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Wednesday, September 30, 2009
My Du-ology (with apologies to Becky)
How long should a series run?
I was wondering if I had an original thought on this subject, feeling pretty certain that the other CM's know far more about it than I, when I saw an opportunity to pull off a neat trick: *appear* to be sticking to the topic while wandering off in another direction entirely.
Let me tell you about how my young adult series came to be a series of...two. (In Becky's words, that's a "du-ology.")
I wrote a young adult novel a while back. I submitted th manuscript and detailed outline for a second and third book to my agent. A whole bunch of stuff happened in the manuscript, setting up a dramatic story problem for book two and a satisfying twisty resolution for book three. I was feeling, I must admit, a little smug. I thought I had really *nailed* this series thing. Yeah, I still have a way to go before I'm the sort of author who can sell on a proposal and three chapters, but I was on my way, right?
When Barbara (my extraordinary agent) did her thing and came up with an enthusiastic editor for the project, I was even more excited and impressed with myself. Ha! I thought - this publishing thing's not so hard after all, right?
Then came the "Aaaaaaand...."
Now when Barbara says "aaaaand" in that particular way she has, I have learned that I need to put the phone down, walk to the kitchen and pour myself a generous single malt, take a large enough gulp that it leaves dribbles down my chin, walk back to the office, lie down on the floor, close my eyes, cry for thirty seconds, and only then pick up the phone again and ask her to continue.
But I didn't know that then.
Barbara said "Aaaaaaand" and I said "Mmm hmmm?" and she said "It turns out they already have enough trilogies on the schedule so this is going to be a two-book series. Oh, and she has a few concerns about the story direction. It's a great starting place, though."
I'll spare you the next eight months of re-writes. Suffice it to say that the book I turned in was related to the original manuscript much in the way that, say, Paris, France is related to Paris Hilton.
And to think that, the day Barbara called me, my worry was how I was going to compress books 2 and 3 into a single book. Ha! Ha! Ha ha ha!
What's the point of this story, you're wondering? (Other than the valuable tip I've given you on translating Barbara-isms....trust me, you're gonna want to write that one down.)
Well, it's this: my series is now beautiful. Wish I could take credit, but it's the result of an editor who was willing to give me ample guidance, who knows what my target reader responds to, and who was unafraid to send me back again and again until I got it right. Left to my own devices I would have quit when it wasn't close to baked. Instead I got the job done.
So today's lesson is...
Sometimes editors know what they're doing.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Just for fun, I'll give you the answer I used to think was true before I learned otherwise.
How many books should there be in a series? Same answer as for any "How much" question: Just enough to leave them wanting more.
(If you doubt this, give it a try. Answer the following:
"How many Doritos should I have?"
"How many pages should I write in my fifth grade report about Abraham Lincoln?"
"How long should I stand on the porch kissing Matt Spicer?"*** )
***high school boyfriend...
Monday, September 28, 2009
Why all book series must be trilogies
Palladins, Seekers, and Other Icons
As long as it takes....
Since I'm beginning my second series, I've been thinking a lot about this. I've decided that there are two kinds of series in crime fiction and they depend on the type of ICONs they feature as main characters.
The first type of series can sustain many books and go on, well, forever--until readers get bored or the author runs out of patience or ideas. In this kind of series the main character is relatively stable.
They don't really change--although the people around them and their circumstances do.
There are two main ICONic characters that work in this kind of series.
The INVESTIGATOR is a main character whose interest and driving force is to solve a puzzle, thus restoring balance to the world. These are many of your amateur sleuths and PIs. Think Sherlock Holmes, Nero Wolfe, Miss Marple. They gain satisfaction from pitting their wits against the badguy and using their brains to figure things out.
In either of the above, the main characters' actions change the people around them more than themselves. Yes, they may gain physical scars, maybe even a few bad dreams along the way, but they won't change a lot from one book to the next.
In the second type of crime fiction series, the characters are malleable--in fact, they are undergoing a metamorphosis because their motivation to become involved in the crime is personal. There's something missing in themselves, a psychic wound if you will, and they're driven to fix themselves in order to fix the universe.
The two ICONic characters who are malleable and do change from book to book are:
The SEEKER may not need forgiveness as much as they need answers. Not specifically the logic that solves a crime but rather faith that there is something higher, something more out there and if they just strive hard enough, they may find it. Think Kathy Mallory, Fox Mulder...any character who begins as a cynic but really wants to believe in something larger than themselves or wants to believe in people rather than an abstract concept of justice.
Of course there are combinations and variations--that's what makes writing interesting! But it's interesting that you can easily name a dozen or more of the Palladins and Investigators, complete with long, long running series, than you can the Penitents or Seekers.
I think that's because when a character is on a quest to change themselves, there's nowhere to go once they achieve that. So they're often suitable for trilogies or shorter series or even standalones.
But for characters out to change the world around them and not themselves--well, lets face it, the world is never going to stop needing some improvement, is it? There will always be battles to be fought for justice, puzzles to be solved....
Gina Freeman, a main secondary character, is seeking herself--she's put on so many facades to please others that she has no real idea who she really is, but working in the ER as a resident is like being placed in a crucible and she's slowly forging her true identity.
Amanda, the medical student lead character of my second book, WARNING SIGNS, is at heart a Palladin, always driven to do the right thing for her patients.
Lucy Guardino, the main character of my new series, thinks she's a Palladin but at heart, she's truly a Seeker. She an FBI agent/soccer mom who works crimes against children while trying to protect her own family from danger—an impossible task, of course.
So, does this breakdown make sense to anyone else? What kind of Icon is your favorite to read? Which characters represent those Icons?
Do you want your characters to stay the same or grow and develop over time?
Thanks for sharing!
About CJ:
About CJ:
As a pediatric ER doctor, CJ Lyons has lived the life she writes about in her cutting edge suspense novels. Her debut, LIFELINES (Berkley, March 2008), became a National Bestseller and Publishers Weekly proclaimed it a "breathtakingly fast-paced medical thriller."
The second in the series, WARNING SIGNS, was released January, 2009 and the third, URGENT CARE, is due out October, 2009. Contact her at http://www.cjlyons.net
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Felony WUI - Writing Under the Influence
What author has influenced me the most? Have I mentioned I'm a little hard headed? Maybe it's the red hair but I've been told I telegraph my unwillingness to get with any program but my own. By that same token, my formative years (back when I could be shaped by my environment) were spent enshrouded in the words and worlds of many great writers. I can't blame any one of them for how I turned out but each remains reflected in my current fascination with all things literate.
Dr. Seuss. I put him at the beginning of the essay because that's where I first met him. His sing-song rhythms and colorful characters matched my mischief level without remorse or repudiation. Did I know that the Sneetches were teaching me about racism and tolerance? Was I aware that Green Eggs and Ham are a way to offer your friends the very best of your world? Or that the compromise lessons of Zax should worm their way into the Congressional Record as easily as they've found purchase in my short stories? Of course not. I wasn't a prodigy. Yet, here we are, forty years later and I still put pen to page with my mind firmly fixed on doing more than entertaining – I want to make a point. And I haven't given up hoping that one day I'll make up my own language understood by children the world over. That guy had game.
Louisa May Alcott. Little Women not Little Men. It might seem like an obvious choice for a middle female child who dreams of becoming a writer but there's more to Louisa's impact than just a blue print for my foray into publication. Jo didn't fit. Not with her aunt who could make her life easier or with the boy next door who was perfect on paper. She didn't moan. She didn't hide in the attic or lock her stories into a trunk and call it a day. Everything I write, the fact that I face each blank page, no matter how it comes out or who ends up reading it is an homage to Josephine March and her never say die attitude. As an added bonus, neither of us know how to match our handbag to our shoes. Kindred spirits as Lucy Maud Montgomery might say.
Marco Polo. He taught me that writing is transformational. Between the covers of a book you can not only visit lands of lushness and intrigue but you can live with the people who've gotten there first. You don't need a passport or a youth hostel. You need Marco. He's the Concorde and the Queen Mary, the local translator and the town's oldest storyteller. A mind expanding, intellectually jump-starting, emotionally invigorating Aladdin carpet ride. Marco Polo is the author equivalent of a legal magic mushroom.
Honorable mentions go to Roget for the thesaurus, Webster for the dictionary and Gutenberg. That printing press thing is working out.
But don't take my word for it. Submerge yourself in their essence. Read. Mysteries and romances and thrillers and biographies and business how-tos and Dilbert. Take it all in and digest your cerebral feast before embarking on an after dinner stroll down your own path. Thank you, Robert Frost.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Son of Tarzan
Which author influenced me the most?
Without a doubt Edgar Rice Burroughs, because his were the books that I wished I could read, long before I had muddled my way through the alphabet or discovered Dr. Seuss. My parents had read his adventure stories when the paperbacks cost a nickel, and being ardent book lovers they kept them all. So I grew up surrounded by pulps, and though I couldn't read the pages within, their covers spoke volumes.
Artists like Frank Frazetta, Roy Krenkel, and J. Allen St. John brought Tarzan to life at a visceral level, so I was already convinced he was a real historical character (like Sherlock Holmes) even before I had read his first adventure. The same with John Carter of Mars and Carson of Venus. And who doesn't believe that Pellucidar, the world at the center of the earth, is just waiting to be rediscovered?
Once I was old enough to read them, the stories didn't disappoint. In fact they inspired me to seek out adventures with other authors like Lester Dent, author of innumerable Doc Savage tales. The Shadow. Conan. I couldn't get enough.
The pulps were a gateway to comics, which led to a decade-long addiction to science fiction. But somewhere along the line, on a trip to the attic or digging around dusty shelves in my parents' basement, I also discovered the lurid covers of crime fiction. And among those cracked spines I found Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, at which point I not only wanted to read, I wanted to write stories of my own. And like the books that inspired me to read in the first place, I was determined to write something that was unapologetically entertaining, a great adventure. An adventure in which you could lose yourself — and find yourself — at the same time.
Any time my will falters, writer's block looms, or I'm struggling with a plot or character, I'll re-read one of the stories that first made me fall in love with books, preferably in an edition with the original cover art. And somehow they're just as thrilling, though I know what's waiting around every turn of the page. Like a classic movie or favorite bedtime story, a great adventure never gets old.
Friday, September 25, 2009
The Movie That Changed My Life
How does it feel to be responsible for the death of another person? Can you live with yourself? "Suddenly it's not an empty universe at all," Judah (Martin Landau) tells Cliff (Woody Allen). God occupies it, and has eyes, and sees. "The man is an inch away from confessing to the police." Then suddenly one morning, he wakes up, the sun is shining, his life is good, and he has returned to "his protected world of wealth and privilege." The moral of this story? "We define ourselves by the choices we make," Judah says. By choosing to have Dolores (Anjelica Huston) murdered, Judah has defined himself as a man of wealth and privilege, respected by society, "idolized" by his wife, and a murderer. He can live with that. (See the entire review at http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050911/REVIEWS08/509110301/1023 )
And for the first time, I understood that people can and do get away with murder, mayhem and evil and still sleep well at night. That people can live with two contradictory impulses simultaneously, and be just fine.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
A Tree Grows in Humboldt
The short answer is Raymond Chandler, an anthology of poetry printed in the 1930s, and Casablanca. Here's the long answer ...
I'm an only child. In addition to the absence of siblings, I lived, for good portions of my childhood and all of my adolescence, in remote, rural areas (in junior high and high school this meant forty acres of undeveloped property in Humboldt County with no PG&E and no phone).
I spent a great deal of time by myself. I was often lonely, except for the company of our many animals (horses, chickens, cats, dogs, and at various times, goats, pigs, rabbits). The solitude gave me many gifts ... self-reliance. Decision. A love and understanding for nature. An appreciation of companionship.
It also gave me books.
Books, to me, were what playgrounds and television were to most of my contemporaries. They were entertainment that required no technology, no power. Nothing except a kerosene lamp or sometimes a flashlight. (And yeah, I'm givin' it to you straight about the kerosene lamp.)
My parents started me reading early ... Dr. Seuss, of course, and all sorts of early reader books that graduated into Nancy Drew by the time I was seven and Poe by the time I was eight. I remember reciting "Annabelle Lee" on the way to the bus stop in third grade, when we lived in a cabin in the Rocky Mountains.
A favorite was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which contained this line:
Books became her friends and there was one for every mood . . .
And so there was. I read whenever I could, whatever I could, wherever I could. I loved comic books (Batman had a huge influence on me), I read the classics from Austen to Tolstoy, I read potboilers (The Exorcist at eleven years of age can scar you!). I read horror, mystery, adventure, and lots and lots of poetry. Blame Dr. Seuss!
We did spend a few years in suburban San Jose, and television was no stranger to me for most of my childhood (I still laugh over Laverne and Shirley, OK?) But for some reason, I was always drawn to vintage movies of the '30s and '40s, even as a kid. My first noir was written when I was eight--a gangster melodrama with a French love interest and a tragic ending for the gangster when he tries to go straight. My favorite magazine when I was nine and ten was called Nostalgia Illustrated--lots of articles on old movie stars and radio shows and ... well, you get the idea. And I don't have a clue as to why I was drawn to noir and the '30s and '40s. Maybe I'm just a poster child for Shirley MacLaine ...
My relationship with books and plays and fiction as the ultimate entertainment form and escape (and I should include some non-fiction in there, too, because I did devour history books and became a big fan of Desmond Morris when I was a freshman in high school) is so deep and abiding and an essential part of who I am that it's kind of impossible to limit things down to one influence. Especially because there are conscious influences, like Chandler, and unconscious influences, and the latter are probably the strongest of them all.
Throw in this uncanny nostalgia for an era that is before my parents' childhood, a love of classic film and an attraction to noir and hardboiled that is apparently pre-natal, mix it all with four-color dark fantasies of super-heroic revenge, and an early life in out-of-the-way places.
All of this influenced me, continues to influence me, always will influence me.
So that's the long answer ... books were my friends. Some of the best friends of my life.
And my friends--like my grogmates on Criminal Minds--are the biggest inspirations of all.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
T.C. Boyle - Thanks for giving me permission
by Sophie Littlefield
Which author, book, and/or movie influenced your work the most?
When I stumbled on an early short story collection by T. Coraghessan Boyle in the 1980s - not even sure which it was, though a quick search gets me thinking it might have been Descent of Man - I was riveted. I was in my first year or two of college, home for the summer, broke, bored, and trolling for something new at the local library. I was shocked that you could write in such an unvarnished way about human appetites and still get published.
There was also an element of emotional violence in Boyle's work that struck a resounding chord in me, one which, it turns out, later formed the basis for most of my own work. Also, some of the stories were also just so wonderfully, unapologetically, fantastically weird. I had certainly never heard of magical realism and, if I had, would have assumed it wasn't allowed in Missouri.
I wondered which of the librarians had test-driven the book - I was under the impression there was some round-table vetting process - and hoped I would not meet her eye by accident, because surely she would know: reading the book, I was convinced, had marked me forever.
In those days I felt deeply ashamed that I was so viscerally attracted to raw writing. A decade later, books like Mona Simpson's Anywhere But Here made me see that you could reveal the drama at the core of human relationships without necessarily having to introduce sex and violence into the story. Though damn if those don't make handy story elements.
** PS this post was lifted from one I wrote for my friend Patrick Shawn Bagley when he asked authors to discuss their "pivotal books." It fit so well I couldn't resist using it. Sorry to be un-fresh, but I can't be a genius every damn day. **
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Your voice matters. And not just the literary one
I know you probably expect me to list some great literary fiction that I love, like Doris Lessing's "The Golden Notebook" and Elie Wiesel's "Night" or "Dawn." Or maybe thriller writers I've gotten into lately, like James Rollins and Brent Ghelfi. Or maybe mystery writers that let me step into a time machine and consider hard questions, like Anne Perry or Arianna Franklin. And all of those would be perfectly true.
But I'm going to talk instead about books I read aloud, because they've influenced me a great deal. I read aloud to my son. A lot. We stop at the bookstore almost every day after school to do homework, drink a milk, and read.
Now the books we read lean more toward The Edge Chronicles and Spacecraft and Vehicles of the Entire Star Wars Saga, but back in the day we read a lot of Doctor Seuss and Margaret Wise Brown (Good Night Moon, The Runaway Bunny). In a book you are going to read, say 50 times, you notice every single word. That's where I understood the genius of these writers.
Doctor Seuss and Margaret Wise Brown OWN you as a reader. You can't not put the stress where they want you too. "I ran and found a Brickel bush. I hid myself away. I got brickels in my britches, but I stayed there anyway."or "Good-night room, good night moon."
If you compare this to say "Max and the Magic Pony." you understand, painfully, the difference between great and barely good enough. "Max and the Magic Pony" is a perfectly fine story, but the prose is unreadable. My son loved it and wanted to read it every night. And it was horrible. Every single time. I read that book 21 times before it "accidentally" fell behind the bookcase and did not resurface for 2 years.
But I could read "Spooky Empty Pants" or "Good-Night Moon" every single day (and did some weeks). Why? Because the authors understood sentence rhythm. They knew that each word matters, and they always picked the right ones.
Sure, I heard about that in college when I was taking creative writing. But reading good children's books was an enforced lesson in poetry. It wasn't until I had to read every single word in a story over and over and over that I got it deep in my bones: Every word matters. It's not just the meaning. It's the sound. It's the stress. I learned to channel Dr. Seuss, and it helps my writing.
Monday, September 21, 2009
By Tim Hallinan, critically-acclaimed thriller author of BREATHING WATER.
I fell under the spell of my first influence when I was five years old and living in Washington, D.C. My parents had scheduled a night out, and the baby-sitter bailed at the last moment, so I got hauled along to a dinner in a "real" restaurant and then a movie that my parents thought would bore me senseless.
It enthralled me. It transported me. It made me want to leave my body and fly through the air instantly to wherever it was that movie took place. That was the only place in the world I wanted to be.
The movie was "The King and I," and the place, obviously, was Thailand. And here I am, 175 years later, living in Thailand part of each year and writing about it. And as much in love with the place now as I was when I first saw "The March of the Siamese Children."
So my first influences were Rodgers and Hammerstein. Later, I identified more traditional masters for a thriller writer, artists whose work triggered something inside me that made me ask, "Could I do that?" The first of these was the inescapable Raymond Chandler. For all that Chandler repeatedly credited Hammett with inventing the modern whodunit (Hammett gave murder back, Chandler said, to the kind of people who create it), for me the real alchemy came when Chandler created Philip Marlowe.
Chandler also changed my world view. Reading him at, say fourteen, I first became aware that light is, so to speak, a local phenomenon, courtesy of an accidentally nearby star, and that we actually live surrounded by a kind of ravenous darkness in which anything can happen to anyone at any time. That's the thing, I think, that gives Los Angeles sunlight the uniquely cold, chromium brilliance it has in Chandler's books.
In my late teens and twenties I discovered writers who specialized in throwing light onto moral gray areas – first, the great Eric Ambler and second, the incomparable Graham Greene. I became fascinated with shadings of right and wrong, with the idea – new to me then – that moral absolutes were a luxury of the well-fed. Things look much grayer when one's children are hungry or when the rat-infested slum in which you live is set fire to in order to clear land for a skyscraper, or when an 18-year-old girl has to weigh prostituting herself against making money to feed her parents and keep her brothers and sisters in school.
More recently, Robert Wilson's wonderful Bruce Medway books, set in Africa, have explored this ground with skill and a kind of energetic compassion.
So here I am, writing about the land of "The King and I," using a form borrowed from Chandler and his followers, and exploring a morally complex universe. And as happy doing it as a pig in mud. I have the luxury of living someplace I love (Bangkok) and managing complicated daydreams for a year or so until they're book-length. And my newest Bangkok thriller, BREATHING WATER, has gotten the best reviews of my career, including eight or ten "thriller of the year" designations from sites such as Reviewing the Evidence and Gumshoe Review, as well as some almost embarrassingly positive print reviews.
So I may spend most of each year in Bangkok, but you can give my regards to Broadway.
About Tim:
Timothy Hallinan has lived, on and off, in Southeast Asia for more than 25 years. He wrote songs and sang in a rock band while in college, and many of his songs were recorded by by well-known artists who included the platinum-selling group Bread. He began writing books while enjoying a successful career in the television industry. Over the past fourteen years he has been responsible for a number of well-reviewed novels and a nonfiction book on Charles Dickens. For years he has taught a course on "Finishing the Novel" with remarkable results – more than half his students complete their first novel and go on to a second, and several have been, or are about to be, published. Tim currently maintains a house in Santa Monica, California, and apartments in Bangkok, Thailand; and Phnom Penh, Cambodia. He is lucky enough to be married to Munyin Choy-Hallinan.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
All else being equal, his corpse will disappear faster in the woods, but it will stay disappeared longer (giving you more time to establish an alibi) in the sound. According to Spitz and Fisher's classic Medicolegal Investigation of Death, one week in the air equals two weeks in the water (and eight weeks in the ground). The salt water will delay the process even further.
At either site, the process will take longer in the cold months, so you should delay the murder until the first snows of winter. There are no guarantees, of course, but there are bound to be many less hikers around in the winter, and with luck the body will be down a hill and covered with snow, impossible to see. After the up and down temperatures of spring, decomposition should be well established by the time hikers return, again giving you more time to cover your tracks. Animals will help out and perhaps carry away the pieces of flesh with the bullet wounds that occurred when your fit of pique got out of hand.
Unlike what we see on television, dead bodies sink when put in water. They surface when decomposition advances enough that the tissues fill with air. (Tissues, not the body itself. It does not inflate like a balloon so poking holes in it will not ensure that it stays down, as my husband demonstrated lately by shooting a bloated fish with a BB gun.)
Apparently Puget Sound does not get cold enough to freeze, but still, the colder the water, the more time it buys you. If the water is particularly deep and cold, the body may never surface. (Hence the lyrics, "Superior, it's said, never gives up her dead….")
Of course there will be many other factors to consider. Transporting a dead body is difficult, messy and risky. The closer you can get your target to the dump site under his own power, the less distance you have to carry him, so if he's a boater and not a hiker that might affect your decision. Frankly, if he lives alone and has no family, it might be better (and free you of months of suspense waiting for the body to turn up) to kill him in his own home. If he's old enough for it to seem believable, poison something in his kitchen with digitalis and let it appear to be a heart attack.
Foxglove grows easily in Washington and I hear it's very pretty. Or, if you can get close enough for a gunshot, make it look like a suicide (just don't move the body afterward, and don't get fancy and try to fake a note). Either way, with luck he will decompose in the safety of his own home for a week or two before anyone comes looking for him, disintegrating certain evidence and giving you time to work on your alibi.
Also, this might make it hard to sell the house, so if you have some extra funds you might want to snap it up yourself and expand your estate. Then you won't have to worry about getting another nasty neighbor and having to start this process all over again.
Lisa Black spent the happiest five years of her life in a morgue. Strange, perhaps, but true. In her job as a forensic scientist she analyzed gunshot residue on hands and clothing, hairs, fibers, paint, glass, DNA, blood and many other forms of trace evidence, as well as crime scenes. Now she's as a latent print examiner and CSI working with fingerprints and crime scenes. She has been published in Germany, the Netherlands, France, the United Kingdom, Spain and Japan.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
TIm's question
So if there was a violent struggle and a body at the scene, would the focus solely be on blood samples, hair and tissue, and so on, or would random dust or surrounding matter be scooped up. I'm wondering in the context of poisons being used, something that might be left behind as a trace powder, but not something you'd look for if there seemed to be a more obvious, physical (as opposed to chemical) cause of death.
If there's a visible streak of powder on the carpeting near the body, with no apparent explanation, it would probably be collected. If it's next to a spilled jar of scouring powder or something that it is likely to have come from, it would probably be ignored. If it's on the other side of a generally filthy room, it would probably be ignored. Once collected, it would be tested as a potential drug like cocaine, and then stored. It would probably not be tested unless the investigators were really grasping at straws, because it's a long story to test a substance when you have no idea what it is. You have to test things for things. Narcotic? Adhesive? Accelerant? Blood? If it's curare or Cover Girl Shine Free translucent eye shadow, we probably don't have the supplies or procedure to identify it. Never mind that they do it in CSI every week. In real life, we don't have a Bat Computer.
When I worked at the coroner's office, we would tape the clothing and the scene for hairs and fibers, but only if the person died of strangling or bludgeoning. We didn't tape gunshot victims when there was no reason to believe there had been any physical contact with the suspect. (Incidently, taping is generally better than vacuuming because adhesive tape picks up only the most recently deposited debris. A vacuum might suck up stuff that's been there for years.) However, now that hair and fiber analysis is such a dying art, agencies may no longer do even that. Ditto for collecting samples of carpeting or upholstery at the scene to be compared to anything found on the suspect. At the moment my boss here in Florida is looking into getting me a comparison microscope so I can start doing hair/fiber analysis again, as even the state labs discontinued the practice. With this in mind, it's likely that hairs and fibers would not even be collected at the scene, certainly not dirt or dust.
So an obvious powder might be collected, but only as a possible illegal drug. With signs of a violent struggle present it's unlikely that the idea of poison would enter anyone's mind.
But if your character needs a hair and fiber expert, well, let me give you my number….
Lisa Black spent the happiest five years of her life in a morgue. Strange, perhaps, but true. In her job as a forensic scientist she analyzed gunshot residue on hands and clothing, hairs, fibers, paint, glass, DNA, blood and many other forms of trace evidence, as well as crime scenes. Now she's as a latent print examiner and CSI working with fingerprints and crime scenes. She has been published in Germany, the Netherlands, France, the United Kingdom, Spain and Japan.


text:
New Zealand cities must capitalise on Christchurch's earthquake experience if they are to make themselves more resilient to natural disasters, a top quake expert says.
Speaking at the Royal Society in Wellington last night as part of the National Library's Big Data discussion series, University of Canterbury (UC) geologist Dr Mark Quigley said the post-disaster awareness bubble created by the earthquakes was shrinking. He said costly mistakes such as the development of flood and liquefaction prone parts of eastern Christchurch in the 1990s and early 2000s were examples of "what could continue" if the public did not seek a deeper understanding of the Christchurch experience.
"If councils yield to developers and allow vulnerable land to be zoned and built upon and insurance companies are willing to come to the party then people will buy there, regardless of the risk," he said.
"This is a major psychological and financial risk that people take, commonly because the consequences of relatively infrequent but potentially catastrophic events are not really thought about."
Dr Quigley called on New Zealanders to move from a generalised awareness that natural disasters such as earthquakes occur to a more specific understanding of how such events could impact on them personally and financially.
"We all know about earthquakes, but is it possible that we could get a rock fall event in our backyard that could bury our house? Is our home or workplace up to the building code? How vulnerable are our buried lifelines? Will we be without sewerage, water, power and internet for weeks after an earthquake, such as many people in eastern Christchurch went through?"
Dr Quigley said parts of Wellington and Lower Hutt were areas where extensive liquefaction could be expected to sever buried lifelines in an earthquake.
He urged "everyday people" to pressure authorities to act proactively to deal with these issues before earthquakes, rather than after.
Research suggested the cost of strengthening buildings before a major event is less expensive then demolishing and rebuilding after it. He said proactive lifeline remediation and protection, stricter building code enforcement and careful land use planning were important components of increasing resilience before earthquakes.
"The inconvenience and expense of fixing our Victorian sewers in liquefaction prone areas now, for instance, pales in comparison to the personal, financial, health and environmental costs of waiting for the disaster to eventuate."
Dr Quigley will deliver a keynote address at the Science Communicators Association of New Zealand conference in Christchurch today.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
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text:
FRIENDS WHO CARE® is designed to help children better understand what it means and how it feels to be a young person with a disability. This educational program gives students the opportunity to learn what is involved when someone has a disability and how they adapt to live life, go to school, or work as independently as possible.
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FRIENDS WHO CARE® is also fun! The curriculum explores a range of disabilities and includes specially crafted learning activities, hands-on exercises, guided discussions and guest speakers. It starts with an introduction to disability, and looks at vision, hearing, and physical disabilities and then at learning disabilities including AD-HD, autism and intellectual disabilities.
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FRIENDS WHO CARE® is for classrooms, schools and community groups.
What is included with the program?
The FRIENDS WHO CARE® curriculum includes a teacher's guide, specially crafted learning activities and hands-on exercises.
What does the program teach?
FRIENDS WHO CARE® teaches children about a wide range of disabilities. Students will learn how to accept their peers with disabilities and include them in everyday activities.
Download the materials
Complete the fields at the right to download the FRIENDS WHO CARE® materials or view short videos of Easterseals Representatives.


text:
311, 'Time Bomb' – Song Review
Remember when you and your buddies would stay up all night drinking Mountain Dew, eating pizza and playing 'Tony Hawk'? The soundtrack of choice for such an age adolescent nerd revelry was obviously the tones of 311, for whom the basement trend continues in new single 'Time Bomb.'
The Omaha, Neb. quintet, together since 1988 and 10 albums deep, have their sound down to a science (read: formula). Crunchy guitars, crisp, jilting rhythms, and back-and-forth rock-rap (remember that?) lyrics are exchanged between the awesomely named Nick Hexum and less awesomely named Doug Martinez. The dreadlocked bassist goes by P-Nut. We're guessing he's of the baked, if not blanched, variety.
'Time Bomb' comes off of 'Universal Pulse,' their hypnotically cover-arted release from last year. For what it's worth, you may mistake Hexum's lyrics as mockery of a lame attempt at freestyling — see "I'm rocking on the mic / Saying things that you like, a line so staggeringly asinine as to be unforgettable. Martinez joins in for the equally profound chorus, beginning "Let me introduce you / To the excitable crew."
We are not enthused.
The instrumentation is cool in a Cool Ranch kind of way. It's the kind of thing that you play while hitting up Taco Bell for that Fourth Meal, or anything titled Xtreme: a tired attempt at being what once was cool.
Listen to 311′s 'Time Bomb'


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For years, Troll 2 has been the high (or low) watermark for terrible, awful, inept, and overall shittiness in movies. Being who I am, I sought it out and watched with a mix of awe and revulsion. It's putrid for sure, but I became increasingly interested to see the film that caused this unrelated sequel to get its name. I finally hunkered down to watch the original Troll from 1986 to see how it compared to what many consider the worst movie ever made…
You guys. I didn't think it was possible, but Troll might actually, somehow, be WORSE than Troll 2. The latter at least has the excuse of having a cast of nobodies ranging from talentless and inexperienced to certifiably insane; there are actual known people in Troll, and it has at least a passably large budget. It is both terrifying and insipid. Boy howdy.
The first and biggest problem with Troll is that it's presented like it's supposed to be a kids' movie; there's a cutesy xylophone score and a plot involving a young boy who has to save his sister and, really, the whole world from the eponymous little thing. Hell, look at the trailer! But there's also a huge amount of murder, dismemberment, horrible hand puppet creatures, and pulsating facial prosthetics. Surely a kind of response to the worldwide phenomenon that was Joe Dante's Gremlins, Troll was, apparently, rated PG-13, but I don't know anyone over 13 who'd want to see it, nor anyone under 13 who'd not be traumatized. And, I kid you not: The main character's name is Harry Potter. Why the hell did I watch this movie?
The movie stars Michael Moriarty, Sonny Bono, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, June Lockhart, and Noah Hathaway, the kid who played Atreyu in The Neverending Story. Okay, what were these people all thinking? It's not like any of them were major thespians at the time; Moriarty hadn't shot one scene of Law & Order yet, but come on, dude! What are you doing? This isn't even a Larry Cohen movie, so he really has no excuse for being in this. There is a scene where Moriarty turns on a shitty hair metal version of "Summertime Blues" and dances around for seemingly no reason. What did this add to the narrative? Why did he agree to do it? Did he think it would be funny? Did he think he was a good dancer and needed to show off his skills? He's basically dancing the way a giraffe would if it were pogoing while being tranquilized. It's a thing, that's for sure.
Okay, so the "plot" of this movie: Harry Potter (Moriarty) moves his family into a new apartment building. It is populated with incredibly irritating people, including a pervy lech (Bono), a hard-nosed John Wayne wannabe, and a weird old lady (Lockhart) who seems overly concerned with medieval folklore. In the very first minute after they've moved in, Potter's daughter, Wendy Anne, gets taken by a troll while playing in the basement. The troll then uses a ring to make himself look like the little girl and terrorize the girl's older brother, Harry Potter Jr. (Hathaway). She literally runs around like a fucking lunatic and the adults don't care all that much, and whenever Jr. expresses concern about how frankly psychotic she is, they just laugh it off like he's the crazy one. Fucking nightmare.
The troll then goes to the various tenants in the building and, still under the guise of being a harmless young girl, turns them into various forms of vegetation in a horrible and disgusting manner. Sonny Bono gets turned into some kind of enormous peapod and is, mercifully, in the film the least. From the plant-people come vines and bushes and a creature of some sort that eventually turn their whole apartment into a shrubbery-filled wonderland… if you find soppy puppets wonderful. These scenes with the little girl before she turns back into the troll are the creepiest things I've ever seen. That poor young actress; why would they put her through something like that? She has to say "I know what death looks like. It looks like this!" to one guy and she has to pretend to be infatuated with Julia Louis-Dreyfus before turning her into some kind of a wood nymph. She just won a damn Emmy, people! Is this REALLY supposed to be for kids?
Harry Jr. befriends Lockhart's character, and this is where we learn that the troll is actually named Torok, who used to be a guy and was cursed. Now he needs to turn the apartment into a fairy land so he can turn the whole world into a fairy land. Or something. She tells Harry Jr. to watch his sister like a hawk, which he takes to mean literally not looking away from her at all times. His parents, who are unequivocally the worst, think he's acting weird, but don't even remotely think their insane, rampaging daughter is the least bit odd. Once everyone in the whole apartment except the parents and Lockhart are plantified, the old lady tells Harry Jr. he must go into the magical realm to find his sister, and gives him a spear to drive into the heart of the biggest monster in there, for that surely will dispatch everything. He goes through the door to a forest and finds his sister pretty easily, but a guy in a demon suit attacks and is shot from below to force-perspective us into believing he's a giant.
Now, this movie is gut-wrenchingly terrible, but I will admit, begrudgingly, that there is one performance that's actually very good. Phil Fondecaro is the little person actor inside the troll suit. This is not why he's good in it. He also plays a different character (another tenant in the building) who the girl-troll befriends, thinking him to be an elf. He gives the most grounded and believable performance in the entire film. It must be irritating to have to play tiny monsters all the time, so when he gets the chance to be himself, he totally gives it his all. It really is a shame that a good performance is utterly wasted on this pile of compost. He delivers a speech about how he's cancer-ridden and likely dying soon that is immediately undercut by the girl-troll "doing him a favor" by turning him into an actual elf. Just the saddest.
Troll 2 is categorically awful, but there's something intensely watchable about those people doing literally everything wrong, from the writing to the directing to the acting to the effects. I found Troll exponentially more annoying and tougher to sit through. Comedy and children's films are two things that, if done badly, are twenty times worse than mere bad horror/sci-fi/fantasy. This film cannot figure out what audience it's aiming for, and the plot is so thin it may as well be a runway model. A person can have a good time in a group of friends watching Troll 2 and mocking its innumerable missteps, but almost zero pleasure can be derived from watching Troll. Don't watch it. It's the worse worst movie.


text: Another long time request by PlsB9s from my old channel "monsterlyinlove"... very meaningful song.. one of my personal favorite too..... please enjoy!!! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Billy Ocean was one of the first Caribbean singers to be embraced by MTV, resulting in a string of Top Ten hits during the mid-'80s. Born Leslie Charles in Trinidad on January 21, 1950, Ocean moved to England at the age of eight, and by his teenaged years, was singing regularly in London clubs. During this time, Ocean paid the bills by working at Ford Motors, but continued to pen songs and perform, as he issued an obscure debut single in 1974 under the name of Scorched Earth. But by 1975, the singer had dropped his alias and was going by Billy Ocean, resulting in a self-titled debut that spawned the singer's first hit single, "Love Really Hurts Without You," peaking on the singles chart at number two in the United Kingdom and number 22 in the United States. Ocean continued to issue albums (1980's City Limit, 1981's Nights (Feel Like Getting Down), and 1982's Inner Feelings) plus further singles, with "L.O.D. (Love on Delivery)" and the title track from Nights (the latter of which crossed over onto the U.S. R&B charts) being sizeable hits; as he also began penning songs for other artists, including a track on LaToya Jackson's 1980 self-titled debut. But breakthrough success was just around the corner for Ocean, as he scored a massive hit single in 1984 with "Caribbean Queen," a track that shot to the top of the charts worldwide. Depending on the region, the song's title and lyrics were changed slightly, resulting in the tune being known as "African Queen" and "European Queen" in other parts of the world, while the album it was taken from, Suddenly, was eventually certified double platinum (a few other singles, "Loverboy" and the ballad "Suddenly," were also successful). Ocean's winning streak continued with 1986's Love Zone (another double-platinum hit), which spawned a pair of hit singles: "When the Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going" (which was used as the theme song to the movie Jewel of the Nile), which peaked at number two, and the number-one "There'll Be Sad Songs (To Make You Cry)." 1988 saw Ocean score another number-one single with "Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car," taken from the platinum album Tear Down These Walls. But afterward, the hits dried up for Ocean (although his 1989 collection, Greatest Hits, has been a steady seller over the years), as such further albums as Time to Move On, L.I.F.E., and Showdown failed to spawn hits.


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Well folks, It's decided, we're committed.
March 8th at 12 noon MST.
All new website, All new Family ChArtist. The press release is below. A few sneak peeks at other functionality that we'll be talking about this week on the blog.
For Immediate Release:
Generation Maps announces release date for Family ChArtist.
New website will help you quickly and easily create beautiful genealogy charts.
Cedar Hills, Utah. — February 22, 2010 — Generation Maps today announced the release date for Family ChArtist, an exciting new genealogy chart creation tool. Family ChArtist is a new web application that will make creating and designing beautiful genealogy charts easier and faster than ever before. Family ChArtist is being showcased this weekend at the Family History Expo in St. George, Utah (www.familyhistoryexpos.com) and will be released to the general public with an all new Generation Maps website at 12 noon Mountain Standard Time on March 8th.
Impressive and Easy to Use Features:
HIGH QUALITY GRAPHICS: Generation Maps offers modern, classic, colorful graphics to beautify and enhance your chart.
FAST AND EASY: First time users can create beautiful charts in just a few minutes. Previously, chart printing required purchase, installation and juggling of various design software programs, online databases and file formats. Family ChArtist has combined all these elements for you and allows you to simply create what you want over the web.
GENEALOGY CAPABILITY: Family ChArtist is FamilySearch Certified, applying information straight from FamilySearch to your chart. FamilySearch information can be edited as necessary. Your family genealogical information can also be entered using a Gedcom or manual entry. Generation Maps is working toward future integration with other software and picture database systems as well as genealogy software companies.
FLEXIBLE OPTIONS: Generation Maps has created Family ChArtist with powerful, user-friendly features. You can adjust the same graphic in many different ways, using transparency, rotation, and scaling controls, to create exactly the look you want. Attractive new enhancements can also be added to each graphic to create very different charts. Family ChArtist is flexible, allowing you to add or correct information about yourself, siblings, cousins, stepfamilies, and other relatives. Additional personal information such as prominent characteristics, careers, etc., can also be included.
INEXPENSIVE PRINTING: Any 8.5 X 11 chart you create can be printed FREE on your home computer. High quality professionally printed charts range in size from 16"x20" to 36"x48". Inexpensive draft copies on standard bond paper start at $19.95. Other printing options include presentation, glossy photo and parchment papers, as well as beautiful canvas giclees. You can also purchase a .pdf file for $39.99, and minutes after you place your order you will receive an email with a link to download your file for later use. As with all Generation Maps charts, extra copies are always HALF PRICE. Order copies of your chart to give to your children or other family members as meaningful gifts.
Become an Artist
Family ChArtist has been designed with each customer in mind. You are the artist. With beautiful graphics and embellishments it is easy to create something personalized for your family. You choose the layout, information to be included, size, paper, color, pictures, borders, backgrounds and artistic design. Each chart is a direct expression of your individuality.
"I think the best feature of this new program is the wide range of wonderful graphics," says Kim Hovorka, CEO of Generation Maps. "We have chosen modern, classic, colorful graphics that can be used to beautify and enhance your chart. Images include a wide range of religious and patriotic symbols, LDS temples, flags, classic, modern and vintage embellishments and backgrounds. Users can even upload their own pictures, scans of documents or other images to decorate their charts."
Free Offer for Scrapbooks and Albums.
With Family ChArtist, you can create an 8.5 X 11 chart free of charge and save it to your computer to print whenever you choose. If you decide you want to print a larger size for your home, just order from the same menu and your chart will be printed and shipped to you promptly. Whether you are decorating your home, creating a family book, looking for a special gift for someone you love, or bringing your heritage to life for a family gathering, Family ChArtist will help you fashion a beautiful expression of your family's history for your surroundings.
To find out more about Family ChArtist and its outstanding capabilities, go to www.thechartchick.com. Janet Hovorka, development director for Generation Maps, will be sending out a new blog post each day until the official release of Family ChArtist. Each ChartChick blog post will feature different functions and design options on the new site. Users will find creative chart suggestions and ideas to help them use Family ChArtist when it becomes available March 8th.
About Generation Maps
Generation Maps was established in 2004 to help families express their heritage in an attractive way for all to see. Generation Maps charts provide a visual reminder of your family's history and help establish feelings of love and confidence that come from knowing who you are and that you are part of a family. Generation Maps charts can awaken individual potential embedded in one's inherited traits and nurture emotional healing through understanding a family's history. Family ChArtist will carry on the Generation Maps tradition by offering a new, simplified, personalized way to create decorative charts that promote family traditions and unity.
Generation Maps is still the premier printing service for any kind of genealogy chart you can imagine. In addition to the new Family ChArtist program, Generation Maps continues to offer a multitude of custom chart printing services, including both decorative and working genealogy charts. Custom decorative designs come with an online preview system that gives you personalized attention and feedback until the chart is exactly the way you envisioned it. Working charts are oversized, inexpensive, family reunion-type charts that display your entire file in one place. You can write on and add information to working charts. Generation Maps has printed working charts up to 800 feet long with information for over 30,000 people. In addition, Canvas Giclee Fine Art photos are available at Generation Maps for a very competitive, reasonable price. All charts can be printed on any of 8 paper choices, plus canvas. Free consultations are always available at http://www.generationmaps.com/consult.
For more information, visit www.generationmaps.com or www.thechartchick.com, or email firstname.lastname@example.com.
Monday, February 22, 2010
Family ChArtist--Release Date and Press Release
Posted by Janet Hovorka at 6:17 AM
Labels: Family ChArtist, Generation Maps, New FamilySearch
1 comment:
- Anonymous said...
nice post. thanks.
- March 4, 2010 at 3:07 AM
Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)


text:
Division (mathematics)
In mathematics, the word "division" means the operation which is the opposite of multiplication. Some symbols for division can be a slash, a line, or the division sign (), as in:
- or or
Each, of those three, means "6 divided by 3" with 2 as the answer. The first number is the dividend (6), and the second number is the divisor (3). The result (or answer) is the quotient. Whole numbers, any left-over amount is called the "remainder" (such as 14/4 gives 3 with the remainder as 2, as the number 3, same as 2⁄43 or 3.5). 1⁄2
The numbers can be very big, such as with two hundred: 200/5 = 40, or with 7 billion: 7,000,000,000 / 1000 = 7,000,000 (equals 7 million).
With multiplicationEdit
If c times b equals a, written as:
where b is not zero, then a divided by b equals c, written as:
For instance,
- .
In the above expression, a is called the dividend, b the divisor and c the quotient.
...is not defined.
Division is most often shown by placing the dividend over the divisor with a horizontal line, also called a vinculum, between them. For example, a divided by b is written
This can be read out loud as "a divided by b" or "a over b". A way to express division all on one line is to write the dividend, then a slash, then the divisor, like this:
This is the usual way to specify division in most computer programming languages since it can easily be typed as a simple sequence of characters.
A typographical variation which is halfway between these two forms uses a slash but elevates the dividend, and lowers the divisor:
- a⁄b .
Any of these forms can be used to display a fraction. A fraction is a division expression where both dividend and divisor are integers (although typically called the numerator and denominator). A fraction is an accepted way of writing numbers. It is not always expected that the result of the division is written in decimals.
A less common way to show division is to use the obelus (or division sign) in this manner:
But in elementary arithmetic this form is used rather often. The obelus is also used alone to represent the division operation itself, as for instance as a label on a key of a calculator.
In some non-English-speaking cultures, "a divided by b" is written a : b. However, in English usage the colon is restricted to expressing the related concept of ratios (with a:b said as "a is to b").
Related pagesEdit
- Divisor, another meaning as a number which evenly divides an amount
- Division by two
- Remainder


text:
Following an unscheduled closed session Tuesday night, the Barrow County Board of Commissioners voted to approve a $10,000 settlement with a former county inmate whose allegation of abuse was made public in 2011 by local and state representatives of the NAACP.
Six months after an NAACP press conference on the steps of the historic county courthouse in downtown Winder, Phillip Clifford Wells Jr. filed a federal lawsuit against the Barrow County Detention Center and four jail staff.
For the full story, see the Oct. 10 issue of the Barrow Journal.


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Jump to: navigation, search عيد الأضحى
Eid al-Adha
Feast of the Sacrifice
Observed by Muslim world
Type Islamic
Significance Commemoration of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his young, first-born, and only son in obedience of a command from God
Marks the end of the annual Hajj to Mecca
Celebrations Gatherings of family and friends, meals (especially lunches and late breakfasts), wearing new clothes, giving gifts
Observances Eid prayers, sacrificing usually a sheep, cow, goat, buffalo or camel, giving away about one-third of the meat to friends and neighbors, and donating one-third or more of it to the poor and needy
Begins 10 Dhu al-Hijjah
Ends 13 Dhu al-Hijjah
2013 date 15 October
Related to Hajj, Umrah, Eid al-Fitr
Eid al-Adha (Arabic: عيد الأضحى ʿīd al-aḍḥā [ʕiːd ælˈʔɑdˤħæ] "festival of the sacrifice"), also called Feast of the Sacrifice, the Major Festival,[1] the Greater Eid, Kurban Bayram (Turkish: Kurban Bayramı; Bosnian: kurban-bajram), or Eid e Qurban (Persian: عید قربان), is the second of two religious holidays celebrated by Muslims worldwide each year. It honours the willingness of Abraham (Ibrahim) to sacrifice his young first-born son Ishmael (Ismail])a as an act of submission to God's command and his son's acceptance to being sacrificed, before God intervened to provide Abraham with a lamb to sacrifice instead.[2] In the lunar based Islamic calendar, Eid al-Adha falls on the 10th day of Dhu al-Hijjah and lasts for four days.[3] In the international Gregorian calendar, the dates vary from year to year, drifting approximately 11 days earlier each year.
Eid al-Adha is the latter of the two Eid holidays, the former being Eid al-Fitr. The basis for the Eid al-Adha comes from the 196th ayah (verse) of Al-Baqara, the second sura of the Quran.[4] The word "Eid" appears once in Al-Ma'ida, the fifth sura of the Quran, with the meaning "solemn festival".[5]


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Greater adoption of cloud computing is considered an inevitable trend by regulators and lawmakers from both sides of the political aisle, according to my fellow panelists at Tuesday's "@Microsoft Conversations on Privacy" at the Microsoft Innovation & Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
However, we all agreed that the pace of cloud adoption is largely going to be determined by the speed at which cloud providers, consumers and policymakers can clarify roles and responsibilities when it comes to protecting data held by cloud service providers.
This was one of the chief conclusions to come out of our spirited discussion at Tuesday's event, "Privacy in the Cloud: How Can Cloud Providers Address the Privacy and Safety Concerns of Government, Consumers and Corporate Users?"
I had the pleasure of representing Microsoft on the panel. Joining me were David McClure, Associate Administrator of the U.S. General Services Administration; Ari Schwartz, Senior Policy Adviser at the U.S. Department of Commerce, and Paula Bruening, Vice President, Global Policy of the Center for Information Policy Leadership. Christopher Wolf, Hogan Lovells US LLP Privacy & Information Management practice and co-chair of the Future of Privacy Forum, joined us as moderator.
David McClure said he is questioned frequently about cloud computing by Democrats and Republicans in Congress, and saw little difference in their attitudes towards the technology. Both parties want to know if cloud computing is reliable, secure and economical, McClure said.
"All organizations, public and private, are looking for cost-effective IT," he said.
Ari Schwartz concurred, and added that he has been convinced about the economic advantages of cloud computing for small and medium-sized businesses for some time. He also believes cloud providers can provide greater security and privacy protections than most smaller organizations can afford to provide for themselves.
Also, as David and I discussed, cloud computing is not radically different than IT outsourcing or the shared services environments that government and corporate customers are used to. What is different and challenging is helping cloud customers understand who is responsible for what when it comes to securing and maintaining the privacy for their data. The responsibilities change for both the cloud provider and consumer depending on the cloud deployment (public, private, hybrid) and service model (i.e., infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, software as a service) chosen.
Paula noted that the complexity of cloud computing is even more difficult for consumers who want to know how to protect the privacy of their information, increasing the importance for companies to embrace the concept of privacy accountability, and to take greater responsibility for the protection and responsible use of their customers' data.
Everyone agreed that one particularly valuable tool to help clarify privacy roles and responsibilities for government cloud customers will be FedRAMP (short for Federal Risk and Authorization Program), a program that both David and Ari have contributed to that aims to create baseline security and privacy controls for federal agencies considering adoption of cloud services.
Up to now, David said, every agency has been creating their own baselines and applying them in their own ways, resulting in a lot of excess spending on duplicative analyses of cloud providers and risk assessments.
As I expressed to the panel, FedRAMP – which is expected to be released soon – will be extremely helpful to cloud providers as well as to public sector customers. Having a standard approach to Assessing and Authorizing (A&A) cloud computing services will help develop a common security risk framework that cloud providers can build our services to meet. It will also allow agencies to share the burden of the traditionally costly and time consuming A&A process required to use these services by facilitating joint authorizations that will speed the adoption and deployment of cloud services across government.
I want to thank all of my fellow panelists and everyone who attended Tuesday's event, and we look forward to continuing this important discussion around cloud privacy in the weeks and months to come. Below is video from the Tuesday panel discussion:
Tags: Cloud Computing, Data Protection, Innovation


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I first heard about Guinness Brownies through another blog, but forgot to bookmark it and couldn't remember where I had seen it. I had sent the link to a friend who's a fan of beer-based baking, but then thought it would be nice to just make them for her instead. A quick Google search brought up myriad other blog posts, including the one I had seen originally, as well as some other variations. After cruising through a bunch, I realized most of them were riffs on one standard recipe — one I liked much more than the recipe I had first come across.
Now, normally, I like to leave recipes alone for the first attempt, figuring I need to give it a chance to wow me before I make changes. But most of the versions I found called for white chocolate, which I loathe. And I knew it would cook out and be undetectable in the final brownie, but I still wasn't keen on buying white chocolate just for this recipe. One other blogger had subbed in milk chocolate chips, which seemed like a good idea to me. I think the object here is chocolate-y sweetness and milk chocolate can certainly achieve that, with the bonus of being an ingredient I can use in other things.
Random rant: why do they sell baking chocolate squares in packages of 6 ounces? Most of the recipes I've come across call for 8 ounces, which means buying two packages and then letting the remaining four ounces sitting around in the cupboard (where, yes, I am likely to forget I have them and then go buy more. I really need a more organized baking cupboard).
Cracking a beer at 11 a.m. felt a bit funny, though it's not my first time. (Those Guinness Cupcakes are also an excellent recipe, if you're looking for something else to do with the dark Irish beer.) And I was a bit nervous about cooking it down. I'm not a huge beer fan and was afraid reducing it and intensifying the flavour would make it stand out far too much in the final brownies. Plus, it did seem a bit weird to cook beer.
But what do I know?
Not much apparently because these were fantastic. They were rich and dense, flavourful but not overly beer-y. A definite keeper.
Guinness Brownies
This is a hybrid recipe from a couple of sources, but I have to give Bitchin' Camero a shout out because that is a seriously awesome blog name and Blondie's Cakes for the smart idea of reducing the Guinness for additional flavour.
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- 3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 6 tablespoons unsalted room temperature butter, cut into cubes
- 8 ounces dark bittersweet chocolate, chopped (I used 6 ounces of bittersweet and 2 of 70 per cent dark chocolate)
- 3/4 cup milk chocolate chips
- 4 large eggs, at room temperature
- 1 cup granulated sugar
- 2 bottles Guinness beer, reduced to 1 1/4 cups
- 3/4 teaspoon vanilla
- 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
- icing sugar for dusting (optional)
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Line a 9 x 13-inch baking pan with parchment paper.
In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, cocoa powder, and salt until evenly combined. Set aside.
In a double boiler set over low heat, melt butter, bittersweet chocolate and milk chocolate chips. Remove from heat.
In a large mixing bowl, beat together eggs and sugar on high speed until light and fluffy. Pour in melted chocolate mixture and beat until combined.
Add flour-cocoa mixture and beat until just combined. Whisk in cooled Guinness and vanilla. (It will take a few minutes for the beer to incorporate. I used more of a folding technique with the whisk for the first minute or two to keep everything from slopping everywhere.)
Pour into prepared pan. Scatter over semi-sweet chips.
Bake 25 to 30 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean. Note: mine only took 24 minutes; start checking at the 20-minute mark.
Let brownies cool. Dust with icing sugar if using and serve.


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WNBA Might Want To Sign Her: This Woman Is The Basketball Rapid Fire Shooting Champ! (Got Mad Skills) [Fixed]
Some serious skills.
Please click the "Report" button below if the video on this page is not working properly.
Comments will only be displayed by verified emails. No Spamming or Racism.


text:
Blumenthal: Obama's Newtown reference may spur gun changes
HARTFORD (AP) — Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal says President Barack Obama's reference in his inauguration speech to the murders of 20 children and six educators in Newtown could spur changes in federal gun law.
Blumenthal told The Associated Press on Monday that the image and symbol of the Dec. 14 shooting deaths in the president's speech will be a "motivating force" to pass new laws.
Obama said America's journey is not complete until all children from Detroit to Appalachia to "the quiet lanes of Newtown" know they are cared for, cherished and safe from harm.
Blumenthal, a Democrat, said Obama's reference to Newtown is valuable because he has given only two inaugural speeches and every sentence counts.
Obama is proposing a ban on military-style assault weapons, limiting high-capacity ammunition magazines and requiring background checks for all gun buyers.


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12 September is the 255th day of the year (256th in leap years). There are 110 days remaining.
- 1991: The first Flying lesson of the year takes place at half past three p.m.; Neville Longbottom breaks his wrist after a dreadful flight. Harry Potter is made Seeker of Gryffindor after he chases Draco Malfoy. Draco Malfoy challenges Harry to a duel at midnight. When Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Neville get to the Trophy Room for the midnight duel, they discover Draco told Argus Filch, the caretaker, that they would be out of bed at that time. The group manages to avoid Filch, but have a run in with Fluffy instead.[citation needed]
- 1996: Hannah Abbott had been taken out of Herbology to be told her mother had been found dead.[citation needed]
External linksEdit
- 12 September on Wikipedia
Community content is available under CC-BY-SA unless otherwise noted.


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More on Derek Hough and Brilynn Rakes – DWTS 16, Week 4, AT&T Spotlight Dance
Just beautiful. Derek talks a bit with Xfinity about dancing with Brilynn:
"She was born with serious vision problems. She's legally blind. She'll never drive. She has to wear these special contacts which protect her eyes because she's incredibly light sensitive. But through all that, where her sight is seriously impaired, she's become this amazing dancer. For your vision being an important thing, you'd think, for dancing, she's managed to find ways to make it work. She's an inspiration."
"DWTS" viewers will see that Derek choreographed a contemporary ballet piece for Brilynn to the Grace Potter & the Nocturnals' song "Stars." "The chorus of the song is, 'I Can't Look at the Stars,'" Derek noted. "[But] I can't believe she's legally blind."
The longtime hoofer said Brilynn, who took private lessons for years with Orange County, Calif., dance teacherJayne Persch, can only see shapes a few feet in front of her and can't detect color. "When she watches TV, she has to get two inches from it and look at it sideways because her peripheral vision is better than her direct vision."
Brilynn melted Derek's heart when he learned she had used what little vision she has to watch him on "DWTS." "She thought she was going to be doing a solo on the show and I kind of came in and surprised her; [producers] said she really likes you on the show; she thinks she's doing a solo and we want you to surprise her and do a duet."
Derek said he's learned a lot from Brilynn as they've rehearsed for their big number. "She emulates what I try to live my life by, which is, just following your bliss, your passion, what you love. She did that, even with the restriction in her eyesight. She just loves dancing and followed it, even with her vision. She's just found a way and we can all take a page out of her book," Derek told xfinityTV.
"When I watch her dance, I'm surprised how she knows where I am and she can sense me. There are moments we spread apart and I have to make a noise so she can find me and we run into each other. I live for moments like that on the show."
Derek expects Tuesday to mean a great deal to him: "I can't help but tear up when I'm dancing with her. It's pretty special."
Brilynn talks about dancing and dancing with Derek.


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- Consider IT development and IT operations as elements in a production plant.
- Go and re-visit how you can use Kanban boards to protect your bottlenecks i.e. your highly overdemanded resources.
- There are 4 types of work: Business project work, IT project work, changes and unplanned work. The last two ones, if not properly managed, will destroy you.
This book is a tool to reflect on how you need to interact with core business areas and executives. Above all, this is a novel, a human story that you will find very close to your everyday live.
The special bonus in this book for those related to security? Read how the IT security officer goes from being hated to being a part of the solution to the problems the company is having. That is a great worth reading passage in this book.
An additional ingredient in the book is the role of a somehow distanced but experienced mento. One of the lessons of the book: do not despair and think simple!
And remember:
- IT is pervasive, like electricity, it is not just a support area.
- If IT wins, the business wins.
- IT and business in unsuccessful companies is a dysfunctional marriage.
- Interesting idea: A hedge fund betting on organisations with a great IT department.
- A new? concept: devops (from development and operations).
- And even a newer proposal: organisations with no IT department, but rather IT inside the business areas. How does this sound?
Kudos to the authors Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford!
|Infosec people, build the tower but enjoy the tree!


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I had written something on Frobe Lagasse in 2009.
I never thought someone would write me about him. Alice, Frobe' sister, named one of her children after him.
This is the file of Frobe Lagasse.
Frobe is a second cousin. His grandfather was Pierre Lagacé who was my great-great-grandfather's brother.
Few people know his genealogy but I do and someone else does now.
Having found all my Lagacés ancestors, I had been looking for distant relatives and this is how I found one whose husband is related to Frobe and Alice.
Frobe married Valéda Forand in 1897. They had at three children: Joseph Norman, Laurent and Blanche. Laurent probably died young.
There are two people who also have Frobe Lagasse in their data banks on Ancestry.
The problem is that they say that Frobe Lagasse died in 1964.
Frobe died in 1915 and this is his death certificate. He died from tuberculosis.
Click on the image it will appear in another window
Here are some information about Norman Lagasse.
He was born in January 1899 in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
Blanche was born around 1905.
In the 1920 U.S. Census, Valéda and Blanche are living together. I had found no traces of Norman.
There might not be any descendants of Frobe Lagasse who was the son of Adolphe Lagasse an undertaker in Massachusetts around 1909, but now I know that there are Alice's descendants in the United States.
Next time…
Bottom of the ninth.
It's not over till it's over.


text:
"Marley," director Kevin McDonald's log-gestating documentary about reggae legend Bob Marley, has finally dropped a trailer ahead of its 4/20 (get it?) release.
Bob Marley & The Wailers exploded on the U.S. scene in the early '70s amid a giant cloud of marijuana smoke and a massive tangle of dreadlocks, delivering hits like "I Shot the Sheriff" and "Get Up, Stand Up," introducing the nation to whole new world of music and culture.
But Marley would die tragically in 1981, at the age of 36, succumbing to cance, and leaving behind a legacy that endures today. "Marley" opens April 20.


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Choice of the Vampire (iPad)
Published by
Developed by
Also For
DescriptionThis multiple-choice game casts the player as an undead denizen of the Mississippi river delta in the period between the War of 1812 and the American Civil War some fifty years later. Choosing from any of a wide variety of backgrounds, all the characters will have their distinctive abilities (measuring over 21 statistics overall, five of which are somewhat binary continuums) put to task thriving as a wolf among sheep and surviving amongst the curious parallel political structures of the vampires also. Certain elements of the story veer into Choice of Romance territory, these vampires caught up in soap operatic machinations to rival Anne Rice's best. As in some other games by its makers, surviving to the end of the game results in the sharing of a code allowing players to resume the very particular affairs of this specific character in future installments of the game.
There are no iPad user screenshots for this game.
There are 23 other screenshots from other versions of this game or official promotional screenshots.
Promo Images
Part of the Following Groups
User Reviews
There are no reviews for the iPad release of this game. You can use the links below to write your own review or read reviews for the other platforms of this game.
Critic Reviews
There are no critic reviews for this game.
There are currently no topics for this game.
BibliographyThe game is proud enough of its research to include a bibliography in its "about" page:
- Berkeley, Kathleen C. Like a Plague of Locusts: From an Antebellum Town to a New South City, Memphis, Tennessee, 1850-1880. New York: Garland, 1991
- Blume, Helmut. The German Coast: During the Colonial Era, 1722-1803. Translated by Ellen C. Merill. Destrehan, LA: The German-Acadian Coast Historical and Genealogical Society, 1990.
- Brister, Nancy. A Street by any other name. NewOrleans.com, 2009.
- Deiler, J. Hanno. The Settlement of the German Coast of Louisiana and the Creoles of German Descent. Philadelphia: Americana Germanica Press, 1909.
- DeLatte, Carolyn E. ed. The Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial Series in Louisiana History. Vol 4, Part A Antebellum Louisiana, 1830-1860: Life and Labor. Lafayette, LA: University of Louisiana, Lafayette, 2004.
- Erskine, John H. A Report on Yellow Fever as it appeared in Memphis, Tenn., in 1873. Public Health Papers and Reports. Vol 1, pp 385-392. New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1875.
- Labbe, Dolores Egger ed. The Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial Series in Louisiana History. Vol 3, The Louisiana Purchase and its Aftermath, 1800-1830. Lafayette, LA: University of Louisiana, Lafayette, 1998.
- United States Marshals Service. www.usmarshals.gov
- Wikipedia, in all its messy glory, for too many articles to count.
- Yoes, Henry E. III. Louisiana's German Coast: A History of St. Charles Parish. 2nd ed. Lake Charles, LA: Racing Pigeon Digest, 2005.
Related Web Sites
- Play Choice of the Vampire (Free, legal play of the game through your web browser.)
Pseudo_Intellectual (62616) added Choice of the Vampire (iPad) on Apr 14, 2012
Other platforms contributed by Pseudo_Intellectual (62616) and LepricahnsGold (139220)
There are no game credits on file for this release of the game. Everything in MobyGames is contributable by users.


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Earthquake. Fire. Hurricane. Tsunami. Genocide. War. Famine. Hardly a day goes by that one does not hear of a disaster of some kind that is happening in our world.
We listen to the news, we are concerned, we pray, we donate, we try to give relief. Then the 24-hour news barrage moves us on to the next big news story and the cycle starts all over again. Until we become slightly numb to devastation.
While we may quickly move on with our lives after a disaster strikes, those directly affected by it may feel the devastation for many years to come.
Eight years ago, Rosa was living in the mountains outside the city of Santa Ana, in El Salvador. Her eldest son, Carlos, was already sponsored through CFCA. The family was getting by on a meager income that Javier, Rosaís husband, brought in through agriculture, and a small garden that Rosa enjoyed tending. Rosa stayed at home to tend to the children and to take food to her husband in the field.
Then, in January 2001, an earthquake, registering 7.6, destroyed their† home.
Rosa and her family slept outdoors for many nights and then went to stay with her brother. Rosa, Javier and their three children, her parents, and her brother and his family of four moved to an area in Santa Ana that had been designated for earthquake victims. There they built a small home from scrap metal that they found.
Rosa finds life in the city to be much harder and more expensive than in the country. She now has to buy the vegetables and beans that before she had grown herself, and she buys less of everything because food prices have increased. Where she used to buy one pound of rice, now she buys half a pound. She is, however, very grateful for the nutritional supplements her family receives as a benefit through CFCA. She also misses the community in her old village.
Rosa now earns a living by going to othersí homes and washing their clothes. Javier works as a bricklayer in the capital, San Salvador. He tries to come home every three days to see his family but the transportation expenses are high, averaging $4 a week.
The family prays every night for Carlosí sponsor. They also pray that the other children in the family receive sponsorship.
ìGod holds me which is good, because things are only going to get worse. Things are more expensive now,î Rosa said. ìSometimes I feel like I have been abandoned by God, but then I tell myself I canít give up because faith is living inside us.î
In September Rosaís 9-yearñold son, Bryan, received sponsorship. Godís answer to her prayers.
Update: At the time of this posting, Carlos, 14, is no longer in the sponsorship program. He decided to leave the program to find a job. Rosaís youngest son, Cesar, 3, has been sponsored in his place.


text:
A wide-ranging match-fixing investigation has uncovered more than 680 suspicious matches — including World Cup and European Championship qualifiers and two Champions League games — and found evidence that a Singapore-based crime group is closely involved in match-fixing, Europol said Monday.
The investigation by Europol, the European Union's joint police body, found 380 suspicious matches in Europe and another 300 questionable games outside the continent, mainly in Africa, Asia, South and Central America.
"This is a sad day for European (soccer)," Rob Wainwright, the head of Europol, told a news conference. He said criminals are cashing in on soccer corruption "on a scale and in a way that threatens the very fabric of the game."
Europol declined to name suspects, players, clubs, or officials involved so as not to prejudice ongoing investigations, and it was unclear exactly how many of the matches mentioned were previously known to have been tainted. Still, the very announcement shed light on a murky underworld of match-fixers and illegal betting spanning the globe.
The probe uncovered €8 million ($10.9 million) in betting profits and €2 million ($2.7 million) in bribes to players and officials and has already led to several prosecutions.
Those numbers are far lower than many estimates of the amount of cash involved in match-fixing and betting on rigged matches, but prosecutors said the amounts they named are what they can directly pin down through paper trails, phone records and computer records.
"This is the tip of the iceberg," said Friedhelm Althans, a German investigator.
Europol investigators analyzed 13,000 emails and other evidence and identified 425 players, criminals, match officials and club staff suspected of being involved in manipulating matches dating back several years.
Wainwright said the involvement of organized crime "highlights a big problem for the integrity of football in Europe."
He said a Singapore-based criminal network was involved in the match-fixing, spending up to €100,000 ($136,500) per match to bribe players and officials.
Wainwright said while many fixed matches were already known from trials in Europe, the Europol investigation that began in July 2011 lifted the lid on the widespread involvement or organized crime in rigging games.
"This is the first time we have established substantial evidence that organized crime is now operating in the world of (soccer)," he said.
The global nature of the organized crime syndicates involved makes them hard to track down and prosecute. Europol said a single fixed match can involve up to 50 suspects in 10 different countries.
Europol said in a statement the criminal group behind most of the match-fixing was placing bets mainly in Asia.
"The ringleaders are of Asian origin, working closely together with European facilitators," the organization said, but it added that "Russian-speaking" and other criminal gangs were involved .
Wainwright said the international soccer community now needed a "concerted effort" to tackle the corruption. He said he would be sending the results of the investigation to UEFA President Michel Platini.
Previous investigations have found that a World Cup qualifier between Liechtenstein and Finland in September 2009 was fixed, as was the European Championship qualifier between Norway and Malta in June 2007.


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|Version 13 (modified by 13 years ago) (diff),
Support for LaTeX Math Formulas in Wiki Pages
Notice: This plugin is unmaintained and available for adoption.
Allow embedded equations in wiki pages. Basically a port of mt-math to trac.
Download the source. Go to the top level directory of TracMath and type:
$ python setup.py bdist_egg
This should create an egg file under the
dist subdirectory of your current directory. Copy the egg to the
plugins directory of your trac project. If you have any difficulties installing consult these trac plugin installation steps.
To activate the component, edit your project's
trac.ini file to include:
[components] tracmath.* = enabled
The settings default to a linux environment where
latex_cmd is
/usr/bin/latex and
dvipng_cmd is
/usr/bin/dvipng, and
cache_dir is
/tmp/tracmath. You can override these settings by including in your
trac.ini file settings such as:
[tracmath] latex_cmd = <location of your latex binary> dvipng_cmd = <location of dvipng> cache_dir = <cache directory> max_png = <max number of pngs in cache - defaults to 500>
Bugs/Feature Requests
Existing bugs and feature requests for TracMathPlugin are here.
If you have any issues, create a new ticket.
Download the zipped source from [download:tracmathplugin here].
You can check out TracMathPlugin from here using Subversion, or browse the source with Trac.
{{{ #!latex $\mbox{Var}[\tau(X_p,X_d)] = \mbox{Var}[E(\tau(X_p,X_d)|X_p)] E[\mbox{Var}(\tau(X_p,X_d)|X_p)]$ }}}
would produce something akin to:
Similar Plugins
Recent Changes
Author: rlotun
Attachments (1)
- test1.png (1.2 KB) - added by 13 years ago.
Download all attachments as: .zip


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The City of Alachua welcomes the opportunity to do business with interested vendors!!!
Prior to doing business with the City, vendors must submit a vendor registration form, W9, Certificate of Liability Insurance (guidelines are stipulated below), a copy of your Local Business Tax Receipt, and a "Certificate of Good Standing" from the Division of Corporations.
Florida Statute 865.09 requires that any fictitious name under which a person transacts business be registered, after newspaper advertising, as set forth in the statute.
To view our purchasing ordinance in its entirety, click here. Then click on Part II - CODE OF ORDINANCES, Chapter 2 - ADMINISTRATION, and then ARTICLE V. - PURCHASING.