text:
Obama meets with Dalai Lama despite China's objections
- Meeting the Dalai Lama does not mean the United States backs Tibetan independence%2C White House says
- The Dalai Lama was met as an important religious leader%2C NSC spokeswoman says
- Chinese officials call the Dalai Lama a %27wolf in sheep%27s clothing%27
WASHINGTON — President Obama met the Dalai Lama on Friday despite fierce objections from China that the meeting would damage the U.S.-Chinese relationship.
The exiled Tibetan leader visited the White House for the third time during Obama's presidency.
The two met in the less significant Map Room — not the Oval Office. And the White House, as it has in the past when the Dalai Lama has visited, did not allow for journalists to chronicle the two men interacting as the administration often does when the president meets with important visitors.
The White House, however, posted a photo of the Dalai Lama and Obama's meeting Friday on its official flickr account.
White House press secretary Jay Carney said the administration was "appreciative" of the media's desire to have had access to the meeting, but "in this case we weren't able to do that."
Ahead of the visit, the White House underscored that it continues to recognize Tibet as part of China, while at the same time raising concerns about the deteriorating human rights situation in the Tibetan areas of China.
"The president stressed that he encourages direct dialogue to resolve long-standing differences and that a dialogue that produces results would be positive for China and Tibetans," the White House said in a statement following the meeting. "In this context, the president reiterated the U.S. position that Tibet is part of the People's Republic of China and that the United States does not support Tibet independence."
National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said Obama would meet the Dalai Lama "in his capacity as an internationally respected religious and cultural leader."
"The United States supports the Dalai Lama's 'Middle Way' approach of neither assimilation nor independence for Tibetans in China," Hayden said in a statement. "We will continue to urge the Chinese government to resume dialogue with the Dalai Lama or his representatives, without preconditions, as a means to reduce tensions.
But just hours after the White House announced on Thursday that the meeting would take place, China's foreign ministry issued a statement that warned the meeting "will grossly interfere in the internal affairs of China, seriously violate norms governing international relations and severely impair China-U.S. relations."
Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying reiterated those remarks at a regular press conference Friday in Beijing.
Beijing often refers to the Dalai Lama, who has lived in exile since 1959, as a "wolf in sheep's clothing" and suggest that he quietly condones the use of violent means to establish an independent Tibet. The Dalai Lama says he wants autonomy for Tibet, and respect of human rights from the Chinese.
The White House said Friday that the Dalai Lama reiterated that "he is not seeking independence for Tibet and hopes that dialogue between his representatives and the Chinese government will resume."
Hayden said ahead of the meeting that the Obama administration remains "concerned about continuing tensions and the deteriorating human rights situation in Tibetan areas of China."
Obama and China's President Xi Jinping are both to travel to the Netherlands next month for the Nuclear Security Summit, where they are expected to meet.
Jonathan Pollack, a China analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said that Beijing's protest about Friday's meeting was very similar objections it raised when U.S. presidents have met with the Dalai Lama in the past. He said it was doubtful that it would have an impact on the upcoming Obama-Xi meeting or the U.S.-China relationship in general.
"There is kind of a ritualized set of objections that are always expressed by the Chinese and then life goes on," Pollack said. "The U.S. appropriately doesn't give these objections overly serious heed."


text:
» Stanford "traded" Twitter handles with Syracuse, giving up @SUAthletics in exchange for a local goods package that includes a crate of oranges.
"Obviously we're thrilled to activate @GoStanford as our official Twitter handle and pull off this dynamic trade," said Bernard Muir, The Jaquish & Kenninger Director of Athletics at Stanford. "From a branding standpoint, this trade makes sense for both schools. We held both accounts – the social media equivalent to having two starting quarterbacks, and we wanted to derive as much
value fun as possible. We expect great things from our new starter, @GoStanford, and wish @SUAthletics good luck in a new home."
The Cardinal also landed four-star quarterback Keller Chryst and got $151 million from donor John Arrillaga. But those oranges! What a coup.
» Oregon continues its run as basketball's Transfer U. Last week, the Ducks added Houston transfer Joseph Young, a 6-foot-3 guard that led the Cougars with 18.0 points per game as a redshirt sophomore. If he isn't granted a waiver, he will only be eligible for the 2014-15 season.
Dana Altman recently landed his fifth and sixth senior transfers in ex-Iowa State commit Richard Amardi and UNLV's Mike Moser.
» Oregon State running back Storm Woods, on his team's 31-27 Alamo Bowl loss to Texas: "I've watched it more than 10 times by myself, honestly. It haunts me still, and it fuels me but at the same time, I have to let it go." Continue reading "Pac-12 links: Stanford lands four-star QB, $151 million donation, Twitter trade" »

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Caliber's digital platforms are tailored to your loan's needs.
Complete Loan Application • Upload Documents • Check Loan Status
Setup Recurring Payments • Statement Delivery Settings • Tax Documents
About Me
Experience a new way to manage your home loan - from the palm of your hand! Check on the status of your mortgage application, make a mortgage payment, and more.
You may be asked to submit additional documents during processing of your loan application. But it doesn't have to be a hassle - you can upload them now on our website.
Want to know how much home you can afford? Use our monthly payment calculator to see homebuying expenses for several loan options.
At Caliber Home Loans, mortgages are our only business… and our products and services are proof of this dedication.
Our specialized approach to home financing enables us to deliver exceptional service during every stage of the process. We understand that you have unique, personal needs and expectations, so we work together to deliver exceptional service and help you close your loan to your complete satisfaction.
With a variety of home loan programs, highly competitive pricing, in-house loan processing and our unique, state-of-the-art technology, Caliber Home Loans' staff of professionals are ready to guide you through the home financing process.
Update the information below to estimate your monthly payment
Private Mortgage Insurance typically costs between 0.5% to 1% of the entire loan amount over 80% LTV on an annual basis.


text:
Improbabile would be the Italian way to describe being a successful female wineaker in Puglia. Throw in being an Australian, and the fact that the winery is literally an industiral garage, and you have an interesting recipe for some of the best organic wine in the region.
Winemaker Lisa Gilbee went to her first wine tasting at 9. She loved everything about it, particularly the concentrated musty aromas that permeated the room. She knew then that she wanted to make wine. She left her native Australia for Italy in 1994 and landed in Puglia's lesser-known winemaking region of Manduria. Seven years ago she started her winery Morella, named after her husband, Gaetano Morella.
Four years ago she applied for a building permit. Italian bureaucracy being what it is, the permit has just been approved, to which Lisa laughingly says, "The good news is that in that time we learned a lot about what we need. The bad news is that loans got tighter." The building, which will include a home for her family, will be in the country amid their vines, a field of young ones (40 years old) on one side, and the old vines (80 years old) on the other. Lisa was lucky enough to purchase the old vine section from an elderly couple who tended the vines themselves until they passed away – 8 months apart from each other.
Everything Lisa does is natural. She holds herself to very high standards and employs a biodynamic "coach," Ukrainian Alex Podolinsky, whom she knew from Australia. Before going biodynamic, as she puts it, "I stopped using the 'icides' – pesticides, herbicides, fungicides." For her region this was radical, because most of the growers were in the sway of the chemical salesmen who promised increased yield. Naturally, this resulted in poor quality wine, mostly sold in bulk to other winemakers.
By choice, Morella is neither certified as organic or biodynamic. It's not even DOC. Lisa follows her own farming practices and believes that her fans will trust that she's done the right thing.
Despite the dreary, rainy day of our visit, Morella's fields, even in their post-harvest state, glowed. The land and its plants radiated vitality, beauty and health. No wonder Lisa's dream is to build her winery and home for her family amidst these vineyards.
Morella grows 4 varietals: Primitivo, Negroamaro, Malbec and Fiano. From these grapes, 6 wines are made: 4 red and 2 white.
Lisa describes her garage as a "lego winery." Hand plunging, slow open fermentation and a basket press are her building blocks. The basket press – an old-fashioned cage with pistons that squashes the grapes – extracts 60% by volume and the grapes can only be pressed once with this method. Industrial presses yield 80%, the remainder of volume being stems and leaves. What's left from her pressing is sold to distilleries.
The juice is then put into 300 liter barrels, mostly to segregate one varietal from another, but also to allow for micro-oxygenation and settling. The latter is essential because the wine will not be filtered. After 12–18 months, the wine is moved to either stainless steel or cement tanks for another 2–6 months. Then it is hand-bottled. She said, "It's refreshing as an Australian to have wines with natural acidity. In Australia we have to add acid."
Her final thought; "It's old fashioned wine making with attention to cleanliness. If you have good vineyards, you don't have to do much in the winery."
The winery's production is 20,000 bottles. 2000 are white. Most is sold in Switzerland, followed by England. A few palettes find their way to the U.S. so do yourself a favor and look for them. They are imported by Piedmont Wine Imports.
Tasting Notes
Morella Primitivo Negroamaro, 2010
Albero Damiano, the Maitre d'Hotel at Palazzo Indelli in the seaside town of Monopoli, tasted the wine and weighed in with the following – "Stupendous!" It's not necessary to serve with this with meat, it would also work well with vegetables and fish. "Personally, I like wine that tastes of ripe fruit, which this does. Chocolate finish. Serve with figs, almonds, or biscotti."
We agree with the expert. It's elegant and sophisticated. Should be savored with a special meal, and if your meal isn't special, this will make it so. This is a Châteauneuf-du-Pape-style wine.
Morella Old Vines Primitivo, 2010
Gorgeous wine. Full of ripe fruit, currants and berries, but not a hint of sweetness. Medium body. You can almost taste the gnarl in the vine. Legs linger on the glass leaving patterns like an historic leaded window. Deep ruby red (not as black as the Primitivo Negroamaro blend). Settles in after 10 minutes and becomes noticeably rounder and even more luscious. Albero Damiano added, "the ultimo Primitivo for typical Puglian food, like orrchiette with broccoli rabe, sausage and mushrooms."
Learn more about Morella at www.morellavini.com


text:
Blog Archives
Posted by Grace and Grit
FAITH?….CONVICTION?….GOD'S WILL?…..PURPOSE?…..SURRENDER?….SACRIFICE? These are the attributes explored in Eric Metaxas' biographical account of the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German martyr who gave his life to make a stand against the evil of Hitler and Nazi Germany.
In times of adversity, when being a Christian and taking action for your beliefs comes at a heavy price, men like Bonhoeffer reveal to us an example of a life lived for extraordinary purpose, and with extraordinary circumstances. This book is a very detailed account of a brilliant and courageous life, a life that impacted millions and still holds relevant insight for the Christian of modern times. It explores his passion for having a very intimate relationship with Jesus, and for teaching others how to separate from mere religious ceremony and regulation so that they could reach into the lives of others with purpose and compassion, and to make Jesus real and personable in everyday life. It explores his thoughts on grace, and portrays how deeply a true understanding of God's grace can penetrate a heart and feel it with deep conviction and purpose. It explores the grey areas of decision that all Christians must face in times of war and unusual circumstances and Bonhoeffer's deep convictions to honor what he believed God wanted him to do even if others misunderstood or did not agree.
I enjoyed reading this book, and found myself being able to relate to the time period and events through Bonhoeffer's eyes in new and insightful ways. It was quite disturbing to me, actually, to comprehend how drastically Germany changed in a very short period of time. I couldn't help but wonder about the possibility that Christians today could find themselves in similar circumstances. If such were to transpire, I wonder how many modern Christians would be able to come forward and embrace pending death for the cause of Christ with the conviction and gratitude that Bonhoeffer and his comrades were able to do. I highly recommend this book, and believe it will challenge you to look closely at your own beliefs and convictions.


text:
Charlie Barrett and Barrett Communications, is stopping off at Pump Up Your Book on Day 1 of his virtual publicity tour with Pump Up Your Book!
Read his interview and win a FREE Kindle Fire at http://www.pumpupyourbook.com/2012/03/04/interview-with-charlie-barrett-barrett-communications-hollywood-publicity-firm-kindle-fire-giveaway/!
Well known, experienced, professional Hollywood book, TV and movie publicist Charlie Barrett formed The Barrett Company in 1991 as a full service publicity and media relations agency to serve books/authors/publishers, television and motion picture industry clients. The Los Angeles headquartered publicity firm offers 21st century publicity and media relations services to celebrities, authors, actors, directors, screen writers, filmmakers as well as film and television producers.
Charlie's author clients have include LA author-screenwriter Carla Malden, author of Afterimage, Kindle's John Locke/Lethal People, Julie Sinatra/Under my Skin, Warren Adler/War of the Roses, David R. Fett MD and Steve Langford/White Sleeper, Deby Eisenberg/Pictures of the Past, Marty Jurow/See'in Stars: A Show Biz Odyssey, actor George Kennedy/Trust Me, Peter Ford/Glenn Ford: A Life and Dr. Ken Nedd/Power Over Stress as well as many, many others.
Since it's inception, TBC has served as publicists to such companies and celebrities as CBS, Simon & Schuster, ABC, Globe Pequot Press, Harper Collins publishers, Norton publishers, Paramount studios, Oxford University Press, PBS, Warner Brothers, American Movie Classics cable channel (Mad Men), Bravo, Life Time Television, NYU Press, Ben Bella Books, Fox Television Network, Little Brown publishers, Fox News, CNN, self-published author service firms such as Xlibris, Author House and i-Universe as well as numerous celebrities from Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon to Kevin Costner, Tatum O'Neal, Tim Curry, Martin Landau, Robert Stack, Rod Stewart, Gary Conway, Oprah Winfrey (Oprah's Big Give television series on ABC) and numerous other stars.
Mr. Barrett started up The Barrett Company publicity firm after serving in top PR positions with the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) for more than ten years, where he was in charge of media relations for Johnny Carson's Tonight Show and Today, among other well-known NBC shows such as Unsolved Mysteries, Fame and numerous highly-rated NBC specials, including The American Film Institute Awards and The American Movie Awards.
When earlier basing in New York City, Mr. Barrett served as a book publicist to many major publishers with publicity campaigns for a number of best-selling authors from large trade book publishers from Scribners to Random House.
Mr. Barrett has also held executive media relations posts with 20th Century Fox Film Corporation in New York and Capitol Records in Hollywood, New York and London, where he helped launch recorded music by The Beatles, The Band and many other music artists including Joe South, Freda Payne, Bobbie Gentry and Glen Campbell.
You can visit his website at www.thebarrettco.com. Visit them on Twitter at www.twitter.com/thebarrettco.


text:
Russell L. Gordon was elected vice president and chief financial officer in April 2012. Prior to being elected CFO, he worked closely with RPM's operating companies in monitoring monthly performance and establishing budgets as part of RPM's annual planning process. Mr. Gordon joined RPM as director of corporate development in 1995 and was elected as vice president - corporate planning in October 2007. Prior to joining RPM, he held various financial positions in corporate treasury and control as well as in the specialty chemicals division at The B.F. Goodrich Company. He began his career as an industrial engineer in wafer fabrication operations at VLSI Technology Inc., where he worked on inventory control, production scheduling and statistical process control initiatives. Mr. Gordon earned his bachelor of science degree in operations research and industrial engineering at Cornell University in 1987. He also received a master of management degree from the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University as a Sara Lee Fellow in 1991, where he was elected as a member of Beta Gamma Sigma.
RPM International (NYSE: RPM)
Price quote as of 4:10:00 PM ET. Supplied by EDGAR Online.
Media KitDownload the RPM media kit for background information on the company, financials and more
RPM International Inc. Corporate Identity GuidelinesDownload the Corporate ID Guidelines and logos
RPM International Inc. (NYSE: RPM) owns subsidiaries that are world leaders in coatings, sealants, building materials and related services. From homes to precious landmarks worldwide, their brands are trusted by consumers and professionals alike to protect, improve and beautify. Among its leading consumer brands are Rust-Oleum, DAP and Zinsser. Learn more about RPM brands >>
RPM is a compelling long-term investment.
The percent by which RPM's 10-year total return has bested the S&P 500. More reasons >>
Get the latest news and financial information on why RPM is a good investment Download investor kit >>
This website uses cookies and other tracking technologies (also known as pixels or beacons) to aid your experience (such as viewing videos), as well as "performance cookies" to analyze your use of this website and to assist with marketing efforts. If you click the "Accept All Cookies" button or continue navigating the website, you agree to having those first and third-party cookies set on your device. If you do not wish to accept cookies from this website, you can choose to not allow cookies from this website by updating your browser preferences. For more information on how we use Cookies, please read our Privacy Policy.


text:
View Photo Gallery
Remove ads with our VIP Service
Drag Me to Hell
Christine Brown is an ambitious L.A. loan officer with a charming boyfriend, Professor Clay Dalton. Life is good until the mysterious Mrs. Ganush arrives at the bank to beg for an extension on her... View more >
Starring Justin Long, Alison Lohman, David Paymer... View more >
Genre - Horror
Directed by Sam Raimi
Opened in Theaters - Friday, May 29th, 2009
This Movie is Not Currently Playing in Theaters
Drag Me to Hell isn't playing in theaters listed on The BigScreen Cinema Guide.
What are your options?
Search movietickets.com for showtimes
While we list showtimes for every movie theater in the United States, some of our readers are from other countries. If you do not find showtimes on our site, please try the link above to search for showtimes on movietickets.com. This way, you can still take advantage of the features of The BigScreen Cinema Guide while obtaining movie schedules for other theaters from our partner site.
Click here to search for showtimes
Look for the movie on home video
This movie is most likely available on home video, so please check out the links below to see if it's available on Blu-ray, DVD, and/or streaming services.
New Movies - Box Office - Favorite Movies - All Movies
Coming Soon - Search
Home - About Us - Ad Info - Feedback
Journal/Blog - The Marquee - Movie Links - News and Events - Now Showing - Reader Reviews
Customize - VIP Service
Journal/Blog - The Marquee - Movie Links - News and Events - Now Showing - Reader Reviews
Customize - VIP Service
|The BigScreen Cinema Guide is a service of SVJ Designs LLC. All graphics, layout, and structure of this service (unless otherwise specified) are Copyright © 1995-2020, SVJ Designs. The BigScreen Cinema Guide is a trademark of SVJ Designs. All rights reserved.
'ACADEMY AWARDS®' and 'OSCAR®' are the registered trademarks and service marks of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.


text:
Well now you can simply by using Niggle It - a secure online tool that allows you to keep track of all your warranties, assets, contracts and time-critical agreements.
We put the right documents in your hand at the right time so you can stay in control of your increasing load of deadlines. And it's simple to use.
Our friends who have had Niggle Fever are now wondering what they would do without it!
Start Niggling Now (it's free!)
Key Features
Cheap & Easy
Find out more about Niggle It's secure online asset, warranty and contract tracking service.


text:
Baby corn and potato curry in smoky Mexican chipotle chilli and dark chocolate
My parents were on face time whilst I was making this curry today. My little sweetie had been running around in his spider costume, "I'm not Aarav, I'm spider Aarav" and insisting that I play with him instead of cooking, not dad…mumma. He knows. "It's nice to see Rakesh at home and in the kitchen too, wow" commented my dad. They know it doesn't happen all the time. So my husband turned the phone towards me, showing that I was grating chocolate into the curry, "Look at what your daughter is doing". My mum let out her idiosyncratic youthful and quiet giggle and my dad thought it was really interesting. Interesting, rather than any ode to the ridiculous butchering of a simple curry.
I did live my childhood without limits in my mind. I'm sure that if I had told my folks I wanted to become a Bollywood actress they would have said something about me having to learn how to dance rather than see my 5ft1 inch frame as an eliminating clause. I remember wanting to write a novel and my husband (before our marriage when I was a teen) asked me why not. There was no reason not. I know kids are supposed to do things when there's a time but I saw that my little one wanted to talk and he started naming animals and objects at ten months, why not?
So then when did the limits come in (to my mind)? Was it when they gave me predicted grades at school and deliberately undercooked them to 'motivate' me? Apparently they never predicted straight A's as that would have made me complacent, apparently. Or was it when my manager spent an hour and half telling me the things that I needed to do better or wasn't very good at because there was no point in telling me about the 95% (as he stated) of stuff I did right? Or was it when the health visitors and nursery nurses told me that my child would probably never be an eater. Or was it the people who told me that mainly celebrity folk get published in the magazines. When did it become about what is 'realistic'. What can we afford? Even that's a limit isn't it? Where is a realistic place to find a new house?
I say, be the child that lets the mind float into wants and ventures. Like this curry.
Have you seen how dark and deep that colour is? The chipotle and red pepper give smoky accents to the vegetarian curry and then you feel this deep, lightly bitter sweetness that's quite embracing. You will smell whole spices and they add warmth, but don't overpower the recipe. It is not a quiet curry that hides in the middle of a week of 'I just ate'. No. This curry is for those times when you want to carry forwards.
350g baby corn, slit into quarter lengths
450g potatoes, peeled and cubed
4 cloves of garlic, roasted in their skins
2 cloves
1 small stick of cinnamon
1 tsp. cumin seeds
Salt to taste
45g chipotle chilli paste
20g dark chocolate
500ml water
3 red peppers, roasted
1 tsp. coriander powder
1 tsp. cumin powder
1 tsp. amchur powder or a squeeze of lemon juice
One onion, thinly sliced
¼ tsp. turmeric
4-5 curry leaves
2 tbsp. cooking oil
- Blitz the (skinned) garlic and red peppers to a puree and leave it to a side
- Heat the oil in a pan and add the cumin seeds, cloves, cinnamon and turmeric and curry leaves and allow the seeds to sizzle before introducing the onion and salt. Sauté the onion until it has softened before mixing in the baby corn and the potatoes.
- Sprinkle in the cumin powder, coriander powder and the amchur powder. Mix it all well and then add the water and roasted red pepper mix and bring the curry to a simmer.
- Stir in the chipotle chilli paste and then grate in the dark chocolate.
- Cover the curry and simmer it until the potatoes are cooked.
- Serve with rice or better, buttery chappati.


text:
City of Santa CruzHome Menu
City Calendar
Santa Cruz Community Farmers' Market
- Date: 07/15/2020 1:00 PM - 6:00 PM
- Location: Cedar and Lincoln Streets
Santa Cruz, California 95060
For over 30 years, the Santa Cruz Community Farmers' Market (SCCFM) has been committed to your health and to the health of the local community!
The market showcases the best in regional organic produce, pasture-raised meats, eggs and dairy, sustainable-harvested seafood and artisan goods.
The focus is to provide you with direct access to the best selection of regional products while supporting responsible and ecological farming practices.
Purchasing your food through the area's farmers' markets ensures that you are getting the freshest, healthiest and tastiest foods while supporting local jobs, increasing local spending and promoting the region's strong farming tradition.
Rain or Shine!
For further information, please visit www.santacruzfarmersmarket.org


text:
I was a guest on the show "Where We Live" on WNPR radio in Connecticut this week. The theme was "Suburban Corporate Wasteland" – the increasing numbers of white elephant office campuses in suburbs. Apparently Connecticut has several of these and some buildings are actually being demolished because there's no demand for them.
The entire program is worth a listen, particularly if you are someone trying to figure out how to redevelop one of these things. Several local officials join to talk about efforts to do that in their towns. If you want to just hear Yours Truly, I'm on for about 10 minutes starting at 38:30. Follow this link to listen to the show.
There are a number of challenges converging to put pressure on suburban office campuses in some places:
1. Decentralization has run its course. There was a massive wave of suburbanization in the post-War era that has finished. That's not to say things are going to be re-centralizing. Rather, the massive move from the core to the periphery is largely complete. The development pattern of the United States will continue to be decentralized, but it will largely be driven by organic growth rather than relocations. I think something similar happened with driving. The factors driving VMT growth above the rate of inflation – more cars per household, women entering the workforce, and such – are pretty much played out in terms of driving huge additional travel miles.
2. Corporate M&A and industry restructurings have dampened demand in some areas. In Connecticut specifically, a number of the complexes in question were from pharmaceutical and insurance companies. There has been a lot of consolidation in the pharma industry, for example. And with a challenging environment for new drug development, pharma companies are now really focusing on cost cutting and reducing overhead, not building massive new office parks.
3. The nature of work is changing. There was a popular trend for a while towards massive suburban office HQ campuses. For example, Sears moved from its namesake tower in downtown Chicago to a big campus in Hoffman Estates. These campuses had tons of free parking and lots of onsite amenities like gyms, dry cleaners, cafeterias, day care, etc. They also offered an idyllic, almost pastoral setting in some respects. Workers could spend their days cocooned inside the campus. Today's firms are less vertical integrated and more networked. They are heavily globalized and collaborative. They've also figured out that people who don't get out and engage with the world around them end up cut off from information flows, leaving them a step behind. Workers are also demanding more flexible working conditions. And of course there's cost cutting pressures. This leads to things like hoteling, co-working, and telecommuting – no massive suburban office park needed.
4. In select industries and cities, there has been a resurgence in the fortunes of downtown offices. This has particularly been the case in high tech. Google's second largest office is in Manhattan. Salesforce.com's Exact Target unit employs a thousand people in downtown Indianapolis. Amazon is building a large urban campus is Seattle. Many companies in Chicago have relocated downtown from the suburbs. I've probably seen more announcement of these types of moves in Chicago than anywhere else. I'd caution that in most downtowns the trends in private sector employment have remained negative. But in select locales and industries, things have been looking up. In industries where there's a need for proximity to high end business services or where there are unique clustering or labor force issues, downtowns will retain an appeal.
Put it all together and it's clear office space demand is weaker than it used to be. Joel Kotkin recently surveyed the same trends and suggests that the US may have hit "peak office". The idea is not that office space will actually decline, rather that it won't be growing at the same rates as in the past. This will affect both urban and suburban markets.
It's easy to see how these trends combined to pound a place like Connecticut. It's next to NYC, the premier central business district zone in America. But it is also far enough to make commuting to most of it a pain (even the express train to Stamford takes about an hour). And it's an expensive and business hostile environment to boot. Large scale employers who want a suburban footprint can find many better places.
We are in fact seeing this happen in finance. Goldman Sachs is booming in Manhattan, but has what I believe is their second largest US office in Salt Lake City, presumably housing back office functions. Deutsche Bank is building a big facility in Jacksonville. JP Morgan Chase has a huge presence in Columbus, Ohio, where its former Bank One unit was based. A place like Connecticut is the odd man out. Suburban Chicago is probably set to be another loser. But in smaller cities the suburbs will do much better.
Also, don't be too quick to write the eulogy for the suburban office campus, even in the tech industry. A recent article in Der Spiegel featured Silicon Valley's new "monuments to digital domination" – including Apple's $5 billion Norman Foster designed campus, Frank Gehry's campus for Facebook, and others for Google, NVidia, and Samsung. In Houston, Exxon Mobil is putting the finishing touches on a three million square foot campus that will employ 10,000 people. But unlike Google moving 2,500 people to downtown Chicago, projects like that don't make national headlines.
I don't think there will be a massive back to downtown wave, and the suburban office park is not dead. But there are headwinds facing suburban office space, particularly in expensive, mature markets.
Aaron M. Renn is an independent writer on urban affairs and the founder of Telestrian, a data analysis and mapping tool. He writes at The Urbanophile, where this piece originally appeared.


text:
FARMINGTON — The state Department of Environmental Services reports after a review of residents' water wells in the area of the former Collins and Aikman site off Davidson Drive, no contaminants have been found. The site has been approved to be added to the Superfund list by the Board of Selectmen and the state will approach the new governor for a letter of approval in early January.
Selectmen have been discussing the Superfund designation process since June and have been working with the state DES and the federal Environmental Protection Agency on scheduling cleanup of the site at 52 Davidson Drive for April 2013. The former property, operated by Collins and Aikman, housed automotive plant operations decades ago. The N.H. Custodial Trust is now charged with maintenance of the property, but DES was brought in for support when they revealed there did not have enough funds to properly care for it.
At an Aug. 13 meeting, selectmen officially approved sending a resolution to soon-to-be governor Maggie Hassan, requesting the property be deemed a Superfund site and placed on the National Priorities List.
E. Molly Stark of the DES Hazardous Waste Remediation Bureau said Gov.-elect Hassan will be contacted in early January 2013, after she settles into her new office.
Stark predicted around that time, the trust may reach a sales agreement with George Sacco, a metal recycler from Massachusetts who approached the town Planning Board recently to discuss expanding his business to Farmington. In purchasing a 10-acre subdivided lot from the approximate 100-acre Collins and Aikman site, Sacco said he would agree to lease existing maintenance equipment to the Custodial Trust for continual upkeep for the property.
According to DES, contamination extends from the former Collins and Aikman plant site and under Route 11, to properties across the road which are currently undeveloped. The contamination, known as "chlorinated solvents," has gone below the surface, deep into the earth's bedrock, and led to a town aquifer being shut down years ago.
Stark said since meeting with town residents over the summer at a public hearing to discuss the matter further, she personally agreed to knock on locals' doors and test their water wells for any existing contamination. Now she says her testing process is complete and she is confident there is no contamination in the nearby water supply, noting the plume hasn't grown since the 1960s.
"The dissolved concentrations migrate down with the groundwater direction so it's sort of like … a conveyor belt that picks up material from a source and it downgrades a certain amount so you don't detect it anymore," she explained. "With so many gallons of groundwater, it's diluted away. When you look at the size of the plume, the conveyor belt, that hasn't increased over time, but we wanted to be sure. We just wanted to be careful and be sure and from what I saw, there's nothing to be concerned about in terms of residential wells."
According to the DES website, the Superfund program serves to address contamination at sites where hazardous substances were abandoned, accidentally spilled, or illegally dumped, and pose current or future threats to human health or the environment. In New Hampshire, the Superfund program is currently involved in the cleanup of 20 sites where the DES provides technical guidance and regulatory oversight to the process, with an additional one in process.
DES: No contaminants found in residential wells near former Collins and Aikman site in Farmington
FARMINGTON — The state Department of Environmental Services reports after a review of residents' water wells in the area of the former Collins and Aikman site off Davidson Drive, no contaminants have been found. The site has been approved to be added to the Superfund list by the Board of Selectmen and the state will approach the new governor for a letter of approval in early January.


text:
Rodriguez loses battle with Green Monster
Homer, diving catch overshadowed by inability to corral balls off wall
BOSTON -- Before Friday's game, when he was still a little surprised to be in the starting lineup, Sean Rodriguez stood in the visiting dugout at Fenway Park and talked about the hardest part of playing left field in front of the Green Monster.
He'd played there before, and he said he was comfortable doing so in the American League Division Series opener. But the biggest challenge, he said, would be balls that ricochet off the wall and back into the outfield grass.
So, of course, Rodriguez had to deal with plenty of them in the Rays' 12-2 loss to the Red Sox on Friday in Game 1.
"It's called a monster for a reason, right?" Rodriguez said afterward.
The course of Rodriguez's afternoon closely followed the Rays' fate. He couldn't have started out much better, rewarding manager Joe Maddon's faith by giving the Rays a 1-0 lead in the second with a home run and bouncing back in the bottom of the inning with a diving grab in left.
But in an uncharacteristically sloppy defensive game for the Rays, Rodriguez misplayed several balls off the Green Monster. Jonny Gomes tied the game with a two-run double off the wall in the fourth inning. Will Middlebrooks and Jarrod Saltalamacchia each did the same later on, crushing balls to left that hopped away from Rodriguez.
"The wall obviously can play its way on some people," Rodriguez said. "It did to them on that ball Kelly Johnson hit in the last inning as well. They're used to it being out here every day."
Before things got ugly for the Rays, Rodriguez showed why Maddon had him batting sixth against Red Sox left-hander Jon Lester.
After Lester retired the Rays' first five hitters -- four on strikeouts -- Rodriguez worked a full count before crushing a home run, the first of his career in the postseason, into the last row of seats atop the Green Monster to give the Rays a 1-0 lead in the second inning.
Lester's pitch was right where any hitter would want it -- a 94-mph fastball in the middle of the strike zone. It was the pitch before that, however, that stirred up some controversy. Lester threw a 2-2 changeup that Jarrod Saltalamacchia appeared to catch at the bottom of the strike zone, but home-plate umpire Chris Guccione called it a ball.
Lester stared down Guccione as Rodriguez rounded the bases, and he talked to Guccione as he left the mound.
"I thought it was a pretty good pitch," Lester said. "I asked him, you know, did he have it down or did it come -- did it miss in or where he had it? And he just said it was borderline down. And he had it down, so nothing you can do after that."
Rodriguez had a similar outlook when asked about the Rays' disastrous defense Friday. The only thing they can do Saturday, he said, is make sure it doesn't happen again. And perhaps they can be thankful, in a weird way, that they made so many mistakes on Friday as opposed to later in the series.
As important as each game may be in the postseason, they have a chance to redeem themselves Saturday in Game 2 (live on TBS at 5:30 p.m. ET).
"Definitely fortunate. It's just one loss," Rodriguez said. "But again, you have to put all those little things behind us and make sure we come out and just be efficient as we have all year on defense."


text:
Universal Extendable Oven Shelf (350mm To 560mm Wide ( 320mm Depth ) Stock Number: ES655005
Will this part fit my Appliance?
This product is compatible with:
- Cookers & Hobs - With Appropriate Dimensions (Please See The Description)
Universal Extendable Oven Shelf
This shelf is one of our most popular products. It extends from 350mm to 560mm and is 320mm in depth - providing extra space in your oven. If your current shelf has been damaged, or you just want to make the most of the space inside your oven, this could be the ideal shelf.
It could be a great addition to your kitchen, helping to ensure that your oven is ready and prepared to tackle the cooking of your delicious meals!
- Universal
- Adjustable - width can be extended from 35cm to 56cm
- Depth: 32cm Approx
- Full Dimensions: 350 - 560 mm x 320 mm
- Includes clips - (attached to the ends where they extend)
Important - Please Note:
This extendable shelf is designed to fit most ovens - however, we do recommend that you measure your oven cavity prior to ordering to make sure this shelf will fit - particularly if you have a 6 or 8 hob cooker.
At times the manufacturer may update or change the design of the part supplied without prior notice. This is due to their continued improvement to quality, and may mean the part supplied is not exactly as shown in the photograph - but is the correct and current part.
26 Questions and 30 Answers
Depth and width 3 Answers
My oven is 17 inches wide and the self is 14 inches in depth so will this shelf fit pls - sorry hopeless at maths and converting etc., !!
- No problems, the shelf will extend to 22 inches wide and is 12.4 inches deep.
- Hi, width-wise no problem, as shelf adjusts between 13 3/4" - 22". Depth-wise it will be a little shallow (as I found myself) as it is only 12 1/2" deep. Hope this helps!
Samara at eSpares says...
Hi Magicdogwalk The measurements of this oven shelf in inches are: Extends from: 12 inches to 22.04 inches Depth: 12.40 inches This shelf will fit your cooker :)
would this fit a caravan oven? 2 Answers
eSparesMalindi at eSpares says...
Please check the dimensions of your oven to see if this shelf will fit your appliance. The measurements for this universal extendable oven shelf are listed above: "from 350mm to 560mm and is 315mm in depth."
- That will depend on the size of the oven. You will have to measure it and check if it lies between the narrowest and widest measurements given in the item description.
does this shelf have the screws or anything to put the shelf into the oven as my oven does'nt have any? 2 Answers
- This is just a basic extendable shelf; no other fittings are supplied. It'll fit into any grooves or rails on the side of a regular oven.
- The shelf rests on the existing ridged sides within the oven. It extends to the correct width and is stiff enough not to move once in place
How do the clips fit please 1 Answer
eSpares Staff at eSpares says...
The clips are part of the shelf and do not require fitting, it makes the slides difficult to move but they do not 'lock' the adjustment only stiffen it.
Extending oven shelf 1 Answer
Is there anything to stop the shelf decreasing in width when being taken out of the oven with pans on it.
eSpares Staff at eSpares says...
There is not a lock on the shelf but it is tight and we have had no reports of the shelf moving during use.


text:
The neverending story.
The original Everquest, released on March 16, 1999, was a tremendous moment for PC gaming in every way imaginable. It wasn't the first massively-multiplayer online role-playing game, but it was certainly the biggest. There were 100,000 trees, for crying out loud. Trees! The game was so big it managed to eclipse people's entire lives, earning it the moniker "Evercrack" and spawning support groups for Everquest victims and their loved ones, such as Everquest Widows and Online Gamers Anonymous.
With roughly 450,000 customers and revenue near one billion dollars, it didn't take long for other companies to take interest in the burgeoning MMORPG phenomenon. Sony Online Entertainment, Everquest's publisher and developer, appeared poised to crush the usurpers when Star Wars: Galaxies was announced, until that one miraculously flopped like a Hutt on a hot sidewalk, leaving a gaping hole in the MMO market. With Blizzard's World of Warcraft looming, we assumed that Everquest II would be a bid on Sony's part to pick up the pieces and re-establish its online dynasty.
But instead, Everquest II seems to have been designed with the hardcore, non-competitive role-player in mind. While this means great things for the explorers, achievers and socializers out there, the killers will feel left out in the cold (to find out where you fit in, click here) due to the fact that there is no Player versus Player combat, of any shape or form, to be found anywhere in Everquest II. You can't even duel, much less gank, grief or corpse-camp.
Still, Everquest II isn't built for newbies. The game does include a basic tutorial and a small island where first-timers can get their bearings, but nothing will prepare them for the humongous, sprawling city they'll be swallowed up by after they leave the comforts of Noob Island
Instead, the detailed plot, plethora of quests, long-winded NPCs, massive world, rare items, involved item-crafting systems, and absence of Player Killer (like me) make Everquest II one of the most inviting role-play sanctuaries known to online gaming. Only the hardest-hearted fiends will have the patience and creativity needed to screw other players, and a large percentage of the adolescent contingent will be frustrated quickly in the game's opening hours. In turn, Everquest II is not an MMORPG with something for everybody, but boy, there's a lot here.
Little has happened in the lands of Norrath since the last game. Creatures large and small still stalk the countryside, while the cities of Freeport and Qeynos bustle with commerce, adventurers, and refugees. The refugees are the product of a little cataclysm in which the moon exploded and rained fiery death all over the place, but that's hardly worth mentioning. You are one such refugee, and you're immigrating to either Qeynos (if you're good) or Freeport (if you're evil) to begin a new life as a hero-to-be.
Of course, before you get to spell-casting and sword-swinging, you must create an identity. Your name must contain only letters, the first of which must be a capital, the rest of which must be lower-case, rendering our first choice, "T3h PwNz0rZ," impractical. The races include several varieties of elves, humans, gnomes, halflings, trolls, rat people, cat people, ogres, barbarians, frog people and humans, while the sexes mildly alter NPC reactions and little else.
The character creator allows you to play with a couple major details, such as hairstyle, skin color and height, and a ton of smaller ones such as jaw width, thickness, and length. However, upon entering the game world you'll discover that the tilt and elevation of your eyebrows, which you tortured yourself over, are of no consequence and that all members of a given race look largely the same from a distance. What at first seems like a detailed character creator is in reality a somewhat dull one incognito.
After creating your character, you choose a moral disposition, which affects the tone of the city you'll wander around in as well as a few quests. However, these opposing alignments seem unnecessary given the absence of PvP. Gesturing rudely at the bad guys just isn't as thrilling as rolling one of their farming parties or harassing their noobs.
From there you'll enter a brief tutorial aboard a ship that covers the nuts and bolts of movement, speaking, buying, and fighting. Thankfully, there is an option to skip this segment if you think you know what you're doing. The ship takes you to a refuge where you're introduced to crafting, item collection and grouping.
Then it's on to the big city of your choosing. You'll be immediately led by a glowing trail to the inn, where you'll get your room and meet your landlady. She'll give you a couple pieces of furniture that you may place in your room as you see fit, and then you'll have to go complete a few delivery quests on her behalf. Until you do so, you won't be able to advance past level seven, so if you decide to drop into the sewers for a bit of monster hunting, your fun will be cut short quickly and you won't immediately understand why.
Once you figure out how to become a citizen and complete the first set of required quests, the entire city opens up to you, and you'll have no idea where to go. Most of your quests are delivery errands; you'll basically have to run all over the city talking to every citizen you meet. The NPCs have a lot to say, and if they have a quest for you they'll probably even say it out loud.
When you address an NPC, their response will pop up in a dialogue window. If you can reply, smaller dialogue boxes will also pop up. If more than one of these appears, you have a quest on your hands. Since you have to talk to NPCs to get quests and since there are a million NPCs, you'll wind up just clicking on everyone in sight and scanning for the "I'll take it" responses.
Clearly, Sony wanted to force players to become somewhat immersed in the lives and stories of the townsfolk, as evidenced by the tremendous amount of back story and actual voiced character responses. However, this system ultimately fails in this aim and winds up being a waste of time compared to the far simpler route of grabbing quests from an adventurer's guild.
At any rate, you'll pick up loads of quests as you wander through your huge city and its many zones. You can have up to fifty quests active at any one time, so to keep things somewhat organized, you have a journal that tells you where you got each quest and what you must do to complete it. The quests are further divided into the zones from which they originated. This poses a problem, though, because you actually want to know the opposite. When you're in the Forest Ruins, you don't want to know what quests you got in Southern Qeynos – you want to be able to quickly look at what quests can be completed in the Forest Ruins. Instead, you have to sit there and read through all your quests until you come to one that can be completed in your current zone.
Another problem with the quest system is that few will remember which ones they have active, which can make it difficult to get groups together for certain quests. This wouldn't be a problem if quests could be shared within a group, but alas, they cannot.
There are four basic player classes in Everquest II: mage, priest, fighter, and scout. You'll also be able to pick a profession at level 10 and a subclass at level 20. You won't be able to level up past 10 until you choose a profession, and the "profession" NPCs aren't always easy to find. On the flip-side, there are a lot of classes and jobs to choose from, so chances are you'll be able to find one that's just right for you. Keep in mind, though, that some classes may only be played by certain alignments, so don't join the good side if you want to become an assassin. Your race, however, has no bearing on what classes you may become, which is a nice change from the original.
The combat in Everquest II will be instantly familiar to anyone who has ever played an RPG. You target an enemy, attack, and click on various special moves as the battle progresses. In groups, warriors still taunt and tank, while healers buff and cure and mages nuke, dot and debuff. In a new twist, your party will occasionally be presented with a Heroic Opportunity. When this happens an icon will appear in the bottom right hand of the screen accompanied by a couple symbols. These symbols correspond with various abilities, and if your party can execute them all, it will be granted a boon.
Crafting has taken on increased significance in Everquest II as you will be able to assume a crafting profession and gain skills to aid in your work. Much like the regular classes, you may initially choose between crafts, outfitting, and scholarship and then, for example, move into armor smithing, weapon smithing, or tailoring. You'll have to venture into the world for raw materials, buy recipes, and then sit down at a work bench or mannequin to create your item.
Since Everquest II is focused more on cooperation than competition, guilds are given quests in the form of writs by Heralds. By completing more and more writs, guilds gain status within their city and renown abroad. While we would have loved to have seen some guild vs. guild wars, the guild quests are a great idea and should certainly keep dedicated guild-mates busy until their husbands, wives and children leave them.
Not that dedicated EQ II players will notice, because Everquest II's environments look great, as do its large structures. Players and NPCs are all nicely detailed and animated thanks to good motion-capture, and the game's lighting effects are excellent. While there are some very large zones that stream into one another, running around town can be a chunky process and the significant loading times will do little for your sense of otherworldly immersion. But have no doubt; Everquest II has the most impressive virtual vistas of any MMO to date.
Like its graphics, the game's sounds are a mixed bag. The authentic NPC voices are mostly done well, and the epic, orchestral scores are beautifully mastered and appropriate for their situations. Some of the sound effects, though, are a little funky. Every time you jump your character will make a weird, constipated grunt. Too bad no shops sell fiber bars.
It should also be noted that if you want to enjoy EQ II, you better have a good rig. The game comes on 9 CDs and takes up a whopping 7 GB on your hard drive. If you want to enjoy the pretty pictures, you'll need at least 512 MB RAM and a fairly new video card.
It's always tough reviewing MMORPGs since they tend to morph and change dramatically over time, but it's safe to say that Everquest II is a solid effort. It takes place in a gigantic world with loads of great content, and the seemingly endless number of small quests means that if you only have a half-hour to play, you can actually get something done. However, Everquest II isn't terribly intuitive or noob-friendly when you're just starting out, its questing system could use some real improvements, and the lack of any PvP is a bummer to the bloodthirsty savages at GR. So provided you like to role-play and have a lot of time on your hands, you should definitely give Sony's latest quest a long, hard Care Bear stare.


text:
Where to Find the Best European-Style Frankfurters in Philadelphia
A unique hot dog feature each week from hot dog connoisseur and cartoonist Hawk Krall!
Even though my hometown of Philadelphia is going through a serious hot dog renaissance, mostly of the gourmet kind, for years we were considered sort of a ho-hum hot dog town, outside of the semi-obscure legacy of Fish Cake Combos and Pepper Hash.
Every once in a while I would hear (or read) about these old German sausage shops off in the suburbs, but what exactly they made, and if they were any good, that was always vague.
Recently while preparing for an eight-course hot dog tasting at Audrey Claire's Cook in Philadelphia (that I'm working on with Keith Garabedian of Hot Diggity), I finally had an opportunity to check these places out, and while there were a couple of disappointments, overall I was amazed at the the amount of really good, traditional German and Polish natural casing dogs you can find if you venture to the outskirts of our supposedly non-hot-dog loving city.
Some of these are seriously up there with the best dogs in the country. This is why you should never, ever buy a pack of tasteless, mushy grocery store hot dogs in Philadelphia ever again.
Philadelphia: Eat These Frankfurters
Illg's Meats
Traditional German Wiener
Halteman Family Foods
Czerw's Kielbasy
Old World Polish Hot Dogs
Krakus Market
Parowki Hot Dogs
Net Cost Market
The Hot Dog Holy Grail
Veal Frankfurter
Bobak's Garlic Wiener
Long Frankfurter
Rieker's Prime Meats
Wursts and Wieners
German Wiener
White Veal Wieners
100% Veal Wieners
All products linked here have been independently selected by our editors. We may earn a commission on purchases, as described in our affiliate policy.


text:
Single Bedroom Apartment Sale in Paris, 75004
The properties shown on this website are either for sale by the owner, who has formally agreed to the presentation of the property or are presented via affiliate agencies who hold original mandates for sale. Certain properties are classed as "Off Market" and are presented on an informal basis and interested parties will need to be presented to asset holders, on their individual merits, as potential purchasers. The particulars and photographs shown on this website are supplied for information only and shall not be taken as a representation in any respect on the vendor or the agent, or Parisian Property Consulting or its related entities.
These details, whilst believed to be accurate are provided for guidance only and do not constitute any part of an offer or contract. Intending purchasers should not rely on them as statements of representation of fact, and must satisfy themselves by inspection or otherwise as to their accuracy.


text:
I'm really enjoying Alien Rage right now, and I guess that's kind of weird, because it was a poorly rated game. When I was chatting with a friend about it on launch, he went "ew, Giant Bomb did a Quicklook of that game, and it was horrible." But, well, much to my surprise, Alien Rage is not actually horrible. It's fun; I love rocketing through levels, shooting alien monsters in the face for killing all the other humans in the game. I'm quick. My guns feel really nice. Explosions are liberal and glorious. The game looks and sounds fantastic. The script is amusing, if trite.
Which brings me to the one and only complaint I have about this game: I die. A lot. My character is made of tissue paper. For all his speed and damage output, he seems to take less continuous fire than his enemies do, and dies almost instantly, which robs the game of its pace, even on the easiest difficulty. Sitting here, I found myself thinking "sure, you could give the player more health, but if they didn't die, where would the challenge come from?"
And then a thought struck me that I hadn't really explored in quite some time, which is the idea of challenge. People seem to love challenging games. I know I do. A cult of people has been built around games like I Wanna Be The Guy, Super Meat Boy, and other, similar games. We value difficulty.
It makes sense, of course: when there's no effort involved, you're not engaged. Dark Souls works by requiring you, the player, to be wholly engrossed in the experience if you wish to survive. Thief is at its best when you overcome the biggest challenges.
But death seems to be the primary way we determine difficulty. I think back to Bulletstorm, a game about getting as many points as possible. Here, the goal wasn't to not die, it was to be as varied and interesting as possible. Bulletstorm was fun when you killed people inventively. It wasn't fun when you just pointed and clicked on people until they died. A lot of people, however, said "it's easy!" Because all that mattered to them was whether or not they died.
And you know what? Dying's easy. Dying's cheap. Dying happens. Your mind starts degenerating and then you're lying in bed moaning in pain and begging for people to ease your suffering and then you fall into a coma and you don't wake up. You get hit by a drunk driver and your skull caves in and everything that was you gets snuffed out in an instant. Living happens too: no matter how bad life is, I can roll out of bed in the morning. Even when they told me parts of my body was failing, I still got out of bed and I still went to their appointments. I can go to school. I can cook food for my sibling. I can keep my appointments. I can function. I can live.
That stuff's easy.
It's living well that's hard. It's finding a good job with a healthy environment that means you don't have to take scissors to your clothes to make them look presentable, or worry about putting food on the table. It's having a good schedule that means you're able to get proper sleep. It's having good people around you that means you've got the proper support group. What's hard is standing up in front of a group of people and fighting your way through crippling social anxiety. What's hard is finding people who will respect your physical limits and treat you right. What's hard is being there for the people you love when you just fight to make it through the day. What's hard is discovering that someone you love, with the same illness you have, is beginning to show signs of dementia. Even harder is getting her to the hospital when she starts acting up, and being told that she'll hate you for it. Harder still is listening to her cries in the hospital, clashing against the melancholic drone of machinery. Hardest of all is telling her goodbye before they shut the lid on her casket.
Difficulty doesn't need to be tied to a fail state. They can be tied to emotions. And fail states? They'd work better if they required you to try something new, rather than simply start over. We humans don't get that luxury.
So, y'know, let's rethink difficulty. I think we do life an injustice when the only thing that matters to us is whether we live or die. I think we should want more than that, do more than that. We should have goals, wants, needs, disappointments, failures, opportunities to do better. Sure, I can get up in the morning, but it's a different thing entirely to return to school years later and end up on the Honor Roll, then transfer to the next school and nail a 4.0 right out of the gate. Sure, I can say "I have social anxiety disorder as a result of my illness" and stick with that, or I can force myself past it and start talking and making new friends and doing my best to function and gaining valuable experience.
I can go through hardship without dying.
So I think we need to rethink what makes games hard. In Thief, getting caught was what made the game hard. In Defense Technica, it was creating the best, most damage-dealing path I could. In Tropico, it's having the best tourism industry despite frequent earthquakes, or maybe trying to farm in the shadow of an active volcano that sets your crops on fire. In Hitman, it's killing someone without even touching him.
Living life well is hard.
So maybe our digital entertainment could be a little less binary.
I'm Doc. You can find me on Twitter, Tumblr, or the DocTalk tag. Games can be better than they are. Don't forget that.


text:
One of the NASA brains behind the project that became OpenStack is taking the wraps off a start-up that promises an enterprise-grade cloud using open source.
Josh McKenty today unveiled Piston Cloud Computing, a start-up that fuses Google-class algorithms with enterprise security and compliance policies to deliver what McKenty is calling a "cloud operating system" founded on the basic OpenStack code he helped create.
McKenty will also unveil pentOS: software that installs OpenStack on Hardened Linux From Scratch and has been hardened using a computing algorithm called Paxos. Paxos is favoured by Google in BigTable and used by Ceph, the petabyte-scale distributed network and storage file system for Linux.
Paxos will let OpenStack customers establish a type of master-slave relationship between the servers and storage devices floating their clouds that is called "master election", and which McKenty reckons even his G-men at NASA didn't get the opportunity to use on Nebula.
Nebula was the cloud computing platform released as part of the OpenStack project in July 2010 by NASA and Rackspace; McKenty was technical lead and cloud architect for Nebula.
Now Piston Cloud chief executive and co-founder, McKenty has been joined by Christopher MacGown as co-founder and chief technology officer. MacGown was the former technical lead for Slicehost, bought by Rackspace in 2008. Piston Cloud has 15 employees and $4.5m in series A funding.
According to McKenty, he didn't get to implement master election while working on Nebula because the NASA team had lacked the money.
"Master election is more sophisticated than what we were doing at NASA," McKenty told The Reg. "We were budget constrained, but had more money than what medium enterprises are willing to spend,"
Master-election is helpful in the kinds of networks and datacentres typically running public and private clouds because it helps ensure consistent results are delivered when a set of commodity systems are working together in an elastic, clustered pattern.
Paxos delivers results when the processors or servers stop. It makes a number of trade-offs in its calculations for the components to make sure consistent results are delivered and the application keeps running.
At NASA, McKenty relied on a high-availability node instead of using master-election, with two or three servers built for one task to handle scientific work. It worked because the computing loads and levels of uptime were not as intense as you might get in business, he said.
The kinds of customers McKenty is targeting with Piston Cloud, however, will have bigger and more demanding network loads than those at NASA and won't have the time or knowledge to build dedicated nodes. There's an expectation that customers won't have the kinds of networking experience that others using OpenStack – telcos such as NTT and Korea Telecom – will have in building carrier-grade networks.
McKenty is also adding to a set of common APIs to pentOS which will enable regulators to audit a company's hardware and software – part of a process to ensure they comply with government regulations such as the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, The Federal Information Security Management Act, and Sarbanes–Oxley Act. pentOS implements CloudAudit from the Cloud Security Alliance for common interface and namespace for audit, assertion, assessment, and assurance of public and private clouds.
pentOS has been certified to work on hardware from Arista Networks hardware, with plans to support Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks "later". McKenty claims pentOS will let you install a secure and scalable OpenStack cloud running on HLFS within minutes from a USB. pentOS will released as a developer preview on 3 October with general availability planned for 29 November. Future roadmap plans include new features in charge-back and billing and the improvement of management tools, McKenty said. ®


text:
- Equipe pro
- Communauté MHR
- Chronique
Le 13 mai 2013
Once again Montpellier came up short in their ¼ final play-offs against Castres on Saturday afternoon. The third time in 3 years these two sides have been matched together and for the second season on the trot Castres came out worthy winners. The match was completely one sided with Castres doing their homework well, making sure that the Montpellierrean attack was never in top gear and at every break down the home side were first to the ball and often stole throughout the match. For reasons hard to understand Montpellier were never really present, was it the occasion, or was nerves, who knows but they never got out of the starting blocks and were constantly on the back foot. Only Benoit Paillaugue shone with his boot passing 4 penalties, others worth mentioning were, Combezou, Bias, and again the young Sicart at fullback all played their hearts out, but that was never going to be enough. Castres were mentally far stronger, quicker to the break downs and their aggression was so evident that Montpellier had little to offer in their feeble and indiscipline resistance. They also had down their homework on Mamuka Gorgodze, who was subject to maximum attention knowing full well that if he snapped a yellow card was never far away. Mister Poite the referee for the match is know for dealing with indiscipline, this seemed to have been ignored by Montpellier as they faulted in abundance just as he was warming up with penalties galore against Montpellier out came the Yellow card and Mamuka was sent marching to the cooler for 10 mins, at this level no one can afford to play with only 14 players on the park. Minutes later Classens took off from the base of a 5mts scrum and barged over, no one was going to stop him from that distance. The break was made and even when Montpellier had 15 on the park they could make no inroads into the Castres 22. The match was never going to be an all running affair there was to much at stake, Castres knew that and closed down Montpellier attack with comparative ease, gaining turn over ball on countless occasions, and in the end they came out easy winners, the score at the final whistle Castres 25 Montpellier 12.
This winds up the season for Montpellier and holidays are very close, a large number of players will be leaving the club for pastures new, and we wish them the very best with their new clubs. The players who are staying may have to look long in the mirror, yes H Cup qualification has been achieved but that home tie ¼ final place was not, more points were gained than last season and the same 5th place in the Top 14, is this enough to satisfy the President that remains to be seen, expectations were very high this season and they have not been fulfilled, whether the influx of class players arriving for next season will make the difference that is needed to achieve and advance we will have to wait and see.
Montpellier have become a force in the today's Top 14 but they are still not in that elite Top 4 which is the clubs desire, efforts will have to be made on all fronts if the podium is to be to be part of Montpellier's future, but before that is ensured, Discipline has to be conquered...
Steve Whittell.
A voir aussi
Equipe pro
Equipe pro
Equipe pro
Equipe pro


text: Anatomy of the thyroid and parathyroid glands. The thyroid gland lies at the base of the throat near the trachea. It is shaped like a butterfly, with the right lobe and left lobe connected by a thin piece of tissue called the isthmus. The parathyroid glands are four pea-sized organs found in the neck near the thyroid. The thyroid and parathyroid glands make hormones.


text:
Sponsored Links
Transfer your iPhone contacts between device and your computer as CSV or vCard format or export these files directly to other address books programs, like Google Contacts, Yahoo Address Book and etc, backup contacts into local machine and check out in the program anytime, restore all your contacts to iPhone from the backup file, Xilisoft iPhone Contacts Backup will always be your ideal backup and management tool for iPhone contacts information!Features:
1.Backup contact information to local machine and check out in the program anytime without connecting to the device.
2.Not afraid of phone breakdown or contacts data corruption, Xilisoft iPhone Contacts Backup can bring all your contacts data back by restoration function.
3.Export contacts to computer in format of CSV or vCard file for backup or check out on your computer.
4.Import contacts from CSV or vCard files to your iPhone to renew your contacts.
5.Export contacts data in CSV/vCard format directly to other address books like Google Contacts, Yahoo Address Outlook, Windows Address Books and etc to enrich your contacts collection.
6.You are free to delete any contact information item and get sync on your iPhone immediately.
7.Sort your contacts list by different standards like Last Name or Mobile Phone Number or other categories.
8.Search tool is available to facilitate you search any contact by name, phone number or other information.
9.Display contacts detailed information in the pattern same with iPhone\\\\\\\\\\'s to make you feel more familiar and convenient to check the information.
10.English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese interface languages are optional.


text:
Beat the Streak Report: Friday, June 27
James Loney, 1B, Dodgers
5-for-11 vs. LAA LHP J. Saunders
.383 June AVG, .331 home AVG in '08
Curtis Granderson, OF, Tigers
.411 AVG during 14-game hit streak
4 multi-hit efforts in last 6 G
Derek Jeter, SS, Yankees
8-for-21 (.381 AVG) career vs. NYM LHP Johan Santana
Michael Young, SS, Rangers
20-for-54 (.370 AVG) career vs. PHI LHP Jamie Moyer
Top 5 current leaders
1. spooky93, 41 games
2. tnelson003, 28 games
2. dalmeetz048, 23 games
4. junk4cows, 23 games
5. pacioccoj, 23 games
5. rookiewade3, 23 games
Season leader: spooky93, 41 games
Yesterday's results
Spooky93 continued his charge toward BTS immortality, riding a 3-for-3 day from the sizzling Lance Berkman to push his streak to 41 games.
Berkman also came though for several other fans with an eye on the top prize, as he was the most popular pick of the day at 8.4 percent.
Unfortunately, many other top picks were not able to reward the faith shown in them by fans. Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter wound up with no official at-bats in a postponed game, which did not affect any streaks, but Derrek Lee, Carl Crawford and Aramis Ramirez all went hitless to dash the hopes of many a BTS participant.
Yesterday's Top 5 most selected players
1. Lance Berkman (HOU): 8.4%, 3-for-3
2. Alex Rodriguez (NYY): 7.1%, 0-for-0
3. Derrek Lee (CHC): 6.2%, 0-for-3
4. Carl Crawford (TB): 5.6%, 0-for-5
5. Derek Jeter (NYY): 4.7%, 0-for-0
4 Comments
My 3 picks. I had to narrow to one.
J.D. Drew
Nick Markakis
Ian Kinsler
Went with Drew.
I thought about Brian Roberts too like Spooky93 but Odalis has been pitching well before the DL trip so I wasn't sure. And with Baltimore, it came down to Roberts v. Markakis. Just went with latter but it didn't matter as I decided to go with Drew.
I think the more important issue to address outside of the "No Pick" is why some of the daily entries don't get posted in time?
There was a day earlier this week when picks locked at 1230 PM and yet the entry wasn't posted until after 1245!
This hasn't been the 1st time. It has happened 2 or 3 times before and this blog has only been open a few weeks.
Finally, when will there be a blog opened for the MLB.com: Home Run Edition and MLB.com Survivor contests?
I feel like I am completely up-to-date on the happenings in the Beat the Streak world, but completely cut off from the other two.
did ya notice how many people had "No Selection" of those with the longest streaks of the season?
All i can say is this: the next time that spooky93 picks Ichiro that will be the pick that burns down the house of his hopes to win it all. I will go out on a limb and say that the man( Ichiro) who has been mostly responsible for this streak staying intact will in fact be the pick to lead to spooky93's demise. If the spookster is to be bold enough to rely on Ichiro to do it for him just one more time…..that will send the pile of logs tumbling to the ground. Ichiro will go 0 for 4 with a walk and that my friends will be the end of what could've been. How ironic that the man who helped him get so far will be he one to crush the dreams of spooky93. Remember these words my fellow readers and you will see that what I say will indeed come to fruition if indeed spooky93 pushes his luck in relying on the beast from the east to make it happen. You heard it here FIRST. So it has been said, so it has been written. So it shall be. FACT!


text:
Elgato's EyeTV 3.6.8 is Mac OS X software that provides a user interface to the various TV Tuners from Elgato and some licensees. It is bundled with TV Tuner products sold by Elgato and is offered separately as well. Its main function as a PVR is to show the Tuner's received TV programs on the computer screen. It can show live programs and also offers Time shifting. It can record programs permanently to disk, by pre-programming.
EyeTV 3.6.9 Build 7513 Multilingual | MacOSX | 240 MB
It is able to wake up a sleeping Mac automatically just before the programmed time for a recording. Recorded video can be edited, i.e. scenes can be cut out or extracted without loss of quality. For most countries it is sold in it offers an Electronic program guide covering all available channels. After a recording, the movie can be automatically re-encoded fitting specific formats such as Apple TV, iPhone, iPod, Sony PSP and others, optionally making use of Turbo.264 for faster processing. Re-encoded video does not, however, include DVB subtitles.
Watch live TV on your Mac
Turn your Mac into the coolest television in the house. Pause the TV show while you get a snack. Rewind and watch that great play again. Fast forward past the advertisements. Float the EyeTV window on top of other applications to keep an eye on your show while you work or surf the Web, and watch two TV windows Picture-in-Picture.
At your Desk or in the Living Room
Sit at your desk and navigate the resizeable window with a mouse, or go full screen and stretch out on the couch with an EyeTV or Apple Remote. EyeTV's gorgeous On Screen menu makes it easy to channel surf and move through the Program Guide and menus in the comfort of your living room.
Organise channels
EyeTV provides detailed information about each television channel. Drag and drop the ones you watch most frequently into a "favourites" list, or go a step further and organise your sports, news, movie channels and more into their own lists. Each list of channels comes complete with matching Program Guide information.
Record the show you're watching
Is the show you started watching 10 minutes ago worth saving? No problem. EyeTV can record back to the beginning of the program from the live TV buffer and won't mind a bit if you pause, rewind, and fast-forward while you watch the rest of the show.
Record upcoming shows
If you prefer to plan ahead, it's easy to create a Schedule to record upcoming shows. EyeTV will wake up or turn on your Mac automatically.
Smart Playlists
Organise your growing library of EyeTV recordings any way you like. File them by series and season, by artist, by genre - there is no limit to the number of Playlists you can create to store and find your recordings.
OS - MacOSX 10.7 or Later
Home Page -Download link:
[Misafirler Kayıt Olmadan Link Göremezler Lütfen Kayıt İçin Tıklayın ! ]
[Misafirler Kayıt Olmadan Link Göremezler Lütfen Kayıt İçin Tıklayın ! ]Links are Interchangeable - No Password - Single Extraction


text:
High Line grasses and perennials arrived onsite at 6am this morning. Friends of the High Line Deputy Director of Horticulture Melissa Fisher is working on the installation of the plants along with the High Line construction and landscape team including: SiteWorks, Kelco Landscaping, Inc., The Plant Group, planting designer Piet Oudolf, and landscape architects Field Operations.
[Grasses and perennials arrived on site at 6am this morning. Once unloaded, all plants were sorted, counted, and prepped for topside installation.]
[Plants are craned up to High Line level for unloading.]
[Equipment is brought up to High Line level for use by the plant installation team.]
[Planting designer Piet Oudolf's signature planting layout was inscribed into the soil and numbered. Sorted plants are located according to a detailed map.]
[Perennials are placed in-between reinstalled rail tracks.]
Filed under: Construction | Tagged: Construction, Piet Oudolf, planting, Section 1 | 7 Comments »


text:
Snapshots from Mexico: The Best Things I Ate and Drank in Nayarit
"We could just stay here forever," my boyfriend suggested as we sat sipping from a ballena of Pacifico, swaying in a hammock two stories up from the street in Sayulita, a sleepy Mexican surfing town. We were coming to an end of a week in Nayarit, the western Mexican state just north of Puerto Vallarta, hugged by the Pacific and veined with mountains and jungles.
I thought about his idea. We could. Sure, we had "jobs," and an apartment with some things in it in San Francisco, but what did that matter with this addictive coastline and all the fresh corn tortillas we could dream of at our disposal?
The state is rich with natural resources, and has a good-sized mining industry, a sizable agricultural presence, and a small-but-lucrative fishing industry, too. But in recent years, Nayarit has begun pumping their proximity to Puerto Vallarta, branding their lovely coastline "Riviera Nayarit," and promoting the area as a safe destination for tourists.
We ended up with a flight deal for round-trip tickets to Puerto Vallarta and no plan, other than renting a car, cruising coast, and finding some surf. We're not resort types, though there are plenty to be found in the region, particularly in Punta de Mita. That's probably inevitable, but there's also a multitude of alternative towns, filled with vacationing locals, pangas hauling in the day's catch, and open-air taco shops opening up when the sun goes down, slinging fresh tortillas and tripe.
What's New On Serious Eats
Sayulita is one such town, despite its growing popularity with American tourists. There are plenty of gringo bars to be found, but the vibe here is laid-back backpacker, not golf carts and room service, thanks in large part to its reputation as a surf destination.
North on Carretera Pacifico (Highway 200), we found ourselves a little bit in love with Chacala, a small fishing village with few restaurants and even fewer big hotels. Arriving on the tail end of a national holiday, the beach was packed with Mexican families. Here, the touristy-looking restaurant on the beach was actually the best spot for seafood in town, with camarones (shrimp) on offer a number of ways, and fresh fish grilled over a wood fire and available by the kilo.
The best food in Nayarit showcases simple technique, bold flavors, and those epically good fresh tortillas. Salas, often displayed in homestyle do-it-yourself bars, were consistently impressive. Seafood—particularly shrimp — was consistently snappy, sweet, and excellent, whether raw or cooked. Getting local recommendations helped us know which stand to hit for tacos, and which for quesadillas. And I can confidently report that the pollo asado roadside stands are absolutely as delicious as they look.
Here are some highlights from the trip, featuring bites and sips in Sayulita, Chacala, La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, and La Penita de Jaltemba. Have you eaten in Nayarit? Where do you like to go?
All products linked here have been independently selected by our editors. We may earn a commission on purchases, as described in our affiliate policy.


text:
Fast forward to June of 2007.
This was the state of our kitchen the night before I left for Chicago. I went there to live with Lynette and Roger for 7 days while Shane did a miraculously quick "base makeover" of the kitchen. In this picture, all the cabinets have been ripped off, and everything has been cleared out that could be cleared out! That's Ethan in the picture...about 6 months old at the time. (Yes, I'm a little behind on blogging this!)
I said 'base makeover'; that is to say that Shane:
- installed new electrical
- installed new plumbing
- installed new recessed lighting
- tore off the hideous teal panelling and installed new drywall
- finished said drywall (doesn't sound like much, but that one is a three day project in itself!)
- Primed all the walls and ceilings
- installed all the cabinets
- installed all new appliances, a new sink and faucet, and a garbage disposal
- installed all new counter tops
- installed new slate flooring (in the kitchen only)
Anyway, the boys and I stayed away (seriously, who on earth can live with no kitchen--with three boys 3 and under at the time--for a week?) so that we would not be in the way, and they (with the asthma problems they have) would not have any problems with all the dust and dirt that would be stirred up.
This is what we came home to:
Since the initial make-over, here is the rest of the work that Shane has done:
Installed new sliding glass doors where our double window used to be
Outside view
Now, before you go too much farther, I want to warn the squeamish (and those who haven't followed my blog for all that long)--you may want to stop here and skip a few pictures if you don't like things that slither!
One of the days that Shane was ripping off panelling was more *ahem* interesting than any of the others had been up to that point. On this particular day, Shane found a little "house guest" during demolition of the walls. His account of the story was that while he was pulling a sheet of panelling off, he heard a 'tssssss, tssssss' sound. (Similar to a rattlesnake, was it Shane? *giggle*) The rest is history. If you'd like, you can read the whole account in my original post, (complete with lots of pictures!) entitled: "There's a WHAT in my wall?"
Did I mention that that was an unbelievably interesting day!?!
Once the excitement of the snake was behind us, the demolition of the wall between our dining room and back room began! Most of the pics from here on are of the dining room; the kitchen already was semi-completed. Only the finishing touches remained for the kitchen.
Panelling and insulation gone
Studs and header coming out
All gone!
Hey Julie--remember that stuff you uncovered in your MIL's kitchen? Here was our old dining room floor (the 'white' tiles). How hideous is this? And to think....it was covering up even more hideous brown tile underneath!
This is always an exciting day for me--drywall going up!
Three coats later, the sanding can start. This is Shane sanding over our slider (and supplying the rest of my house with a covering of fine, white powder in the process)
Drywall DONE! This is also always a great day. I love those smooth, beautiful walls!
Let it be known that I possess neither the skill nor the patience for that!
However, I am mean with a roller in my hand.
Faux-finishing the dining room begins! (If you at this point are wondering how on earth we are going to do one room in two colors....just hang in there for a few more pictures!)
Finish in the dining room complete
Hanging my plate rack and plates above the sliding glass doors
Okay, I know this may be difficult to see, but we simply blended the two finishes of the two different areas together over the archway and over the slider, where the rooms came together. You can see it a bit in the pic above, too. It really turned out well and we were able to get the feel of two distinctly different areas, instead of one big room--which I love.
Working on some electrical so we could hang our new light fixture
Let there be light! Yay!
The slate tile installation begins....
This particular tile is probably the most difficult tile floor you can install. The tiles are cut from the earth (slate rock) and are each unique and very different from each other--not like installing man-made ceramic tile that comes from a factory! These are all different colors (makes for a very cool and unique finished look) and many are different sizes and thicknesses, which increases the difficulty of installation. Lynette and Roger were able to help lay some of the floor when they were down one weekend.
Cleaning and sealing the floor--this has to be done both before and after grouting on Slate tile. See the color difference on the first three rows that he has completed already?
The new, shiny floor!
Beginning to build the posts for the archway
Back to the kitchen:
Shelves are in, time to stain the trim and the door!
Installing the crown moulding on top of the cabinets.....
And now, presenting the final result: our finished kitchen!
The final touch--my favorite sign in the whole entire world....and only a little bit true.
And now, here I am, all done with this post; and I just realized that I forgot to include pictures of the finished dining room! I am not going back and adding them now, so I will just do another post another time.