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Full circle from Farneta, Sam Sebastiani waters his Italian roots and honors the monastery where the family story began.
Story David Bolling
Photos Steven Krause
It is usually easier to understand the past from a distance, when you're not entangled in its grasp.
Now 76, Sam Sebastiani has that distance, and from where he sits on the patio of his home off Gehricke Road, at the back side of Schocken Hill, he can see the past all around him, even if the future is sometimes shrouded by fog.
His last name, of course, is woven tightly through Sonoma history; it is one of three names most commonly spoken and prominently honored since the founding of the city's iconic Mission San Francisco Solano in 1823.
Those names—Mariano Vallejo, Agoston Haraszthy and Samuele Sebastiani—cover some very big bases: Vallejo, the founding father; Haraszthy, founder of Buena Vista Winery and the first commercially successful winemaker in California; and Sebastiani, founder of one of the biggest and oldest winemaking dynasties in the state and the model of philanthropic patronage in Sonoma.
It was on Schocken Hill, in the quarry owned by Solomon Schocken, that Samuele Sebastiani, Sam's grandfather and a recent immigrant from the Italian village of Farneta, labored to deliver basalt paving stones with his horse-drawn cart to scow schooners in the Sonoma slough for construction of the streets of San Francisco. Samuele was 19 when he came to America, with some experience making wine, tending vines and little else. But he knew how to work hard and how to save money, and bit by bit he saved enough to buy a small Sonoma winery in 1904. Then, instead of hauling cobblestones, he used the horse and wagon to haul barrels of wine (believed to be full of zinfandel) around town, selling it by the cup or jug. He never stopped working, and he never stopped building a life and a legacy until he had more or less worked himself to death.
Sitting in his redwood-walled, leather-bound study, Sam reflects back on the patriarch whose name he carries and whose life reveals the core values of another time.
"I asked my dad why he (Samuele) died, and he said, 'He just got worn out.' He was 70 when he passed. If you ever saw that man's hands, there was a lot of work in those hands. He had fingers the size of two of most people's fingers. I've got some pictures where you can see his hands holding me, like 'meat hooks' my dad used to call it.
"He wasn't one to just do the wine thing. He got the winery going and then he built a cannery and started canning fruit products from the Valley, because he wanted to keep the people who worked on the winery employed. It was a seasonal thing, and when the season was over you don't need the guys. So, he would reason, 'We got a bunch of guys here, let's put them over, we'll build a cannery and then we'll can fruit. Then we'll just hire their wives.' And pretty soon that's still not keeping them busy, so he started building houses on Fourth Street for the workers; he built most of the houses on Fourth Street—and if you worked there long enough, you could keep it. He gave it to you.
"There are many stories about my grandfather," Sam says. "He'd go to town and play cards with the guys and just fall asleep on his wagon. The horse would pull up next to the house and his wife, Elvira—my grandmother—would come out and wake him up, and then he'd put the horse away."
Sam gets up, walks around the study thinking, comes back.
"Then, he wanted to pave the street down to town, because Spain Street wasn't paved. So he went to the city and he said, 'Well, I'll pave half the street if you guys will pave the other half.' The city basically said, 'Screw you.' So, he paved one half. There's a photo from the air in the 1930s that shows half of Spain Street paved from his house to town. He did it all with concrete."
Besides paving half of Spain Street, Samuele built all of the Sebastiani Theatre, a skating rink, a motel, a bowling alley, a meeting hall at St. Francis Catholic Church and, finally, St. Francis Solano Catholic School.
Sam didn't get to spend much time with his namesake, who died when he was only 5. But Samuele's lessons lived on through the men who worked for him.
"I actually learned and worked with the old-timers. I was fortunate that the guys that worked for him were still alive and kicking strongly when I was a kid, so I worked in the winery with the old Italians who learned things like welding just because they had to. I learned all these trades, not well, but I could do just about anything as long as you only wanted it to last for two weeks.
"We all did the bottling, which was so far different than today that it's laughable. We would put a little siphon filler at the tank that we were going to bottle, just hook it up, turn the valve on, and then you just put bottles on these siphon fillers and we just did that all day. Five of us could do 300 cases in a day. When we hit 300, we used to go home. Now, they do 60, 70, 80 bottles a minute."
The wine in those 300 cases a day flowed from a very different tradition, perhaps more attuned to the rhythms of life back in Farneta and the nearby La Chertosa monastery where Samuele made his first wine. Back there and then, wine was a staple, a part of every meal.
"They were making something that everybody had because it was good for them," says Sam. "It helped digestion, it had flavor, but they weren't aiming for gold medals, they were aiming to make a good food product that was on the table. So they didn't care about the name of the fruit. It was, try a little of this and a little of that. They had varieties of grapes that were for color. Salvador was the prime one; it's like ink. If you get it on your clothes you're not getting it out."
Sam pauses, reflecting on those early winemaking days in Sonoma. "You don't see Salvador today, it's not very good as a varietal, but we had vineyards with Salvador growing in rows, so we would take Carignan from other rows next to it and add some Salvador to put a little more power in it."
No one had labs back then, no one knew the chemistry of the soil and the vine, and so some practices considered heresy today were commonplace.
"Sometimes," says Sam, "they would use white grapes to sweeten a blend and add more floral characteristics. I remember being in the winery when they'd hook this tank up to that tank, put them together. As a teenager, or younger, you don't ask questions, you just do it. But as I got older, I started to think, 'What the hell are we doing here?' But that's just the way they made wine."
Sam would go on to earn an MBA from Santa Clara University and spend two years in the army before he came back to Sebastiani and dug into the modern business of making wine with his father, August, who had already recognized that quality was at least as important as quantity in the emerging wine industry. Along the way and through the years, Sam took numerous short courses at UC Davis just as the university's fabled enology program hit its stride.
"When I went up to UC Davis, I did not sit there for a 12-month course or anything like that, but I took all these short courses, for years. I would leave here at four-thirty, five o'clock in the morning, I'd be up there at six and I'd go to school, I'd come back. I've got a bunch of these little diplomas, the three- and four-day courses that they taught. But what I was taught, in those days at Davis, 30 percent of it has been proven not to be right. Because, they were just theoretical thoughts and now we know better."
The infinite complexity of making great wine, of course, cannot all be learned in school. The variables are endless, says Sam. "When you get into the winemaking game, there is so much to learn. Where the fruit is grown, what clone the fruit is, the training method you use on the vine, when you pick it, your theory about picking it, the leaf thinning and the process of growing the grapes.
"Then, you go to the winery and you ferment it. Which yeast do you use? You go to your barrels and whether you just let it sit there, whether you turn it, whether you stir it, and if it's white wine what forest you bought the barrels from, what grain you specify—tight grain or light grain or in between. Toasted head, no toasted head. The length of toast of the barrel. I mean, you really have an infinite number of variables."
Just talking barrels with Sam can quickly become an extended conversation. "The grain of the barrels is to me the biggest piece. A large big grain hole is going to let that much more oak tannin and the various compounds from the barrel into the wine very fast. It's a little harsher, so we specify tighter grain. So it goes on. The type of corks. How much you want the bottle to age it before you release it."
After Samuele's passing, his son August bought the winery with his wife, Sylvia, and it was clear changes needed to be made. Samuele had built volume by selling the same wines to as many as 50 private labels all over the country. "He went into Houston, Omaha, New York, all these places," recalls Sam. "He would say, 'You want your bottling label? You print it, I'll send you the wine.' So, then you had a bottling facility in your warehouse, and the rail cars would come and they'd unload the wine, they'd put it in a tank, tomorrow they'd bottle it, and then the next week it's up in the store. So we had wine all over the place."
Because the bulk wine buyers often had sanitation issues with their bottling operations, and the Sebastiani wine would be compromised by bacteria, August decided to make the process simpler for those customers.
So, says Sam, "He told them, 'Get rid of your bottling line, save the money. I'll ship your bottled wine with your label on it.' So he evolved to having the bottling line at the winery. But we still had all these, 50 or 60 private labels on our wine."
August also pioneered production of varietal wines in jugs, cabernet and chardonnay for the masses, at a time when Gallo's Hearty Burgundy blend owned the market.
"We had these half-gallon jugs and my dad says, 'You've got to get me labels for these, and we've got to have it in the bottle in 30 days.' So we just went into afterburn. I got the labels for him and we started shipping it out to America. We did a press event in San Francisco, and The New York Times had a guy at the dinner, they put it on the wire, and we went from 500,000 cases a year to 3.5 million cases in three or four years."
The August years could be called Phase Two of Sebastiani Winery. When August died in 1980, and Sam took over, Phase Three began.
"We were at 4.2 million cases by then and I had a lot of really tough decisions to make. I started doing the cost accounting and we were making 25 cents a case on some wines. It was hardly worth starting the machinery. So I started cutting out items, and these private label guys, and I shrugged the winery back down, kept the high-end, quality wines, where we were making larger profits."
There were also serious quality control issues arising from aging equipment that resulted in recalls.
Sam's response was a major investment in new equipment and better technology. "We spent a lot of money on the lab at Sebastiani—$25,000 microscopes, mass spectrometers; they could tell you everything that's in your wine."
The result was that in 1985 Sebastiani Winery won 96 awards—more awards for more wines, says Sam, than any winery in America.
And that's the year his mother, his brother Don and his sister Mary Ann decided he was spending too much money and had to go. They, in essence, fired him.
What followed were some tough years, during which Sam and his then-wife Vicki regrouped, scraped together all the cash they could and launched Viansa (a compound of Vicki and Sam) on a knoll above the Sonoma marsh wetlands at the southern mouth of Sonoma Valley. With sons Jon and Michael (who eventually became president and winemaker of the operation), they pioneered a new marketing model, cutting out distributors, selling direct to consumers through an ingeniously designed wine club, an Italian marketplace that drew people by the thousands to the hilltop tasting room, and through a chain of retail outlets they set up across the country.
In the process, Sam—who cared deeply about waterfowl—poured energy and money into an elaborate restoration of the previously drained wetlands at the foot of the Viansa hill. He and Vicki were living in a mobile home on the edge of the property and, says Sam, "I used to go out there every morning, every night. We put owl boxes out. We'd have owls flying around. We'd have all kinds of bird life; it was alive."
Sam's efforts created the largest private wetland in Sonoma County, strategically sited at the top of the bay. Why was it so important?
"Well," he says bluntly, "because I'm not an asshole kind of guy. I like the outdoors, and we've gone too far with our expansion as human beings; we need to start preserving, or we won't have places where these animals and these birds have a place to carry on their life cycle."
At its peak, Viansa was grossing some $25 million a year with a wide range of Italian varietals and gourmet food products created by Vicki.
But then the marriage fell apart, Viansa suffered collateral damage, Sam and Vicki sold the winery and Sam retreated to Nebraska, where he had bought a ranch on the central flyway of the North Platte River.
It looked like that might be his final chapter, but you can't make great wine in Nebraska, and it turns out that Vitis vinifera flows deep in the family veins.
In 2014, Sam debuted La Chertosa wines, an Anglicized name that harkens back to that Italian monastery outside Farneta where Samuele did his first fermentation. Sam had visited the monastery many times over the years, and was taken by both the scenic, rugged similarity of the locale to Sonoma Valley, and by the deep red soil, full of iron oxide, that closely resembled the California dirt where Sebastiani vineyards was born.
Tradition is a core value in Sam's winemaking—so much so that he was knighted by the president of Italy in 2002 for promoting Italian varietals in the U.S. And tradition is at the core of La Chertosa, which offers a 2014 reserve zinfandel that has won four gold medals and Best of Class of Region in recent competitions; a 2014 reserve Barbera, with four golds and two best of class awards; a 2010 reserve Sangiovese with a gold and best of region awards from the 2017 California State Fair competition; and a 2015 reserve chardonnay with two golds.
In what might be called his Phase Four, Sam Sebastiani appears to be having fun. "I want to keep it small," he says, by keeping La Chertosa at around 1,200 cases. "and it's the first opportunity in my life when I haven't had to sell enough wine to make payroll."
He and his wife Robin share the home on the hill behind the quarry where Samuele got his start in Sonoma. It is a full circle. It makes him happy and proud.
"If you go back and look at what my grandfather did," says Sam, "you see he was a benevolent guy. He built homes and apartments for his workers. He gave homes to workers who stayed with him. He built a theater for the city. He tried to keep everyone employed. My father tried to do the same thing. I guess benevolence is vaccinated into our psyche."


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subset: commoncrawl


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Terry stood overlooking the skate park. He spent too much time here and not enough in school, at least that's what his Dad used to tell him. Should he take the old man's offer? Sure, the old man needed Terry but did Terry need him?
He needed something. Dad was murdered. Terry had the evidence. He found it hidden at Dad's after he died, but he'd need help using it to put Dad's killers away. The old man had been doing this for decades, putting murderers behind bars with his fists and his brains. Terry could fight, but he wasn't trained. Plus there was a reason the old man was called the world's greatest detective.
Terry McGinnis looked out over the vast expanse of Gotham City. Wayne was too old to protect it anymore. He needed help. He asked the seventeen-year-old if he wanted to make a difference, a real difference.
"I'll do it. I'll tell Wayne 'yes'. I'll become the new Batman."
I wrote this for the FFfAW Challenge-Week of July 11, 2017. The idea is to use the photo above as a prompt to write a piece of flash fiction between 100 to 175 words long, with 150 being the ideal. My word count is 162.
My tale is very loosely based on the WB animated TV series Batman Beyond (1999-2001). Bruce Wayne is now elderly and has retired from being The Batman, but crime in Gotham is worse than ever. A chance encounter with a teenager named Terry McGinnis and the subsequent murder of Terry's father by a corrupt businessman leads to Wayne training Terry to be the new Batman.
When I saw the photo prompt, the first thing I thought of was that the young man in the foreground was staring out over the city trying to make the biggest decision of his life. The rest followed.
To read more stories based on the prompt, go to InLinkz.com.


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- This event has passed.
DJ Ceremony
February 23 @ 9:00 pm - February 24 @ 12:00 am
DJ Ceremony is one of New York City's most in-demand Alternative DJs. He has a 1st Saturday residency (as a producer/DJ) at the popular Greenpoint live music venue Saint Vitus. There he produces his flagship party "Oscillate Wildly" (a Smiths/Morrissey-themed fan celebration), in addition to a '90s Britpop night that occurs on alternating months. He also has a weekly Wednesday night residency at Jesse Malin's subterranean East Village club, Berlin. DJ Ceremony is routinely booked by many of NYC's most influential Alternative nightlife producers such as Michael T, Joe Hart, Bettina May, Twig The Wonderkid, and Gemini & Scorpio. He can regularly be heard as a guest DJ or one-night-only producer at an eclectic array of local venues such as Le Poisson Rouge, Gemini & Scorpio Loft, Beauty Bar, and Rumpus Room. Although DJ Ceremony's specialty is UK Alternative music, he enjoys performing in a versatile range of different styles, and looks forward to bringing a bright, fun, kinetic sound to select Saturdays at Parklife.
Follow DJ Ceremony on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and his website.


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Thanks to VitaCost and Nutiva, I am once again stepping out of my foodie comfort zones and will be trying out some new products.
Today, my goal is to sit down and do a little research on Nutiva's site to see what kind of delicious, organic, allergy free type foods I can make! They have a ton of recipes on their site!
Some ideas so far are Popcorn with some red palm oil drizzeld over top and some Organic Blueberry muffins made with Coconut flour & Chia Seeds.
As for the hemp oil and the shortening… I'm not sure. But their web site allows you to search by product, so I'm thinking it will be pretty easy.
How about you? Have you used any of these ingredients and or have a recipe you'd like to share? Please feel free to leave me a comment and include a link – if you have one.


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We're thrilled to announce that our principal, Cathy Purple Cherry, has been named a 2018 Baltimore Visionary by Baltimore Magazine! Be sure to check out her profile in the February issue and read more here on how she and this group of Baltimore Visionaries are shaping the city's future—one big idea at a time.
Related Articles
- Eight Key Issues for Special Needs Environmental Design
- Creating Successful Opportunities in School and at Home for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders − the Smallest Details Make the Biggest Difference
- "Ask Cathy" Column: August 2016


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Monongahela maestros
Knowing nothing about hockey, the Mrs. and I nonetheless enjoyed watching a lightly Tivo-ed version of Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals last night. And the kids we were rooting for took the cup! Go Pens! (Or is it Guins? We're out of it.)
What a nerve-racking game ice hockey is. Huge, garbage-truck-sized guys, flying around way faster than they ever could on foot. It makes the pro football daddies look like they're standing still. And with modern TV -- at least the video resources that show up for a do-or-die championship game -- you get a better sense of it than I can ever remember. Marv Albert croaking out Ranger games from a six-team league out of my two-transistor radio back in high school -- it was never like this.
Even Muhammad Ali was there, albeit in a Red Wings jersey. In a luxury suite with Thomas "Hit Man" Hearns, no less. Great stuff. God bless Pittsburgh, and America.


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Send us your Paoli photos:
Paoli is a town in Phillips County.
The community was named for Paoli, PA
The latitude of Paoli is 40.612N. The longitude is -102.472W.It is in the Mountain Standard time zone. Elevation is 3,888 feet.
The estimated population, in 2003, was 43.
Sections below provide additional information and links about Paoli demographics, travel and tourism, nearby airports, cemeteries, the Phillips County economy, education, environment, genealogy, government, historic sites, libraries, maps, museums, newspapers and other media, nonprofit groups, real estate, recreation, religion, transportation, and weather in the 80731 ZIP code.
28% of Paoli residents report German ancestry, and 17% report Irish. For more info on local ancestry groups, see the Paoli ancestry & family history guide.
Post a query on a message board:
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At the time of the 2000 census, the per capita income in Paoli was $14,947, compared with $21,587 nationally.
Phillips County supported George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election. For more information, see our Paoli political report.
The average commute time for Paoli workers is 13 minutes, compared with 26 minutes nationwide.
More info about Paoli:
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Was surprised, that was an old laptop from 2009 that came with the stock Windows 7 version and still worked fairly OK. Have to say that the new interface, which is indeed looking better and simpler. The desktop is enjoyable, but the fact that this Windows version beams up to Microsoft whatever I'm doing with on my own laptop is still a bother and a cold shill on the spine.
On my newer laptop I run Linux Mint. This is an old version installed back in 2013 and could really use an update. So, since it was upgrade-weekend I've decided to simply go ahead and bring up this Linux machine to a more recent version of Mint and see what had changed over the past years. While doing this upgrade, a question popped up: "how about adding the design of Windows 10 with Linux underneath, would it work?"
And this is the result:
The intention wasn't creating a perfect look-a-like, but (in my opinion) to try mixing and getting a relatively fresh looking design based on Windows, at the same time without opening hand from our privacy.
Operating System
I've got Linux Mint 17.2 (codename Olivia, Cinnamon edition for x64) downloaded from http://www.linuxmint...tion.php?id=197
Instead of installing to disk, this time I've installed and now run the operating system from a MicroSD card connected to the laptop through the SD reader using an SD adapter. The MicroSD is a Samsung 64Gb with advertised speed of 40Mb/s for read operations. Cost was ~30 EUR.
Installing the operating system followed the same routine steps as one would expect. There is a GUI tool from within Linux mint to write the DVD ISO into a pendisk connected on your laptop. Then boot from the USB and install the operating system on the MicroSD, having the boot entry added automatically.
Window 10 theme and icons
Now that the new operating system is running, we can start the customization.
The windows style you find on the screenshot can be downloaded from: http://gnome-look.or...?content=171327
This theme comes with icons that look exactly like Windows 10, but that wasn't looking balanced nor was our intention to copy pixel per pixel the icons. Rather, the intention was re-using the design guidelines. While looking for options, found Sigma Metro which resembled what was needed: http://gnome-look.or...?content=167327
If you look around the web, you'll find instructions on how to change the window themes and icons. Otherwise if you get into difficulties, just write me a message and I'll help.
Firefox update and customization
Install Ubuntu Tweaks. From there, go to Apps tab and install the most recent edition of Firefox because the one included on the distro is a bit old.
Start changing Firefox by opening it up and going to "Addons" -> "Get Addons". Type on the search box "Simple White Compact", this was the theme that I found the simplest and will change the browser looks, from icons to tab position as you can see on the screenshot. Other extensions that you might enjoy adding while making these changes are "Adblock Plus" to remove ads, "Tab Scope" to show miniatures when browsing tabs and "Youtube ALL HTML5" to force youtube running without using the Adobe Flash Player.
Office alternative and customization
Then we arrive to Office. I only keep that oldish laptop because it has the Adobe Reader (which I use for signing PDF documents) and Microsoft Office for the cases when I need to modify documents and presentations without getting them to look broken. So, I was prepared this time to run both apps using Wine (it is possible) but decided to first do an update on the alternatives and try using only Linux native apps. Was not badly surprised.
LibreOffice 4.x is included by default on the distro. Whenever I'd use it, my slides formatted in MS Office would look broken and unusable. Decided to download and try out version 5.x and to my surprise notice that these issues are gone. Both the slides and word documents are now properly displayed with just about the same results that I'd expected from Microsoft office. I'm happy.
To install LibreOffice 5.x visit https://www.libreoff...reoffice-fresh/
For the Linux edition, read the text document with instructions. Quite straightforward, just one command line to launch the setup. So, I was happy with LibreOffice as a complete replacement to Microsoft (no need to acquire licenses nor run office through Wine). However, those icons inside LibreOffice still didn't look good, they looked old. On this aspect the most recent version of Microsoft Office simply "looks" better. I wanted LibreOffice to look that way too. So, got icons from here: http://gnome-look.or...?content=167958
It wasn't straightforward to find out where the icons could be placed because the instructions for version 4.x no longer apply. To help you, the zip file with icons need to be placed inside:
Then you can open up "writer" and from the "Tools" -> "Options" -> "View" choose "Office2013" and get the new icons being used. The startup logo of LibreOffice also seemed too flashy and could be changed. So I've changed with the one available at http://gnome-look.or...?content=166590
Just a matter of overwriting the intro.png image found at:
Alternative to Adobe Reader for signing PDF
Every now and then comes a PDF that requires being printed, signed by pen and then scanned to send again to the other person. I stopped doing this kind of thing some time ago by adding a digital signature that includes an image of my handwritten signature on the document. This way there's no need to print nor scan any papers. Adobe Reader did a good work on this task but getting it to run on Wine with the signature function was not straightforward.
Started looking for a native Linux alternative and found "Master PDF Editor". The code for this software is not public but I couldn't find other options and these were the only ones that provided a native Linux install supporting digital handwritten signatures: https://code-industr...asterpdfeditor/
If you're using this tool for business, you need to acquire a license. Just for home-use is free of cost. Head out to the download page and install the app. I was surprised because it looked very modern, simple and customizable. I'll buy a license for this tool, does exactly what I needed. Having LibreOffice and MasterPDF as complete alternative to MS Office and Acrobat, there is no more valid reason (on my case) to switch back the old laptop whenever editing documents. This can be done with same (or even better) quality from Linux now.
Command line
A relevant part of my day-to-day involves the use of command line. In Linux this is a relatively pleasant task because the terminal window can be adjusted, customized and never feels like a second class citizen inside the desktop. With these recent changes that were applied, was now possible to improve further the terminal window by showing the tool bar (see the screenshot).
Open a terminal, click on "View" -> "Show tool bar". Usually I'm against adding buttons, but that tool bar has a button for pasting clipboard text directly onto the console. I know that can be done by the keyboard using "Ctrl '+ Shift + V", but found it very practical to just click on a single button and paste the text.
Non-Windows tweaks
There are tweaks only possible on Linux. One of my favorite keeps being the "Woobly windows". Enable Compiz on the default desktop environment: http://askubuntu.com...-wobbly-windows
With Compiz there are many tweaks possible, I've kept them to a minimum but certainly is refreshing to use some animations rather than the plain window frames. If you never saw this in action, here is a video example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDDqsdrb4MU
Skype alternatives
Many of my friends and business contacts use Skype. It is not safe, it is not private, and I'd prefer to use a non-Microsoft service because the skype client gets installed on my desktop. Who knows what it can do on my machine when it is running on the background. One interesting alternative that I've found was launching the web-edition of skype that you find at https://web.skype.com/
From firefox, there is the option to "Pin" a given tab. So I've pinned skype as you can see on the screenshot, and now opens automatically whenever the browser gets open, in practice bringing it online when I want to be reachable. A safe desktop client and alternative would be better, this is nowhere a perfect solution but rather a compromise that avoids installing the skype client.
There are more small tweaks happening to adjust the desktop for my case, but what is described above are the big blocks to help you reach this kind of design in case you'd like to do something similar. If you have any questions or get stuck at any part of customization, just let me know.
Have fun!


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Journie Bell | Actress, Model, Dancer, Kidpreneuer
Sweet, sassy, and stylish, Journie Bell was born on December 21, 2009 in Houston, Texas. Exuding a bubbly personality since she was a toddler, Journie made her Acting and Modeling debut at the tender age of Five years old when she responded to a casting call for The Premiere Program in April 2015. Through this opportunity Journie got a chance to experience every child's dream: a trip to Walt Disney World! For six months Journie worked one-on-one with her acting coach Dru West. The final competition took place at the Walt Disney Swan Resort in Orlando, Florida where Journie performed four monologues and walked the fashion runway before top industry professionals, as well as thousands of other guests. She also had the pleasure of meeting Disney Channel stars Skai Jackson, Lauren Taylor, J.J. Totah, and Peyton Myer.
The Premiere Program was only the beginning for this blue-grey eyed mini diva! The following year Journie received a full page feature in the Summer 2016 edition of Ultra Style & Talent magazine. She also filmed with the TL Modeling agency along with walking the runway for the Posh Girls Boutique in their "Fashion & Fame: Where the Wild Things Are" Fashion show. Journie also performed "Annie" during the show for 2Xclusive Performing Arts.
As of 2017, Journie has booked work as a boutique model and has been casted for multiple photo shoots. She's filmed two music videos and made an appearance on the Aniyah Cotton Talk Show, along with being published in several magazines such as Dixie, Jules Model, and Hopscotch. Journie also had the opportunity to walk for two distinctive designers, YS Clothiers and Monbebe Lagos, in the KidFash Magazine Fashion show that was produced in an effort to spotlight anti-bullying awareness. She is also a dancer with 2Xclusive Performing Arts Studio.
Outside of modeling, acting, dancing, and ripping the runway, Journie has successfully launched her brand Jewel Box by Journie B. Journie wanted to let others know that they can accomplish their dreams if they "Just Believe" in themselves. Journie is a well-rounded child who has developed interests in swimming and gymnastics. She is also learning how to play the electric guitar! Journie is bilingual and her favorite school subjects are math, science, and art. Even with her extreme talent and poise, Journie hasn't lost sight of what matters most. She appreciates the love and support she receives from her mother, father and grandmother. Journie credits her father as her personal hero; for he has shown her that through hard work and dedication she can accomplish her dreams!
Please visit the following link to read the article from Houston Style Magazine.
Journie Bell


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No band today - Pete had speakers set up & was playing recorded music. Several musicians stopped by including "Mighty Michael" but left. Then Billy Davis & Harmonica Shah stopped by & eventually set up and played for an hour or so.
6E8A0022John'sCarpetHousePete'sPlaceBluesjamJohn's Carpet House Pete's Place Blues jamDetroit MI5142017


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When you have food coloring in standard colors but want it in inky black, don't hesitate to mix your own. While the black may not be a true midnight black, it will be dark enough to meet most of your decorative needs. In fact, once you try it, you might swear off combing through specialty bake shops to find premade black food coloring. Add 10 drops of red food coloring to a clean, non-porous bowl. Add 10 drops of blue food coloring to the bowl. Add 10 drops of yellow food coloring. Stir the three colors together to create black food coloring. Test your color by mixing some of the black coloring into a small amount of the food you wish to tint. Add an additional drop of each color -- one at a time -- to the original bowl of food coloring to adjust as needed. If you don't need to make adjustments to the color but need to make more black food coloring, make sure to add all three colors in equal measure. If you do not use all of the food coloring, store what's left in a small, non-porous container with a tight-fitting lid.
- To make black frosting using chocolate frosting, simply mix in blue food coloring. Add one drop at a time and stir, then repeat until you reach a rich black color.


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Pet First Aid Basics: The First Aid Kit
Accidents and injuries may occur at any moment for pets, just like humans. Having a first aid kit can be vital to your pet's survival in the case of an injury or accident and may even be lifesaving. Early and prompt first aid may also lessen the consequences of an injury and possibly help shorten the recovery period. As with any emergency, being prepared is one of the most important things you can do to help reduce the complications that could arise because of a delay in treatment.
Many of the same things we would find in a human first aid kit can also be found in a well stocked pet first aid kit. Although you will need to include special items for exotic animals or breeds that have special needs, the basic items will still work for most domestic pets, whether canine or feline. Here are some important items to include and their uses:
- Emergency phone numbers – this should include your veterinarian's business hours, as well as his emergency phone number for nights, holidays and weekends, should an emergency arise. Some veterinarians may also provide a personal number to clients; keep that number in the first aid kit if you have it. You should also include the number of your local ASPCA poison control center, which will be able to provide vital information 24-hours a day on emergency conditions and what you will need to do before you arrive at an clinic or can get the animal professional help.
- Handbook – which can be purchased at local ASPCA centers or stores, from your veterinarian or local bookstore. You may also find valuable information at your local library which you can take home and read, to familiarize and educate yourself what to do in the case of a pet emergency and how to deal with them calmly and effectively.
- Photocopy of your pet's medical history – include any medications the pet is currently receiving, conditions which may be chronic and shots and checkup record, in case you have to take your pet to a facility that does not have this information (for instance, if you are on vacation away from home).
- Bottled water – which may be necessary to treat a dehydrated animal, flush a wound or eye, and also cleanse your hands before you handle the injured area.
- Blanket – to help keep an animal warm and calm if he goes into shock after a trauma. A blanket will also help to swaddle and immobilize a frightened animal, or secure a limb which has become broken or damaged. The familiar scent of the blanket from home will also help to reassure the animal in unfamiliar surroundings, when he is frightened. For exotic pets such as a snake, or other reptile, a pillowcase can be utilized the same way and also be useful for transporting the animal safely.
- Disposable garbage bag – for cleaning up the area where your pet is injured. If you are unable to move the animal, it will be important to remove nearby debris that may cause further harm or injury.
- Scissors – for cutting bandages, clean cloth strips or removing matted fur in order to administer medical treatment. Scissors will also come in handy for cutting lose a smaller animal such as a cat or other tiny breed that may have become tangled in foliage, rope or some other material. Pet clippers or a sharp, clean toenail clipper may be handy for an injured claw.
- Tweezers or tic removal tool – particularly important if you live in a wooded area, or camp often with a pet who may be ill due to a tic bite, or other poisonous insect that requires you remove it or its stinger from your pet's skin.
- Gauze – sterile packages, or a roll which can be used both for bandaging a wound as well as securing other bandages over a wound. Gauze is a great aid in stopping bleeding and also padding an injured area until proper coverage and bandaging can be applied.
- Antiseptic wipes and ointment – which can be utilized on skin and topical wounds will be sufficient until professional medical treatment can be administered. Make sure you do not use this for eyes, and that it is non-alcohol so as not to sting and cause further discomfort to your hurting pet. You will want to make sure your pet stays calm, so your first aid should not cause more pain.
- Plastic gloves – to help ensure you do not further infect an open wound, as well as for your own protection.
- Muzzle or leash – may be needed to secure the animal from further injuring himself, or those administering first aid to him. You may know your pet, but be prepared for him to exhibit aggressive, defensive and unusual behavior when he is in pain or frightened. Always err on the side of caution to make sure both you and your pet are safe and that he can be treated quickly and safely without worry from additional injuries to both the handler and your pet as he reacts while traumatized.
- Digital pet thermometer – to help you monitor your pet's vital signs until professional medical treatment can be administered.
- Syringe or eye dropper – useful for flushing wounds, and also giving water to a weak pet. Can also be used for cleaning out ears or eyes with an approved solution. Your veterinarian will be able to provide this for you.
- Special medications – if your pet has a chronic condition, it will be helpful to have medications that treat his condition handy, in case you are not able to get home and retrieve those items if needed. Make sure you store the first aid kit properly so that medications do not become damaged or spoiled.
- Special treatments – including the proper items to induce vomiting, handle diarrhea, counteract ingested poison or treat allergic reactions to insect bites will be important in preventing further complications from these conditions.
- Hot and cold packs – for treating swollen limbs or other injuries and conditions
- Compact, sturdy container with a handle – which will keep your first aid kit contents clean, dry and easy to retrieve quickly and carry to your injured pet. Plastic or canvas is a good choice. Choose a container that will not become too hot in high temperatures, and should be sufficient for keeping contents dry and protected.
Check your first aid kit regularly to make sure it is complete. Sometimes small incidents and injuries occur which will require use of some of the contents. Checking regularly will ensure that you have replaced used items and be completely prepared for an emergency. Check expiration dates on medications to ensure they can be used if needed.
Take a pet first aid class – having experience in a training class will help you in an emergency, as well as providing confidence you will need during a stressful situation. A calm owner will help the injured pet to remain calm, as well as reassure him while he is scared and in pain.
Do you have a pet first aid kit prepared? What do you keep inside? Tell us in the comments!


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First Daughters
Chelsea Clinton to Report for NBC News
Jenna Bush has some competition in the first-daughter-turned-reporter category, as NBC News has hired Chelsea Clinton as a reporter. Clinton will report stories for the network's "Making a Difference" segment, which runs on NBC Nightly News. The segments highlight people volunteering to improve their communities. Clinton will show up in the NBC newsroom on Monday.


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Hey guys!
Wow, fancy me actually posting when I promise to...
This week I have got anything really beauty related as I found that when I was absent from m blog I was tagged. But, I have a problem I can not find who tagged me or where I tagged, BUT I have the questions. If YOU are the one that tagged me, please let me know as I am extremely sorry!!!!
So, let us get started?
1. What inspired you to start your blog?
I was inspired by various YouTubers/Vloggers like Tanya Burr, Vivianna Does Makeup, Spinkle of Glitter and Zoella.
2. What is your ultimate dream holiday, and why?
I would love to go to so many places but I don't think I could ever afford it. If I had the opportunity I would definitely do the whole 'backpack around Europe' thing ad I would love to visit Greece!
3. What's your reaction to receiving this award?
Well, I didn't even know that this was an award until I read the question and now I am super intrigued to find out where I was tagged!!! Thank-you immensely to the person who chose me for the award, you are truly an mazing person and I am so honoured and thankful!
4. Favourite beaut guru?
Oh wow! I actually can not decide! If I had to choose my top THREE only relating to beauty things it would have to be Tanya Burr, Zoella and I LOVE Pixiwoo!
5. What are your interests other than beauty?
I don't really have any other interests as passionate as makeup but I do love reading, watching movies, tumblr, youtube (not jus beauty, I actually really love the funny youtubers) and I must say I am passionate in getting into University!
6. What would you like to see your blog do in the future?
In a dream world I would love my blog to be a place where everyone is nice to each others and no one is judgemental! Like a little community! If I ever had the time and confidence (and expertise) I would definitely try Youtube!
7. What do you do as a career or would like to in the future?
Well I am starting grade 12 (last year of school) in less than a month and am constantly pressurised to choose a career. All though I don't really see how 16 or 17 year olds could ever know exactly what they want to do, when and how. Although I have a feeling I would try to get into University to do a Primary teaching course. (K-6. 5years - 12) Oh, and I would love to do a few make-up and beauty course along the way!
8. What I our best achievement?
To be completely honest, I don't really have something that significant at my age, being only 16 the only things that I have really achieved is getting my L's and achieving/completing year 10 successfully. If I was asked this exact question in a year and a few months I would have some pretty amazing things o write.
9. Who inspires you most?
Nobody in particular, I am the type of person that feels gross and lazy if I sit for too long and I have to do something constructive. Whenever I see people who manage to look flawless, have a successful career an raise kids etc, those are the people that inspire me most. If I had to choose a youtuber It would by Louise from Sprinkle of Gliiter or the Nic and Sam from Pixiwoo!
10. Favourite beauty product?
My all time favourite beauty product is always a mascara as it opens the eyes.
If having to choose specifically, the one product I will probably use for a very, VERY long time in the Rimmel STAY MATTE powder.
11. What is something you wish you could own, and why?
Wow, this is a very tricky questions. So instead of going all deep and mushy I'll stay with materialistic things.
Makeup wise: I have ALWAYS wanted a bobbi brown creamy concealer!
Skincare wise: Anything from Origins!
Hair wise: I would adore to own the highest tech hair straightener.
Clothing wise: ANYTHING PRETTY!!!!
I am going to tag:
I am going to tag:


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19th October, 2018
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Fair pay for fair work? "Dividends" in owner-managed companies.
22nd May, 2019
There have been a number of Court decisions in recent years grappling with the application of established legal... Read More »
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Grant funding from DoD begins in study of species responses to climate change. June 2015
Dov Sax begins 2-year term as President-Elect of the International Biogeography Society. January 2015
The New York Times features work from the Sax Lab. October 2014, Link
John Zinda (postdoc in the Sax Lab) receives 3 years of independent funding from NSF! spring 2014
Regan Early (former postdoc in the Sax Lab) begins her faculty position at the University of Exeter! January 2014
The Research Highlights section of Nature features work from the Sax Lab. October 2011, Link
Matt Heard completed his PhD, September 2011. Congrats Matt! See more about his work at this site: Link
News coverage on BBC website of climate paths paper by Regan early and Dov Sax.
October, 2011
Nature 'Journal Club' posting by Dov Sax on impacts of speed of climate change for conservation management.
August, 2010
News coverage in Nature on managed relocation of commercial trees in British Columbia.
June, 2009
National Science Foundation: Racing the Clock: Rapid Climate Change Forces Scientists to Evaluate Extreme Conservation Strategies.
May 25, 2009
Yale Enviroment 360: As Climate Warms, Species May Need to Migrate or Perish by Carl Zimmer.
April 20, 2009
Stanford University Report: Wood Institute Names 19 Leopold Leadership Fellows
Boston Globe: Driving Mr. Lynx by Chris Berdik.
October 12, 2008
Friendly Invaders – New York Times By Carl Zimmer
September 8, 2008
Deporting Plants and Animals to Protect Them from Climate Change – Scientific American by David Biello
July 17, 2008
Conservation Magazine: Aliens Among Us. A round table with James H. Brown and Dov F. Sax, Daniel Simberloff, and Mark Sagoff . April-June 2007 (Vol. 8, No. 2)
Eco-Defense against Invasions by Virginia Gewin in PLOS Biology


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Fall Photos
- By iannagata
- 29 November, 2017
- 10 Comments
It's fall, and Chi and I just got back from a quick trip to Hakone, by Mt. Fuji.
Since one of the purposes of this blog is to give our supporters a glimpse of our life in Japan, I thought I'd share a few fall photos. After all, it's impossible to understand Japan apart from the four seasons.
This trip was also the first time I got to use a new camera and lenses I received as a gift from a very generous friend and supporter. Hoping to bless others through this blessing I've received.
Also, many thanks to Chi for these photos, as she helped me swap lenses, find the best angles, take care of the tripod…and simultaneously post photos of me taking photos on her Instagram.
10 Comments
wondrous. thanks for sharing and thanks to that supporter, who will remain anonymous, (TY). especially enjoyed the photo right above you two.
Glad to see you still have a great eye for composition! That ship looks interesting.
Love the pictures! Wish I were there to see it!
Wonderful pics of the season.
Awesome picture! Would love to see it in person.
Beautiful photos and perspective, blessed!
Ahhhhh, natsukashi desu! Use this generous gift well. You have great eye.
Wow! These are amazing photos!! Thanks for sharing the kouyou! So beautiful. And hope you had a nice time celebrating your birthday!
Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter. – Ansel Adams
Nice pics – thanks for sharing and being ready to click the shutter…
Awesome pictures, great photography! Brings back memories of our yearly-fall trips to Japan . .


text: Use mouse scroll wheel over image or pinch-to-zoom on touch devices. You can also click and drag around on image. Park it 1 1 Follow Mister Freedom Jacket Parked to Gear Up by Goodhal Garage Keywords Gear Jacket Mister Freedom Sign up to add your own keywords More from this Garage: More from this Profile: Garage Aprilia Motorcycles Garage BMW Motorcycles Garage BSA Motorcycles


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Maria Catrillon
Tell us briefly about those you love.
I'm really close with my parents, and I have two sisters also. I'm also still really close to my best friends from high school even after going out of state for college. My big thing is to stay in touch. Being in the Peace Corps it can be challenging, but I still manage and find time to reach out to them. It's great too because both my family and friends have always been very supportive of me joining the Peace Corps.
What does your community celebrate?
There are a few large celebrations. One is a celebration of a birth of a child, which is a huge event! It's called Denabo, or the naming ceremony. It happens one week after birth. During the ceremony, men congregate and pray. People also bring the mother gifts, such as soap, fabric, and food. Another celebration is called Kilé, which is a work party. It's celebrated on the rice farms. Women in the community cook lunch and bring it to the fields where all the men gather to eat. Korité is the celebration of the end of Ramadan (30 days of fasting). Many people wear new outfits and there is a ton of food! Young girls dress up in their new clothes and go around asking for money, which I believe is to showcase their outfits.
What are your hopes?
My hope is to have some sort of impact in the community that I live in. I hope to identify the most serious issues and make valuable efforts to address them.


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Welcome to the Alvarado High School band alumni registration page. If you were once a member of the Alvarado High School band, we would greatly like to hear from you! Please provide us with the following information so that we can add you to our alumni page. First and last names are required, but the other fields are completely optional.
All information you provide below will become available to all visitors to the AHS Golden Warrior Band Web site. Once you have submitted your information, it will appear on the alumni page in two to three working days.
If you are currently on our alumni page and you would like to update your information, please resubmit your information. All fields left blank will remain unchanged.
If you are currently on our alumni page and would like to have your information removed, simply resubmit your first and last names only. We will remove your entry as soon as possible.


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Yahoo email account recovery
Бюджет $10-30 USD
I need to recover my Yahoo email account, my phone number is not valid anymore and when I tried to log in with my new device it will ask to verify it unfortunately I have no access to the number anymore.
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I have very good knowledge on E-mail Issue and i have worked with HCL IBM on the same issues. I can delivery the work as faster you need.
By going to the Yahoo Mail website on a computer, you can select the Trouble Signing In button below the sign in boxes and enter your yahoo email that you are having trouble accessing. If you do in fact have this numbe Больше
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Give me one chance to recover the email I hope everything will be all right


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1953 / 2003 Commemorative Edition
Advanced Automotive Technologies is proud to announce the limited production of the 1953/2003 Commemorative Edition. Our 1953/2003 Commemorative Edition combines the retro styling of the original 1953 Corvette with the modern power and comforts of todays Corvette.
By blending the classic styling of the 1950's with performance, comfort, and technology of the 21st century, the 1953-2003 Commemorative Edition offers the best of both eras.
Advanced Automotive Technologies built the original show car and was a major contributor to the design. It is not an officially endorsed vehicle by General Motors.
The vehicle is based on a customer provided Chevrolet Corvette C5 convertible but could also be converted using a Corvette Hardtop (not hatchback). All new body panels are installed using the same attachment locations as production panels. A small recess cut into the rear trunk inner fiberglass to clearance the new deck lid contours is the only modification to production vehicle. There are no structural modifications. All safety related items remain intact.
Production of the 1953-2003 Commemorative Edition has begun, and to date we have delivered 155 vehicles.
More information and pictures are available at
This is a web site that Chaz Cone, owner of CEC #11 has begun and shows where each vehicle has been shipped and many stories and pictures from each owner.
1953 CE Wagon
Custom Corvettes
Project Cars
Classic C5 Engine Covers
Aftermarket Upgrades
Magazine Articles
Automotive Links
About AAT


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In 2008, the view calculated that the four major international record companies had a collective global market share of 77.3%. Downsizing that a little, say to 75%, on the basis that as a ratio the majors release fewer titles than the independents and you might expect when you turn to the review pages of the national press that around three quarter of the reviews would be of albums on the majors' labels and a quarter on independent labels. You'd be very mistaken.
This weekend I tracked the reviews of non-classical albums in the Saturday edition of the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Times and the Observer's Music Monthly magazine. Here are the figures:
|Daily Telegraph
|Sunday Times
|Observer MM
This means that of the 45 albums reviewed, in total only 47% were released by the majors, a figure that falls to 37% if one omits the 18 albums given two sentence reviews by the Observer's Music Monthly magazine.
Moreover, if you leave out "event" releases – the Robbie Williams' album, a four CD Frank
Sinatra set, or the Norah Jones and Michael Jackson sets – the percentage falls even further.
The discrepancy between albums released and reviewed is partially understandable and yet at the same time puzzling. If you're a young would-be gunslinger of a rock critic it's highly unlikely you'll be much interested in Barbra Streisand or Snow Patrol now – earlier they were cutting edge, or could be argued to be so, and so a reviewer could make his mark, pushing the band forward or stamping firmly on its hopes.
Always better to write about "the next big thing", whether it is or not, than the fourth album by Starsailor. Similarly, outside the dedicated music press, national newspapers, seeking to develop and grow younger audiences, want "the new", want to be the place where "the new" is regularly to be found. But about the "once new" — a broad range, for example, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Steve Earle, Elvis Costello, Eels, Metallica, Iron Maiden, Lionel Ritchie, Diana Krall ….
Of course some of them (Carpenter and Earle, for example) have been dropped by the majors. Why? Well one reason is that they don't attract the attention of reviewers, so their
sales slip (and their contracts follow). Some, like Richard Thompson and Earle are happy in independent land. They like their freedom. But not everyone is that way constructed.
So two weeks ago Lyle Lovett, an artist who has had considerable critical success, released Natural Forces, his 13th album – 11 studio outings, one live album and two compilations, all for various UMG labels — to a resounding silence in the UK's mainstream press.
Or think about re-issues. We all praise Ace and its brother re-issue labels, even those who wait for the latest Bear Family mega compilation and then slice it up into a series of out of copyright cheapies.
The majors are best known for mainstream re-issues. Some of these have been enormously successful, such UMG's Dreamboats and Petticoats series in the UK, which has virtually created a new market for re-issues.
Releases, like these are not reviewed rather they are written about in the press in the manner of event releases by the likes of Robbie Williams in articles about silver surfers and shopping patterns in supermarkets.
But, what of the likes of Davy Graham? A hugely important guitarist, operating on the fringes of jazz and folk in the UK in the 1960s, Decca's two CD anthology has received little publicity. Over the years, like UMG, EMI, SME and WMG have put out similar groundbreaking e-issues to a mixed reception in terms of publicity.
In general, the exceptions noted above – and it's early days yet for Davy Graham — the re-issues of the majors get (almost) reasonable press coverage, but how many Lyle Lovetts are there on the majors' rosters and how many will there be next year?
The cost-cutting practices of the majors will inevitably mean less. But each act axed means sales of between 40,000 and 50,000 albums lost. Those lost sales add up. They might also add up for the national press, in terms of (new) readers who don't read the dedicated music press but have a wider interest in music than Greatest Hits and Dreamboats .
How to reach them? Print a wider range of album reviews.


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Do you know somebody who could be
the 'Donegal Person of the Year'?
Nominations are being sought for the prestigious "Donegal Person of the Year" accolade that has been awarded in the past to may well known names such as Brian Friel, Daniel and Margo O'Donnell and both Brian and Sean McEniff to name but a few.
This year was the first occasion that there was a dual person of the year, Anne Marie Ward and the late Hugh Green.
Unfortunately, Hugh Green passed away in July but he had said that the award of Donegal Person of the Year was the most special award he had received in his lifetime.
The Donegal Association Dublin held their Annual General Meeting on Wednesday 17th October in the Regency Hotel, Drumcondra.
Despite the poor weather, there was a good attendance on the night. Sorcha Ní Dhomhnaill, Chairperson, welcomed everyone to the meeting and reviewed the Association highlights of 2012.
The current President, Tony Dunlevy's term of office came to an end, so it was time to say goodbye and many many thanks to Tony for all his hard work and commitment during his four year term.
Tony has worked tirelessly in his role as President for the Association.
Martin Mc Gettigan was inaugurated as the new President and was presented with his chain of office at the AGM.
Martin made an enthusiastic and inspiring speech and he displayed great ambition and pride in taking up this position. We wish Martin well in his new role.
The Donegal Association AGM also passed a motion to appoint two new positions to the Executive Committee, The Honorary IT Coordinator and the Honorary Assistant IT Coordinator.
These positions will allow the association to embrace new technology such as social media, website improvements & other technical development areas.
The Donegal Association will hold their Annual Mass in the Regency Hotel, Drumcondra, on Sunday 18th November at 6.30pm.
The Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Mr. Richard Bruton TD will give a lecture after this mass. All are welcome to attend.
The closing date for receipt of nominations for the "Donegal Person of the Year" is 30th November so there are only six weeks left to get your nominations into the association.
The nomination process is quite simple.
Anyone or any group may nominate someone – the main criteria being that the person nominated must be from Donegal or should have made a significant contribution to the promotion of the county.
Nomination forms may be:
1. Downloaded from the Association's website www.donegalassociation.ie
2. By post from: The Secretary, Donegal Association, c/o Teachers Club, 36 Parnell Square, Dublin 1.
3. Or ring: The Secretary at 086- 8077965
Public Relations Officer at 087-2439317
Nominations should set out the reasons for the nomination and include supporting documentation and endorsements from individuals and groups.
So, don't forget that the time is short - the Association now look forward to receiving your nominations!


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Lane, Andy; Caird, Sally and Weller, Martin
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Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) have recently become a much discussed development within higher education. Much of this debate focuses on the philosophical and operational similarities and differences between the types of MOOCs that have emerged to date, the learner completion rates and how they can be sustained. In contrast there has been much less discussion about how such courses do, or do not, fit in with existing higher education policy and practice in terms of the social, economic and environmental benefits. This paper begins to address this issue by comparing and contrasting current MOOCs with one large population ICT-enhanced, mostly online Open University UK course presented a decade earlier and how they have both served, or might serve, broader social, economic or environmental objectives. The paper concludes that while MOOCs are forcing a re-conceptualisation of higher education study, much can also be learned from previous and existing large population mainly online courses from open universities.
|Item Type:
|Journal Item
|Copyright Holders:
|2014 The Authors
|Project Funding Details:
|Extra Information:
|Awarded Green Gown Award (Research and Development), Finalist Certificate 2012. The SusTEACH project.
|MOOCs; policy and practice; environmental impact
|Academic Unit/School:
|Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) > Engineering and Innovation
Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM)
Learning and Teaching Innovation (LTI) > Institute of Educational Technology (IET)
Learning and Teaching Innovation (LTI)
|Research Group:
|Innovation, Knowledge & Development research centre (IKD)
Design and Innovation
Centre for Research in Education and Educational Technology (CREET)
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|Depositing User:
|Andrew Lane
|Date Deposited:
|07 May 2014 10:36
|Last Modified:
|09 Dec 2018 08:19
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Your full service digital business partner
Consolidated Productions Pty Ltd enable your business to tackle the most difficult challenges with ease. Our innovating and inspiring work produces world-class services and products built to achieve maximum results for your business today.
Not just an LMS
Taking safety and risk management very seriously, we developed software to make it easy for your business to manage all your compliance and governance requirements with complete solutions that make a difference.
Valued results with simplicity
We manage Intellectual Property rights for professionals using creative and strategic actions designed for maximum penetration and awareness. Consolidated Productions has a proudly rich history of supporting and working alongside those that help support our community.
Safety First, it starts at the very beginning
Our association over many years with World Wide Swim School has allowed us to truly appreciate the value of an inspired partnership philosophy that encourages the absolute best outcomes for all parties. We take pride and comfort from the fact Consolidated Productions has helped establish, promote and grow WWSS to be the front-runner in online education for parents and swimming teachers to help develop skills in our young people to enable them a grounding for the future with water safety.
Make great even GREATER
Our truly unique team of dedicated professionals are always committed to the cause with unrelenting determination and can creatively shape average ideas into truly remarkable outcomes. From a variety of backgrounds, the team boasts experience in workplace governance, information technology, software development, creative production, technical services, marketing and multiple levels of senior management in a range of industries.


text: Instrumentation: 1d1. 1d1. 2d Eflat & bass cl. 1 - 2. 1. 0. 0 - 2 (3) perc. 1 hrp - str. This arrangement of Mahler's most intimate orchestral work can be performed by a chamber orchestra of approximately 26 to 34 players. The arrangement remains very faithful to Mahler's original and is ideal for professional chamber orchestras, academic conducting programs, student conductor concerts, or whenever the full orchestral forces required for the original are not present. Reviews: "Illuminating.....with solos leaping out in unusually bold detail." Steve Smith, New York Times http://thechronicleherald.ca/artslife/910697-sns-brings-condensed-intensity-to-mahler-fourth Click link below to purchase full score online. http://ondinepress.musicaneo.com/sheetmusic/sm-188749_mahler_arr_lee_symphony_no_4_in_g_major_full_score.html Performance material available for hire. Please email email@example.com for all rental inquiries.


text:
More evidence, aside from a slip-up by a RIM employee during a developers webcast, shows our exclusive on the release of BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 to be correct again. According to the slide, PlayBook OS 2.0 will release at 4:01am on February 21st for everyone in an unknown timezone. The release will coincide with the launch of BlackBerry Bridge 2.0, which will bring the remote control functionality and OpenOn we saw demoed at CES 2012.
BlackBerry Mobile Fusion will also be released on the same day, giving IT professionals the ability to manage all BlackBerry devices from a single interface — with Android and iOS controls coming in March.
via Engadget


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The PioSphere Weekly Forecast
March 25, 2013 Leave a comment
The Weekly Forecast
PioSphere Reporter Josh Landry
Pioneer Performance: This week's award is a bit unorthodox but nonetheless impressive; Transylvania had four student athletes named to the HCAC All-Academic Team for the Winter 2012 semester, which requires a 3.5 GPA or above. The four chosen were Kayla Dobson (Basketball), Elizabeth Hardt (Track and Field), Lydia Lissanu (Women's Swimming), and Ben Lyvers (Track and Field). Congratulations go to the Pioneers who perform both on and off the field.
Matchup of the Week: This Tuesday at 4 p.m. the men's tennis tream travels to Centre College, while the women's team will host the Colonels at Transy in the only matchup against Centre for both teams this season. After a win over Franklin College on Saturday, the 3-4 men's team will have a chance to bring themselves up to .500 against their rivals, while the women's team can pull back above .500 after a rough spring break road trip.
Player to Watch: Early into their inaugural season, the women's lacrosse team will travel to Danville on Wednesday for their first rivalry game against the Centre Colonels. Five games into the season, Freshman Aubrey Bausum is leading the Pioneers offensively, averaging seven goals per game. Look for this trend to continue on Wednesday at 6 p.m. if the Pioneers are to keep from falling to an even 3-3 on the season.


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Italian Seasoned Bread
1 cup + 3 tbl. water (70-80 degrees)
4 1/2 teaspoons butter
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 envelope zesty italian salad dressing mix
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon sugar
3 cups bread flour
4 1/2 teaspoons nonfat dry milk powder
2 1/4 teaspoons active dry yeast
In bread machine pan, place all ingredients in order suggested by manufacturer.
Select basic bread setting. Choose crust color and loaf size if available. Bake
according to bread machine directions (check dough after 5 minutes of mixing;
add 1 to 2 tablespoons of water or flour if needed).
Yield: 1 loaf (1-1/2 pounds)
Back to ABM Bread
Machine Index
Cooking Home Razzle
Dazzle Recipes
Copyright ©2002 - 2012
That's My Home


text:
Come see our great selection of OEM and aftermarket parts, accessories, apparel and much more. We are always willing to help you find what you need and if it's not on our floor, ask if we can get it for you. Stop in or call TODAY!
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text:
Nina Dobrev And Her Boobs Did The Ice Bucket Challenge While Wearing A Bikini
Is your dream in life is to have a single day where you could just sit around and watch video on video of hot girls getting ice water dumped on them? Take a vacation day from work (or just don't show up for all I care), because your dream has finally come true. Special days like this won't come around often, so my professional advice is to take advantage of it while you can.
[Image via Shutterstock]
[Video via Instagram]


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Product review
Get the Tecno R6 with Free Oraimo Car charger and cable.
Performance wise, with the Tecno R6, you get value for money. The handset has an octa core processor. It is clocked at 1.1GHz to ensure that you have good performance from the device. Then there is the GPU, it ensures that graphic intensive applications and games perform well.
4G Network
Android 7.0
5 '' Touch Screen
Camera: 5 / 2MP flash
Audio Player / Video Player
SMS / MMS / e-mail
Bluetooth / WIFI
Internal memory: 8GB RAM: 1GB
Web browser / GPS
Visualization docs (Word, Excel, Ppt ...)
12h in communication
145 * 72 * 9.6 mm;


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Today and Tomorrow Only!
Download "97 Miles South – Key West to Cuba ebook for free!
"The plot takes the reader on a spellbinding ride that exposes the ugly political underside of modern Cuba. Adventure, Romance, Intrigue-It's all here." – Bonnie Rice
Get your free copy now!
2 thoughts on "Summit Celebration….Free Download"
Got another one I could read. Trying to tune up before the trip. Thanks for any help.


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Redwood City, Calif. – February 28, 2017 – C3.ai today announced Version 7 of its enterprise software platform for big data, predictive analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and Internet of Things (IoT) applications, with new tools and enhancements that significantly increase the productivity of application developers, data scientists, and business analysts by enabling them to all work on the same framework. This productivity improvement reduces companies' IT expenditures and speeds time to market of predictive analytics software applications that perform AI and machine learning at scale to recommend actionable business insights and facilitate digital transformation.
According to a Forrester Research report written by Vice President and Principal Analyst Mike Gualtieri, "Enterprise interest in AI is surging… We expect enterprise interest in, and use of, AI to increase as software vendors roll out AI platforms and build AI capabilities into applications. Enterprises that plan to invest in AI expect to improve customer experiences, improve products and services, and disrupt their industry with new business models."
"C3.ai successfully addresses a number of challenges that have plagued enterprises in the past with respect to traditional approaches to Machine Learning," said Holger Mueller, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research. "With C3.ai, data remains in place, gets automatically updated and refreshed, and thus Machine Learning capabilities are no longer the domain of a small clique of advanced users. Business users are empowered to create their own Machine Learning-powered analytical applications and can plug them in to transactional applications as needed."
Version 7 of the C3 Platform is rolling out to enterprise customers worldwide in Q1 2017 with advanced capabilities spanning five elements of the C3 Platform – data science tools, artificial intelligence algorithms, application development tools, edge analytics, and platform administration – that increase user productivity and accelerate the delivery of AI and IoT applications.
1. Operationalized Data Science
- C3.ai now offers C3 Ex Machina, a visual analytics and machine learning development tool that simplifies and speeds big data exploration and predictive analytics modeling. Powerful yet intuitive, C3 Ex Machina empowers data scientists and business analysts to extract actionable business insights quickly – and without writing any code.
- Native support for Python and R, allowing data scientists to leverage their programming language of choice and push their code back to production in the C3 Platform without re-writing any code.
2. Enterprise AI / Machine Learning
- C3.ai is expanding on the AI and machine learning capabilities currently integrated in its platform with additional deep learning technologies and more advanced analyses that increase the precision and accuracy of predictions. C3.ai also added: image processing for object and facial recognition at the edge; natural language processing (NLP) for analyzing text-based data such as hand-written notes and work logs; expanded support for libraries of machine learning algorithms; and a machine learning pipeline that makes it faster and easier to develop and deploy machine learning models and publish them back to the platform.
3. High-Productivity Application Development
- The C3 Type System, a high-level abstraction layer that enables disparate users to interact with the same metadata-driven architecture for defining and developing applications, now offers native HDFS integration to connect to customers' data lakes as well as several enhancements that improve performance and optimize storage.
- A new version of C3.ai's metadata-driven, web-based development toolset, C3.ai Tools, improves the user's ability to define integration processes, create and extend data models and analytics, build machine learning classifiers, and rapidly develop user interfaces.
- A new Eclipse plug-in gives developers additional tools to develop, deploy, and debug applications on the C3 Platform.
- In addition to Cassandra, C3.ai now provides full support for AWS DynamoDB, a fast and flexible NoSQL database service for applications that need consistent, single-digit millisecond latency at any scale.
- Integrated profiling and debugging tools enable developers to quickly resolve issues and identify performance bottlenecks.
- Improved roles and responsibility management simplifies administration and improves security.
4. Edge Integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Tighter integration with AWS IoT and Lambda lets connected devices easily and securely interact with the C3 Platform.
- Support for the C3 Type System at the edge enables customers to process and execute analytics on edge devices.
5. Intelligent Enterprise PaaS
- C3.ai has streamlined and improved platform administration tools, including the ability to manage environment configurations, manage auto-scaling configurations, and enable self-healing of common issues.
"Enterprises have made significant investments in data lakes, data scientists, and application developers on the road to digital transformation. However, in many cases, developers and data scientists operate in isolation, which can delay and even derail the delivery of AI and IoT applications that work. Version 7 of the C3 Platform bridges that gap by enabling disparate teams to operate on the same platform and object model. This boosts productivity tremendously, reducing our customers' IT costs while speeding the realization of predictive analytics results."
– Ed Abbo, President and CTO, C3.ai
"As a second-generation, born-in-the-cloud offering, C3.ai boasts native, integrated AI and Machine Learning capabilities. C3.ai is a unique platform in that it starts with a data-first approach and combines it with a model-based development approach. Enabling both skilled professional and business users to garner insights and use Machine Learning to go beyond traditional Business Intelligence capabilities makes the platform even more appealing. Additionally, C3.ai ships purpose-built applications on top of the platform, but also enables enterprises to build their own applications on the platform. All these capabilities of the C3 Platform have been created with the idea of empowering a few users to do a lot of work, while at the same time broadening the potential user base by requiring more business acumen than technical knowledge from platform users."
– Holger Mueller, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
About C3.ai
C3.ai provides a next-gen enterprise platform (PaaS) for the rapid design, development, and deployment of even the largest-scale big data, AI, and IoT applications. By leveraging telemetry, elastic cloud computing, analytics, and machine learning, C3.ai brings the power of predictive insights to any business value chain. C3.ai also provides a family of turn-key SaaS IoT applications including predictive maintenance, fraud detection, sensor network health, supply chain optimization, investment planning, and customer engagement.
C3.ai Contact:
Kim Dion
Corporate Public Relations
(650) 503-2200


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Last year as spring break approached, my husband and I found ourselves with no plans a few weeks out. It was too late to try and piece together a beach trip or Disney vacay. Neither of us had ever traveled to Big Bend, and it was something we had talked about doing for a while. So we decided to take a last-minute road trip out west to see our great state's only National Park and check out the neighboring towns of Marathon and Marfa. In hindsight, our kids were too young to enjoy the park (WAY too young!), but it ended up being the adventure of a lifetime! We are already planning a return trip when the kids are older.
Prior to this trip, I had never been that far west in Texas. Other than a single trip to Abilene and a one night's stay in Lubbock, my Texas life had mostly been confined to East, Central, and Gulf Coast Texas, with several jaunts in the Hill Country. West Texas is a whole other world! It is what the Yanks think of when they envision the last frontier of Texas. It is dry, it is dusty, and it is VAST. Cowboy boots are more a necessity than a fashion statement. It's the stuff Hollywood Western dreams are made of.
Since our trip was last minute, and I'm not too big on camping, we opted to stay outside of the park when visiting Big Bend. Marathon is only a 45-minute drive from the north entrance of the park. This sleepy town doesn't have too much to offer, but as the gateway to Big Bend, it boasts one of the loveliest hotels in the state. Gage Hotel is a beautiful oasis in the center of this brown and desolate expanse. With its lush and colorful landscaping, the Gage makes you feel as though you have stepped into a Technicolor dream. Home to the famous White Buffalo Bar, the Gage is a must do even if you plan to lay your head elsewhere. I had a fabulous jalapeño margarita, and the bar snacks are nothing to scoff at. We also ate at the main restaurant, which was a meal to remember, but we found the bar area much more accommodating to children and opted to dine there the following night. They were obsessed with the white buffalo trophy hanging on the wall, and a cozy fireside table was the perfect setting for our family dinner.
The Gage is definitely the place to be if you are visiting Marathon, but you might want to ease on down the road if you are a fraidy cat. According to local folklore, there are at least three resident ghosts keeping company at the hotel, and Room 10 is allegedly their favorite haunt (pun intended!). I believe these sightings most likely came after too much time bellying up at the White Buffalo Bar!
The morning after our arrival, we picked up picnic supplies at The French Company Grocer and took off for Big Bend. After first stopping at the welcome center to get a packet for my son to earn his Junior Park Ranger badge, we were off to explore this beautiful park. Although we enjoyed most of the views from our car, we did get out to hike the very short and very manageable Fossil Discovery Trail. We were surprised to see so many bluebonnets already blossoming in mid-March, almost a full month before we spotted any blooms around Houston.
My children were two and four at the time, so you can imagine our options were quite limited. It was very fun, however, just to see the sights and point out all of the different landscapes and desert wildlife. We enjoyed lunch right on the Rio Grande River with Mexico a literal stone's throw away, albeit across the rushing water. The kids threw rocks into the river, and we just relaxed and enjoyed the scenery. The gorgeous river canyons, desert landscape, and colorful mountains are jaw dropping and not be missed!
We debated a second day at Big Bend, but mindful of our limitations, we decided to cut our losses and leave early for Marfa. The park and Marathon were great, but we were ready to see the art and culture of the most buzzed-about small town…perhaps ever! Get the scoop on Marfa in Going Out West, Part 2 — coming to the blog soon! In the meantime, if you plan to visit Marathon or Big Bend, here are some of my recs:
There is no question, Gage Hotel is where you want to rest your bones. Even if there were many other options, which there aren't, the Gage is just an amazing, fabulous hotel. The majority of the rooms open up to a center courtyard with impeccable landscaping. If you find yourself with nothing better to do, you can always just sit in one of the many rocking chairs lining the doors to the rooms and take in the gorgeous view.
Again, the Gage Hotel is the place to be! You can dine at the chic and delicious 12 Gage Restaurant, which boasts an extensive wine list, including their own private label, and serves inspired seasonal dishes that would rival any of Houston's own hot spots. As with most Texan restaurants, the menu is definitely beef heavy, but with steaks this good, you won't find many people complaining! (Not to worry if red meat is not your thing – they offer several seafood, poultry, and vegetarian options as well.)
For a more casual option, The White Buffalo Bar at the Gage is top notch. A sampling of their Spring 2015 menu includes brisket tacos, Mexican shrimp and crab cocktail, and their famous White Buffalo Burger. You can sip a ranch water or prickly pear margarita while you chat with the locals, who seemed to make this their second home during our stay. The atmosphere was lively, but we never felt it was too much of a "bar scene" for our kids during the early evening hours. There were other children dining, and the ground venison sliders were perfect for the kids to share.
For breakfast, lunch, or just a fun treat, Johnny B's Old Fashioned Soda Fountain is within walking distance from the Gage. This is a no-frills, greasy spoon kind of place serving hamburgers, fries, and old school stacked enchiladas, as well as homemade shakes, malts, and floats.
Marathon Coffee Shop also serves up a pretty legit morning meal, offering delicious breakfast tacos and enchiladas, as well as homestyle biscuits and gravy. If you're lucky, you will time your meal to coincide with that of the local banjo player who enjoys picking and strumming for the patrons sitting on the porch!
The French Company Grocer is the local general store, and you can find simple groceries, produce, beer and wine, camping supplies, and even a few great souvenirs on its shelves. I scored a handsome Big Bend coffee table book to take home with us! (This is one of my favorite travel tips: Do not waste your money on cheap and cheesy tchotchkes or knick-knacks when you vacation. Instead, try to find something unique that you will actually wear or use in your home. Coffee table books are my favorite souvenirs. I always hate myself briefly when I'm lugging them around and paying extra baggage fees for their heft, but it is all worth it when I get home and have a beautiful memento to display.)
There are several local galleries and shops on the main drag in Marathon, and you can get the full experience in a few hours' time. When you're finished exploring on foot, I suggest taking a short drive along Post Road. This scenic route is about five miles long and ends at Post Park, which lies next to a pretty little pond formed by the Pena Colorado River. The path to the park is known for its abundant wildlife – wild turkeys, javelinas, deer, and the occasional fox can be found along Post Road. My children had a great time "hunting" for animals and, once again, throwing rocks into the river!
Although we were quite limited in our activities with two preschoolers, we thoroughly enjoyed our stay in Marathon and our journey to Big Bend National Park. The park itself is enormous, and I would love to spend several days exploring and hiking the trails next time. The Chisos Mountain views are drop-dead gorgeous, and the surrounding Chihuahuan Desert is unlike anything I've seen. I can't wait to get a closer look! A fun fact about the Chisos: it is the only U.S. mountain range contained entirely in a national park!
There are a gazillion website and travel blogs that provide far more information about the various trails and routes in Big Bend than I am qualified to speak on. There are, however, a few must see places I have on my list for next time: 1) Big Bend Ranch State Park is adjacent to the National Park, and I think it would be worth it to check out some of the terrain in this less-explored wilderness. If you've seen Richard Linklater's masterpiece Boyhood, the final "seize the moment" scene was filmed in Big Bend Ranch State Park. 2) The ghost town of Terlingua is fascinating to me. I have read so much about it, and I would love to explore this little gem, including the Starlight Theatre and La Kiva (temporarily closed for renovations). 3) In nearby Alpine, the Big Bend Brewing Company is a must if traveling without the babes. They are brewing some fabulous beer, and I think a tour and tasting would be a blast! 4) The Mexican town of Boquillas also borders the park, and cross-border access was reopened in 2013. You can rent burros to ride, and from what I understand, Boquillas is completely safe. I say cross at your own risk…you probably won't see me there!
Stay tuned for Part 2 of my adventures in the wild, wild west! Up next…Marfa!


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Belinda here today to share two layouts that I have created using some gorgeous chipboard pieces.
First up is my take on the White With One challenge for August which is white + liquorice.
Bit hard to see from the photo but I sponged some white gesso onto my chipboard pieces in a patchy kind of way. Once dry I added Tim Holtz Distress Stain in Black Soot over the top and then wiped away the excess with a baby wipe. Aren't all of those fabulous chippie words cool?? Totally love the arrows too.
Here's what I used:
IDDL0022 Loolabelle's Chevrons #2
IDDL0023 Loolabelle's Love Arrows
IDW0028 Love (4 per board)
IDW0078 Trouble Sweet Beautiful
IDW0080 Totally Adore Wonderful
IDW0081 This Always Day You
And here's my second layout...
I painted my title and chevrons with about 3 coats of white gesso. Once dry I dipped an applicator in water and added some soft blue Pan Pastels around the edge.
The stars are the perfect embellishment for a boy layout. Don't you think? I love them anyway. Here I have covered them with a thin wood veneer, painted gesso around the edges for a softer edge and then flicked paint from a Posca Pen over the top.
Here's what I used:
IDP0112 I Love Your Face
IDS0076 21 Stars in a board
IDDL0022 Loolabelle's Chevrons #2
Well that's all from me today. I hope you are feeling inspired to play with your chipboard too and experiment with altering them to suit your own project.
Thanks so much for visiting the blog today. Don't forget to leave a comment to go into the draw to win a pack of chipboard!


text:
San Diego employment attorneys at Ceartas Legal LLP provide skilled, experienced representation to employees who have been the victim of discrimination, harassment, retaliation, and wrongful termination. We can also help you obtain the wages and overtime to which you are entitled if your employer refuses to compensate you in accordance with State and Federal Law.
Our employment lawyers fight zealously to preserve and protect the rights of plaintiff employees throughout San Diego County. We can help you obtain the fair and just compensation that you deserve when you have been harmed by your employer's actions or refusal to ensure a safe workplace.
Please fill out the following employment law Case Evaluation Form. One of our knowledgeable attorneys will review your information and contact you to set up a free, in-office consultation.


text:
please dont paste the code into a text file.
compress the original php files into a zip archive and attach the zip[ file so i can see the complete code in context.
Your friends over here at WebAssist! These Dreamweaver extensions will assist you in building unlimited, custom websites.
These out-of-the-box solutions provide you proven, tested applications that can be up and running now. Build a store, a gallery, or a web-based email solution.