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Saturday, December 4, 2010
Red Sox Get Gonzalez After Two Year Pursuit
What This Means For Adrian Gonzalez
There is one and only one drawback for Gonzalez in this deal. He no longer gets to live in San Diego. The Red Sox are and always have been the ideal landing spot for the slugger. In his five years of playing half of his games in the cavernous Petco Park, he still managed to hit 161 home runs and average a .288/.374/.514 line. With Fenway's short porch in right field, Gonzalez should see a nice tick upwards in his slugging numbers. He also becomes a very rich man. The Sox will, presumably, extend him seven years for around $170 million.
What This Means For Boston
The Red Sox have coveted Gonzalez for two years after it became clear that the Padres had no shot at retaining him with free agency looming. Plugging Gonzalez in at first will move Kevin Youklis to third while urging Adrian Beltre not to let the door hit him on the ass on the way out. The Sox also had to hand over a nice package of prospects from a deep if not great system. Casey Kelly, Anthony Rizzo and Reymond Fuentes are three of the top six or seven prospects in Boston's system plus San Diego will receive what's behind curtain number three in a player to be named later. The move certainly sparks a fun debate about which infield is better between the Sox and the Yanks. I figure Jeter and Marco Scuturo are about a wash.
What This Means For San Diego
The Padres managed to not get all delusional after last season's surprising push for the playoffs and kept their game plan on track. It must have been tempting to take another run with Gonzalez and move him at the deadline if they fell back to earth. But they made the smart move and dealt him when they could get the most bang for their lack of bucks. In Casey Kelly, they get Boston's top pitching prospect who was already pitching at Double A as a 20-year-old. Anthony Rizzo might be the heir apparent to Gonzalez at first base. As a 21-year-old in Double A, he hit 20 home runs and a .263/.334/.481 line. Reymond Fuentes is a toolsy outfielder and the cousin of Carlos Betran. At just 19-years-old, he stole 42 bases during his A ball season. The Padres will certainly deal Heath Bell at some point during the season to continue their youth movement.
2 comments:
2 things:
1) Although the right field fence will be moving in about 8 feet next year due to enlargement of the bullpens, it still isn't a "short porch" unless you hit one around Pesky's Pole. It's no Yankee Stadium: http://espn.go.com/travel/stadium/_/s/mlb/id/2/fenway-park
2) You failed to mention that by acquiring Gonzalez via trade and sign and moving Youkilis to third, the Sox essentially get 2 draft picks out of the deal by letting Beltre sign elsewhere.
So the question becomes: Is Gonzalez + a first round and sandwich pick in 2011 more valuable than Beltre, Kelly, Rizzo, Fuentes and a PTBNL? I say yes.
Sox brass has stated their preference of acquiring talented players in their prime via trade rather than free agency and I for one think it's a good strategy. At least until MLB gets their heads out of the sand and fixes the draft instead of spending time trying to expand the damn postseason.1) You're right about Fenway not really having a short porch in right but it's a much better hitter's park than Petco even if Fenway isn't all that home run friendly. My point was simply that you can expect his slugging number to go up.
2) Yes, obviously the Beltre comp picks are valuable. There a factors surrounding them though. If the Angels sign Crawford and Beltre, the picks aren't nearly as valuable. The Angels 1st pick is protected and the Rays would get the 2nd round pick for Crawford. In this scenario, the Sox would be getting a sandwich round pick and the Angels 3rd rounder. Just for example.
That said, I still think it's a win-win if the deal gets re-worked after the Sox failed to extend Gonzalez today.


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Hi there!
This is Deedee from Mrs. Wills Kindergarten! I wanted to share a throwback post I did over on my blog!
Back in 2011, I helped lead a pretty sizable blog book study with this fantastic book! I did a little resource roundup and if you are feeling like a boatload of summer free files, let me tell you where to start!
Here are just a few of the things you will find!
Swing on by. Warning... it will be a bit like a scavenger hunt as you go through the posts, but click HERE to get started!

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Dear customer,
You can contact us at any time if your order is not finished, or have any doubt, complaint and advice with us. we will look sincerely at your service.
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The holiday season will officially kick off at the White House Monday when President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump receive the 2018 White House Christmas tree.
The tree will arrive at the North Portico of the White House by horse and carriage, continuing an annual tradition. This year's tree, standing 19-and-a-half-feet tall, hails from Mountain Top Fraser Fir in Newland, North Carolina, and will be displayed in the Blue Room. The President, not traditionally present for the tree's arrival, is scheduled to make an appearance this year.
White House Christmas tree selection is a competitive process overseen by the National Christmas Tree Association, which has provided the official tree since 1966.
Mountain Top Fraser Fir's Larry Smith was named "Grand Champion" in the tree association's contest last summer, his fifth attempt to win the honor of providing a tree to the White House, according to the National Christmas Tree Association.
"I feel as though I have finally won the Super Bowl. It's a great honor to represent the Christmas tree industry by providing the Official White House Christmas Tree in 2018," Smith said in a statement.
In September, the White House's chief usher Timothy Harleth and superintendent of grounds, Dale Haney, traveled to North Carolina to select a Fraser Fir from the "appointed field" on Smith's tree farm.
The tradition of the White House Christmas tree dates back to 1889, when President Benjamin Harrison placed the first tree in the Yellow Room, decorated with candles and toys for his grandchildren, according to the White House Historical Association. The tree is believed to have made its debut in the Blue Room during the Taft administration in 1912.
While Monday's tree arrival marks the formal kickoff to the White House's 2018 festivities, broader preparations, led by the East Wing, have been long underway. The first lady posted a photo from a planning session in July, hinting that gold ornaments and red berries are in store for this year's décor.
"Planning is underway for this year's #Christmas at the @WhiteHouse! There is still a lot of work to be done, but I hope everyone will enjoy our final holiday vision for the People's House," she tweeted.
The season's festivities will continue Tuesday, when the President pardons the Thanksgiving turkey, and into December, when the Trumps are expected to host a packed schedule of holiday parties.
™ & © 2018 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.


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Dataset Link: Click Here
Version: 2.0
Update Date: 1 July 2021
Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) is a major study following the development of approximately 10,000 young people and their families from all parts of Australia. It is conducted in partnership between the Department of Social Services, the Australian Institute of Family Studies and the Australian Bureau of Statistics with advice provided by a consortium of leading researchers. The study began in 2003 with a representative sample of children (who are now teens and young adults) from urban and rural areas of all states and territories in Australia. The study has a multi-disciplinary base, and examines a broad range of research questions about development and wellbeing over the life course in relation to topics such as parenting, family, peers, education, child care and health. It will continue to follow participants into adulthood. The study informs social policy and is used to identify opportunities for early intervention and prevention strategies. Participating families have been interviewed every two years from 2004, and between-wave mail-out questionnaires were sent to families in 2005 (Wave 1.5), 2007 (Wave 2.5) and 2009 (Wave 3.5). The B cohort ("Baby" cohort) of around 5,000 children was aged 0–1 years in 2003–04, and the K cohort ("Kinder" cohort) of around 5,000 children was aged 4–5 years in 2003–04. Study informants include the young person, their parents (both resident and non-resident), carers and teachers. The study links to administrative databases including Medicare (Immunisation, MBS and PBS), NAPLAN, AEDC and Centrelink – with participant consent – thereby adding valuable information to supplement the data collected during fieldwork. In 2014-15, a special one-off physical health and biomarkers assessment of parent-child pairs was undertaken in the younger cohort. The cross-generational datasets from this 'Child Health CheckPoint' are available in the Additional Release files.


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Please choose one of the below listed options to report complaints about Teradata accounting, internal accounting controls or auditing matters or other concerns to Teradata or the Audit Committee of its Board of Directors.
Reported matters relating to Teradata accounting, internal accounting controls or auditing matters will be referred to members of the Audit Committee as appropriate. Reports of misconduct, including those made anonymously, will be investigated and feedback will be provided when appropriate.
The law provides protection against retaliatory termination or adverse employment action by Teradata and its officers, associates and agents, against any employee who (i) provides information to a supervisor, the federal government or Congress that the employee reasonably believes relates to federal securities or anti-fraud violations, or (ii) files, testifies, participates in, or otherwise assists in any actions involving conduct that the employee reasonably believes relates to federal securities or anti-fraud violations. Teradata will not condone reprisals against people who report suspected violations in good faith, and their identities will be protected to the maximum extent possible consistent with law and Teradata policy.
Other Communications with the Board of Directors Shareholders and interested parties wishing to communicate directly with the Board of Directors, any individual director or Teradata non-management directors as a group regarding Teradata business operations, conduct or other matters relating to the Company are welcome to do so by writing the Corporate Secretary of Teradata at 17095 Via Del Campo, San Diego, California 92127, who will forward any communications as directed. Communications may be made anonymously and/or confidentially as indicated above.


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Previous: Environment Variables, Up: Invoking GCC
The program protoize
is an optional part of GCC. You can use
it to add prototypes to a program, thus converting the program to ISO
C in one respect. The companion program unprotoize
does the
reverse: it removes argument types from any prototypes that are found.
When you run these programs, you must specify a set of source files as command line arguments. The conversion programs start out by compiling these files to see what functions they define. The information gathered about a file foo is saved in a file named foo.X.
After scanning comes actual conversion. The specified files are all eligible to be converted; any files they include (whether sources or just headers) are eligible as well.
But not all the eligible files are converted. By default,
and unprotoize
convert only source and header
files in the current directory. You can specify additional directories
whose files should be converted with the -d directory
option. You can also specify particular files to exclude with the
-x file option. A file is converted if it is eligible, its
directory name matches one of the specified directory names, and its
name within the directory has not been excluded.
Basic conversion with protoize
consists of rewriting most
function definitions and function declarations to specify the types of
the arguments. The only ones not rewritten are those for varargs
optionally inserts prototype declarations at the
beginning of the source file, to make them available for any calls that
precede the function's definition. Or it can insert prototype
declarations with block scope in the blocks where undeclared functions
are called.
Basic conversion with unprotoize
consists of rewriting most
function declarations to remove any argument types, and rewriting
function definitions to the old-style pre-ISO form.
Both conversion programs print a warning for any function declaration or definition that they can't convert. You can suppress these warnings with -q.
The output from protoize
or unprotoize
replaces the
original source file. The original file is renamed to a name ending
with `.save' (for DOS, the saved filename ends in `.sav'
without the original `.c' suffix). If the `.save' (`.sav'
for DOS) file already exists, then the source file is simply discarded.
and unprotoize
both depend on GCC itself to
scan the program and collect information about the functions it uses.
So neither of these programs will work until GCC is installed.
Here is a table of the options you can use with protoize
. Each option works with both programs unless
otherwise stated.
compilation-optionsNote that the compilation options must be given as a single argument to
or unprotoize
. If you want to specify several
gcc options, you must quote the entire set of compilation options
to make them a single word in the shell.
There are certain gcc arguments that you cannot use, because they
would produce the wrong kind of output. These include -g,
-O, -c, -S, and -o If you include these in
the compilation-options, they are ignored.
converts prototyped function definitions to old-style
function definitions, where the arguments are declared between the
argument list and the initial `{'. By default, unprotoize
uses five spaces as the indentation. If you want to indent with just
one space instead, use -i " ".
with -l inserts
a prototype declaration for each function in each block which calls the
function without any declaration. This option applies only to
If you need special compiler options to compile one of your program's
source files, then you should generate that file's `.X' file
specially, by running gcc on that source file with the
appropriate options and the option -aux-info. Then run
on the entire set of files. protoize
will use
the existing `.X' file because it is newer than the source file.
For example:
gcc -Dfoo=bar file1.c -aux-info file1.X protoize *.c
You need to include the special files along with the rest in the
command, even though their `.X' files already
exist, because otherwise they won't get converted.
See Protoize Caveats, for more information on how to use


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FurryBrasil is a furry forum and news portal which holds discussions on the furry community, fine arts, fursuits, literature, RPGs, environmentalism, spiritualism, and several other topics.
- Address: http://furrybrasil.com.br/
- Founded: 2001
- Administrator: Titus Forcii
FurryBrazil was founded in March 2001, entering into operation in September of that year. Its domain at the time was furrybrasil.com.br, and did not include the forum. It listed some sites of furries and artists across the world, seeking to promote the concept of furry into the country and generate Portuguese content, something rare in scattered sites.
From the list furry.br, on Yahoo! Groups, the idea arose of creating a forum so that furry Brazilians could exchange ideas and share projects. Soon some Portuguese furs also joined the group. The resulting interaction was instrumental in increasing the size of Brazilian furry fandom.
Gray Wolf, Koga Silver Dragon, Perx and Titus Forcii became administrators at the end of 2007, with the site moving for a time to furrybrasil.org. The latter three remain administrators as of March 2010.
In November 2010, the site moved back to furrybrasil.com.br and introduced news, reviews, event listings and interviews with furs like Dragoneer and Heather Bruton (Muzzle to Muzzle, by Hwei Chow), some of the latter in English.[1]
- ↑ FurryBrasil, uma nova era - Titus Forcii, FurryBrasil (14 November 2010)


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Bad market performance, government lockdowns, global epidemics and loadshedding aren't what threaten our investing and financial behaviour.
Our biggest threat is ourselves.
Studies have shown that people improve substantially in financial and investment decisions as they get older. When we are young — and perhaps less secure in our financial situation — we have a tendency to be controlled by emotional biases; strong impulses that can be detrimental to our investment habits.
Behavioural economists refer to some typical flaws that are commonly seen in investment decisions as failures of rationality. In order to achieve long-term financial goals, it is, therefore, important to identify and wrestle with some of our personality-driven investing mistakes.
Even more so when we're going through a crisis and it's confrontational!
It's hard, but it's not impossible.
The first step is to accept that a problem exists in the way that we approach our decision making – before we sabotage ourselves. It is then a question of devising a set of strategies to control, or at least mitigate, harmful decisions.
It's important to be kind to yourself at this point – sabotaging your future self DOES NOT mean overextending yourself now to keep up with premiums, but it also means not selling off investments out of fear if it's not in your best interest. The goal is to slow your decision process down so you avoid making errors you will regret.
According to a survey conducted by Barclays Wealth, many wealthy investors realise their tendency to make emotional decisions, and would be happy to have some help dealing with certain issues.
The ability to exercise control plays a vital part in financial decision-making, especially when investment climates can be volatile, confusing, and nerve-wracking. It is important to feel confident in your financial plan, so that you can resolutely commit to whatever investment strategy you decide will benefit your future self best.
For example, research suggests that there is a psychological phenomenon referred to as the trading paradox. A high percentage of investors feel they need to trade frequently in order to maximise their investment gains but, at the same time, many of the same investors feel that their overall returns suffer because they trade too much. Even though certain investors have this realisation and see the downfalls of their actions, they still give in to emotionally-triggered temptations and often miss out on optimal returns as a result.
Behavioural coaching, in this instance, could help someone to focus on methods of changing this behaviour for good.
Behavioural Coaching
Behavioural coaching employs a range of professional techniques to help you to make changes to certain patterns of behaviour. Behaviour comprises actions and reactions, and behavioural coaching has been defined by the Behavioural Coaching Institute as "the art of facilitating the learning and development of an individual, so as to increase their effectiveness and happiness".
It emphasises that much of human behaviour is, in fact, learned, and that all behaviours result in positive or negative consequences for the individual and those around them.
This model of coaching, therefore, involves identifying and measuring certain learned behaviours and their impacts. To do this requires an exploration of core values and motivations, as well as assessing covert behaviours (such as anxiety or self-defeating beliefs) in relation to overt actions (such as public speaking).
Once you have identified an issue and sought professional guidance in establishing a personal set of effective coping mechanisms, it is important to consistently exercise your newfound good habits. These need to be practiced on an ongoing basis, and regular monitoring and evaluation will help you to achieve long-term success.


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Friday Night: The Fashion Show
As Jon, Robert and I head into the ballroom for the evening's dinner and fashion show, I am thinking to myself how happy I am to be there. Two terrific classes taught by two excellent teachers, and a well-planned market with a good range of vendors. It's a complicated affair, and I have to admire the hard work that went into getting it off the ground.
We join a large table of festive ladies right next to the runway. I will admit to being one who enjoys a good fashion show, and I'm looking forward to this. I also hear from Jon that the door prizes can be quite nice.
Dinner is interesting. We are served salmon. I usually do not eat fish because it often makes me sick. But I'm so famished I shovel in a few forkfuls and demolish the fettucine. I eat one of the haricots verts, and it tastes like a Clover bamboo US 4. Bon appetit.
Everyone is finishing up dessert (individual factory-made custard tarts the size of silver dollars) when Rick Mondragon takes the stage. I know it's him without being told. He is, and I do not say this without years of experience to back me up, the gayest man I have ever seen.
We are talking Liberace gay. Richard Simmons gay. Rex Reed impersonating Bette Davis while simultaneously having sex with Paul Lynde, baking a soufflé, and redecorating the bathroom gay.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
No, seriously. I'm not the world's butchest man, myself, and camp humor can be a riot. Alas, Mr. Mondragon is not funny. And a big queen who is not funny has an Annoyance Factor rating somewhere between a telemarketing call on your wedding night and a wasp in your underwear.
After some welcoming remarks and a couple prizes, he gives a shout out to some woman named Maggie. I have never heard of her before, but Jon has shown me some of her designs at the market. (They weren't to my taste, but I could see them being deeply popular with women who live in Palm Springs, carry raffia totes, and describe themselves as "sprightly.")
A shout out is fine, but Maggie is then invited to take the stage to tell us all about her new love. It would seem that she is getting married to some fellow who makes her knees weak, and moving to Spain. She gets that far before becoming fahrklempt and handing the microphone back to Rick. She doesn't say anything about knitting. Or yarn. As she sits down again at her table and starts winding wool, I cannot for the life of me understand what has just happened.
But it is time for the show.
Things get off to a rocky start. Whoever has been hired to run the audio is having a bad day. Or is possibly drunk, or tripping. When the lights go down, there is no music. Rick calls for music. There is a long pause. Then the music starts. Then stops. It will continue to do so haphazardly throughout the evening. Songs will repeat (how hard is it to come up with an hour of different disco songs?) or occasionally fade out completely in the middle of a model's walk on the runway, leaving her stranded.
The balance with the microphones is also off, meaning that sometimes you can't quite make out what Rick and his co-host, someone named Susan, are saying.
Given Rick's announcing skills, this is perhaps a good thing. Unfortunately, we do hear at full volume and clarity his extremely inappropriate and unprofessional remarks about the sole male model. At one point, he goes beyond mere leering to say that Casey or Chip or whatever his name was "…has to get home soon, his parents don't trust me around him at night."
Great, Rick. That's just what we need. A gay man in a room full of Midwesterners reinforcing the negative stereotype of gay men as predators who can't control themselves. I am embarrassed and angry.
The pieces on display are a mixed bag and there are far too many. The show seems to go on for hours. Edited down by half, it would be an appropriate length, but would still have far to many schmattehs.
We are subjected to an entire segment devoted to ponchos. So many that they sometimes have to come down the runway in groups of three.
Now, it's my guess that the poncho must have risen to popularity partly because it is by definition a simple garment. However, that simplicity means you can only do so much with it. The designers, having realized this, apparently have decided that the only direction in which they can take it is "uglier and uglier."
The nadir is reached when the "Mermaid Poncho" is thrown in our faces. Where the name came from, I don't know. Perhaps, like the Little Mermaid, it is supposed to look like something wretched and bedraggled that washed up on a beach. If so, hats off to the designer for succeeding with flying colors.
I begin to notice a pattern. There are only two designers whose works consistently draw actual, as opposed to merely polite, applause. They are Sally Melville and Barry Klein. Sally Melville's men's sweaters are almost all wonderful, the only exception being an odd pullover which is described as having "shirt-tail styling." Unfortunately, it makes at least four people at our table ask, "Hey, what's up with the ass-flap?"
I also notice that:
- Very few of the women's garments in the show would fit the average woman sitting in the audience. Given that so few supermodels knit their own clothes, I think this stinks. Know thy audience. The designer who gives instructions for plus sizes (or hell, even average sizes) stands to make a mint.
- 80% of the pieces in the show would not be worth the time, effort, and money because they will fall completely out of fashion within one season.
My final summation is that obviously those responsible for Stitches, while eminently capable of getting great teachers and putting together a fun market, don't have a fucking clue about putting on a proper fashion show. If this is they best they can do, they should either not do it again, or hire somebody who knows how to do it.
And Rick Mondragon should keep his mouth shut. His clothes make enough noise on their own. I now understand why the stuff in Knitter's looks like it does.
To be continued.
(Sorry this is taking so long, y'all. I wrote most of it Sunday night, and I'm posting it when five minute lulls in my work allows.)


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Optional Quilted Mattress Pad
This mattress pad is cold water machine washable with a cool tumble dry, no bleach.
Optional Waterproof Mattress Pad
The other mattress pad has an innovative waterproof design. It is composed of two layers, the top layer is an ultra soft white terry cloth material and the bottom layer is a space age quiet pliable thin vinyl material. To give you protection without that rubber vinyl feel and noise.
RETURN AND CANCELLATION POLICY: Please note that our sheets, comforters and mattress pads, etc. are all custom sewn for you when you order. We do this so we can offer many colors and custom sizes, thousands of combination's, in fact! Because our bedding is custom for your order, please order carefully. Cancellation of an order is generally impossible as we start sewing ASAP. We can only accept returns within 30 days of order, a 50% re-stock fee will apply, and the bedding must be un-opened and in original packaging. Bedding that has been used or washed is not returnable. Please note that you are responsible for all shipping costs.


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MatterHackers PRO Series PETG
MatterHackers PRO Series PETG 3D printing filament is an exceptionally tough and sturdy material that is a terrific addition to your filament library. PETG filament has minimal shrinkage, making it a great solution for parts that need to be impact resistant and pliable. MatterHackers PRO Series PETG filament is specifically formulated to enhance PETG's natural properties, like durability, heat and chemical resistance, and ease-of-use. As natural PETG is translucent, any parts that involve light diffusion is an ideal use of this material and many translucent colors are available below.
Filtered Results
Clear Filters


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The Samsung Galaxy A21s SM-A217N is an Android Smartphone. It has 6.5 inches, HD+ 720 x 1600 Pixels screen resolution. And it is powered by Exynos 850 Octa-Core CPU, and runs Android 10.0.
This Samsung smartphone gives the user 3GB of RAM. Where the Android Operating System is running, In addition to the user applications and games. And for the storage space it has 32GB of internal storage and Up to 512GB of external memory via microSD card.
To capture and share the best memories of your life with family and friends, You can use the front selfie camera which has 13 megapixels of resolution. And the (48.0 MP Wide + 8.0 MP Ultra-Wide + 2.0 MP Depth + 2.0 MP Macro) Quad main camera with Flash and Auto Focus features.
The Galaxy A21s has 5000mAh battery with 15W Fast Charging Support.
You can read here the full specifications, and features of the Galaxy A21s SM-A217N. So you can know more about its supported networks, dimensions, weight, SIM card size, the connectivity options, And much more.
Helpful Tip: To learn more about this Samsung device, check our How-Tos section. Also, You can download its Official User Manual as a PDF file.


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05/04/06 Suffocation for Profit
Animal Friends and most of Croatian citizens are asking our parliament representatives to ban
In hidden basements, barns, garages and attics, in cramped cages where their natural behaviour is not possible, without any veterinary control, chinchillas are living their short lives. Although they are wild animals in need of a lot of movement and jumping around, this is made impossible for them. This type of keeping and breeding conditions results with abnormal stereotype behavior, fear, reproduction disorders and death of baby-chinchillas. Because of stress, captivity and boredom, they repeat the same movements in the cage, refuse food, they hurt themselves and other animals in the same cage by biting their fur, ears and tails and by picking their eyes out. After they are bought by the company Chinchilla d.o.o. situated in Cakovec, they are killed with deadly gases. The animals suffocate, make contract their muscles while letting out noises of pain. All this is happening in Croatia for only one company's bloody earnings and the extra profit of a few citizens!
That is why Animal Friends will on Thursday, May 4, 2006, at 12 noon, on Ban Jelacic Square, send a clear message shown on a four meter big board, while symbolically showing the act of suffocation. This is meant to ask the parliament members to ban all animal breeding for fur with new coming Animal Protection Act. Animal Friends requests the parliament members to consider the firm ecological, economical and health related reasons which make it impossible to protect animals without breeding controls that are tortured and killed just for human vanity. The only solution is to ban all animal breeding for their fur by law.
Although in the initial version of Animal Protection Act there was a regulation saying that all animal breeding for fur will be banned, because of the strong profit of the lobby, but later it was removed without any arguments for doing so. Animal breeding for fur in Croatia is based on one company's profit, whose production is constantly dropping and as such isn't significant economic branch. Great Britain and Austria have due to the ethical unacceptability banned all animal breeding for fur - inspite of a large number of breeding farms and significantly larger fur manufacturing in their countries.
It is disgraceful that for only one company's profit, that pollutes our environment and exploits the citizens of Croatia that keep the chinchillas for them, law does not prohibit the barbarian torturing and killing of those animals for their fur, as judged by most of Croatia's citizens. Those wish that this type of practice is forbidden by law and that Croatia keeps growing as a civilized country that condemns breeding and killing of animals for trivial and spiteful reasons. We expect from our parliament members to continue with the positive decisions such as banning the import of baby seal pelts in Croatia (that has recently been passed) and that with the Animal Protection Act ban all animal breeding for fur.
Considering the fact that the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Water Management had based the proposition of Animal Protection Act on the Austrian law, we are asking, not only banning animal breeding for fur, but all other primitive practices that are regulated by the Austrian law, such as keeping dogs on chains and killing dogs in shelters. Furthermore, it is absurd that in an Animal Protection Committee are also representatives of Croatian Chamber of Commerce and representatives of Croatian Craftsman Chamber that consider animal welfare strictly for self interest reasons. Regulation that allows performing surgical procedures on animals without any necessary education is also unthinkable.
We expect our parliament representatives to seriously and responsibly realize the necessity of updating the Animal Protection Act so that all animals are protected in line with the ethical development of all Croatian citizens.


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ntroducing Leafy Greens to Sow 'n Sow's new 'Edibles' Gift of Seeds range. This pack includes a mix of lettuce, spinach and rocket seeds to make the handiest, easiest greenery for every meal. There is nothing quite like tucking into your own home grown produce after nurturing and watching it grow. The gift is not just the beautiful card but the joy of growing and of course, the delicious rewards at the end.
Best sown from spring to autumn, simply scatter seeds in a sunny position and cover with a thin layer of soil.
Each card features original artwork by Daniella Germain and includes a packet of mixed seeds, a plastic plant label and sowing instructions.
-Made in Australia
-100% recycled paper
-Includes an illustrative plant label to mark where your seeds are planted
-Comes with a recycled kraft envelope for mailingVarieties: Lettuce 'lactuca sativa', Rocket 'Eruca sativa', Spinach 'Spinacia oleracea'.
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Salary Negotiation For Women: Ask The Expert
InformationWeek salary survey data shows the gender pay gap remains alive and well in IT. One reason: Women walk a tricky tightrope during the negotiation process.
Do you fear you bring home less money than the guy in the office next door? If you're a female IT executive, you're probably right. In our 2014 InformationWeek US IT salary survey, the difference for male and female IT executives spoke for itself: Median total compensation for male IT executives is $25,000 higher than for female execs, according to our data. Male VPs of IT -- a crucial "lieutenant" role on the career path to CIO -- report earning a median base salary of $139,000 -- while females in that role report a median of $125,000.
What are we doing wrong, ladies?
As my mother loves to say, "If you don't ask for it, you won't get it." But the act of asking for more in itself is fraught with complications for women, says Joan C. Williams, distinguished professor and founding director of the Center for WorkLife Law at University of California's Hastings College of the Law, and author of eight books, including What Works for Women at Work: Four Patterns Every Woman Should Know (NYU Press, 2014).
"If I hear once more that the reason for the wage gap is that women don't negotiate, I may just blow a gasket," she wrote, in an eye-opening column on salary strategies.
"Women don't negotiate because they're not idiots," she wrote.
Williams will be my guest on InformationWeek Radio to share her knowledge -- and take your questions. Join us for Salary Negotiation For Women: Get What You Deserve, Tuesday, July 22 at 2 p.m. EDT (11 a.m. PDT). Register now.
Williams' point about women not being idiots: Some of those times you kept your mouth shut, at annual review/raise time, or as you accepted a new job, you were right. You used your emotional IQ, your intellect, your research, and your knowledge of the personalities involved to decide that asking for more would likely backfire.
You were up against what Williams calls the "tightrope" of masculinity and femininity. Be perceived as too masculine, and you're bitchy. Be perceived as too feminine, and you're not aggressive and effective enough.
There's no perfect mix of masculine and feminine. Every boss and coworker you have may think a different balance of the two is "normal."
Sounding familiar? Women walk this tightrope in all sorts of professional situations -- from speaking up in meetings to tooting your own horn up the chain of command.
I wrote about it with regard to a high-profile project I led. I wrestled with what degree of worry I could show. Too much, and I'm branded a Nervous Nellie. Not enough, and I'm branded incompetent. I finally embraced the fact that no one would think I was Chicken Little for having legitimate worries about project issues. After all, the men did, too.
This tightrope dynamic especially factors into hiring and salary negotiations, Williams says. Studies show women get penalized more often than men do when asking for more money. But you can use strategies to try and stay in balance. So let's take how you handle negotiations to the next level.
In our online broadcast July 22, Williams and I will discuss classic mistakes to avoid in negotiations, whether women wait too long to try for the next promotion -- and how to be assertive at work without being labeled the dreaded word that rhymes with witch. Bring your experience and your problems.
With regard to walking the tightrope, I see reason for optimism for women in IT. In the past year, I have met a growing number of female CIOs and IT leaders who simply will not downplay being women. I listened to Dell CIO Adriana Karaboutis declare: "Get out of your own way" and advise women to reach sooner for that next career step.
I watched the day vanish when all professional IT women wore boxy grey or brown suits. When I moderate panels on female IT leadership these days, the participants wear bright blue, brilliant yellow -- even pink.
I just ran a column by Daria Hutchinson, a woman in a leadership role at big data company Platfora, that proved a hit with our readers: How To Explain Big Data To A Fifth Grader. One of the cool things to me about the article: She included a photo of her with her daughter. When I reported on the microprocessor and PC industry in the 1990s, I was lucky to meet female execs at all. And if I did, they never even hinted at being moms. That would be leaning too far on the feminine side of the tightrope.
I see women inside and outside IT leading by example, walking the tightrope with bravery and grace.
Let's keep sharing what we learn on that walk. Register now to join me for the Salary Negotiation radio show with Joan C. Williams.
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General Warm-up
Healthy Eating Costs You $1.50 More A Day
Eating nutritional foods is one of the best ways to reduce obesity. But following a healthy diet isn't always easy, especially for lower socioeconomic groups.
One of the biggest barriers to buying good food is the cost, many experts say. Now researchers at Harvard School of Public Health have put a dollar amount on the price of healthy eating. By reviewing 27 studies on the cost of healthy vs. unhealthy foods, they've estimated the daily cost of eating better. Their results are published in the British Medical Journal.
"Conventional wisdom has been that healthier foods cost more, but it's never been clear if that's actually true or exactly how much more healthier foods might cost," said lead study author Mayuree Rao. "We found that the healthiest diets cost about $1.50 more per day, and that's less than we might have expected."
The study
Rao and her team looked at studies done after 2000 that compared healthy and unhealthy version of certain foods – for example, lean beef vs. a fattier cut, and studies that compared healthy and unhealthy diet patterns, such as a diet rich in fruits and vegetables versus a diet without fresh produce.
The studies they analyzed came from 10 countries, including the United States, Canada and several European nations. The food prices were converted to international dollars and adjusted for inflation.
The researchers evaluated the prices based on a specific food's price per serving, as well as the price per 200 calories of that food item. They evaluated the diet patterns based on the price per day (three meals' worth) and the price per 2,000 calories – the FDA's standard daily intake recommendation for adults. This ensured the researchers were looking at the price variations from all angles.
The results
Some food groups showed more of a difference in price than others. Meat had the highest price difference; healthier versions cost 29 cents more per serving on average than the less healthy option. Grains, snacks and dairy, on the other hand, showed minimal price differences between healthier and unhealthier versions.
On a broader scope, the healthiest diets appear to cost consumers about $1.50 more per day than the unhealthiest diets. This means consumers who eat a diet rich in fruits and vegetables, for example, pay about $1.50 more per day than those who eat a diet made up mostly of processed foods.
This result was consistent across several types of healthy diets, the study authors say, including the Mediterranean-style diet, Harvard's Alternative Healthy Eating Index, and diets focused on eating more energy dense foods.
Every study has a caveat – something the scientists couldn't control for or didn't analyze that may be affecting the results. In this case, the study authors were limited by data that had been collected by others in the past. The definition of a "healthy" diet varied between each study, and the prices were only evaluated to reflect the price for a typical adult's daily diet.
"Our aim… was not to evaluate whether one specific product costs more than another, but whether healthier foods in a broad class of foods cost more, on average, than less healthy foods in the same broad class," the study authors write.
Rao wants you to consider what $1.50 means to you.
"For many low-income families, that means quite a lot," she said. "It translates to about $550 more per year for one person, and that could be a real barrier to healthy eating."
But for other people, $1.50 is less than they spend on their morning cup of coffee. It's "just a drop in the bucket when you consider the billions of dollars spent every year on diet-related chronic disease like obesity, diabetes and heart disease," Rao said. "When you look at the long-term health impact, the extra $1.50 is a good investment."
Post by: Jacque Wilson — CNN.com Health writer/producer |


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LEGO action returns to the Indiana Jones world. New features include split screen co-op and a level editor.
Will include all the levels from the original LEGO Indy.
This page contains co-op info for LEGO Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues on the Wii. All information about LEGO Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues was correct at the time of posting. Information is subject to change. If you see any errors please email us.


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Why has the council's chief lawyer and Bundred crook, Shahzia "Dim" Daya started threatening councillors with legal action if they discuss the recently departed council Chief Exec Anna "Big Wedge" Klonowski with the press?
Total mystery surrounds the sudden RESIGNATION of the Reverend Rees's representative on Earth and chief bag carrier. Big Wedge, barely six months into a role filling her boots with extraordinary sums of public cash while leading an inane "improvement journey" at the council quit on Monday 4 September for "family reasons" taking a payoff reputedly in the region of £70k. What for?
This, so the story goes, is because Big Wedge suddenly discovered her parents were seriously ill and she needed to to look after them. We can only sympathise with this SUDDEN and SIMULTANEOUS deterioration of these executive parents, both of whose health apparently collapsed in the six months since Big Wedge began her latest well remunerated public sector "improvement journey".
No doubt Big Wedge watchers are pleased that she's continued to display her remarkably ordinary intellect and way with a tired old cliche to the very end. Isn't quitting for "family reasons" a hackneyed old code in political circles for "JUMPING BEFORE I'M PUSHED"? So what has Big Wedge really been up to?
Creating and running a systematic BULLYING CULTURE at the top of the council is what. We understand that in early September a letter began circulating claiming that Big Wedge had personally bullied 14 Service Directors out of Bristol City Council over the last year and had then paid them off to keep them silent.
Intrigued, a local reporter called the council's PR department where they were greeted with barely-concealed PANIC at the mention of Big Wedge and bullying. The reporter was promised they would receive a call back with a statement. Obviously this never came.
Instead, for the rest of the week, local newspaper editors received regular calls from various senior bosses and PR types at the council BEGGING them not to run any bullying stories in relation to Big Wedge. Then – after a weekend, apparently considering her position – Big Wedge announced the following Monday morning she was quitting "for family reasons". Coincidence or wot?
What's even stranger, however, is why the Reverend and Big Wedge ever thought bullying bosses out of the organisation and paying large compensation packages was necessary? (Were they getting a kick out of bullying their staff?) Because didn't they have a brand new INDEPENDENT REPORT (kept secret from us) into their managers' conduct around financial management in 2015 – 16 and the unlawful budget set in 2016?
So why wasn't this report used as the basis for DISCIPLINARY ACTION against these bosses? This would have saved us a fortune and ensured none of these crooks ever worked in local government again. Surely a win-win?
Or maybe this secret report contains some rather more uncomfortable facts that need to remain secret? For example, Klonowski started working in a SENIOR ROLE in finance at Bristol City Council in 2015. What exactly did she know about HIDDEN DEBTS and UNLAWFUL BUDGETS?
Similarly, council lawyer Shahzia "Dim" Daya, who's still got her feet firmly under the table at the Counts Louse and is now threatening councillors all over again, OVERSAW the council budget meeting in 2016 where an unlawful budget was set with her FULL KNOWLEDGE. Alison "Three Jobs" Comley – still raking in a six figure sum – also knew all about the unlawful budget, according to PUBLISHED MINUTES, and she continues in post trashing parks and unlawfully refusing to house the homeless.
Then there's the pair of BENT CHIEF INTERNAL AUDITORS who knew lots and lots about unachieved savings and inaccurate reports to councillors. They, too, are still collecting generous salaries for their mendacity and failure.
Isn't it time the Reverend published his secret new report into his bent bosses so we can find out what's been going on inside his useless council and we can sort it out if he can't?
NB. Any legal threats in relation to this article to the Bristolian's email please.


text: The Nazarene Archives is open Monday through Friday from 8:00 A.M. to 4:30 P.M. Visiting researchers usually can schedule nearby lodging at reasonable rates. Nazarene Theological Seminary is in the metro area and its library is open in the evenings (except Wednesdays and Sundays) when classes are in session. A coordinated research plan can maximize the value of a trip for researchers.


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The Tooth Fairy Then and Now
WE CAN ALL REMEMBER what it was like to put a baby tooth under the pillow and find a shiny quarter there in the morning. The Tooth Fairy is a prominent figure in the magic of childhood, and it's fun to look at how cultures have approached lost baby teeth differently throughout history.
The Superstitions That Preceded the Tooth Fairy
Long before the Tooth Fairy was sneaking teeth out from under pillows, she was digging them out of the ground. Medieval Europeans would burn or bury baby teeth because they believed that a witch could control people if she got hold of their teeth.
In addition to protecting themselves from witches, kids would burn their baby teeth to help ensure a peaceful afterlife, because they might be doomed to an eternity of searching for their teeth as ghosts if they didn't destroy them! That sounds pretty intense.
Unlike their neighbors to the south, the Vikings considered baby teeth to be good luck in battle — so much so that they would buy them so that they could wear necklaces made out of children's teeth! That could either be very intimidating or very strange-looking — or maybe both.
Tooth Fairy…or Tooth Mouse?
The Tooth Fairy doesn't look like Tinkerbell in every culture. Many Latin and European countries have a Tooth Mouse instead! She's called Le Petit Souris in France, which translates to "the little mouse," and like the Tooth Fairy, she swaps out teeth hidden under pillows for money or small gifts. In many Spanish-speaking countries, the Tooth Mouse is Raton Perez.
How Did We Come Up With the Tooth Fairy?
Like many of our traditions in the U.S., the Tooth Fairy has its roots in European folklore. The modern idea of the Tooth Fairy got its start in the early 1900s, and it was actually the beloved fairy characters popularized by Walt Disney that helped the idea gain enough traction to become what it is now.
Why Do We Need the Tooth Fairy?
We probably don't "need" the Tooth Fairy, but losing a tooth can be a scary experience for many children, and having something magical like a reward from the Tooth Fairy to look forward to can really help. They'll have something to be excited about instead of focusing only on how much it might hurt to lose the tooth. But fantasy characters aren't the only ones out there who can help with children's tooth concerns: dentists can too!
We have the best patients!
Top image used under CC0 Public Domain license. Image cropped and modified from original.
The content on this blog is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of qualified health providers with questions you may have regarding medical conditions.


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Klotz & Neutrik 10M Pro Microphone Cable
£22.20 ex. vat
Klotz & Neutrik 10M Professional Microphone Cable
The Klotz & Neutrik 10 Meter Professional Microphone Cable combines Klotz MY206 microphone cable & industry standard Neutrik 'XX' Series XLR connectors.
Choose from a choice of 7 cable colours and 3 different connectors.
*Pictured 2m cable is for illustration purposes only.
Klotz MY206 Cable
Klotz MY206 is high-quality professional balanced microphone cable with PVC jacket, spiral shield and stranded copper cores.
In developing this cable Klotz paid special attention to the high demands of everyday use on stage and in the studio. A special rubber-like PVC material ensures flexibility at extreme temperatures (out-door recordings), additional cotton padding keeps the capacitance constant and avoids handling noise. Finally a particularly dense spiral shield provides maximum shielding even under large mechanical loads.
- Ultra-low capacitance (60 pF/m)
- Extremely flexible
- Construction
- Conductor: Stranded bare copper, 28 x 0.10 mm
- Cross Section: 0.22 mm2
- Insulation: PE
- Shielding: Bare copper spiral shield
- Outer Jacket: PVC, matt
- Overall Diameter: 6.15mm
- Min. Bending Radius: 30mm
- Working Temperature: -20C / +70
Neutrik 'XX'-Series XLR Connectors
This cable is available with a choice of 3 different Neutrik XLR connectors.
- NC3MXX-BAG & NC3FXX-BAG - 3 pole XLR cable connectors with black metal housing and silver contacts.
- NC3MXX & NC3FXX - 3 pole XLR cable connectors with nickel metal housing and silver contacts.
- NC3MXX-B & NC3FXX-B - 3 pole XLR cable connectors with black metal housing and gold contacts.


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LOS ALTOS, Calif. – Oct. 23, 2013 – Netskope™, the cloud app analytics and policy company, today announced that former Symantec Chairman and CEO Enrique Salem will join the Netskope Board of Directors. Salem's appointment is accompanied by the addition of four new Netskope advisors, including The Coca-Cola Company chief of enterprise architecture Alan Boehme, former HP and Royal Dutch Shell CIO Mike Rose, Netflix vice president of IT operations Mike D. Kail, and former Cisco vice president of enterprise Alan Cohen.
As a Director, Salem will work closely with the executive team to help Netskope align its business with the dilemma CIOs face around the increasingly widespread use of cloud apps in their organizations. Cloud apps have emerged as a more agile and efficient way for employees to perform core business processes across every functional area of the enterprise. However, many of these apps are unsanctioned, and therefore difficult for IT to secure, audit and optimize.
"IT and security leaders are grappling with a major catch-22 when it comes to cloud apps," said Salem. "Cloud apps let people and the business go fast; yet they are hard to keep secure and compliant. I look forward to working with the Netskope team to solve this dilemma for organizations, allowing them to embrace the cloud instead of holding it back."
"We're honored to have Enrique join our board of directors," said Sanjay Beri, CEO of Netskope. "Enrique's support validates the approach Netskope is taking to help enterprises embrace the cloud. We're excited to work with him."
The Netskope Board of Directors is led by Netskope CEO Sanjay Beri and includes Mamoon Hamid, General Partner and co-founder of The Social+Capital Partnership, where he has invested in and served on the boards of such disruptive cloud companies as Box and Yammer (Microsoft) and Arif Janmohamed, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners and previously from the Corporate Business Development group at Cisco Systems.
About Enrique Salem
Enrique Salem contributes more than 25 years of executive leadership, business strategy, and board experience to Netskope. Most recently, Enrique served as president and CEO of Symantec, where he worked for 19 years in a variety of leadership roles. Prior to that, he served as CEO of Brightmail and SVP of products and technology at Oblix and Ask Jeeves. In March 2011, Salem was appointed to President Barack Obama's Management Advisory Board.
Alan Boehme, Advisor
As chief of enterprise architecture at The Coca-Cola Company and board member for the Cloud Security Alliance, Alan Boehme brings technology and business transformation strategy to Netskope. Alan has served as SVP and head of IT architecture for ING and CIO for Juniper Networks and Sage Software.
Mike Rose, Advisor
Mike Rose brings more than three decades of executive IT and board of directors leadership, customer advocacy, and a strong IT-business partnership philosophy to Netskope. Mike has served as CIO for HP, SVP and CIO for Royal Dutch Shell, and EVP of service, support, and operations for Juniper Networks, where he previously served on the company's board of directors.
Mike D. Kail, Advisor
As vice president of IT operations at Netflix and at the forefront of cloud innovation, Mike D. Kail brings thought leadership and practical customer advice to Netskope. Prior to Netflix, Mike served as VP of IT operations at Attensity.
Alan Cohen, Advisor
Alan Cohen brings general management and go-to-market strategy to Netskope. Alan was vice president of enterprise for Cisco, where he was responsible for developing and driving the company's enterprise, vertical industry, and public sector positioning. He has served in executive product and marketing functions for Nicira (VMW) and Airespace (CSCO) and currently serves as chief commercial officer for Illumio.
About Netskope
Netskope is the cloud app analytics and policy company. Only Netskope eliminates the catch-22 between being agile and being secure and compliant by providing complete visibility and enforcing sophisticated policies in cloud apps. Netskope performs deep analytics and lets decision makers create policies in a few clicks that protect corporate data and optimize cloud app usage in real-time and at scale. With Netskope, people get their favorite cloud apps and the business can move fast, with confidence.
Netskope is headquartered in Los Altos, California. Visit us at www.netskope.com and follow us on Twitter @Netskope.


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Fair warning: this article spoils the ending to Starflight, although it doesn't spoil the things you need to know to get there.
Starflight, one of the grandest and most expansive games of the 1980s, was born in the cramped confines of a racquetball court. Rod McConnell, a businessman who had been kicking around Silicon Valley for some years, happened to have as his regular playing partner Joe Ybarra, a former Apple executive who in late 1982 had decamped to join Trip Hawkins's fledgling new Electronic Arts as a game "producer." Intrigued by Ybarra's stories of "electronic artists" and an upcoming revolution in entertainment based on interactivity, McConnell wondered if he might somehow join the fun. He thus started discussing ideas with a programmer named Dave Boulton.
Boulton, who died in 2009, is the unsung hero of Starflight. His involvement with the project wouldn't last very long, but his fingerprints are all over the finished game. He was, first and foremost, a zealot for the Forth programming language. He was one of the founding members of the Forth Interest Group, which was established just at the beginning of the PC era in 1977 and did stellar work to standardize the language and bring it to virtually every one of the bewildering variety of computers available by the early 1980s. More recently his hacking had led him to begin exploring the strange universe of Benoit Mandelbrot's fractal sets fully eighteen months before Rescue on Fractalus! would make fractals a household name for gamers and programmers everywhere. Boulton enticed McConnell with an idea much bigger than Lucasfilm's simple action game: an almost infinitely vast planet which, thanks to the miracle of fractals, the player could roam at will.
McConnell founded a company named Ambient Design and hired a couple of young programmers to help Boulton. One, Alec Kercso, was just finishing a degree in Linguistics in San Diego, but was more interested in his hobby of hacking. The other, Bob Gonsalves, was another dedicated Forther who wrote a monthly column on the language for Antic magazine. He was hired on the basis of this as well as his intimate familiarity with the Atari 8-bit platform, which thanks to its audiovisual capabilities was the great favorite around EA circles during that first year or so, until the Commodore 64 came online in earnest. On the strength of McConnell's friendship with Ybarra and little else — the whole group of them had among them neither any experience with game development nor any real plan for what their game would be beyond a vast environment created with fractals — EA signed them as one of the first of their second wave of contracts, following the premiere of the initial six, reputation-establishing EA games. Ybarra would be their producer, their main point of contact with and advocate within EA. He would have his work cut out for him in the years to come.
The idea soon evolved to encompass not just a single planet but many. The game, to be called Starquest, would let you fly in your starship across an entire galaxy of star systems, each with planets of its own, each of which would in turn be its own unique world, with unique terrain, weather, life forms, and natural resources. For Boulton, the man who had gotten this ball rolling in earnest in the first place, it was suddenly getting to be too much. You just couldn't do all that on an 8-bit computer, he said, not even with the magic combination of Forth and fractals. He walked away. He would go on to develop early software for the Commodore Amiga and to join another unheralded founder, Jef Raskin of the original vision for the Apple Macintosh, to work on Raskin's innovative but unsuccessful Canon Cat.
Left on their own with only Boulton's prototype fractal code to guide them, Kercso and Gonsalves felt over their heads. They needed to be able to show each planet as a rotating globe from space, complete with the fractal terrain that the player would be able to explore more intimately if she elected to land, but didn't know how to map the terrain onto a sphere. McConnell soon found another programmer, Tim Lee, who did. Lee had already written firmware for Texas Instruments calculators and written very complex policy-analysis applications for life-insurance companies. Yet another Forth fan, he'd just finished writing an actual game in the language, an IBM PC port of the Datasoft action game Genesis which Datasoft would never ship due to its incompatibility with the PCjr. With the graphics code he'd developed for that project, plus his own explorations of fractal programming, Lee was more than up to rendering those spinning terrain-mapped globes.
Lee also brought with him his programming expertise on the IBM PC. This prompted the team to take a big step: to abandon their little 8-bitters and move to the bigger 16-bit MS-DOS machines. They had recognized that Boulton had been right: their ideas were just too big to fit into 8 bits. MS-DOS was just finishing up its trouncing of CP/M to become undisputed king of the business-computing world, but had managed little penetration into homes, which were still dominated by the likes of the Apple II and Commodore 64. On the one hand, the IBM was a terrible gaming platform: its CGA graphics could show only four colors at a time in palettes that seemed deliberately chosen to clash as horribly with one another as possible and give artists nightmares; its single speaker was capable of little more than equally unpleasant bleeps and farts; even standard gaming equipment like joysticks were effectively non-existent due to a perceived lack of demand. But on the other hand, the IBM was an amazing gaming platform, with several times the raw processing power of the 8-bitters and at least twice the memory. Like so much in life, it all depended on how you looked at it. Ambient Design decided they needed the platform's advantages to contain a galaxy that would eventually encompass 270 star systems with 811 planets between them, and they'd just have to take the bitter with the sweet. Still, it's unlikely that EA would have gone along with the idea had it not been for the imminent release of the PCjr, which was widely expected to do in home computing what its big brother had in business computing.
About this point the last and arguably biggest piece of the development puzzle arrived in the form of Greg Johnson, Kercso's roommate. Not much of a programmer himself, Johnson had, like his roommate, also just finished a degree and wasn't quite sure what to do next. He had listened avidly to Kercso's reports on the game's progress, and eventually started drawing pictures of imagined scenes on his Atari 800 just for fun. He was soon coming up with so many pictures and, more importantly, ideas that Kercso got him an interview and McConnell hired him. Just like that, Johnson became the much-needed lead designer. Until now the team had been focused entirely on the environment they were trying to create, giving little thought to what the player would be expected to actually do there. As Kercso would later put it, what had been an "open-ended game of exploration" now slowly began to evolve into "a complex story with interwoven plots and twists." Johnson himself later said his job became to come up with what should happen, the others to come up with how it could happen. Or, as Lee put it, Johnson designed the scenario while the others designed "the game system that you could write the scenario for." And indeed, he proved to be a boundless fount of creativity, coming up with seven unique and occasionally hilarious alien races for the player to fight, trade, and converse with during her travels.
Critical to those conversations became a designer we've met before on this blog, Paul Reiche III, who spent two important weeks helping Johnson and his colleagues to hash out a workable conversation engine which made use of the system of conversation "postures" from a game he had co-designed with Jon Freeman, Murder on the Zinderneuf. Reiche, an experienced designer of tabletop RPG rules and adventures as well computer games, continued to offer Johnson, who had heretofore thought of himself as a better artist than writer or designer, advice and ideas throughout the game's protracted development.
"Protracted" is perhaps putting it too mildly. The process just seemed to go on forever, so much so that it became something of a sick running joke inside EA. The project appeared on more than three years worth of weekly status reports, from the time that EA was mature enough to have weekly status reports until the game's belated release in August of 1986. Over that time the arcades and home game consoles crashed and burned; the home-computer industry went through its own dramatic boom and bust and stabilization; countless platforms came and went, not least among them the PCjr; EA gave up on the dream of revolutionizing mainstream home-entertainment and accepted the status of big fish in the relatively small pond of computer gaming; IBM achieved business-computing domination and then ceded it almost as quickly thanks to the cloners; the bookware craze came and went; Infocom rose to dizzying heights and crashed to earth just as quickly; the Soviet Union went from an Evil Empire to a partner in nuclear-arms control. And still, ever and anon, there was Starflight, the much more elegant name chosen for Starquest after the release of Sierra's King's Quest. McConnell's company name changed as well before all was said and done, from Ambient Design to Binary Systems (get it?).
EA very nearly lost patience several times; McConnell credits his old friend Joe Ybarra with personally rescuing the project from cancellation on a number of occasions. With the contract structured to provide payments only after milestones that were few and increasingly far between, McConnell himself took personal loans and worked other jobs so as to be able to pay his team a pittance. Throughout it all he never lost faith, despite ample evidence that they didn't, to be painfully blunt, entirely know what they were doing. The team members lived on savings or loans when their meager salaries ran out. Many months were consumed by fruitless wheel-spinning. As Lee later admitted, they were so entranced with this model universe that they "spent a lot of time trying to model things that didn't add to the play of the game." Forth was never the most readable language nor an ideal choice for a large group project, and as the project wandered off in this or that direction and back again the code got nightmarishly gnarly. This just made trying to modify or add to it take still longer. With McConnell only able to afford a tiny office and most of the team thus working remotely most of the time, just keeping everyone on the same page was difficult. Given the situation and the personalities involved, a certain amount of freelancing was inevitable. "There was no master plan detailing each and every task to be done," said Kercso later. "We had an idea of what the major modules had to be and we added a lot of final design as we got into programming each of the modules"; then they did their best to mash it all together.
Starflight was a prototypical runaway, mismanaged, overambitious project, the likes of which the industry has seen many times since. The difference was, instead of being ignominiously cancelled or shoved out the door incomplete, Starflight somehow ended up amazing. Call it serendipity, or credit it to a team that just wouldn't give up. Once the core group was assembled, nobody thought of quitting; everyone was determined to finish the game — and on its own original, insanely ambitious terms at that — or die trying. "I remember saying that I didn't care if I died after it came out," said Johnson later, but "please, God, let me live until then."
Some of the confusion and occasional lack of direction is visible in the final game. Even the biggest Starflight fan would have trouble praising the arcade-style in-space combat engine, for instance, which manages to be both far too simplistic and far too baffling to actually control. There's a disconnected feeling to certain elements, as of clever ideas that were never fully woven into the holistic design. You can gather flora and fauna from the planets you visit and return them to your base to study, for example, but you make so little money from doing so as opposed to mining minerals — and the controls for stunning and gathering your specimens are once again so awkward — that you're left wondering what the point is. Ditto most of the intriguing alien artifacts you find, which you cart excitedly back to base only to find that they "reveal very little of interest" and are "totally useless to us." And the game has what should be a fatal case of split personality, being half stately space opera and half silly romp filled with sci-fi alien caricatures.
And yet it really doesn't matter. Starflight is that rare piece of work that actually justifies the critic's cliché of being more than the sum of its parts. It's not a tight design; appropriately given its theme, it sprawls everywhere, sometimes seemingly uselessly so. But even its blind alleys are fascinating to wander down once or twice. It's the opposite of a minimalist masterpiece like M.U.L.E., whose every last note is carefully considered and exhaustively tested and blended carefully into the whole. And you know what? It's every bit as awesome.
But for the benefit of those of you who haven't played it it's really high time that I tell what the game's all about, isn't it?
Starflight starts you off at your base on your home planet of Arth — no, that's not a typo — with a rather shabbily equipped ship and a little bit of seed capital. If you're smart, you'll spend most of the latter training a crew, which will include, in the tradition of a certain classic television series that went where no man has gone before, a Captain, a Science Officer, a Navigator, an Engineer, a Communications Officer, and a Doctor. You'll also need to save enough to add a cargo pod or three to your ship, so you can begin to earn money by landing on nearby planets and scooping up minerals for sale back at Arth. You need money to upgrade your ship with better engines, weapons, and defenses, to train your crew, and to buy something called endurium, if you can't find or mine enough of it. Endurium is Starflight's equivalent to dilithium crystals, the semi-magical fuel that enables faster-than-light travel.
As you build up your ship and your bank account, you can travel ever farther from Arth, exploring an algorithmically generated galaxy so vast that, like the Fibonacci galaxies of Elite, even Starflight's creators hadn't seen all of it before the game's release. And so you fly and land where you will, searching for mineral-rich planets you can mine and, even better, habitable planets you can recommend for colonization; you receive a substantial finder's fee in return for each recommendation. Alien races inhabit various sectors of the galaxy. Some you may be able to befriend, or at least achieve a level of mutual toleration with; others you'll have to fight. Thus the need to fit out your ship with the best possible weapons and defenses.
This, then, is Starflight the sandbox game. While it's in no way derivative of Elite — Starflight's creators couldn't have even been aware of the older game until quite late in their own development cycle, since Elite didn't reach American shores until late 1985 — Starflight does generate a similar compulsion to explore, an addictive need to see what all is out there. But everything about Starflight is richer and more complex, with the exception only of the combat system that was the heart of Elite but a mere afterthought in Starflight (if you had to spend much time in Starflight actually fighting, it would be a very, very bad game). With so much more computing horsepower at their disposal, Binary Systems was able to add layer after intriguing layer: the ability to land on planets, and once there to engage in an exploring and mining mini-game that is as absurdly addictive as it is superficially simplistic; the chance to converse with the aliens you meet instead of just shooting at them; the whole CRPG angle of training a crew and keeping them healthy; sensor- and Navigator-confounding nebulae and wormholes to negotiate. Whereas Elite sessions soon settle down into a comfortable routine of trade-jump-fight-dock, rinse and repeat forever, Starflight always seems to have something new to throw at you.
But the most important difference is the plot that Starflight layers over its sandbox. I realize everyone is different on this point, but personally I always have a little bit of trouble with purely open-ended games (see my review of Seven Cities of Gold for another example). When I play Elite I eventually start to get bored for lack of any real narrative or goal to shoot for beyond the almost impossible one of actually becoming Elite. Ian Bell and David Braben originally wanted to include a real plot, but there just wasn't room to contain it inside a 32 K BBC Micro. Starflight, however, has the sort of plot-driven direction that Elite so painfully lacks.
So, having told you what you can do in Starflight, let me now tell you why you do it. Evidence has recently turned up on Arth that the planet's inhabitants did not evolve there; that it was colonized at some point in the distant past, that the colonists regressed into barbarism due to war or other pressures, and that only now has civilization recovered. A cache of old documents has also revealed the secrets of endurium and faster-than-light travel. All of which is great, except that Arth has even bigger fish to fry. A strange wave is spreading across the galaxy, causing stars to flare — with disastrous results for any orbiting planets — as it strikes them. Thus your mission is not just to explore and get rich, but to discover the source of the wave and to stop it before it reaches Arth.
Starflight has an unusually elaborate plot for its day, but unlike in so many more recent games it never straitjackets you to it. The plot is more backstory than story. The game is essentially a big scavenger hunt, sending you off to reconstruct quite a complicated galactic history. Follow the trail long enough and you should turn up the clues and objects you need to end the threat to Arth and the galaxy by blowing up a certain Crystal Planet that's the source of all the trouble. There's not all that much that you actually need to do to beat the game when you know how. In fact, you can do it in less than two game days. It's the clue- and object-scavenging that's all the fun, the process of putting the pieces of the backstory together. When you discover Earth, for example — yes, those original colonizers of Arth came, inevitably, from Earth — it gives a thrill when you first look down on those familiar continents from orbit. Other pieces of the puzzle are almost equally thrilling when they come to light. If you're playing cold, sans walkthrough — which is honestly the only way to play; you'll otherwise just be left wondering what all the fuss is about — you'll need to look everywhere for clues: to the occasional emails you receive from your overseers on Arth; to messages and artifacts you find on the planets; to the map and other materials included in the game package. And, most importantly, you need to talk at length to all those aliens, a goofy and amusing rogue's gallery of sci-fi clichés. They're the silly part of this odd mixture of stately epic and silly romp — but they're so much fun we'll take them just as they are, cognitive dissonance be damned.
Now, this plot-as-scavenger-hunt approach to gameplay is hardly an innovation of Starflight. The Ultima games in particular had long been trolling these waters by the time it appeared. The breadcrumb-following approach to game design always gives rise to the possibility of getting yourself stuck because you've missed that one little thing in this absurdly vast virtual world on which all further progress depends. Yet there is a difference between Starflight and Ultima in this respect, a difference not so much in kind as in quality. Starflight is a much more friendly, generous game. Whereas Ultima seems to relish making you fail by hiding vital clues in the most outlandish places or behind the most unlikely parser keywords, there's a sense that Starflight really wants you to succeed, wants you to solve the mystery and save the galaxy. There are multiple ways to learn much of what you need to know, multiple copies of some vital artifacts hidden in completely different places, multiple solutions to most of the logistic and diplomatic puzzles it sets before you. Yes, there's a time limit, what with Arth's sun destined eventually to flare, but even that is very generous, operating more as a way to lend the game excitement and narrative urgency than a way to crush you for failing some hardcore gamer test. Its generosity is not absolute: in my own recent playthrough I had to turn to a walkthrough to learn that you need to be obsequious when you talk to the Velox or they'll never share an absolutely vital piece of information that I don't think you can glean anywhere else (remember that, would-be future players!). Still, even these few choke points feel more like accidents than deliberate cruelties strewn in your path by cackling designers. Starflight really does feel like a welcome step toward a more forgiving, inclusive sort of gaming.
Spoilers begin!
No discussion of Starflight's plot can be complete without the shocker of an ending. When you finally arrive at the Crystal Planet and are preparing to destroy it, everything suddenly gets deeply weird via a message from an earlier visitor:
I can hardly believe it! Those weird lumps are actually intelligent life. The Ancients are endurium! And we have spent hundreds of years hunting them to burn for fuel in our ships. Their metabolism is so much slower than ours that they live in an entirely different time framework. I don't think they even know we are sentient. I believe it was only because of a link thru the Crystal Planet that contact was made at all. This Crystal Planet was their last defense. I can hardly blame them. Carbon-based life must have seemed something like a virus to them.
Despite this discovery, the only option — other than to simply stop playing — is to blow up the Crystal Planet anyway, thus annihilating the home planet of a race much more ancient and presumably more sophisticated than your own. It's a strange, discordant sort of ending to say the least. Some have made much of it indeed; see for instance an earnest article in Envirogamer that would make of Starflight an elaborate allegory for our environmental problems of today, with endurium representing fossil fuels and the stellar wave standing in for global warming. I'm not really buying that. Not only does the article strike me as anachronistic, an argument born of 2009 rather than the mid-1980s, but I somehow have trouble seeing Starflight as a platform for such deliberate messaging; it strikes me as a grand escapist space opera, full stop, without any rhetorical axe to grind.
But is Starflight's ending a deliberate subversion of genre convention, like the controversial ending to Infidel? Maybe. It's not as if the game is not without a certain melancholia in other places; for instance, you'll occasionally meet a race of interstellar minstrels who roam the spacelanes singing sad songs about glories that used to be. Yet after you do the bloody deed on the Crystal Planet the game immediately leaps back to unabashed triumphalism, gifting you with medals and music and glory and a chance to roam the galaxy at your leisure with an extra 500,000 credits in your account, burning genocidal quantities of endurium as you do so with nary a moral qualm to dog your steps. What to make of this seeming obliviousness to the ramifications of what you've just done? You'll have to decide for yourself whether it represents subtlety or just a muddle of mixed messages that got away from their creators. It's just one more of the layers within layers that make Starflight so memorable for just about everyone who plays it.
Spoilers end!
In addition to its innovations in the softer arts of design and narrative, Starflight has one final, more concrete quality that sets it apart from what came before, one that can be very easy to overlook but is nevertheless of huge importance. It's the first of these big open-world games that offers a truly persistent virtual world to explore. Due to the limitations of 8-bit floppy-disk drives, earlier games all fudge persistence in some way. The Wizardry and Bard's Tale games, for instance, save only the state of your characters between sessions. Everything else resets to its original state as soon as you leave the game, or, indeed, just travel between dungeon levels or between the dungeon and the city. Amongst numerous other oddities, this means that you can actually "win" these games over and over with the same group of characters; the games literally forget you've done so almost immediately after showing you the victory screen. The 8-bit Ultimas do only a little better: the outdoor world map does persist along with the details of your characters, but cities and dungeons, again, reset themselves ad infinitum. You can go into a town, murder a dozen guards and rob every shop in town, then exit and return to find all restored to peace and tranquility again. Indeed, solving the early Ultimas is virtually dependent on you doing exactly this.
Starflight, however, is different. Its whole vast galaxy remembers what you have done, on both a macro- and micro-scale. If you discover a juicy new planet, name it, and recommend it for colonization, it goes by that name for the rest of the game. If you befriend or piss off a given alien race, they don't forget you or what you've done. If you strip-mine a planet of all its minerals, they don't reappear the next time you land on it. If you make notes in your "Captain's Log" (a first in itself), they remain there until you delete them. If you blow up an alien race's home planet thereby destroying their entire civilization, it stays blown up. This is a huge step forward for verisimilitude, one enabled by Binary Systems's choice to throw caution to the wind and target the bigger, more capable MS-DOS machines. [1]This is not to say that all is smooth sailing. Starflight constantly saves updated versions of its data files to disk as you play. It then relies on you to "commit" all of these changes by cleanly exiting the game from the menu. If you ever exit without properly saving, or get killed, your game becomes unplayable until you reset it back to its original data — whereupon you have the joy of starting all over. My advice is to make backups of the files "STARA.COM" and "STARB.COM" after every successful session; then if you get killed or have some other problem you can just copy these back into the game's directory to get back to a good state. Or, if you like, here's a DOSBox startup script you can use to automatically keep a few generations of states. Just copy it into the "[autoexec]" section of the game's ".conf" file, editing as needed to suit your directory names.
As Starflight neared release at last, it was very much an open question whether it would find an audience. By now the PCjr had come and gone — just as well given that the game's memory requirements had ballooned past that machine's standard 128 K to a full 256 K. No one had ever released such a major title exclusively on MS-DOS. Normally if that platform got games at all they were ports of titles that had already proved themselves on the more popular gaming machines, delivered months or years after their debuts elsewhere. Binary Systems and EA could only make sure Starflight supported the popular Tandy 1000's enhanced graphics and hope for the best.
The best was far better than they had bargained for: initial sales far exceeded the most optimistic expectations, leaving EA scrambling to produce more copies to fill empty store shelves. It would eventually sell well over 100,000 copies on MS-DOS alone, a major hit by the standards of any platform. Starflight placed owners of other computers in the unaccustomed position of lusting after a game on MS-DOS of all places, a platform most had heretofore viewed with contempt. Appearing as it did even as owners of the new generation of 68000-based machines were reveling in their Macs, Amigas, and Atari STs, Starflight was an early sign of a sea change that would all but sweep those platforms into oblivion within five years or so. With it now clear that a market of eager MS-DOS gamers existed, the platform suddenly became a viable first-release choice for publishers and developers. Only years later would Starflight belatedly, and not without much pain given the unique Forthian nature of its underpinnings, be ported to the Amiga, ST, Macintosh, Sega Genesis, and even the little Commodore 64 — the latter of which would probably have been better bypassed. It would sell at least 200,000 more copies on those platforms, a nice instance of creativity and sheer hard work being amply rewarded for Rod McConnell's idealistic little team of five.
Most of Binary Systems stayed together long enough to craft a fairly workmanlike sequel, Starflight 2: Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula, released in 1989 for MS-DOS just as the first ports of the original game were reaching those other platforms. It was playable enough, but somehow lacked some of the magic of the original. Most then drifted away from the games industry, with only Greg Johnson continuing to work intermittently as a designer, most notably of the Toejam & Earl games for the Sega Genesis. Starflight had been such an all-consuming, exhausting labor of love that perhaps it was hard for the others to imagine starting all over again on another, inevitably less special project. Making Starflight had been the sort of experience that can come only once in a lifetime; anything else they did in games afterward would have been anticlimactic.
If we're looking for something to which to attribute Starflight's success, both commercially and, more importantly, artistically, we're fairly spoiled for choice. Alec Kercso credits the way that he and his colleagues were allowed to work "organically," experimenting to see what worked and what didn't. Credit also the odd idealism that clung to the team as a whole, which prompted them to never back away from their determination to make something bigger and qualitatively different than anything that had come before, no matter how long it took. Credit Joe Ybarra and the management of EA who, skeptical as they may sometimes have been, ultimately gave Binary Systems the time and space they needed to create a masterpiece. Credit Rod McConnell for giving his stable of talented youngsters the freedom to create whilst finding a way to keep the lights on through all those long years. And credit, almost paradoxically, the limited technology of the era. With their graphics capabilities sharply limited, the team was free to concentrate on building an interesting galaxy, full of interesting things to do, and to tweak it endlessly, without needing to employ dozens of artists and 3D modellers to represent every little idea; tellingly, the only artist on the team was Johnson, who was also the lead designer. And of course credit Johnson for giving the game a plot and an unforgettable, quirky personality all its own, without which all of its technical innovations would have added up to little.
There's a stately dignity to Starflight even amidst all the goofy gags, a sense of something grand and fresh and new attempted and, even more remarkably, actually realized. Few games have ever captured that science-fictional sense of wonder quite this well. If you start playing it — and that's very easy to do now; Starflight 1 and 2 are both available in one-click-installable form from GOG.com — you might just find yourself lost in its depths for a long, long time. This, my friends, is one of the great ones.
(Useful vintage articles on Starflight include an interview with Rod McConnell in the March 1987 Computer Gaming World and especially one with Tim Lee in the July/August 1987 Forth Dimensions. Alec Kercso wrote about the game in, of all places, Jonathan S. Harbour's Microsoft Visual BASIC Programming with DirectX. Good recent articles include ones in The Escapist, Gamasutra, and Sega-16. Tim Lee gave part of the source code and many design documents to Ryan Lindeman. He once made even more source and documents available online, some of which can still be recovered via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Similarly available only via the Wayback Machine is Miguel Etto's technical analysis of the game's Forthian underpinnings. See The CRPG Addict for an experiential play-through of the game.)
↑1 | This is not to say that all is smooth sailing. Starflight constantly saves updated versions of its data files to disk as you play. It then relies on you to "commit" all of these changes by cleanly exiting the game from the menu. If you ever exit without properly saving, or get killed, your game becomes unplayable until you reset it back to its original data — whereupon you have the joy of starting all over. My advice is to make backups of the files "STARA.COM" and "STARB.COM" after every successful session; then if you get killed or have some other problem you can just copy these back into the game's directory to get back to a good state. Or, if you like, here's a DOSBox startup script you can use to automatically keep a few generations of states. Just copy it into the "[autoexec]" section of the game's ".conf" file, editing as needed to suit your directory names. |


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