need to bomb them off of the face of the planet as well, so use the same techniques you've been using, and you should be fine. They'll throw a wrench in your escape plans when you're crossing the bridge back to Algonquin, first by sending a helicopter your way, and then an armored tank. Thankfully, both can be taken out easily with your explosives; simply wait for them to get close, throw, and detonate. It's at this point that the driver of your vehicle will be shot by the cops, so you'll now regain control of driving the vehicle. All you have to do is lose the cops, and you can then bring Tony back to his place to end the mission.
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