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Meet Patti Whelan
Patti Whelan is the senior secretary for Disability Support Services. She provides vital, day-to-day support for the DSS program and is the first contact for her division.
"Patti is committed to bringing a high level of customer service to students, instructors and staff," says her nominator Berta Pace, division administrative assistant for Business & Computer Systems.
Whelan has worked at De Anza for 12 years, during which time she has worn many hats. She first began as a student worker at the College Information Desk, a position she reports that she received through the OTI program.
She then worked as a casual employee in several different areas, including Plant Services, Admissions and Records, the Social Science and Humanities Division Office and the Educational Diagnostic Center (EDC).
"I graduated somewhere in the middle and was then hired in EDC as a part-time, permanent receptionist and stayed for a few years," Whelan says. Her present position as the senior secretary in Disability Support Services (DSS) opened for a full-time position in 2006. With a lot of encouragement from many co-workers, she applied and got the job that she loves so much.
Pace says her skills are exemplary. "Patti actively participates in bringing about quality customer service, with willingness and enthusiasm to DSS and De Anza. Her recordkeeping abilities really help to make the program a success and she continues to work hard to keep the division documentation and daily activities organized, including student file maintenance, using required state guidelines."
Pace also says that Whelan continues to be a strong advocate for students with disabilities. "She has a calming demeanor when assisting students. In her daily duties, she assists a large population of students with varying psychological, neurological and physical disabilities with tact, patience, empathy and kindness," Pace says. "Patti's compassion for others and her innate ability to help students contributes to a feeling of safety and welcome, as many who come in have had negative experience regarding their disability."
Whelan says the students and staff in DSS make her proud to work hard to help them all. "I appreciate the fact that even if we have had a bad hair day in the DSS office, we always come back as a tight-knit supportive program," she says.
Pace says Whelan is the mainstay of the department and makes sure that it runs efficiently, and she exhibits a wonderful attitude about life. "I have had personal experience with Patti when I needed to ask assistance with mobility issues and the use of the DSS cart. She arranged for the daily transport while I needed it, treating me with courtesy and cheerfulness, which I really appreciate. These traits help maximize the Disability Student Services program at De Anza."


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Jet-setting in Style
On Thursday, September 19th, The Atlantan held the fabulous Jet-setting in Style event in celebration of the Grand Opening of Jet Linx and also in collaboration with The Atlantan's September Fashion issue.
Styled in the latest fall trends, models from Saks Fifth Avenue showcased beautiful ensembles from the hottest designers. Jim Ellis Porsche's gorgeous new cars wowed guests throughout the night. Guests enjoyed complimentary tours of eight spectacular private jets on site at Jet Linx.
Absolut Tune and Stella Artois were on hand serving their signature drinks. Delicious light bites by Sun in my Belly Catering were enjoyed by all guests, who were moving to the music of DJ Battle. Local artist Maggie Mathews live painted the scene throughout the event. Ice Sculpture Inc. kept things cool with two gorgeous sculptures. Hula dancers from Dames A Flame entertained guests, as did a live saxophonist and street drummer. Event Drapery, Monte Carlo Productions and Unique Floral Expressions created the gorgeous ambiance for the evening's event.


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July 23, 2014
Preschool and Kindergarten Readiness
With Cheryl Kemerer, M.D., pediatrician
Wednesday, August 6
7 p.m.
Fauquier Hospital Sycamore Room
Almost every parent asks the same question as their child leaves toddlerhood and enters the preschool stage of development. "Is my child ready for school?" Pediatrician Cheryl Kemerer, M.D., recognizes the difficulty that parents face, but assures, "School readiness does not depend on chronologic age or a single developmental factor. It is better defined as 'the extent to which a child exhibits behaviors, skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in school.' "
She says that while preschool offers the chance for play in a structured environment, kindergarten is more academic. It's where children begin developing the memory, organizational skills and social interaction to start the process of learning in a school setting. Success in either setting depends on developmental readiness -- emotional, social, physical and cognitive.
Helping a child prepare for the school experience starts years before the first school bell. Dr. Kemerer says, "Parents are a child's first teachers, but that doesn't mean you need to invest in workbooks or flashcards. Look for everyday ways to teach and reinforce letters, shapes, colors, numbers, etc."
One of the most important activities that parents can foster is reading. Dr. Kemerer says, "Read to them! A lot! Reading exposes a child to a large vocabulary that will enhance ease of learning to read. Encourage them to 'read pictures' to you by having them tell a story about the pictures. And take advantage of story times at local libraries – it not only reinforces a love of books, but is a great place to learn basic rules of attention and to practice interacting with other kids."
Dr. Kemerer says that limiting screen time to two hours a day leaves more time for exploration and physical play. "While providing opportunities for exploration in different settings, such as nature, zoos, museums, even grocery stores, respect and foster curiosity by answering questions and posing questions to your child to stimulate thought. And providing a variety of materials (pencils, pens, markers, paint, pipe cleaners and beads, etc.) can help develop fine motor coordination."
It's easy to think that kindergarten is all about counting and alphabets, but it's important to remember that your child will be learning vital social skills that he or she will build on all during their school-age years. As a parent, use the time leading up to kindergarten to increase your child's feelings of responsibility-- teach them to pick up clothes, hang up their coat, put toys away and share in other household chores. Dr. Kemerer says, "Whatever they can do for themselves, have them do it. Allow children to try to come up with solutions to problems on their own before jumping in to help. It will develop practical skills and give them a sense of their own competency and self-reliance."
By the time kids start kindergarten; they should have had some experience with making and playing congenially with friends. Play dates and group activities allow children to develop these important skills.
Your pediatrician can help you decide if your child is ready for the next step. Make wellness appointments and be sure to ask about any developmental concerns you may have.
School readiness starts long before the bus arrives, but as the first day of school approaches, Dr. Kemerer offers some ideas on how to manage those last few weeks before the big day:
A preschool readiness checklist
Your child is ready to start preschool if he or she:
A kindergarten readiness checklist
Your child is ready to start kindergarten if he or she:


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Triton looking good, getting better as semistate looms
LAFAYETTE — A funny thing sometimes happens to basketball teams with the approach of March.
Seniors, sensing their time is nearly up, start to pick up the intensity. That in turn helps develop younger players, who are able to make increasingly bigger contributions.
It doesn't always happens, but when it does, it can make for some great postseason runs.
Such has been the case for Triton at least, as the No. 10 Trojans first knocked off No. 8 Michigan City Marquette for their sixth straight sectional championship, then advanced through defending regional champion Fort Wayne Canterbury in a reprisal for last year's double-overtime championship loss before handing No. 4 Pioneer a convincing 53-41 loss to put Triton back on top at Regional 13 Saturday.
Triton is looking good and hoping the best is yet to come as the Trojans (19-5) travel to the Lafayette Jefferson Semistate Saturday to take on Lafayette Central Catholic (18-8) in a 4 p.m. tipoff.
"I've definitely learned a lot about our team," said Triton head coach Jason Groves. "If you would have told me we'd have been here in November, I'd have thought you were crazy, but give credit to our kids. They've changed the way they've gone about things, they've changed the way they've gone about practice and really gotten better as the season went along."
"This is a group of seniors that don't want to lose, and you can see that not just in the games, but I saw it in practice," he continued. "I don't know how to teach that where they're competing and wanting to compete so hard that they're not going to lose in practice, but I recognize it, and I recognized it towards the end of the year. It's nice to see. I really wanted to advance in the playoffs because I felt like we were really playing well and really wanting to compete."
Triton enters this Saturday's semistate riding an 11-game win streak. The last time the Trojans lost was in a Bi-County Tournament semifinal with LaVille back on Feb. 2. It was around that time that Groves started to see a change in his players.
"It was sometime after Bi-County. I can't put a finger on exactly what day it was, but we hadn't won Bi-County for the first time since we've been in the Bi-County, and that disappointed our kids," said the Triton boss. "We had lost five games to that point, which was probably the most games we'd lost up to that point in the last five or six years. I basically told them 'We can go one of two ways: You guys can keep doing what you're doing, and I'll coach you, I'll do my best, but we're not going to go very far in the postseason. Or we can learn to change things and, seniors, you can realize that this is it for you guys and start doing things the right way.' That's kind of when our seniors started to realize. And you see that sometimes, the seniors when you get towards the end of the year, they realize 'Oh man, my time's up.' I think they just recognized that towards the end of the season, and they didn't want to be done so credit them."
One senior in particular deserves much of the credit for Triton's success.
Clay Yeo is already the most decorated ballplayer in program history with single game, single season and career scoring records. In fact, he's only 29 points shy of Plymouth grad Kyle Benge's Marshall County scoring record 1,979, set in 2005. But as the supporting cast around him has developed, it's allowed the 6'6" Valparaiso recruit to find new levels to his own game.
Sophomores Skyler Reichert and Joey Corder have begun knocking down big shots, and Corder is now intermittently running the point. Senior Seth Glingle has become a bigger contributor on the offensive end, and junior Tanner Shepherd, always an offensive producer, has stepped up his defensive effort. The combination has taken some of the pressure off Yeo and allowed him to let the game come to him as teams throw anything and everything at him.
"At the beginning of the season I was definitely coming in thinking I had to do a lot, and I think I was doing it the wrong way," said Yeo. "I was trying to go one-on-one too many times. I think late in the season I've really let the offense work and I've gotten into the game by working with the sway of the offense. These younger guys, like Joey Corder being a sophomore and running the point guard position for us, that's definitely not an easy position, he's stepped up big, and everyone's just played very well the last half of the season.
"Coach always tells me to trust my teammates. You've got to when teams are running two guys at you and running different defenses like box-and-one, triangle-and-two, you've definitely got to trust guys to step up, and so far they've done a great job."
The trip to Lafayette Jefferson is nothing new for Triton's seniors, although it's been two years since their last semistate berth.
Yeo, Glingle, Drew Mosson and Bryson Mosier can all remember that 2011 run that ended at state and junior starting forward Cody Shively was also along for the ride as a freshman, but this time feels a little bit different.
"My sophomore year when we went I felt like I was there in the backseat," said Yeo, whose free throws in overtime lifted the Trojans to the championship. "I was doing good things for the team and I felt like I was probably a role player, but I had people like Griffyn (Carpenter) and those guys in that senior class, it was kind of their time. Now being a senior I feel like I'm in the driver's seat, these guys are feeding off me, and I'm the guy that has to set the tone for the start of the game and what we do the week before in practice. That's what those past guys taught me, so I'm just trying to do what they did."
"I think our roles are a lot more important this time around, definitely, because we're actually out there doing it," said Shively. "We've seen other kids do the same things that we have to do. We've seen what needs to get done, we just have to go out there and get it done."
A bigger role means more pressure, but Triton's upperclassmen say they relish the feeling.
"It's obviously different. Last time we went I hardly played at all. It was a lot of fun just being a part of the team," said Glingle. "But just knowing I'm a big part of why we're here now, it's an amazing feeling to actually be contributing this year. It's a blast."
"I feel more comfortable just because now it's in our hands," said Mosson. "We have control over what's going to happen in the game; we're not just sitting there watching the other kids do it. So that if something bad happens, we can correct our mistakes and try and build from that during the game."
Triton's last three runs to semistate have all ended at the state championship — with runner-up finishes in 2011 and 2009 and the program's lone state championship in 2008. The last two times the Trojans have met Central Catholic at this level, the match-up has been favorable to Triton, which is 2-0 in the series with wins in both the '08 and '09 campaigns.
But it's a brand new day, and the Trojans say they'll have their work cut out for them this weekend.
"I think that's insignificant. This is a totally different team for them and a totally different team for us," said Groves. "That's just something that these kids maybe remember being there at the game, but that's not going to factor in. It's a new team, a new year, and we're just going to go with that approach. I told our kids it's going to be a war, it's going to be a battle, and we've got to play excellent basketball for 32 minutes."
"We're going to have to play really hard," Mosier said. "They're really fast and they work hard. We're going to have to match that, just play really good defense against them and stop their penetration. Just work harder than them."


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October 23, 2012
Positioned to Profit: How Three Law Firms Are Riding High in Changing Tides
Positioned to Profit: How Three Law Firms Are Riding High in Changing Tides
Many managing partners, consultants and industry pundits predicted the rotten economy would force a major transformation in the way law firms do business, particularly on the fiscal and management fronts. As we head toward 2011 with the economy ever-so-slowly improving, we may be able to assess those prognostications more clearly. Are firms experiencing a major overhaul, or a sea change, in management and operations? Probably not. But maybe a new tide has come in, exemplified by a few flexible, forward-thinking firms that have showed how to ride atop the tide, rather than be submerged by it.
Here's a look at three firms that serve as guideposts in focusing on how to stay financially and organizationally strong, come what may in the economy. What's striking is not that these partnerships felt the heavy strain of the recession and revolutionized themselves—it's that they positioned themselves to seize opportunities during the downturn.
Embracing Creativity in Fees to Achieve a Win-Win
For years now, many within the profession have been ringing the death knell for the billable hour, claiming that law firms would have to restructure their fee systems because clients would demand it. Well, the billable hour is hardly dead, with the vast majority of partnerships continuing to rely on it.Yet more and more firms are devising creative alternative fee arrangements (AFAs)—and perhaps none has been more aggressive in this regard than Kansas City-based Shook, Hardy & Bacon, which has one of the nation's premier litigation defense practices.
While the 500-plus-attorney firm's use of AFAs predates the recession by almost a decade, it has increasingly utilized such structures during the past few years. So much so, in fact, that today AFAs account for one-third of Shook Hardy's revenues—that's right, one-third—or more than $300 million per year.
"It's been clear to us for some time now that clients were looking for ways for their law firms to be more creative and innovative," says the firm's chair, John Murphy. "We saw this as a real opportunity to use alternative fee arrangements as a means of aligning our interests with those of the client and to show a willingness to share the risk."
When asked if clients are increasingly requesting AFAs in the face of the tough economy, Murphy's quite definitive. "Absolutely," he says. "I would say that 100 percent of the time clients include a section in their RFPs that asks if responding law firms would consider an alternative means of billing their time. I'm not suggesting, obviously, that 100 percent of the time the clients decide to go that route, but they at least always want to talk about it."
The obvious benefit of AFAs for clients is that they can more easily, and more certainly, budget outside legal expenses; that is, it eliminates surprises that sometimes exist with the billable-hour system. And for Shook Hardy, the shift to alternative fees helps simplify billing and tighten operations, which can lead to higher levels of profit. That's especially the case with one of its major clients, Tyco International. Several years ago, the global manufacturing giant consolidated its outside counsel for its product liability litigation from some 100 law firms to one: the Kansas City partnership.
Soon after becoming Tyco's counsel, Shook Hardy implemented an AFA program in which the company pays the firm a flat fee each year, in monthly installments, to handle all of its products liability work. This is the sixth year of that arrangement—and every year the fee has decreased and the firm's profitability has increased, according to Murphy.
"It's clearly been a win-win situation," he says. "The reason is, when you're working like that you gain efficiencies. You understand the business of the client and you understand what the client's needs are moving forward. And you can use that to provide value. So that's been a real success story for both the firm and the client."
To help keep such AFA programs running smoothly, Shook Hardy has a project administrator to make sure that the legal teams and the technology that supports their work are functioning well—and that the budgets line up. "Matt [Bohnen] performs a role that's very similar to a project manager in the construction industry," Murphy says. "If we're getting paid a certain amount of money on a monthly basis or a yearly basis, he's going to let us know from a budget standpoint how we're doing against that."
Murphy expects that, in time, 50 percent of all revenues will stream into the firm on an alternative-fee basis, whether it be through flat fees or hybrid arrangements. The key to success with AFAs, he adds, is creating a trusting and open environment for lawyers to communicate to clients early, often and fully.
For advice to others in the profession, he offers this: "Coming out of this recession, clients are going to be looking even more for their law firms to be creative and innovative and for their law firms to partner with them. I think you just have to embrace that creativity and not be reluctant to change."
Standing Strong with a Culture of Debt-Free Wheeling and Dealing
As even casual observers of the legal profession know, some prominent firms have imploded and disappeared in the past few years. While there can be multiple causes for a firm's demise—among them, poor management and internal bickering—neck-deep, long-term debt is usually at the top of the list. And even for firms that are able to survive tough times, carrying debt can slow them down and hinder their ability to add talent, technology and other resources necessary to compete.
That's never been a danger for Cleveland-based Baker Hostetler, which has more than 600 lawyers and 11 offices across the nation. Its partners have perpetually had the satisfaction of operating in the black—but in times like these, that appreciation deepens and, more importantly, it allows them to expand their corner of the market while other firms are stuck in place or falling behind.
"We've been around since 1916 and we've never had long-term debt," says Steven Kestner, the firm's executive partner. "We pay for the investments we make—new markets, facilities, talent, technology—when we make them. This is just part of our culture. We've got a strong paid-in capital position and it gives us a very solid balance sheet. Of course in this economic envi-ronment, it has helped us considerably."
Considerably indeed. For starters, it allowed the firm to avoid doing what many of its competitors across the nation were forced to do in the depths of the recession: Baker did not defer any associate starting dates, withdraw offers or cut back starting salaries. "In those regards, we've kind of stayed the course," Kestner says. "And, we're in a position to continue to grow and expand because of that."
But the firm did a lot more than "stay the course" in other ways. It continued to beef up its New York office, which opened in 2001 with three lawyers, so that it now has more than 120 attorneys there. Plus, in the past year the partnership has grown its ranks firmwide by nearly 50 lawyers. And it also defied the logic many law firms employ—don't expand to new competitive markets in a recession—by opening an office in Chicago in 2009.
Kestner says it was anything but an inopportune time for branching out into the Windy City, a move the partners had discussed for years and a location that seemed to be a natural market, given Baker's Midwest roots. "From my standpoint the timing for us worked out well in Chicago because it's a great legal market, there was out-standing legal talent available, and it's also an advantageous real estate market," he points out. "It was part of our planning process and didn't require any special financial arrangements."
But geographic expansion during a downturn isn't the only way Baker has bucked conventional wisdom. It has also doubled its intellectual property practice in the past five years, a period of time when IP activity at many firms slowed or held steady.
When Kestner looks to the future, he sees no reason the firm should apply the brakes to its expansion and growth. After all, the sentiment seems to be, why let a little economic crash slow you down? Again, the key is that ledger book. "We are looking to continue to grow, even in this environment, but we do so coming from a foundation of being a well-capitalized firm," he says. And that's a healthy approach, for sure.
Successfully Shifting from "An Excess of Democracy"
Consensus certainly has value—but requiring it for every decision can tend to slow a law firm's wheels and draw partners away from billable tasks. In so many words, that's the conclusion the partners at a 31-attorney Vermont firm came to about a year or more ago. The result: The partnership of Primmer Piper Eggleston & Cramer consolidated their decision-making mechanism, shifting away from a consensus approach that involved all 19 partners on most policy matters and implementing a more centralized team, consisting of the chair and three executive committee members.
This move helped the firm gain new efficiencies and remain fiscally stable during the rocky 2010 economy. "We're poised to have a really great financial year in 2011," says Anne Cramer, who became PPE&C's chair in January and will rotate away from the role after a two-year term.
The shift effectively builds on another move that occurred when the firm first became PPE&C, after Primmer & Piper and Eggleston & Cramer, both Green Mountain State partnerships, merged in 2006. Soon after the combination, the partners hired a professional administrator, Cindy Bauer, to serve as chief operating officer and run the daily business aspects of the firm, helping the lawyers focus on bigger-picture matters. Still, they continued to set decisions only after getting input from all the partners, until it became clear they needed a change to streamline management operations more.
"When we brought the two firms together we realized that all the people involved are very collegially oriented, and so consensus management had always been, frankly, a high priority for us," Cramer says. "But at some point we understood that it was just taking up too many hours of too many attorneys' time, particularly since we opened up a New Hampshire office in 2008."
So now, if the management team is considering something as major as expanding to another market or hiring a lateral partner, the firm still wants buy-in from all the partners. But if they're hiring an associate or doing a computer upgrade, they don't. "This has definitely streamlined things," Cramer says.
There's a challenge here, of course, as there is with any such management modification. "The challenge is to change the culture and think consultant Robert Denney, who has advised PPE&C. "It's also critical to build confidence that this realignment will lead to greater efficiency and better decision making. And it already has."
Denney says centralizing management often is more effective than the all-inclusive approach, especially when it comes to managing revenues and assets. A key reason is that the team approach can falter because not all players are experienced—or adequately interested—in such matters. "It's axiomatic that in a firm of any size a very high percentage of the partners don't look at the financial and management reports, or if they do, they don't understand them," he says. Consequently, having one person or a small team committed to being in the know offers better guidance and stronger fiscal health
Another concern presents itself: The potential for ego-clashing. After all, when an organization of any sort makes such a move, it's essentially taking away a degree of control from some members. But that's a problem that PPE&C has wisely taken steps to avert.
"I'm not going to promise you that I've got people who don't feel bruised from time to time," Cramer says. "But I think we've worked hard to ensure that our experienced and talented people play different roles in governance. You don't want to lose collegiality, so you can't have people feeling disenfranchised. I think we've taken advantage of our information systems to make sure that shareholders have access to the information they need [about the workings of the firm]."The ultimate idea, of course, is that operational and decision-making streamlining gives the lawyers more time to practice their craft and bring in higher revenues—which, in turn, helps grow the firm and enhance its market share. "That's the goal and I think we're attaining it," Cramer says. "Everybody understands that we have a good sense of where we're going and what we need to get there."
About the Author
Steven T. Taylor is an award-winning freelance journalist living in Portland, OR, who writes on various subjects in the legal media.


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Whose Dog Is It? [1]
If you've taken in a lost dog, you're not alone. Many of us have done so, and then made all attempts to contact the guardian so that the dog could be returned. Sometimes the reunion takes place within hours or days, but other times it can take weeks or months. At some point, many people have abandoned hope of finding the original family and simply accept the dog into their own.
That's what Jordan Biggs did after months of searching for the guardians of a husky mix who came to her door in April 2011. Attempts to contact the people who had lost the dog she calls Bear through humane societies, animal shelters, craigslist, veterinary offices, posters, and going door to door failed. Once he had been with her for two months, she considered him to be her dog [2].
Since that time, Bear has become her service dog, having been trained to seek help if her asthma results in a loss of consciousness. They do agility together, which is one way she has invested in him in addition to providing him with veterinary care and having him microchipped and neutered.
Then, earlier this month, Sam Hanson-Fleming saw Bear, who he calls Chase, in the car in front of him, and was ecstatic that he had found the dog who had jumped his fence over a year ago, leaving him and his two young sons deeply saddened by the loss. When his dog was first lost, he posted craigslist ads and filed lost dog reports with several organizations. He wants his dog back, but Biggs refuses to give up her dog.
This is a tricky situation. Of course, there's the possibility that the dog Biggs has is not the same one that Hansom-Fleming lost, and perhaps additional medical records can clear up the issue. But if it is the same dog, whose dog is it now? Do they both have a claim to this husky mix, or does he clearly belong to one or the other of these people? Obviously, they both love the dog. However, the question, from a legal standpoint, is not who loves the dog, but who OWNS the dog. What do you think?


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Chacott for Professionals Finishing Powder, I have heard, is the best selling loose powder in Japan and is a range originally made for dancers and stage performers. Not that I am a stage performer, but I do find that my make up slides off by mid day quite often.
This powder is sweat proof, water proof, long lasting. It comes in 2 sizes and the larger size (which I bought) is gigantic at 170grams! God knows I can't finish a loose powder as it is!
Here are the shades – I chose 757 because I have been looking for a powder with no shimmer that matches my skintone (ie. so there is no white cast at ALL on my face).
757 matches me NC35 skintone well, it is NOT too dark.
So after a million years, my parcel from Hong Kong finally arrived. 170g is HUGE. I thought my Creme De La Mer powder was huge, this one is HUAGE!
I guess because this is a professional product, you get a huge tub because you're probably applying this on lots of people or reapplying it quite a lot. I was a bit worried to be honest – I didn't want anything too heavy or cakey on my skin.
I wanted matte but not too matte. Fussy I know…
BTW the large tub isn't compact at all. You will not be carrying this anywhere, unless you are emigrating. It reminds me of a pancake. There's also a cheaper, smaller 30g version.
To show once again, how huge this is, here it is next to my pride and joy, my new iPhone 4 (I know everyone has one but I waited 18 months to get mine!):
Ok so open it up and there's a plastic lid to keep things in place:
Under that is a sifter – not a proper sifter, more of a piece of paper with holes in it. It does not, as you can see, keep powder portions under control!
The powder looks mighty dark here but seriously, once it is on the skin it's not that dark.
The texture of this party is lovely; it's very soft, finely milled, sinks into the skin quickly and leaves a lovely matte finish. There's no nasty shimmer in it. This powder is PERFECT for photos – there's no ashy cast on the skin and it's nicely matte.
On the downside, I noticed that if you use too much, you can get a bit of the 'dead' effect – see MUFE's HD foundation. Both of these products are made for cameras, stage, performers – so maybe that's why over using them leaves the sort of 'flat' look…it suits the camera, not necessarily the office.
I found oil control good – better than my usual but I wouldn't say it controlled oil all day on the T-Zone. If you are oily then you will need a blot powder/sheets etc to keep shine at bay. My skin is quite dry (another point is that this powder didn't leave me looking cakey even on dry patches) so this powder is just right for it at the moment.
Pore cover is excellent – it really makes the skin smooth out.
Powder on the skin with moisturiser only, no concealer, foundation or retouching:
It looks like I'll still have this powder when I'm 64 (if I live that long) because there's so damn much of it.
Overall this is a great powder and one I will keep on using every day and also when I am doing videos and taking photos because it really suits cameras!
But I will also keep using my other powders of choice depending on my mood (ie. La Mer when I want something more shimmer, Becca for my compact powder, Laura Mercier for more glow etc.)
I bought this from eBay and paid around £20 for it including shipping.


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ASUS is really making a name for itself within the Android world of late, proving that it is not always necessary to give up specs for low prices. They have definitely usurped center stage at times, announcing and releasing products that are affordable, innovative, and just as powerful as the competition. First seen at CES, the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer has been flying off the shelves, and the Eee Pad Slider and Eee Pad MeMo should be arriving soon (probably to the same warm welcome). Though this is already an outstanding array of tablets, ASUS is not stopping there, and has unveiled two devices at Computex.
ASUS Eee Pad MeMo 3D[1][2]
We had already seen this tablet at CES, but it was simply called the Eee Pad MeMo. I'll give you one guess as to what has changed since then. Got it? That's right, the only difference is the fact that the new version will have a 3D IPS display (1280×800). If you are worried about the annoyance of wearing 3D glasses, that won't be an issue with this tablet, since it uses glasses-free 3D technology.
If a 3D display doesn't close the deal for you, ASUS has gone ahead and also added a cool bluetooth accessory for the MeMo 3D. ASUS calls it the MeMIC Bluetooth headset, and it looks a lot like an mp3 player, which is actually one of its functions — to access your music via bluetooth. The accessory's second function is quite interesting though, it actually works as a phone. When connected to the tablet, it can be used as a headset, with a microphone and speaker located where you would expect them on a good old fashioned candy bar phone. It can be assumed that it is mostly meant for services like Skype, Tango, Qik, etc., but one cannot help but wonder if carriers will support this device as a regular smartphone (Wouldn't that be neat?).
Other features are pretty much identical to what we have seen before. The MeMo 3D still has the 7-inch form factor, which can be a big advantage to many of us who can't reach the same level of comfort from a 10-inch device. If you happen to be a fan of the HTC Flyer, you may also be interested in the MeMo 3D, it has the same 7-inch form factor, as well as a stylus that can turn this tablet into your electronic notepad.
ASUS Padfone[3]
Leaked images of this device have been passed around the internet for a few days now, but we did not know that ASUS would bring official word about it so soon. The Padfone is an innovative device that brings phone and tablet together. It works something like the Motorola Atrix and its laptop dock. The ASUS Padfone comes with a tablet accessory, which has a slot in the back where one can simply dock the phone and use it as a tablet (for more details, check out Taylor's article).
ASUS is displaying a mock-up Padfone at Computex and they are projecting a launch by Christmas. Though not many details are given, having official word from the manufacturer is always good, and they rarely do it so soon after the rumors leak out.
Wrap Up
The innovative ideas that ASUS is teasing us with are great, but we do wish more details were available (processor, RAM, etc.). We know that the MeMo at CES had a Snapdragon processor, but considering ASUS went as far as upgrading to a 3D display, who knows what else may be changed.
Details on the Padfone are limited when it comes to aesthetics, as ASUS has not given word of what this neat smartphone will have packed inside. ASUS did decide to tease us with a few videos though. Check them out, along with the press release, and stay tuned for more details on all of these as ASUS is showing no signs of slowing down.Show Press Release
Chairman Jonney Shih unveils the stunning Padfone device, a 3D tablet, ultra-thin and light notebooks and netbooks, plus the world's first PC motion sensing controller and a sleek 27″ All-in-One HD desktop
Taipei, Taiwan (Computex, May 30, 2011) – ASUS Chairman Jonney Shih has unveiled the highly-anticipated Padfone along with the latest ASUS innovations, which include new UX Series notebooks, redesigned N Series notebooks with SonicMaster audio technology, the revolutionary and versatile Eee Pad Memo 3D, ultra-thin Eee PC X101 netbooks, and unique home entertainment devices such as the motion-sensing WAVI Xtion and the 27″ All-in-One high-definition ET2700XVT desktop PC. With "Break the Rules, Innovation Beyond Expectations" as the dominant theme this year, Mr. Shih has reiterated the company's strength in cutting-edge designs and superior engineering skills to help bring users the devices of their dreams.
"Breaking the rules and changing the status quo are the keys to our success, and we strive to offer customers an experience that surpasses their expectations," said Mr. Shih.
Padfone elevates consumer choice to new levels
Innovation is at the heart of ASUS design and the new Padfone reveals exciting new possibilities for mobile computing and communication. This convergent device combines a smartphone and a tablet computer into one symbiotic gadget that allows consumers to choose the screen size that best fits their activities while seamlessly sharing data and 3G internet access.
UX Series ultraportables
ASUS is noted for its exquisite design, and nowhere else is this more evident than in the new UX Series, developed in close cooperation with Intel® to ensure the best products become available to consumers. These astonishingly thin ultraportables are made possible through the use of a strong but light aluminum alloy shell with a unique 'spun' finish on polished surfaces. The artistry of the series draws inspiration from luxury timepieces, displaying sharp edges, an oversized keyboard and smartphone-like touchpad for added comfort, as well as reinforced hinges for extended longevity. Measuring a mere 17mm at its thickest point, the needle-thin UX Series nonetheless packs impressive specifications, with the latest 2nd generation Intel® Coreâ"¢ mobile processors up to the powerful i7, SATA 6Gb/s solid-state drives and the Instant On feature, which resumes the notebook in seconds.
N Series notebooks and All-in-One PC with SonicMaster
ASUS continues to innovate in PC audio. The same SonicMaster technology that ASUS first developed with Bang & Olufsen ICEpower® for the incredible NX90 can now be enjoyed on the new N Series, where stunning high-gloss designs meet the very latest mobile technology. This latest N Series, co-designed by ASUS and world renowned designer David Lewis, comes with the addition of a dedicated external subwoofer for deep bass extension that would otherwise be impossible to replicate on a notebook. Desktop PC users can also experience the same well-appointed luxury with the 27″ HD All-in-One ET2700XVT desktop PC, which offers ultra-wide 178-degree viewing angles and optional 10-point multi-touch for smooth, fully consolidated computing.
Eee Pad MeMO 3D adds depth to tablet devices
Recognizing that no two users have quite the same needs when it comes to tablets, ASUS has introduced a fourth tablet to go alongside the recently announced Eee Pad Transformer, Eee Pad Slider and Eee Slate. Powered by the latest version of the Android operating system, the Eee Pad MeMO 3D has a 7″ multi-touch screen that can also be used with the supplied stylus for note taking in portrait orientation, plus a unique glasses-free 3D display mode for entertainment on the go.
The Eee Pad MeMO 3D is designed to be an alternative take on the 10″ tablet that is fast becoming a standard size. This portrait-oriented device uses a screen that can also be used more traditionally with all Android Honeycomb applications, should users choose to do so.
Eee PC evolved
ASUS evolves the Eee PC further with new models that take netbooks to ever-greater heights. The new Eee PC X101 has been designed from the start to be the perfect ultraportable for modern mobile users, with its Intel® MeeGo operating system incorporating full support for a wide range of social networking services. Eee PC X101 Series netbooks are also offered with the Windows® 7 operating system, and models ship with both solid state and mechanical hard drive storage configurations.
Wireless home entertainment with WAVI Xtion
Drawing on its research and development foundations, ASUS has worked closely with PrimeSenseâ"¢, the leader in motion-sensing technology, in crafting the world's first and only open-source, controller-free gesture-based device for PC. WAVI Xtion offers limitless enjoyment for consumers, upscaling PC fun onto big screen TV. The technology represents total integration of multimedia, social networking and gaming. The Xtion Browser affords internet usage with hand and body movements for an interactive experience, expanding web content with larger fonts, icons and graphics for livelier navigation. The Xtion Portal acts as an app store where users can purchase new games and utilities designed for WAVI Xtion, while social networking becomes more intuitive with a controller-free interface and exciting gesture input, also using an attractive visual style. WAVI Xtion ships with a game bundle that includes MayaFitâ"¢, Beat Booster, and DanceWallâ"¢, all perfect for exercise and fun for the entire family. Better still, the Xtion Engine incorporates gesture-based controls into many existing PC games, so consumers can experience them in a completely new way.
The ASUS Padfone is a device that explores one possible convergence between two popular mobile devices – the smartphone and tablet. The Padfone solves the problem of data transfer hassles and multiple SIM cards when both a smartphone and 3G tablet are used. With the Padfone, the smartphone docks inside the tablet to give users an expanded view to suit their tasks. With the phone docked, it can recharge from the tablet's larger battery and the tablet can also make use of the smartphone's 3G internet connection. The dual interfaces for both the pad and phone ensure an enhanced user experience as the layout is automatically adjusted for all activities such as video conferencing, web browsing and emailing.
UX Series
Notebook PC users demand the very best performance in increasingly portable packages, which is exactly what the new ASUS UX Series delivers. Clad in a svelte aluminum alloy shell that has a unique 'spun' finish, the UX Series packs a number of impressive features, including 2nd generation Intel® Coreâ"¢ mobile processors, including the powerful i7, to ensure blistering performance. Up to 7-hour battery charges mean that the UX Series is always ready for action – and with the Instant On feature it resumes work in seconds.
N Series
The new ASUS N Series combines a stunning design with the very latest mobile technology and legendary SonicMaster audio, which has already made a name for the ASUS NX90. The slim, glossy black exterior denotes a premium notebook with specifications to match, including cutting-edge features such as second generation Intel® Coreâ"¢ mobile processors and USB 3.0. Developed together with Bang & Olufsen ICEpower®, ASUS SonicMaster ensures that the N Series sounds as good as it looks, with oversized internal speakers, sophisticated audio processing and a bundled dedicated subwoofer that delivers deep, rich bass that belies the notebook's compact size. This latest N Series is co-designed by ASUS and renowned designer David Lewis.
Eee Pad MeMO 3D
The ASUS Eee Pad MeMO 3D is designed to be an alternative take on the 10″ tablet that is fast becoming a standard size. This portrait-oriented device has a 7″ multi-touch screen that can be used in the usual way with Android Honeycomb applications, but there's also the added twist of stylus support, so users can opt for handwriting input and treat the MeMO 3D much like a digital notepad. Productivity is only one area where the Memo 3D scores highly, though. The bundled MeMIC Bluetooth hands-free headset makes it ideal for listening to music and making calls, while flipping the MeMO 3D into landscape turns it into a glasses-free 3D display that adds a new dimension to mobile entertainment. Consumers can enjoy movies, games and photos in 3D, all from the palm of their hand.
Eee PC X101
The ASUS Eee PC X101 is a new netbook that is designed to perfectly meet the needs of the modern mobile user who lives and works online. Just 17.6mm thick and weighing less than 950g, the Eee PC X101 can be slipped into a bag and taken anywhere, but this is no cut-down portable computer – it packs a 10.1″ screen, QWERTY keyboard and the latest Intel® Atomâ"¢ N435 processor.
Users can get online with 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, where the Eee PC X101 really comes into its own. The Intel® MeeGo operating system has full support for a wide range of social networking services and a raft of productivity tools built in, making this a netbook that's ready for use right out of the box. There's also the X101H model, which has all the same features but comes with a hybrid hard drive and choice of Window® 7 or MeeGo.
WAVI Xtion
ASUS WAVI Xtion is a sophisticated multi-component technology, and the result of extensive cooperation, innovation and development. While ASUS has been working closely with PrimeSenseâ"¢ in creating the core technology behind WAVI Xtion, the product also brings to market a host of additional pioneering highlights. Collaboration with AppSide has resulted in the creation of Xtion Portal, and ASUS has also worked with Hillcrest on the highly-interactive Xtion Browser. Bundled game DanceWallâ"¢, which gets consumers physically active as they enjoy themselves with family and friends, was developed by Softkinetic Studios.
All-in-One ET2700XVT
Featuring a 27″ HD display with ultra-wide 178-degree viewing angles, HDMI-in ports, a digital TV tuner and SonicMaster audio, the ASUS All-in-One ET2700XVT is the perfect desktop for any home or office. This is more than a mere monitor – it is a full PC at far less the space requirements of other desktops, with optional 10-point multi-touch that makes it ideal for entertainment applications.


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Foard Falls in Round 3, Hickory Advances
The Fred T. Foard Tigers' 2010 season ended Wednesday in the third round of the 3-A West playoffs. Gastonia Ashbrook tied Foard 1-1 in overtime, but it beat the Tigers 4-3 in penalty kicks to advance to the region semifinal.
Ashbrook plays at 7 p.m. Saturday at Hickory. The Red Tornadoes beat Asheville 1-0 on Wednesday to advance.
Foard ends the season 14-7-5 overall.


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The Baltimore Ravens' coaching staff might be a victim of the front office's success and its ability to draft or sign good players.
You never hear John Harbaugh mentioned as a possible NFL coach of the year. Brian Billick was never a serious candidate either, even though he had a good run in Baltimore from 1999 until 2008.
Few of the experts expected the Ravens to win the AFC North, much less play in the Super Bowl in New Orleans. A 9-7 or 8-8 record was a more realistic possibility.
But to say the Ravens were just a team of destiny would cheapen some of the things they accomplished in 2012. When you look back at the injuries, staff changes and young players, the Ravens are on a remarkable run because of the strong coaching.


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Jane Pratt
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NEW YORK - MAY 11, 2011: Jane Pratt, founding editor of Sassy and Jane magazine, poses for a portrait at SAY Media on May 11, 2011 in New York City. Pratt is launching a new website-- xoJane.com. (PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL NAGLE)
Copyright: © 2011 Michael Nagle


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although really... nothing to see here
although really... nothing to see here
To leave feedback: Click seller/buyers name, Click feedback score, Click leave feedback
Wow, no one found that interesting?
That's bad ass man
is it a double sided waterfall? change the color to red and have a good liquid cornstarch mix to it, then it will have that blood effect.
coooooooooooooooool man
Products i offer for sale:http://www.automags.org/forums/showt...RKM-3D-Designs Im building Emags now
That's impressive. You do that on your own mill or have it done?
Single piece of acrylic cnc cut on a cnc cut stand lit with leds. My boss at work has a side business making signs like this on his 3axis at home.
I'd possibly buy something like that.... Black base though.
It can be done. Im not selling them but ill gladly relay any orders.
What would be a general cost of it?thanks
whats the biggest he can do?
it would be cool to get the AO Army banner done on two 8'X4' pieces of "lexan" plexi name brand. and sonic weld then end to end and hang on the wall (or hing them together) put some leds in them and go to town for a sweet paintball man cave back drop.
not a bad way to spend 500
Pm for cost as this is paintball talk
its a photoshop brush I made
I did want it to look like the logo was shot onto pictures I make
Saw the first pic and had no idea what it was supposed to be. Saw the second pic, and it makes a lot more sense now. Pretty cool
the first pic was supposed to lead to confusion


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You know what didn't work in 2012? Risk-on/risk-off. As hard as I tried to stamp out this ridiculous bit of hedge-fund-ese, I was not able to. There are too many commentators out there, and too many traders who want to succumb to this kind of non-rigorous, intellectually lazy thinking, and it's impossible to shut them all down.
But let 2012 be a lesson to you: It was revealed that you would have underperformed these people if you'd followed them. Notice I say "underperformed," because one thing is for certain -- none of these blowhards will let you see their returns after what I bet was a fiasco year for what I can only call an "alleged" strategy.
Why did risk-on/risk-off lead you astray? Let's count the ways. First and foremost, the S&P 500 gained 13.5% last year, or 16% if you include reinvested dividends. One thing we know for sure is that those who played this on/off switch game -- this binary nonsense -- didn't get to reinvest those dividends. Again, these payouts were a hugely important component of the year's performance. Some of these trading machines may not have much of any of these dividends to show for their efforts, let alone reinvested ones, even as companies continued to deliver increasingly higher payouts and even though the tax rate on them was absurdly low. (At this point, let's just call that tax rate "low," as the increase in the new law only takes it to about half of what we were warned it could be.)
Second, the shorthand "risk/no-risk" let you down entirely as a daily allocation tactic. Let's take Europe. What was risky? Bonds? Stocks? Bonds were miraculous performers. But stocks were incredible, too. I guess if you flitted from risk-on to risk-off and back again, you sold low and bought high pretty regularly. After all, the biggest amounts of money were made from the riskiest moments -- theoretically what you were supposed to avoid if you were "playing" risk-off. The non-strategy might as well be called "buy high, sell low." Maybe if you do it enough times, it will work?
I don't think so.
Third, risk-on/risk-off totally backfired as a portfolio sector-management tool. The riskiest stocks were the least risky -- the utilities and the lower-yielding healthcare names. So you would have been hurt even by the term "risk" as a rubric. Secondarily, bonds as a "risk-off" strategy seems contradictory. Bond funds began to take it on the chin late in the year even as the environment got riskier and riskier, thanks to the fiscal cliff and its attendant spending slowdown by a more cautious U.S. consumer.
So, what's the conclusion of all of this? Simple. I ran money for 30 years before this "risk-on/risk-off" garbage came in to play. I am beginning to believe it is simply the refuge of those who refuse to do individual stock homework, or who can't think of anything to ask or say.
Let 2013 be the year when people who continue with this terminology get defrocked -- not that they were ever frocked to begin with. I know I will do my best to out them as short-term mental hooligans. Maybe this time, with the sterling performance of the risky S&P, it will become clear that the risk-on/risk-off nonsense is nothing but a travesty perpetrated by those seeking and offering sound bites that were nothing but costly diversions from true investing principles.


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Discrimination Complaint Filings and Agency Processing Times Rise Slightly
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) today released the Annual Report on the Federal Work Force for Fiscal Year (FY) 2008, which shows small increases in discrimination complaint filings against federal agencies and in average complaint processing time government-wide.
The annual report informs and advises the President and the Congress on the state of equal employment opportunity (EEO) throughout the federal government. Data in the report, available online at www.eeoc.gov, are presented both in individual agency profiles and in government-wide aggregate form.
According to the comprehensive report, 16,752 complaints alleging employment discrimination were filed against the federal government in FY 2008 – up 2.4 percent from the prior year. EEO complaints were filed against agencies on the basis of race, color, sex, national origin, religion, age, disability and reprisal. Pre-complaint counseling and alternative dispute resolution (ADR) programs addressed many employee concerns before they resulted in formal EEO complaints. Of the 38,898 instances of counseling in FY 2008, more than half did not result in a formal complaint being filed.
Agencies completed a total of 11,157 EEO complaint investigations in FY 2008 with an average processing time of 180 days, an increase of four days from FY 2007. Of the 7,538 cases closed on the merits, 2.5% resulted in findings of unlawful discrimination. In addition, the parties entered into settlements in 3,249 complaints, or 19.5% of the total complaint closures. Agencies paid out a total of over $50 million in monetary benefits to complainants (including appellate decisions).
"Federal agencies must step up their efforts to improve complaint processing time, while also focusing on quality results," said EEOC Acting Chairman Stuart J. Ishimaru. "The Commission continues to assist agencies in creating model EEO programs and implementing best practices to promote an inclusive, discrimination-free federal workplace."
The federal government is the nation's largest employer with nearly 2.7 million employees across the country and around the world in FY 2008. Over the past decade, there have been subtle changes in the composition of the federal work force, one of the most diverse in the nation. Overall, the participation rates of women, Hispanic or Latinos, and Asians have slightly increased, however, the number of people with targeted disabilities continues to decline and remains below 1% of the total work force.
The EEOC, through its LEAD Initiative (Leadership for the Employment of Americans with Disabilities), offers agencies enhanced technical assistance and guidance to increase the number of people with disabilities employed by the federal government. Further information about LEAD is available online at http://www.eeoc.gov/initiatives/lead/index.html.
The EEOC monitors federal agency compliance with equal employment opportunity laws and procedures. Further information about the EEOC is available on its web site at www.eeoc.gov.
This page was last modified on September 17, 2009.
Return to Home Page


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5 Handheld Vacuums for Mini Messes
In the course of keeping a tidy home there are those little mini messes that require quick and easy cleanup. (I'm looking at you, kitty litter and pet fur.) Often, these chores seem too small for lugging out the full size vacuum cleaner. Enter the handheld vacuum to the rescue!
• Black & Decker Pivoting Hand Vac Bagless, cordless vacuum with a pivoting nozzle and on-board flip-up brush. $59.99 at Best Buy
• Dyson DC34 Cordless Vacuum Bagless, cordless vacuum with a dual mode motor and on-board tools. $199 at Overstock
• Dirt Devil Ultra Hand Vac Corded vacuum that requires bags and has a motorized brushroll for cleaning carpets. $49.99 from Dirt Devil
• Shark Pet Perfect II Hand Vacuum Bagless, cordless vacuum that includes a crevice tool for tight spaces. $59.99 at Target
• Bissell Pet Hair Eraser Bagless, corded vacuum with two nozzles – a hard nozzle and a flexible contour nozzle. $29.99 from Bissell
• How to Shop for a Vacuum Cleaner
• The Best Vacuum Cleaners
• Dyson Wants To Vacuum Your Pets
• Robot Invasion: A New Wave of Roomba Alternatives
(Images: As credited above.)


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2013 Heisman Trophy winner Jameis Winston grounds out against New York Yankees
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TAMPA, Fla. – Heisman Trophy winner Jameis Winston has had a chance to play against the best in baseball, too.
Florida State's quarterback in the fall, Winston entered the Seminoles' exhibition game against the New York Yankees on Tuesday in the fifth inning as the left fielder. He then grounded out to second base in the sixth inning while facing minor leaguer Shane Greene.
Winston took two called strikes from Greene before getting a loud cheer when he shattered his bat on a grounder that went foul. On the next pitch, Winston hit a groundball to second.
Winston led the Florida State football team to the 2013 national championship in a 34-31 victory over Auburn on January 6.
The 6-foot-4, 230 pound sophomore has allowed one hit over four scoreless innings in three games as the Seminoles' closer this season.
He played in the field twice previously this year, getting a hit in his lone at-bat.


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Fender Mustang Floor Multi-FX Unit | NEW to the Mustang Series
The Fender Mustang Floor
12 Preset Amp Models
3 dozen+ Built-In Effects
Ableton Live Lite 8 Fender Edition included
3 dozen+ Built-In Effects
Ableton Live Lite 8 Fender Edition included
Meet Fender's First Ever Multi-FX Unit…
Being the youngest member of the Mustang Series, The Fender Mustang Floor features the same top quality materials and specifications as the highly respected Mustang Amplifiers. It's versatile and robust, with high performance pro level amp modeling. The Mustang Floor is ready to play straight out of the box, you don't need to be a pro to achieve the pro sounds you want.
"Basically a Mustang Amp, minus the power amp and speaker"
Designed for a variety of applications, the Mustang Floor features models and sounds to accommodate a wide variety of musical styles, with great multi-effects for any basic guitar amp.
Take a Look at the Official Demo
Key Features:
- 9 footswitches
- 2 solid aluminium treadle-style control pedal
- Intuitive Mustang III control panel and LCD window
- 37 effects at your feet
- 12 amp models
- Modeling preamp with low impedance speaker emulated outputs for direct runs to PA system
- 100 on board factory and user presets
- Chromatic tuner
Use it as a practice system, with stereo headphone output and auxiliary input, so you can connect your iPod or media player and jamm along!
We almost forgot to mention… the Mustang Floor is really easy to connect to your computer via USB, for high quality, low-latency audio output and interface with free Fender FUSE application.
Fender FUSE
Open up a world of possibilities, including on-screen parameter control, deep editing, additional effects, unlimited preset storage, online preset swapping with the Fender FUSE community, and free Fender artist presets.
More from Fender at Dolphin Music
More 2012 Mustang News:
- Fender Squier Mikey Way Signature Mustang Bass Guitar
- Kurt Cobain's Fender Signature Mustang Guitars
- The Gift that Rocks: Fender Mustang Mini!


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Starbucks CEO: 'We Will Do for Tea What We Did for Coffee'
Starbucks Chief Executive Howard Schultz wants to bring a Starbucks-like experience to Teavana Holdings Inc., the Atlanta-based tea company the coffee giant is buying for $620 million in cash.
"It's the second most consumed beverage in the world after water," Mr. Schultz said Wednesday in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. "We will do for tea what we did for coffee."
Starbucks's plans for Teavana, a mall-based purveyor of specialty high-end teas, include a tea bar offering customized hot and cold tea drinks, while opening more outlets in urban locations outside of malls, he said.
Mr. Schultz stressed that the company's push into tea is not a sign that its core coffee business is slowing. "We are deeply committed to opening up at least 1,000 new U.S .Starbucks stores over the next five years," he said. "There will be those that will think perhaps an acquisition like this is linked to a slowdown in our business and it's quite the opposite."


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Did you read today's front page stories & breaking news?
From the Wires
Frost & Sullivan Hosts Analyst Briefing - Turkish Healthcare Market Poised for Growth
Is Turkey the Next Big Thing in Healthcare?
By: PR Newswire
Jan. 9, 2013 05:13 AM
LONDON, Jan. 9, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- A diverse set of forces - such as government investments under health transformation programme and the consolidation of middle class and high disease burden - will help Turkey stay among top attractive countries in the healthcare market. This briefing will investigate the landscape of an industry that will grow from $21.7 billion of 2011 to $29.6 billion in 2015.
This briefing will benefit healthcare service providers, medical technologies providers, medical devices manufacturers, distributors, pharmaceutical companies and all other institutions operating in vertical sectors, by discussing emerging trends and providing forward projections for the Turkish healthcare industry.
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"The total healthcare market in Turkey is expected to grow at a CAGR of 8.2%, boosted by the healthcare transformation program that implemented hospital modernisation, increasing access to funding and private sector expansion. By 2015, Turkey's healthcare spending will reach $62.7 billion, positioning the country as a strong investment destination for healthcare", observes Healthcare Research Analyst Hilal Cura.
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The hair salon on the corner advertises, "Halloween Makeup Done Here." There are spooks and scarecrows at the doors of the houses on my block. As we approach Halloween, I am thinking of the many meanings of the festival, from trick-or-treat to the turning of the year.
This is the most magical, crazy, shivery night of the year. It is the topsy-turvy, inside-out, upside-down time, when the past lies ahead of you and the future walks behind you, breathing on your neck. It is a night when the doors between the worlds swing open, when the dead walk among the living and the living move among the dead.
The last night of October is the start of Samhain (which is pronounced "sow-in"), the great Celtic festival when the dead walk among the living, the fires are extinguished and rekindled, the god and the goddess come together in sacred union, and as the year turns from light to dark, the seeded earth prepares to give birth again. It's a time, when the Celts knew what they were doing, to watch yourself and watch comings and goings from the barrows and mounds that are peopled by ghosts and faeries. It's a time to honor the friendly dead, and the lordly ones of the Sidhe, and to propitiate the restless dead and remember to send them off and to set or re-set very clear boundaries between the living and the hungry ghosts. It's a time to look into the future, if you dare, because linear time is stopped when the hollow hills are opened.
As Celtic scholar Marie-Louise Sjoestedt wrote, "This night belongs neither to one year or the other and is, as it were, free from temporal restraint. It seems that the whole supernatural force is attracted by the seam thus left at the point where the two years join, and gathers to invade the world of men."
If you have never learned to dream or see visions or to feel the presence of the spirits who are always about – if you have never traveled beyond the gates of death or looked into the many realms of the Otherworld – this is the time when you'll see beyond the veil all the same, because the Otherworld is going to break down the walls of the little box you call a world, and its residents are coming to call on you.
It's a time for dressing up, especially if you are going out at night. You might want to put on a fright mask to scare away restless spirits before they scare you. You might want to carry a torch to light your way, and especially to guide the dead back to where they came from when the party is over. Before Europeans discovered pumpkins in America, they carried lit candles in hollowed-out niches in turnips.
All of this was so important, and such wild, sexy, shiverish fun that the church had to do something about it. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III decided to steal the old magic by making November 1 All Saints' Day, or All Hallows Day; so the night of Samhain became All Hallows' Eve, or Halloween for short. A century before, an earlier pope had borrowed the date of the old Roman festival to propitiate the dead – the Festival of the Lemures, or Lemuralia – and renamed that All Saints' Day. But since Roman paganism had been largely suppressed, the church fathers decided to grab the glamour of the Celts, among whom the old ways are forever smoldering, like fire under peat.
Few people who celebrate or suffer Halloween today seem to know much about its history. For storekeepers and the greetings card business, it's a commercial opportunity. For TV programmers, it's a cue to schedule horror movie marathons. For kids, it's time to dress up as vampires or witches and extort candy from neighbors. My preferred way to spend Halloween is to rest quietly at home, with candles lit for my dead loved ones, and a basket of apples and hazelnuts beside them, tokens of the old festival that renews the world and cleanses the relations between the living and the dead.
Text adapted from The Dreamer's Book of the Dead by Robert Moss (Destiny Books)
Divination at Halloween: By tradition, Samhain is also a time for divination, since the departed can see across time and at this turning of the year we may share in their powers – and anyway, at New Year who doesn't think about what the year ahead may hold? The 1904 postcard in the illustration above shows a young woman looking in a mirror in hopes of spotting her husband-to be, a survival of an ancient rite.
Whatever you think or feel, the universe says yes. Perhaps you have noticed this. Yes, we are talking about the law of attraction. It is indeed an ancient law, never a secret to those who live consciously. "All things which are similar and therefore connected, are drawn to each other's power," according to the medieval magus Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim. It is a rule of reality that we attract or repel different things according to the emotions, the attitudes, the feelings, the agendas that we carry.
Before you walk into a room or turn a corner, your attitude is there already. It is engaged in creating the situation you are about to encounter. Whether you are remotely conscious of this or not, you are constantly setting yourself up for what the world is going to give you. If you go about your day filled with doom and gloom, the world will give you plenty of reasons to support that attitude. You'll start looking like that cartoon character who goes about with a personal black cloud over his head that rains only on his parade. Conversely, if your attitude is bright and open to happy surprises, you may be rewarded by a bright day, even when the sky is leaden overhead, and by surprisingly happy encounters.
Through energetic magnetism, we attract or repel people, events, and even physical circumstances according to the attitudes we embody. This process begins before we speak or act because thoughts and feelings are already actions and our attitudes are out there ahead of us. This requires us to do a regular attitude check, asking, What attitude am I carrying? What am I projecting?
It is not sufficient to do this on a head level. We want to check what we are carrying in our body and our energy field. If you go around carrying a repertoire of doom and gloom, you may not say what's on your mind, but the universe will hear you and support you. Attitude adjustment requires more than reciting the kind of New Age affirmation you see in cute boxes with flowers and sunsets on Facebook. It requires deeper self-examination and self-mobilization.
What are you doing? A woman in one of my workshops told me she hears this question, put by an inner voice, many times a day. Sometimes it rattles her and saps her confidence. But she is grateful for the inner questioner that provokes her to look at herself. It's a question worth putting to yourself any day. As you do that, remember that thinking and feeling are also doing.
"The passions of the soul work magic." I borrowed that from a medieval alchemist also beloved by Jung. It conveys something fundamental about our experience of how things manifest in the world around us. High emotions, high passions generate results. When raw energy is loose, it has effects in the world. It can blow things up or bring them together. There is an art in learning to operate when your passions are riding high and to recognize that is a moment when you can make magic. Even when you are in the throes of what people would call negative emotions — rage, anger, pain, grief, even fear — if you can take the force of such emotions and choose to harness and direct them in a certain creative or healing way, you can work wonders, and you can change the world around you.
How? Because there is no impermeable barrier between mind and matter. Jung and Pauli in concert, the great psychologist and the great physicist, came around to the idea that the old medieval phrase applies:unus mundus, "one world." Psyche and physis, mind and matter, are one reality. They interweave at every level of the universe. They are not separate. As Pauli wrote, "Mind and body could be interpreted as complementary aspects of the same reality." I think this is fundamental truth, and it becomes part of fundamental life operation when you wake up to it.
The stronger our emotions, the stronger their effects on our psychic and physical environment. And the effects of our emotions may reach much further than we can initially understand. They can generate a convergence of incidents and energies, for good or bad, in ways that change everything in our lives and can affect the lives of many others.
When we think or feel strongly about another person, we will touch that person and affect his or her mind and body — even across great distances — unless that person has found a way to block that transmission. The great French novelist Honoré de Balzac wrote that "ideas are projected as a direct result of the force by which they are conceived and they strike wherever the brain sends them by a mathematical law comparable to that which directs the firing of shells from their mortars."
Bring in the creative imagination, and it is wonderful how the world can rearrange itself. I heard a beautiful little story about this from a friend in California. She had been consciously building a kind of inner sanctuary, a place of peace and joy where she could take herself anytime in her imagination. She envisioned a lovely place with healing waters, around an oak tree she knows in the natural world. In imagination, she added a swing to the tree, visualizing the ropes fastened to one of its great limbs. She pictured herself rocking happily under the spreading canopy of the oak. She used this image to help her get through a long and sleepless night when she was severely ill.
A week later, feeling much restored, she took a hike to the place of the oak. And found that someone had added a swing, exactly where she had placed it in her imagination.
Scientific experiments have shown the ability of the human mind and emotions to change physical matter: studies by Masaru Emoto have shown that human emotions can change the nature and composition of water, and the Findhorn experiments have taught us that good thoughts positively affect the growth of plants. Conversely, rage or grief can produce disturbing and sometimes terrifying effects in the physical environment.
"We are magnets in an iron globe," declared Emerson. If we are upbeat and positive, "we have keys to all doors….The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck." Conversely, "A low, hopeless spirit puts out the eyes; skepticism is slow suicide. A philosophy which sees only the worst …dispirits us; the sky shuts down before us."
Whatever our circumstances, we always have the power to choose our attitude, and that this can change everything.
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Excerpted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life ©2015 by Robert Moss.
A dream is a wake-up call. It takes us beyond what we already know. Dreams are the language of the soul, and they are experiences of the soul.
There are "big" dreams and "little" dreams, of course. In big dreams, we go traveling and we may receive visitations. We travel across time – into the future and the past – and we travel to other dimensions of reality. This is reflected in the words for "dream" that are used by indigenous people who have retained strong dreaming traditions and respect for dreamers. Among the Makiritare, a shamanic dreaming people of Venezuela, for example, the word for dream is "adekato," which means "a journey of the soul".
Most societies, across most of human history, have valued dreams and dreamers for three main reasons. First, they have looked to dreams for contact with a wiser source than the everyday mind – call that God, or Nature, or the Self with a great big Jungian S. Second, they have looked to dreams as part of our survival kit, giving us clues to possible future events we may want to avoid or enact. Third, they have known that dreaming is medicine, in several important senses. Dreams show us what is going on inside the body, often before physical symptoms present. When we do get sick, dreams are a factory of images we can use for self-healing.
In indigenous cultures, dreaming is central to diagnosis and healing. From the Otomi Indians of the state of Puebla in Mexico, we have this marvelous account of a shaman named Don Antonio who used dreams as a medical text
"When I became a shaman, I began to see how to cast out illness my dreams. It was like looking at a printed page. The shaman receives knowledge, what sorts of illness one person has, what sort another has, in his dreams…Learning how to cure from dreams is like being taught to read as a child, You ask your teacher, 'What is this or that called?' and your teacher tells you…In this way you receive knowledge about illnesses. These things are revealed to you in your dreams…As you're curing the patient your dreams tell you what the problem is and who are the enemies who caused the illness. Your dreams tell you what is needed for the cure."
Source for Don Antonio quote: James Dow, The Shaman's Touch: Otomi Indian Symbolic Healing. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1986. 51-52.
Photo: Otomi protective figure made with amate paper (bark cloth) in Sam Noble Museum, University of Oklahoma
"Shit is good!" The elderly Italian grocery store owner's eyes twinkled as she bagged tomatoes and homemade pasta. "If you crap in your dreams, it means money."
excuse myself to use the ladies room. When I finish I look in the bowl
and see not only the biggest poop I have ever seen — but also a poop of
such nature I have never seen before. I call my mother in to show
her and there it is: Within the poop is another poop that seems to
be alive — sort of growling or grunting and moving. I am not afraid, but
absolutely I don't know what to say or think — I am more or less
standing there wideeyed trying to figure out what exactly it is.
didn't like this growling poop within poop, but thankfully it is out of me and
in the bowl. I wake feeling shocked – but also released.
A common variant of the poop dream is one in which we need to go but find ourselves doing it in public. Sometimes this reflects a need for privacy in the dreamer's life. Sometimes it's more about whether and when it's okay to "let it go" in front of others. Guidance on that may come from the reactions of others inside the dream. If other people in the dream don't seem to notice or mind, that may be telling you it's okay to let it all out. Let's remember that in some cultures, going in public was normal bathroom procedure, as witness the picture of a Roman communal toilet from Ostia.
Colloquial phrases involving shit or its synonyms may also give us a clue to the meaning of a dream of this ilk. Relevant phrases that plop to mind include:
I'm pooped
The shit hit the fan
I'm in deep doodoo
Shit for brains
He/she is a real shit
That's crap
On the shitlist
Time to shit or get off the pot
(the list is endless – add your own phrases)
This dream theme has been actively discussed for as long as people have been dreaming and needing to go. Some of the best pages in the most famous dream book of the ancient world, the Oneirocritica ("Interpretation of Dreams") by Artemidorus, are devoted to ????? (the Greek word for shit, from which we derive the term "scatological"). Though I am no fan of dream dictionaries, I have a soft spot for Artemidorus, because he was always careful to note that similar dreams mean very different things according to the varied circumstances of the dreamer, and he checked on incidents that followed a particular dream.
If you see a lot of human shit in a public place, according to Artemidorus, you won't be able to accomplish anything there. In general, it doesn't bode well if someone is shitting on your head. But that depends. "I know of a man who dreamed that a rich friend was defecating over his head. That man received a fortune and was named the heir of his friend." On the other hand, a man who dreamed he was "befouled with dung by a poor acquaintance" later suffered great damage from the person who shat on him in the dream.
Defecating while in bed is not a good thing in a dream, says Artemidorus; it could mean you'll be bedridden. It could also mean that your relations with a spouse or partner are in trouble, since the bad has been defiled. On the other hand to defecate copiously while seated on a toilet means "good luck for all men", including "the alleviation of many cares and all distress. For the body is lightest after it has relieved itself." It's also a happy event when you dream you relieve yourself this way at a place in nature, on a road or in a river. Watch out, however, if you dream you are pooping in a temple, a place of commerce, or a public street.
Good stuff, though I'm not sure I'd be happy if I dreamed that anyone was pooping on my head.
Don't be shy about posting on your own dream products!


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Brief SummaryRead full entry
Bacteria are any of a very large group of single-celled microorganisms that display a wide range of metabolic types, geometric shapes and environmental habitats—and niches—of occurrence. Normally only several micrometers in length, bacteria assume the form of spheres, rods, spirals and other shapes. Bacteria are found in a very broad gamut of habitats; for example, bacterial extremophiles that thrive in such places as hot springs, arctic environments, radioactive waste, deep sea oil seeps, deep Earth crustal environments, hypersaline ponds and within other living organisms. There are approximately 50 million bacterial organisms in a single gram of typical surface soil. The worldwide bacterial biomass exceeds that of all plants and animals on Earth. However, the majority of bacteria have not yet been characterised. Read more...


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In the wake of Newtown, CT, Christopher Dorner, the theater shooting in Colorado, Columbine and a host of other terrible shooting assaults on a defenseless public, there are calls for greater legislation to ban assault weapons and proposals to arm elemetnary school teachers and even janitors with weapons.
A poll published last week in the LA Times shows a majority of Californians, even a majority of California gun owners, favor stricter gun control laws and regulations that require background checks for all gun purchases — even private weapons sales — and toughen penalties for illegal gun purchases or using an illegal weapon. The poll also calls for greater steps to keep guns away from the mentally ill.
Conservatives who adore the second amendment are crying foul that the majority wants to restrict the second amendment (all the while calling the majority vote on Prop 8 reasons for why gay couples can't marry). But could technology be the answer to making it safer for responsible gun owners to keep and use their weapons while preventing bad guys from using these weapons. Is biometrics the answer?
Technology exisits today that would use biometrics, the science that uses our body's unique identifying properties, to authenticate our identies wth our firearms so that only the authenitcated person could fire it. Biometrics for firearms would likely by a fingerprint, although a telescope attached to a rifle could be used for an iris scan. Once authenitcated, the weapon can only be fired while the authenticated user is holding it. In the case of Newtown, where the guns used were all legal firearms owned by Nancy Lanza would not be able to be fired by the shooter, her son, Adam Lanza. By requiring all guns to be equipped with biometric locks, illegal weapons would be nearly impossible to configure and enable for use.
Adding this technology to guns would add to the cost and there's still the huge backlog of exisiting weapons out there. But a biometric lock on a gun doesn't restrict anyone's second amendment right, it advances gun safety and responsible use, and it would prevent stolen guns from being used in commission of a crime. Consider the consumer products industry's response to the Tylenol tampering case from about 30 years ago; tamper-proof packaging emerged after someone poisoned bottled of Tylenol resulting in several deaths. The prescription drug industry responded to accidential overdoses of prescription drugs by children by placing a choldproof cap on the pill bottles. The added safety precautions didn't erode our freedoms and made if safer for society to trust consumer products purschased. So why not add a child protection safety feature to a weapon?
Back to the LA Times survey:
The findings often cut across demographic and political lines: Nine of ten gun owners and slightly more among non-owners favored background checks for all gun purchases. Eighty-seven percent of conservatives shared that position, along with 96% of liberals.
But even in a state that is home to some of the nation's strictest gun-control laws, voters were more closely divided over some measures now being considered by state lawmakers. Those included whether to enact a five-cent tax on every bullet or allow schools to hire armed guards. One measure was a clear loser, as two-thirds opposed arming teachers in order to protect their students.
"Everybody agrees on keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous people — criminals and the mentally ill — and on punitive measures against criminal enterprises. Those are no-brainers," said Drew Lieberman of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, a Democratic polling firm that conducted the survey with the Republican polling company American Viewpoint.
But "when you get to the some of the more … nanny-state-type proposals, you've got a little bit of a difference there."
The findings come three months after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., reignited the gun debate. President Obama set gun control measures as a priority at the start of his second term; the Senate and House have been tussling over whether the federal government should take steps to protect citizens from gun violence or to minimize restrictions on gun owners.
In California, legislators are working on a parallel track with a host of other gun control proposals. Among them are the bullet tax, heightened protections for schools and the registration, insuring and licensing of all gun owners. The state already bans assault weapons, has imposed universal background checks and limits the size of ammunition magazines for sale.
Besides the background checks, voters expressed strong support for increasing the penalties for committing a crime with a gun (87%) and increasing the punishment for illegally buying, selling or possessing a gun (85%). Republicans overwhelmingly joined Democrats in supporting both.
Having grown up in a family of hunters, I have great respect for those who respect their weapons. I can't say hunting appealed to me on three levels: hunting season is too freaking cold in Upstate New York, I hate getting up early, and there were enough drunk hunters in the woods at daybreak that just made sleeping in safer.
I inheireted ny grandfathers .22 rifle that was made in the 1930s; I promptly gave it to my brothers for two reasons — I had no interest in keeping the weapon and I knoew they'd respect and take care of it better than I evenr could. The second amendment says you have a right to own a gun. But there's nothing in the Constitution that says you have to. And for my conservative and libertarian friends who believe they need to be armed to protect themselves against a tyrannical government, I can say one thing: if the government wanted you dead, you'd be dead. Their weapons, training, resources and firepower could take out out pretty quickly. So let's surrender this notion that we need to arm outselves to protect against the government.