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Anyone out there? Hello? Seriously, what's wrong with the world?
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Does Tim Cook's "netbooks not computers" angle foreshadow jumbo iPod touch?
Tim Cook spoke about netbooks at Apple's latest earnings call.
Quoted all over the web, his comments are as follows:
For us, it's about doing great products. When look at netbook, cramped keyboard, terrible software, junky hardware, very small screens, just not a consumer experience. Not something that we would put the Mac brand on, quite frankly. It's not a space, as it exists today, that we're interested in or that customers will be interested in long term. But do look at the space and see how customers respond to it. People who want a small computer that does browsing and email might want to buy an iPod touch or an iPhone.
If we find a way that we can deliver an innovative product that really makes a contribution, then we will do that. We have some interesting ideas in this space. Product pipeline is fantastic for Mac. 17 out of last 18 quarters, have exceeded market rate of growth. Quite an accomplishment in this quarter, especially when compared to very low-priced netbooks "that I think it's a stretch to call them a personal computer" which are propping up industry.
OK, what's the take home message here? Allow me to translate it from Applespeak for you.
- Netbooks have small screens and cramped keyboards, which we don't like.
- We won't make netbooks, we're filling that space with the iPhone and the iPod touch.
- We will attack that segment with something else too (unless Steve cancels it).
- Netbooks aren't personal computers.
But how about one and four? I think the real hidden messages are buried in those two.
So netbooks have small screens and cramped keyboards. Of course: that's how big they are! Obviously, a 14" netbook wouldn't be much of a netbook now, would it?
So how to make a netbook-like device that doesn't have a small screen or a cramped keyboard, while keeping it small?
Easy. By making it an oversized iPhone. An Apple tablet. The whole thing will be a screen, and a touchscreen at that, with the possibility of showing on-screen keyboards.
And finally, what about the "not a personal computer" comment?
It's obviously bullshit, for one. Why wouldn't a device with PC hardware (matching the capabilities of a top laptop from a few years back), running a full-blown PC operating system, be a personal computer?
Commenting the earnings call, Jason Snell sees it this way:
Boom! Tim Cook destroys the Netbook world again. "I think it's a stretch to call it a personal computer." Ouch. They've said much of this before, but it's very clear that Apple wants us to know that they're looking at this category and have some ideas... just nothing to announce today.Well, I beg to differ. Not about the fact that Apple has some ideas, no. But I don't think Tim's comments were meant to belittle the netbook sector. No, I think what he's trying to say is something like this:
What we're going to release in that sector won't be a Mac, it won't be a real personal computer. And I know people will whine about that, comparing our product to netbooks, which are PCs. However, if we keep repeating that netbooks aren't PCs, it might actually start looking true, so people will stop whining.
So there you have it. A tablet device is coming, and it won't be a Mac. It couldn't be: if it were, people would start running all sorts of Mac software on it, and most of it would run very poorly on such an underpowered little thing.
So it will be something based on the iPhone OS. Hopefully, with enhanced functionality, though. Multiple apps, a true file system, saving documents, menus, windows, and so on... The possibilities (and the questions) are legion.
Posted by Puiz at 4/23/2009 4 comments Links to this post
Friday, May 23, 2008
Questioning Tog: Does the Mouse Really Rule?
Did you hear this one? According to Tog, the keyboard feels faster than the mouse, but it's actually slower. (This came via Tim Bray and John Gruber).
Tog says Apple spent $50 million on user interface related R&D by 1989, and learned, among (hopefully numerous) other things, that:
- Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
- The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.
No matter how many times I've read this very general statement, it never sounded right to me. Nobody seemed to ever mention any details. When I finally took the plunge and read Tog's actual analysis (parts 1, 2 and 3), I found out that the details still weren't there.
I would really like to know the answers to the following questions, for example:
- How many different functions did the subjects have to perform in these tests?
- What exactly did accomplishing a task by "mousing" and by "keyboarding" involve?
- How many key combinations did the user have to remember for a test? How difficult were these key combinations to enter? How easy were they to remember?
- How many mouse targets needed to be acquired, how big were they, and how far apart were they positioned?
- Did the users have any previous experience with acquiring similar mouse targets to those featured in the test?
- Did the users have any previous experience with using similar (or identical) keyboard combinations to those in the test?
- Was the user manipulating an object (like a text box or an image) between these "tasks"? If so, how big was the visual representation of this object? Did the user have to return to the object after acquiring the target needed for the task? If so, was it also timed?
Tog's test revisited
Tog does provide us, though, some insight into the methodology of at least one of his tests in the third part of his discussion:
The test I did I did several years ago, frankly, I entered into for the express purpose of letting cursor keys win, just to prove they could in some cases be faster than the mouse. Using Microsoft Word on a Macintosh, I typed in a paragraph of text, then replaced every instance of an "e" with a vertical bar (|). The test subject's task was to replace every | with an "e." Just to make it even harder, the test subjects, when using the mouse, were forbidden to just drop the cursor to the right of the | and then use the delete key to get rid of it. Instead, they had to actually drag the mouse pointer across the one-pixel width of the character t o select it, then press the "e" key to replace it.While I'm not a user interface expert, this passage leaves me scratching my head. It does seem to prove an interesting point on perception vs. reality, but it definitely fails to prove that the mouse is faster in general.
The average time for the cursor keys was 99.43 seconds, for the mouse, 50.22 seconds. I also asked the test subjects which method was faster, and to a person they reported that the cursor keys were much, much faster. This was a classic example of the difference between subjective time (the passage of time the user experiences) and objective time (the passage of time the clock experiences). Put simply, the more mentally engaging the task, the shorter the time appears.
All it proves is that acquiring targets (vertical bar characters) scattered over a large area of the screen is more efficient with the mouse than with the keyboard. As we'll see in a minute, moving to smaller distances (especially single steps) would be much easier with the keyboard.
The same way, if you need to pick up 20 parcels which are miles apart, you'll probably take a car or a bike, but not if the same parcels are placed on the first 20 steps of a staircase.
As the vertical bars can be pretty far from each other, moving your pointer between them constitutes a significant part of the test, so it should favor the mouse, the faster vehicle – so I thought. But when I ran the test* on myself as a (somewhat questionable) test subject, using TextEdit and a paragraph from an Ask Tog article, I got the following results:
- Mouse: 143 s
- Keyboard: 133.5 s
By the way, having performed this test, I really fail to see how much it has to do with what Tog calls the "high-level cognitive function" of deciding "upon which special-function key to press." Maybe I'm really smart, but I didn't find that holding down an arrow key would tax my cognitive capabilities that much.
I also noticed how unnatural it felt to be using the mouse for the task. I was struggling to exert the right amount of force needed for precision alignment. It felt unbelievably tedious and even physically painful – my right wrist actually hurt afterwards. (Could all this suffering be another reason why using the mouse for the task seems longer than it actually is?)
*These test results are meant to serve little more than entertainment purposes. One (biased) subject, who happens to be the same person who devised the test, is less than statistically convincing. Yet I've made efforts to make these tests as meaningful as possible. I performed every task several times, and averaged the results. When I felt that fatigue, proficiency achieved by practice, or other factors interfered with my results, I kept re-doing the tests, switching their order, and sometimes taking long breaks from them, until I found that my results stabilized around a value, and that any difference between the values I got for the two or three tasks I was comparing was representative rather than accidental. I also honestly tried to achieve a reasonably good score in each test, without going into extremes. (I basically pretended that I had to perform actual work, in an office setting, on a looming deadline. I'm an average typist, and a power mouse user, having spent a decade working in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Final Cut Pro, all particularly mouse-heavy applications.)
The mouse fights back
It occurred to me later that my results may have been affected by the font size I happened to be using. It was 13 points (Verdana) on a 17" screen at a 1440 x 900 resolution; Tog might have used a larger font and/or a smaller screen resolution almost two decades earlier.
Sure enough, setting the font size to 22 points turned the results around, improving the speed of the mouse by a large margin, and letting it score a narrow victory over the keyboard (though nothing like the double speed that Tog reported). Keyboard times also improved a bit:
- Mouse, large font: 113 s
- Keyboard, large font: 122.5 s
That got me curious. What happens if we increase the font size to a ridiculous 200 points? I found out that the difference between the mouse and the keyboard almost disappeared in this dreadfully impossible task. In addition, the test results varied greatly, and repeating the test again and again helped improve times by leaps and bounds as I learned new tricks on the way. The keyboard started to win again, though mouse performance improved by a small margin every time I repeated the test. I averaged the results when I felt that the curve of the mouse improvements was flattening out:
- Mouse, huge font: 155.5 s
- Keyboard, huge font: 133 s
Beating the test
But there's more. Trying to speed up my "keyboarding," I tried the Alt-Right Arrow key combination, which jumps one whole word ahead, making navigation faster – and stumbled upon a "cheat": TextEdit considers the vertical bar a word boundary, thus whenever one shows up, Alt-Right arrow will stop the pointer right before it. Using this cheat (which involved more cognitive brain functionality, as well as some keyboard acrobatics), I needed more concentration than before, so the task felt much more difficult, and I also had to stop and correct some errors (something I didn't have to do using the other two methods). However, it cut my keyboarding time by a fourth, beating the hell out of the mouse at both normal and large font sizes:
- Keyboard "cheat," normal font: 95.5 s
- Keyboard "cheat," large font: 94.5 s
One side effect of the cheat was that I ended up inadvertently typing a lot of uppercase "E"s. I think the reasons are that here (1) I had to use two modifier keys (Alt and Shift), (2) I had to switch between them pretty fast, and (3) almost every second navigational keystroke (i.e. Alt-Arrow) was followed by a selection (Shift-Arrow), then immediately by a replacement ("e") keystroke, requiring me to switch between three different key commands very often, making me mess up one of them a lot.
Using a huge font size slowed down this task as well, but it was still the fastest way at that size:
- Keyboard "cheat," huge font: 123 s
I could come up with several pages' worth of analysis, comparing and contrasting how font size affects each test case, but suffice it to say that without specifying everything down to the smallest details, it's just about impossible to decide whether the keyboard or the mouse is faster even in a very simple test like this. Tog seems to have oversimplified things a lot.
The keyboard's turn
In order to investigate things a bit further, I also came up with a test of my own, one where I felt the keyboard would have the edge, as it required smaller, more precise navigational movements.
In my test, the subject needed to replace every second letter of every word in a (much shorter) paragraph with the letter "p." I was the test subject again, and these were my results:
- Mouse, normal font: 137 s
- Keyboard, normal font: 90 s
- Mouse, large font: 118 s
- Keyboard, large font: 76.5 s
Replacing the letters was identical in both cases, so it didn't influence the results. (Or did it? We'll get back to that very soon.)
Somewhat surprisingly, a larger font size helped both tasks equally well. I expected mousing to benefit more, as the targets became larger, thus easier to acquire. Investigating the reason for this anomaly is beyond the scope of my blog post, but it, again, proves my main point: that things are complicated.
If you think by now that I'm some sort of a keyboard evangelist and mouse hater, rigging tests so that they will always let the keyboard win, then well, you've got that mouse pointer hovering over the wrong guy. No, I'm the guy who keeps rigging tests in small ways that change the results in big ways, trying to show that simplistic statements like Tog's are simply wrong. And ultimately, I just want the help the case of redundancy and freedom of user choice in user interface design.
So then I changed a little aspect of my test: instead of the letter "p," the subject now had to enter the "¶" character in place of every second letter of every word. This turned the test on its head, making the previously victorious keyboard lose by a Tog-uesque 50% margin.
What gives? Well, it's simple. While the subject (i.e. yours truly) could easily rest his fingers on the "p" key while navigating with the keyboard in the previous version, that was no longer possible with the hard-to-reach Alt-"7" combination needed for the "¶" character. Thus, every time I had to switch between entering that symbol and navigating/selecting, I had to lift my fingers off the keyboard and reposition them, losing a lot of time. (With practice, my times improved greatly. From an initial dysmal 184 seconds, which I excluded from my calculations as an anomaly, I reached a much more respectable average of 149 seconds by the time I finally decided to give the whole frustrating mess a rest. As always, the number I provide is an average. However, an interesting trend to note is that this is an initially huge margin that gets significantly smaller with practice.)
- Mouse, large font: 126 s
- Keyboard, large font: 149 s
So, guess what? You can't say that "the keyboard is faster." You can't even say, "The keyboard is faster when replacing every second letter of every word in a text." No, you even have to say what character you're replacing it with. It gets as specific as that.
*Switching to a monospaced font didn't help much, though. I ran the test with Monaco, and didn't notice any statistically significant improvements.
After testing some very narrow areas of the huge field of "user interaction by keyboard vs. mouse," all I can say is that both input methods have their strengths and weaknesses, and their optimum fields of use should be analyzed and investigated much more carefully than Tog appears to have done.
Personally, I think it's best to let the user decide what method(s) to use, and provide for both keyboard and mouse-based functionalities, whenever it makes any little sense. But even providing several methods isn't going to be enough: you also have to get them right. Designing key commands and mouse targets is pretty easy to mess up, having the user end up with useless input methods even in their preferred contexts.
Also, even though some specific input methods may have intimidating learning curves, in some cases, they may be worth the effort (e.g. in the case of the iPhone keypad). Obviously, users may be a bit tough to sell on such user interface choices, so they must be explained in a careful and convincing way.
Finally, I also wonder whether it's always speed that matters. It may easily be the case that the faster way of performing a task is more exhausting, less natural, or simply less fun. Speed may or may not be important; the developer simply can't imagine every possible way his or her product will be used. Maybe a task you imagined to be pretty rare as a developer will end up being the one that your user needs to perform a thousand times in the course of two hours – so there had better be a fast way of doing it. And while you're at it, why not also create an easy way, and a fun way? Redundancy can be a great thing in the world of user interfaces.
That is, unless you can find a perfect way, one which is easy, fun, fast and natural in every situation – I'm hard-pressed to find too many examples, though.
Posted by Puiz at 5/23/2008 1 comments Links to this post
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
The Magic Text Field: searching, URLs and bookmarks
Cabel Maxfield Sasser notes how advertisements in Japan display search boxes with recommended search terms, as opposed to URLs. It certainly feels more user-friendly (and natural) to enter real words into one box (the search box) than to type something as geeky as a URL in another box (the URL field), and the author even speculates that future versions of Safari may transition to displaying a more prominent Google field and a less prominent URL field.
This has got me thinking. These are my closely related, highly anecdotal observations on URL entry vs. searching:
- Some people (especially Firefox users) enter everything, even URLs, in the Google box. (By default, a new Firefox window has focus on the Google box.) These users will have to click again at the Google-displayed URL, but they don't seem to mind.
- I sometimes catch myself mistakenly using the URL field instead of the Google field, hinting that search may be taking over from URL entry in my use as well.
- Firefox actually accommodates (perhaps encourages) this previous behavior: entering expressions in the URL box yields Google search results or top hits. Other browsers simply display the predictable error messages caused by such attempts at connecting to malformed URLs.
- I hardly ever use the bookmarks menu for opening a page, relying on the autocomplete feature of the URL field instead. That is, if I add something to my bookmarks, I will navigate to it later by starting to type some words from its URL (if meaningful), rather than choosing it from the menu.
- But then I hardly ever add any bookmarks either. If I want to bookmark a page for later retrieval, I don't have to do anything: it will be automatically added to the History list, and thus it will be available for autocomplete, too.
- In Leopard, Safari's history items and cached pages are indexed by Spotlight, even enabling users to find visited pages by searching for words in their contents.
I think web pages are verbal, and the most natural way of relating to them is by typing text.
Posted by Puiz at 3/25/2008 0 comments Links to this post
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
MacBook Air: harbinger of the tablet Mac?
As I was re-reading, for some reason, my old post on the November tablet Mac rumors, and got to the part where I speculate on the features of the purported device (such as ports and disk drives), something suddenly occured to me.
As I speculated back then, a tablet Mac would very likely need to do away with some traditional Mac features, such as an optical drive. However, I didn't think it would lack Ethernet or FireWire: I thought those would be too extreme omissions.
Guess what: Apple has just shipped a Mac without any of these things. It remains to be seen how exactly people are going to respond to such a radical elimination of items whose presence in a Mac have been taken for granted for almost a decade, but looks like Apple is on to something there.
The Air is more of a breakthrough in what it lacks than it is in what new features it adds (basically, a MultiTouch trackpad), and I'm sure Apple is eagerly anticipating feedback.
If it turns out that there exists a significant enough class of users who don't mind the radical departure this Mac represents, Apple can be more confident in launching yet another product category: a tablet Mac, taking the Air's ultraportability concept yet one step further.
MultiTouch cannot be forever confined to cellphones and trackpads.
Posted by Puiz at 2/13/2008 0 comments Links to this post
Thursday, January 31, 2008
MacBook Air: iMac or Cube?
The introduction of the new Mac laptop is a bold move by Apple, as the subnotebook radically eliminates some components that may be considered essential.
Every single Mac that Apple has released since 1998 has had Ethernet connectivity, as well as an optical drive. Since 2001, every Macintosh has also shipped with a FireWire port.
The MacBook Air does away with all three.
Sure, there are workarounds, but all are cumbersome. Ethernet is available as a $29 dongle that Apple sells separately, though it would occupy the single USB port of the Air. External optical drives also exist (Apple sells one exclusively for the MacBook Air), but carrying such additional devices around somewhat defeats the purpose of having a super thin, super light notebook. The external drive would also need to fight over the single USB port with competing devices, unless you buy yet another companion product, a USB hub.
You can also hack into the optical drives of neighboring Macs or even PCs with a piece of software that is reputed to "just work," as one expects from Apple. However, it's kind of creepy to be constantly asking favors from fellow computer users, even installing software on their machines, whenever you want to use an optical drive. And those computers had better be equipped with WiFi, too.
And as for FireWire, you're pretty much out of luck there.
So, what the hell were they thinking? How could such a device ever sell?
Well, Apple did make a similarly radical move back in 1998, when it introduced the original iMac. Steve Jobs was back with a vengeance, and he chose a pretty dramatic way to show everyone he means business: he released a sexy-looking, simple entry-level Mac that lacked a floppy drive, and eschewed traditional ports such as SCSI or ADB in favor of USB. So what happened? The iMac sold as hot cakes, and peripheral makers started to build USB keyboards, mice, scanners, etc. The floppy disk was already on its way out, but the iMac's snub might have been the last nail in its coffin. So, the iMac pretty much changed the world around it.
Will the MacBook Air do the same? Will USB flash drives kill optical disks? Will WiFi drive Ethernet into extinction? Is Apple knifing its own FireWire baby?
It certainly looks like Apple would very much like all of this to happen. Just as modems started to disappear from Macs, Ethernet may be next, surviving only in professional machines. Optical drives may still stick around for a while, though, but Apple doesn't think they will be missed from the MacBook Air. While you'll still need to leech the drive of a neighboring computer for software installs, the Mac maker would prefer if you turned to its products and services instead of using an optical drive: get music and video off iTunes, use iPods instead of burning CDs, and buy Time Capsule for backups. Clever.
There certainly is method in this madness. Anyone in the market for a $1,800 notebook must have some cash to burn on these products and services, so each Air sold (especially in countries where the iTunes Store is available in its full glory) should generate some guaranteed extra revenue for Apple. Besides, these relatively wealthy people probably already have a Mac at home anyway, helping them overcome most of their objections to the Air.
If sales of the Air reach a critical mass, the new Mac could help reform the computing landscape, just like the iMac did a decade ago. If sales end up failing to go off the charts, but remain respectable, then, well, Apple can still boast a successful niche product, and I'm sure that a hundred bucks or two may go off the price eventually, if needed.
But what if Apple has made a major miscalculation, like the one in the case of the Power Mac Cube? Wasn't it also a relatively underpowered pro-level Mac that the market deemed too expensive? Pundits crucified the Cube for putting style over substance, and weak sales of the radical-looking new Mac spelled serious trouble for the still-vulnerable Apple.
I don't think there's any reason to anticipate a similar fate for the MacBook Air. There may be some superficial similarities to the Cube, but the differences are more significant:
- As far as tech specs go, the Cube was clearly a weaker product than the Power Mac, yet it cost more. The MacBook Air is also a weaker product than the MacBook Pro, but it costs less as well. (However, it may also be compared to the MacBook, and it wouldn't fare so well in that comparison: the Air is the less capable and more expensive of the two notebooks.)
- Miniaturization is not such a strong selling point for a desktop Mac as it is for a notebook. The beauty of the Cube was mostly skin deep, whereas the thinness of the Air is also very practical.
- Apple's revenues in fiscal 2001 were $5.65 billion, whereas in 2007, they were $24 billion. Apple can better afford to risk less-than-optimal initial sales of a new experimental niche product now than it could at the time of the Cube.
Posted by Puiz at 1/31/2008 1 comments Links to this post
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Yet more whining on Apple secrecy
I'm sure Jens Alfke is a great guy and a great engineer, and I understand if he leaves Apple due to creative differences. Yet some of his comments seem to warrant a big "Duh!"
I think Apple's policy on blogging is one of the least enlightened of major tech companies; Microsoft in particular is surprisingly open.Well, Apple has been all about secrecy for the past decade or so, while Microsoft, perhaps the world's greatest vendor of vaporware, has always embraced blabbering as one of its main communication tools. Isn't it as simple as this?
Posted by Puiz at 1/24/2008 0 comments Links to this post
Sunday, December 02, 2007
E-book readers: they look good on paper
There's been some talk about Amazon's new Kindle e-book reader being the "iPod of books." This analogy might be cute and catchy, but it's deeply flawed, and wishful thinking at best.
First, being the iPod of books is a very ambitious undertaking. Much more so than being the iPod of music. Here's why:
- With the iPod, the content that the device was built for is music. The display is only an organizer for it. The actual presentation of the content is audio playback. With an e-book reader, however, the display has to serve not only as an organizer, but also as the actual presentation canvas for the content itself. And that's hard, because
- electric devices have been able to play back music for decades. Most users were already satisfied with the sound quality of existing MP3 players even before the iPod debuted, so Apple's device didn't need to achieve a technological breakthrough in its core competence of music playback. However, no electric device exists today that could "play back" a book or a newspaper at an acceptable quality. Therefore, a successful e-book reader will need to break new ground.
- Listening is passive, while reading is active. Listening to a song only requires you to push the play button, and the rest will just happen to you. However, reading a book requires constant and conscious interaction: not just scanning the text with your eyeballs, but also physically navigating the book by turning pages.* A device for reading has to facilitate that as well in a very humane and user-friendly way, not to mention providing additional functionality such as annotation features**.
**This blog post of mine is serving me as a great lesson about procrastination. I've been working on it for over a week, and in the meantime, several other web authors have posted their opinions, which are in some cases very similar to mine. Ars Technica's John Stokes, for example, mentions annotation features, as well as several other points I also visit.
The Muzak of Books
But there's more on the iPod analogy front. The music you hear on an iPod is comparable to what you hear on your stereo. Sure, the quality is certainly not the same as on a high-end device, but it's is acceptable for the vast majority of users, most of whom would be hard-pressed to tell much of the difference anyway.
However, just imagine, for a moment, an iPod that could only play a MIDI version of any song. You would hear your favorite songs arranged for generic software instruments, and some machine voice would do all the vocals.
Would this device be a hit? Would you buy it?
I'm asking because this is more or less what Kindle, or any other e-book solution on the market today, does. What it presents is nothing but the MIDI version of a book. Layout is generated on the fly, using a generic font. Sure, the original words are kept, just like the original notes in a MIDI version of a song. But yet it's not the same song, and it's not the same book. It's the Muzak version of a book. It looks more like a webpage. Compared to the real thing, it's an abomination.
Readers want the real thing; the book as it has been designed and laid out by design professionals.
Sure, Muzak has its place in elevators and public toilets, but it's not the music you love, it's not what inspires your kids to write fan mail. And the same way, Kindle is perfectly suitable for reading an end-user license agreement or a shopping list – but not something you care about, not something you grow attached to.
A book reader? That's me!
And finally, there's a third thing. Your iPod does not equal to the music on it. The two are very separate things. An iPod is just the device that plays your music. The music is something you cannot touch, wherever it's coming from. A band, a stereo, a clock radio, an iPod: these are sources of music, you never think of them as the music itself. You don't even think of a CD as the music itself: it's just a recording that you have to get music out of by playing it in some device.
It's not that I have a penchant for stating the obvious, but this is a very important difference between music and books. Books have a physical representation that music or films lack: they are objects. The volume that you hold in you hand isn't a "source of book," or a "book recording" that you have to "play back." Nope. It's the book itself. It's a thing.* You need eyes and hands to read it, no other devices are necessary.
*Again, someone else has said it better as I was plugging away with this post. Damn.
Envisioning a device that will one day complement, substitute and perhaps even replace paper-based books, and calling it an "e-book reader" is a mistake. If such a device is to emerge, it won't be "playing back" a book: it will have to be the book.
I picture a featureless, lightweight, white or semitransparent, sublime-looking object, about the weight, size and shape of a book. Its surface would appear to be paper-like, with text and images apparently printed on it: it would show a page from a book. (Or maybe a spread. I know that there would be some serious and hard design decisions to be made, like how to accommodate oversized layouts such as a newspaper's.)
Looking at this thing from a distance, you could even mistake it for some high-tech version of a book. Not a reader: you're the reader. It's the book.
You would turn pages by imitating page-turning gestures on its touch-sensitive surface. You could flick it by manipulating its side. It would need to accommodate loads of other familiar gestures, in order to make you feel like you're reading a book (like, half-turning a page to see what's behind it, then turning it back). And the whole thing would need to bring you as much as possible of the whole book experience, such as layout, design, typography, look and feel, and even as many as humanly possible of these partly tongue-in-cheek, yet entirely perfectly valid points.
Maybe the world isn't ready for such a device. Not in the "world's not ready for Vista" sense, but simply because the hardware needed for such a device isn't feasible yet.
Of course, this thing will happen one day. Maybe it will work through directly stimulating parts of your brain to give you a complex multisensory illusion of reading a book, and you shouldn't expect it before 2100. Maybe it will happen next year. But it will be there.
We need to save trees. We need to simplify logistics. We need more interactivity: spoilt by the web experience, how many times did you wish you had hyperlinks or search boxes in a book or newspaper you were reading?
A real-world need
Two years ago, I left my home country. Among various other changes, I'm no longer able to read my favorite newspaper as it's not available where I live now.
Even though it's the year 2007, there's still no technology out there that could help me out. And no, Kindle won't be the answer either.
Back in the days, I would drive to work for an afternoon shift, and I'd make a stop at a drive-in restaurant for an early afternoon breakfast. I would buy my favorite paper, fold it out in front of me, and read it while eating.
I would look at the front page, and see what's above and below the fold. I would look at the teasers, the headlines, the subheads, the captions; the different fonts and typefaces, the weighing of contents by the size and position attributed to them by the editors and designers.
I would subconsciously use the placement of photos, the clever typographic solutions, and all the other subtle ways of presenting all the information and meta-information, to choose which stories I would read, and in what order. To this day, I can recall some of the stories the paper broke years ago, and my recollections are always complete with the entire layout, not just the words and the pictures.
After looking at the front page, I would go in. As I'd turn the pages, some familiarly distinct features would appear, making sure both that I feel at home and that I can find my way.
For instance, there was be the opinion page, one of my favorites. One big editorial, serious in tone, set in boldface (a bit of an assault on readability, but still, I'd grown to like it). A short, rather caustic opinion piece, in a larger font, set in italics. A small box with a short scathing op-ed always by the same guy, day in, day out. And in the center of the page, a large essay on some controversial issue, with an attention-grabbing pull quote: something I was almost certain to read every day.
When I moved halfway across Europe, I was looking for ways to keep reading that paper (which was not available on newsstands in my new adopted home). A subscription was out of the question: both the expense and the delay would have been forbidding.
So I subscribed online. I was looking for the same experience, or at least something similar. But it wasn't meant to be.
It's not just that I was unable to take my subscription to a restaurant. It's not just that I was confined to a computer for reading. All I could access was a page with a list of headlines. I could click on each, and the text would appear in my browser. As would the photos. I could also search, and get yet more clickable lists.
That was it. No layout, no design, no presentation. Just the words and the pictures. It was a website, except that the stories were not written for the web. They were cut and pasted from the paper. It was less than a website, and much less than a newspaper. It united the disadvangates of both.
I despised it and canceled after a few weeks.
Apparently, whoever was in charge of the online version thought that content was the only thing that mattered, where content would equal all the words and the pictures. According to this belief, when you buy a paper, you pay for words and pictures, and that's it. Today's newspapers place these things tediously on pages, requiring a lot of human effort, but that's only because a printed page has a limited capacity, and working with this limitation is hard. In a better, more advanced world, there will be no more paper, therefore there will be no need for laboriously placing the contents on these things called "pages." You would just present a table of contents, and the contents themselves, which are free to flow without any spatial limitation.
Therefore, a newspaper or a book would be just like a webpage, and all you'd do is search, click, and then scroll, scroll, scroll and scroll as you read.
Welcome to the brave new world. Luckily, this will never happen. Anyone who thinks that a newspaper, a magazine, a book, or basically anything that gets printed, is nothing but a sum of its words and pictures is seriously, sadly mistaken, and will not be the driving force behind a successfull e-book concept.
Anyone who doesn't know the vast, incredible importance of layout and presentation simply doesn't get publishing, period.
Anyone who gets publishing knows that an online HTML version of any print publication is not an equivalent of the original.
Apparently, Jeff Bezos doesn't get publishing. He's good at selling books and other things. He's a salesman. He may even be a sales visionary. But that's it.
An acceptable presentation of a book or a newspaper in an electric solution means that it has to look very close to the real thing. It has to make you forget that you're looking at a gadget.
Apple's chance
Currently, the only company that seems to even come close to "getting" things like these is Apple. In addition to its obvious lead in user interface design, its famous dedication to any design, and very specifically, typography, is a clear indication. Remember, the Mac was the device that kick-started desktop publishing in the eighties.
I think, or rather, I hope, that Apple will introduce a device to top Kindle, turning Amazon's attempt into the kind of roadkill that litters the technology highways. Kind of like the iPod did to the likes of the Archos Jukebox.
Three years ago, based on the success of the iPod, I thought Apple could probably be the one company to pull it off.
Now, in 2007, Apple has unveiled Multi-Touch, as well as an embedded version of OS X. If e-books are going to be more than a blip on the radar any time soon, they will be courtesy of Apple, not Amazon.
Posted by Puiz at 12/02/2007 0 comments Links to this post
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Kindle: damn, they stole my idea. Here's my mail to Steve Jobs from 2004
Naive as I was, I sent the following e-mail to Steve Jobs back in 2004.
Needless to say, he never wrote back.
Dear Steve,
Here's a product/service idea I think Apple could pull off pretty decently.
We all hope that one day lots of trees will be spared by switching from paper to a digital alternative. Yet it's not happening. E-book readers crash and burn. People insist on real books and newspapers, and it seems to be an emotional thing.
Or is it? I think it's just that current devices suck. Apple could, once again, show the world how it's done, and make it a hit.
Here's what I think it needs.
(1) A reader (let's call it an iPad for now) needs to resemble a book. It should look non-technical, white, matte, and just beg to be read like a book. (Most of this is a display thing.)
(2) Once iPad resembles a book (breaking users' resistence), people will see incredible benefits. How about "A thousand volumes in your hands?" Readers easily navigate through book collections, take notes, use bookmarks, etc. (Touch-screen technology and on-screen keyboards should be considered. Miniaturization isn't such a big issue here.)
(3) PDF should be to the iPad what MP3 is to the iPod. Transferring these files for immediate access needs to be a breeze. One hidden benefit: users will stop printing long documents that they'd only read once (like software tutorials). People hate reading on computer screens – this should be a hardcopy replacement, not a computer replacement.
(4) Apple has good enough reputation in the contents business to launch an e-bookstore and get large publishers on board. If this catches on, it can be an even bigger cost saver than AAC vs CD. Not to mention periodicals like dailies that face stiff competition from the Web: they could fight back this way. DRM is needed, natch.
(5) You may want to take the computer partly out of the equation. Introduce a small, cheap flash-RAM dongle that retails free of charge as a supplement to books -- or is sold separately. It contains a DRM-protected copy of the book, and it plugs right into the iPad. You can read it while it's plugged (no piracy). Think about buying newspapers at the newsstands like this, on 1" by 1" cards! Quite revolutionary, saving huge printing costs and time.
That's it. If I got you started, I'll gratefully accept donations.
All the best,
András Puiz
Posted by Puiz at 11/20/2007 0 comments Links to this post
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Maybe this iPhone will be an U.S. thing after all?
Despite all the hype, the response to the iPhone in Europe isn't nearly like it was in the U.S. Is T-Mobile happy with 10 thousand units sold in Germany on the first day?!
I hope Apple knows, but Europe is a different market. Mobile telephony was born here. There are several service providers, with competitive plans. People here live and breathe cellphones. They unlock phones. And there is a huge choice of devices. Oh, and the iPhone plans are horribly expensive.
Also, saying that the iPod doesn't enjoy a monopoly like in the U.S. (arguably an important factor in the iPhone's success) would be a huge understatement. The iPod's market share in Germany "hit a high" of around 28% in 2007: nowhere close to U.S. figures.
I wonder if Apple wants the iPhone to be a rock star in Europe, or just a device with respectable sales. In the former case, the company may soon be forced to go back to the drawing board and rethink its European iPhone strategy.
Posted by Puiz at 11/11/2007 0 comments Links to this post


text:
- Case report
- Open Access
- Open Peer Review
Monochorionic-triamniotic triplet pregnancy after intracytoplasmic sperm injection, assisted hatching, and two-embryo transfer: first reported case following IVF
© Ghulmiyyah et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2003
- Received: 05 July 2003
- Accepted: 08 August 2003
- Published: 08 August 2003
We present a case of monochorionic-triamniotic pregnancy that developed after embryo transfer following in vitro fertilization (IVF).
After controlled ovarian hyperstimulation and transvaginal retrieval of 22 metaphase II oocytes, fertilization was accomplished with intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). Assisted embryo hatching was performed, and two embryos were transferred in utero. One non-transferred blastocyst was cryopreserved.
Fourteen days post-transfer, serum hCG level was 423 mIU/ml and subsequent transvaginal ultrasound revealed a single intrauterine gestational sac with three separate amnion compartments. Three distinct foci of cardiac motion were detected and the diagnosis was revised to monochorionic-triamniotic triplet pregnancy. Antenatal management included cerclage placement at 19 weeks gestation and hospital admission at 28 weeks gestation due to mild preeclampsia. Three viable female infants were delivered via cesarean at 30 5/7 weeks gestation.
The incidence of triplet delivery in humans is approximately 1:6400, and such pregnancies are classified as high-risk for reasons described in this report. We also outline an obstetric management strategy designed to optimize outcomes. The roles of IVF, ICSI, assisted embryo hatching and associated laboratory culture conditions on the subsequent development of monozygotic/monochorionic pregnancy remain controversial. As demonstrated here, even when two-embryo transfer is employed after IVF the statistical probability of monozygotic multiple gestation cannot be reduced to zero. We encourage discussion of this possibility during informed consent for the advanced reproductive technologies.
- triplet pregnancy / IVF / monochorionic / cerclage / outcome
Although the developmental mechanisms responsible monozygotic mutiple gestation are poorly characterized, some laboratory procedures altering the zona pellucida (e.g., ICSI and assisted embryo hatching) have been proposed as important. In this report, we describe the first known case of monochorionic-triamniotic triplets after IVF, an unusual physiological event requiring the sequence of two properly timed, distinct embryo splitting events.
Case Report
A 21 year-old Caucasian nulligravida presented with her partner for assessment and treatment of primary male factor infertility of 24 months duration. Both were in good general health and the female's past gynecological history was unremarkable. The wife smoked approximately 1/2 pack of cigarettes daily, and used alcohol only rarely. Her only regular medication was a prenatal vitamin. Physical exam revealed no abnormality; BMI was 20 kg/m2. Her blood type was O positive. Cervical cytology and laboratory tests results were all normal, and saline hysterography identified no intracavitary defects. The patient had never used ovulation induction agents or periovulatory hCG.
The partner was a non-smoker and took no regular medications. He had commissioned no pregnancies in a prior marriage, and had been diagnosed with azoospermia four years earlier. Urological evaluation found no anatomical abnormality. Karyotype was normal 46, XY and Y-chromosome microdeletion analysis via polymerase chain reaction method was negative for any known mutation. Obstructive azoospermia (rete testes obliteration) had been diagnosed after exploratory scrotal surgery four years before presentation. The couple declined intrauterine insemination with anonymous donor sperm for personal reasons. Given the male factor infertility diagnosis necessitating intracytoplasmic injection (ICSI), the couple elected in vitro fertilization utilizing surgically retrieved spermatozoa. Full informed consent was obtained, including a discussion of multiple gestation risk.
Following pituitary downregulation with intranasal nafarelin acetate (0.4 mg/d), controlled ovarian hyperstimulation commenced using a combined FSH+hMG protocol. Subcutaneous hCG was administered on stimulation day 11, when serum estradiol was 2110 pg/ml. Twenty-two oocytes were retrieved via ultrasound-guided transvaginal needle aspiration, undertaken in parallel with spermatozoa collection via testicular biopsy (both procedures performed under intravenous sedation). Utilizing ICSI, 10 oocytes advanced to the 2pn stage. Two embryos (8 and 9-cell stage) were transferred fresh on post-fertilization day three after assisted hatching via acid Tyrode's method. One blastocyst was cryopreserved. Serum hCG was 423 mIU/ml two weeks after embryo transfer.
At 28 weeks' gestation, the patient was readmitted to hospital for mild preeclampsia with a blood pressure of 140/80. To promote fetal lung maturity, betamethasone (12 mg × 2 doses) was administered via intramuscular injection. The patient had no focal neurological signs and ALT and AST were elevated (97 and 121 u/l, respectively). Liver function tests normalized soon after admission. Platelet count was 157,000 and protein (325 mg) was present in 24 h urine collection. Multifetal biophysical profiles were performed every 48 h with reassuring results. At 305/7 weeks' gestation, serum uric acid was 7.8 mg/dl, platelets had fallen to 115,000, and the patient began to experience visual scotomata. Based on these findings consistent with worsening preeclampsia, the patient underwent a primary low-transverse cesarean delivery (estimated blood loss = 1,000 ml) resulting in the births of three viable female infants (1475, 1021, and 1021 g); one vertex and two breech presentations. Apgar scores were and 8/9, 9/9, and 8/9, respectively. A single three-umbilical cord placenta (weight = 639 g) was delivered without complication, and each umbilical cord was morphologically normal. The patient was discharged home after seven days in good condition, and two of the triplets were discharged home three weeks later. The other infant was discharged home at eight weeks age due to necrotizing enterocolitis that required surgery for intestinal obstruction. At six months follow-up, mother and babies continue to do well.
Previous investigators [2–4] have suggested at least three factors could modulate development of monozygotic multiple gestations in the setting of the advanced reproductive technologies: ovulation induction per se, certain IVF culture conditions, and zona pellucida architecture/micromanipulation. As these three variables commonly occur together, multiple regression analysis to quantify the individual contribution of each intervention has proven difficult. The potential impact of such iatrogenic influences on monozygotic gestations is reviewed elsewhere [5]. Whether or not spontaneous embryo splitting or duplication might occur as another mechanism by which monozygotic/monochorionic multiplets develop remains controversial. Although rare, the de novo appearance of multiple inner-cell mass within a single embryo has been documented both in animals [6, 7] and humans [8].
Intrapartum and neonatal challenges of triplet pregnancy include a higher risk of respiratory distress [9] and a known association between intratriplet birthweight discordance and overall neonatal mortality [10]. A recent Japanese study [11] revealed improved perinatal mortality rates among triplets over the interval 1980–1998, but birthweight <2000 g persisted as a poor prognostic indicator of outcome throughout the study period. While the societal cost of multiple births has proven more difficult to study, previous work has shown depression and divorce rates to be higher among parents of multiple births compared to those who have only singleton deliveries [12, 13].
Epidemiologists have rightly called attention to the problem of higher-order multiple births when a larger number of embryos are transferred [14], and some authors have suggested that a reduction in multiple gestations can only be obtained by transfer of one embryo after IVF [15]. However, this monozygotic/monochorionic triplet pregnancy occurred in the context of a single blastocyst implantation after day three transfer of two embryos with IVF, a practice we regard as clinically conservative.
While the largest published series of monozygotic twin sets from one center found the frequency of monozygotic twinning not statistically different between zona manipulated and zona intact subgroups [8], summary research collected from multiple institutions (and embracing an even larger pooled sample) has offered a contrasting view [16]. Indeed, it must be acknowledged that our present report describes a triplet conception and delivery following both ICSI and assisted embryo hatching. Yet whether these zona manipulations were causative or merely associative interventions cannot be fully determined from available data. Further observational studies will be necessary to characterize more completely the physiology of monozygotic/monochorionic multiple pregnancy.
The exact mechanism of monozygotic mutiple gestation is still poorly characterized. Procedures that modify the zona pellucida (e.g., ICSI and assisted embryo hatching) have been suggested as important in the monozygotic multiple gestation hypothesis, yet a definitive relationship between any clinical intervention during IVF and the subsequent development of multiple monozygotic gestation remains speculative. Nevertheless, even when the number of embryos transferred is limited, the potential for spontaneous embryo duplication escapes prediction. Accordingly, counseling should disclose such information during informed consent and offer a full opportunity to discuss number of embryos to transfer.
Author contributions
LMG was resident physician associated with the case and drafted the manuscript. MP was chief medical attending. MJT was senior embryologist responsible for cell culture and assisted fertilization. JHZ was the lead obstetrician and primary surgeon at delivery. DPE was consulting perinatologist. ESS conceived of the research, directed the resident, and coordinated manuscript revisions.
Written consent was obtained from the patient for publication of this manuscript.
Authors' Affiliations
- Bulmer MG: The Biology of Twinning in Man. Clarendon Press, Oxford. 1970Google Scholar
- Edwards RG, Mettler L, Walters D: Identical twins and in vitro fertilization. J In Vitro Fert Embryo Transfer. 1986, 3: 114-7.View ArticleGoogle Scholar
- Derom C, Vleitinck R, Derom R, van den Bergh H, Thiery M: Increased monozygotic twinning rate after ovulation induction. Lancet. 1987, 30: 1236-8. 10.1016/S0140-6736(87)92688-2.View ArticleGoogle Scholar
- Alikani M, Noyes N, Cohen J, Rosenwaks Z: Monozygotic twinning in the human is associated with the zona pellucida architecture. Hum Reprod. 1994, 9: 1318-21.PubMedGoogle Scholar
- Sills ES, Moomjy M, Zaninovic N, Veeck LL, McGee M, Palermo GD, Rosenwaks Z: Human zona pellucida micromanipulation and monozygotic twinning frequency after IVF. Hum Reprod. 2000, 15: 890-5. 10.1093/humrep/15.4.890.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar
- Chida S: Monozygous double inner cell masses in mouse blastocysts following fertilization in vitro and in vivo. J In Vitro Fert Embryo Transf. 1990, 7: 177-9.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar
- Ozdzenski W, Szczesny E, Tarkowski AK: Postimplantation development of mouse blastocysts with two separate inner cell masses. Arch Gynecol Obstet. 1997, 195: 467-71.Google Scholar
- Sills ES, Tucker MJ, Palermo GD: Assisted reproductive technologies and monozygous twins: implications for future study and clinical practice. Twin Res. 2000, 3: 217-23.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar
- Shinwell ES, Blickstein I, Lusky A, Reichman B: Excess risk of mortality in very low birthweight triplets: a national, population based study. Arch Dis Child Fetal Neonatal Ed. 2003, 88: F36-40. 10.1136/fn.88.1.F36.View ArticlePubMedPubMed CentralGoogle Scholar
- Jacobs AR, Demissie K, Jain NJ, Kinzler WL: Birth weight discordance and adverse fetal and neonatal outcome among triplets in the United States. Obstet Gynecol. 2003, 101 (5 pt 1): 909-14. 10.1016/S0029-7844(02)03080-6.PubMedGoogle Scholar
- Imaizumi Y: Perinatal mortality in triplet births in Japan: time trends and factors influencing mortality. Twin Res. 2003, 6: 1-6. 10.1375/136905203762687825.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar
- Nielsen J: Parents of twins have a specifically higher divorce rate. Sygeplejersken. 1986, 86: 21-PubMedGoogle Scholar
- Garel M, Salobir C, Blondel B: Psychological consequences of having triplets: a 4-year follow-up study. Fertil Steril. 1997, 67: 1162-5. 10.1016/S0015-0282(97)81457-4.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar
- Schieve LA, Peterson HB, Meikles SF, Jeng G, Danel I, Burnett NM, Wilcox LS: Live-birth rate and multiple-birth rate risk using in vitro fertilization. JAMA. 1999, 282: 1832-8. 10.1001/jama.282.19.1832.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar
- De Neubourg D, Gerris J, Van Royen E, Mangelschots K, Valkenburg M: Prevention of twin pregnancy after IVF/ICSI using embryo transfer. Verh K Acad Geneeskd Belg. 2002, 64: 361-70.PubMedGoogle Scholar
- Schieve LA, Miekle SF, Perterson HB, Jeng G, Burnett NM, Wilcox LS: Does assisted hatching pose a risk for monozygotic twinning in pregnancies conceived through in vitro fertilization?. Fertil Steril. 2000, 74: 288-94. 10.1016/S0015-0282(00)00602-6.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar
- The pre-publication history for this paper can be accessed here:http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2393/3/4/prepub
Pre-publication history
This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article: verbatim copying and redistribution of this article are permitted in all media for any purpose, provided this notice is preserved along with the article's original URL.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Jungle Spy?
3 comments:
Hello, first of all, I love your work! You are a pretty amazing artist!
I would like to talk to you about this post
where you drew what the Cloverfield monster should have looked like.
I had idea for an anime that had a character with a design very similar to this one you just posted.
In fact, your design is much superior to mine.
Any chance you can allow me to use this design in the anime?
So far I am only organizing it and adding details, and it probably won't be pitched for a couple of years, but I'd still like to ask you early on just in case.
What do you say? Please contact me at Yadowspicky AT yahoo.com
Regards, Bryant
- May 19, 2009 at 5:04 PM
- Chris Wood said...
- June 19, 2009 at 2:01 AM
- September 16, 2009 at 8:44 AM


text:
U.S. Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission
Federal Agency Charged Security Guard Was Fired Because of Mennonite Head Scarf
ATLANTA – The Pollard Agency, a Fruithurst, Ala.-based contract security company, will pay more than $49,000 to settle a religious discrimination lawsuit brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the agency announced today.
The EEOC had charged in its suit that the Pollard Agency discriminated against security guard Marian Lawson by firing her rather than accommodating her religious practice of wearing a head scarf. Pollard, whose belief as a Mennonite Baptist requires the scarf, was fired from a client location in Monticello, Ga.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires employers to reasonably accommodate the sincerely held religious beliefs of employees and job applicants so long as such measures do not cause hardship to the employer. The EEOC filed suit on March 8, 2010, in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia after first attempting to reach a voluntary pre-litigation settlement through its conciliation process.
The consent decree settling the suit, in addition to the monetary relief of $49,556, includes provisions for equal employment opportunity training, reporting, and postings. In the suit and consent decree, Pollard denied any liability or wrongdoing.
"This early settlement benefits everyone involved, especially Ms. Lawson, who can now put this episode behind her," said Robert Dawkins, regional attorney for the Atlanta District Office. "The EEOC is pleased that Pollard chose to resolve the matter early and to take steps to ensure similar problems do not occur in the future."
The EEOC enforces federal laws prohibiting employment discrimination. Further information about the EEOC is available on the agency's web site at www.eeoc.gov.


text:
Note 1: This entry is featured in the 32nd Tangled Bank science blog carnival.
Note2 : I suppose you can think of this as third in a series of Deep Impact posts. It may be the last one for a while, but this mission has made me do a lot of thinking, so I reserve the right to keep writing!
I get a lot of questions from people asking why we should fund space travel. There are lots of answers to that, including the obvious (to me, at least) points about how our lives are much, much better due to the exploration of space (think for a moment what things would be like right now without satellite technology; tech that was developed by-- surprise-- the space program), what we've learned about the Universe, what we've learned about the Sun and how it affects us (directly and hugely, including causing power outages during solar eruptions), what we've learned about Earth's climate from simply going up and looking back down... and the list goes on.
But there is also a deeper impact. A much deeper one, a profound one.
It may not be universal in all humans, but exploration is a survival trait. When the climate changed, got colder, early humans who got up off their butts and went traveling, looked around corners, set off for new ground-- they survived. Ones who sat tight and tried to wait it out probably didn't do so well. Standing on our tiptoes and looking over an obstacle is, in a very real sense, what makes us human. Space travel is an extension of that. What greater obstacles than the Earth's gravity, the vacuum of space?
But there's something else, too. Space travel inspires us. When it's understood, when it's comprehended, when it's internalized, it propels us to new heights both literally and figuratively. It makes us better people.
It certainly made a group of school kids in Minnesota better people. Their teacher, Dee McLellan, was inspired by Deep Impact. She thought about how much copper was used in the impactor which hit the comet, and wondered how many pennies it would take to make that much weight. She told her 7th grade Earth science class this, and they made it a project: collect as many pennies as they could to equal that weight.
And they made it! They got 300 pounds of pennies, the actual weight of the copper in the impactor. But it's the next part that really inspires me: they sent the money they collected to their sister school in the Ukraine, where money is even tighter than it is in our own US school system.
The kids worked hard, and they did good. Inspired by the space program, they helped children they've never even met. Even though they're just starting to explore science and space, they were able to make a difference, and they made it clear across the planet.
... but you know, this planet seems a whole lot smaller when humans send ships across the solar system, just so we can peek around a corner and see what's there.


text:
MONTGOMERY COUNTY, Ky. (WKYT) - On Thursday night, strong winds and heavy rain whipped through parts of Montgomery County, leaving behind some serious storm damage.
Dispatch say they have heard homes and a barn have been damaged in the Camargo Levee Road and Ficklin Road area.
Dispatch also reports to us an unconfirmed report of a possible tornado in the area.
Just hours after the storm hit, we spoke with a man whose home was seriously damaged by the strong winds.
"I could hear the wind coming down the road and it just kept coming and coming. I looked up at the sycamore tree and limbs started breaking off it so I ran up to the house," said Vaughn Spencer, whose home and truck was damaged by Thursday's storms.
It wasn't long before Spencer realized that his home on Ficklin Road couldn't hold up against the powerful winds.
"My wife came running in the door and she asked me what all the noise was. About that time, all of the windows busted out of the front of the house and the ceiling fell in," Spencer told us.
Spencer's son was at work when the storm ripped through and learned that his home had been seriously damaged through a text message.
"It's never something you want to come home to. Our kitchen ceiling fell out, there was insulation everywhere, the windows were busted out and the wind stripped everything off the rafters from inside the house," his son said.
Emergency crews say about six or seven homes were damaged by the storm in the Camargo area.
No injuries have been reported.


text:
|Sighting Report
|Occurred : 9/17/2001 01:00 (Entered as : 09/17/2001 1:00)
Reported: 3/11/2008 10:07:25 PM 22:07
Posted: 3/31/2008
Location: Wilmington, OH
Shape: Circle
|U.F.O when you get the chance to see them you'll never want to forget......
My self and my sister were together driveing down a main open road route 50,in wilmington ohio, late at night. My sister was in the driver seat,as I was in the passanger seat.
As we both looked to our left, heading south, we together seen.. (very clear was a UFO It was in a feild along side of the road, maybe 20 feet,from the car.
It was huge, the size of two cars together and low to the ground,as we both staired at this, there was a moment of silaince. As she turned to me to speak, our eyes locked together. And it had vanished...It was round, light all on the bottom,stood very still.. We pulled over on the road. And tried to see were it had gone. But we seen nothing.
((NUFORC Note: Witness indicates that the date of the incident is approximate. PD))


text:
Been Awhile....
since I blogged, I see. I've been really busy with work, mostly. I'm getting hours right, left and center...they seem to be increasing steadily. It helps that a couple of my co-workers (in this case, cow-irkers) are completely and utterly lazy. I'd have been perfectly happy just getting 15-20 hours a week, but I sure as hell am not going to turn down the 32-36 I've been averaging lately. It's been going pretty well. I seem to be doing okay, and I get along pretty well with almost everyone. I've got a really good rapport with the asst. manager and one of the senior guards....they're pretty funny and have the same twisted sense of humour that I do.
On the down side, I seem to have peed off two cow-irkers because I recently ratted them out to the boss over something that happened last Thursday. One of them was already cheesed off at all the hours I was getting over him, and then last Thursday happened. The other one (who's the other "senior" guard) probably got pissed when I went over his head and had the front desk call the cops when he wouldn't do jack to solve the problem. I'm too damn old to take crap off 17 and 19 year olds. The air temperature got decidedly colder around me when I saw them both yesterday. Oh well, in order for that to bother me, I would first have to care about them or their thoughts.Any time I have to work with them may be uncomfortable, but so be it...at least they know now that I won't hesitate to do what I think is right. There is another cow-irker that I simply CANNOT stand, but she's just a silly little girl, so I don't pay a lot of attention to her.
So I was pretty ticked with my brother in my last entry, wasn't I? Well, he's since apologized most sincerely, and was here for another visit at Christmas. This one was vastly different from the last one. He came over to play dominos a couple of times, and darts with Mick. I actually had that night off, so I was able to hang with them. I'm not sure what made him finally apologize (it took several weeks)....but I'm glad to see a glimmer of the Greg I used to know. I think Mom may have shamed him. LOL
Now to make this post smoking (or non) related...I was around mucho cigs over the holidays, and I didn't have the urge even once. My brother, nephew, niece and brother in law all smoke, and a lot of my sister and brother in laws friends smoke. I hung outside with them at Wanda's, and I hung in the garage at my place with them, and it didn't bother me a bit. I even held Cam's smoke while he did something, and I kind of looked like it like it was a fresh piece of shit. It certainly smelled like it. LOL


text: I just wanted to let you know how pleased I was with the bowl you sent. I appreciated your finding out what kind of tone and note I was looking for and picking a bowl that fit. Your willingness to expedite the shipping so that it could arrive on time for the bridal shower gift made all the difference! I want you to know that our gift brought tears to the bride-to-be's eyes, and she told me later it was her favorite gift.


text:
In the latest World's Best Design Schools survey published in the 2 October 2009 issue of BusinessWeek, the Master of Design (Design Strategies) program of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU)'s School of Design (SD) has been rated among the world's best "design thinking programs".
The magazine has selected 30 top design programs at the postgraduate level from all over the world. On this list of honor only three courses are offered by Chinese institutions, namely PolyU School of Design, the Central Academy of Fine Arts in China and Shih Chien University in Taiwan, the remaining institutions are famous design schools in the US and Europe.
Swire Chair Professor of Design and SD Director Prof. Lorraine Justice said this is another concrete proof that the school is on par with top design institutions in the world. SD was also rated twice as one of the top 10 design schools in Asia by BusinessWeek in 2006 and 2007.
In presenting the league table of top design programs, the magazine said "students in these programs take classes in art, management and science, for example, and create projects in multi-disciplinary teams with students from other schools. They aim to use design for strategy rather than merely for aesthetics and may find jobs as design managers, researchers or business consultants." The magazine concluded that "these 30 programs have formally established hybrid curricula".
Design Strategies is offered as a specialism with PolyU Master of Design Scheme. This specialism seeks to locate design strategically in the context of business and technology by exploring best practices as shown in case studies, human-centred explorations to identify previously unrecognized user needs and desires, comparative analyses of business opportunities, successes and failures, and analyses of branding strategies, with particular attention paid to the local context of transforming original equipment manufacture (OEM) to original design manufacture (ODM), and finally to own brand management (OBM). The specialism is applicable to both business and non-profit organizations and extends across local and global issues.
In recent years, SD has scaled new heights under the directorship of famous design educator Prof. Lorraine Justice, who was named as one of the Top 40 Designers in the world by New York-based ID Magazine in 2006. She is now spearheading design research "as fresh as any program in the US, with multidisciplinary partnerships, sponsorship from global companies, and a focus on ethnographic research".
PolyU is the pioneer and sole provider of design education at tertiary level in Hong Kong. Famous designers who graduated from SD include world-renowned fashion designer Ms Vivienne Tam, Oscar-winner and Supervising Animator for Shrek Mr Raman Hui, founder of the jewellery brand Qeelin Mr Dennis Chan, and Partner of Kan & Lau Design Consultants Mr Freeman Lau.
PolyU Design program ranked among World's best
In the latest World's Best Design Schools survey published in the 2 October 2009 issue of BusinessWeek, the Master of Design (Design Strategies) program of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU)'s School of Design (SD) has been rated among the world's best "design thinking programs".


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Stay up-to-date with the latest news and updates from SAGE. On this page, find links to SAGE news, discipline, and product social media sites.
SAGE News
|SAGE Publishing
|Blogs and Community Spaces
News from across the sector with the added bonus of free access to a range of research
A space to explore, share and shape the issues facing social scientists
A multidimensional online network for the community of researchers
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Florence and Tuscany Tours by Florapromotuscany Soc. Coop.
Tour Operator, Travel Agency and Tourist Guide Cooperative
We are a travel agency with great experience in tour organization. Our team is dynamic team and loves the job as we all share a common passion for art and culture.
Florapromotuscany was founded in 2006 through the union of authorized tour guides specialized in Florence and Tuscany. Our direct experience on the field and on all organizational processes makes our company unique in this industry.
Our headquarters are in the heart of Florence, within walking distance from the most important city museums and major historical sites. This strategic position allows us to always be present to solve any eventual last minute issues!
Florence and Tuscany Tours is specialized in:
• Guaranteed guided join a group tours (starting from 1 participant on) carried out in the most common languages. We were the first ones to conduct our guided tours in monolingual groups, a characteristic that still today distinguishes us and which we believe is proof of the quality of our services.
• Customized tours tailored to your needs: we can assist you with the organization of events and personalized programs all over Italy. Unusual itineraries, food and wine routes, adventure travel, women tours and much more.
If you are traveling with your children, we offer a wide range of visits and itineraries for the whole family so that your visit to Italy is a fun and educational experience!
• Ticket sale and booking for all of Florence major museums
Angelika, Daniela and Manuela, the three agency partners, together with the rest of their team, will be delighted to pamper you!
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Frequent Links
Deutsche Reichspartei
The Deutsche Reichspartei (DRP, English: German Reich Party, German Imperial Party or German Empire Party) was a nationalist political party in West Germany. It was founded in 1950 from the German Right Party (Deutsche Rechtspartei), which had been set up in Lower Saxony in 1946 and had five members in the first Bundestag.
The DRP was established in 1950 when the majority of the Deutsche Rechtspartei members of the Bundestag decided to establish a more formal party network under the DRP name.[1] The new party absorbed the "National Democrats", a splinter group from Hesse.[2] The party took its name from an earlier group of the same name that had existed during the German Empire period.[3] The initial three deputy chairmen, Wilhelm Meinberg, Otto Hess and Heinrich Kunstmann, had all been members of the Nazi Party from which Adolf Hitler rose to power.[3] From 1951 the group published its own newspaper Reichsruf ("Call of the Reich").[4]
The party moved towards explicit neo-Nazism in 1952, when the Socialist Reich Party (SRP) was declared anti-constitutional and disbanded by the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany. Much of its membership then joined the DRP.[5] The membership of Hans-Ulrich Rudel in 1953 was seen as marking out the party as the new force of neo-Nazism and he enjoyed close ties to Savitri Devi and Nazi mysticism.[6]
Stability under Konrad Adenauer and the growth experienced during the Wirtschaftswunder meant that the DRP struggled for support, averaging around only 1% of the national votes in the federal elections of 1953, 1957 and 1961.[3] The party's only major breakthrough came in 1959 in the regional election for Rhineland-Palatinate, where it won 5.1% of the vote and thus was able to send deputies to the assembly.[3]
In 1962 the party took part in an international conference of far right groups hosted in Venice by Oswald Mosley and signed up as members of his National Party of Europe.[7] This initiative did not take off as Mosley had hoped, however, as few of the member parties, including the DRP, were interested in changing their name to National Party of Europe, as he had hoped they would.[8] One of the party's last acts in 1964 saw it sponsor a tour of Germany by controversial American historian David Hoggan.[9]
The lack of national success however saw the leaders of the DRP seek to extend their influence further, and they made contact with the leaders of other rightist parties such as the German Party and the Gesamtdeutsche Partei seeking close ties.[10] It was soon decided that a more formal union with other rightist groups was desirable They held their final party conference in Bonn in 1964 in which they voted to form a new union of "national democratic forces".[3] The party was symbolically liquidated, with the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) established immediately afterwards.[3]
- ↑ Cas Mudde, The Ideology of the Extreme Right, Manchester University Press, 2000, pp. 25–26
- ↑ Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship, Penguin Books, 1971, p. 581
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 Luciano Cheles, Ronnie Ferguson & Michalina Vaughan, Neo-Fascism in Europe, Longman, 1991, p. 71
- ↑ Bracher, The German Dictatorship, p. 583
- ↑ Martin A. Lee, The Beast Reawakens, Warner Books, 1998, p. 115
- ↑ Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun, New York University Press, 2003, pp. 101–102
- ↑ Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun, p. 30
- ↑ Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918-1985, Basil Blackwell, 1987, p. 247
- ↑ Bracher, The German Dictatorship, p. 588
- ↑ Mudde, The Ideology of the Extreme Right, p. 26


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For the first time, the Indiana Court of Appeals needed to decide whether an urban or residential landowner owes a duty to protect neighbors from damage caused by a tree falling from the landowner's property.
In J. John Marshall and Marjorie Marshall v. Erie Insurance Exchange a/s/o Cindy Cain, No. 20A03-0908-CV-366, Cindy Cain's home is next to a vacant lot owned by Marjorie Marshall, which John helped to manage. Elkhart code enforcement told them that a tree on the lot needed to come down, so John had a professional arborist inspect the tree. The arborist just visually inspected the tree and determined it didn't need to be taken down. The tree later fell onto Cain's house. Her insurer, Erie, reimbursed her for the repairs and brought a suit against the Marshalls for damages for negligent maintenance of the tree. Marjorie died before the bench trial concluded.
The trial court entered judgment in favor of Erie; John filed a motion to correct error, which the trial court denied.
John argued there was insufficient service of process upon Marjorie. Even though someone else signed the return receipt indicating the notice was received, the service by mail was effective, ruled the appellate court.
John also claimed the trial court erred in finding they owed a duty of care to Cain. Judge Margret Robb wrote it would appear the Restatement (Second) of Torts section 363 forecloses the issue of whether the Marshalls owed any duty to protect Cain from the fallen tree. But that would leave urban or residential landowners essentially powerless in the face of a neighbor who refused to remove or secure a dangerous tree just because it was a natural condition of the land. Like several other states, the appellate court adopted a reasoning that departed from the strict application of the rule in context of urban or residential property.
Living in close quarters substantially increases the risk that a falling tree will cause damage or injure someone, and similar to the problem relating to a highway - as mentioned in the Restatement rule - the reduced size of property lots in an urban or residential setting make the burden of time and money to inspect and secure trees relatively minor especially as compared to the potential damage that could result from the tree's fall, she wrote.
The appellate judges held that an urban or residential landowner has the duty to exercise reasonable care to prevent an unreasonable risk of harm to neighboring landowners arising from the conditions of trees on his or her property.
The trial court properly applied a duty of reasonable care to the Marshalls, and properly found that sufficient evidence supported the Marshalls breached that duty and that John was jointly and severally liable since he acted as Marjorie's agent in care of the lot.


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Remember the old spy movies? Fashion phone-watch came back with all these new Bluetooth devices! Below the Rwatch M26 of 1.4 inches, It also has versions White and Blue.
Inside the box we have the watch, a manual and a microUSB cable to recharge.
This is the clock. At the bottom we have the touch buttons.
More details of the touch buttons.
The construction is tight and the rubber is of good quality.
On the side we have the power switch.
And the back is metallic.
Connecting an analog clock!
Look at the top the bluetooth symbol and battery.
You can also exchange the watch for digital. There are four models, two analog and two digital.
The menu resembles the Apple devices.
He sends you scan and download the APK on my phone to pair the device.
The application focuses on the sport, measuring distance and counting calories in exercise. You do not need to use the application, just pair and the clock will work.
Below the pairing made on mobile:
Even with no pairing, You can use the icons below the pedometer, barometer, altimeter and stopwatch.
In this screen we have the bluetooth configuration, Dialer, messages and contact book.
We also have the option to check the previous calls, notifications, music and camera. In all cases, activate the appropriate application on your phone.
There are also settings, anti-lost system that warns you when the phone is far, power-save and change ringtones.
See just the barometer working:
And the altimeter:
And the pedometer:
And the timer:
I pareei with the phone and received my missed calls via Bluetooth. One can easily return the call directly on the clock, and speaking at the clock.
All cell phone notifications are received on the clock:
This play is to find lost cell phone using the clock. The phone is beeping and saying: "I'm here '!".
The Calculator looks pretty with the Dialer:
I made a video showing the product! Check it out:
I liked the clock, Although it is a little too big. Worry a little too, but only with constant use. The battery until it lasted quite. I leave the link to the product:


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Increase your business by generating more fans, leads and sales from your Facebook pages using cutting-edge software technology!
"Likes" are not only a popularity badge. They are a powerful promotion tool that helps strengthen the connection between fans and organizations/products/individuals. Studies held amongst serial Facebook likers indicate that people who "like" a brand are more likely to spend more money on that brand, more likely to recommend the brand to their friends, and more likely to continue purchasing this brand in the future. This means that the Like button has strong implications on the relationship between the "Liked" and those who like them, both online and offline.
BIB's New Facebook Marketing Services
I have cracked open or should I say hacked into the APIs of Facebook and wrote some powerful software that allows me to pull some amazing information from Facebook so that I can offer these new services. With the ability now to pull Pin Point Targeted Member Emails and UIDs directly from any Open or Closed Facebook Group, Fan Page, Events, Posts and even Comments.
Facebook Emails and User Ids
Now before you start jumping up and down with amazement let me say that Facebook emails cannot be used for old fashioned email spamming because it's not allowed and will go to bit bucket heaven. These emails can be used for inviting people to like your Fan Page with up to 5000 at a time in 48 hours. This would be a one shot boost to any new or old Fan Page that just has no momentum. For safety only 1000 would be used to prime the Fan Page pump so to speak. The targeted UIDs (User Ids) are used to create direct targeted Facebook ads instead of displaying your ads to random members based on location and subject. Using this method would allow you to use the cheaper CPM method and be seen by millions of people for less than $50 a campaign.
Note: Max 25 Sources (Groups, Events or Fan Pages) used max when gathering targeted users.
Facebook User EBlast


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Have you ever experienced that uncontrollable shake in your body and not known if it is okay or not? Its a fine line when muscles shake - it depends on if you are working out the muscle or stretching. Shaking muscles is not dangerous if you are working out! It's a different level of muscle … Continue reading Muscle Shakes? Yay or Nay?
Tag: injury prevention
Do you know what and where the Serratus anterior is? Firstly, the purpose of strengthening Serratus anterior is to help the scapular (shoulder blade) sit more downward & facing up as this will help your shoulder joint move back into the right position and not cause any pinching. This muscle is classified as a Phasic … Continue reading Serratus?
The Secret To Keep You Running!
Repetitive movement such as running can cause body asymmetries. Body asymmetries develop because of overuse of certain muscle groups while others are underused and can lead to poor optimal body mechanics. This can result in a variety of ailments from lower back pain to hip bursitis to knee problems. It can also lead to a … Continue reading The Secret To Keep You Running!


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|By Admin1 (admin) (pool-151-196-239-147.balt.east.verizon.net - 126.96.36.199) on Saturday, August 14, 2004 - 4:59 pm: Edit Post
Peace Corps Volunteer Jim Jawn in Tonga
Peace Corps Volunteer Jim Jawn in Tonga
7.1.2004 - Funny story...
Sort of. Well, first, apologies for the last post. I could delete it, but it makes me laugh... So today was the first day of training and it actually went pretty well. The stuff we talked about was pretty applicable, went out last night with all of the G66 volunteers to Luna Rosa (*Tourists, eat here. IT ROCKS! Get the lobster too, its worth it) transplant our regime to Wanda's and had a great time. It was definitely a lot of fun.
Alright, I'll preface this by saying I have absolutely no clue at all about what the heck Tonga girls are looking for or how to act or anything. They are a total friggin mystery to me. I don't know how to explain it. I just don't know. New group guys, you'll see what I mean. So last night, I was actually sort of complaining about Tongan girls in general and my aparent just awfulness at any and all atempts to sort of have a relationship or hook up or just take a relationship to that holding hand PDA's are taboo level. Anything that I would consider more than talking I fail miserably at.
So all of us have pretty much had our fill of beer for the evening, half the group has left early to get some shuteye before training and there is a couple of us left just sort of hanging out and finishing our beers. We start heading out. I do some ridiculous dancing type stuff on my way out the door across the dance floor and suddenly, this extraordinarily strong (yet supple) female hand grabs my shoulder and rips me around. Suddenly, I'm some dorky white guy filling in for the handsome latino lead in Lambada! The Forbidden Dance. I'm thinking "what the hell is going on here?" Well, when in Nuku'alofa, I do like the Nuku'aolfans do. I gyrate my pointy caucasian thighs like some spastic math major with muslce spasms. She's diggin' it! Unbelievable! This is outstanding! Her front gold tooth is shining like a diamond in the flourescent lighting. I think, just for a moement, I'm in love.
Just when I'm thinking life can't get any better, like a diligent postal inspector on a special package patrol, I get the full inspection. Jumpin Jehosaphat! I'm not going to go into any lewd details, but needless to say I'm overwhelmed. She's looking for an easy Visa, I quickly tell myself. She knows your money and she ain't no rabbit. This is just too damn easy! Fokisi!
By this time, however, I'm planning the honeymoon. "Maybe we'll have First Sunday before First Sunday and maybe, just maybe we can skip the wedding feast. I'll have to go to church at least a couple of times but that'll be worth it. I'll have to start saving for the kids college and send those invitations out..." Suddenly the music stops and the scorching finale of Lambada wind down. D'enouement.
Back to reality. We're not married yet or anything. Kick ass. So my Midas-toothed Tongan pixie grabs me by the hand and tells me to start murdering people. Well actually she didn't, but she could have, I felt like a dumb cow. She sits me down and we exchange these deep, soulful glances that peirce each others inner being. Actually, I still don't know what the hell is going on. I'm like "Peace Corps. Tonga. Your name is Jim." Just gathering my wits about me and such.
Well this kind gentlemen towering over me, gently taps me on the shoulder to give me the middle finger. I'm like "Strange, he must be American and not a Kiwi or Roo because he's using the middle finger. Oh yeah, he's giving that to me. Weird! I wonder what I did or how this gigantic gentleman knows me. Perhpas before I was married I may have been a bit rude. Well those days are behind me now, my friend. I'm moving on, I've got better and shinier things on my bunsen burner. His arrogant American sign-language has no time in my new life." My gold-plated postage inspector grabs me by the hand and directs us to another table. Thank Otua! That behemoth was quite intimidating don't you agree darling? Yes, Yes, quite right. Blah, Blah, Blah and then...
BAAM! Full on early 90's high school french kissing. This is sensory friggin overload. "You know, this flies in the face of all of the cultural training I've been so overwhelmingly prepared for. Are Tonga women always this wonderful?" I'm drunk, married, and at this point partly comatose. I feel like sleeping beauty (at the end, not the beginning). Suddenly these other white people that I used to recognize before Simi jr. was born, people from my old life, drag me back to reality.
Steve: "My that's quite the shit-eating grin you have there"
Me: "Oh yeah, Stevey what's up?"
Steve: "You alright?"
Me: Aside [What I think: Alright! Does this damn fool even know about the wedding? And the crazy wild passionate love I've been making! Damn him and his foolish questions] What I say: "Yes."
Steve: "We thought you went to the bathroom and we're just wondering where you got to."
Me: "Oh. My bad. See you at training tomorrow?"
Steve: "Yup." [Exit Stage Left]
So darling where were we? BAAM! BAAM! Double Baam! Kissing like the end of "The Breakfast Club" just explodes. Jesus, that couldn't have been more than 10 minutes since they left. Time has flown by. Suddenly, in the middle of the hooking up, I realize that Mrs. "We Deliver" isn't giving me the attention I so justly deserve. I open my eyes. Christ! She's not even looking at me! What the hell is going on! I've got all this time and energy expended for the wedding, the cake's already ordered and she doesn't even have the decency to pay attention to the foreplay! Son of a bitch!
Momentary hiatus. Well, 7 months in Tonga have made me nosy. Gossip is my Melrose Place. I stop kissing and look for the direction of the glance. Its Mr. Middle Finger Extended (MFE). Damnit! I've been had! I politely tell Mrs. Bizarre Love Triangle that I'm may be sexually repressed and funny-smelling, but I know a hustle and pre-emptive ass kicking when i see one. I kindly gather my wits, tux rental receipts, package and beer and get my palangi ass out of there as absolutely fan-digity-fast as I can. Disaster averted and I still got my cold Ikale.
And so my list of "Why Tongan women act crazy and why I'll never understand them" gets more intersting and complicated. Last night, my list got a "boyfriend that can kick you ass" corollary. Its getting complicated now, but the equation works in regular space-time, but doesn't work in quantum. I'll need to explore this theorem further when i return from new zealand.
Oh yeah, here's an aside, please don't take offense to this stuff, its more of a joke than anything else. Tongan women are great, I just have a hard time understanding them sometimes and my encounter last evening was not a representation AT ALL of what normal Tongan fefine's are like. It was pretty cool for like 10 minutes though...
So New Zealand Update? Supposed to be leaving tomorrow (I think). No hotel rooms booked, no itenerary, I'm not packed, don't know how I'm getting to the airport or who's coming with me. I don't know my flight number and I don't know really anything about what I'm going to be doing. Except for red and black dinner night (I'm wearing a red t-shirt.) And this is how every holiday should start. I'm sure I'll dork out and spend some time at the internet cafe's just dying to see if I got any comments on my site, so I'll be around. Anyways, wish me luck.
| This Month's Issue: August 2004
Teresa Heinz Kerry celebrates the Peace Corps Volunteer as one of the best faces America has ever projected in a speech to the Democratic Convention. The National Review disagreed and said that Heinz's celebration of the PCV was "truly offensive." What's your opinion and who can come up with the funniest caption for our Current Events Funny?
Exclusive: Director Vasquez speaks out in an op-ed published exclusively on the web by Peace Corps Online saying the Dayton Daily News' portrayal of Peace Corps "doesn't jibe with facts."
In other news, the NPCA makes the case for improving governance and explains the challenges facing the organization, RPCV Bob Shaconis says Peace Corps has been a "sacred cow", RPCV Shaun McNally picks up support for his Aug 10 primary and has a plan to win in Connecticut, and the movie "Open Water" based on the negligent deaths of two RPCVs in Australia opens August 6. Op-ed's by RPCVs: Cops of the World is not a good goal and Peace Corps must emphasize community development.