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The Great Taliban Jailbreak
It took years to lock them up. Hundreds of enemy fighters captured during some of the fiercest combat of the war. But then, one night last spring, as American troops surged into Taliban territory, all of those prisoners, all of that progress, disappeared. Poof. Luke Mogelson ventures down the rabbit hole to find them
When the stranger unbolted the cell door and whispered for them to hurry, Rahim assumed that somewhere in the prison a fight must have broken out. It was the middle of the night, and normally the heavy metal door remained locked until the morning call to prayer. For the past five months, Rahim had shared this cell, in Kandahar's Sarposa Prison, with five other captured insurgents, two of whom he'd fought alongside in the fiercely contested district of Panjwai. Now, from where they lay on old blankets and cushions on the floor, all five gazed uncertainly at the man standing in their doorway. "We are your friends," the man said. "There is a tunnel over here. Come quickly and get inside it."
Rahim and his cellmates stepped into the prison's dimly lit lime green corridor. At the passageway's far end, a metal gate sealed the cell-block entrance. Every ten feet or so, solid black doors led to more communal cells. Nearly 500 Taliban occupied this part of Sarposa, called the political block. Some were military commanders and shadow-government officials, others hardened foot soldiers and young recruits. Their arrests represented years of effort by coalition forces to quell a resuscitated insurgency and impose some semblance of law in one of the least stable regions in Afghanistan. Following the stranger down the long hall, Rahim noticed that most of the cells were now empty.
The group made its way quietly but without too much concern for the guards; Sarposa's officers seldom patrolled the political block. Once in the morning and once in the evening they came to take attendance; otherwise, the Taliban were left to care for themselves. Within the block's three contiguous wings, a council of elders resolved disputes, prisoners knitted blankets and clothes for those lacking them, and in an enclosed courtyard a detained imam led prayers five times a day. The cells themselves were lavishly furnished with comfort items delivered in large plastic bags by visitors every weekend—cushions, blankets, rugs, electric fans, and lamps. Periodic security checks invariably uncovered mobile phones secreted in the floors and walls. Since the Taliban consider music un-Islamic, radios were nonexistent. Instead, for amusement, inmates flipped over metal soup bowls and beat them in time with religious chants. As Rahim and his cellmates moved down the corridor, their footfalls were mu±ed by such a drumming.
American soldiers interrogate a suspected Sarposa fugitive.
Near the gated entrance at the end of the corridor, the stranger ushered the group into a cell adorned with old maps, embroidered tapestries, and a mirror hanging from a coatrack, decorated with an etching of an AK-47. A blue carpet had been pulled back from one corner of the cell to reveal a triangular hole in the floor. Rahim approached the jagged opening and peered inside. The striated walls tunneled down through half a foot of concrete, through an equally thin layer of foundational stone, and finally through some six feet of brown earth. Several prisoners gathered at its edge. Some were young fighters; a few were geriatrics or amputees. Rahim was in his early twenties but had lost his left leg a year earlier to an IED and now used a prosthesis. He watched an old man toss his crutches aside and lower himself into the floor. Rahim did the same.
The dirt below was dry and soft. It was so crowded that when Rahim fell to his knees and started to crawl, he bumped into the man ahead of him. As he inched forward, another prisoner jumped into the hole behind him. On all fours, his back scraping against the ceiling, Rahim wormed his way forward. Whoever had burrowed the passage had installed a series of light bulbs that hung from an electrical cord. But by now many of the bulbs had shattered, broken by passing prisoners, and pieces of glass littered the tunnel floor. After a few hundred feet, it was almost completely dark.
Built on the western edge of Kandahar, Afghanistan's second-largest city, a few feet from the congested Herat highway and bordered by residential neighborhoods, Sarposa Prison is a hulking symbol of government control in the traditional heartland of the Taliban. Administered by Afghans with the help of American overseers, its five cell blocks house the majority of criminals and insurgents captured in the beleaguered Kandahar Province. Naturally the facility ranks high on the target list for those still at large, and over the years Sarposa's officials have engaged in severaldeadly struggles with the Taliban, each one exposing the prison's defining characteristic: its vulnerability.
The Taliban first tunneled their way out of Sarposa in 2003, when forty-one prisoners escaped. After a weeklong search, only a handful were recaptured. In 2008 a delivery truck carrying two tons of explosives blew open Sarposa's main gate, allowing some thirty Taliban fighters on motorcycles to swarm the breach with AK-47's and rocket-propelled grenades. They killed at least nine guards and released well over a thousand prisoners (some 400 of them insurgents). One witness to the assault told me he was standing across the highway eating a pastry when the bomb blew out all the windows of the nearby shops and turned the air opaque with dust. "There were a lot of Taliban on this side of the road," the man said. "One of them had a machine gun in his hands and was yelling at the prisoners, 'Come out! Come out of the prison!' " A fleet of minibuses waited nearby to ferry the fugitives out of the city, back into the countryside.
Soon after, American and Canadian advisers, keen to prevent captured insurgents from rejoining the fight, helped Sarposa officials institute a host of security upgrades. They erected a new guard tower on the perimeter and covered open courtyards with metal mesh. They moved the first checkpoint farther back from the road, installed new blast walls, and strategically positioned sixty additional assault rifles and machine guns. A U.S. official giving a tour of the improved facility told reporters that the only chance of another escape was if the enemy "put a nuke on a motorcycle."
*Escape from Sarposa *
Taliban accounts tell how a single foot soldier masterminded the most intricate prison break of the Afghan war.—James Pogue
To disguise their operation, the Taliban diggers set up a working cement factory near the prison. During the five-month excavation, they sell 150 cinder blocks, "making much profit."
Worried that passing NATO tanks might collapse the tunnel, the team parks a truck just feet from the prison to test its integrity.
The diggers veer off course, adding 350 feet to the total length of the tunnel.
During the escape, prison spies are discovered. They are beaten and dragged through the stifling tunnel in handcuffs.
Nearly 500 Taliban exit through a breach in the prison's political wing.
The Taliban conceived a subtler strategy. A little more than a year after the assault on Sarposa, an insurgent whom the Taliban call Ihasan Ullah (no doubt an alias) came up with the idea to dig a tunnel from outside the prison rather than from within. According to the Taliban, Ihasan once spent three months in Sarposa as an inmate and, while there, committed its layout to memory. In an account of the prison break published on the Taliban's website, Ihasan himself is said to have initially
dismissed his own scheme as preposterous, a quixotic dream: "This fantasy and vision seemed laughable at first even to its owner. He dared not share his opinion with others." Eventually, however, while riding a motorcycle past Sarposa with two of his friends, Ihasan could no longer help himself—he revealed to them his secret ambition. Ihasan's friends "thought it was impossible and deemed it dangerous to attempt. But they placed their trust on Allah."
Ihasan drew up a plan and submitted it to the Taliban's shadow governor for Kandahar, Mullah Mohammad Isa. Isa rejected it out of hand. "No one was willing to even hear the idea," Qari Yousef Ahmadi, the Taliban spokesman for southern Afghanistan, told me. But Ihasan remained undeterred; he'd become convinced they could pull it off. After fleshing out the plan in greater detail, he returned to the governor, who consulted with his high command,** **a commission of Taliban elders assigned to advise him. This time the provincial leaders told Ihasan to start digging.
In the fall of 2010—while, just a few miles away, American soldiers were engaged in some of the bloodiest combat of the war among the orchards and vineyards of Kandahar's restive Arghandab Valley—Ihasan rented a small one-story building with a red door across the highway from Sarposa Prison. The building was said to be owned by Zia al-Haq, a young carpenter who kept a shop in front; behind the shop, Ihasan and his men built an annex and established a factory that filled steel forms with concrete for construction projects. At night, after the factory closed, four of them remained inside the building, pretending to be watchmen.
Ihasan himself swung the pickax while the others extracted the soil. As Ihasan burrowed farther from the building, the Taliban fid wheels from children's bicycles under steel barrows, fashioning carts to haul out the dirt. Back at the factory, Ihasan's helpers loaded the soil onto trucks and brought it to the bazaar, where it could be sold as brick-making material. Qari Yousef, the Taliban spokesman, says that Ihasan insisted on being the only digger. "I talked to him about it," Yousef told me. "He said, 'I never got tired of it. Each hour, each day, and each month I grew more excited, because I knew I was getting closer to my victory.' "
After two months, four additional Taliban joined the operation, and the pace increased to ten feet a night. When the tunnel was more than 300 feet long, the air inside grew thin, so the workers installed a long pipe with holes punched every few feet to deliver fresh air pumped from a large battery-powered bellows in the factory. After four months, with the tunnel more than two football fields long, Ihasan encountered a village water line and realized he'd strayed off course. Guessing he was somewhere beneath a neighborhood to the west of the prison, Ihasan downloaded a map of the facility from the Internet and used it to adjust course. When I asked Qari Yousef about this, he said, "That was not the first time we used the Internet for help. We downloaded a map when we attacked the Inter-Continental hotel in Kabul. For this prison, we got the map from Google."
By now, twenty-one Taliban were living in the small room behind the carpenter's shop, some of them filling the concrete forms during the day, others moving dirt from the tunnel at night. Their building shared a wall with a tiny electronics store that sold cell phones and SIM cards. When I recently met with the neighboring store owner, he told me that he'd never noticed anything suspicious about the men in the cement plant. "The door was always locked," he said. "We never talked to them." The shopkeeper's landlord, however, a man in his early twenties named Ghulam Nabi, apparently possessed a keener sense of intuition.
One afternoon, a couple of weeks before the actual escape, the shopkeeper said Nabi walked next door and stood in front of the concrete factory, attempting to see inside. The building's owner, Zia al-Haq, stormed out and confronted him. "Why are you standing in front of my gate?" Zia demanded. An argument ensued, and Zia produced a metal pipe from within his kameez, a long flowing tunic. He struck Nabi on the head, and Nabi fell to the ground. Zia hit him again with the pipe, then kicked him several times in the face, before going back inside.
The shopkeeper said he watched the whole incident through his window. He put Nabi in a taxi and brought him to the hospital. "His head wasn't broken, only blood was coming from his nose and mouth," said the shopkeeper. "In the taxi, he was just staring at me blankly. For three days in the hospital he said nothing. The day he died, they picked up his head, and brains came out of his nose."
The shopkeeper told me that the district chief of police, several guards from Sarposa, and agents from NDS (the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan's spy service) came to the house to investigate the murder. "They asked what was going on," he said. "We told them there was a fight between these two men. We told them this man was not allowing other people to stand in front of his building." If the investigators bothered to search the building, nothing struck them as out of the ordinary. The murder suspect, Zia al-Haq, had already vanished. A different man soon inherited the property. "After the Taliban escaped," the shopkeeper said, "that man also disappeared."
Guided by satellite imagery, Ihasan and his men successfully altered course and, in the spring of 2011, reached the middle of the prison. Between the team's cement-factory starting point and the political wing stood a much smaller cell block called Tawqif Khana, which segregated important Taliban commanders from the rest of the population. This became the team's secondary target. At night, one of the imprisoned commanders, who had a mobile phone and was aware of the plan, would tap the floor of his cell with a long metal stake used to tether livestock. By following the sound of the tapping, Ihasan was able to navigate directly under Tawqif Khana.
The team pressed on. After tunneling for another five days, covering some seventy-five feet beneath the prison grounds, they reached the political block. Now all that remained was for Ihasan to verify that the tunnel ended beneath the appropriate cell—cell 7, which belonged to the only Taliban prisoners in the block who knew about the operation. Ihasan's idea was to raise a blade through the earth that would barely break the cement floor and thereby discreetly pinpoint their location to the prisoners above. But there was a problem: The tunnel was five and a half feet underground and not even three feet tall. It could never accommodate a blade long enough to reach the surface. No matter. Ihasan procured a car jack and several short blades. One by one, he drove the blades up into the earth using the jack. When one blade was almost entirely inserted, Ihasan affid a new one behind it to push the lead blade higher. In this way, the Taliban said they located cell 7 on their second try.
The passageway completed, the tunnelers withdrew to the factory and readied themselves for the crux of the mission. Governor Isa and his high command decided that Ihasan "would himself be the commander of the prisoner extraction." On April 24 a team of suicide bombers was dispatched to stand ready near the prison in case the operation was discovered. To assist him, Ihasan chose five men from among the twenty-one Taliban living behind the shop. At 9 p.m., by cell phone, they alerted two prisoners in cell 7 and the commander in Tawqif Khana that the time had come. Within an hour, using the jack and steel pry bars, Ihasan's men had broken into Tawqif Khana;the concrete floor of the political wing was much thicker, but eventually they opened a second hole there. Four handguns and four knives were passed up to the prisoners, and Ihasan's men began fetching Taliban from their cells.
Deep in the tunnel, Rahim started having difficulty breathing. The ventilation pipe above, while functioning, issued only a small amount of air. At one point an elderly prisoner started yelling in a panicked voice, "Take me out! Take me out!" In all, Rahim crawled almost a thousand feet, crossing the entire breadth of the prison grounds. After an hour, he spotted a dim illumination in the distance, leaking along the walls. Little by little the light grew brighter, until an arm reached down and pulled him out of the hole and into a crowded room.
_Afghan officers search cars on the highway fronting the
Here things were happening. Two men held out a wide scarf full of bills and cell phones. "Put everything you own into the scarf," one of them ordered. Rahim threw in all his cash—3,500 Pakistani rupees (about $40)—and was directed to another man, who gave him a pair of shoes. Along the room's far wall, Taliban with mechanical clippers were trimming prisoners' beards. The inmates were allotted an equal share of money from the scarf, split into groups according to the areas in which they had fought before being captured, and ushered through the back door, across a yard surrounded by mud-mortar walls. When Rahim stepped outside, he realized where they were: a small building just opposite the heavily fortified front gates of Sarposa. From where he stood, he could see the top of a guard tower.
After passing through a metal gate, the prisoners were loaded onto the backs of large trucks and covered with sheets. One by one the trucks pulled onto the highway directly in front of the prison, merged with traffic, and disappeared.
At 5 a.m., hours after Rahim and his cohorts passed directly beneath his office, the warden of Sarposa Prison, General Dastagir Mayar, was awakened. One of his guards stood in the doorway. The entire political block was empty, the guard said. A stout 57-year-old Pashtun from Wardak Province with a neat helmet of dark hair and a matching mustache, Mayar speaks quickly and with urgency, liberally gesticulating. He wanted to know how.
"You have to come and see," the guard told him. "There's a hole."
It would be difficult to find a more accomplished prison official in Afghanistan than General Mayar. After graduating from the police academy in Kabul thirty-eight years ago, he served in the Ministry of the Interior for nearly a quarter century, through communist and mujahideen regimes alike. During this time, he says, he received training in Russia, India, Turkey, Germany, England, and the United States. Unlike many educated Afghans with money who fled abroad when the Taliban took control of the country, Mayar settled in Kabul to work for an NGO that distributed bread to indigent war widows. When Hamid Karzai came to power with the support of the United States, Mayar joined the Ministry of Justice and helped establish a national corrections system. Eventually he served as the warden of a series of prisons.
A small group of suspected Taliban are returned to Sarposa.
When he was sent to Sarposa in 2009 at the request of the attorney general, Mayar told me, "everything was messed up. There was no security. Drugs were coming into the prison regularly. We didn't have enough personnel." He continued: "We were receiving messages from NDS that we were going to be attacked again. So we used the little security we had to guard against an attack from the outside. We didn't have enough people to patrol the inside." In a sequel to the 2008 attack, the Taliban targeted the main gate shortly after Mayar became warden, using a truck packed with 1,700 pounds of explosives. The blast shattered the windows of his office, injuring him with shards of broken glass. Several guards were killed, but those remaining managed to drive back the assault.
In addition to the security improvements he made with his American and Canadian advisers, Mayar said he lobbied to change the location of the prison. "I told them. I warned them. When I first came here, the first thing I said was we need the prison to be in a different place. We came up with a plan to move it. The mayor's office agreed, the governor agreed, the Americans agreed. But the Canadians said, 'We've already spent a lot of money on this prison, therefore it should stay where it is.' "
Mayar insisted that he continued to vigilantly defend what he perceived to be the facility's point of greatest vulnerability: its unbuffered perimeter, which runs hard against a neighborhood and a major thoroughfare. "I was a good ecutive officer," he said. "The problems that I saw, I alerted the higher authorities about. I was sending requests to Kabul and the police chief. I told them these are the problems we have. I told them we need a checkpoint on each street around the prison. I told them. But who thought someone would make a tunnel with electricity inside? It's beyond imagination." The inconceivability of the escape—what else could he have done? how could anyone have possibly anticipated such a thing?—was a point Mayar emphasized repeatedly when I met with him inside Sarposa, where he is now the chief suspect in the jailbreak, a prisoner who stands accused of treason.
News of the escape traveled quickly, adding to a growing sense of futility and frustration with a war that was now grinding through a ninth year of oscillating gains and setbacks. Later the same day, officials and news outlets from the U.S. and Europe pointed out that in a single night the Taliban had managed to undermine eighteen months of intense combat throughout Kandahar Province. In Canada, meanwhile, members of Parliament lamented the millions spent reinforcing Sarposa. "How can we invest in something and it be so poorly run?" said former opposition leader Stéphane Dion. "Nationally speaking, we wanted an explanation."
In Afghanistan, the finger-pointing started immediately. On the afternoon of the escape, Mayar found himself under interrogation by NDS agents and Interior Ministry officials. Just hours into the investigation, the justice minister made a confounding announcement (which he would later rescind): There had never been a tunnel; the prisoners had instead been let out through the front gate. At this point, Mayar realized his fate was sealed. "One day I was a national hero," he told me, "the next day I was a traitor." The following evening, Mayar and three of his officers were arrested; a day later, twelve more guards joined them. Other officers fled the city. Mayar and his men spent five days in detention at the National Police headquarters, after which they were transferred into the custody of NDS.
Mayar told me that the prosecutor handling his case instructed the NDS agents to give him his own cell, in deference to his rank. Instead, he was locked in an underground basement full of insurgents. "They were talking among themselves," Mayar recounted with a laugh, "and when I entered the room, the first thing I heard one of them say was, 'It smells like Americans.' I didn't sleep all night." The next day he was moved upstairs to a new cell located down the hall from an interrogation room that held several Taliban fighters who had escaped from Sarposa and been recaptured. Every day, through the walls, Mayar could hear NDS agents electrocuting them and beating them with whips. He would sit in his cell and listen to their screams.
Last August, after a month in captivity, Mayar discovered that an old friend, Brigadier General Ghulam Farooq Dawari, had replaced him as warden of Sarposa. Before coming to the facility, Dawari had served as the head of a neighboring prison, and during that time he was in regular contact with Mayar. "When he was appointed to this position, I came to congratulate him," Dawari told me when I met with him at Sarposa. We were squeezed into the tiny room where he lives, which barely accommodated a narrow cot and an old television on a metal stand. As he gazed distractedly at the television, Dawari invoked the kind of cryptic restraint journalists encounter so often with Afghans occupying precarious positions in a precarious government. "I told him, 'There are good and bad people around you,' " Dawari said. " 'Some good people are advising you, but bad people are using you.' He said unfortunately he could not recognize who was good and who was bad."
Much later, after we drank tea and ate grapes and discussed the weather, I pressed the general to speak plainly. Did he think Mayar was guilty? Could his friend have been complicit in the escape? "It's very difficult for me to say yes or no," he answered. "What I would say is that when these things happen, they're very secret. This is the work of the Taliban, which has the support of Pakistan. If one person knows about it, another person can hear. I can't say he was aware of the plan, and I can't say he was not aware." Dawari paused. "I visit him sometimes," he said. "When I see Mayar, I feel sorry for him. It's painful for me. He is the same rank as I am. His officers are very good people. They know Kandahar better than I do. But now they are in prison."
Mayar, for his part, told me, "I have no one except the new warden. The new warden is my family and my friend." We were sitting inside his old office, and the film of brown dust on the coffee table between us was polka-dotted with spots where Mayar had leaned forward and jabbed his finger to emphasize some point or other. He was as loquacious as Dawari was reserved—a difference maybe not of temperament but of circumstance. For nearly three hours, Mayar expounded on the injustice of his situation with the fervency of a man who has waited long and lonely hours for a sympathetic ear. It was clear that everything he told me was something he had told himself a thousand times before.
According to Mayar, whose black hair had grown gray during his imprisonment, the prosecution's case rested on an alternate theory of how the tunnel was built: The passage was not actually dug by Ihasan and his twenty-one helpers but by Taliban prisoners from within Sarposa itself. As evidence, they have pointed to a fresh layer of loose dirt and debris spread over the political block's hard-packed courtyard. But Mayar has an explanation for this. He says that while he was warden, his Canadian advisers hired a local contractor to add the new dirt to the courtyard in order to create a slope that would allow rainwater to better drain. He told me this again and again, with the kind of exasperation you might expect from a man potentially facing ecution over such a matter.
The prosecution's theory would seem simple enough to disprove. But Mayar's attorney told me that the local contractor, fearful of contradicting the government, claims his documentation of the project was destroyed in an office fire.
The Canadian government, of course, could easily confirm or deny Mayar's account. His attorney, however, says he doesn't know how to contact them. When I contacted them myself, a spokesman for their foreign office forwarded my questions about the dirt, contractor, etc., to several people at the Correctional Service of Canada (which worked with Mayar at Sarposa) and then responded that "it would be inappropriate for the Government of Canada to comment."
Mayar does not believe that the case against him has much to do with his guilt or innocence anyway. He thinks he is the victim of a vendetta. When I asked why he and his guards had been so quickly blamed, Mayar glanced at Dawari, who had joined us and was sitting silently on a leather couch across the room. "There are some powerful people here," he said, echoing suddenly the elliptical rhetoric of his friend. "I didn't obey them. I obeyed the law. That is what I'm being punished for."
A couple of weeks later, I returned to Sarposa and asked to speak with Mayar alone. We sat in the same office, mutely watching a young guard pour us tea. After the guard had left, Mayar made sure the door was closed. Then he said: "I'm glad to be able to talk to you without the warden being here. There is a conspiracy against me. I don't know whether or not to tell you the truth. It could be dangerous for me."
In Afghanistan, conspiracy theories are ubiquitous, as commonplace as the tragedies whose true meanings they purportedly reveal; nevertheless, Mayar's anxiety, at least, was bona fide. "There is the government," he said, "but inside the government there are power brokers who have their own government. They were requesting me to release prisoners or to have prisoners transferred to Kandahar so that I could release them." One of these power brokers, according to Mayar, was Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president's brother, who was assassinated last July. Before he died, Karzai had been the head of the provincial council in Kandahar and its preeminent strongman.
Mayar said that Wali Karzai turned against him after he refused to free a relative of one of his guards. "When the prison escape happened, all of the enemies I made in the government attacked me. NDS was under the control of Wali Karzai. The court was under the control of Wali Karzai. And they wanted to blame me because I didn't obey Wali Karzai."
Mayar shook his head. "Because of the way this investigation is being conducted," he said, "sometimes I think about killing myself. But suicide is a form of cowardice."
Earlier this winter, in a nondescript house in Kandahar, I met with Rahim, the Taliban escapee (whose name here is an alias used to protect his identity). He had traveled from Helmand Province, where he was living in hiding, and had shaved his beard so as to appear less conspicuous. There was no heat in the room, and as we sat on the floor, Rahim pulled his one leg to his chest, wrapping it in his _patu, _a thin wool shawl worn by Afghan men. I'd been expecting a hardened veteran, a killer. Rahim was both of these things. But he was also a very young man, palpably unsure of himself, and the longer he talked the clearer it became that he was more nervous than I was. "I did not want to be a Talib," he told me. "When I saw the foreigners' behavior toward our people, I felt I had to stand up against them. It wasn't only me. Many, many people from my area joined the Taliban."
Rahim's hatred for the foreigners began about five years ago, when coalition soldiers (probably Canadians) built a road through Pashmul, Kandahar, the cluster of tiny villages where he was born and raised. "They brought big tanks and trucks and destroyed any wall and house that was in their way," he said. "They never asked permission from anyone and never paid anyone for the damage they caused. The only time they stopped was when the Taliban attacked them." According to Rahim, the soldiers often answered such attacks with air strikes and mortars that killed civilians. Seven members of his family, he told me, were injured by mortar fire.
In 2006, when Rahim and his friends were old enough, they began attending secret meetings organized by the local Taliban commander, Mullah Manan. "He was telling us the stories," he said. "He was telling us about the treatment of the people by the coalition and the cruelties of the coalition. He was encouraging us to join the Taliban." Finally, after a night raid in Pashmul during which an old man and three women were killed by special-operations forces, Rahim felt he had no choice. "I knew them personally," he explained. "They lived in my village."
Rahim's father, a former mujahideen who fought the Soviets in Kandahar during the 1980s, strongly disapproved of Rahim's decision and tried his best to dissuade his son from becoming an insurgent. "My father was trying to take me back from the Taliban. He was sending me text messages," Rahim said_. _But by then, Mullah Manan's influence was greater than his father's; in Rahim's view, history had passed his father by. "My commander was saying, 'You should not listen to your father.' He was saying, 'This is not the time to stay at home.' " Rahim turned a deaf ear to his father's exhortations and for a year fought against Afghan and coalition forces in Zhari and Panjwai districts, traditional strongholds for the insurgency. It was in Panjwai that Robert Bales, an American soldier, allegedly murdered seventeen unarmed villagers, including nine children. When I drove through Zhari and Panjwai this April, both sides of the road were lined with heavily armed Afghan National Army soldiers braced for something to happen.
Even after losing his leg, when he was 20, to an IED likely buried by his fellow insurgents, Rahim said, "I was still loyal to the Taliban, and I still wanted to help them." He was sent to Quetta, Pakistan—home to the Taliban's senior military leadership, who orchestrate the insurgency in Afghanistan—where he received his prosthesis, and when he returned to Kandahar, he was tasked with transporting and resupplying insurgent groups throughout Panjwai. It was while bringing clothes and food to Taliban fighters there that he and two friends were picked up by the police and handed over to agents from NDS.
In a recent report, the United Nations found that about half the prisoners who spend time in NDS custody are brutally tortured. Forms of torture reported by prisoners include electric shock, "wrenching" of genitals, removal of toenails, suspension from the wrists by metal chains, and beatings with rubber hoses, braided cables, electric wires, and wooden sticks. The most rampant abuses take place in Kandahar.
In his case, Rahim said that the agents locked them in a hut and beat them for several weeks. "They were beating us on our backs and the bottoms of our feet with a whip," he said. "They were beating us and asking us, 'What were you doing? What were your activities?' We told them we were ordinary Taliban. We told them: 'We were with Mullah Manan, and we will be with him again.' "
Eventually, Rahim was transferred to Sarposa.
It was getting late by the time he finished telling his story, and he was leaving early in the morning to return to Helmand, where the insurgency was even more entrenched than in Kandahar. As he stood to go, I asked him whether there was any message he wanted to convey directly to Americans. "These foreigners should take their hands off my country," Rahim said in a surprisingly subdued tone that seemed to carry more weariness than anger. "Afghanistan will be a stable place if these other countries stop interfering here. Our country will be better off without them."
Today the political block in Sarposa is full again. In fact, it is overfull. When I last visited, there were 707 suspected insurgents living there. The maximum capacity for the entire facility is only 800; as of February, it held 1,550 prisoners. Now that number is certainly much higher. "There has never been so many," General Dawari, the current warden, told me in February. "Every twenty days we receive seventy new prisoners. The government thinks of this prison as a bottomless well." While new prisoners steadily arrive, few leave. Among the 707 suspected insurgents, Dawari said, only thirty-seven had ever appeared in court. "This means the courts and the government don't care," he said.
Dawari had clearly grown disillusioned with the system he'd devoted most of his life to. His son was recently kidnapped and held for more than a month, he received constant threats on his own life, and he lived essentially as a prisoner himself. "Since I've come to Kandahar, I've made many, many enemies," he said. "My house is here in Kandahar in a safe place, but I haven't been home in twenty days, because I'm scared. I stay here day and night. My superiors don't allow me to leave, either. Every day there is new intelligence that there will be an attack on the prison. Once I didn't go home for three months." Despite his sacrifices and his thirty-one years of service, Dawari told me, "tomorrow my fate could be the same as General Mayar's."
Before I left Sarposa, I returned to see Mayar once more. At some point I asked him whether he still believed in the government and justice system he says betrayed him. He thought for a while before answering: "What is unbearable is that so many people have been killed here. My own countrymen and many young Americans and people from other countries have been killed here. They are sacrificing their lives here. But no one is helping with the law." Mayar estimated that "at least 20 to 25 percent" of the Afghans doing time in Sarposa were innocent. The implication, however subtle, was clear: What kind of government has such a legal system? And for what purpose have so many lives been lost protecting such a government?
As we stepped out of Mayar's old office, a group of guards snapped to attention and saluted their former warden. Mayar bummed a cigarette from one of them, then tossed his patu over his shoulders and walked back to his cell.
Luke Mogelson is a writer based in Kabul and the editor of Razistan. Additional reporting by Muhib Habibi.


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BurdaStyle Sewing Vintage Modern Contest 2013 - Red Jacket
Added Feb 13, 2013
by matrowland
London, United K...
I made this double breasted jacket from red corduroy. It is based on the Frank Button Down Shirt from the BurdaStyle Vintage Modern book. In many ways it was a bringing together of almost all I have learnt in my first few months of sewing. I didn't note down the exact pattern variation measurements but I will explain what I did as far as possible in case anybody would like to try something similar. I've marked it down as for men but I'm sure with slightly different tailoring it could fit a lady perfectly.
The jacket has a v-shaped back yoke, interfaced collar and cuffs, is lined and can be worn either with all the buttons done up or with one undone and the flaps folded down. The cuffs have a decorative piece with a blue button. The visible thread and front buttons are blue as well to give a nice colour contrast to the red. My main inspiration was a classic double breasted pea-coat. I was also thinking of the Victorian Redcoats and the jackets the Beatles wore on Sgt. Pepper. I wanted a more modern, casual look and slim cut, and a medium weight, so I used the bright red cord and modified a Burda shirt pattern. My personal twist is that the front flaps (and buttons) taper so they are at an angle. Oh, in the first two pictures the hem is slightly folded over. This is just because I didn't straighten it out properly before having my photo taken. Oops!
Material Notes
The main fabric is a medium weight red corduroy. Any medium to heavy cotton or wool would work, I think. It is lined with a fine cotton. I also used heavy weight interfacing (iron on) for the cuffs and collar and light weight interfacing for the outer flap.
6 Comments Sign in to add a post
Feb 22, 2013, 01.42 PMby elizabethd
Terrific work! And you've only been at it a few months? Amazing.
Feb 21, 2013, 11.52 AMby kevinsews
Very nice. Ditto on Martin's comment. I started sewing and it's difficult to find men's patterns. Creating my own is something I'm just getting into. Keep up the good work and thanks for the insperation. Kevin
Feb 15, 2013, 11.52 PMby jaslyn117
Very nice job! :)
Feb 13, 2013, 09.53 PMby martinK
congrats, that is a stunnig beatiful red jacket! I am vey happy so see some more men fashion here. It is definetly underrepresented :-) curious what will come next!
Feb 13, 2013, 07.05 PMby Jamie Lau
I love that you used a bright red corduroy and it's so refreshing to see a men's project! Thanks for sharing!
2 Replies
Feb 13, 2013, 08.41 PMby matrowland
Thank you! I saw the fabric in the shop and it just suited my idea perfectly.
The book is awesome, by the way! Most of them out there don't have any men's stuff at all, and it's helping my technique a lot.
Feb 13, 2013, 08.46 PMby Jamie Lau
I'm glad you're enjoying the book and I hope to see more of your creations in the future!
Feb 13, 2013, 06.48 PMby MojoHollz
Well made, and the color is definitly a stand out (I am of course biased as red is one of my favorite colors)! It looks like it fits like a glove too, very nicely done :)
Add to Favorites 12 people added it

subset: commoncrawl


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TopLine Co needed a new logo design and created a contest on 99designs.
A winner was selected from 146 designs submitted by 35 freelance designers.
Logo for TLN Clothing- custom clothing for teens/kids/adults.
We will also have a line of clothing that will be for purchase.
TLN Clothing
Looking for a logo for TLN Custom Clothing OR TLN Clothing (havent decided whether we want "custom" or not but will decide once we see some designs. Our clothing line will be similar to Hollister/Abercrombie but we will also have some cool sports clothing too.
We will be incorporating the logo into some shirt designs as well as our clothing tag. Feel free to submit it in either of these as if it looks good, we might want that.
- cool looking
- catchy
- Possibly vintage (abercrombie/hollister style
- Possibly Reebok/Nike Style (sporty)
- Possibly vintage meets sporty
- Possibly a symbol (ie: abercrombie has the moose) WE WANT SOMETHING CATCHY!!!
- childish
Find out how a design contest works or learn more about our logo design services.


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Schools throughout the North-east played their part in fundraising activities for Sports Relief 2014 last Friday.
Arnage School children repeated their fundraising efforts of two years ago by completing a sport relief mile to school in style.
The small school came together on Friday morning at one pupil's home, which happens to be exactly one mile from the school to raise money.
All the pupils, including some parents, pre-school children, a pet dog and even head teacher, Margaret Rattray, took part.
PTA chairperson, Emma Dawson, said: "It was a beautiful morning and it was brilliant to see so many eager faces at the start line.
"Watching everyone literally come together was an amazing sight, some children rode bikes to the start line, others were bought by cars, parked up lining the route.
"It was just so heart warming."
Pupils have been learning about what sport relief funds are used for and how children less fortunate than them have to work to pay for their education.
The school believe they will raise nearly £150.
Head teacher Margaret Rattray said: "Keeping fit, having fun, being part of a great community and raising money - our Sport Relief Mile had it all!"
Ellon's Meiklemill School pupils donned clothing that they would wear when taking part in sport or a hobby.
Some pupils dressed as footballers, rugby players, gymnasts, boxers and even a Highland Dancer. For the privilege pupils paid £1.
Auchterellon Primary School saw the P7s organise football and an obstacle course for all the pupils to enjoy.
Children paid a donation to take part.
The school raised £527.97 for their efforts.
Auchnagatt pupils took part in a cycle and walk along the Formartine and Buchan Way travelling as far as Maud and back.


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Rick Kearney set out to squash his company's turnover by building the ultimate employee-centric workplace. Now, two years and close to $12 million later, he's expecting more from Summit East -- much more
Only Rick Kearney knows why he did it. And for the moment, anyway, that's just fine with him. "Very few people have the total vision," says the computer entrepreneur. "They just don't absorb it." Until they do -- and he's sure "they will, eventually" -- those around Kearney are free to draw whatever conclusions they want about what he's been up to since May 1998, when he first decided that he needed to take full ownership of a 116-acre former cow pasture. It was then that he pledged himself to building an "employee-centric office park" on the site. After plunking down $4.6 million to acquire the dirt, Kearney has since spent an additional $2.9 million on the development, in addition to $4.2 million to put up his own headquarters there. "Some people think I'm crazy, but I'm not doing this imprudently," he insists, though he freely admits he knew "nothing" about real-estate development when he started.
Building the office park is a mystifying move, but it's one that's in keeping -- aside from its scale -- with the character of the 42-year-old, whose soft voice and sporty polo shirt guarantee that he'll be underestimated. "It scares the heck out of her," he exclaims, describing the reaction of his wife, Bernadette, to his latest undertaking. "Did he ask me? No," she reports. "But I trust whatever he says he wants to do."
What Kearney wants to do isn't always easy to predict. Back in 1986, for instance, he quit his gig as a systems engineer at IBM Corp. -- on the same day, no less, that he'd earned admittance into a prestigious recognition program -- to devote himself to, um, volunteer work. "I think I said something like, "Thank goodness, I'm sitting down,' " recalls Bob Ramay, who was then Kearney's boss. "But I knew Rick, so I knew he had thought this through."
"Rick has accomplished many things I told him couldn't be done," says Mainline's CFO, Erin Ennis.
What Ramay didn't suspect was that years later he'd find himself working as a project manager at Mainline Information Systems Inc., the computer reseller Kearney started in 1989, after having started a nonprofit and cofounded a foster home. Kearney has devoted the past decade to furiously building the fast-growing Mainline, a four-time Inc. 500 company based in Tallahassee, Fla., into a regional and then national competitor -- and then an international one with projected revenues of $135 million this year. As CEO, president, and sole owner of the company, Kearney carefully credits "understanding IBM" as "the key to our success," leaving out his own bullheaded opportunism. In 1996, when sales were at $19 million, Kearney committed Mainline -- even the name is calculated, he says, to convey that "we are mainstream people, not computer weirdos" -- to becoming one of the first IBM business partners to peddle its precious mainframes (now known, to ease the stigma, as enterprise servers). By 1997 sales had skyrocketed to $70 million. To get there Kearney had doubled the number of employees by hiring a dozen salespeople and four vice-presidents.
"Rick considers himself to be a visionary," says Erin Ennis, Mainline's chief financial officer. "He isn't satisfied with anything less than a big mission." And he isn't easily deterred. Last year, she recalls, "we all told him he was crazy" for wanting to start a separate venture to showcase the company's emerging expertise in E-commerce. The result: Kearney launched Shirttailor.com in November. "Rick has accomplished many things I told him couldn't be done," Ennis says.
Even so, as the former CEO of a real estate conglomerate, Ennis felt duty-bound to "talk frankly" with Kearney about his imposing scheme to single-handedly develop the land that a $75,000 granite sign now identifies as Summit East. She reminded him about the fickle fortunes of the community's real estate developers, warned him of the project's potential for sapping him of his time and Mainline of its much-needed internal capital. Across town, she pointed out, Arvida -- the development arm of the St. Joe Co., the state's largest real estate company -- was building a 5,000-home community called Southwood, which would eventually include 5.7 million square feet of commercial space. Kearney heard what Ennis had to say -- or claims he did. "I tend to resist, but I do listen," he says. "She's tried to add a certain amount of sanity to it."
But there was little room left for sanity -- or anything else -- in Kearney's grandly detailed design for the park. He envisioned as many as 20 office buildings, each one housing employees of fast-growing technology companies, including his own. The Summit East companies would, in effect, share the costs (and, of course, the benefits) of state-of-the-art systems, from a videoconferencing center that would broadcast live classes, to a centralized "brain" for backing up data. They'd also find themselves equipped with the most modern tools for retaining talent, able to offer an atmosphere where their employees could commune among the majestic oaks or linger by a picturesque pond, while never being far from their beloved laptops, thanks to strategically placed wireless transmitters. Kearney wanted Mainline workers to toil in cubicles they would help design; he wanted them to be able to click on icons to alert the park's concierge to such pressing errands as dry-cleaning pickups or take-out lunch deliveries. Using the park's intranet, employees at Summit East would be able to tap in and check on the kids they'd dropped off at its day-care center. There would be jugglers at lunchtime and jazz concerts at dusk, and in-between, employees would strike up the bandwidth using fiber-optic pipelines and feel the rush of hyperactive phone switches. After work they could dine at the park's restaurants, shop at its grocery store and strip center (now known, to ease the stigma, as a midsize shopping center), and pick up prescriptions at its pharmacy. With so much so close, employees wouldn't ever need, or want, to leave.
Which was, as Kearney kept insisting, the reason he was building Summit East: to end, once and for all, Mainline's chronic retention and recruitment problems. Well, that's how he sold the idea anyway. "What Rick wanted to do was to create an environment for people so that they'd want to come to work there, even if they were not getting the same size paycheck that they could be getting in California," says general contractor Laurie Dozier, the cofounder and president of Mad Dog Design & Construction Co., a local contractor with about $20 million in revenues. Dozier, recounting his initial discussions with Kearney in the summer of 1998, says, "He wanted this to be the workplace of the future."
That's true but hardly complete. Kearney, whose employees will move into Summit East's first building this month, hasn't shelled out roughly $12 million solely to buy the undying loyalty of his 70 local workers. As he -- and, for now, he alone -- sees it, the "smart campus" represents his most intelligent weapon against an enemy that threatens Mainline's viability, an insidious foe that other company builders may not behold until it's too late. "Right now, this is 'Rick Kearney's wild idea.' But once people see it, they'll grasp what it's about," confides the CEO, whose company posts net profit margins of around 10%. "This is absolutely critical to the survival of this company."
Planting himself in what will one day be the giant atrium of his new building's foyer, Rick Kearney draws such a vivid picture that he seems not to notice everything that's missing: the circular reception desk, the zigzagging staircase, the glass-enclosed sky bridge and -- perhaps most conspicuously of all -- his own feet. Most of the absences can be explained by the fact that Mainline's building, on this day in late December, is still about five months from completion. Kearney's dress shoes, on the other hand, were fully operational, and visible, until very recently. By the time he attempts to reclaim them, they have sunk almost up to their laces in the ooze of mud that Summit East, softened by two days of drenching downpours, has become.
But Kearney, ever determined to finish what he's started, insists on completing his lavish description of the "kinetic artwork" that he imagines sprouting from the opposite wall. He's conjuring a 12-foot metal tree, its branches protruding in all directions, with 18 video monitors hanging from them. If such a totem exists, he hasn't yet found it. Neither has Dozier, who hoped he'd gotten close last autumn when he snapped a picture of a video wall he spotted while vacationing in Belgium. But "it wasn't what Rick was after," reports Dozier. And Kearney, as the contractor has learned by now, always knows exactly what he's after.
Through Summit East, he's out to lend new meaning to the term Internet bubble by creating a self-contained colony for young, brainy E-centrics. Upon moving in, CEOs will simply plug their companies into the park's state-of-the-art voice, data, and communications network, and thus be spared even the momentary distraction of having to choose their own systems. Kearney foresees the enrolled companies' helping one another by forming alliances, identifying opportunities, and occasionally sharing their Java programmers.
So rigid are Kearney's ideas about Summit East that he's convinced he can get the park he wants only by doing it himself. Not that he hasn't sought any formal input. In early 1998, he paid $22,000 to have an Orlando-based real-estate-consulting company analyze key elements of his plan: Should Summit East be gated? How wide need the roads be? Motel or hotel? Sit-down restaurant or fast-food joint? Waterfalls? Ponds? According to Owen Beitsch, executive vice-president of Real Estate Research Consultants Inc., Kearney "or at least one of his staff people" showed him the door after reading his company's recommendations. "His principal objective is about keeping the human resources involved. We explained that while we agreed with his objectives for preserving human capital, real estate is at best a speculative business," says Beitsch, who criticized Summit East as being too big, too costly, and at an unproven location to boot. "We suggested some ways to reduce the speculative nature of the opportunity, such as finding a developer. He chose to disagree that it was speculative, and he chose to do it himself," says Beitsch. Kearney proudly confirms that "I totally ignored everything he said," which he succinctly summarizes thusly: "Their final analysis was, 'You're in over your head, and you should sell the whole thing.' "
After digesting Beitsch's biting report, Kearney upped his real estate holdings by buying out his partner. Needless to say, "my preference would have been to continue to own half of it," Ennis notes. William F. Butler, a partner at Boutin Brown Butler, a local real-estate-appraisal and -consulting firm, who evaluated the property last year, valiantly validates Kearney's scheme even as he tenderly tempers it. "The park is not going to grow weeds," he says. "But will it become the high-tech mecca that Rick wants it to be? That's the question," says Butler, who has served as an adviser on the project.
Now, with the completion of Mainline's headquarters, what Summit East has indisputably become is a tribute to Kearney's rock-hard commitment, which rivals the thick steel frames bordering the hillside building's windows. He's serious about what he says. When he promises to give a visitor uninterrupted time, Kearney doesn't just mean that he'll ignore any calls. He actually unplugs the phone and wraps the limp cord around its receiver for emphasis.
Dozier got his first whiff of Kearney's pungent passion when he beheld the budget for Mainline's 30,800-square-foot building. At $4.2 million, Kearney's spending level was "rare for this community," says Dozier. At roughly $136 a square foot, the building has cost about one and a half times the price tag of the average office building in the area, Kearney estimates.
Kearney calls his "campus" the "offices of the next millennium."
But the budget's size was only the first signal that Kearney, who sees himself as building "the offices of the next millennium," would disregard any and all preexisting practices. In choosing an architect, for instance, he settled on Manausa Lewis & Dodson Architects Inc., a local firm that had never designed a corporate office building. "I told Rick that I was going to design him an award winner," explains principal C. Trent Manausa. In selecting an interior designer, Kearney bypassed local contenders and chose Griswold, Heckel & Kelly Associates Inc. (GHK), a Chicago-based firm that, he had read, designed surroundings for the kind of company he wanted Mainline to become -- namely, a giant company like Sun Microsystems or Hewlett-Packard. "I wanted to be able to get the coolest and best of what's out there," he says.
Not that he always chose it. When GHK proposed a coat of glaring tungsten blue paint for the kitchen area and break room -- where Mainline's minions can flop into overstuffed chairs and chill in front of the big-screen TV or the gas-fueled fireplace -- Kearney toned it down to a "more Old South, normal blue." But he did go along with many of the firm's recommendations: shrinking the library (so much research is now done online); relocating the coffee bar (why risk spillage around the work area?); and splintering the central copier room into multiple smaller locations (it cuts down on waiting time).
He consistently pushed for unusual alternatives. For the grounds' drainage system, he couldn't abide the typical eyesore of storm-water ponds that, he says, "end up looking like moon craters" when they're empty (and, for that matter, breed mosquitoes when they're full). Summit East has one big pond engineered to handle the runoff and storage of water. "It'll be one of the finest ponds in Tallahassee and certainly the most expensive," notes Kearney, who spent about $60,000 to prove to state regulators that it could handle all the water. He wanted all of Summit East's landscaping to convey "human-centric" comforts, grandiose yet practical: from the wide two-lane entrance and two-lane exit, lined with two-inch-caliper trees, to the illuminated wall-of-water fountain, to the roads cushioned by an extra-thick two-inch layer of asphalt.
Nonetheless, "this isn't an open wallet," says Dozier. "This has been tightly controlled, and people have been reined in." In March 1999 Dozier realized that not only were his fears about costs justified -- what with "pretty sporty" masonry and the underestimation of expenses associated with packing down the soil and procuring the steel needed to fortify the glass-heavy structure -- but the situation was worse than he had imagined. The projections for the Mainline building were over budget by a staggering $1 million.
Getting the word, Kearney managed to stay optimistic. "We had plans for a building," he says. "Just not one we could afford."
Kearney consistently pushed for unusual alternatives at Summit East.
The task, as Dozier defined it, sounded straightforward enough. "We had to cut costs without cutting into the heart and soul of the building," he says.
That presumed that Summit East's mastermind knew which aspects of Mainline's building were expendable and which were most crucial to achieving his oft-repeated goal: halting the unacceptable turnover rate among employees, whose ranks had swelled so swiftly that workers bulged from three separate buildings. As he rethought Summit East -- never mind when he'd originally conceived the project -- Kearney must have felt confident that he knew the answer to management's most ancient yet urgent query: What do employees really want?
As a matter of fact, he did -- feel confident, that is. But the reasons he gives now for having championed key features, insofar as he's able to recall them, can feel as squishy as the ground around the new structure still can. Go anywhere in Mainline's building (OK, not the bathrooms), and it's clear that Kearney believes his employees value exposure to natural light. "We had to fight the architects to get the windows we wanted downstairs," he says. There's a glass-enclosed skywalk, a staircase with an outside view, and even a serpentine window spanning both stories, hugging the curving contour of the building's steel frame. Two of the walls upstairs are composed entirely of glass. And then there are such outdoor-access areas as the lanai, a screened-in porch where employees can spend quality time with their laptops, undistracted by bugs or rain.
The abundance of windows suggests that Kearney had compelling data to show that employees wanted them. But the best evidence Kearney offers for the need for natural light is the testimony of a creative worker, albeit one of the Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci is "known to have preferred to work by a window," says Kearney, who logically assumes that the Italian polymath, were he alive today, would be designing Web sites.
Then there's the modular furniture Kearney wanted, stackable pieces giving employees flexibility in terms of how high they could configure the walls of their eight-by-eight-foot cubicles. They've got options in terms of accessories too: pegboards, extra drawers, and windows that would let them gaze upon the faces of neighboring cubists. "If you create an ergonomic and a customizable work environment," Kearney explains, "employees can be just as happy in cubicles as in closed offices, because of the socialization that can occur among them." How, pray tell, did he come to possess that nugget? "I talked to the manufacturers of the furniture," he says, adding that they told him they get a "bad rap" from the Dilbertized masses. Further, he's factored in the findings of "independent studies that the manufacturers have either researched or commissioned or whatever."
Whatever source Kearney freely points to as having stoked his vision of the ultimate employee-centric workplace, it seems insufficient. He's read, for instance, about cutting-edge Web-design companies where the CEO works out in the open, either at a podium or at a stand-up desk. Not Kearney, who has a regular office. Why so conservative? "I don't think IBM executives would feel as comfortable meeting with us around a stand-up table," he says. That may be true, but the notion that Kearney would make it a priority to satisfy anyone else's taste seems implausible.
But other people -- -in this case subordinates -- are supposed to have been Kearney's entire reason for undertaking Summit East. In recent years Kearney, whose company now employs 135 workers in total, hasn't been able to budge Mainline's 20% turnover rate. Until last year, that is -- when it shot up above 25%, a spike he attributes to the ill effects of having employees spread out in different buildings. Feeling "isolated and abandoned," he explains, has made some of them vulnerable to the frequent feelers they get from headhunters.
Summit East isn't Kearney's first attempt at curbing turnover. Hoping to inspire loyalty, he's already boosted employee benefits. He's outfitted employees with cell phones and pagers, and even offered them the option of telecommuting. "They all just become entitlements," he says -- including the three-night cruises for two, offered to employees in 1997 (in the Bahamas) and 1998 (in the Bahamas and around Key West). In 1997 he went so far as to launch Integra Professional Services, a subsidiary dedicated to recruiting technical personnel for both the company and its customers. The money-draining experiment lasted 18 months. Similarly, a short-lived plan to offer senior executives phantom stock -- in lieu of stock options, which Kearney claims he'll be ready to grant "in the not-so-distant future" -- ended up spooking him.
"I became disheartened," says Kearney, who realized that "if you do all those things, you have only a chance." Hoping to lift those odds, and inspired by the camaraderie and job satisfaction he noticed at the more "people-centric" vendors and IBM outposts he had visited, four years ago he began looking for four acres that Mainline could call its own. There, he'd create "an environment that spoke of success and quality and future growth and opportunity." But as his desire to find just the right spot deepened -- not one next to a truck stop or abutting a housing project -- 4 acres became 10 acres. Then 12. He was considering paying $800,000 for 20 acres when, in November 1997, a deal came along for some land on the east side of Tallahassee, at the interchange of U.S. 90 East and Interstate 10. He spent $2.1 million to buy a 50% partnership interest in what is now Summit East.
Kearney's vision: the ultimate employee-centric workplace.
As the plot thickened, and lengthened, so did his ambitions. He began talking about making it impossible for employees to be recruited away "once they'd tasted the goodness of what our campus has to offer." Last September, having obtained the necessary permits, gotten the city's OK on spending $2.2 million to extend its sewer system, and even won over the park's neighbors, Kearney couldn't contain his satisfaction over the plans for Mainline's building. At the time, he described the new headquarters to me this way, "All of this is designed with this idea in mind: if you were an employee designing a workplace, what would you like to see? -- as opposed to what's cheapest for the employer."
That makes it sound as if employees have been canvassed and questioned, probed about which environmental elements they'd like to see incorporated. Not exactly. Seven employees did make up the committee that met with five vendors of cubicles, evaluating their offerings in terms of structure and value. And all employees were invited to test the systems, then fill out questionnaires. "I know more about workstations than I care to know," says Sherrie Kishbaugh, marketing-operations manager, who later sat on the committee that tested 10 different chairs. The winner, she notes, was also one of the most expensive candidates. In terms of other input, employee Mike Jones says in November he visited Summit East, where Kearney sought his opinion on the best color for the wall fencing in the smoking area. "I didn't care, but I thought it was interesting that he asked," Jones notes.
To be sure, while employees are a big part of the equation, Summit East isn't as much about them as Kearney sometimes says. He sees a much bigger picture, or at least one that's coming into focus. It's too risky, he knows, to wait until he can make out its exact shape. So Summit East, for all the expense and hard work that have gone into it -- to keep it on budget, Kearney switched the masonry veneer, reconfigured the air-conditioning system, and redesigned the roof -- really just embodies his best guess about what he needs to do to withstand what he believes the future holds. He hasn't spent all that money just because he wants employees to hang around or even because he wants to see his beloved Tallahassee take its rightful place beside RaleighDurham, N.C., as a hotbed of fast-growing technology companies. He's expecting something more from Summit East. Much more.
Kearney has seen the future, and, frankly, as far as Mainline goes, it stinks. The company he's run for the last 10 years couldn't even survive for the next 5.
That much he's sure of. So while he talks up "synergy" and "connectivity" as vital elements of why he's building Summit East, the actual impulse driving him is much more primitive: fear of the unknown. He projects unshakable certainty because he's up against utter uncertainty. And he knows it. "Obviously, a lot of critics will tell you it will be hard or impossible to do something like this," he says. "You can't listen to what everybody tells you. You've got to have patience, faith, and confidence."
He pauses, then adds in a near whisper, "People just aren't believers."
"If local people don't get it, we'll bring in the companies from afar."
Kay Stephenson, who calls Summit East "a wonderful idea," ranks as a nonbeliever. In late 1998 the cofounder and president of Datamaxx Applied Technologies Inc. was shopping around for new office space to accommodate her software company's phenomenal growth. In 1999 its sales rose to $12.5 million, up from $4.4 million the year before. Stephenson is now building a 33,000-square-foot facility -- not at Summit East but at Southwood, the competing development across town, which includes 450 acres zoned for commercial use. "I just felt like if anybody could pull this off, they could," she says, speaking of Arvida.
And it helped that Arvida gave her "an unbelievable deal" while Kearney "wouldn't negotiate on price," says Stephenson, who ended up paying $376,000 for 3.76 acres, as opposed to the $600,000 Kearney demanded. "We had really hoped to attract Kay," says Mainline CFO Ennis, "but it would have been difficult for us to match their price." Summit East's prices also alienated Mike Sheridan, who this year has been looking for 50,000 square feet for his company, a third-party administrator of insurance benefits that is growing by nearly 15% a year. "Rick has not been able to translate how much he wants for the property into the value-added he's offering," says Sheridan, chairman of Fringe Benefits Management Co. "I'm not 100% sure he's going to pull it off."
Summit East is, after all, merely "vaporware," as Don Rosenkoetter puts it. That hasn't stopped him from signing on, however. Others have looked at the Summit East site map, but Rosenkoetter, CEO and president of One WebPlace Inc., went further. He actually chose a Monopoly-size square on which to build a 54,000-square-foot headquarters for his start-up, which makes E-commerce software. The 55-employee company, which has been based in Albany, Ga., expects to move in come April 2001.
"It's a wonderful environment for a nerd workaholic," says Rosenkoetter, who admits that his construction experience has been limited to sand castles and airplane models. Still, he knows what he'd like to see as part of the new headquarters: an exercise room, a sauna, showers, an outdoor basketball court, and a media room so "employees can watch our commercial on the Super Bowl," he cracks.
The company may be able to afford such a premium TV spot, given what it's spending on the new building. Kearney is actually financing the construction, then leasing the finished product to the start-up, which will have to pay for any internal modifications. "Unless we do a little bit to facilitate them coming here, there will never be a first," Kearney has said. There's already a second. Glen Davidson, owner and president of PAT LiVE -- the only division of ATG Technologies, a three-time Inc. 500 company -- says that in February he decided to build the headquarters for his $12-million technology-service company at Summit East, against the advice of his own accountants. "They said it was too expensive," he recalls. "But you've got to spend your money on something, so why not have a nice place to work at?"
If that philosophy sounds eerily compatible with Kearney's, that may be because Davidson meets with Kearney and six other CEOs once a month as part of a peer group. "He did the sales pitch on me. I got to thinking about what Rick preaches hard on -- the retainment of our people -- and I said, 'Heck, let's do it,' " Davidson says. "I've made a lot of decisions in my life without looking at the analytical side of it."
As far as Kearney's concerned, the analysis that led him to build Summit East remains solid, no matter how soft local reaction has been. To fill up the 136,000 square feet of office space that's part of Phase I of the development, he decided at the end of last year to launch an incubator. He set about raising $50 million to back a dozen or so high-tech start-ups, which are expected to move in with Summit East companies. He's setting aside 2,000 square feet of space in his own building for just such a start-up tenant. And he's already had interest in the incubator from corporate supporters, including IBM and Sprint. "If the people locally don't get it, we'll just bring the companies in from afar," Kearney reasons. David Wimberly, whose company, First Financial Group LLC, serves as adviser to the Summit East Technology Fund LP, says that "this whole concept is just a real brainy concept. Rick is a real genius at coming up with ideas."
But as Kearney sees it, he never had any choice. Mainline, he's convinced, will have to radically change over the next five years -- at least as a peddler of mainframes, machines whose prices are dropping 30% a year. "Five years from now," Kearney says, "we will not be selling mainframes and making a profit. I just don't know what business we'll be in." He adds: "There will be big winners and big losers in the next five years. Everything will be reevaluated in terms of whether it can be done differently through electronics. The world as we know it is going to change. We're all at risk."
Clearly he sees Mainline playing a role in E-commerce, helping integrate and facilitate new E-business partnerships. This year he's aiming for 5% to 10% of revenues to come from the company's E-commerce efforts. That's why he acquired a local $1.1 million Web-design company last September and launched a Korean-based E-commerce consulting division in January. That's why he took it upon himself to build Summit East rather than hire a developer -- because a CEO needs to know more than ever before. Furthermore, "put up a four-wall building downtown, and you are not going to survive," he says. Scott Maddox, the supportive mayor of Tallahassee, says that Summit East represents the kind of "bold bet" that cities need to take. "If you act in a traditional governmental fashion, you will miss the boat in the Information Age," says the jeans-clad 32-year-old mayor.
"What we're doing is creating a friendly environment for companies that want to participate in the transformation of this marketplace," Kearney explains. "You have to have fertile, tilled soil for wherever the seeds land. You have to be ready for whatever comes next." Tilting forward in his office chair, he unwinds the phone cord from the receiver, preparing to plug it back into its jack. "We don't know what half the changes are going to be," he says softly. "But we've got the fiber-optic cables in the ground, and we're ready."
Joshua Hyatt is a senior editor at Inc.
Please e-mail your comments to email@example.com.


text:
The Medici Journal
The Medici Journal
The Medici
The Medici family ruled with immense power across four centuries (1434-1737) originally in Florence and later in a wider sphere of Italy and Europe. They produced four Popes of the Catholic Church, two regent queens of France and grand duchy rulers of Tuscany in the 15th and 16th centuries. One of the wealthiest families in Europe they derived prosperity from banking and textile guilds in Florence. They were also adroit at connecting daughters and sons to the most elite European families by building social networks through marriages of political and financial power embroiling them in complex intrigues and scandals. They're remembered most favorably for being patrons of art and architecture through the construction of Basilica's and their support of artists such as Michelangelo, Verrocchio, Botticelli and da Vinci.


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Issue : When running DBCC CHECKDB on SQL server 2000, We are facing t-log growth & blocking.
Cause : DBCC CHECKDB does block in 2000 and earlier. The code for DBCC in 2000 was complex since it was working against a moving target (the database being modified), so to have a consistent database to check, DBCC used the transaction log to keep track of what modifications was performed while DBCC was running. Due to this blocking cause.
DBCC CHECKDB was completely re-written in 2005. It now uses a database snapshot, hence no need to block. Thanks to Pual & Team.


text: "TASSIMO Intellibrew™ technology ensures that each sip is perfect in every way. Whether it's an energising espresso, a revitalising herbal tea or a creamy hot chocolate, TASSIMO prepares every drink individually at the touch of a button - for the most delicious results. The machine automatically scans the barcode on each T DISC to obtain the information it needs to prepare your favourite drink: the amount of water, the brewing time, plus the optimum temperature. TASSIMO does all the work, giving you the time to enjoy special moments throughout your day."


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April 28, 2011
On bripeness
Would you believe people are making serious wine in Arizona? Locals here would scoff. Of course we are, they'd protest. Where have you been? The high desert around Tucson and other relatively higher elevation sites northwest of Phoenix near Jerome and Prescott have several vineyards, not the least of which was planted by Oregon's own Dick Erath.
Turns out I'm not the only one looking for a break from the wet. Dick may have sold his eponymous winery last year, but he has been down in several years focused on Arizona viticulture. Arizona, where frosts after budbreak and rain at harvest are essentially non-factors. Dick's traded Pinot noir for Sangiovese and other grapes more suited to the southwestern climate.
In the arid climate here, you need plenty of water for irrigating your vines. The good news is you don't need to worry much about rot and mildew in the vineyard. I imagine organic farming is easier here, if you're so inclined. Not so much need for highly engineered sprays for to ward off disease during wet growing seasons.
However, I imagine you do need to worry about "bripeness." Bripeness? That's a word my Guild Winemakers partners and I (mostly they) coined to describe really ripe tasting wines that are obviously acidified. In hot climates, grape sugars can rise quickly while grape acids plummet, especially because of warm nights. The results are grapes with plenty of sugar and ripe fruit flavor, but lacking acidity that keeps a wine fresh tasting (and microbiologically stable). The solution? Tartaric acid powder from a bag. Heaps of it in some cases.
Now let's be clear. I'm interested in making wine from grapes without fussing with them if possible. Wine grapes have the rare natural ability to be made into wine without added sugar, acid or even yeast. I think if you can do that, do it. But you can't always do that, and part of the issue for me is building the experience of when to pick to preserve natural acidity while not having unripe flavors. I will add tartaric acid to wine when I think it's necessary. I won't add too much, mostly because I don't want bripeness.
What's that taste like? Candy is a good example. Take Sweettart type candies. They're sweet and fruity tasting, but have serious tartness. My kids love Sour Patch candies. Same thing. Intentionally tart though sweet at the core to provide balance. And what about Pixie Stix? Essentially sugar and citric acid, and oddly enough Pixie Stix is a newly classic term to describe certain wines, usually those that taste highly acidified. Where the fruit flavor is broad and ripe, not cool and focused like lesser ripe but still ripe berries, for example, with something of a tent pole of acidity sticking out awkwardly. Acid that makes the ripe wine overly bright, or simply bripe.
Yesterday I tried the 2009 Arizona Stronghold Mangus Red Wine, yes, from the guy from Tool among other people involved. The wine was tasty with plummy flavors, obviously ripe but not pruny or raisined. And not volatile or otherwise flawed like hot climate wines can get. But it was bripe. Just a little too tart for the ripeness. Not bad, rather a smudge on perfectly good, clean table wine.
The wine shows the challenge of this desert climate. But I'm left curious to try more Arizona wines, including those from Dick Erath's planting that is apparently not too far from where I'm staying. Wish I had more time. A return visit may be in order.
4 comments:
I'm preparing a tasting of Arizona wines for my local eno society. Last February, I & some friends tasted over 50 wines & chose 5 of the best to share. Meanwhile, I've been studying up on AZ wines. The grapes are grown at elevations of 4200 to 5200 feet on moderately alkaline soils (pH 7.8 to 8.4). At that elevation, daytime temps are around 95 degrees, with a diurnal drop of 35 or more degrees. This nightly change in temp produces grapes that are naturally high in acid (no bripeness). Irrigation from 300 ft wells provides water when needed thru drip. The vines are naturally stressed (not much need for thinning or canopy pruning), producing a low yield of one to three tons per acre on their own. Because the acid is so high, most wineries use neutral oak to keep balance & to let the fruit shine thru. Challenges?: In 2009, a late frost in Willcox wiped out as much as 75% of some vineyards' crops; in 2010, a hailstorm stripped the vines in Sonoita vineyards, completely obliterating the season's crop in that area. Total vineyard acreage in AZ is currently 650, so if you lose the crop on your 10 or 25 acres, you don't have many sources elsewhere to buy grapes. As for the 2009 Mangus, keep in mind it's been in bottle for less than 6 months; most AZ wineries release their wines VERY early (they say it's because of demand; I suspect its limited capital). My notes on the 2009 Mangus do note it was very full & ripe for a Sangio-cab-merlot blend, but I'm going to let the bottle I purchased rest for a year or so to let it mellow.
- Vincent Fritzsche said...
Don, thanks for the informative comment. Fascinating to learn more about the soil acidity. Our soils in Oregon are fairly acid. I had no idea about Arizona. I realize I wrote too generally. Of course there is the monsoon season in summer, so rain can be an issue. Though I don't think that affects harvest so much. And at elevation up near Jerome there are cooler nights compared to other areas. The bottom line - I want to try more. Wish your tasting was in Portland, assuming it's not.
Hey Amigo! A question for you. Your post states the Erath winery was sold last year. I previously read that in 2004/2005 Dick Erath sold the winery (label, capital improvements, etc) to Chateau Ste Michelle. However, he did not sell much of his land. Rather, he entered into a long term lease arrangement with CSM for it to farm his land and use the juice. Am I right? Held a poor Seattle-ite out!
- click here said...
i wouldn't think grapes could flourish in such an arid landscape. granted in the mountains and hills, rainfall and snow hit and hit hard.


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ENLIGHTENMENT Part A Million
For those who haven't noticed yet, I have a new article up on SuicideGirls. You should be able to get to it by clicking on the words "new article up on SuicideGirls" in the previous sentence. I'm really bad with this HTML mark-up stuff. So if that didn't work, there's a link over to your right that will also take you there.
The latest article is a kind of a response to some of the endless chatter my last post generated. Sometimes I say things here in an offhand way, forgetting that I'm supposedly some kinda celebrity or some such garbage. I commented about that webpage maintained by that person whose students have been advertising in the comments section of this blog — which I think is just a really weird thing to do, actually. Anyway I kinda wish I hadn't said anything because I couldn't give a shit about her in particular or her students. There's a much more serious problem.
See, lots of the stuff that various wanna-be Masters out there claim as the basis for their supposed Grand Awakenings are pretty much the same stuff I encountered a number of years ago as part of the normal process of doing this zazen stuff. Not just me. Lots of practitioners encounter this stuff. In my case, I was also pretty jazzed up about it. I remember walking around thinking, "Yeah, bay-bee! I am the King of All Creation and you better believe it!!!" I was ready to start collaring the monks I saw begging for loose change at Shinjuku Station and challenging them to Enlightement Smackdowns. Had they seen the great truths to which I was now privvy? I thought not. HA! What fools they were compared to ME!
But if you study the koans, you'll see over and over and over again instances of young monks all jazzed up on their initial experiences in the practice being told off by their teachers. If the relationship between teacher and student is a healthy one, this usually works. When it's not, the youngsters often end up breaking away from their teachers convinced that they have surpassed even the great masters in the depth and power of their new-found enlightenment. This is nothing new. It's been repeated countless times over the past couple thousand years.
This is one of the reasons Dogen advised people not to study Buddhism without a teacher. I devoted a whole chapter to this in my upcoming book. But the upshot is that it's OK to do zazen without a teacher. Unless you're really obsessed with obtaining some kind of big experience from the practice, it won't do you any harm and, in fact, will probably do you a whole lot of good. But if you find yourself getting truly serious about the practice, a teacher is absolutely necessary. Among other things, a good teacher will keep you from declaring yourself the One True Messiah upon your first shallow rumblings of understanding.
We've been so conditioned to look at and understand the world we live in a specific way deemed by society to be "normal" that when you first start to get an inkling of how things actually are it can be quite a shock. The severity of that shock depends on how deeply you bought into the supposedly "normal" way of looking at things. If you really, really, really bought into it without question, you're gonna be in for one hell of a surprise upon encountering even the merest shadow of understanding how things really are. If you've had questions and doubts about what most people see as "normal" all along, the shock may not be quite as severe. The people who are the most severely shocked are the ones most likely to believe they are now the New Savior of Humanity the moment they get a glimpse that things might not be as they've been told. Still, the difference between what life really is and what you've been told it is, is so great that pretty much everyone is surprised by it.
I think there's a real danger in what's going on with all these supposed Enlightened Beings plying their trade nowadays. Someone who is very persuasive can have you believing just about anything. I told the story in Hardcore Zen about how deeply impressed I was by the former leader of the Cleveland Hare Krishna temple. He was later allegedly involved in a murder case in West Virginia. I recently came across a copy of the book Monkey On A Stick, which details the case and has a photo of the guy. Looking at him again after 20-some years I shuddered to think what might have transpired had I not held on to that little bit of skepticism towards what he was saying that I felt at the time. I know exactly how people get involved in those horrible gloom-and-doom cults because I could easily have been one of them.


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Green and pink striped house ~ credit?
Yes, green and gray are my two all time favorite colors. And though I have done posts on chartreuse with green accents, I can't believe I've never done a post about gray and green. They are both such soothing colors, and green can be warm or cool, depending on how it is used and looks amazing with both cool grays and warm creams. Though it is often seen as springy or Christmas-y, I believe it makes an amazing seasonal transition color into the fall. Saying good-bye to greenery and hello to golden landscapes. It really marries the two together, adding a richness in a way no other color can. Blues seem to be the color of the moment, but has anyone though to entertain, a lovely shade of green?
Eclectic Interior Design Group~ Keep it (art arrangements) Tight
I love how each photo here has some element of pattern as well, from simple stripes on a throw or the bottom of drapes to damask bedspread, or a trellis wallpaper, it's so refreshing to see these patterns.
Coastal Living ~ Green, gray, white and aqua striped damask bedroom
Coastal Living~ Green dining room
Horse Art ~ Taylor Howes
Coastal Living ~ Gray and white striped dining with green accents


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Happy new year to everyone! I wish you all the best in 2014 for you and your loved ones! This is the first post of 2014 and I am so happy about this year as I have so many things to look for and so many goals to achieve!
Yesterday we went to London and although it was probably the first time I was so tired in my life, I also had an amazing day just visiting sights and shopping! I am a little disappointed though that we hadn't stayed another day, as there were a lot of places we wanted to visit but we didn't have the time!
I will be doing my new year's resolutions and a recap of 2013 in a few posts (I know I 'm already late!) but one of the things I want to do this year is step out of my comfort zone (as much as possible!). I am a really shy person and to be honest I would love to take pictures inside and not have to worry about people staring but as my blog started growing and I am loving what I am doing, I love being able to show you my outfits of the day and the places I was wearing them as well as increase the quality of the pictures! To do that, I have to step out of my comfort zone and just take pictures outside and that's exactly what I've done here! It was terrifying at first but then I was really proud of myself. People were passing and a lot of them did stare but for ones I was proud of myself, actually being there and taking those pictures and for having a blog to share them. People do stare and they will probably always stare so at least make it count!.. Well I guess I did I had a really great start of 2014!
I am wearing:
Faux fur jacket - Primark
Jeans - New Yorker
Shirt - Primark
Bag - Parfois
Shoes - New Look
Watch - D&G
Bracelet - Present ( charm for 2014)
Have you ever been to London? Would you like to see a "photo - travel diary"?


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Well, this is a bummer. Sounds like it was a stingray spike to the chest. Funny, I would have thought it would be something more venomous that would get him.
Is a stingray venomous? I don't know.
Even the crocodiles may shed a tear. Rest in Peace, Steve Irwin.
04 September 2006
Well, this is a bummer. Sounds like it was a stingray spike to the chest. Funny, I would have thought it would be something more venomous that would get him.
Posted by shadowfax at 10:00 AM
4 comments:
As I understand it (and it comes from network news, so you do the reliability calculations), stingray bites are indeed venomous, but not very. In this case it was likely the physical trauma to the heart, not the venom which killed him. in fact one expert-ish person interviewed said that if the pucture had been a few inches away in basically any direciton he likely would have been badly but not mortally hurt.ReplyDelete
It does seem a shame on some level that he wasn't eaten whole by a giant monitor lizard or something. Not to be crass, but his efforts were really spectacular in the facce of large predators, so it seems, I don't know, petty maybe, that he died in such a way.
It's also a bit of a shame because he had so deliberately and recklessly courted death so very many times, but this was apparently not one of them -- he just surprised a ray he hadn't seen.ReplyDelete
Tragic as his death is, it's sad that he basically died in a wildlife-related accident, rather than dying as he lived -- knowingly teasing a deadly beast.
I saw the headline and I thought, "Stingray?". I mean, what the hell was he doing to the stingray? I didn't think they were real aggressive.ReplyDelete
From what I've read, the venom of a stingray is quite deadly. But for a human to die from it means that the venom came directly in contact with a vital organ. The reports are saying that Steve Irwin went into cardiac arrest immediately after the attack, leading to believe that the barb carrying the venom punctured through the chest and hit the heart.ReplyDelete
And stingray attacks are relatively common, but mostly on the feet and legs because someone in the water stepped too close to a stingray and it became frightened.
All in all, the world has lost an amazing man.


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newbie: man date: 1.10.98 We will start off with perhaps one of the basic ways that you can raise your technical knowledge in the unix world. Unlike many of the more widely used desktop operating systems, Unix comes with an invaluable resource for getting more information on each command you have at your disposal. That resource is called the "man pages". Each flavor of unix will come with the utility 'man' and should be used extensively. Once logged into a unix account, you can type "man man" to get more information on this utility. You will see a nicely formatted page of instructions on how to use the 'man' command. You may have difficulty understanding the man pages. The man pages are usually written by the author of the program who has a very logical and technical mind. This means that the man pages may often read like a very dry text book. Don't be discouraged as you read and experiment, it gets easier. You may ask "how do I know which commands to learn more about?" The 'man' utility comes with a feature that helps you find what you are looking for. Lets try the "man man" command, and see what other pages are available to help us. We will use the "-k" option with 'man'. This option instructs 'man' to show matching keywords. flatland ~$ man -k manual catman (8) - create the cat files for the manual man (1) - display reference manual pages man (7) - macros to format Reference Manual pages route (8C) - manually manipulate the routing tables whereis (1) - locate the binary, source, and manual page flatland ~$ Notice that we got several matching results for the word "manual". Now, the trick is to display the right page. There are two 'man' pages, each with a different number. To select one over the other, we will use the number with the 'man' command. For example: man 7 man This will display the 'man (7)' page about "macros to format Reference Manual pages". man 1 man (or just 'man man' as it defaults to '1') will display the original page, about "display reference manual pages". Throughout these files we will teach you various commands to help navigate a Unix system. Even though the files may seem overly comprehensive, we encourage you to continually reference the man pages for more information on each utility. Unix is robust with many additional command options that make it a flexible and powerful Operating System.
firstname.lastname@example.com (c) copyright 1998, 1999 Brian Martin