text:
7145 Barataria Blvd.
Private Events
Movie Locations
Private Party, Live Music & Event Venue
Canoes / Kayaks
Wedding Gallery
Catering Gallery
Parties Gallery
Movie and TV Gallery
Décor Gallery
Live Alligator Gallery
Maison de Cochon Gallery
Live Alligators Gallery
I had my destination wedding at Bayou Barn in May 2016 and couldn't have been happier with the turnout. The venue was PERFECT for myself and my (now) husband's personalities... super rustic...
-Kim Bondad
This past weekend, Top Metairie DJ provided wedding ceremony & reception DJ services at Bayou Barn in Marrero. The venue setting and location is very cozy, yet impressive. It was a...
-Ron Folse
Definitely a beautiful place!!! The natural decor and lighting, not to forget to mention, the exceptional staff!!!
-April Bordelon
We had our daughters wedding rehearsal dinner here and I can't say enough about how wonderful it was. The food was fabulous and everyone in that place is very friendly and professional. The...
-Carol Sadowsky
I recently had my rehearsal dinner at the Bayou Barn and had a WONDERFUL experience! From the staff, to the food, to the decor,to the band, to a few last minute requests, Tammy was...
-Carrie Abrams
A busy place with a local following. Friendly staff and service. Great way to taste Cajun food. Highly recommended.
-Red Hatter
We had our company picnic here and three days later I'm still thinking about it. We got the Cochon de Lait (you've got to try this!!) Cajun Baked beans, potato salad and corn bread. The...
I can't thank Mrs.Tammy, Mr. Jarrod, and their staff enough for everything they did to make our wedding perfect! Words cannot describe how awesome they are. We got so many compliments on...
-Jennifer Travis Colson
Tammy and her crew made all my wedding dreams come true! She created a day of beauty that exceed my expectations. From my cake, to the food, to the setup, she listened to every detail and...
We had our annual convention here last month and this place did such an amazing job. All of our guests raved about the food, the venue and how attentive the staff was. I'm a...
-– PSA Peugeot
I had my ceremony and reception here in December 2014, everything literally went PERFECT. Tammy, the owner of Bayou Barn went out of her way to make sure our event was perfect and is a...
The food was phenomenal, we were able to specify all liquors, wines, and beers to our liking, and the service was top notch. I felt absolutely spoiled as a bride here. I believe that you...
-Mary and Justin
It was the most unbelievable day. Tammy was so genuine and kind, she made sure that everything was just perfect for us and exactly how we wanted it. She took care of everything right...
-Janice B.
Had a wonderful time. The music was great. Tammy and her husband were very welcoming. Their staff were friendly and very helpful. Enjoyed the dancing and the dancers on the dance floor show...
-Tena Base
Great Time Today! No better way to introduce my family to pure CAJUN hospitality! Cannot say enough about the great food, friendly staff, and of coarse, an excellent band. Even this Yankee...
-Robert Fitzgerald Hotalen
We had a class reunion here and it was the best. We all enjoyed the place, atmosphere, and the food was delicious!! A big Thank you to Tammy Friloux. We appreciate all the help you gave us...
-Lori Eschete
This place is the cats pajamas! Good food, good music and just plain good people. ...Son-Of-A-Gun Y'all Gonna Have Big Fun On The Bayou...AIEEE!
-John J. Hutchings
You truly are the best, Tammy. I cannot thank you enough for taking charge and planning our wedding from beginning to end. Your enthusiasm and patience was a much needed calm.
-Traci Richard
"The food was totally amazing! Overall, this was one of the best experiences I've had in New Orleans. This is our 5th year coming here and we'll be coming back again. Thanks Bayou Barn!"
-– Guest, New Orleans Food Fest
I had my husband's 50th birthday party at Bayou Barn. It was a great party. The food and music was awesome. Thanks so much to Tammy and her crew for making our event so special....
We attended a convention at Bayou Barn this past summer. The food was excellent. We enjoyed a whole Pig roast (which was the highlight of the affair) as well as grilled chicken and a...
-Karen T.
My wife and I discovered Bayou Barn many years ago. As others have said, it was a very fun place to visit - we spent a Sunday afternoon there for the fais-do-do, ate some crawdads, had fun...
Lonely Planet Rates Bayou Barn #3 out of 124 things to do in South Louisiana Below New Orleans, the Mississippi River flows 90 miles to the bird's-foot-shaped delta, where river pilots...
-Lonely Planet
This is the only place to rent canoes around the Jean Lafitte National Historical Park area. It is advisable to talk to the park ranger first and find out what areas are accessible or if...
-Jase K.
We visited new orleans rode out to the swamp to go canoeing in the Jean Lafitte National Historical Park. We rented a canoe from Bayou Barn. They have their own launch so we did not have to...
OMG! We had an unbelievable party out there at the Bayou Barn. It is a giant building, that opens up to nature, with a big stage, and lots of cool decor, gator skulls, turtles, and more....
-Riverside High School Band
Head out to Bayou Barn for a wonderful day on the bayou. You can rent a canoe for about $20 a head without a guide into the swamps. It's safe, you're in an area that you can't get lost...
The Bayou Barn is a great, fun, very affordable place ... They don't open for live music every night, but they do lots of specialty shows. most recently I went to a fundraiser for a...
-Mary C.
My wife and I had a lovely afternoon at the Bayou Barn attending their weekly Fais Do Do, a Sunday dance with Cajun Zydeco Music. My wife blushed her way through two-steppin' with all the...


text:
'Hollywood Hillbillies' features Ga. family | Weird
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. -- Honey Boo Boo is getting some competition.
Another family from rural Georgia is coming to reality television, with "Hollywood Hillbillies" set to debut in January on ReelzChannel.
The show follows Michael Kittrell and his grandmother Delores Hughes, known as "Mema," as the family moves from Grayson, Ga., to Hollywood. Along for the ride are Kittrell's aunt, Dee Dee Peters, her boyfriend Paul Conlon, and Kittrell's uncle John Cox.
Kittrell is known as "The Angry Ginger" on YouTube, where a video he made to protest a "South Park" episode that claimed redheads have no soul gained attention.
Alana "Honey Boo Boo" Thompson, her mother and their rural Georgia family are the subjects of a hit TLC show that focuses on their lives in a small town.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
This report provides the percentage of attrition by grade from the end of one school year to the beginning of the next for students enrolled in public schools, including charter schools, in the state. The information is as of October 1 of the school year selected.
More about the data.
Click any column header to sort ascending (first click) or descending (second click).
A blank value indicates that either:
The school or district is new in the year selected
The school or district has no students enrolled in that grade level in the year selected
The school or district has no grade in the year selected for students from the previous year to advance
The data is suppressed because the enrollment total is less than 6.
A value of zero indicates that there was no attrition in that grade for the year and student group selected.


text:
It seems everyone has a speed camera story, and here is mine. Just after Christmas I received a citation from Maryland Safe Zones Automated Speed Enforcement in the mail. It was not my car; I was not in the place at the time specified, and the picture of the license plate was virtually unreadable. I was offered the option of paying $40 or asking for a court date. I chose the latter and received a letter a couple of weeks later stating that I needed to appear in District Court in Towson at 9 a.m. on Jan. 31.
Fortunately, I appeared before a judge who was full of good humor, compassion and common sense. After my name was called and I walked to the front of the courtroom, I was asked if it was my car in the picture. I replied in the negative. Next, the judge looked at the citation and without hesitation said, "Case dismissed. I cannot read this license plate. Not guilty." All of that took about 30 seconds, and I didn't need to present evidence in my defense. Interestingly enough, the same thing happened to the man who was called before me.
To dispute this inaccurate citation, I had to drive 54 miles in morning traffic, which took me 90 minutes of drive time, and pay a $5 parking fee, not to mention the cost of gas and missing time off from work. In addition, I am left with a nagging suspicion that I received the inaccurate citation because I had received a citation in September in Montgomery County, and my name was in the Maryland Safe Zones data base. Did a person or computer match the unreadable license plate to mine because it was similar?
I was not originally opposed to speed camera enforcement because I thought if drivers obeyed the speed limit they would avoid penalty. I was so naïve. Maryland Safe Zones Automated Speed Enforcement incurs no penalty for being inaccurate; the driver bears the burden of proving his or her innocence. Are the citizens of Maryland really safer?
Evelyn Barrett, Hampstead


text:
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- To be the #1 destination for authors, agents, customers, client publishers, and employees.
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Mitch Albom · David Baldacci · Peter Brown · Sandra Brown · Stephen Colbert · Chris Colfer · Michael Connelly · James S.A. Corey · Tina Fey · Malcolm Gladwell · Newt Gingrich · Neil Patrick Harris · Noah Hawley · Elin Hilderbrand · Mark Hyman · T.D. Jakes · N. K. Jemisin · Sebastian Junger · Grace Lin · Brad Meltzer · Joyce Meyer · Stephenie Meyer · Walter Mosley · Joel Osteen · Gwyneth Paltrow · James Patterson · David Perlmutter · Keith Richards · J.K. Rowling · J.D. Salinger · Stacy Schiff · David Sedaris · Jen Sincero · Nicholas Sparks · Rick Steves · Donna Tartt · Scott Turow · David Foster Wallace · Brent Weeks · Lindy West · Tom Wolfe · Malala Yousafzai


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Howto: Set up a simple (insecure) Windows compatible network
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Joined: 20 May 2006
Posts: 7024
Location: Auckland, New Zealand
Posted: Fri 05 Oct 2007, 19:46
Post subject:
Howto: Set up a simple (insecure) Windows compatible network
Subject description: With printing
N.B. I was going to put this on the wiki, but the server account seems to have been suspended - I hope we don't lose everything - I'd only just got the printing page quite useful
If you're using Puppy, which is a single user, root only distribution, you probably aren't too concerned about security, and there's a good chance if you want to set up a network, you don't want to bother with user accounts and passwords.
This is the easiest way to set up a "server" that any computer on your lan(Windows or Linux/Unix with Samba) can connect to and have full read/write access.
For example, our main computer is much newer than our other ones, so it is always the first one turned on, and we essentially use it as a server - we keep files on it, have the printer connected to it, and have the same email account set up on all the computers, using the mail directory on this one (it seems to be perfectly safe to do this - even using Thunderbird on several machines simultaneously
). Because I dual boot this computer, I need to have it set up so it looks identical on the network whether it is in Windows or in Puppy, so all the shortcuts on the other computers work. Here is what to do:
- Install the full samba on the "server" - the computer you want to be able to connect other computers to. There is a full samba dotpup, which is huge, or I think you can get by with muppy-smb and the samba petget package.
- Put something like this in your smb.conf (probably /etc/samba/smb.conf):
;*******************section global*****************
public = Yes
;this is the name of the windows workgroup the computer should show up in, so should match whatever you use in any Windows computers
workgroup = HOOD
server string = Samba Server %v
security = share
log file = /var/log.%m
max log size = 50
server signing = No
paranoid server security = No
socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_SNDBUF=8192 SO_RCVBUF=8192
preferred master = No
domain master = No
dns proxy = No
ldap ssl = No
message command = /usr/local/bin/LinPopUp "%f" "%m" %s; rm %s
read only = No
case sensitive = No
;this line works for me, but I have commented it out as other people say it causes trouble with Windows XP clients.
;msdfs proxy = No
restrict anonymous = No
;this is the name of the computer on the network, so if you are dual-booting, it should match what your computer is called in Windows
netbios name = Green Room
max protocol = NT
;*******************section printers*****************
;I think Cups automatically shares printers with other PCs running CUPS, so this is mainly useful for Windows clients.
browseable = yes
printable = yes
create mode = 0700
guest only = yes
use client driver = yes
path = /tmp
;*******************section green room*****************
[green room]
path = /mnt/home
guest ok = Yes
writeable = Yes
force user = root
;*******************section e*****************
path = /mnt/hdb5
guest ok = Yes
writeable = Yes
force user = root
;*******************section f*****************
path = /mnt/hdb6
guest ok = Yes
writeable = Yes
force user = root
;*******************section Puppy*****************
path = /
guest ok = Yes
writeable = Yes
force user = root
Network Identification
For identification of the computer on the network, the two lines I commented in the global section (workgroup and netbios name) are important. Change them to something appropriate.
The printers section I used should allow any computer on the network (Windows or Linux) to see and print to any printers installed on this server, using drivers installed locally on the client computer - this is the way small Windows networks are normally set up. So if you install a printer on the server (which you are dual booting) and give it the same name as you use in windows, other machines should see it and print to it the same, whether the server is in Windows or in Puppy. This means that people should stop complaining because they can't print because you are in Linux
(This works with Cups, I don't know if you can do it using XPDQ printing).
To make this work though, you need to open /etc/cups/mime.convs and uncomment this line near the end:
#application/octet-stream application/vnd.cups-raw 0 -
, and open /etc/cups/mime.types, and uncomment this line near the end:
You also need to download
and extract it to /usr/bin if you don't already have it.
Shared Folders
The sections after the printers section are for each individual folder that I want to share on my computer, and because I am dual booting, they match the shared drives and folders I have in Windows. They have the path to them in Puppy, and the name of them in the network, which matches the names they have on the network in Windows. (Just to confuse things, I happen to have my C: drive showing up as green room on the network, when the computer is also called Green Room). I also have the Puppy section to share the whole Puppy filesystem, and if Puppy is your only operating system, this may be the only shared folder you want. If you don't want to share the whole filesystem, you could share /root/my-documents, or whatever.
If you are dual-booting like me and trying to look like Windows, then you'll probably want to mount the partitions your shared folders are in at bootup - check out the "personal-start-reboot-scripts" dotpup.
For the "client" computers, if they don't need to be "servers" themselves, then you can just install the samba petget package on them, and use LinNeighborhood to browse the network (It's not necessarily that intuitive, so Rarsa gave a fairly good explanation at http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=2163), or you can install Muppy-smb, which will automatically mount network shares. I believe Muppy-smb also has a gui for adding a shared folder on a server.
EDIT - starting with Puppy 4, LinNeighborhood will be replaced by pnethood, which is much easier, and can also be installed in older Puppies if you have gtkdialog3
EDIT - just thought I'd point out that some people are getting confused because I identify my computer on the network as "Green Room" (this is the netbios name), but I also share its "C: drive" as "Green Room" i.e. /mnt/home is shared as //Green Room//Green Room).
If something doesn't work, please post and we'll try and sort you out. I had terrible trouble getting printing to work, so forget about all the other ways people say to do it, and stick to exactly what I've described, without any extra lines or anything, and see if that works.
Last edited by disciple on Wed 01 Oct 2008, 22:54; edited 8 times in total
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Joined: 20 May 2006
Posts: 7024
Location: Auckland, New Zealand
Posted: Sun 28 Oct 2007, 23:18
Post subject:
Well, almost 400 people read it, but very few must have tried
, because I just tried following my own instructions and found (to my horror
) that you can't have comments following anything on the same line in smb.conf
LinNeighborhood tips:
To use LinNeighborhood with the least effort possible, I find I have to uncheck "Always scan as user", and check all four options in the group below it (on the preferences->scan tab).
Also there seems to be a bug in LinNeighborhood, and it won't unmount shares if you mount them without having the option checked to replace spaces with underscores (on the miscellaneous tab).
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Joined: 20 May 2006
Posts: 7024
Location: Auckland, New Zealand
Posted: Tue 15 Jan 2008, 05:18
Post subject:
I have Windows 98 clients. SOME PEOPLE SEEM TO NEED TO REMOVE THE
msdfs proxy = No
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Joined: 24 Nov 2006
Posts: 132
Posted: Sat 26 Jan 2008, 21:01
Post subject:
I'm trying to get a usb drive on my puppy 2.16 to read/write in windows xp, it goes through a netgear modem/router that has a really slow usb connection where is does work (workgroup = 'workgroup') but I'm trying to do the same thing from puppy.
I installed Samba 3.0.21c from dotpups.de and it all seems to work OK, but I'm just refreshing My Network Places in windows and it doesn't show up. Is there something else I need to do?
Thanks in advance for any help. DB
More detail
### My smb.conf ###################
public = yes
workgroup = workgroup
server string = Samba Server
security = share
server signing = no
paranoid server security = no
read only = no
case sensitive = no
restrict anonymous = no
netbios name = PUPPYPC
max protocol = NT
socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_SNDBUF=8192 SO_RCVBUF=8192
domain master = no
prefered master = no
dns proxy = no
ldap ssl = no
path = /
guest ok = yes
writable = yes
force user = root
browseable = yes
path = /mnt/sda1
guest ok = yes
writable = yes
force user = root
browseable = yes
path = ~/Choices
guest ok = yes
writable = yes
force user = root
browseable = yes
### Output from smbclient -L ###################
sh-3.00# /etc/rc.d/rc.samba stop
sh-3.00# /usr/sbin/smbd
sh-3.00# /usr/sbin/nmbd
sh-3.00# smbclient -L \\\\\puppypc\\
Domain=[WORKGROUP] OS=[Unix] Server=[Samba 3.0.21c]
Sharename Type Comment
--------- ---- -------
puppypc Disk
smblacie Disk
smbchoices Disk
IPC$ IPC IPC Service (Samba Server)
ADMIN$ IPC IPC Service (Samba Server)
Domain=[WORKGROUP] OS=[Unix] Server=[Samba 3.0.21c]
Server Comment
--------- -------
PUPPYPC Samba Server
Workgroup Master
--------- -------
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Joined: 20 May 2006
Posts: 7024
Location: Auckland, New Zealand
Posted: Sun 27 Jan 2008, 21:16
Post subject:
It looks like it is sharing itself properly and the windows machines are somehow having trouble seeing it. Presumably you have tried restarting them (and then waiting a while as sometimes computers take a while to talk to each other) - that often works
Can the Puppy pc see itself - e.g. with LinNeighborhood?
If LinNeighborhood is set up correctly then it will automatically show you browseable things on the network - I think if you grab my config file from the bottom of the page [url=]http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=167065&sid=b65e9c480e76b42b8b3e0082b8e19b24]here[/url] and put in the correct workgroup name, then that should work.
Does the internet work on both PCs? (Just wondering if the router is assigning IP addresses properly and stuff...)
There must also be a way of connecting to a computer that you can't browse to in Network Neighborhood in XP, by manually putting in the host name or IP address of the server... I'm pretty sure you can manually put in the address for the "map network drive" feature anyway.
The best advice I think I can give you is like I said - first copy my smb.conf, change the workgroup name, and see if that works. If it doesn't, remove the msdfs proxy line, and see if that works. It is very easy to have SAMBA set up in a way that seems right, but just doesn't work, and for no obvious reason.
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Joined: 24 Nov 2006
Posts: 132
Posted: Mon 28 Jan 2008, 04:37
Post subject:
OK, both computers can see each other now, but I still can't share files.
FWIW, both computers see the internet no problem, and two windows boxes on the router share properly too
.... now writing this down for others looking, and for myself to google when I get lost again ...
In puppy LinNeighbourhood I found the windows box by typing the IP address by elimination into 'Add' then 'Query' and eventually windows box showed up.
In Windows I did have a different workgroup name to everything else - fixed that with 'Set up a home or small office network' wizard, then in XP Network Neighbourhood clickrd 'View workgroup computers' and puppy samba shows up.
the problem is I can't get into the shared dierctories. Double clicking the windows box in LinNeighbourhood doesn't do anything, and in Windows clicking the puppy server I get "\\Puppypc is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource..."
Anyway, I'll try smbmount tomorrow as I've found that better than LinNeighbourhood in the past, and I'll try your config as well.
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Joined: 20 May 2006
Posts: 7024
Location: Auckland, New Zealand
Posted: Mon 28 Jan 2008, 05:34
Post subject:
BTW For connecting to Windows shares from Puppy
is much more convenient. I just mentioned LinNeighborhood because if it is set up right it appears to browse the network in exactly the same way as Windows (instead of searching for the IP), so you can tell if it can be seen by browsing the network.
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Joined: 24 Nov 2006
Posts: 132
Posted: Fri 01 Feb 2008, 21:36
Post subject:
Well I can access my windows pc from puppy now, using pnethood (which seems a bit random but eventually does get through). But I still can't get to my puppy pc from windows - still "\\Puppypc is not accessible ... "
I wonder if I have permissions set right in puppy, or if it's McAffee firewall in windows 'protecting' me.
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Joined: 20 May 2006
Posts: 7024
Location: Auckland, New Zealand
Posted: Fri 01 Feb 2008, 22:19
Post subject:
try booting one of the other computers up with Puppy, and seeing if it can connect to your "server". If it can't then the problem is definitely with your Puppy server. If it can, then the problem is the communication between Puppy and Windows.
When you say "Still", what have you done differently? Obviously the machines have been rebooted by now, but have you tried anything else? Have you tried copying my smb.conf? And both having the msdfs proxy line, and not having it?
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Joined: 26 May 2006
Posts: 2946
Location: Southampton, UK
Posted: Sat 02 Feb 2008, 02:55
Post subject:
DavidBell wrote:
Well I can access my windows pc from puppy now, using pnethood (which seems a bit random but eventually does get through).
Try increasing the timeout parameter to nbtscan on about lines 51 and 53 of /usr/local/apps/pnethood/pnethood (assuming you are using 0.5). I was considering making this user configurable.
community website
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Joined: 24 Nov 2006
Posts: 132
Posted: Sat 09 Feb 2008, 20:59
Post subject:
Hairywill, I increased the first parameter from 1000 to 3000 in both lines.
It still misses some servers in the 'scanning network' bit at the start, but if you keep hitting refresh it does find them all.
I think it lists all the shared folders for each server properly, but often when you hit 'connect' it crashes, sometimes you can kill the process, other times you have to restart X with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace.
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Joined: 26 May 2006
Posts: 2946
Location: Southampton, UK
Posted: Sun 10 Feb 2008, 06:22
Post subject:
To keep your input connected to pnethood I have replied in the pnethood thread. Thanks for your report, sounds like an interesting one.
community website
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Joined: 20 May 2006
Posts: 7024
Location: Auckland, New Zealand
Posted: Mon 11 Feb 2008, 02:24
Post subject:
Are you making any progress sharing files from Puppy?
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Joined: 24 Nov 2006
Posts: 132
Posted: Mon 11 Feb 2008, 04:35
Post subject:
Hi Disciple, I'm still messing around with it, actually haven't had much time the last week or so. I tried a few more samba configs with no luck, also tried booting my laptop with a P2.14 disk but it couldn't see anything at all in LinNeighbourhood.
All this is because I have a VIA running puppy 2.16 that I use to play music and I really like it because it's not being interupted with windows alert and alarm noises all the time. But Windows is still my main OS for business stuff so I thought I could make the VIA into network storage as well, then when my windows laptop is in the network I can backup to the VIA.
Would be sweet, and it should be so simple to do, but I've hit two problems. One is the samba server, and the other is I can't get puppy to mount a USB drive on startup without me being around. It's very frustrating. I guess I will get there eventually, but linux really needs to address this simple task stuff and make it foolproof... when I do get this working I will probably never update puppy because it's just too painful and I will have forgotten the steps.
Anyway I have another computer that runs 2.16 that I will have to try with to see whether it's samba or windows messing me around, but it's a bit of a hassle to move and so forth, so maybe next weekend.
Thanks anyway. DB
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Joined: 28 Nov 2007
Posts: 17
Location: indonesia, jawa tengah,jawa barat
Posted: Wed 27 Feb 2008, 13:16
Post subject: can't explore shared puppy from wind
Subject description: tree connect failed: NT_STATUS_BAD_NETWORK_NAME
i almost give up to make share puppy
i can see puppypc in my windows
but i can not explore
so,i try type
smbclient -L puppypc
Domain=[WORKGROUP OS =[UNIX] server=[Samba 3.0.25b]
tree connect failed: NT_STATUS_BAD_NETWORK_NAME
would you help me?
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Florida's Fort Lauderdale is best known for its beaches and extensive canal network, which has given the city the nickname "Venice of America."
Many visitors head to Fort Lauderdale for the warm and sunny conditions between December and April. Sistrunk Historical Festival takes place in winter and it commemorates the achievements of people with African heritage. The popular Fort Lauderdale Air Show is also held in spring. Las Olas Art Fair, held several times throughout the year, attracts many art lovers from far and wide.


text:
Christina Aguilera never was big on talent shows until, well, she was big on one.
The superstar songbird and star of NBC's megahit "The Voice" said she had never even watched a full episode of "American Idol" before she was approached by producers about a role on a new show aimed at spotlighting new talent.
"I don't normally watch a whole lot of television — you know, especially music shows," Aguilera said in a "Today" show appearance. "I would feel bad for the contestants they'd poke fun at just for TV sake."
U.S. & World
News from around the country and around the globe
Aguilera doesn't have to lob potshots at hopeful kids in her role on "The Voice." Instead of being a judge, she's a coach, imparting tips to starstruck youngsters.
"Part of my being inspired is helping these people along with their journey," Aguilera told Matt Lauer. "I just hope to be a positive influence and all of that."
The Grammy winner has had a tough 12 months, getting divorced, bungling the National Anthem at the Super Bowl and getting arrested for public drunkenness. But her TV gig has drawn positive reviews while showing her warm side.
The show, hosted by Carson Daly, features singers Cee Lo Green, Adam Levine of Maroon 5 and country star Blake Shelton, along with Aguilera. The performers encourage young singers and then evaluate their performances. The show, which airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m., has scored big in the ratings.
"NBC now has a show to compete or exceed Idol on all levels, with huge stars, amazing singers, and heartwarming stories," raved Hollywood Today.
Selected Reading: Today, Billboard, Hollywood Today.


text:
Earlier this year, senior members of President Barack Obama's campaign team took a trip to Las Vegas. Nevada holds a special place in Obama-wonk lore as the place where his monthslong strategy of defeating Hillary Clinton by slowly and surely amassing delegates emerged. But the operatives were not there in March for any political reason. They were there to make money — specifically to land what they hoped would be the first corporate client for their new advertising business, Analytics Media Group (A.M.G.). Its bland name obscures its relatively grand promise: to deliver to commercial advertisers some of the Obama campaign's secret, technologically advanced formulas for reaching voters.
The potential client was Caesars. The casino chain was looking for ways to induce semiregular visitors to show up more routinely at its other casinos around the country and to keep regulars from defecting to new competitors. A.M.G. was making the pitch that keeping gamblers loyal to Caesars was not all that different from keeping onetime Obama voters from straying to Mitt Romney. It was all a matter of figuring out how to get their message in front of the right customers at the right time. It was not lost on the Obama strategists that the "change" they were talking about was not the kind "you can believe in" but rather the kind you can put in a slot machine. "I kind of felt like the Devil's advocate," Chauncey McLean, 31, the Democratic Party's director of media tracking during the campaign and now A.M.G.'s chief operating officer, wryly told me.
A.M.G. was founded in late December by a splinter group of longtime Obama advisers: Larry Grisolano, who oversaw how the campaign spent its advertising dollars; Grisolano's direct-mail partners Terry Walsh and Pete Giangreco; Jeff Link, a seasoned Iowa veteran who was an outside adviser in 2012; and Erik Smith, an advertising consultant for the 2012 campaign, whose work running one of the biggest 2004 pro-Kerry outside groups gave him an inside track with party donors from the corporate world.
McLean was their first hire. During the campaign he proved himself to be particularly deft at translating between the old hands of the political world, who talk about "message" and "narrative," and the quants in their 20s, who speak of "code" and "algorithms."
McLean was so moved by Obama's 2004 convention speech — the one that called for an end to a red-state America and a blue-state America — that when Obama decided to run in 2008, he took a leave from law school and joined the campaign. He had just spent the last 18 months of the 2012 presidential race bouncing between a couch in Washington and a small, shared apartment in Chicago where a colleague slept in the dining room. So he was experiencing considerable culture shock in the high life of Vegas.
Arriving at Caesars Palace after a first-class flight (only the second of his life), he was shown to his room. "I open the door and there's just this huge, like, double, wall-to-wall window with a view of the strip and a huge king bed," he said. Over room service, he met with his deputy, Chris Frommann, now 26, and made some last-minute revisions to their proposal. McLean took an iPhone picture of his kung pao chicken and sent it to his wife back in Brooklyn, "to show her that I'd made it," he joked.
The next morning McLean, Frommann, Grisolano, Smith and a couple of others were escorted through a maze of doors that led them to the casino's marble-and-glass executive offices, where their meeting went well enough that they scheduled another, to discuss a deal. Later that night they celebrated with a red-meat-and-red-wine dinner at Old Homestead, Caesars' upscale steakhouse.
Recalling that Vegas trip while sitting at a MacBook Pro-dotted coffee shop in Brooklyn in March, McLean treated his shift from selling Obama to selling Caesars as a small discomfort that was necessary if he wanted to keep working on the technological advancements he and his colleagues developed on the campaign. In a nonpresidential year, no political effort would have the money to finance what he described as the "huge R.& D. project" that the Obama campaign effectively became. The resources for that kind of project could now be found only in corporate America. If companies with big budgets wanted members of Obama's team to do for them whatever it was that they did for the president, McLean couldn't see why they shouldn't answer the call.
Political marketing has usually lagged behind commercial marketing. Companies that spend billions of dollars a year developing ways to make many more billions of dollars a year tend to have little to learn from presidential campaigns, which are generally start-ups aimed at a one-day sale. But the (re)selling of the president, 2012, was an entirely different matter. The campaign recruited the best young minds in the booming fields of analytics and behavioral science and placed them in a room they called "the cave" for up to 16 hours a day over the course of roughly 16 months. After the election, when the technology wizards finally came out, they had not only helped produce a victory that defied a couple of historical predictors; they also developed a host of highly effective marketing techniques that were either entirely new or had never been tried on such a grand scale.
Grisolano and McLean and the others were part of a singular breakthrough in the field of television-ad buying, where about 50 percent of the campaign's budget was spent, or more than $400 million. Previous campaigns would make decisions about how to direct their television-advertising budgets largely based on hunches and deductions about what channels the voters they wanted to reach were watching. Their choices were informed by the broad viewership ratings of Nielsen and other survey data, which typically led to buying relatively expensive ads during evening-news and prime-time viewing hours. The 2012 campaign took advantage of advanced set-top-box monitoring technology to figure out what shows the voters they wanted to reach were watching and when, resulting in a smarter and cheaper — if potentially more invasive — way to beam commercials into their homes. The system gave Obama a significant advantage over Mitt Romney, according to Democrats and many Republicans (at least those who were not on Romney's media team). Now A.M.G.'s founders say the company is at the forefront of a move to turn upside down the way the $60-billion-a-year television-ad market has functioned since its start. And they hope to get very rich in the process.
That is essentially the pitch Grisolano began making just before Christmas to the tech whizzes he needed to hire to rebuild the system they used during the campaign. He also offered profit sharing and salaries often commensurate with those being offered by Facebook or Google, who were also recruiting from the Obama campaign.
"You're sort of involved in this cutting edge of something and see this whole thing on the horizon changing," Grisolano recounted telling them. "I think that's exciting."
McLean, for one, was primed to hear his message. When the election was won last fall, he asked Jim Messina, Obama's innovative campaign manager — and ardent tech advocate — what he should do with his life. As McLean tells it, and Messina affirms, Messina said, "I'd either go out into the country and run a campaign or I'd go make a load of money."
A couple of weeks before Election Day, over drinks at the Pump Room in Chicago's Gold Coast, a safe distance away from the re-election headquarters and its press minders, Grisolano and Erik Smith first let on that there was far more happening in the Chicago campaign office than any of us covering it truly understood. Grisolano told me that the campaign literally knew every single wavering voter in the country that it needed to persuade to vote for Obama, by name, address, race, sex and income. What's more, he hinted, the campaign had figured out how to get its television advertisements in front of them with a previously inconceivable level of knowledge and accuracy.
Grisolano, a gruff and stocky Iowan, spent years in the shadow of his mentor, Obama's founding strategist, David Axelrod, happily so, but he now seemed eager for his own recognition. There was also no mistaking that he believed he had figured something out that would be worth a lot of money after the election. He wouldn't say more, at least not then. But after the election, in February, he began to describe his new business venture to me in detail.
To understand how it works, you must first understand the vast technological engine that powered the campaign but remained largely out of view of the public and the press. Messina, the campaign manager, often boasted about how the Obama 2012 effort would be "the most data-driven campaign ever." But what that truly meant — the extent to which the campaign used the newest tech tools to look into people's lives and the sheer amount of personal data its vast servers were crunching — remained largely shrouded. The secrecy around the operation was partly because the president's strategists wanted to maintain their competitive edge. But it was also no doubt because they worried that practices like "data mining" and "analytics" could make voters uncomfortable.
Using data wasn't new for the Obama strategists. The 2008 campaign developed the most sophisticated system to date to identify tens of millions of voters and place them into useful categories: those most likely to vote Republican, who would be ignored; those supporting Obama — and how likely they were to vote. That system — based on a complicated scoring method that relied on the processing of reams of data — was first devised by an outside consultant, Ken Strasma. But it was partly managed inside the campaign by an economics forecaster, Dan Wagner, who, at 24, helped perfect it for the campaign's use. Wagner, who was recruited by A.M.G. but decided to start his own venture instead, seems to exist in two realms. One is digital, where he operates like a Dungeons and Dragons dungeon master, trying to shape the rules to the reality he is creating ("I was a Level 14 wizard or something," he jokes of the fantasy role-playing game). The other is corporeal, where he is self-deprecating about things like his romantic life. ("Hey, I do 'Big Data,' " he says.) His work on the 2008 campaign has been portrayed in a book, "The Victory Lab," by Sasha Issenberg. "Here's where I am in the 'Victory Lab' — blah, blah, blah," he said dryly while turning to his chapter in the copy I was carrying when we met for breakfast at the Ace Hotel in Manhattan one day in May.
Wagner dismisses the notion of "romantic war rooms" operating on political gut instinct as outdated and misguided. His is a hard-data system that rejects anything that is not definitively quantifiable. In the Bush era, strategists boasted about how they could predict voter behavior based upon car and sport preferences, a well-publicized bit of political magic that captured the imaginations of politicians and journalists alike. Wagner's approach, part of a broader move in politics, cut all of that out; why engage in such divination when you have the time and money to just call voters and ask them about their leanings directly? "We're trying to predict political preference; we're not trying to predict whether you buy a car," Wagner says dismissively.
The campaign couldn't call the more than 150 million registered voters, obviously. But they could call enough of them in swing states (up to 11,000 a night) to figure out how they — and other people who lived near them, looked like them and earned like them — were likely to vote with an increasing degree of accuracy. In 2008, Wagner and his small team combined information from those calls with any other data they could find — census data, state voter lists and the like — and fed it into algorithms that produced support scores. One ranked how likely swing-state voters were to support Obama on a scale of 0 to 100, and another ranked how likely they were to show up at voting booths. Those scores helped the campaign direct resources toward the right voters, and Obama beat John McCain by 7 percentage points.
But even before the president took office, as the economy was in meltdown, his strategists, looking ahead four years, assumed that his re-election would not be easy. Wagner was assigned to the Democratic National Committee headquarters, where he set out to develop a far more sophisticated version of his analytics system, using bigger computer servers, better data on the nation's voting-age population and more precise algorithms.
If there was any doubt about the system, it was dispelled after the 2010 special election in Massachusetts for the U.S. Senate seat left vacant by Edward M. Kennedy's death. For much of the campaign, pollsters for the Democratic candidate, Martha Coakley, showed her ahead. Wagner and his group had their own numbers indicating that Coakley's support was soft and dropping. His warnings went up the chain to the president, but some strategists dismissed him as if he were a " 'dumb kid,' " Wagner told me.
After Coakley lost and Wagner's methods were validated, the Democratic Party poured money into Wagner's department, which grew from 2 people to 15. Later that year, Wagner's team developed the prototype for what Messina says he considers "an evolutionary jump": a newly robust and reliable "persuasion score" that identified how easily individual undecided voters could be persuaded to vote for or against the Democrat in a race, based on how likely they were to show shifts in their preferences in telephone interviews conducted over time.
When Messina started up the Obama re-election campaign in 2011, he gave Wagner the go-ahead to nearly quadruple his team, which was moved to the cavernous office space at the Prudential Center in Chicago. This immediately made his analytics department one of the biggest of its kind in the country.
Obama supported the idea, aides said. But he warned in one early meeting against getting too deep into the data and "slicing the salami too thin," as his communications director, Dan Pfeiffer, put it to me.
Soon after the office opened, Wagner's group moved into a separate, windowless room, the cave. Messina said he wanted them to lose all sense of time and to focus. Wagner also cited the secret nature of the work. I once unknowingly wandered near the cave, looking for a bathroom, and a young press aide chased me down and escorted me away. (Because it was also near the kitchen, at the time I thought the aide was concerned I might try to force a metaphor out of an exposed piece of rotting fruit.)
"Anybody who had a computer and a basement as a kid saw the cave as a real opportunity," Wagner told me. It was packed with about 40 desks, a number that was determined through a contest Wagner held among his staff to figure out how to "best utilize the floor plan." The result came from "the best combination of square footage per person, subject to constraints: You couldn't move your arms more than six inches without hitting somebody," he said. On the back of the door his team would affix pieces of paper with snippets of conversation they heard from people who walked by: "Those people are weird, don't go in there" or "That's the secret sauce." Across one wall there was a large printout of the surface of Mars, a mocking reference to a column in The Wall Street Journal in which Peggy Noonan described a job posting of Wagner's as "politics as done by Martians."
In fact, through his postings, Wagner assembled a team that included a biophysicist, who worked at the Stem Cell Initiative at Harvard and three professional poker players. The cave dwellers would take breaks at the Ping-Pong table out in the main offices with their peers; Gaurav Shirole, a 23-year-old data analyst and graduate of the business school at the University of California, Berkeley, who also joined A.M.G., became so good that when the president visited the campaign office during the summer, the staff volunteered Shirole to compete against Obama. (Shirole won, but got in trouble with his mother when she saw the photo of him playing in flip-flops and a T-shirt.)
Yet in truth, their task was daunting. Shortly after Messina opened the Chicago offices, Joel Benenson, the president's national pollster, conducted a "benchmark" poll that had some sobering results. Roughly a fifth of Obama's 2008 vote had shifted into the undecided column. "We knew we weren't going to get all of them," Benenson said. But the campaign needed to get back many millions of them. And it fell to Wagner's team to figure out exactly who they were, to a man and to a woman, and then rank them according to a 0 to 10 persuasion score.
As the denizens of the cave were setting out to do that, the digital-analytics team, led by Rayid Ghani, a 35-year-old research scientist from Accenture Labs, developed an idea: Why not try sifting through self-described supporters' Facebook pages in search of friends who might be on the campaign's list of the most persuadable voters? Then the campaign could ask the self-identified supporters to bring their undecided friends along. The technique, as they saw it, could also get supporters to urge friends to register to vote, to vote early or to volunteer and donate.
Identifying persuadable friends became a significant undertaking. "We ended up building it from scratch because nothing like that existed," Ghani told me. The computer code alone was thousands of lines, said Will St. Clair, 25, who helped write it and who also now works with McLean at A.M.G.
The campaign didn't go into much detail, at the time, about exactly how it used Facebook. But St. Clair put it in fairly stark terms when I talked to him at A.M.G.'s temporary offices in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in April. They started with a list that grew to a million people who had signed into the campaign Web site through Facebook. When people opted to do so, they were met with a prompt asking to grant the campaign permission to scan their Facebook friends lists, their photos and other personal information. In another prompt, the campaign asked for access to the users' Facebook news feeds, which 25 percent declined, St. Clair said.
Once permission was granted, the campaign had access to millions of names and faces they could match against their lists of persuadable voters, potential donors, unregistered voters and so on. "It would take us 5 to 10 seconds to get a friends list and match it against the voter list," St. Clair said. They found matches about 50 percent of the time, he said. But the campaign's ultimate goal was to deputize the closest Obama-supporting friends of voters who were wavering in their affections for the president. "We would grab the top 50 you were most active with and then crawl their wall" to figure out who were most likely to be their real-life friends, not just casual Facebook acquaintances. St. Clair, a former high-school marching-band member who now wears a leather Diesel jacket, explained: "We asked to see photos but really we were looking for who were tagged in photos with you, which was a really great way to dredge up old college friends — and ex-girlfriends," he said.
The campaign's exhaustive use of Facebook triggered the site's internal safeguards. "It was more like we blew through an alarm that their engineers hadn't planned for or knew about," said St. Clair, who had been working at a small firm in Chicago and joined the campaign at the suggestion of a friend. "They'd sigh and say, 'You can do this as long as you stop doing it on Nov. 7.' " (Facebook officials say warning bells go off when the site sees large amounts of unusual activity, but in each case the company was satisfied the campaign was not violating its privacy and data standards.)
By March 2012, Wagner's team had a workable list of what it deemed to be the most persuadable voters — in total, roughly 15 million of them in the swing states. Messina ordered the campaign to direct a majority of its efforts toward winning them back, one by one if necessary. They could reach many through their Facebook friends and others through more conventional means like e-mail and knocking on doors. But how could the Obama campaign be as targeted and tech-savvy on TV?
The Internet, and specifically social media, may have fundamentally changed politics, but there is still nothing with the power to enrage or inspire like a well-produced television ad (see "47 percent, Romney"). This is in part because of the evocative nature of video, which can be transmitted over the Internet as well. But it's also because that imagery is typically put in front of people when they are at their most receptive, zoning out on the couch, relaxing, their defenses down.
TV advertising has also historically been the most expensive and least efficient way to reach voters. Commercial TV time is still valued and sold in pretty much the same way as it was when people gathered every night to watch Walter Cronkite. Most advertising is based on audience ratings kept by Nielsen Media Research, which derives its information from a national survey of 22,000 households and smaller surveys in local markets, selected to perfectly represent the American television-viewing population, Nielsen says. Through "people meters" that monitor what specific members of these households are watching in real time and, in some cases, written diaries of its participating families, Nielsen does a reasonably good job of telling advertisers which demographic groups are watching which shows. Nielsen's ratings categories are still dominated by the broad audience segment known as "adults 18 to 49," but they can also include smaller groups like "women 18-plus" and "Hispanics." If Revlon wants to sell its newest shade of lipstick, for example, it knows it can reach lots of women through a show like "Grey's Anatomy." If Miller Lite wants to get its shiny blue cans in front of young men in their beer-drinking prime, it knows it can do so through spots on "Jimmy Kimmel Live."
Political campaigns have typically shown most of their ads during news programs, where they can reach older viewers who are engaged in the topics of the day and, it stands to reason, are most likely to vote. If a pollster identified other broad groups that a candidate wanted to reach, like women or young men, then the campaign could venture out into other shows. Traditionally, "these are the tools that you have," Grisolano told me one day at his office in Chicago, the L train screeching along the rails outside. "You have programming that overdelivers or underdelivers in broad, sweeping groups."
The better that campaigns — and all major marketers — have become at identifying precisely whom they want to talk to, the more inefficient the old model can seem. For instance, a campaign may need to win over those 5 percent of independent, female, likely voters who are still undecided, but there is no separate ratings category for them, no precise way to know which shows they are watching. It's very likely a campaign can speak to some of them through commercials on "Grey's Anatomy," but by buying time there, the campaign is spending a lot of money on an audience that is mostly made up of people the candidate actually does not need to speak to.
The 2012 Obama campaign knew it had to be especially efficient in buying television time because it expected to be outspent by the combined forces of the Romney campaign and super PACs, including the American Crossroads organization, co-founded by Karl Rove.
"If we had to withstand being outspent — and nobody wanted to withstand it — but if we had to, we could tolerate being outspent with the people who have basically already made up their mind for us or the people who made up their mind against us," Grisolano said. "But we were going to make sure that we put the full power of our buy with the people who were swing voters, who were on the edge. So, my task became, how do you create the tools you need to make that a reality?"
Grisolano was going to have one thing at his disposal that no presidential adviser had before him: Wagner's list of roughly 15 million persuadable voters. But he had no way of knowing if he would be able to reach them with any real precision on TV. He turned to Amy Gershkoff, a young political scientist he met a couple of years before who was making a name for herself grappling with just these sorts of challenges. Gershkoff was 30 years old, had a Ph.D. from Princeton and had developed software that was making political ad buying more efficient. Gershkoff was digging more deeply into the Nielsen data and matching it against information in party-voter lists to get a better read on what shows key voting blocs — not generic television audiences — were watching. She was finding that a campaign could reach many of them in greater concentrations and for less money on cable channels like Lifetime than on more expensive shows with bigger audiences like "The Office."
Grisolano recommended that Messina speak with her, and Messina hired her to be director of media planning, reporting directly to him. Messina wanted Gershkoff to build a master program that would allow him, as the campaign manager, to decide how to spend the campaign's advertising budget across all mediums — not just television, but the Internet, radio, print ads and the mail — at optimum cost using real-time polling data to measure how the ads were moving or not moving opinion. (A version of this project would be built by McLean, whom Gershkoff brought with her, and Frommann, his deputy.)
But it soon became clear that such a system could eliminate the role of Obama's longtime television-ad-buying firm, GMMB, run by the senior Obama strategist Jim Margolis, which stood to potentially lose millions in buying commissions. Colleagues described Margolis as furious. He called it "dumbfounded." Grisolano and Axelrod backed him up in his argument that any savings on commissions would be wiped out in the chaos of recreating a system that already existed (and forgoing the expertise and relationships that Margolis's 30-person buying team had in the television world).
Messina relented, but said that GMMB would take guidance from Gershkoff's department. As Gershkoff put it to me gingerly when we spoke in May: "Fundamentally I was brought in to create tools that would help Jim spend nine digits' worth of the campaign's budget. Any time you're moving that kind of money around, people can be resistant to the idea."
There were other turf battles. Gershkoff was given her own analytics department to analyze media, but Wagner believed all analytics should be handled uniformly through his department, several former campaign officials said. (He wouldn't discuss it with me when I asked about it.) The two had differences in other areas as well. Gershkoff insisted that her staff members wear business attire; Wagner, who often wore flip-flops, had only one requirement of his staff in the cave: "You have to wear clothes."
But Gershkoff had come upon a cache of data that all the strategists would come to appreciate. She had contracted with a relatively new firm called Rentrak that was competing with Nielsen and was buying up real-time, raw viewing data directly from cable and satellite companies that had nearly 20 million set-top boxes in eight million homes. When Gershkoff told Grisolano, he was thrilled. Rentrak's huge new trove of data, he surmised, could help him find out with relative certainty what shows were being delivered to the homes of the roughly 15 million persuadable voters Wagner's department had identified.
The concept for the "optimizer," as it was known in the campaign, was born: a system that could determine with more precision than ever what swing voters were watching in the greatest concentrations and how to get commercials in front of them in the cheapest advertising time slots possible. But making that idea a reality was going to be very difficult. "My first idea was, O.K., I've got a list of people who I know are targets here," Grisolano said. "I've got a list of viewers and what they watch over here. Just match them up and spit out what TV shows my targets are watching." He acknowledged that "what I didn't necessarily fully grasp in my enthusiastic naïveté was that the size and magnitude of these data sets are apparently extraordinary, and the engineering feat of doing what I wanted to do was a lot more complicated than I envisioned it."
That task would not ultimately be overseen by Gershkoff. By the end of 2011, she left the campaign, her tenure cut short by a family emergency, she said. When she re-emerged that spring, it was as the director of global analytics at the public relations and advertising firm Burson-Marsteller.
Responsibility for building the optimizer was handed off to Wagner. "We took over in January and then had to build it from scratch, completely from scratch," he said. Fortunately, there happened to be a rare expert in set-top-box data, named Carol Davidsen, working in the cave. Davidsen looks younger than her 37 years — "no kids," she says — and she speaks in a rapid, elliptical manner, as if her thoughts are running too fast for her sentences to keep pace. Before joining the campaign, she had a successful career as a forward-thinking data engineer. But she had become fed up with corporate life by the time she received an unsolicited e-mail from Wagner's analytics department, which recruited employees by searching the 2008 online-donor list for those who listed themselves as programmers. "I'm a huge supporter of Barack Obama," she said a few weeks ago at Think Coffee in Greenwich Village. "But I also was kind of at a time in my life where I needed to be part of a perfect team, and I knew that was possible in a world where people weren't worried about getting a raise or people weren't worried about getting a promotion."
Her previous employer, Navic Networks, was a very early pioneer in the field of set-top-box data collection. And she was one of the early programmers to figure out how to make a television, designed as a one-way path for sending programming into American homes, relay information back about what exactly a viewer was watching.
Davidsen determined that Rentrak could roughly do what Grisolano wanted it to do: produce data that could be checked against Wagner's list of most-persuadable voters to find matches. Rentrak had access to the set-top boxes in the homes of thousands of the targeted voters in every competitive market of every swing state. (For instance, Rentrak had 100,000 people in its Denver sample, some 20,000 of whom were on the Obama list; Nielsen had a total of 600 people in Denver.)
But there was the potentially politically explosive matter of privacy. Unlike Facebook, where users were at least giving the campaign explicit permission to collect personal data even if they had not read the fine print, television watchers were making no such agreement. To address this, the campaign and Rentrak hired a third party to "anonymize" the data so that they would only know that the information was coming from a set-top box of somebody on the persuadable list; identifying information would be stripped away.
The optimizer software would then comb advertising price and viewership data to figure out the top-rated time slots among those on the Obama persuadable list — which could vary from market to market — and then rank them based on which produced the highest concentration of the Obama swing voters at the best rates. The results were striking. The campaign determined that two of the top shows to buy were 1 a.m. repeats of "The Insider" and afternoon episodes of "Judge Joe Brown" — shows that were far cheaper than the evening news or anything being shown on the networks in prime time. "When you're talking about 'The Insider,' that might be shift workers in a state like Ohio, folks who are working class and aren't getting home until midnight," said Daniel Jester, the head GMMB buyer, who was aggressively locking in low rates early. "The person watching 'Judge Joe Brown' in the afternoon also may be the same viewer watching 'The Insider' at 1 a.m."
The Romney campaign was not pursuing these same voters the same way. If they had been, Davidsen told me, the market would have become competitive, prices would have spiked and the system would have lost some of its advantage. As far as the Obama team was concerned, the optimizer helped it do what most strategists deemed impossible in a campaign between two well-financed opponents — talk to undecided voters through television advertisements on shows on which the opposition was not running a countermessage.
By Election Day, the Obama campaign had done far more to utilize cable and to run ads at odd times of day — who watches "Area 51" on Syfy at 2:30 a.m.? — than Romney had. In all, Obama ran nearly twice as many cable ads as Romney did, 588,006, on more than twice as many channels, 100, according to analysis by NCC Media, which helped both campaigns place spots.
It is not that the Romney campaign was unaware such technology could be developed. Rentrak, a nonpartisan vendor, reached out to offer its services in the spring of 2012 but found no takers. The former Bush strategist Sara Fagen worked with the Romney consulting firm TargetPoint to develop a competing optimizing service, but, she said, the media team "chose not to use it." (She is now working with some TargetPoint colleagues to develop one for a new company they are forming, Deep Root Analytics.)
Stuart Stevens, Romney's chief strategist, said the campaign used plenty of data to inform its television buying. But as far as he was concerned, Fagen was one of many offering some new service. The Romney campaign, he said, had a different mission than Obama's. "We still were trying to inform likely voters who Mitt Romney was," he said, "and until you get those voters, you're insane to go off and say, 'We're going to try to win this with left-handed Lithuanians.' "
In the end, an analysis by the Republican ad-buying firm National Media found that Obama paid roughly 35 percent less per broadcast commercial than Romney did. Kantar Media CMAG, an ad-monitoring firm, showed that Obama and his supporting super PAC got nearly 40,000 more spots on the air than Romney and his super PACs did despite spending roughly $90 million less.
The day after Obama won 51 percent of the vote, he visited his Chicago staff, including those on the analytics team. Davidsen said Obama hugged her and signed a favorite piece of cave paraphernalia, a replica of a narwhal tusk. "An honor," she said.
When the campaign ended, Obama's team of tech experts did not exactly knock down the door of the White House personnel office looking to put their newfound tools into the service of the new presidential agenda. They were heading East and West — to Silicon Valley, Wall Street and, in the case of A.M.G., Las Vegas — in search of venture capital and clients.
There is, of course, a tradition of political operatives leaving presidential campaigns to cash in on the corporate side. This has often been to join the public-policy campaigns of a given industry or company between political bouts, or perhaps to help with some brand and image management.
But there is just as much of a tradition in Democratic politics, especially among the young, to keep the fight alive after a campaign's end. The young staff members of the McGovern campaign left that particularly demoralizing endeavor to re-engage with their causes and their party; the Web-pioneering Deaniacs went on to feed the ranks of MoveOn and the 2008 Obama campaign.
The Obama political movement had tended to hold itself apart from the corporate world, its members galvanized by what they saw as an opportunity to change the country. But after Election Day in November, huge political success met financial opportunity. The people in their 20s and 30s from the Obama tech team had seen others just like them get incredibly rich on innovations (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) that were as transformational as anything they could hope to achieve in government. Now they started to think about what innovations they could bring to the market.
A.M.G. may be the most baldly commercial of the new crop of companies coming out of the cave, but they are all trying to translate what they learned there into future success. A few weeks ago, Wagner announced he was starting a new firm called Civis Analytics with an investment from Eric Schmidt, the Google executive chairman, who was a technology adviser during the campaign. As Wagner described it to me, he would use analytics to help nonprofit and for-profit companies reach out to segments of the population they were struggling to connect with. One of his first clients is the College Board, which runs the national SAT test. Civis will identify "kids who are low-income, high-achieving but not meeting their college potential." The "commercial applicability is wide," he said, so the company will not be averse to working with big, for-profit companies of all kinds.
Carol Davidsen was also recruited by A.M.G., but she decided to take the lessons of the Obama campaign in a different direction. If anything, her approach is almost anticorporate, even though she said she was not against getting rich if she could. Her company, called Cir.cl, which she founded with a campaign programmer, Joshua Thayer, endeavors to find people with complementary interests who may have reason to do business with each other, like parents with baby equipment to dispose of and parents-to-be in the market for that equipment. She calls it "recommerce."
"I have a lot of friends with kids," she said one recent Friday at her new office, a bouncy-ball and Mac-strewn onetime closet space in an industrial building in Downtown Brooklyn. "There's this little plastic play house. Does every single one of those need to go into a garbage dump? Why did we give up on doing business with each other? Why is it always to big corporations? It doesn't have to be." Explaining her choice to me, she said, "I don't want to spend my time optimizing for Coke."
When I talked to Chauncey McLean in Brooklyn in April, he walked me through how the campaign's technological achievements could translate into services provided to private businesses, like Caesars. The casino had gobs of data on its customers. "We have a giant list of people, and we need to make a model of likely customers," he said. A.M.G. would break them down along a range of Caesars Scores, à la Wagner's persuadable scores. Then A.M.G. could work through it and direct advertising toward those whose visits had fallen off: find what they watch via Rentrak in the greatest concentrations and then ply them with TV advertising.
Over several meetings with McLean and his young A.M.G. staff members, I asked them to talk about the switch in mission from getting Obama elected to helping Fortune 500 companies sell stuff. Will St. Clair, who helped write the campaign's Facebook program, said he saw himself as a programmer first and foremost and only joined A.M.G. after deciding that he didn't want "to play the Internet start-up billionaire game, which is a lot less fun than it looks on paper." Gaurav Shirole said he was considering a job in the Treasury Department when McLean approached him. "I'm a Silicon Valley kid, so the start-up bug has been there forever."
Frommann acknowledged having ventured into politics with a certain idealism. "We've all watched 'The West Wing,' like, four times, and we want to do our small part to change the world," he said. Politics, he said, was emotionally satisfying. Corporate clients meant new data sets, "stuff I haven't worked with before, intellectually that's interesting to me."
Still, it was hard not to detect some deeper disappointment about what was possible in politics. Frommann told me that in 2010, shortly after college, he joined the Social Security Administration. Within a year, he had helped develop a new system that, he said, would have saved the administration as much as $1 billion a year. Just as his idea was gaining traction, his entire unit was disbanded, the ostensible result of budget cuts but also, he surmised, bureaucratic infighting. Sometimes, he said, it seems as if political life can be as much like "The West Wing" as it is like "House of Cards," the Netflix show about a conniving member of Congress living in a kill-or-be-killed Washington.
McLean says Grisolano wooed him by awarding him with the title of chief operating officer and wide latitude to hire whomever he needed. He was also drawn to Grisolano's sales pitch that the optimizer approach could prove a disruptive force in a $60 billion commercial-advertising industry. It spoke to the same desire to be part of something big that led him to join the first Obama campaign. "This is going to be a huge deal, right?" he said "It's a multibillion-dollar industry, and we're going to change the way that it works."
He said his work at A.M.G. would also help provide the Democratic Party with even better tools three years from now, when he and his colleagues say they want to be involved in 2016. "We're going to bring it home," McLean said.
But for now, he does not seem to miss Washington. "I respect everybody who's working for the president — right? They're incredible kids — incredible people — but you have a limited movement, because you're hamstrung; the House is the House," he said. "When you go where the money is and you go where people get reached, you have a transformational effect. Money creates change."


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Noisey, Vice magazine's music channel, has uploaded video footage of "a nameless ghoul" from the mysterious Swedish buzz metal act GHOST talking about Satan's faith in his band and his band's faith in the BEACH BOYS. Check out the clip below.
GHOST cult leader "Papa Emeritus" (rumored to be REPUGNANT/SUBVISION's Tobias Forge, who takes the stage in the form of "a satanic pope") and his anonymous ghouls are currently supporting MASTODON and OPETH on a North American tour.
GHOST is continuing to support its debut album, "Opus Eponymous", which has been called "amazing" by Stereogum and "a primer on the creation of melodic hard rock" by The Big Takeover.
GHOST floored music fans with its first U.S. shows and served notice that it is not only a "band to watch" but will be a force to be reckoned with for years to come. In its live review of GHOST's New York City headlining show, the Village Voice called the group's performance "lurching and menacing", saying "GHOST's sound is like heavy metal trapped in a state of suspended animation since 1973."
GHOST's "Opus Eponymous" is a daringly fascinating combination of satanic rock music merged with an almost unthinkable pop sensibility. Enveloped in a shroud of mystery and standing anonymous beneath the painted faces, hoods and robes which their sect demand, the GHOST deliver litanies of pulsating heavy rock and stimulating lyrics which "glorify and glamorize the disgusting and sacrilegious." The music and philosophies of GHOST specifically target "individuals who have a void in their life perhaps caused by some form of emotional trauma or upset" (research suggests these are most likely adolescents); this dearth can then be alluringly filled by GHOST's music and philosophies.
Photo credit: Stephanie Cabral


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Difference between revisions of "Hauppauge WinTV-NOVA-TD-Stick"
(diversity information)
m (Use the firmware template.)
|Line 27:
|Line 27:
First problem is that it comes in Diversity mode as default. So, is needed to change from Diversity mode to Dual-Tuner mode by using Windows/MacOS driver diversity utility (it is only needed to change once, first time).
First problem is that it comes in Diversity mode as default. So, is needed to change from Diversity mode to Dual-Tuner mode by using Windows/MacOS driver diversity utility (it is only needed to change once, first time).
You will need the [http://www.wi-bw.tfh-wildau.de/~pboettch/home/linux-dvb-firmware/dvb-usb-dib0700-1.10.fw dvb-usb-dib0700-1.10.fw firmware file] in <tt>/lib/firmware</tt> or the relevant place for your distribution.
=== Drivers ===
=== Drivers ===
Revision as of 23:43, 15 January 2008
A DVB-T USB device from Hauppauge.
It is supported under Linux.
This device features two tuners and is supplied with two antennas. You'll have adapter0 and adapter1 in /dev/dvb, which you can use separately.
The "Diversity" option is a hardware based feature that allows for the device's two receivers to be configured in a combined use mode to achieve better reception on a single channel. The diversity feature of the DiBcom demodulators is currently not implemented in the Linux-DVB drivers, so only the dual tuner configuration is presently supported on such devices [1].
Components Used
- 2× Microtune MT2266 tuners
- Dibcom DiB7700P DVB-T demodulator
This device's USB ID is 2040:9580.
Making it work
Diversity mode
The driver currently does not support Diversity, it only support Dual-Tuner.
First problem is that it comes in Diversity mode as default. So, is needed to change from Diversity mode to Dual-Tuner mode by using Windows/MacOS driver diversity utility (it is only needed to change once, first time).
August 21, 2008 - New firmware file fixing the last cause for i2c errors and disconnects and providing a new, more modular i2c request formatting.
You will need the dvb-usb-dib0700-1.20.fw firmware file in /lib/firmware or the relevant place for your distribution.
You may need to change the name of the file to dvb-usb-dib0700-1.10.fw or create a link until the driver code reflects that change.
For archival purposes: dvb-usb-dib0700-1.10.fw firmware file
August 29,2008 - Issues with Firmware 1.20. Some issues have been found with the latest version of the firmware. Users may wish to continue to use 1.10 unless they have patched their v4l-dvb code with dib0700_new_i2c_api.patch.
November 15,2008 - Issues with Firmware 1.20.
- The above mentioned dib0700_new_12c_api.patch is not available discretely but is now rolled into the mercurial drivers
dvb-usb-dib0700-1.20.fw firmware fileis now stable for reception, but remote control functionality is broken; any key press is repeated until the next key is pressed. The only way to get remote control functionality presently is to roll back to 1.10 firmware and suffer the occasional disconnect.
- The mercurial drivers have been changed so they now load 1.20 firmware. To revert to 1.10 firmware you need to rename your firmware file to dvb-usb-dib0700-1.20.fw or provide a link of that name.
- To avoid spurious remote control signals with 1.20 firmware, you need to edit /etc/modprobe.d/options or from Ubuntu onwards /etc/modprobe.d/options.confand add:
options dvb_usb disable-rc-polling=1
November 28,2008 - i2c errors. Changes were made to the remote control drivers on November 16,2008 to correct the repeat key problem. The card is generally stable for dual tuner reception and remote control function with Firmware 1.20.
November 10,2009 - mt2060 I2C write failed. Possible regression of a driver bug raised against Ubuntu running 2.6.27-14 and 2.6.31-2.17 causing mt2060 I2C errors in MythTV useage with firmware 1.20. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/397696 Recommend check the kernel extensions listed here for Low Noise Activation and rc_polling are loaded with correct config file name for your distribution, EIT listings information is turned off until a suitable delay (500ms-1000ms)is added to a single card (not both) and the card has correctly been added to the database as two tuners (no additional NULL entries) in the mythtv recordcard table.
Support is present in the Linux kernel from version 2.6.24-rc1.
Just use Mercurial by following the How to install DVB device drivers instructions.
Sample kernel output
From 2.6.20-16-generic with drivers compiled from repository 4th Jan 07:
$ dmesg | grep dvb [ 40.858884] dvb-usb: found a 'Hauppauge Nova-TD Stick/Elgato Eye-TV Diversity' in cold state, will try to load a firmware [ 40.912496] dvb-usb: downloading firmware from file 'dvb-usb-dib0700-1.10.fw' [ 41.624338] dvb-usb: found a 'Hauppauge Nova-TD Stick/Elgato Eye-TV Diversity' in warm state. [ 41.624397] dvb-usb: will pass the complete MPEG2 transport stream to the software demuxer. [ 42.047026] dvb-usb: will pass the complete MPEG2 transport stream to the software demuxer. [ 42.359232] dvb-usb: schedule remote query interval to 150 msecs. [ 42.359235] dvb-usb: Hauppauge Nova-TD Stick/Elgato Eye-TV Diversity successfully initialized and connected. [ 42.359404] usbcore: registered new interface driver dvb_usb_dib0700 [ 68.220540] dvb_usb_dib0700 2-4:1.0: resuming [ 68.220812] dvb_usb_dib0700 2-4:1.0: resuming


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Shimmer Yellow Sixlets
SweetWorks Premium Chocolate Maker
SweetWorks is a premium chocolate maker for over 5-decades. They make high-quality treats and chocolates. SweetWorks is better known for Sixlets, candy coated chocolates in a rainbow of colors.
Sixlets are small round candy-coated, chocolate-flavored candy made by Oak Leaf Confections. The candy coated candies have a chocolate centers are made from a mixture of cocoa and carob, giving them a "malted" flavor. The ball-shaped candies are made in many colors including red, brown, yellow, green, blue and orange. Sixlets can be bought to fit season, holidays and themed parties. For Easter, the theme includes white, pink, and blue pieces. Christmas variations use red, green and white. Halloween theme use orange and black sixlet candies.
These bright sixlets are a shimmery yellow color. Sixlets, which are about a centimeter in diameter, have a sweet chocolatey center with a shiny candy coating. They are packaged in a 2 pound bag.
|Gluten Free
|Sugar, dextrose, partially hydrogenated palm kernel oil, reduced protein whey (milk), cocoa, corn syrup, carob, tapioca dextrin, soy lecithin, natural & artificial flavors, salt, colors (include yellow 5, titanium dioxide, mica based pearlescent pigments).


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Make a difference in providing quality experiences for our local youth.
Your donation will:
Your gift is tax deductible to the full extent allowed by the law. The Northwestern Lehigh Youth Athletic Association is a registered 501(c)3 organization.
You may also send your gift to: NYAA, PO Box 7, New Tripoli, PA 18066
New Privacy Policy


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Archive for March 9, 2009
surf art
these are pretty incredible. i'm just gonna let you mellow on the photos. this is just one of the incredible series of underwater art installations – dubbed Dopamine – from surf/street/skate label Insight51, featuring the combined creative handiwork of Steve Gorrow and photographer Dustin Humphrey (from environmentalgraffiti.com).


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The animals were without food and water for days before Animal Care and Control found them.
The owner was evicted from her home for having too many animals, but ultimately decided to leave them behind. Robin Demmo, a real estate agent whose help the missing tenant once enlisted in searching for an apartment, said the owner's name is Nina. Concerned with the welfare of the dog, Demmo had previously offered to take Sasha if no one else would, but received this cryptic response: "If one dies, they all die."
Since the animals were found, Demmo has taken it upon herself to save Sasha from an ill-fated future. She has taken Sasha out of the care of AC&C, which is not a no-kill shelter.
"I don't believe an animal should be abused. The dog does not deserve this," said Demmo, who works at Presidential Realty in Middle Village, an agency that specializes in finding homes for people with pets.
Sasha's worries are not over, however. Demmo, who has two dogs of her own, has reassured her landlord she will only keep Sasha until she is placed in a permanent home.
"If I can help a pet, I will. I would keep her if I could," said Demmo, whose back problems and small apartment prevent her from having a large dog that requires frequent walking.
Sasha is 12-year-old Labrador-shepherd mix that is great with kids. She also gets along with cats, as she lived with 60 of them for some time, and certain dogs. Demmo was told Sasha has enlarged mammary glands. She was spayed last summer by a rescue group that set aside money for the life-saving procedure. Demmo is hopeful that a loving family, maybe with a yard, will welcome Sasha into their home to live out the rest of her days.
"If someone would like to donate their time and come to walk her, that would also be greatly appreciated," said Demmo.
Those interested in walking or adopting Sasha are encouraged to call Robin Demmo at 347-527-2692. Demmo lives in Maspeth.


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Please submit it to firstname.lastname@example.com.
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The Market at Ag Heritage Park
August 8, 2019 @ 3:00 pm - 6:00 pm
The Market at Ag Heritage Park takes place on the grounds of the Edward L. Lowder Red Barn, located at 580-B S Donahue Dr. Just look for the two silos. Parking is on the right just before you reach the barn.
Date: August 8th, 2019
Time: 3:00 PM until 6:00 PM
The 2019 season will run on Thursdays, from 8/8 til Thursday, Aug. 29. Hours are 3 to 6 p.m.
The Market is an open-air, growers-only farmers market that operates each Thursday, May-August, at Ag Heritage Park on the Auburn University campus. Hosted by the College of Agriculture, The Market features area vendors offering fresh, locally grown fruits and vegetables, herbs, ornamental plants and cut flowers as well as locally produced jams and jellies, baked goods, soaps, honey, goat cheese and more.
Now in its 14th season, The Market at Ag Heritage Park gives Auburn University employees and students and all area residents the opportunity to Buy Fresh, Buy Local, directly from the growers.
The weekly farmers market is open to the public, and everyone is welcome. It is held rain or shine, unless severe weather poses a danger to vendors and customers.


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Mustad Ice Threaded Studs
Quality Ice Studs in Different Shapes and Sizes
The Mustad ice threaded studs fit perfectly into every stud hole and come in different shapes and sizes. Ice studs are made of premium hardened steel with a welded tungsten carbide insert providing additional grip on winter surfaces like ice and snow.
Ask the expert
Questions about this product?Let us know
Where to buy
Find your nearest dealer
Product summary
Find your nearest dealer
Good to know
- Different shapes and sizes available
- Designed for riding and jumping on snow, ice and hard rocky terrain
- Galvanization protects against rust
- In order to prevent injuries, we strongly suggest using them in winter conditions
Errol Wernike, farrier in Germany
Going to events and clinics had a big influence on how I'm doing my work today
Top trotters, farrier students and foals
The amazing career of Jörgen NordqvistRead story


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John Makely / NBC News
Anju Singh, who was born in India and works at the National Institutes of Health, won an extraordinary ability green card for her scientific research.
This is the second story in NBC News' series "Immigration Nation," an in-depth examination of immigration in America.
One is a federal scientist with a Harvard pedigree and a body of ground-breaking research. The other is a burlesque performer with the looks of Rita Hayworth and a ground-shaking shimmy.
Both women have been deemed "aliens of extraordinary ability" by Uncle Sam -- an elite cadre of immigrants who earn green cards, and a path to citizenship, by proving they are tops in their field.
While the "extraordinary ability" route can be one of the fastest, persuading a faceless bureaucrat they deserve permanent residency can be a frustrating, expensive, even humbling experience for high achievers who may already be household names in their homelands.
"The process is a nightmare," said Anju Singh, the researcher with the National Institutes of Health, who was born in India and studied and worked in the U.S. for nearly a decade before she pursued the coveted green card granting permanent U.S. residency.
The payoff, though, is something many immigrants with less impressive resumes can only dream about.
"I have never been so excited about a piece of plastic," said Bettina May, the dancer and pinup model who left Canada to striptease on more fertile American soil. "And it's actually green!"
Fewer than 4,000 extraordinary ability EB-1A green cards -- which don't require a job offer from an American sponsor -- were approved last year. A third of the applications were rejected, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Source: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
Have an Oscar, Nobel, Pulitzer or Olympic gold medal? Getting the card should be a breeze. But for other A-list artists, athletes, scientists, educators and entrepreneurs, reams of documentation are needed to show they meet at least three of 10 criteria for the program -- from awards and media coverage to high salary and membership in elite groups.
May was touring the U.S. on a one-year visa when she decided to apply. Over four months, she compiled a 2-inch-thick dossier to demonstrate burlesque was an art form and that she had made a unique contribution.
The file she submitted in December 2010 had clippings from papers around the country, tape of her appearance on a "Real Housewives" franchise, box-office receipts and hard-won letters of recommendation from producers and venue owners attesting that she is the creme de la Can-Can.
"It's hard to ask for favors, especially from people you don't know too well," May said.
Waiting and worrying
While Miss Universe can land a green card in a matter of weeks, this Golden Pasties winner had to wait more than a year and a half because her lawyer left her birth certificate out of the application and the adjudication officer kept sending requests for more evidence.
"I was a wreck, thinking at any minute they're going to tell me you have to leave the country," she said. "It's so hard to live your life that way. What do I do if I get kicked out? If I go back to Canada, I'll have to get a desk job." After $10,000 in legal fees, May got her ego-boosting green card in August.
Singh had a shorter but similarly stressful wait.
After attending veterinary school in India, she came to the U.S. in 2003 for graduate studies. She earned a doctorate in immunology in five years and trained at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Things got complicated when her husband was laid off. As a non-resident, he was ineligible for unemployment benefits and dependent on his wife's visa, which could have made it harder for her to find employment sponsors.
She also was pregnant when she decided to apply for a green card early last year. Between bouts of morning sickness, she badgered big-name scientists who had cited her work to give her recommendations and began reviewing research to satisfy an application criterion.
Among the challenges: translating her biggest achievements -- isolating novel markers to identify stem cells that make bone, which could one day lead to disease cures -- in a way that would impress an adjudicator with no scientific expertise.
Anju Singh, who was born in India and works at the National Institutes of Health, won an extraordinary ability green card for her scientific research.
'I'm really extraordinary'
Soon after giving birth, she received a letter from the government. There was no green card inside; they wanted more evidence, and a guarantee she would continue working in her field, which bridges basic lab research and clinical medicine.
Three months later came word she was approved.
"I was so happy, I couldn't sleep," Singh said. "I was thinking, 'I'm really extraordinary.' It was an amazing feeling."
While statistics show the percentage of applications approved hit a decade high last year, some immigration lawyers think it's actually getting more difficult to make cases, with frequent requests for more evidence that underscore the subjective side of the process.
Jeff Goldman, who practices in Cambridge, Mass., said he had to get the National Basketball Association commissioner's office involved after the feds expressed skepticism about the worthiness of Cleveland Cavaliers forward Omri Casspi, who stars in cereal commercials in his native Israel, was a first-round draft pick and was named to the NBA's all-rookie team.
"We have seen over the years it's harder to get these cases approved," said Michael Wildes, a lawyer who helped supermodel Gisele Bundchen and golfer Greg Norman obtain green cards. "We've seen the government go through (applications) with a surgical knife."
Adjudicators go from screening ballerinas to biologists. While there are guidelines, "in practice, there's a big standard deviation," said Cletus Weber, an attorney from the Seattle area.
Paul Hawthorne / Getty Images
Sean Yazbeck won an extraordinary ability green card for his entrepreneurship and parlayed it into a spot on Donald's Trump's "The Apprentice."
One of his clients, German mobile-technology entrepreneur Cyriac Roeding, won approval in a few months in 2007 and went on to launch the hugely successful startup Shopkick. The wait was far longer for Sean Yazbeck, a British phone-network engineer who got his green card in 2005 and went on to win Donald Trump's "The Apprentice."
"For me, it was a very long, sweaty four years of waiting and waiting," he said.
Well-credentialed foreigners who don't think they qualify for EB-1A, or the closely related EB-1B "outstanding professors or researchers" category, can seek green cards in the less-stringent "national interest waiver" category. That has its own set of requirements, and applicants from China or India face a backlog.
Those who don't meet the standard for a waiver typically must find a full-time permanent position with a U.S. employer that can demonstrate that it could not find a qualified American for the job.
Most lawyers said if a client is rejected for an extraordinary green card, it doesn't pay to appeal.
Singer Celine Dion's bodyguard and driver, Nick Skokos, was turned down in 2009 after immigration officials determined he was a little too ordinary. He sued, but the courts ruled against him. He remains in the U.S. on a non-immigrant work visa, with no path to citizenship.
Related story:
Through the obstacle course of immigration, many paths to citizenship
"For Nick, the case was never about whether he had permission to be in the United States or not," said his lawyer, Luther Snavely. "Nick just loves the U.S. He wanted to become a lawful permanent resident and then a U.S. citizen, and he felt very strongly about it."
Extraordinary ability green cards must be renewed after 10 years, or the holder can apply for citizenship in about five years.
Yazbeck did it and is naturalized. Roeding and Singh haven't decided whether to seek citizenship. May, though, is counting the days until she can file.
After visiting every state except Michigan, she's sure she wants to twirl her tassels here forever.
"It's a beautiful country, and the people are amazing," she said.