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What's worse than getting kids to brush their teeth on Monday?
Having to do it all over again on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday!
Just about every parent goes through the daily brushing battle, but very soon – and perhaps with your help – getting kids to brush their teeth – twice a day – everyday – is going to be fun and easy thanks to the two young dads who invented the Grush.
What is the Grush?!?
Grush is short for Gaming Toothbrush.
The Grush is a high-quality toothbrush that doubles as a motion-sensing gaming wand. It comes with two replacement brushing heads, a device holder, and two interactive, age-appropriate and instructional brushing games.
Grush transforms the brushing chore into a fun and interactive game!
When kids use the Grush to brush their teeth, it wirelessly transmits information to any of your Android or iOS devices.
The motion-sensing brush allows kids to play a Grush mobile game, which guides their brushing and lets you track the results. You can even share this information with your child's dentist!
See How the Grush Works!
Watch the video by the two smart dads – Dr. Yong-Jing Wang and Ethan Daniel Schur, who co-founded Grush, Inc., the award-winning San Francisco-based start-up dedicated to improving the oral health of children through innovative technology.
In addition to seeing how the Grush works, if you order the Grush by May 17th, you'll have the opportunity to be a part of Grush, Inc. and be among the first to own the Grush by November 2014!
What are the benefits?
Your kids will not only be first on your block who'll want to brush their teeth; they'll think you're super cool!
This sponsored post is brought to you by Grush and coordinated by Wendy's Bloggers.

subset: commoncrawl


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Please take a tour of the property we just listed at 306 11724 225TH ST in Maple Ridge.
It's a Buyer's Dream AND it's affordable. Why would you rent when you can own this top floor end unit with a southern exposure & river view from the master bedroom, living room & its large private patio. Freshly painted inside & with new carpets, you can just move in and enjoy your new life in your own home. Your friends will love it too. BONUS: this home is just minutes from shopping, restaurants, recreation, West Coast Express & the new Chances Casino. This home is going to be a great buy for someone. Should that be you! Don't miss this great opportunity. Rentals are capped at 1. Pet restrictions: 1 dog or 2 cats allowed.


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I wanted to search discussions on mailing lists and view conversations. I didn't want to use some webinterface because that wouldn't allow me to search quickly and offline. So making my mail client aware of these emails seemed to be the way to go. Fortunately, the GNOME mailinglists are mbox archived. So you download the entire traffic in a standardised mbox.
But how to properly get this into your email clients then? I think Thunderbird can import mbox natively. But I wanted to access it from other clients, too, so I needed to make my server aware of these emails. Of course, I configured my mailserver to use maildir, so some conversion was needed.
I will present my experiences dealing with this problem. If you want to do similar things, or even only want to import the mbox directly, this post might be for you.
The archives
First, we need to get all the archives. As I had to deal with a couple of mailinglists and more than a couple of month, I couldn't be arsed to click every single mbox file manually.
The following script scrapes the mailman page. It makes use of the interesting Splinter library, basically a wrapper around selenium and other browsers for Python.
#!/usr/bin/env python import getpass from subprocess import Popen, list2cmdline import sys import splinter def fill_password(b, username=None, password=None): if not username: username = getpass.getpass('username: ') if not password: password = getpass.getpass('password: ') b.fill('username', username) b.fill('password', password) b.find_by_name('submit').click() def main(url, username=None): b = splinter.Browser() try: #url = 'https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/private/board-list/' b.visit(url) if 'Password' in b.html: fill_password(b, username=username) links = [l['href'] for l in b.find_link_by_partial_text('Text')] cookie = b.driver.get_cookies()[0] cookie_name = cookie['name'] cookie_value = cookie['value'] cookie_str = "Cookie: {name}={value}".format(name=cookie_name, value=cookie_value) wget_cookie_arg = '--header={0}'.format(cookie_str) #print wget_cookie_arg b.quit() for link in links: #print link cmd = ['wget', wget_cookie_arg, link] print list2cmdline(cmd) # pipe that to "parallel -j 8" except: b.quit() if __name__ == '__main__': site = sys.argv[1] user = sys.argv[2] if site.startswith('http'): url=site else: url = 'https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/private/{0}'.format(site) main(username=user, url=url)
You can download the thing, too.
I use splinter because handling cookies is not fun as well as parsing the web page. So I just use whatever is most convenient for me, I wanted to get things done, after all. The script will print a line for each link it found, nicely prefixed with wget
and its necessary arguments for the authorization cookie. You can pipe that to sh
but if you want to download many month, you want to do it in parallel. And fortunately, there is an app for that!
Conversion to maildir
After having received the mboxes, it turned out to be a good idea nonetheless to convert to maildir; if only to extract properly formatted mails only and remove duplicates.
I came around mb2md-3.20.pl from 2004 quite soon, but it is broken. It cannot parse the mboxes I have properly. It will create broken mails with header lingering around as it seems to be unable to detect the beginning of new mails reliably. It took me a good while to find the problem though. So again, be advised, do not use mb2md 3.20.
As I use mutt myself I found this blog article promising. It uses mutt to create a mbox out of a maildir. I wanted it the other way round, so after a few trial and errors, I figured that the following would do what I wanted:
mutt -f mymbox -e 'set mbox_type=maildir; set confirmcreate=no; set delete=no; push "T.*;s/tmp/mymuttmaildir"'
where "mymbox
" is your source file and "/tmp/mymuttmaildir
" the target directory.
This is a bit lame right? We want to have parameters, because we want to do some batch processing on many archive mboxes.
The problem is, though, that the parameters are very deep inside the quotes. So just doing something like
mutt -f $source -e 'set mbox_type=maildir; set confirmcreate=no; set delete=no; push "T.*;s$target"'
wouldn't work, because the $target would be interpreted as a raw string due to the single quotes. And I couldn't find a way to make it work so I decided to make it work with the language that I like the most: Python. So an hour or so later I came up with the following which works (kinda):
import os import subprocess source = os.environ['source'] destination = os.environ['destination'] conf = 'set mbox_type=maildir; set confirmcreate=no; set delete=no; push "T.*;s{0}"'.format(destination) cmd = ['mutt', '-f', source, '-e', conf] subprocess.call(cmd)
But well, I shouldn't become productive just yet by doing real work. Mutt apparently expects a terminal. It would just prompt me with "No recipients were specified.".
So alright, this unfortunately wasn't what I wanted. I you don't need batch processing though, you might very well go with mutt doing your mbox to maildir conversion (or vice versa).
Damnit, another two hours or more wasted on that. I was at the point of just doing the conversion myself. Shouldn't be too hard after all, right? While researching I found that Python's stdlib has some email related functions *yay*. Some dude on the web wrote something close to what I needed. I beefed it up a very little bit and landed with the following:
#!/usr/bin/env python # http://www.hackvalue.nl/en/article/109/migrating%20from%20mbox%20to%20maildir import datetime import email import email.Errors import mailbox import os import sys import time def msgfactory(fp): try: return email.message_from_file(fp) except email.Errors.MessageParseError: # Don't return None since that will # stop the mailbox iterator return '' dirname = sys.argv[1] inbox = sys.argv[2] fp = open(inbox, 'rb') mbox = mailbox.UnixMailbox(fp, msgfactory) try: storedir = os.mkdir(dirname, 0750) os.mkdir(dirname + "/new", 0750) os.mkdir(dirname + "/cur", 0750) except: pass count = 0 for mail in mbox: count+=1 #hammertime = time.time() # mail.get('Date', time.time()) hammertime = datetime.datetime(*email.utils.parsedate(mail.get('Date',''))[:7]).strftime('%s') hostname = 'mb2mdpy' filename = dirname + "/cur/%s%d.%s:2,S" % (hammertime, count, hostname) mail_file = open(filename, 'w+') mail_file.write(mail.as_string()) print "Processed {0} mails".format(count)
And it seemed to work well! It recovered many more emails than the Perl script (hehe) but the generated maildir wouldn't work with my IMAP server. I was confused. The mutt maildirs worked like charm and I couldn't see any difference to mine.
I scp
ed the file onto my .maildir/
on my server, which takes quite a while because scp
isn't all too quick when it comes to many small files. Anyway, it wouldn't necessarily work for some reason which is way beyond me. Eventually I straced
the IMAP server and figured that it was desperately looking for a tmp/
folder. Funnily enough, it didn't need that for other maildirs to work. Anyway: Lesson learnt: If your dovecot
doesn't play well with your maildir and you have no clue how to make it log more verbosely, check whether you need a tmp/
But I didn't know that so I investigated a bit more and I found another PERL script which converted the emails fine, too. For some reason it put my mails in ".new/
" and not in ".cur/
", which the other tools did so far. Also, it would leave the messages as unread which I don't like.
Fortunately, one (more or less) only needs to rename the files in a maildir to end in S
for "seen". While this sounds like a simple
for f in maildir/cur/*; do mv ${f} ${f}:2,S
it's not so easy anymore when you have to move the directory as well. But that's easily being worked around by shuffling the directories around.
Another, more annoying problem with that is "Argument list too long" when you are dealing with a lot of files. So a solution must involve "find
" and might look something like this: find ${CUR} -type f -print0 | xargs -i -0 mv '{}' '{}':2,S
There was, however, a very annoying issue left: Duplicates. I haven't investigated where the duplicates came from but it didn't matter to me as I didn't want duplicates even if the downloaded mbox archive contained them. And in my case, I'm quite confident that the mboxes are messed up. So I wanted to get rid of duplicates anyway and decided to use a hash function on the file content to determine whether two file are the same or not. I used sha1sum
like this:
$ find maildir/.board-list/ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sha1sum | head c6967e7572319f3d37fb035d5a4a16d56f680c59 maildir/.board-list/cur/1342797208.000031.mbox:2, 2ea005ec0e7676093e2f488c9f8e5388582ee7fb maildir/.board-list/cur/1342797281.000242.mbox:2, a4dc289a8e3ebdc6717d8b1aeb88959cb2959ece maildir/.board-list/cur/1342797215.000265.mbox:2, 39bf0ebd3fd8f5658af2857f3c11b727e54e790a maildir/.board-list/cur/1342797210.000296.mbox:2, eea1965032cf95e47eba37561f66de97b9f99592 maildir/.board-list/cur/1342797281.000114.mbox:2,
and if there were two files with the same hash, I would delete one of them. Probably like so:
#!/usr/bin/env python import os import sys hashes = [] for line in sys.stdin.readlines(): hash, fname = line.split() if hash in hashes: os.unlink(fname) else: hashes.append(hash)
But it turns out that the following snippet works, too:
find /tmp/maildir/ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sha1sum | sort | uniq -d -w 40 | awk '{print $2}' | xargs rm
So it'll check the files for the same contents via a sha1sum. In order to make uniq
detect equal lines, we need to give it sorted input. Hence the sort
. We cannot, however, check the whole lines for equality as the filename will show up in the line and it will of course be different. So we only compare the size of the hex representation of the hash, in this case 40 bytes. If we found such a duplicate hash, we cut off the hash, take the filename, which is the remainder of the line, and delete the file.
Phew. What a trip so far. Let's put it all together:
The final thing
LIST=board-list umask 077 DESTBASE=/tmp/perfectmdir LISTBASE=${DESTBASE}/.${LIST} CUR=${LISTBASE}/cur NEW=${LISTBASE}/new TMP=${LISTBASE}/tmp mkdir -p ${CUR} mkdir -p ${NEW} mkdir -p ${TMP} for f in /tmp/${LIST}/*; do /tmp/perfect_maildir.pl ${LISTBASE} < ${f} ; done mv ${CUR} ${CUR}.tmp mv ${NEW} ${CUR} mv ${CUR}.tmp ${NEW} find ${CUR} -type f -print0 | xargs -i -0 mv '{}' '{}':2,S find ${CUR} -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sha1sum | sort | uniq -d -w 40 | awk '{print $2}' | xargs rm
And that's handling email in 2012…


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Jackson began back in the late 1970s, when heavy music experienced a flamboyant and virtuosic resurgence in popularity and a small Southern California guitar repair shop became the epicenter of a new level of shred-approved excellence. Ever since then, Jackson guitars have been universally lauded as the metal guitars; the shred machines—highly original high-performance instruments of distinctive style and formidable substance. From metal's chart-topping peaks to its darkest recesses, for discerning guitarists all over the globe, Jackson is the only way to go.
To make a long story short, a new generation of talented and extravagant young guitarists who came of age in the burgeoning MTV era of the late '70s and early '80s needed more—in fact, demanded more—from their instruments. A small staff of highly skilled craftsmen answered the call with a new breed of high-performance custom guitars bearing Jackson's own name on their headstocks.
At the time, these craftsmen were just starting to taste success under the banner of Charvel's Guitar Repair, an instrument hot-rodding shop in Glendora, Calif., that had been bought in November 1978 from their employer of 14 months, Wayne Charvel. Jackson-built Charvel guitars debuted in summer 1979 and quickly became the axes of choice for the flamboyant new breed of Sunset Strip guitar heroes whose loud, heavy bands were then being signed left and right by major record labels.
Randy Rhoads
A relatively unknown but phenomenally talented young guitarist named Randy Rhoads contacted Jackson in late 1980. Following a stint with L.A. metal outfit Quiet Riot, Rhoads had just joined former Black Sabbath vocalist Ozzy Osbourne's new band and wanted to meet about designing a distinctive new guitar.
Rhoads met Jackson designers just before Christmas that year, and they quickly designed the guitar together in the "original" Jackson way—by literally sketching it on a paper napkin. The resulting instrument, dubbed the Concorde for its angularly futuristic shape (and the aircraft on which Rhoads had returned to the United States from a U.K. tour with Osbourne), was a sleek white guitar with an offset V-shape, neck-through-body construction and, for the first time, the name "Jackson" on the headstock.
Although the Concorde truly was the first Jackson guitar and there are many photos of Rhoads playing it, it was eventually rejected in favor of a second version that boasted many features suggested by Rhoads himself. Sadly, due to Rhoads' tragic and untimely death in March 1982, this guitar was only photographed in his hands a few times. That said, the second model became the legend—the very first guitar known and revered worldwide as the Jackson Rhoads.
From the early '80s on, heavy metal history would be written with Jackson guitars, staking their claim as a wilder, high-performance alternative to their more traditional Charvel® cousins. Jackson's talented, often demented henchmen quickly created their own renaissance in metal guitar design with a slew of highly original models, and the popularity of Jackson guitars exploded in the early and mid 1980s.
Legendary and enduring Jackson models including the Kelly™, King V™, Double Rhoads, Soloist™, bolt-on neck Dinky™, and Concert™ Bass all appeared during this fertile period, joined later in the decade by the equally successful PC1 (based on Jackson's signature model for Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen) and Jackson's most outlandish body design, the devilishly X-shaped Warrior™.
Metal music continued a vigorous and highly diverse evolution on both sides of the Atlantic during the '80s and '90s, and Jackson melded seamlessly with each and every sonic mutation—thrash metal, speed metal, death metal, the NWOBHM, goth, industrial, nu metal, skate metal, grunge, metalcore, rap metal and countless others.
Recent years have seen Jackson continuing to flourish, with all of the company's most famous models—custom and production series alike—enjoying great success. Jackson signature instruments have also come into their own, with magnificent models bearing top metal names such as Chris Broderick (Megadeth), Corey Beaulieu (Trivium), David Ellefson (Megadeth), Phil Collen (Def Leppard), Mark Morton, Phil Demmel (Machine Head), Chris Beattie (Hatebreed), Adrian Smith (Iron Maiden) and others. Further, the Jackson Custom Shop remains the longest-operating true custom shop in the United States, with many members of its original staff still there and still doing what they do best—providing axe-wielding metallurgists worldwide with world-class high-performance instruments that have no equal.
And so, in keeping with its breathtaking three-decade heritage of excellence, the Jackson legend continues to thrive and grow—without fear or compromise.


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Pre-operative DTI and probabilisitic tractography in four patients with deep brain stimulation for chronic pain.
Owen SLF., Heath J., Kringelbach M., Green AL., Pereira EAC., Jenkinson N., Jegan T., Stein JF., Aziz TZ.
This study aimed to examine, using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), differences in electrode placement in four patients undergoing deep brain stimulation for chronic neuropathic pain of varying aetiology. A pre-operative DTI was obtained for each patient, who was then implanted with deep brain stimulation electrodes in the periventricular/periaqueductal grey area with good pain relief. Using seeds from the postoperative MRI scan, probabilistic tractography was performed from the pre-operative DTI.


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In this post Roman from How this Website Makes Money shares some suggestions on how to create urgency to get past bloggers block.
Sunday morning. You have everything ready. Hot coffee on your right side, a crisp bagel on your left, computer on and ready.
You have the whole day to write. All week the post has been forming in your head and now all you have to do is write it down. Word processor opens, fingers posed over keyboard. Go.
A few minutes pass and nothing happens. The page remains blank. The post that was so clear in your head becomes fuzzy. What is the point of it again? How was it going to start?
Ten minutes have passed and the word processor is gone – you are now doing your online banking. Then you check the news, read an email from grandmother, and finally you scan your favourite blog for tips on how to write good posts.
Half the day gone and you have not started to write.
The blank page is a major stumbling block for most writers. Including me. And the worst part is I know that if I just start writing and fill the page with words then my writing will begin roll. It is just a matter of getting past the blank page and writing the first few paragraphs.
Over the last couple years I have come up with some techniques to get past the blank page. The techniques work on the principle of creating urgency. Not an illusionary sense of urgency – real urgency. I create a situation in which I need to get words on the page or else something bad happens.
Here are a few suggests that you can use to create urgency and force yourself past the blank page.
Hold It In Just A Little Bit Longer
The worst thing that can happen when you are writing and on a roll is to be interrupted by bodily needs. Your rhythm and train of thought can be lost by the ritual – walk, do, flush, wash, sit. To avoid this you usually go to the bathroom before you start writing. But if you want to conquer the blank page this is a mistake.
To create urgency drink two large glasses of water. Wait a half hour or until you feel a slight tinge in the bladder. Sit down at your computer and promise yourself that you will not go to the bathroom until you have written at least one page.
At first you will stare at the blank page, but as soon as the tinge turns into a pinch you will start writing. And as more time passes you will write faster and faster. This method creates a direct relationship between time and urgency – the more time that passes the greater the urgency.
With this method you won't be doing your best writing, but that is not the point. The point is to get past the blank page. A bloated bladder will force you to write. After you return relieved you can peacefully recheck your work and continue writing.
The Evil Eye At The Mom and Pops Coffee Shop
It has been said that J.K Rowling wrote parts of Harry Potter at Starbucks. Not hard to believe – at Starbucks you see lots of people with their laptops. Starbucks provides a nice cozy place to write away from the distractions of home. The atmosphere is pleasant and the employees think nothing if you spend half a day there sipping a Short no sugar, no cream, coffee of the day.
But that is also the problem with Starbucks – no urgency. Nobody cares if you sit there all afternoon staring at a blank screen.
You need to go to a small mom and pops coffee shop, preferably while the owner is working behind the counter. Order a coffee and sit down at one of the three tables in the shop. Open your laptop and promise yourself to write one page before you leave.
Bringing out your laptop you will receive your first sour look from the owner. The owner does not like you. For her the faster a customer drinks their coffee and leaves the better – people who occupy a table for hours sipping a single coffee are bad for business.
After half an hour you will begin to feel the evil eye – this is good. Hopefully all the other tables are occupied and people are forced to hover around with no place to site. At this point the owner will detest you. At any time she might come to your table and ask you to leave – a confrontation you desperately want to avoid.
In this situation is it impossible to obliviously sit motionless in front of your laptop. This is urgency creation at its finest. You will be writing like mad to get the hell out of there.
First Thing In The Morning
When somebody says they will do something 'the first thing in morning' they are lying. Morning begins when you open your eyes. The first thing you do is get out of bed, go to the bathroom, have a shower, coffee and get dressed. It is after all these things are done that you begin to do the 'first thing in the morning' tasks.
If you want to get past the blank page then do not lie about 'first thing in the morning'. Do your writing first thing in the morning. Open your eyes and go directly to the computer. Regardless if you are in the nude or sporting a nightcap, go directly to the computer.
You are not in your best form – your brain is still sleeping. But with little crust chunks in your eyes and the taste of plaque on your teeth you will be typing away so that you can do all the second thing in the morning stuff.
Smoking Can Cause Writing
If you have an addiction you are in luck. Addictions make it easy to create urgency. Smoking is a great example.
Lets say you are sitting at home watching TV. The urge comes – you want a cigarette. You could simply light one up and fill your blood with nicotine, but why throw away this great writing opportunity. Instead of lighting the cigarette, sit down at the computer and place the cigarette in front of you. Promise yourself that you will not light it until you have written a page.
People who are otherwise rational and respectable will stand in the freezing cold behind a dumpster for a cigarette. Addictions are powerful, you need to harness that power to get past the blank page. Your body will be begging you to light that cigarette. Tell your body – yes you can have it as soon as I finish writing a page. Every cell in your body will be helping you write that page. Like an old teletype machine, words will start to appear on the screen.
Don't smoke? No problem, I am sure you have some other addiction. Use its power to create the urgency you need to fight the blank page.
Create Your Own Urgency
These are just some techniques you can use to create urgency. Besides situations you can create yourself there are also those that come unexpectedly. You need to learn to spot them and take advantage.
A good example is the method I used to start writing this post. A few weeks ago I woke up with the flu, sore throat, fever, and runny nose – I felt like crap. All I wanted was to have hot tea and lay wrapped up in my bed covers mumbling incoherently.
Although I was far from being mentally healthy, I did not miss this rare opportunity to create urgency and triumph over a blank page. I wrapped a blanket around myself and sat down at the computer. "I promise to write at least one page before I lay down, put a bag of ice on my head, and drink my tea."


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Ankle Tie Stiletto Sandal
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Dear Dave,
My husband and I have been following your plan, and we're debt-free. Recently he invited his sister, her husband and their two kids to live with us. His brother-in-law recently lost his job, and he did this without talking to me first.
I agreed after the fact, but do you think we need a roommate agreement or some kind of understanding while they stay with us? They have about $70,000 in debt, and they haven't been very responsible with their money.
Dear Amanda,
I've got to tell you there's zero chance that my wife or I would invite someone to live in our home without the other's knowledge and agreement. Pulling a stunt like that is just plain wrong, and you two need to get on the same page long before you try to move these people into your house.
Now, once you've straightened things out between the two of you, and if you're both in agreement, you need to understand that your purpose is to help these folks get back on their feet. Your home is not their home, and this is not an offer for them to stay as long as they like.
You're going to have to ensure that they're taking the steps necessary to straighten out their lives. This means working, and it means they start managing their money by living on a budget.
Don't charge them rent, because the "rent" will be that they work and go over their finances with you. Plus, you put a limit on the time they're going to spend with you.
Regardless of what happens, they're out and back on their own by a certain, specific date.
I wouldn't suggest allowing $70,000 worth of time for them to get back on their feet. I'm thinking maybe four to six months, but don't let this thing drag on with no definitive end in sight. That will only cause trouble and hard feelings down the road. You guys might be able to pull this off — and keep the relationships intact — if you set fair and loving expectations on the front end.
Is converting to a Roth smart?
Dear Dave,
I'm following your plan, and I've just completed Baby Step 3. I've got my emergency fund of three to six months of expenses in place, and I've paid off all my debts, except for the house, so I'm ready to tackle investing. I currently have $100,000 in a traditional IRA. Should I convert this to a Roth IRA?
Dear Levi,
You'll have to pay taxes on the amount you withdraw, and that will amount to roughly a fourth of what you roll from a traditional IRA to a Roth IRA. If you move $100,000, it will cost you about $25,000 in taxes.
If you have that kind of money saved above your emergency fund, and separate from retirement savings, then yes, I'd convert to a Roth IRA. Don't cash out your retirement or dip into your emergency fund. And please, please don't run out and borrow money to make it happen.
The traditional IRA is growing on a tax-deferred basis, while the Roth IRA would grow tax-free. So, if you can pay the taxes out of pocket, I say go for it.
• Follow Dave Ramsey here.


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More properties sell for over the asking price
One in eight (13%) properties sold for more than the original asking price in August – the highest recorded since November 2015.
Other posts:
I focus solely on the University rental market
For years investors have built up student rentals because of the constant supply and demand, but things are changing. There will be 24% fewer students heading to London this term, which is why diversification, understanding local markets and having the capital to acquire properties when others aren't is imperative to progress your portfolio.
Rents fall in London and the South East due to the pandemic
The pandemic has seen the cost of renting fall by -7.9% in London and -7.7% in the South East between March and September.
The typical month rent is now £1,519 in London and £1,061 in the South East, analysis shows. This is a prime example of why APAC focuses on low income, stable rental markets. Every buy to let we acquire, we look at: How much is it? How long will the tenants be there? What is the annual ROI?
Autumn Budget cancelled
The Autumn Budget has been cancelled due to the uncertainty caused by the pandemic. Typically the Budget outlines long-term measures for the economy and happens around November.
Industry pledge will support home movers
The Home Buying and Selling Group and Law Society have produced an industry pledge, which indicates some of the tasks buyers and sellers can currently perform.
Knowing at an early stage for example that a transaction needs certain fire safety certificates can avoid wasted effort.
For sellers, the pledge recommends they instruct a property solicitor on the day they market their property and fill in the property information forms as soon as possible.
For buyers, it is recommended that they secure a mortgage agreement in principle and ensure the money they need to complete the sale is readily available.
NHBC launches first apprenticeships
NHBC, the warranty and insurance provider for new homes, has launched its first ever house building apprenticeship scheme. The company has become an Education and Skills Funding Agency-approved provider of apprenticeships.
NHBC has welcomed the first cohort to its Construction Site Supervisor (CSS) apprenticeship programme.
Million pound homes outperform the rest of the market
Sales activity in the £1m+ property market is storming ahead according to Rightmove, as wealthier buyers prioritise space and leafier locations
Houses over £1m are selling 18 days faster than this time last year – the fastest pace since 2014.
Mini house buying boom leads to highest ever monthly price
According to the latest Halifax House Price Index the average price of a home was £241,604 last month, 1.7% higher than June's £237,834. Prices are 3.8% higher than July 2019.
Will house prices fall?
This will not last, commentators say, and over the coming months, house prices will inevitably fall on average, according to the government's official forecaster, the Office for Budget Responsibility.
It has predicted falls of anything between 2% this year, to 22% by the later half of next year.
Its central forecast is an 11% fall by the end of 2021 and flatlining thereafter.
Is now the time to buy?
In my opinion, we are going through a very strong sellers market. To anyone that is currently buying, I hope you view it as long term.
Mortgage Holidays
The Government announced that mortgage payment holidays will not affect future lending decision, but reading yesterdays papers, my understanding now is that it might. This further enhances our business model and investing into property without the requirements to obtain lending.
Getting started
Identifying your property location for buy to let is as important as completing the purchase. If you do not understand the location, how can you understand the market?
First time buyers
Arguably the forgotten generation, getting on the property ladder is becoming harder and not a position I envy any one in. Our world has changed, I think the first time buyers mortgage market needs a shake up, the salary to property price ratio is getting wider and wider and could create a generation of renters.
APAC Strategy to overcome down markets
Because we are adaptable and building portfolios, downward trends play directly into our hands. It offers us the opportunity to acquire property below market value, purchase from real sellers who need to sell and as such means we can negotiate considerable reductions.
APAC was created to be resilient through both bull and bear market cycles, the development arm and the buy to let arm balance one another out, creating short- and longer-term options for us. We will never need to panic sell.
HMO Property
COVID 19 is creating a shift in the way we live our lives, is the HMO sector going to be hit the hardest long term?
There are so many questions and opinions on this subject, I feel that the need for independence and the segregation could re ignite the studio apartment market. Generally speaking, its good value for money and usually conveniently located to high density areas of work.
Are we on course for …
The widely anticipated COVID 19 recession. Unfortunately, we live in a world where winners and losers are decided by recessions. Despite the negative connotations towards recessions, its actually a magnificent time to be cash rich, brave and decisive.
From our stand point, a recession just offers us better value – more buying opportunities and greater yields. All markets come back, generally speaking, record highs usually follow recessions. The age old adage of buying low and selling high.
Stamp Duty Holiday –
Well the chancellor has really pushed the boat out in order to drive the property market, is it a false economy or a stroke of genius…. I guess we wont know until the middle of 2021, but I can see from APAC's prospective, activity next year stamp duty or no stamp duty, it will be a buying frenzy when the over leveraged need to sell.


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Article Highlights:
Information Reporting
IRS Matching
List of Documents
To ensure individuals properly report all their income, the IRS has an ever-expanding series of information-reporting forms used to advise you and the IRS of your wages, retirement plan income, Social Security benefits, health insurance premium subsidies, stock sales, investment income, etc., for each tax year. The issuers of most of these forms have until January 31 following the year to which they apply to mail them to you or make them available to you online, so they should arrive in your hands soon thereafter. These forms are not only sent to you but are also provided to the IRS and state taxing agencies, when applicable. The IRS and states use them to verify that you are properly preparing your tax return(s). If you fail to correctly account for the information, you can expect to hear from the IRS or your state tax department in a year or so. Here is a rundown on the most frequently encountered of these documents:
W-2 – A form almost everyone is familiar with. It includes the wages from your employer for the year along with withholdings and other information that is crucial in preparing your return. You should receive a W-2 from each employer you had during the year.
1099-INT – This form is used by the payers of interest income to report the amount of interest you earned from various sources throughout the year. If the interest earned is less than $10, the payer may not issue the form, but the interest must still be included in your interest income. Note: If you paid foreign taxes on the interest income, that tax will be reported on the 1099-INT.
1099-DIV – This form is used to report dividend income you earned from various sources throughout the year. If a brokerage firm is holding your stock portfolio, it may use a substitute form, which will likely include payments from all the types of 1099s that it needs to issue. Note: If you paid foreign taxes on the dividend income, that tax will be reported on the 1099-DIV.
1099-B – If you sold stocks during the year, you will receive a 1099-B form showing the gross proceeds of sales from stock transactions. If you have a brokerage account, most brokers use a substitute form showing the details of all your sales for the year.
Special note about 1099s from brokers: In some cases, a brokerage firm may receive a time extension from the IRS to file its 1099s because it needs information from certain mutual funds to properly complete the 1099s. So, if you don't receive your 1099s from your broker shortly after Jan. 31, check with your broker for the anticipated date when the 1099s will be available. If you have an online account, you may be able to download and print the forms, instead of waiting for them to arrive in the postal service mail.
1099-S – If you sold your home during the year, you may receive a Form 1099-S showing the sales price. You may have received this form when the escrow closed, rather than getting it in the mail after the year's end. In either case, the closing escrow statement is also needed for the sales expenses and prorations.
SSA-1099 – If you received Social Security income during 2023, you will be receiving a Form SSA-1099 (RRB-1099 for railroad retirement) reporting your benefits for the year and the amount of Medicare insurance paid.
1099-R – If you received a pension or other retirement plan benefits, including IRA distributions, you will receive a 1099-R showing the year's total amount and generally also the taxable portion, any tax that was withheld, and other information needed to prepare your tax return.
1098 – If you have a home loan, the lender will provide you with a Form 1098 showing the amount of interest paid on the loan for the year.
1098-C – Form 1098-C provides the information needed to determine the amount of a charitable contribution that is allowed for a motor vehicle, boat or airplane donated to charity.
1098-E – Form 1098-E shows the amount of student loan interest you paid during the year.
1098-MA – If you received assistance with your home mortgage payments, you will receive this form; it is helpful for determining how much of the home mortgage interest you paid and the amount deductible by you.
1098-T – If you paid collegetuition for yourself, your spouse or a dependent, the education institution will send you this form showing the amount of tuition you paid throughout the year as well as other amounts that could affect the computation of the higher-education tax credits.
1095-A – If you obtained your health insurance through a government marketplace, you will receive a Form 1095-A, which is needed to compute your premium tax credit and reconcile any advance credit that was used to subsidize your premiums. In some cases, you may need to log into your marketplace account and download the form.
1099-C – If a lender forgives all or a portion of a debt, this form includes a variety of information needed to determine what portion of the debt is taxable and the part, if any, that is excludable from income.
1099-NEC – If you were self-employed in 2023, businesses that paid you $600 or more will be issuing you a 1099-NEC. Some businesses may issue a 1099-NEC even if the amount they paid you was less than $600.
1099-MISC – Used for reporting miscellaneous information, for each person in the course of their business to whom they have paid the following during the year: At least $10 in royalties, and at least $600 in rents, prizes and awards, fishing boat proceeds, medical and health care payments, crop insurance proceeds, gross proceeds paid to an attorney, or other miscellaneous information. Payments to independent contractors should be reported on the 1099-NEC rather than the 1099-MISC.
1099-K – If your business accepts credit cards, debit cards, PayPal or other third-party payments, you may receive a 1099-K showing those sales for the year, depending on the number and total dollar amount of transactions. The threshold for issuing a 1099-K in 2024 for 2023 isto taxpayers who received over $20,000 and had over 200 transactions. For tax year 2024, the IRS plans for a threshold of $5,000 to phase in lower reporting requirements. There is a possibility that some taxpayers may receive a 1099-K reporting income that is not taxable because it wasn't the result of a business activity or that had also been included in Form 1099-NEC. Check with the office if you are uncertain about the taxability of what's reported on a 1099-K you receive.
K-1 – If you are a partner in a partnership, a shareholder in an S-corporation or a beneficiary of a trust, you will receive a K-1 from the entity showing your income, loss, deductions, credits or other information from the entity needed to prepare your return.
It is important to understand that the IRS and most states also get a copy of these documents, and if the information on these forms is not reported correctly on your tax return, you will eventually hear from the government.Also, keep in mind that even if you don't receive an income-reporting 1099 that you were expecting, you are still required to report the income that you received from that payer or business on your tax return.
Please give this office a call if you have questions about any of these informational forms or others not included above.
Sign up for our newsletter.


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AudioAcrobat is well-known for its worldwide social flexibility!
AudioAcrobat has one of the most comprehensive Podcast creation tools on the Web today.
@DIYMarketingCtr | Veronika Noize
Can you fall in love with a software service? @AudioAcrobat it has been 8 years, and baby, I hate NOTHING about u! #love #bestofthebest #gratitude Try it and see for yourself
@TeachMeLaw | Tara Kachaturoff
Looking for outstanding customer service? You'll find it in Brian Ball at @audioacrobat. He's the best. Great company & service. Thanks!
@JanLutherEFTPro | Jan Luther
I love AudioAcrobat! I use it every day. Great product, awesome service, amazing staff @AudioAcrobat Thanks Dave Barrett!
@KimTurcotte | Kim Turcotte
5 Tools that make my business easier & enhance my client relationships Tool #3 @AudioAcrobat
@JanetHilts | Janet Hilts
Thanks, @audioacrobat, for consistently great customer service. You're a great role model for us all!
@Self_Publish | Shelley Hitz
Just set up my podcast using @audioacrobat Wow, was it easy! I can record by phone or computer. ..so simple, love this!
@StephCalahan | Stephanie LH Calahan
@AudioAcrobat Woot! My podcast and iTunes are now all in place. Super easy with AudioAcrobat.
@PeggyDolane | Peggy Dolane
@AudioAcrobat OH: "You are the @nordstrom of the IT world."
@ErinBlaskie | Erin Blaskie
Recommended: @audioacrobat for their audio hosting, storage and conversion abilities!
@SwetaSpeaks | Sweta Patel
Use @AudioAcrobat during your speaking engagement by asking your audience for testimonials just by dialing in. How convenient! #Swetaspeaks
@Hoovers | Hoover's
Self-service storytelling: give members an @AudioAcrobat phone number so they can call & record their story. Upload online as mp3. #cmgrchat
@EmmaLangman | Emma Langman
Check out the tweets from @AudioAcrobat for a company that 'gets' social media for customer service!
@SocialUpgrades | Social Upgrades, SMO
Been using AudioAcrobat off and on for over 4 years now. Been very pleased with their service. Never once had a problem.
Since AudioAcrobat was first introduced in 2004, our members have been overjoyed to share their experiences on our Reply Line, cite their excitement in email responses, greet us in-person with hand-shakes and smiles at trade shows and stay in touch with of daily @mentions, direct messages and re-tweets on Twitter! Here we've assembled some of our favorites in hopes that newcomers to AudioAcrobat may get to know us a little better through others' kind words!
People in every possible endeavor, in over 100 countries, create audios, landing pages, podcasts and videos daily with AudioAcrobat!
All applications and services have features. It is the strategy of use which makes a feature worthwhile. The flexibility of our attributes, knockout features, lightning-fast support and top-notch strategic training says it all! As pioneers in hosting, publishing and streaming media, we have trained thousands on how to record and distribute media, for which the results have been more than rewarding as members all over the world continue to send us their thoughts and experiences. Once a member really believes that we have earned our salt, there is no holding them back, which we feel the following quotes convey quite well.
Check out this cool Reply Line mix! Create one for your business today! Call (540) 402-0043 x2004 to test it out! |
I just want to thank you for your great service all these years. I am a HAPPY customer, and always have been. Recently I had to change cards because someone hijacked my card numbers and I had to wait several weeks to get another card.
When I talked to the woman at AudioAcrobat about why my payment would be late, she was SO wonderful, supportive, kind and informative. She even helped me learn about how to protect my card in the future and she took the TIME to educate me about fraud. I felt like I was talking to a friend...SO wonderful and not common in business.
And I have always felt like I have a great relationship with AudioAcrobat where I'm actually talking to CARING, available people. And I appreciate that you have not raised the prices as I am a single woman, self employed, and SO grateful for all of you at AudioAcrobat.
Your service has always been quick and caring over the years. Thank you. Thank you.
Susan Wight
Professional Life Coach
All these years of using your system with no issues have not gone unnoticed or unappreciated. Thanks for doing your best to give me this great tool for sharing the work I do with the world.
Rick Reynolds
Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist
I appreciate you, and have appreciated your service since day one. I worked as a manager of an IT help desk and technicians at an aerospace company so I am qualified to assign you all an A++!!!
Kay Packard
Founder and Director
American Academy of Hand Analysis (AAHA)
I just wanted to offer a little support for your great staff at AudioAcrobat. I have had an account since 2005 and I am constantly impressed and grateful for the conscientious way you all do business.
Jan Luther
TRS Press and EFT For Grief Programs
Greetings from India...
I really admire your patience and clarity in explaining things. They are really crystal clear and gave lot of ease and grace in using the services.
I truly acknowledge your passion but also your commitment to serve the clients with utmost sincerity which is rare in the present society.
D.Satya Murty., IAS., & ACC
Principal Secretary & Managing Director
Karnataka Neeravari Nigam Ltd.
I took the landing page training from AudioAcrobat, and thought it was probably the most useful training session I had on the web. After watching/listening to the training, I was able to create great-looking (Web) pages immediately.
I highly recommend this training. I use it for teleseminar registrations, product sales, special notices and other tactics necessary to making money on the web.
With a few helpful hints from the training session, my landing pages soon looked so professional that it doesn't seem possible that a 58-year-old could have done them!
Bill Quain, Ph.D.
CEO & Executive Author
Wales Publishing Company
Great Basic Training Class!
Even though I've been using your service for years I enjoyed the basic training class. I'm also glad I took it because I never noticed (or took the time to learn on my own) about your new social media functions. That alone will be incredibly useful to my clients who podcast.
Looking forward to the next training!
Christina Lemmey
Great class. Wonderful to learn how to do a squeeze page so quickly, effectively and cost consciously. Thanks for all the tips and the extras like book titles.
Jeanette Raymond, Ph.D.
Psychologist and Psychotherapist
I had such a wonderful time attending your class ... it was very enlightening, what you can do using the AudioAcrobat Program.
I have shared it with my pastor and a few ministers on staff. I think they will be interested in taking class also. This will not be the last time I will be plugging in with you ... I am so happy my publisher (Success Connection Team) referred me to take your class. I'm going to let him know how much I gained from taking a class like this.
It is an "eye" opener. I'm going to need all of these strategies when I publish my book next year. It going to be so helpful in getting the word out. Thanks for everything. I will be calling you!
Minister Evelyn J. Perkins


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it is always a toss up between yarn and undies, this year just like every year the dilemma of what i require for a month on the road 'attire wise' and what i require for 'sanity wise' is a little tricky with one bag allowance. and just like every other year, the yarn will win out, for this time i have pom poms on my crafty mind.
ever since i saw the picture of Erica and Lauren's pom pom garlands in the first issue of Mollie Makes i have been smitten by thoughts of pom poms. however it was not until last week when the peachy Allie Jane and i were in convo it dawned on me they would be the perfect traveling craft. how easy peasy to carry around on trains, planes and automobiles. this dawning has now resulted in my crafty snug upstairs being strewn with yarn and pom poms. for myself and Our #4 had no self control and we foolishly thought, maybe we could just make one, you know, just to see how it all works and then pack it away and save it for our hols.
yes well, with the pants weather this weekend, it was rainy day recess at the shed and why waste our indoor hours on packing undies, cleaning a shed, writing lists for clan members left behind, when pom poms were calling our names. i am mighty impressed with Our #4's brilliant pom pom making skills. i confess i was doubting he was up to the task, which is really quite rotten of me. however by the second pom pom, he had over taken me in pom pom making abilities and it was full steam ahead. at the end of our pom pom fest we counted over 40 lovely bejeweled yarny balls of fluff. we have many, many more to make and i am delighted to report my pom pom making companion is up to the task. despite the mocking from his older siblings about being seen in public aged 13 with his mother, pom pom making together. he is willing to ride above it all, for he is addicted, truly addicted. as we sat at dinner last night in the Indian Restaurant, our final family dinner for a while altogether. he turned to me and said "i wish i had brought the pom pom maker with me". my crafty mother's heart quickened to hear such words.
whilst travelling this summer i will not only be pom pom making but also proof reading my book, this is tres extreme exciting for me. i mean, how often does one have a chance to do such a thing. i have a visual of sitting in the train carriage, pencil poised for action and my book pages laid out in front of me. i think i would like a packet of Walkers crisps to help me along and obviously a seat with a table in-front of it and in one of the less noisy carriages, yes that would be grand and whilst the little scenario plays out in my head, the little voice is saying "blimey Tif, it will be a surreal moment indeed"
after our travels of a small island we finish up this year's homeward bound trip in Amsterdam, i am pretty giddy about this, not only to show my boys a really wonderful city but also meeting up with my long time cyber buddies Ingrid and Jane where upon we will spend a day and a night together. to think after years of cyber friendship we will actually be sitting together in person chatting about this and that, gosh it is quite a thought indeed.
yes this summer is looking good, getting to spend time with Our #1 and even better still, she will be coming home for a few weeks in August, so she can see her sister. i am thinking a road trip to Portland will be in order, actually i am thinking we may aim bigger and further a field, i may suggest the three of us drive to San Francisco. yes, that just shows how keen i am on this summer... willing to throw away my fear of freeway and city driving.
for a few weeks i will have my girls back together again before Our #1 returns to her studies in England and Our#2 flies the nest to study on the East Coast of US.
so there we have it. tomorrow, me, my yarn and a few pairs of undies will be heading home, but before i shut up shop i must just say how kind you all have been to me. once again, just like every summer i am left marveling at how generous and kind folks are. you take time out of your days to come visit, you leave me lovely comments, always are most nice about my crafty moments, spend your well earned monies in my little store and send me wonderful emails sharing your lives with me. truly you are beyond kindness... truth be told it's been a little busy around these parts, things i cannot always share until the right moment, however i hope you all realize you brighten my days, day after day and without you doing so, i would not be sitting on a train, proof reading a book or making pom pom garlands to decorate a book launch. no sirree, i owe it all to you...
she is truly thanking you most kindly and wishing you all a spiffily and 'tufty squirrel safe' summer ~ Tif


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*Available Now!*
Wrapped Up in Stripes
by Sarah Marsh
Book One, Blue Valley Shifters Series
Publisher: Evernight Publishing
Cover Art: Jay Aheer
As the daughter of the Alpha of the Blue Valley lion pride, Heidi should have the pick of the litter when it comes to dating, but her brothers think differently. Surprised with a trip on a very exclusive cruise, she's excited to explore her fantasies. Bondage? Submission? Ménage? …yes, please! If this is her chance to experience everything she's ever fantasized about, then Heidi is going to go for broke.
Who has time for pleasure? There's far too much work to do. Wild Desires cruise line is having issues, and Mason and Wade plan to get to the bottom of it. They didn't anticipate finding a lioness that has his tiger utterly fascinated. Neither of them seems to be able to resist the temptation sweet little Heidi presents.
Why fight fate when it presents them with such a tasty treat? —good thing they've always preferred to share.
Buy Links:
Evernight: https://www.evernightpublishing.com/wrapped-up-in-stripes-by-sarah-marsh/
Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/ca/en/ebook/wrapped-up-in-stripes
Bookstrand: https://www.bookstrand.com/wrapped-up-in-stripes-mfm
B&N: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/wrapped-up-in-stripes-sarah-marsh/1128918245
Amazon: https://www.amzn.com/B07DQXMWSK
Excerpt: "Wade!" she laughed as he bumped into the couch because he was too busy nibbling at her neck, "you'd better not drop me." "Ah, baby," he gently placed her down on her feet once again, this time in front of a very large bed, "you know I'd gladly kiss any bumps or bruises better." "In fact," Mason's low, sexy baritone sent shivers down her spine. He had turned on a few small lamps, giving the room a low glow before he approached her. "Maybe we'd better check you over anyway, just to make certain you're all right?" Heidi's heart was pounding now, her entire body aching for their touch. She stepped out of her shoes, kicking them to the side. The thin panties she'd worn tonight were already soaked through with desire, and glancing down at the dress pants both men wore didn't help that situation at all. She could see the impressive outline of their hard flesh along their legs, and she longed to feel that firmness inside her. "Hmm, yes, maybe you should check for yourself, then?" She smiled and turned around slowly, presenting them with her back and the strings that would untie her dress. Heidi had been fantasizing all through dinner whenever their fingers had played with that bow. Wade groaned as he stepped closer and traced the criss-cross pattern of the strings along her back until he finally rested his hand at the top of her ass, the heat of it making her bite her lip to stifle her own reaction to his touch. "Baby, since I first saw the back of this dress all I could think about was pulling on this little red bow," he whispered, placing soft kisses on her bare shoulders. "Every time one of you touched my back tonight, I imagined what it would be like if you had pulled on those strings right there at the table." She closed her eyes and shared the forbidden place her fantasy had taken her. "Oh? And then what would have happened?" Mason urged her on as his fingers ran a light path along her collarbone and then followed the edge of the neckline down, taking her breath away. Just then, she felt the small tug at her dress that could only mean that Wade's fingers were pulling on that bow, and when the pressure finally gave way, she could feel the strings along her neck move just a fraction. "The dress would have slowly lowered," she kept her eyes closed, imagining they were still in a restaurant full of people, "until it had pooled at my waist, revealing my bare breasts for you." Heidi felt the silky material of the dress move along her skin until it stopped at her waist, the cool air in the room causing her nipples to pebble. She still didn't open her eyes as she heard the low purrs coming from her mates as she was bared to them. "And then?" Wade's voice was barely recognizable, thick with desire. Heidi was almost panting at this point. She had never been this excited or turned on before, it was almost painful how much she wanted them, how her body longed to be joined to theirs. She supposed Mother Nature really didn't pull any punches when it came to mating—it was glorious in its ferocity. "Then you would put your mouth on me," she whispered back, only seconds before she felt the tip of a warm tongue run a circle around her turgid nipple. She slowly opened her eyes to see the inky darkness of Mason's black hair in front of her as he finally closed his lips fully over her breast, his tongue playing with the sensitive flesh, making her moan out his name. "We like that little fantasy of yours a great deal, baby, but I think we're at our limit for restraint tonight," Wade growled out the words and then released the strings holding up the rest of her dress, letting the silky red material float to the floor, leaving her in only her panties. Mason drew hard on her breast before he let it go and moved his hands up to trace over the wet skin his mouth had left behind. "And we will be revisiting that fantasy, make no mistake, love. But look at you—I think you're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen." Both men took a small step back, simply admiring her in a way no one ever had before. The heat in their eyes made her feel more beautiful than she had ever felt under a man's gaze. It felt so natural to be with them like this, and her own beast preened inside of her. Heidi slowly brought her hands to the waist of her panties and ran a teasing finger along the inside of the lace. "I think you both have way too many clothes on," her eyes moved to where Wade was absently stroking his fingers along his covered cock as he watched her, "so I'm just going to take a time-out while you remedy that." Heidi first peeled down her panties, letting them drop to the floor beside her dress, and the tortured groans from both men as she slowly crawled onto the bed and up toward the headboard was exactly the reward she'd been hoping for. Then she settled herself with her back resting against the headboard, looking forward to seeing her mates for the first time in all their naked glory. They certainly didn't disappoint—both had intense expressions on their faces as they rid themselves of their ties and button-down shirts. Both strong bodies were darkly tanned and thickly muscled, although Wade's physique was slightly bulkier than Mason's refined lines. Their shoes and socks went second as their hands moved to their belts and Heidi suddenly had the urge to giggle as she felt like a kid on Christmas morning about to receive the best presents ever. When their zippers went down and revealed that both men were bare under those expensive slacks, it was her turn to groan, the lioness inside her wanting to taste her mates. She could see the thick roots of their cocks, and when they finally dropped those pants to the floor, her instincts found her crawling back towards them. "That look on your face, love," Mason's voice was low and intense. "If you keep looking at us like you want to eat us up, I may end up embarrassing myself here." She watched his hand move down to stroke his thick cock, which was standing at attention. A small bead of moisture collected at the swollen head, and he groaned when she licked her lips, wondering what his flavor would be like. The drive to attack them both until they'd spent themselves inside her was overwhelming in its intensity. She needed them now, and there was simply no time for slow loving—her beast would not be swayed. "I need to taste you both."
Author Bio:
Sarah Marsh was born in British Columbia, she has only recently began her writing career finding it the perfect outlet for taking the edge off a nine to five office job. She's been a science fiction and romance junkie for years and when her imagination started to take the characters she'd read about even further in their adventures she decided to try writing something of her own.
Sarah's also a former pastry chef and spends a lot of time cooking and baking for friends and family as well as painting and knitting. Her biggest weaknesses are animals of any kind…she even loves the ones that wake you up at four in the morning because they can almost see the bottom of their food dish.
When it comes to life in general she's a big believer that laughter is the best medicine and that there's no such thing as too much love, which is why she's such a sucker for a happy ending.
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First up, I've got a more in-depth overview of the Sony NEX-VG10 over at Tech Tilt.
And second, I just wanted to point out that the location product shots of the NEX-VG10 appear to have been captured with a Sony A850 and Zeiss lenses. I realize that's not quite as juicy as a 5D Mark II on Sony's set (and I'm sure this will generate the obligatory "who cares" comment), but I figured I'd give Sony a bit of credit where credit is due.


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February 2009One of the things I always tell startups is a principle I learned from Paul Buchheit: it's better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy. I was saying recently to a reporter that if I could only tell startups 10 things, this would be one of them. Then I thought: what would the other 9 be?When I made the list there turned out to be 13:
1. Pick good cofounders.Cofounders are for a startup what location is for real estate. You can change anything about a house except where it is. In a startup you can change your idea easily, but changing your cofounders is hard. [1] And the success of a startup is almost always a function of its founders.2. Launch fast.The reason to launch fast is not so much that it's critical to get your product to market early, but that you haven't really started working on it till you've launched. Launching teaches you what you should have been building. Till you know that you're wasting your time. So the main value of whatever you launch with is as a pretext for engaging users.3. Let your idea evolve.This is the second half of launching fast. Launch fast and iterate. It's a big mistake to treat a startup as if it were merely a matter of implementing some brilliant initial idea. As in an essay, most of the ideas appear in the implementing.4. Understand your users.You can envision the wealth created by a startup as a rectangle, where one side is the number of users and the other is how much you improve their lives. [2] The second dimension is the one you have most control over. And indeed, the growth in the first will be driven by how well you do in the second. As in science, the hard part is not answering questions but asking them: the hard part is seeing something new that users lack. The better you understand them the better the odds of doing that. That's why so many successful startups make something the founders needed.5. Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.Ideally you want to make large numbers of users love you, but you can't expect to hit that right away. Initially you have to choose between satisfying all the needs of a subset of potential users, or satisfying a subset of the needs of all potential users. Take the first. It's easier to expand userwise than satisfactionwise. And perhaps more importantly, it's harder to lie to yourself. If you think you're 85% of the way to a great product, how do you know it's not 70%? Or 10%? Whereas it's easy to know how many users you have.6. Offer surprisingly good customer service.Customers are used to being maltreated. Most of the companies they deal with are quasi-monopolies that get away with atrocious customer service. Your own ideas about what's possible have been unconsciously lowered by such experiences. Try making your customer service not merely good, but surprisingly good. Go out of your way to make people happy. They'll be overwhelmed; you'll see. In the earliest stages of a startup, it pays to offer customer service on a level that wouldn't scale, because it's a way of learning about your users.7. You make what you measure.I learned this one from Joe Kraus. [3] Merely measuring something has an uncanny tendency to improve it. If you want to make your user numbers go up, put a big piece of paper on your wall and every day plot the number of users. You'll be delighted when it goes up and disappointed when it goes down. Pretty soon you'll start noticing what makes the number go up, and you'll start to do more of that. Corollary: be careful what you measure.8. Spend little.I can't emphasize enough how important it is for a startup to be cheap. Most startups fail before they make something people want, and the most common form of failure is running out of money. So being cheap is (almost) interchangeable with iterating rapidly. [4] But it's more than that. A culture of cheapness keeps companies young in something like the way exercise keeps people young.9. Get ramen profitable."Ramen profitable" means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders' living expenses. It's not rapid prototyping for business models (though it can be), but more a way of hacking the investment process. Once you cross over into ramen profitable, it completely changes your relationship with investors. It's also great for morale.10. Avoid distractions.Nothing kills startups like distractions. The worst type are those that pay money: day jobs, consulting, profitable side-projects. The startup may have more long-term potential, but you'll always interrupt working on it to answer calls from people paying you now. Paradoxically, fundraising is this type of distraction, so try to minimize that too.11. Don't get demoralized.Though the immediate cause of death in a startup tends to be running out of money, the underlying cause is usually lack of focus. Either the company is run by stupid people (which can't be fixed with advice) or the people are smart but got demoralized. Starting a startup is a huge moral weight. Understand this and make a conscious effort not to be ground down by it, just as you'd be careful to bend at the knees when picking up a heavy box.12. Don't give up.Even if you get demoralized, don't give up. You can get surprisingly far by just not giving up. This isn't true in all fields. There are a lot of people who couldn't become good mathematicians no matter how long they persisted. But startups aren't like that. Sheer effort is usually enough, so long as you keep morphing your idea.13. Deals fall through.One of the most useful skills we learned from Viaweb was not getting our hopes up. We probably had 20 deals of various types fall through. After the first 10 or so we learned to treat deals as background processes that we should ignore till they terminated. It's very dangerous to morale to start to depend on deals closing, not just because they so often don't, but because it makes them less likely to.
Having gotten it down to 13 sentences, I asked myself which I'd choose if I could only keep one.Understand your users. That's the key. The essential task in a startup is to create wealth; the dimension of wealth you have most control over is how much you improve users' lives; and the hardest part of that is knowing what to make for them. Once you know what to make, it's mere effort to make it, and most decent hackers are capable of that.Understanding your users is part of half the principles in this list. That's the reason to launch early, to understand your users. Evolving your idea is the embodiment of understanding your users. Understanding your users well will tend to push you toward making something that makes a few people deeply happy. The most important reason for having surprisingly good customer service is that it helps you understand your users. And understanding your users will even ensure your morale, because when everything else is collapsing around you, having just ten users who love you will keep you going.Notes[1] Strictly speaking it's impossible without a time machine.[2] In practice it's more like a ragged comb.[3] Joe thinks one of the founders of Hewlett Packard said it first, but he doesn't remember which.[4] They'd be interchangeable if markets stood still. Since they don't, working twice as fast is better than having twice as much time.


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I'm very happy about this release. Thanks to hard choices that we dared to make in the past we are now breaking new ground and giving GNOME some of the tools it needs to be the premier free software operating system. It's been a long way since I spent an entire GUADEC porting good old epiphany to this newfangled thing called "WebKit", and what a ride it has been.
There's a lot to talk about, so let's get started.
For the first time in this release, Web uses by default the all new multi-process architecture known as WebKit2. The advantages of such a design are well known by most, but here is a brief list of what this means for us:
- Stability: we now run all the WebKit code in a different process (WebProcess) than the UI code (UIProcess). Most crashes, by far, happen inside WebKit, so this will make the application a lot more stable. When crashes happen, you'll get a message explaining how to continue browsing, just a reload away. Note that for 3.8 we run all the web pages in the same WebProcess, just like Safari for OSX did in 5.1, but we plan to move to multiple WebProcesses in the near future.
- Responsiveness: not only most crashes happen inside WebKit, but most of your CPU (and GPU!) time will generally also be spent there. By moving this processing away we allow the UI to be always ready to react to your input, so tab switching and scrolling are now super smooth. You'll have to see it to believe it, but trust me when I say the improvement is enormous.
- Plugins: in WebKit2 plugins run in their own process (PluginProcess). In general this makes the browser more robust against the frequent crashes and hiccups of some plugins, but for GNOME in particular it means something even better. Flash, as our more loyal users know well, has not worked natively in Web since we switched to GTK+3. The Adobe plugin is stuck in GTK+2, and since using both libraries at the same time in one process is forbidden we have been forced to rely on things like nspluginwrapper for a while. Well, not anymore: we compile our PluginProcess with GTK+2 precisely for this reason, so Flash works again out of the box.
- Security: finally, by isolating all the web content from the application we reduce the possibility of malicious code having access to sensitive information. This will be greatly enhanced in the future with the sandboxing of the WebProcess, but 3.8 lays the first stone for a safer browsing.
Our WebKit2 port and Web backend have been more or less in continuous development for more than 2 years. This is the result of a lot of hard work by all the WebKit contributors, the Igalia WebKit team and the Web developers. Despite being a collective effort, like most free software, I want to thank Carlos García Campos in particular for leading the WebKit2GTK+ effort with so much energy. His hard work and perseverance were instrumental in making this happen, so the usual beverages or thank you notes are more than deserved next time you see him.
All this would be more than enough for a single release, but there is much more to see. Let's keep going.
Private browsing
As advanced during the last WebKitGTK+ hackfest, Web 3.8 brings a straightforward way of launching a temporary and private browsing session, free from any data that could possibly identify you, that will leave no trace on the hard drive once you are done with it. Just go to the application menu and click "New Incognito Window", you are all set.
Undo close tab
You closed a tab just to realize you actually needed to check one more thing in there. You pressed the wrong key. Selected the wrong menu item. Nevermind, in 3.8 Web will remember the tabs (and windows!) you have recently closed, and bringing them back to live is as easy as pressing Ctrl-Shift-T or selecting "Reopen Closed Tab" in the application menu.
UI polish
You want a shiny new search bar? We have it:
A handy new tab button in the main toolbar? Got it:
Vastly improved Web App icons and titles? Yep:
Fancy HTML5 media controls perhaps? You bet:
Plus less clutter in the gear menu, improved theming, simplified Preferences dialog, and many more small UI tweaks.
3.10 and beyond
As usual we are already working on the next major release. For 3.10 and beyond you can look forward to:
- Multiple WebProcesses. This is still under development, but at the very least we think we'll be able to provide either the current "just one" model or the "one per tab" variant. Ideally also the "one per domain instance" that Chrome uses by default, but this one will be trickier. Stay tuned.
- Deeper GNOME integration. Hooking into the new Shell search APIs or the Settings privacy controls is high in our TODO list.
- Overview improvements. Animations? Access to recent history or recently closed tabs?
We think GNOME 3.8 is the best GNOME yet, and Web 3.8 is the best Web yet. We hope you'll enjoy both, we definitely enjoyed doing our part.


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Placement Planning and Disruption Meetings
1. Placement Planning Meetings
Placement Planning meetings should be convened as part of the process of identifying and placing a child - as set out in the Placements in Foster Care Procedure and the Children Looked After in Residential Care Procedure. The first Placement Planning Meeting in relation to a placement should be held before the placement. Where this is not possible because of the urgency of the situation, it should be held in order that the Placement Plan is prepared within 5 working days of the start of the placement.
Further Placement Planning Meetings should be held at intervals agreed with the manager of the residential home or the foster carers and their supervising social worker - or as required for example where there are issues to be resolved in relation to the day to day arrangements for the placement.
The social worker and home manager/foster carers supervising social worker will agree the best format and venue for the meeting and who will chair the meeting.
The people listed below should contribute to the meetings:
- The child's social worker and/or other professional associated with the child e.g. Personal Adviser or advocate;
- The child;
- The child's parents;
- For children in residential care, the child's link worker/keyworker and, where appropriate the home manager;
- For children in foster care, the foster carers and their supervising social worker.
- The child's Placement Plan (recorded on the Placement Information Record on ICS);
- Any work which has been undertaken in supporting the child's placement;
- If relevant: the child's Care Plan, Personal Education Plan and Pathway Plan.
Where the proposed placement has the effect of disrupting the arrangements made for the child's education and training - see Supporting the Education and Promoting the Achievements of Children with a Social Worker, Looked After and Previously Looked After Children Procedure.
Where the proposed placement is out of area, see Out of Area Placements Procedure.
The chairperson should also ensure that the child, parent(s) and others who have been asked to contribute understand the purpose of the meeting, how it will be conducted and are given the opportunity to put their views and suggestions.
If children are not settling into their placement, or if there are concerns about the suitability of the placement, consideration should be given to the following:
- Whether it is possible to sustain the placement until the next Looked After Review by, for example, providing additional support to the placement;
- Bringing forward the date of the next Looked After Review;
- Ending the placement.
2. Disruption Meeting
Consideration should always be given to convening a Disruption Meeting in relation to children whose placement has ended abruptly or on an unplanned basis.
When endings are unplanned, the welfare and well-being of children remain paramount. The needs and feelings of other children living in a foster/residential home will also be taken into account.
For children whose adoptive placement disrupts, a Disruption Meeting must take place - see Disruption of Adoptive Placements Procedure.
An "off line" manager will usually chair the meeting. In complex cases, however, consideration will be given to appointing an independent person as chair.
Those invited, or asked to contribute, should be:
- The child;
- The parents;
- The child's social worker and manager;
- The link worker/keyworker (for residential care) and home manager;
- The foster carer(s) and supervising social worker;
- The child's Independent Reviewing Officer;
- The child's current carers;
- Other relevant staff/professionals.
The meeting will ensure the child (depending on his or her age and level of understanding) is given the opportunity to understand the reasons for and be supported with managing the transition.
Where appropriate, foster carers must be supported to maintain links with children who leave their care.
The precise agenda will depend on the child/circumstances, but the chairperson should ensure the circumstances leading to the disruption are properly reviewed, and that all concerned are provided with opportunities to express their views freely with a view to establishing:
- How and why the emergency/disruption occurred;
- To learn from what happened and avoid the same thing happening again - for the child or others in the placement;
- To contribute to the future planning for the child;
- To identify work to be done and to ensure it is completed;.
- To ensure that appropriate notifications and other post placement arrangements have been undertaken.
The chairperson should keep minutes, which must be circulated to all concerned.
In relation to the disruption of an external residential placement, consideration needs to be given to further use of the resource by the authority.
In relation to the disruption of a permanent foster placement, where the foster carers are in-house approved carers, consideration should be given to holding an early Foster Carer Review to consider the foster carer's approval - see Review and Termination of Approval of Foster Carers Procedure.


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Gain an understanding of A/B tests and design. Learn about the aspects to be aware of to ensure appropriate handling of the data and analyses.
Learn common analyses to compare A/B groups. Understand the appropriate approach to each test given their assumptions and limitations.
Learn to analyze the trend and relationship of variables in A/B groups. Understand how to assess and present the results to any audience.
Understand the basis of regression and regression lines. Learn to run regressions, predict data based on the regression model, and visually present the results.


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Chakra is the Sanskrit word for "wheel" or "disc" and signifies
one of the seven main energy centres in the body.
The chakras correlate to levels of consciousness, archetypal
elements, developmental stages of life, colours, sounds, and much more.
Balanced chakras are important for the healthy functioning of
the bodymind system as a synchronistic whole.