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Spring weather report: A little cooler than usual this weekend with a cool breeze though the sun is out, and we had guests enjoying the area on bicycles yesterday. Beach report (at 7 AM this morning): Water a granite grey-green, with small, choppy waves. Great day for a brisk walk on the beach with someone you love.
All the harbingers of Spring are present: fat red robins out on the grass, the first daffodils in the garden, buds on the forsythia just showing a hint of their brilliant yellow flowers to come. Yesterday Chris reveled in his first sunny Saturday spent in the garden, turning over the vegetable beds and starting seeds for lettuce, peppers, and both edible and ornamental sweet peas among other horticultural delights.
Many of you know that I write books in my spare time; that in addition to A Butler's Life and our cookbook, I've written two novels of psychological suspense and, most recently, one of women's fiction. Alas, if there's something harder for me to do than to find time to write, it's to market the books to a potential agent (who in turn hopefully sells the novel to a publisher). Nonfiction, such as the memoir A Butler's Life is sold by proposal and, on request, an outline and sample chapters, meaning you needn't necessarily have the book completed before you query. Fiction, on the other hand, is sold only when the book is completed, editied and polished to within an inch of its life. But you don't send that polished manuscript in unless you're invited to do so. Before that, you send a query and if the book interests the agent you're targeting, he or she may ask to see more of it.
I've been committed to trying to find a home (besides mine) for this new book, and last week I queried a particular agent. Her name was familiar, but with the research I've done on agents, after awhile names DO look familiar, and besides, I knew from my records that I had previously (unsuccessfully) pitched a book to her. A day or so later I received an email saying that she would be happy to look at a few chapters, especially as she remembered me and had such a nice experience while staying at A Butler's Manor last fall. Eeeeek, no wonder her name had sounded so familiar! Since Chris and I rarely learn what most of our guests do for a living, I'd never connected the dots. Still, whether or not it pans out, I'm still grateful that a happy association with our inn afforded this opportunity!
Wish me luck!
Quote of the day: The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches, but to reveal to him his own. --Benjamin Disraeli


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Burbank, CA July 11, 2005
�ER� WILL RUN FROM 3:00-4:00 PM EST/PST AND THE EXCLUSIVE SYNDICATION DEBUT OF �8 SIMPLE RULES&rdquo WILL DOUBLE RUN FROM 4:00-5:00 PM EST/PST
The WB has set the line-up for the launch of its new Monday through Friday afternoon programming block which will debut in January 2006 with �ER,� one of the most distinguished and successful dramas in television history, scheduled to lead off the line-up from 3:00-4:00 p.m. EST/PST. �ER,� which is licensed to The WB from Warner Bros. Domestic Cable Distribution, has never been stripped on broadcast television stations. Following �ER� at 4:00 and 4:30 p.m. will be the syndication debut of the ABC hit family comedy �8 Simple Rules,� whose 76 episodes are licensed from Buena Vista Television Distribution. These announcements were made by Garth Ancier, Chairman of The WB, Eric Frankel, President, Warner Bros. Domestic Cable Distribution and Janice Marinelli, President of Buena Vista Television.
�In �ER,� one of the most successful series in television history and with the exclusive broadcast rights to �8 Simple Rules,� a very fresh series that has never been syndicated, we believe we have put together a compelling and competitive schedule that is built to succeed in the afternoons,� said Garth Ancier, Chairman of The WB. �We're taking a bold step with this new afternoon strategy and the television community has really stepped up and embraced our new model, presenting us with wonderful choices to build our schedule.�
Both programs are licensed for the initial season only of The WB's afternoon block which runs from January 2006 through September 2006. The WB will debut a new afternoon schedule beginning in September 2006. The network previously announced that the off-network runs of �Reba,� The WB's hit Friday night comedy, at 4:00 and 4:30 p.m. beginning in September 2006. The 3:00-4:00 p.m. hour for September 2006 has not been announced yet.
�ER� will be back on the NBC Thursday night line-up this fall as it enters its 12th season as one of the most honored and successful programs in television history. A winner of the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award, the series has also earned 21 Emmy Awards and 112 nominations � the second highest nomination count in history and the most ever for a drama. In addition, the cast has won four Screen Actors Guild Awards for Outstanding Ensemble Performance in a Drama Series. �ER� was named Outstanding Drama Series at the Emmy Awards in 1996.
�ER� follows the lives of the emergency room staff and doctors of Chicago's County General Hospital, where the difference between life and death rests on split-second decisions--and the pressure, joy and guilt are often overwhelming. The heroic healers who live this life are as varied as the patients they treat.
�It's a real testament to the quality and popularity of �ER� that it can succeed in multiple dayparts,� said Frankel. �We're confident that this powerhouse series will attract a large and demographically desirable audience to The WB at 3 p.m. much the same as it has on NBC for 11 years, as well as on cable and in weekend syndication.�
�8 Simple Rules� is a family comedy that has run on ABC for the past three seasons and is currently running through the summer on Friday nights. Season one and the beginning of season two marked the return to television of one of the great comedic actors of his generation, Emmy winner John Ritter. Ritter starred as a father struggling to raise his suddenly very beautiful and popular teenage daughter (Kaley Cuoco) as well as her younger sister (Amy Davidson) and brother (Martin Spanjers). Starring as his wife in the series is another well known and accomplished comedic actress Katey Sagal. The first season of the series earned the 2003 People Choice Award for Best New Comedy Series as well as two 2003 Teen Choice Awards for Choice TV Comedy and Choice TV Breakout Actress for Kaley Cuoco and two Family Television Awards for Best Comedy and Favorite Siblings.
In seasons two and three, after the sudden and tragic death of Mr. Ritter, the series was energized by the additions of veteran comedic actors James Garner and David Spade.
��8 Simple Rules� is a natural fit for The WB's audience,� Marinelli. �The series will be a perfect compliment to the rich slate of family friendly programming that the network has to offer.�

subset: commoncrawl


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Explore Our Hotel
A modern hotel 12 minutes by train from Leeds city centre, with breakfast included, free parking and free Wi-Fi.
Holiday Inn Express® Leeds - East hotel offers easy access to the North via the M1 and M62 motorways, ten minutes' drive away. Leeds city centre is seven miles from the hotel, with fast, direct trains from nearby Woodlesford station. It takes about half an hour to drive to Leeds Bradford Airport (LBA) to catch a flight.
You can host a business meeting or a training day for up to 30 delegates in the Oulton Suite, which has natural daylight, overhead projectors, air conditioning and complimentary refreshments. If you're set for a long day, catered buffet lunches can be provided.
After a meeting, you can treat your clients to a round of golf at Oulton Hall Golf Club, a 10-minute walk away. The shops and restaurants of Leeds Trinity shopping centre and the nightlife of the Northern Quarter are a short train ride away, in the city centre. Or you can explore the country mansion and parkland at 500-year-old Temple Newsam House, five miles away.
Fill up on sausages, baked beans and scrambled eggs as part of the hotel's inclusive Express Start breakfast. Hotel staffs are happy to order takeaways or offer restaurant recommendations, or you can just unwind with a beer and enjoy live sport on TV in the bar and lounge.
- Black-out Shades
- Rollaway Bed/Cot Available
- Crib Available
- Iron/Ironing Board
- Separate Hanging Closet
- Extra Bedding Available
- Sofa Bed/Sleeper Couch
- Asthma/Allergy Sensitive Features
Bathroom/Personal Care
- Private Bathroom
- Bathroom Amenities Available
- Hair Dryer
- Separate/Walk-in Shower
- Separate Vanity Area
In-Room Features
- Coffee Maker
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- Flat-screen TV
- Work Desk with Lamp
- Desk-level Electrical Outlet
- Cable/Satellite
- Premium Channels
- Direct-dial Phone
- Two-line Phone
- Phone with Voicemail
- Separate Phone Bills for Separate Lines
- Power Converter Available
- Electrical Adapters Available
- Windows Open by Guest
Added Value
- Connecting Rooms Available
- Oversized Bath Towels
- Complimentary Coffee/Tea Supplies
- Breakfast Buffet Included
- Continental Breakfast Included
- Complimentary Coffee in Lobby
- Kids Eat Free
- Off-site Restaurant Delivery Available
Hotel Bars & Lounges
Serving soft drinks and alcoholic options throughout the day and evening.
Location: Ground Floor
Business Services
- 1 Meeting Room(s) Available
- On-Site Business Center
- Printer
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- Office supplies available
Internet Access
- Free High-Speed Internet in all Rooms
- Wireless Internet service is free for all IHG® Rewards Club members
Housekeeping & Laundry
- Daily Housekeeping
Added Value
- Wake Up Calls
- Storage Space Available
- Ice Machine
Hotel Details
Aberford Road Oulton, Woodlesford
Leeds, LS26 8EJ
United Kingdom
Check In: 3:00 PM
Check Out: 12:00 PM
Check-in Age: 18
Parking + -
- Complimentary Self Parking Available
Accessibility + -
- Public Entrance
- Guest Rooms
- Public Restrooms
Accessible Hotel Areas
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Provided by Hotel
Pet Policy + -
- Service Animals Allowed
- Guide Dogs and Service Animals are welcome on request. However, in order to ensure the comfort of our guests as well as preserve and maintain rooms to the high standard our guests expect, we are not able to accommodate pets.
Facility + -
- Smoke-Free Facility
- Number of Floors: 2
- Total Number of Rooms: 77
- Number of Non-Smoking Rooms: 77
- Number of Accessible Rooms: 4
- Connecting Rooms Available
- Current Renovation: 22-March-2019 To 29-March-2019
- Breakfast Lounge & Reception area refurbishment.
- Public Spaces Renovated in: 2019
- Guest Rooms Renovated in: 2010
Languages + -
Languages Spoken by Staff
- English
- French
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Credit Cards + -
- American Express
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- Diners Club
- Carte Blanche
- Discover
- Business Advantage


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THANK YOU all for your support! We are overwhelmed by this project's success. As seen on io9, Csicon, and other awesome places!
We have a NEW GOAL! Check it out!
Our Big Idea is a simple one, but we think it's pretty great. So do some beyond great scifi authors.
We love books. A lot. And we love sci-fi books, new and old. But mostly old.
We've seen too many sci-fi books that are out of print, out of circulation, and, worst of all (given the subject matter) unavailable in any digital format. Meaning, as of now, these books may never be seen in the future imagined in their pages. That's just not right.
So here's what we're going to do: Each month we'll choose one great classic, obscure or otherwise fascinating sci-fi book that's no longer in print and not available online, track down the copyright holder and/or author (if they're still around), acquire or otherwise clear the copyright, and publish the title both online and as an e-book, for little or no cost. Our supporters and followers will help us choose which books will be digitally rescued from copyright and publishing limbo via a monthly poll on our website, and we'll share the story behind the story, including with each ebook what we learned about the book, the author and their history along the way.
And while Singularity & Co. promises to keep our mission alive, in perpetuity, throughout the universe, we need your support to get started. This Kickstarter campaign will allow us to rescue our first four neglected works by providing for the following:
* Acquiring and curating the treasures to be found among many, many paper copies of old, out of print sci-fi books
* Expanding our current website to allow us to display and deliver our sci-fi library - physically as well as electronically - and support voting capabilities for fans to help decide the next titles to be rescued
* Building an open source book scanner (see http://www.diybookscanner.org/ for an example) to aid in turning forgotten paper books into e-books
* Covering costs associated with tracking down rightsholders, authors and/or their estates, as well as clearing or acquiring the electronic publishing rights to our orphaned books
* Spreading the word not only to established fans but also potential supporters who love great books and ideas (may include attending conventions, creating t-shirts, prints and anything else we can think of)
* Covering costs associated with legal work to be done by our attorneys, all of whom are generously contributing their time pro bono (we're trying to keep our costs as low as possible)
This is part adventure, part detective story, and part story about the intersection of the past and the future. So as we dig into a particular book, and pull on the various threads that we need to to make sure we can share it without taking something that isn't ours, we end uncovering the story of that book. That means that as part of each release, we plan on sharing that story, telling you what we learn about the book, it's author, it's history, and the adventure we had bringing it to you.
Rescuing beloved, forgotten, fondly remembered, out-of-print and otherwise lost sci-fi books by bringing them into the digital domain is more than a labor of love - it's our way of celebrating visions of futures past that shaped the way we live now. And it's all in a day's work for your average, ordinary, time-traveling bookshop. Please help us bring the past and future together - Singularity loves company.
Funding period
- (30 days)


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Category:Complete Barack Obama articles
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|This page is part of a project to put the works of Barack Obama and his administration online. If you'd like to help out then please see the Project Page.
See Wikisource:Text quality for full criteria.
- Exempt (author and project pages without outside content)
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Pages in category "Complete Barack Obama articles"
The following 10 pages are in this category, out of 10 total.


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Several dry years have state water officials concerned as reservoir supplies continue to inch lower and lower.
In Santa Clara County, the Almaden Reservoir is at barely 7 percent capacity and Guadalupe Reservoir is at less than 20 percent capacity. The county's Calero Reservoir is at 45 percent of capacity after two dry years.
"We're really at a point where we're really looking forward to hopefully a good rain year, otherwise, at the end of this rainy season we're looking at more water reductions," said Marty Grimes, Santa Clara Valley Water District.
Grimes said local reservoirs are at 81 percent of normal capacity for this time of year.
"That's not great, but that's not that bad and our ground supply is in normal range," Grimes said.
The Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, which serves San Francisco, is at about 80 percent capacity. East and Peninsula Water reservoirs are at 77 percent.
East Bay MUD's reservoirs are at 70 percent of capacity
Back in Santa Clara County, four of the 10 reservoirs can not be filled up because of seismic concerns.
Statewide, farmers were put on notice that they could face water restrictions because of two years of record dry and warm conditions. But that could all change with a normal rainy season in November through March.


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WELCOME TO ASSOCIATED HOTELS, We Really Can Make The Difference
Building value. Realizing potential. Sustaining profitability. At Associated Hotels, LLC (Associated), a Chicago based hotel management company, our success is guided by one simple maxim: Treat each problem, decision, and opportunity as if the result affects us personally. It's an effective approach and we've demonstrated its value by yielding substantial success as owners and operators of hotels, office, retail, and residential properties. Our sense of personal responsibility inspires accessibility, quick response and a hands-on management style. It fosters attention to detail, financial vigilance, and on-target solutions. Our staff of seasoned professionals is knowledgeable, visionary and makes sound financial decisions. In other words, we're committed to results. With over 75 years of experience managing hotels, the principals of Associated know how to achieve consistent profitability. Throughout the country, we have managed diverse properties that achieve outstanding operating performance and distinguished recognition. Our associates, clients and financial partners look forward to continued growth and even greater successes in the future. Associated Hotels, LLC - upholding quality standards and maximizing profitability in hotel management through hands-on leadership and financial expertise.


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Take Action: Join the Detox movement.
A look back at some of the Greenpeace campaign successes from the past twelve months.
You might not realise it but our planet is swarming with chemical monsters, from your washing machine to the North Pole.
Toxic Little Monsters, like PFCs, are still being used by big companies to make all sorts of products, despite the fact...
Children in Beijing and Shishi City, China react to pictures of toxic water pollution off the coast of South Eastern China. 2014-01-23
More than one hundred children create a human banner reading: "Detox Our Future", with the Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior in the background, displaying the 'Detox symbol' between her masts. The activity took place to mark the launch of the...
Around the world a growing movement of people are using their creativity, design skills and purchasing power to demand fashion without pollution. For more information or to find out how you can join the campaign visit: www.greenpeace.org/detox
1 - 5 of 16 results.


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From its creation in the mid-16th century by Andrea Amati to the present day, the modern violin has had an extraordinary and tempestuous history. Arguably its greatest development came during the Baroque era, as violinists and composers, in a sense liberated from the austerity and contrapuntal strictures of The Renaissance, went on a journey, both musically and geographically, avidly seeking more extravagant and original ways in which to express themselves on this fascinating new instrument.
Air sets out to trace one such Baroque journey. It is the story of four unique composers, three of whom were virtuoso violinists, one a lutenist – Falconiero, Matteis and Geminiani from Italy, and
Westhoff from Germany. They wandered throughout Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries in search of musical inspiration and crosspollination, and their music and art of performance intrigued
and delighted kings, contemporaries and audiences alike.
As well as works by these four composers, this album also features some of the other music of their time, in an attempt to show the cultural exchange taking place, much of it intuitively, between musical minds across borders.
Some of these composers were influenced directly by what they heard, whether it was Geminiani by Handel, Bach by Westhoff or Matteis by the wealth of folk music he encountered on his travels
to the British Isles.
This album sets out to show just how diverse the music of the Baroque era was. Air blends the simplest and at times most primitive forms of dance music with the most sophisticated and revolutionary compositions of the day, culminating in a work by Bach - the great
master, whose title is my inspiration for this collection, and whose music remains for me today more modern than that of anyone else.
- Daniel Hope


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Do you know about Crave Green?
When: Tues, May 11th, 6-9pm
Where: Sodo Park by Herban Feast
Tickets: $35 – $50
Herban Feast presents the first ever CRAVEgreen. This glamorously green party will prove that you don't have to sacrifice style to be sustainable. Come hang with your girlfriends, find out some new ways to green your lifestyle, purchase cool sustainable products–from clothing to nail polish–get an organic facial, have a glass of organic wine or drink with a green twist and walk away with an awesome swag bag full of great green products. All this plus the opportunity to support the Women's Funding Alliance–a fabulous local organization supporting women and girls–how cool is that?
More here:


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Attention all Marvel fans out there, the first sneak peek of "Doctor Strange" is officially here.
Benedict Cumberbatch made a guest appearance on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" when he introduced the very first glimpse inside of the highly anticipated flick.
Earlier Tuesday, to help build up the hype even more (as if it needed any!), Marvel revealed a movie poster showing what appears to be Cumberbatch standing in the doctor's Sanctum Sanctorum.
Fans in the United States will have to wait the longest to see the film in theaters, as it's expected to hit the big screen on November 4.
Australia, however, will be able to see it on October 27, and it's slated to debut in the U.K. the day after.
"Doctor Strange's" Cumberbatch is joined by Chiwetel Ejiofor (who stars as Baron Mordo), Tilda Swinton (who plays the Ancient One) Mads Mikkelsen and Rachel McAdams.
"There's going to be some crazy s--t going on," Cumberbatch teased in an earlier interview with Entertainment Weekly when asked about the film's visual effects.
And as for stepping into the famous role, the 39-year-old "Sherlock" actor admitted that he felt "really self-conscious" at first "but, then, by the end, it was great."
"It's like anything, you just have to experiment," he added when discussing how he eventually become comfortable transforming into the surgeon.
Filming began last November and only just wrapped up last month, the magazine reported.
PHOTOS: Hottest star superheroes & villains
PHOTOS: Benedict Cumberbatch's hottest pics


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Epic Games is a privately owned company and does not disclose its earnings. But on a Monday morning in late April, while standing in Epic's parking lot, at Crossroads Corporate Park, in Cary, North Carolina, awaiting the arrival of Cliff Bleszinski, the company's thirty-three-year-old design director, I realized that my surroundings were their own sort of Nasdaq. Ten feet away was a red Hummer H3. Nearby was a Lotus Elise, and next to it a pumpkin-orange Porsche. Many of the cars had personalized plates: "PS3CODER" (a reference to Sony's PlayStation3), "EPICBOY," "GRSOFWAR."
The last is shorthand for Gears of War, a shooter game, which Epic released in November, 2006, for play on Microsoft's Xbox 360 console. Gears of War was quickly recognized as the first game to provide the sensually overwhelming experience for which the console, launched a year earlier, had been designed. Gears won virtually every available industry award, and was the 360's best-selling game for nearly a year; it has now sold five million copies. On November 7th, a sequel, Gears of War 2, will be released; its development, long rumored, was not confirmed until this past February, when, at the Game Developers' Conference, in San Francisco, Bleszinski made the announcement after bursting through an onstage partition wielding a replica of one of Gears of War's signature weapons—an assault rifle mounted with a chainsaw bayonet.
Despite the rapid growth of the video-game industry—last year, sales were higher than either box-office receipts or DVD sales—designers are largely invisible within the wider culture. But Bleszinski, who is known to his many fans and occasional detractors as CliffyB, tends to stand out among his colleagues. Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby's "Smartbomb," a book about the industry, recounts the peacockish outfits and hair styles he has showcased at industry expos over the years. In 2001, he affected the stylings of a twenty-first-century Tom Wolfe, with white snakeskin shoes and bleached hair. In 2002, he took to leather jackets and an early-Clooney Caesar cut. By 2003, he was wearing long fur-lined coats, his hair skater-punk red. In recent years, he let his hair grow shaggy, which gave him the mellow aura of a fourth Bee Gee.
Bleszinski drove into Epic's parking lot in a red Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder, the top down despite an impending rainstorm. His current haircut is short and cowlicked, his bangs twirled up into a tiny moussed horn. He was wearing what in my high school would have been called "exchange-student jeans"—obviously expensive but slightly the wrong color and of a somehow non-American cut. Beneath a tight, fashionably out-of-style black nylon jacket was a T-shirt that read "TECHNOLOGY!" His sunglasses were of the oversized, county-sheriff variety, and each of his earlobes held a small, bright diamond earring. He could have been either a boyish Dolce & Gabbana model or a small-town weed dealer.
Bleszinski suggested that we go to a local diner. He professes an aversion to mornings, and to Monday mornings especially, but he seemed dauntingly alert. "This car's like a wakeup call," he said. "By the time I get to work, my heart's pumping and I'm ready to crank." Before we were even out of the parking lot, we were travelling at forty-five miles an hour. At a stoplight, Bleszinski exchanged waves with the driver of an adjacent red Ferrari—another Epic employee. When we hit a hundred miles per hour on a highway entrance ramp, Bleszinski announced, "Never got one ticket!" On the highway, he slowed to seventy-five. "One of my jobs in life," Bleszinski said, cutting over to an exit, "is to make this look a little cooler." By "this," he meant his job.
Bleszinski's brand of mild outrageousness—the "Cliffycam" on his blog page, which, some years ago, allowed visitors to observe him online while he worked; the photographs of him on his MySpace page alongside the splatter-film director Eli Roth and the porn stars Jenna Jameson and Ron Jeremy—qualifies him as exceptional in an industry that is, as he says, widely assumed to be a preserve inhabited by pale, withdrawn, molelike creatures. There is some truth to this stereotype: most game designers are not like CliffyB. But neither, really, is Bleszinski. The nickname, he told me, was bestowed on him by some "jock kid," when he was a small, shy teen-ager, and was meant as a taunt. Bleszinski took the name and fashioned a tougher persona around it, but, after spending a little time with him, one has the sensation of watching someone observing himself. Video games are founded upon such complicated transference. Gamers are allowed, for a time, all manner of ontological assumptions. They can also terminate their assumed personalities whenever they wish, and, lately, Bleszinski has been asking game-industry journalists if they might not "sit on" the CliffyB moniker "for a while."
Bleszinski was born in Boston, in 1975, eleven years to the day after the birth of his oldest brother, Greg. His father, whom Bleszinski describes as a "very stressed-out guy," was an engineer for Polaroid. The Bleszinskis were a close family. His mother, Karyn, told me, "We always sat down at the dinner table together. That was always important to my husband and me." One of Bleszinski's earliest and strongest memories is the smell of popcorn spreading thickly throughout the house after he had gone to bed, which convinced him that his "parents were having a great time and throwing a party" without him. In truth, this was merely his father's pre-bedtime ritual: over this nightly bowl of popcorn he would often melt an entire stick of butter. In 1990, when Bleszinski was fifteen, his forty-seven-year-old father died when an aortic aneurysm ruptured while he was golfing. Bleszinski still remembers what game he was playing when he learned of his father's death: the Nintendo game Blaster Master. He never played it again.
"He took it very hard," Karyn told me. She described Bleszinski as her "unique child," noting that he was "the most difficult, but he was difficult because he was the most inquisitive. He'd take apart whatever you got for him." After her husband's death, Karyn moved the family to the Los Angeles suburbs, where she worked as a restaurant manager. In 1991, she bought a computer for her son. "I'm not that technical of a guy," Bleszinski told me. "I started off programming my own games and doing the art for them, but I was a crappy coder and a crappier artist. But I didn't want to let that stop me. I was going to kick and scream and claw my way into the business any way possible." He thinks that it was perhaps only the death of his father that allowed him to do this. "If he hadn't passed, he probably would have made me go to Northeastern and become an engineer," he said.
In 1992, a year after Bleszinski had taught himself the rudiments of computer programming, he sent a game submission to Tim Sweeney, the twenty-two-year-old C.E.O. of Epic Megagames, who had recently dropped out of a mechanical-engineering program at the University of Maryland. (Epic's original name, Sweeney told me, was "a big scam" to make it look legitimate. "When you're this one single person in your parents' garage trying to start a company, you want to look like you're really big," he said.) Sweeney still remembers Bleszinski's submission, a P.C. game called Dare to Dream, in which a boy gets trapped, appropriately enough, inside his own dreamworld. "At that time," Sweeney said, "we'd gotten sixty or seventy game submissions from different people and we went ahead with five of them, and Cliff was one of the best." Once his game was in development, Bleszinski became more involved with the company. Sweeney said, "We'd have four or five different projects in development with different teams, and every time one started to reach completion we'd send it off to Cliff, and he'd write off his big list of what's good about this game and what needs to be fixed. Cliff's lists kept growing bigger and bigger." Bleszinski was only seventeen. When I asked Sweeney if he had had any reservations about entrusting his company's fate to a teen-ager whose driver's-license lamination was still warm, Sweeney said, "That's what the industry was like."
Upon its release, Dare to Dream, in Bleszinski's words, "bombed." His second game for Epic, released a year later, featured what he calls a "Rambo rabbit" named Jazz, who carried a large gun and hunted frenetically for intergalactic treasure. Jazz Jackrabbit, which imported to a P.C. platform innovations previously exclusive to Sega and Nintendo consoles, made Bleszinski's reputation. Epic had begun as a company churning out somewhat rechauffé fare—pinball simulators, clone-ish retreads, an uninspired but popular game known as Unreal Tournament. It was Bleszinski, in no small part, who filled Epic's parking lot with sports cars.
At the diner, I asked Bleszinski which games had most influenced him. Super Mario Brothers, he said, "is where it really kicked into high gear." Indeed, the first issue of Nintendo Power, published in 1988, listed the high scores of a handful of Super Mario devotees, the thirteen-year-old Bleszinski's among them. "There's something about the whole hidden element to Mario, where you jump and hit your head on a block and just out of nowhere secret things would appear," Bleszinski said. "They made you feel like a kid in the woods."
Issued in 1985, Super Mario Brothers was a game of summer-vacation-consuming scope and unprecedented inventiveness. It was among the first video games to suggest that it might contain a world. It was also hallucinogenically strange. Why did mushrooms make Mario grow larger? Why did flowers give Mario the ability to spit fire? Why did bashing Mario's head against bricks sometimes produce coins? And why was Mario's enemy, Bowser, a saurian, spiky-shelled turtle?
In film and literature, such surrealistic fantasy typically occurs at the outer edge of experimentalism, but early video games depended on symbols for the simple reason that the technological limitations of the time made realism impossible. Mario, for instance, wore a porkpie hat not for aesthetic reasons but because hair was too difficult to render. Bleszinski retains affection for many older games, but he says, "If you go back and play the majority of old games, they really aren't very good." He suspects that what made them seem so good at the time was the imaginative involvement of players: "You wanted to believe, you wanted to fill in the gaps."
Games like Gears of War, which offer literal representations of what the gamer "sees" and "does," differ so profoundly from a game like Super Mario Brothers that they appear to share as many commonalities as a trilobite does with a Great Dane. The new games fill in all the gaps, and they have also done away with many of the symbolic prerequisites of video-game play, such as the number of "lives" a player has, the score, health bars, and so on. In Gears, there is no score. The player gets a single life; if it is forfeited, one must start again at the nearest passed checkpoint. The health bar is invisible; the only indication of one's injury status is a gradually reddening icon, known as the Crimson Omen. Super Mario requires an ability to recognize patterns, considerable hand-eye coördination, and quick reflexes. Gears requires the ability to think tactically and make subtle judgments based on scant information, a constant awareness of multiple variables (ammunition stores, enemy weaknesses) as they change throughout the game, and the spatial sensitivity to control one's movement through a space in which the "right" direction is not always apparent. Anyone who plays modern games such as Gears does not so much learn the rules as develop a kind of intuition for how the game operates. Often, there is no single way to accomplish a given task; improvisation is rewarded. Older games, like Super Mario, punish improvisation: you live or die according to their algebra alone.
Gears is largely the story of a soldier, Marcus Fenix, who, as the game begins, has been imprisoned for abandoning his comrades (who are known as COGs, or Gears) in order to save his father, who dies before Fenix can reach him. He is released because a fourteen-year war with a tunnel-using alien army known as the Locusts has depleted the human army's ranks. This much we learn in the first two minutes of the game; the next ten hours or so are an ingeniously paced march through frequent and elaborately staged firefights with Locusts, Wretches, Dark Wretches, Corpsers, Boomers, three blind and terrifying Berserkers, and the vile General Raam. Along the way, players can treat themselves to the singular experience of using the chainsaw bayonets on their Lancer assault rifles to cut their enemies in half, during which the in-game camera is gleefully splashed with blood. (Gears is one of the most violent games ever made, but Bleszinski maintains that it contains "very much a laughable kind of violence," like "watching a melon explode in a Gallagher show." Still, one act of violence in Gears 2 is intimate and upsetting enough to have given one of the designers pause, until Bleszinski and others convinced him that the act grew out of a necessary dramatic trajectory.)
The story line and the narrative dilemmas of Gears are not very sophisticated. What is sophisticated about Gears is its mood. The world in which the action takes place is a kind of destroyed utopia; its architecture, weapons, and characters are chunky and oversized but, somehow, never cartoonish. Most video-game worlds, however well conceived, are essenceless. Gears felt dirty and inhabited, and everything from the mechanics of its gameplay to its elliptical backstory was forcefully conceived, giving it an experiential depth rare in the genre.
The novelist Nathan Englander, a fan of the game, cites its third-person viewpoint, in which the player looks over the shoulder of the character being controlled, as a key to its success. "In literary terms," Englander told me, "it's a close-second-person shooter. It's Jay McInerney and Lorrie Moore territory. You're both totally involved and totally watching." As for the collapsed architecture and blown-open spaces of the Gears world, Englander said, "There's the hospital from 'Blindness' and the house from 'The Ghost Writer,' and I know that beautiful, ruined world of Gears as well as either of those."
Much of the resonance of Gears can be directly attributed to the character of Fenix. Video-game characters tend to be emptily iconic. Pac-Man, for instance, is some sort of notionally symbolic being. Mario (who was originally known only as Jumpman) is merely the vessel of the player's desired task. Halo's Master Chief is notable mainly for his golden-visored unknowableness. Fenix, encased within armor so thick that his arms and legs resemble hydrants, his head covered by a black bandanna, and his eyes as tiny as BBs, is different. He shows constant caution and, occasionally, fear. Although he can dive gracefully, his normal gait has the lumbering heaviness of an abandoned herd animal. His face is badly scarred, and his voice (excellently rendered by the actor John DiMaggio, who also provided the voice of Bender on Matt Groening's "Futurama") is a three-packs-a-day growl, less angry than exhausted. Unlike the protagonists of many shooters, Fenix rarely seems particularly eager to kill anything. The advertising campaign for the first Gears was centered on a strangely affecting sixty-second spot in which Fenix twice flees from enemies, only to be cornered by a Corpser, a monstrous arachnoid creature, on which he opens fire. But it was the soundtrack—Gary Jules's spare, mournful cover of the 1982 Tears for Fears song "Mad World"—that gave the spot its harsh-tender dissonance. This helped signal that Fenix was something that few video-game characters had yet managed to be: disappointedly adult.
When I asked about the melancholy at the core of Gears, Bleszinski said, "I was never geeky enough for the geeks and I was never cool enough for the cool people. I've always been in that weird purgatory." That slight feeling of identity crisis persists. A few years ago, Bleszinski divorced his high-school sweetheart. "I woke up one day, and had the two Labs, and the house in the suburbs, and I'm, like, What the hell am I doing here?" he told me. His mother told me that she loves watching him introduce his games on YouTube. "I can also tell he's nervous, but only a mother would know that," she said.
Bleszinski admitted that much of Gears is, in its way, autobiographical. Its look and its aesthetic, for example, were influenced by his first trip to London, where he climbed to the top of St. Paul's Cathedral and, with "a shitty little camera," snapped a picture of a yolky sun setting over the Thames, the sky streaked with nursery blues and pinks. Bleszinski's London photograph is one of the reasons that much of Gears takes place in twilight—a lighting condition prized by cinematographers but comparatively neglected in video games. Bleszinski asked his artists to create a "sci-fi" hybrid of London and Washington, D.C., but advised them to keep the futuristic well balanced with the historical. The big flaw in most depictions of the future, he says, "is that they always forget to leave in the past. Everyone always assumes that the entire world would just explode and be rebuilt in this kind of super-futuristic style. I still see old cars from the thirties and forties around, right next to things that look like they're from the year 2000. It's that mix that makes things interesting."
Gears also contains what Bleszinski calls a "going home" narrative: "There's a sublevel to Gears that so many people missed out on because it's such a big testosterone-filled chainsaw-fest. Marcus Fenix goes back to his childhood home in the game. I dream about my house in Boston, basically every other night. It was up on a hill." In Gears of War, the fatherless Fenix's manse is on a hill, too, and getting to its front door involves some of the most harried and ridiculously frantic fighting in the game. When I told Bleszinski that Fenix's homecoming was one of my favorite levels in Gears, he asked if I knew where its title, "Imaginary Place," had come from. I thought for a moment. Earlier, he had made a nicely observed reference to the novelist Cormac McCarthy, and I was attuned to the possibility of an altogether unexpected window into his imagination. Was it from Auden? No. It was a reference to a line from Zach Braff's film "Garden State," in which "family" is defined as "a group of people who miss the same imaginary place." When you start to peel back the layers of the Gears world, Bleszinski told me, "there's a lot of sadness there."
In addition to the prevailing mood of wistful savagery, the singularity of Gears of War resides in what designers describe as its "feel"—the way that the game's mechanics are orchestrated to create both a compelling experience for the player and the illusion of an internally consistent world. The importance of this sensation is something that Bleszinski has made his special focus and passion. "I'm looking for a fun core-loop of what you're doing for thirty seconds over and over again," he told me. "I want it to grab me quick and fast. I want it to have an interesting game mechanic, but I also want it to be a fascinating universe that I want to spend time in, because you're spending often dozens of hours in this universe." Rod Fergusson, an Epic senior producer who, with Bleszinski, oversees the continuity of the Gears universe, told me that Bleszinski is "a designer by feel" who conceives of games in "big picture" terms "yet tweaks the smallest things." He told me, "If you look at people who tried to copy Gears's mechanics, they don't have that guy doing that hands-on, touchy-feely way of designing. They kind of get the broad strokes, but they don't get the little detaily things."
An example of this is Gears's famous "cover" system, an innovation of Bleszinski's, which demands that the player move with chess-like care and efficiency around the battle space, using walls, doorways, barricades, and the scorched husks of vehicles as cover. Bleszinski told me that a paintball match had impressed upon him the ludicrousness of how most shooters operated, with players running around in the open, strafing their enemies and jumping to avoid being shot. "Getting hit by a paintball freaking hurts like hell," he said. It occurred to him that a shooter based on the idea of taking cover would be a more realistic and primal experience. A 2003 game called kill.switch was the first game to attempt a cover system, but Bleszinski streamlined and augmented the concept. In Gears, an exposed player is actively punished by the game, as the damage inflicted by enemy bullets and explosives spikes nastily whenever cover is abandoned. Bleszinski became fixated on making sure that, when cover is taken, the right amount of dust is kicked up against the controlled character's back and that the character's grunt has just the right timbre and volume. In this way, the reward for seeking cover becomes subliminally sensory.
The most frequently imitated aspect of Gears is a feature known as the "roadie run," so named for the crouch into which a player's hustling character lowers himself, and which Bleszinski thought resembled a rock-show roadie's attempt to move discreetly across the stage. While in roadie-run mode, the in-game camera goes jitteringly handheld and fish-eyed and sinks into a miasma of dust. It is difficult to see exactly where one is going, and the over-all effect is that of intense panic. Bleszinski calls it "the Falluja follow-cam," and likens it to the viewpoint of an embedded journalist. Yet in roadie run the player is travelling only one and a half times faster than normal. The feature is both a brilliant distortion of perspective and a cunning approximation of the confusion of combat.
When a tech company begins to refer to its headquarters as a "campus," a certain threshold of success has been attained. Microsoft and Google both have campuses that rival those of many academic institutions. Epic is still a small company, relatively speaking, but it recently bought a neighboring lot and will soon begin construction of another building, which will make it, in tech-industry terms, an official "campus." Already, it has a gym, a large motion-capture studio for its in-game animation, a small arcade, a basketball court, and a walk-in closet filled with free snacks and drinks whose total caloric worth must be somewhere in the low millions.
The Epic offices display a kind of low-key egalitarianism. None of the parking spaces are reserved, there are no cubicles, and window and corner offices have been somewhat heedlessly assigned. I glimpsed one Epic employee, who appeared to be, roughly, twelve years old, typing away at his desk in a window office, while Gears's senior producer and the company's senior gameplay designer toiled in small, windowless rooms. Bleszinski himself shares his office with two other Epic employees.
If one were to commission a very bright and unusually tasteful adolescent to design his ideal workplace, Epic's headquarters would probably be the result. Its many blacks, grays, and corrugated-metal surfaces might best be labelled Bachelor Futurist, even though, by now, most of Epic's male employees wear wedding rings. The office furnishings come in three styles: Neo-Living Room (easy-rocking, lever-activated recliners), Casual Satanist (black leather couches), and Romper Room Gothic (beanbag chairs). The aroma of lingering adolescence carries over into the mementos, knickknacks, and emblems that Epic's employees use to decorate their offices. Tim Sweeney, with the earnestness of a teen-age boy, has a prominent Ferrari flag hanging in his office—though Sweeney, unlike most teen-age boys, actually owns a Ferrari. Chris Perna, the art director of Gears 2, displays on one of the shelves in his office a foot-high silver-cast Darth Vader Pez dispenser. Bleszinski's office resembles a toy-store yard sale. These are boyish affectations, certainly, but boyishness is the realm in which these men seek inspiration, not a code by which they live.
A Microsoft employee who works closely with Epic described the company as having a "band dynamic." Staff turnover is low, and many of Epic's most senior employees have been friends for more than a decade. This does not seem a very long time until one sits in on an Epic meeting and realizes that anyone over the age of thirty-five achieves the temporal stature of Methuselah. Epic's recent growth is regarded with wary gratitude by many of its employees, though some miss the old days, when, as Sweeney put it, "we were just a bunch of kids who had some cool ideas and were doing neat things."
When surrounded by his colleagues and discussing the gravities of gameplay, Bleszinski discards his self-consciously laid-back manner, and the precision of his gaming mind quickly becomes apparent. A colleague told me that Bleszinski's "huge strength is his basic ability to just get it—pick something up and give you a one-minute usability report."
It is unusual for any game company to allow an outsider access to its meetings, for fear of the game's features being prematurely disclosed. While discussing Gears 2's new "crowd" system, which will allow an unprecedented number of individually functioning enemies to flock across the battle space, Bleszinski mentioned how excited he was to open fire upon them with a certain weapon. Within minutes, I was pulled aside by a Microsoft representative and informed that this weapon's existence would not be confirmed until later in the summer and could I please refrain from mentioning it. The gaming media is largely made up of obsessive enthusiasts, and the carefully planned release of information tantalizes them with the promise of insider knowledge. "How do you reach the core?" Jeff Bell, who used to oversee global marketing for Microsoft's interactive-entertainment division, asked me. "How?" I asked. "Secrets," he said, his eyes sparkling in the manner of a supervillain announcing his plan to poison the Eastern Seaboard's water supply. The game industry is more or less leakproof, and possesses a strange kind of innocence: it guards its secrets as guilelessly as a boy might hide from his mother—but not from his brother and sister—the extraterrestrial living in his bedroom.
I was warned, before attending a play-through of one of Gears 2's unfinished levels, that it was still "janky." Although the level was fully voice-acted, it was only partially scored, and many sound effects had yet to be added. Some of the virtual lighting was not yet functional, and the onscreen Fenix flickered. From time to time, the game crashed altogether. Nonetheless, we watched the level's lead designer guide Fenix through what looked to be an enthusiastically mortared office building. Ahead, in the shadows, numerous monsters scrambled—the goosebumpy Gears warning that a violent engagement was somewhere ahead. By the third iteration of this, Bleszinski was shaking his head: "Enough monster foreplay." When Fenix and a comrade had to walk a bomb to a door in need of obliteration, Bleszinski said that they should be moving "ten to fifteen per cent faster." When the play-through was complete, he said that too much of the level involved going into one room to hit a switch that activated a door in another. The otherwise superlative Grand Theft Auto series is particularly afflicted with this mouse-coaxed-through-a-maze problem, and Bleszinski's only complaint about the G.T.A. games, which he admires, is that they can sometimes "feel like work." This emphasis on making players aware of why they were choosing certain paths without being reminded that their choice was essentially illusory recalled the "vivid and continuous dream" that John Gardner once spoke of concerning fiction.
In a discussion of another level of the game, known as "Hospital," Bleszinski, sitting by himself on a long couch, wondered if, in the online multiplayer version of the level, which pits players against each other, a building's sprinkler system could be used to extinguish the pilot light of an opponent's flamethrower. "Wouldn't that be cool?" he asked. A similar moment resulted in one of Gears 1's most notorious features. One day, late in the game's production, Bleszinski expressed his frustration at having to finish off downed enemies by shooting them. "You know," he said, "I just want to stomp on his head!" From this came the game's gratuitously fatal coup de grâce: the "curb stomp," whereby a player crushes his opponent's skull beneath the anvil of an enormous metal boot. Rod Fergusson later told me, "I wouldn't be surprised if, in the next two weeks, there's a hallway with a sprinkler system that puts out the pilot light of the flamethrower."
Discussion at Epic is collegial and to the point; modern game design is too complex and collaborative for any individual to feel proprietary about his own ideas. At one meeting I attended, a disagreement about weaponry was swiftly resolved. "There's no direct counter to the flamethrower," Ray Davis, the game's lead programmer, pointed out, with exasperation. A colleague, who had obviously heard this before, sighed. "I don't know. I think it's a superweapon," he said. Then someone else observed that the boomshot, another devastatingly fatal weapon, had no direct counter, either, and Davis recognized with a grin that his argument had been destroyed. Bleszinski took the opportunity to raise a singular annoyance of the boomshot, familiar to anyone with experience of the multiplayer version of Gears: the impossibility of knowing whether someone you are charging toward happens to be carrying it. "The boomshot needs something to warn you your opponent's got it," Bleszinski said. He suggested adding small glowing lights around its four barrels, which everyone agreed was a fine solution. Davis, who works most directly with the programmers and was therefore most familiar with what remained janky, brought up the "inconsistent, unfun lethality" of a certain kind of grenade. This segued into Gears 2's inclusion of ink grenades, which create a highly damaging toxic cloud—the proper gameplay use of which no one, so far, had been able to decide.
Until very recently, almost no literature was devoted to game design, and what there was tended to be quickly made obsolete by the speed of technological developments. After the day's final meeting had ended, I realized that, for the two decades that I had been playing games, I had unwittingly been at the mercy of the constantly changing orthodoxies of game design. I knew that some games seemed more fun than others, but I would have struggled to explain why. Bleszinski and the other Epic designers came to this form as children. Growing up playing games, they absorbed the governing logic of the medium, but no institutions existed for them to transform what they learned into a methodology. Gradually, though, they turned a hobby into a creative profession that is now as complex as any other. They have established the principles of a grammar of fun.
Before leaving Epic, I was invited to take part in the daily playtest, which occupies an hour or two of every afternoon. That day, the team was testing the multiplayer modes of Gears 2. Games that feature multiplayer options have proved to be the Xbox 360's most popular, a fact that is easily explained. One of the most common criticisms of video games is that they can wrap those who play in enforced and occasionally deranging solitude. But to take part in a multiplayer game is to give a game new life every time one plays, because one is matched against human players, whose ingenuity and fallibility no computer can hope to equal, and because one can exchange with one's fellow-players advice, taunts, and congratulations. A dozen Epic employees gathered in the test lab and signed in to the individual consoles that lined the walls. The battle would pit one side of the room against the other. I was assigned my slot and selected my avatar—a Drone Locust.
Testing is among the more consuming aspects of modern game design. I was told that Gears 2 would be subject to roughly forty thousand hours of testing before its release. This is an impressive number—until one realizes that the first forty thousand people who buy and play Gears 2 will, in one hour, equal that amount of testing. Gears 1 was released with a few bugs—instances in which the game behaves in a way that was not intended—a fact that many at Epic remain bitterly embarrassed about, even though it is nearly impossible to completely eliminate bugs from any game. Testing of multiplayer modes involves something more sociological than purely technical assessment: learning what tendencies a given environment fosters. If there are places to hide, they must always have a fatal weakness. If a particularly powerful weapon is hidden somewhere, it must be difficult and risky to reach. If a large number of players are being killed at a certain location, the game designers must ask themselves why, and decide whether to correct for this. The aim is to eliminate all ineradicable advantages, but this goal is seldom attained. Two weeks after the release of Gears 1, Bleszinski told me, "I'd go online and get completely destroyed by everybody."
In our first multiplayer game, which was called Guardian, one had to kill the opposing team's leader and all those who protect him. By the end, a teammate and I happened to be the only survivors (I achieved this status largely by hiding), and we encountered Bleszinski crouching behind a stack of sandbags. We decided to charge. Bleszinski popped out from cover and, with a shotgun, expertly exploded the head of my teammate before beating me to death as I rounded the edge of his hiding place. Bleszinski ended the game with twenty-one kills; I had three.
The next contest, then known as Meat-flag but since renamed, amounted to a game of capture the flag—though the flag was, bracingly, a human being. In this match, I was simultaneously chainsawed to death by three people, a spectacle that everyone in the room claimed never to have seen before, in all their hours of play. Our final game was called Wingman, which is played in pairs. Bleszinski and I buddied up, and I shouted across the room to him for some general guidance. "Basically," he said, "kill anyone who doesn't look like you. Our foreign policy."
I fared miserably again, and pride compelled me to point out that I had beaten Gears 1 on its most challenging difficulty level. No one was listening, and Bleszinski stood up. "Now's the fun part," he said. "Figure out what's a bug and what's not a bug." He conferred in a huddle with the other designers about what to enter into the defect-tracking database. "You tell people what you do for a living," Bleszinski said later, "and they're like, 'Oh, you play video games for a living.' No, I play a game that's not as fun as it should be, that's broken, until it's no longer broken. Then I give it to other people to have fun with." ♦


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Every week (Monday, to be precise) we're proud to feature all of our dear readers' homemade pies in a little thing we like to call My Pie Monday. We all love pizza, and there's no greater way to pay homage to the slice than by making one yourself. Whether you've laboriously built your own wood fired oven brick by brick, or you've used the same beat up pizza steel in the same beat up oven for 20 years, we want to see what you're turning out.
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Just Mobile AluDisc Review/
Out of all of Just Mobile's highly polished accessories, the newly released AluDisc strikes us as the most outlandish pieces of Mac accessories we never thought had a place on our desk. This aluminum disc stand has the lowest center of gravity of any stand, but it wasn't designed to elevate your iMac or Apple Display, instead AluDisc is a turntable that can rotate a full 360-degrees giving you the freedom and simplicity of effortlessly swiveling your iMac or Apple Display in its place making sharing what's displayed on your screen to another person a cinch. If tilting your display up and down isn't enough, AluDisc might be just the thing you never thought you needed.Read More


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Create an Account - Increase your productivity, customize your experience, and engage in information you care about.
Experience a laid-back, relaxing evening in beautiful Downtown Garland while soaking in the soothing sounds of jazz.
Come on out to this free event, fun for the whole family! Bring your chairs and blankets for this cool jazz series in the square.
Thursday nights, May 16 and May 23
Each night from 7 to 9 p.m.
Downtown Garland Square - 520 W. State St. (click link for map)
Music | Vendors | Coffee | Good Eats


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If you had the chance to decree that everyone—everyone—would have to watch one YouTube video all the way through and pay attention the entire time, what would it be? It could be something important, historic, funny, dumb, or just something that no one else seems to like nearly as much as you do and you desperately want to force everyone else to see it in the hope that somebody, anybody, gets it the way you do.
This isn't the only YouTube video people get to watch, it's just that yours is required watching. You can only pick one, and saying "I can't decide; here's three" is cheating, and cheating is not allowed! Choose wisely. Ready? Go.


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TORONTO, ONTARIO--(Marketwire - Feb. 19, 2013) - Danbel Ventures Inc. ("Danbel" or the "Company") is pleased to announce the appointment of Ernst & Young LLP ("E&Y") as its auditors, replacing Collins Barrow Toronto LLP ("Collins Barrow"). The Company's Board of Directors and its Audit Committee approved the appointment of E&Y, accepted the resignation of Collins Barrow and reviewed all the documents relating to the change of auditors. Collins Barrow resigned as auditors at the Company's request and there were no reservations in the auditors' report by Collins Barrow in respect of the Company's financial statements issued during the period commencing on January 1, 2010, being the date of commencement of the Company's two most recently completed audited financial years, and ending on December 31, 2011.
In accordance with all regulatory requirements, Danbel has filed a Notice of Change of Auditor and has received a response letter from Collins Barrow, the former auditors, confirming their agreement with the information provided in the Notice. The Company also received a response letter from E&Y, the successor auditors, confirming their agreement with the information provided in the Notice.
Danbel continues to seek opportunities to acquire an operating business or complete a transaction and, if so, Danbel intends to make an application to list its shares on a stock exchange. There is no assurance that the Company will be successful in these endeavours.
Shares Outstanding: 667,716
Contact Information:


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name Corrin Lakeland
location Auckland, New Zealand
Email email@example.com
job Technical Manager
Speciality Data-based insight
Profiling and Data Visualisation
Phone +64 21 467784
Doesn't it seem strange when we are trying to decide what dishwasher to buy, the computer cannot tell us which would be best based on the experiences of previous customers? That KPIs are frequently modelled as the amount we achieved last year plus a fudge factor? That marketers still view their customers as segments rather than people. And finally, that a skilled eight year old is better at the board game Go than the best computer, despite decades of research.
My area of interest is making sense of data and in this site I'll look at some of the problems that interest me as well as what I think should be done about them. There is little cohesion between the different topics except that they all interest me. Broadly speaking, my work is in carefully representing problems so that the computer can solve it for itself. If language is presented in carefully selected chunks then I believe a computer program can gradually learn the underlying structure. That if the right algorithm is shown the purchasing decisions of thousands of shoppers then it can reliably tell us what we would like to buy, without having to know anything else about the products.
So what specifically do I believe we should be doing differently? Principally, I think we should be paying more attention to some of the brilliant algorithms being developed inside the data mining community, and being much more creative about other fields where they can be applied. For instance, we have developed some amazing algorithms for spam detection, and yet emails to technical support at companies are processed by a human or by simple keyword matching. Why? We went past keyword matching in spam detections several generations ago! Along a similar line of reasoning, the ability of statistical parsers to disambiguate sentences is really quite spectacular; the standard of the voice recognition in the top systems is also spectacular, yet for some reason they do not use a statistical parser to help with their disambiguation; and also when we ring up the bank, we don't get the computer saying "How can I help you today?" but instead "Press 1 to withdraw money". Why? The technology is there already, but it isn't used outside research labs.
I guess what it comes down to is that I like solving other people's problems. I'm not that interested in designing new algorithms (though I never turn down a new tool). I think we already have the tools we need to assist in many day-to-day problems, and yet the solutions that currently have are mediocre at best. I think this is because the people writing systems such as the bank's do not have the tools at their fingertips and are not yet forced through competition to get the tools. I think it is time that more ordinary companies, government departments, and people started using the best tools available.


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South African Rugby
Olivier completes switch to Japan
ESPN Staff
July 10, 2012
Wynand Olivier will turn out for the Black Rams next term © Getty Images
The Bulls have confirmed that Springboks centre Wynand Olivier will miss their Currie Cup campaign to take up a contract with the Ricoh Black Rams.
Olivier, who has 37 caps for the Boks, will depart Pretoria at the end of the current Super Rugby season and will return from Japan in February 2013 in time for that year's Super Rugby tournament. With 100 games for the Bulls to his name, the franchise have opted to allow the centre to sit out the Currie Cup because of his previous commitment to the South African side.
"We believe this is a win-win situation for Wynand, the Bulls and the Rams," Bulls CEO Barend van Graan said. "Wynand has been a very loyal servant to the Bulls and Blue Bulls and has played in all our teams since school.
"We were happy to accommodate his request for a release as we appreciate his commitment to the Bulls over many years of service."
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.
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text:
I find the Century Schoolbook family very legible for online documentation. However, I am unsure what sans serif (for typesetting, e.g., LaTeX package names) and monospace (for typesetting code) counterparts to choose for use with this typeface.
Which fonts, in your opinion, could (and could not) be used with Century Schoolbook?


text: Welcome to the homepage of the International Fellows Program of the United States Army War College (USAWC) located in historical Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Each year approximately 80 senior military officers from different countries are extended an invitation from the Chief of Staff of the United States Army to attend the U.S. Army War College. The academic year is full of studying, research, and fellowship as these officers are exposed to and instructed in areas ranging from military concepts and doctrine to national and theater level strategies.


text:
Returns Policy
- General Returns Policy
- All returns require a Return Material Authorization (RMA) number, which can be obtained online at encompass.com. RMAs are valid for 15 days.
- Address all returns to:
- The RMA must be CLEARLY printed on the shipping label. Returns without the RMA clearly printed will be refused and returned by the carrier.
- In addition, please include a copy of your RMA and the original invoices within the package.
- Special order items are not returnable.
- Returns will be credited the purchase price and applicable taxes, less any restocking and or packaging fees, to the original credit card or to your Encompass account.
- Shipping and handling costs are not refundable.
- All returns are subject to inspection and approval prior to credit being issued. Non-approved returns will be shipped back to customers at their expense.
- Items incorrectly shipped to Encompass will be returned to customers at their expense.
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- New and Unused Parts Return
- New and unused parts valued at less than $15 cannot be returned for credit.
- Approved new and unused returns will incur a 15% restocking fee.
- To be eligible for credit, all new and unused returns must meet the following guidelines:
- Returns must be received by Encompass within 60 days from the invoice date. RMAs will not be issued after 60 days from the invoice date.
- Returns must be in resalable condition with an RMA created online.
- A copy of the invoice must be included in the return shipping box.
- The RMA number must be clearly printed on the return shipping label.
- Parts with manufacturer packaging seals that have been opened will be returned at customer expense without credit being issued, or will be repackaged at customer expense (minimum $10.00).
- Do not write on the original parts shipping box or otherwise deface packaging. Any parts packaging returned damaged will be shipped back to customers at their expense without credit being issued, or they will be charged a repackaging fee (minimum $10.00).
- Defective / In Warranty Return
- Encompass will honor the manufacturer's warranty on a product sold by Encompass. Most, but not all, products are warranted for 90 days from the date of the original invoice.
- Defective, in-warranty items will be exchanged only. No credit will be issued for defective items, and an RMA cannot be issued until a replacement part is ordered.
- Manufacturers require the model and serial number of the product the defect was installed in, as well as the exact nature of the defect in detail.
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- Wrong Parts Customers must notify Encompass within five working days of receipt of any part that is shipped in error or short shipped. Encompass will not honor any such claim reported after five working days.


text:
Lollipop Flowers
Wallies® Self-Adhesive Cutouts
2 sheets
20 flowers and leaves 1" x 1¼" to 3½" x 3¾"
- Great for crafting and scrapbooking projects!
- Ideal for decorating small spaces!
- Acid and lignin free.
- Just peel and stick to apply!
- Removable and repositionable.
- Works on walls, wood, glass, paper and more!
- Not recommended for textured or rough surfaces.
Item shipped worldwide.


text:
1Based on gaming laptops shipped as of 04/15/2019 with integrated dual screens. Gaming laptops defined as laptops with models targeting specifically to gamers. Gaming laptops defined as laptop with Nvidia GTX 1060 or Nvidia RTX or AMD R9 or AMD RX470 & above Graphics, excluding detachable PC's.
2"Smart Home Printer" defined using the following criteria: 1) Designed exclusively for mobile devices, and driven by an OEM printer app, like other IoT devices. This HP Tango device is designed exclusively for mobile devices since it requires a mobile device for install. 2) Uses both local Wi-Fi and cloud cell phone data connectivity for two-way connection with OEM app to control printer and get status. 3) Offers voice printing support for Amazon Alexa, the Google Assistant, and Microsoft Cortana. (See Keypoint Intelligence report for details: www.keypointintelligence.com/HPVoicePrint External link (PDF PDF 372KB)). 4) Unique in-class in that it lacks a screen/display, buttons/LEDs other than the power button, and a USB port. Smart home devices often lack screen/display and buttons/LEDs and USB port, since they are designed for wireless and control by OEM provided app on smart device like phone or tablet. Compared to the majority of in-class letter-size color desktop inkjet printers and all-in-ones <$150 USD. Claim based on HP internal research of printer manufacturers' published specifications and Keypoint Intelligence - Buyers Lab March 29, 2018 study commissioned by HP. For details, see www.keypointintelligence.com/HPTango External link. Market share as reported by IDC CYQ4 2017 Hardcopy Peripherals Tracker.
3Requires the HP Smart app download. Features controlled may vary by mobile device operating system. Full list of supported operating systems and details at https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c03561640. For details on local printing requirements see hp.com/go/mobileprinting.


text:
You're at the right place for everything color...
If you care about color and are struggling with color management, we can help.
If you have comments or problems, please let us know.
- Aug 05, 2019Our friend Jeff Collins,
and another friend, Mike Todryk, of IWCO Direct have a great discussion on how Mike was able to take a company with an enormous variety of printing devices & technologies, and transform it so that they know where their color is, they have their color under control, and they maintain a "shared neutral appearance" - through the wonder of G7. Mike shares details about the software they used, and what they did to improve procedures for saving time, money and hitting industry standard color. A special bonus near the end includes the mistakes that brand owners commonly make when communicate color to printers.https://www.buzzsprout.com/episodes/iwco-direct-the-benchmark-of-a-process-control-culture
- 24. IWCO Direct: The Benchmark of a Process Control Culture
- Mike Todryk elegantly walks through what anyone would describe as THE absolute benchmark process control company - across (3) facilities, (13) Continuous Web Litho Presses, (10) Continuous Web Inkjet Presses, (10) Flexo Presses, (3) Digital EP Presses, (2) Sheetfed Offset Presses, (3) Contract Proofers - maintained by (4) in-house G7® Experts.
- Jul 02, 2019Turns out, maybe they were listening after all! X-Rite recently announced a new i1Pro: The i1Pro 3 Plus. This model is made specifically to take measurements of textiles and other unusual materials. Important features include:- The instrument can support transmission scanning for backlit film.- Polarization filter that enables the instrument to take M3 measurements- A larger, 8mm aperture to get better sampling of fabric patterns- The IO table has been updated to support this new i1Pro 3 Plus, and now enables measuring backlit materials.
The new i1Pro 3 Plus and the new IO table are slated to be available in July, 2019.
X-Rite press release on i1Pro 3 Plus
- Jun 10, 2019Microsoft recently announced that they are in development of a new Xbox gaming console. Those who hang on these news items scoured the daily videos prior to the announcement, to see if Microsoft gave any advanced clues. In the videos were screen elements that looked like "R 255" "G 86" and such. It turns out they were leaving a clue about the internal code name for the new gaming console: It's called "Scarlett" and the RGB values they left as a clue were: 255, 36, 0.
How about that?! A color enthusiast can be one step ahead of his friends when it comes to guessing code names of upcoming gaming consoles!If you are a card-carrying color geek, you probably already know that you do not define the color scarlet merely using the RGB numbers 255, 36, 0. RGB numbers are merely device values and don't in themselves describe a color unless they are accompanied by a printing condition or profile. (In a similar way, the number "4" on a toaster does not by itself tell you what color toast you're going to get.)We can certainly make an educated guess, that because Microsoft was involved in the original creation of the color space: "sRGB", that they are intending to use that color space - and in fact that does define the color scarlet, according to Wikipedia.However, the illustration below shows that 255, 36, 0 in the ProPhotoRGB color space for example, is a much more saturated color than 255, 36, 0 in sRGB. It's always a good policy to define your terms!
- Apr 11, 2019
The March/April edition of the SGIA Journal has published an excellent article by Steve Upton:
Print Gamut Ins and OutsThe article is chock-full of interesting bits of info about color gamuts. Learn what can be done to increase a printer's gamut, what does not work, how different systems like xCMYK & CMYKRGB compare, and get an "insider's view" of how gamut volume calculations are made, all by the creator of ColorThink himself!
- Mar 01, 2019Are you in the Seattle area, want to learn color management like a pro and become certified?
Then check out this 3 day paid event! SGIA, famous for their successful Boot Camp series nationally will conduct a Boot Camp training on April 2-4, 2019 at DCG One in Seattle.
CHROMiX is proudly sponsoring. It's rare for a national group like the SGIA to come through the Pacific NorthWest, so take advantage! Some CHROMiX folks will stop in too. Rick and Pat will put in an appearance.Go to this webpage for more details and to register:


text:
|Sydney, Australia
|High School:
|St. Joseph's College Hunters Hill
|House Affiliation:
Senior • 2012
Rowed with twice with the varsity eight and six times the second varisty eight ... Helped the varsity eight take the bronze at the IRA National Championships, locking up the Crimson's second straight top-three national finish ... Contributed to the win at the H-Y Regatta completing a perfect dual season for the varsity eight and Harvard's fifth straight sweep of Yale ... Runner-up to Wisconsin in the grand final of second varsity eight's at the EARC Sprints, contributing to the Rowe Cup win ... Aided in wins with second varsity eight against Northeastern, Navy and Penn, and Princeton ... Runner-up to California at the San Diego Crew Classic.
Junior • 2011
Raced with the varsity eight, contributing to an undefeated dual season and a Sprints championship … Part of the Harvard boat that reached the semifinals of the Ladies' Challenge Plate at the Henley Royal Regatta … Raced to a second-place finish at the IRA National Championships … Contributed to victory over Yale at the 146th Harvard-Yale Regatta … Helped win the Ivy League title, Eastern title and Rowe Cup at the EARC Sprints … Helped defeat Northeastern for the Smith Cup, Penn and Navy for the Adams Cup, Princeton for the Compton Cup, Brown for the Stein Cup and Cornell.
Sophomore • 2010
Rowed in the seven seat of the varsity eight all spring, contributing to the Crimson's 7-1 dual record … Helped Harvard capture its seventh Ladies' Challenge Plate at the Royal Henley Regatta … Helped the Crimson win its 26th Eastern title, 26th Ivy League crown and 30th Rowe Cup at the EARC Sprints … Part of fourth-place varsity finish at IRA National Championships … Contributed to a third consecutive win at the 145th Harvard-Yale Regatta … Aided in fourth straight Compton Cup win against Princeton and MIT … Helped the Crimson win the Adams Cup against Navy and Penn for the 11th straight season … Contributed to the Crimson's 13th straight win over Northeastern for the Smith Cup and a dual win against Cornell.
Freshman • 2009
Member of the freshman eight that went undefeated in dual racing (7-0) … Won a silver medal at Sprints and the IRA National Championships.
Before Harvard
Lettered four times in crew, three times in rugby and twice in track ... Named to the all-state under-21 eight for crew.
Lists fishing and wrestling crocodiles as interests.


text:
Reader Crown Quarto Colour
Paperback, 500 Pages
Price: $123.69
Prints in 3-5 business days
The Smart Frrridge comes with an in-built computer that can be connected to the Internet. It is one of a growing category known as "Internet appliances" that include not only handhelds and smartphones, but also web-enabled versions of typical household appliances. Seeing we have so many things going on in the kitchen we thought, "let's put access to the Internet here". And more importantly, the fridge is really the only thing in the house that is on for 24 hours a day! The Smart Frrridge Reader accompanies the exhibition The Smart Frrridge, Chilly Forecast for Internet Fridge, held at Kunstverein Medienturm in Graz, Austria from 11.12.2010 to 19.02.2011. Curated by Sandro Droschl and Yngve Holen, the exhibition featured the artists Nicolas Ceccaldi, Simon Denny, Yngve Holen, Ilja Karilampi, Morag Keil, AIDS-3D (Keller/Kosmas) and Marlie Mul. Previously published as PDF publication by XYM on www.xym.no, the Reader is now available in the printed format of your... More > choice – delivered straight to your letterbox.< Less
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Product Details
- Copyright
- XYM Print (Standard Copyright License)
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- Published
- March 7, 2012
- Language
- English
- Pages
- 500
- Binding
- Perfect-bound Paperback
- Interior Ink
- Full color
- Weight
- 3.13 lbs.
- Dimensions (inches)
- 7.44 wide x 9.68 tall
- Product ID
- 18942049
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Johnson tackle draws Mancini wrath
Roberto Mancini insisted Glen Johnson's tackle on Joleon Lescott during Wednesday night's Carling Cup semi-final was worse than the one that landed Vincent Kompany with his four-match ban.
The Manchester City manager clashed angrily with Liverpool skipper Steven Gerrard after the 1-0 Carling Cup defeat. Still fuming at Kompany's appeal being turned down yesterday, Mancini feels there was a clear lack of consistency in Johnson not even getting booked for his two-footed challenge.
"It was worse," he said. "This tackle was worse. Gerrard came to me and said I said something. It was not for Johnson. It is for the tackle. This tackle was worse than Vinny's. Everyone can see it."
Copyright (c) PA Sport 2012, All Rights Reserved.News Now - Sport News


text:
Sunday, 7 October 2007
Chicken Yakitori with Udon Noodles in Miso Broth
This will also be my entry to Presto Pasta Nights hosted by Ruth at Once Upon a Feast.
Chicken Yakitori with Udon Noodles in Miso Broth
Chicken Yakitori
200g/7oz skinless chicken thighs or breasts diced
4-5 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp Mirin
2 tbsp Sake
1 tbsp caster sugar
wooden skewers (soaked in water to prevent burning)
I have substituted the sake with rice wine vinegar in the past to save a trip to the shops. Feel free to fiddle with the ratios to your taste.
Over a medium heat warm the soy, Mirin, Sake and sugar. Bring to the boil stirring all the while to prevent the slowly caramelising sauce sticking to the sides of the pan. Reduce the heat and taste. Add additional soy or sugar if necessary for balance. As the sauce reduces the flavours will concentrate so be careful not to add an excess of soy. Allow to simmer for 5 minutes until thickened.
Thread bite sized cubes of chicken breast or thigh onto pre-soaked skewers.
Baste the skewers with the thickened sauce and place on a pre-heated grill plate. Continue to baste and turn the skewers until the chicken is cooked through. The sauce should caramelise and turn the pieces a glossy brown. Be careful not to overcook to ensure you are left with deliciously moist flesh within.
Udon Noodles in Miso Broth
Small bunch gai lan or green of choice
200g/7oz udon noodles
2 tbsp miso paste
3 cups water
1 sheet wakame shredded into strips
While the yakitori is cooking, steam the gail land for a few minutes.
In a medium sized pot add the miso paste and water. Allow to heat through and the paste to dissolve. Add the noodles and allow to cook through on a gentle heat. Just before serving, sprinkle over the wakame.
To serve ladle the noodles and miso broth into bowls. Top with gai lan and serve with yakitori.
24 comments:
- katiez said...
They look very 'moreish' to me - as in 'yes, please, I'll have some more!' (Old joke, sorry - but they really do look good)
- 7 October 2007 at 9:47 am
- Margot at Coffee & Vanilla said...
I must try miso finally. I saw this name several times reading blogs and it made me curious....
Your chicken looks sooo delicious.
- 7 October 2007 at 11:40 am
MY goodness truffle you have done it again! This is great stuff. Your photography gets better and better too!
- 7 October 2007 at 12:21 pm
- Deborah said...
I often like to have appetizers as the main - this looks like the perfect dish to serve as a main!
- 7 October 2007 at 12:32 pm
- Anh said...
Truffle, a dish of comfort indeed! I would eat at least a bowl of that at any time!
- 7 October 2007 at 1:38 pm
- Truffle said...
Katie- That's exactly what I was hoping for! I love the salty, sweet hit- very addictive!
Margot- Thank you! I think miso can be an acquired taste. It's rather salty but you could easily substitute any sort of Asian broth here.
Anon- oh thank you so much! That's a lovely thing to say :)
Deborah- thanks! I'm so glad you agree! Thankfully unlike a lot of the other appetizers I'd happily eat as a main (I'm thinking salt and pepper squid), this is relatively healthy.
Anh- thank you! Sometimes the simple things can be really satisfying.
- 7 October 2007 at 3:09 pm
- Kelly Mahoney said...
Beautiful dish! The color on the chicken is beautiful.
- 7 October 2007 at 5:19 pm
- Kelly-Jane said...
They do looks so moreish, sounds delicious reasing the recipe too :)
- 8 October 2007 at 12:26 am
- Truffle said...
Kelly Mahoney- thanks so much! I'm glad you like it :)
Kelly-Jane - thanks! It's also wonderfully simple and quick which is an added bonus!
- 8 October 2007 at 12:35 am
- Serenity Later said...
i have to agree with katiez on her understanding of moreish, i too thought it meant "oh yes i'll have some more thanks!"
As usual this is really lovely Truffle and while the noodle broth is a nice nourishing accompaniment (i loved your description of the greens as virtuous!) the yakitori skewers are the things us carnivores hanker for. Great writing & great pix!
- 8 October 2007 at 1:10 am
- Big Boys Oven said...
Oh such a lovely dish.... yakitori and udon...a perfect partnership!
- 8 October 2007 at 1:30 am
- Truffle said...
Serenity Later- Thank you! That's the meaning I had in mind too. Silly I know!
Have to keep those carnivorous tastes satisfied and this definitely does the trick!
Big boys oven- I'm quite sure it would be frowned up in traditional Japanese circles but I think it works beautifully. Thanks so much!
- 8 October 2007 at 2:57 am
- Amanda at Little Foodies said...
This looks fantastic Truffle. Great writing as always and pics too.
p.s. I'd always order gyoza too!
- 8 October 2007 at 1:28 pm
- Sylvia said...
Triffle I love the color of this dish. It was a long time that I don't eat.You make my mouth watering...Bad girl ...;-)
- 8 October 2007 at 6:17 pm
- Truffle said...
Amanda - thank you! Your lovely comments are greatly appreciated. Nice to know you're a fellow gyoza lover :)
Sylvia - thanks very much!
- 9 October 2007 at 3:36 am
- Belinda said...
Oh, definitely main dish potential with these delightful Yakitori skewers, I agree! They look great, and along with the noodles in miso broth, a perfect combination. :-)
- 9 October 2007 at 4:05 pm
- neil said...
Isn't it so great when you get to order and EVERYTHING you love comes out. Gyoza lover here too, though somehow I've missed the charms of yakitori chicken, will definitely have to address that as yours look wonderful.
- 9 October 2007 at 8:11 pm
- Truffle said...
Belinda - thank you! I love them together because it's a balanced and low fat meal too, although you'd never guess from the taste!
neil - thanks so much Neil! I'm glad it tempts you. Gyoza are fabulous, aren't they? Very difficult to pass up.
- 10 October 2007 at 12:57 am
- The Cooking Ninja said...
ooh...I love Chicken Yakitori and I love udon noodles. Haven't had these for ages.
- 10 October 2007 at 2:51 pm
- stickyfingers said...
Like Anh, that's my kind of comfort food too. Yummo! Miso can be so addictive, especially on eggplant or tofu Dengaku - smothered in miso, mirin & sake, then baked or Barbecued...mmmhmm.
- 10 October 2007 at 5:23 pm
- Truffle said...
The Cooking Ninja - We have similar tastes! Udon has recently become a bit of a staple for me because it's so quick to prepare and filling too!
stickyfingers - those eggplant and tofu dishes sound wonderful!
- 10 October 2007 at 10:53 pm
- Ruth Daniels said...
What a perfectly gorgeous addition to Presto Pasta Nights. Thanks for sharing.
- 11 October 2007 at 2:58 am
- Susan said...
Ooh, your description of this dish is simply mouth-watering, and it looks fabulous!
- 11 October 2007 at 5:50 pm
- Truffle said...
Ruth - thanks for taking the time to host such a great event! I look forward to the round up :)
Susan - thanks very much! I think the flavours work really well together and fortunately it requires minimal skill to make which is always a bonus for quick mid-week dinners.
- 11 October 2007 at 5:58 pm


text:
audioaddict necesitaba un nuevo diseño de logotipo y lanzó un concurso de diseño en 99designs.
Un ganador ha sido elegido entre 151 diseños de 45 diseñadores freelance.
Audio Addiction
Audio Addiction is a group of a few high end audio professionals looking to disseminate information products on the internet.
We have vast knowledge in all areas of high end audio; home audio, car audio, and professional audio. It is our goal to educate our target audience in the very topics they wish to master. There is a lot of confusion online on these subjects, and we wish to produce a comprehensive range of ebooks, cd & dvd audio programs and seminars to teach them what they need to achieve their goals.
Our target audience consists of early 30 to mid 50 year old males who are college educated professionals and entrepreneurs, who earn between $50,000 per year to high six figure salaries.
These males are audio enthusiasts and audiophiles who are equipment junkies, but are also really passionate about listening to music. Great audio to them is like a drug, literally. They are obsessed with constantly improving their systems, a never ending journey.
Most of these men are in committed relationships or married, and typically need approval from their significant other on budget constraints and aesthetics.
The goal behind our marketing is to provide an intimate 1 on 1 relationship with each individual customer. We want to be seen as a premier authority on all audiophile related topics, yet we do not want to convey the image of a large corporate entity.
The logo must spell out the words "Audio Addiction", and you are free to choose whatever fonts (and font sizes) and combination of upper and lower case letters to achieve this. Please avoid feminine colors.
The logo should stand out on white and black backgrounds, such as those on webpages/ebooks or on the cover of a binder.
The logo should also stand out and not be confused with Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).
The logo may convey a musical connotation, possibly through using musical notes or audio equipment, speakers, etc. This is not a requirement but might help.
Descubre cómo funciona un concurso de diseño u obtén más información sobre nuestros servicios de diseño de logo.


text:
Rob Glover necesitaba un nuevo diseño de impreso o envases y lanzó un concurso de diseño en 99designs.
Un ganador ha sido elegido entre 94 diseños de 26 diseñadores freelance.
Southwest Connects
SW Connects Magazine is a lead generation company that is geared toward serving small business owners advertising needs in the East Valley of Phoenix Arizona. The magazine provides the community local business listings, local community information, and coupons for many of businesses based in the East Valley of Phoenix. We are a company that is based on connecting the services and products to the people who consume them. SWConnects.com will be a content driven website that will help consumers become more informative shoppers and the website will give the consumer a large selection of businesses to choose. The focus of our business is to increase the usage of our publication by making the most attractive directory and the most functional by providing coupon savings.
We are consumer based business that is looking to increase our end user base. The print publication are currently used primarily by women who are homeowners, people with emergency service (like plumbing, towing, flood, etc), and coupon shoppers. The focus of our business is to increase the usage of our publication by making the most attractive directory and the most functional. We are looking to appeal to women sensibilities in the look and feel of the magazine.
Title "Chandler & Gilbert and surrounding communities"
The magazine will be 6.875 inches width by 9 inches in height.
You will have to place an open spot for banner advertisement that will be 6.375 inches from the top of the magazine towards the bottom.
The banner ads will extend from the left to the right edge of the publication.
The banner ads will be 1.375 inches in height.
There will be two banners ads 3.25 inches in width by 1.375 inches in height.
Provide the Southwest Connects logo that will be attached to the file.
Photos that are used or art that is created needs to reflect the East Valley Phoenix Arizona area.
You will need to create highlighted featured boxes that include: Green Pages, Community Guide, Restaurant Guide, and Coupons
Provide website http://www.swconnects.com address.
The prior layout is attached. Use your own vision to create the cover. The layout is provided to see last year's placement and size requirements.
Do not go too close to the edges of the cover. Space needs to be left for binding the magazine.