text:
The IA Switch:
A Successful Collaboration to Enhance Investor Protection
The regulatory transfer of more than 2,100 investment advisers from federal to state oversight, commonly known as the IA Switch, was one of the most significant achievements in the history of the North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA).
The Switch stemmed from Section 410 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (the Dodd-Frank Act)1, which raised the assets under management (AUM) threshold for state regulation of investment advisers from $25 million to $100 million.
This report documents the work that went into the successful completion of the Switch. It draws from a survey completed by state securities regulators on the effect of the Switch; detailed interviews with NASAA members who were key players throughout the Switch; and industry feedback.


text:
Way back in September 1983, I started my first real job, working at Oranim, a big bread factory in Israel that made something like 100,000 loaves of bread every night in six giant ovens the size of aircraft carriers.
The first time I walked into the bakery I couldn't believe what a mess it was. The sides of the ovens were yellowing, machines were rusting, there was grease everywhere.
"Is it always this messy?" I asked.
"What? What are you talking about?" the manager said. "We just finished cleaning. This is the cleanest it's been in weeks."
Oh boy.
It took me a couple of months of cleaning the bakery every morning before I realized what they meant. In the bakery, clean meant no dough on the machines. Clean meant no fermenting dough in the trash. Clean meant no dough on the floors.
Clean did not mean the paint on the ovens was nice and white. Painting the ovens was something you did every decade, not every day. Clean did not mean no grease. In fact there were a lot of machines that needed to be greased or oiled regularly and a thin layer of clean oil was usually a sign of a machine that had just been cleaned.
The whole concept of clean in the bakery was something you had to learn. To an outsider, it was impossible to walk in and judge whether the place was clean or not. An outsider would never think of looking at the inside surfaces of the dough rounder (a machine that rolls square blocks of dough into balls, shown in the picture at right) to see if they had been scraped clean. An outsider would obsess over the fact that the old oven had discolored panels, because those panels were huge. But a baker couldn't care less whether the paint on the outside of their oven was starting to turn a little yellow. The bread still tasted just as good.
After two months in the bakery, you learned how to "see" clean.
Code is the same way.
When you start out as a beginning programmer or you try to read code in a new language it all looks equally inscrutable. Until you understand the programming language itself you can't even see obvious syntactic errors.
During the first phase of learning, you start to recognize the things that we usually refer to as "coding style." So you start to notice code that doesn't conform to indentation standards and Oddly-Capitalized variables.
It's at this point you typically say, "Blistering Barnacles, we've got to get some consistent coding conventions around here!" and you spend the next day writing up coding conventions for your team and the next six days arguing about the One True Brace Style and the next three weeks rewriting old code to conform to the One True Brace Style until a manager catches you and screams at you for wasting time on something that can never make money, and you decide that it's not really a bad thing to only reformat code when you revisit it, so you have about half of a True Brace Style and pretty soon you forget all about that and then you can start obsessing about something else irrelevant to making money like replacing one kind of string class with another kind of string class.
As you get more proficient at writing code in a particular environment, you start to learn to see other things. Things that may be perfectly legal and perfectly OK according to the coding convention, but which make you worry.
For example, in C:
char* dest, src;
This is legal code; it may conform to your coding convention, and it may even be what was intended, but when you've had enough experience writing C code, you'll notice that this declares dest as a char pointer while declaring src as merely a char, and even if this might be what you wanted, it probably isn't. That code smells a little bit dirty.
Even more subtle:
if (i != 0)
In this case the code is 100% correct; it conforms to most coding conventions and there's nothing wrong with it, but the fact that the single-statement body of the ifstatement is not enclosed in braces may be bugging you, because you might be thinking in the back of your head, gosh, somebody might insert another line of code there
if (i != 0)
… and forget to add the braces, and thus accidentally make foo(i)unconditional! So when you see blocks of code that aren't in braces, you might sense just a tiny, wee, soupçon of uncleanliness which makes you uneasy.
OK, so far I've mentioned three levels of achievement as a programmer:
1. You don't know clean from unclean.
2. You have a superficial idea of cleanliness, mostly at the level of conformance to coding conventions.
3. You start to smell subtle hints of uncleanliness beneath the surface and they bug you enough to reach out and fix the code.
There's an even higher level, though, which is what I really want to talk about:
4. You deliberately architect your code in such a way that your nose for uncleanliness makes your code more likely to be correct.
This is the real art: making robust code by literally inventing conventions that make errors stand out on the screen.
So now I'll walk you through a little example, and then I'll show you a general rule you can use for inventing these code-robustness conventions, and in the end it will lead to a defense of a certain type of Hungarian Notation, probably not the type that makes people carsick, though, and a criticism of exceptions in certain circumstances, though probably not the kind of circumstances you find yourself in most of the time.
But if you're so convinced that Hungarian Notation is a Bad Thing and that exceptions are the best invention since the chocolate milkshake and you don't even want to hear any other opinions, well, head on over to Rory's and read the excellent comix instead; you probably won't be missing much here anyway; in fact in a minute I'm going to have actual code samples which are likely to put you to sleep even before they get a chance to make you angry. Yep. I think the plan will be to lull you almost completely to sleep and then to sneak the Hungarian=good, Exceptions=bad thing on you when you're sleepy and not really putting up much of a fight.
An Example
Right. On with the example. Let's pretend that you're building some kind of a web-based application, since those seem to be all the rage with the kids these days.
Now, there's a security vulnerability called the Cross Site Scripting Vulnerability, a.k.a. XSS. I won't go into the details here: all you have to know is that when you build a web application you have to be careful never to repeat back any strings that the user types into forms.
So for example if you have a web page that says "What is your name?" with an edit box and then submitting that page takes you to another page that says, Hello, Elmer! (assuming the user's name is Elmer), well, that's a security vulnerability, because the user could type in all kinds of weird HTML and JavaScript instead of "Elmer" and their weird JavaScript could do narsty things, and now those narsty things appear to come from you, so for example they can read cookies that you put there and forward them on to Dr. Evil's evil site.
Let's put it in pseudocode. Imagine that
s = Request("name")
reads input (a POST argument) from the HTML form. If you ever write this code:
Write "Hello, " & Request("name")
your site is already vulnerable to XSS attacks. That's all it takes.
Instead you have to encode it before you copy it back into the HTML. Encoding it means replacing " with ", replacing > with >, and so forth. So
Write "Hello, " & Encode(Request("name"))
is perfectly safe.
All strings that originate from the user are unsafe. Any unsafe string must not be output without encoding it.
Let's try to come up with a coding convention that will ensure that if you ever make this mistake, the code will just look wrong. If wrong code, at least, looks wrong, then it has a fighting chance of getting caught by someone working on that code or reviewing that code.
Possible Solution #1
One solution is to encode all strings right away, the minute they come in from the user:
s = Encode(Request("name"))
So our convention says this: if you ever see Request that is not surrounded by Encode, the code must be wrong.
You start to train your eyes to look for naked Requests, because they violate the convention.
That works, in the sense that if you follow this convention you'll never have a XSS bug, but that's not necessarily the best architecture. For example maybe you want to store these user strings in a database somewhere, and it doesn't make sense to have them stored HTML-encoded in the database, because they might have to go somewhere that is not an HTML page, like to a credit card processing application that will get confused if they are HTML-encoded. Most web applications are developed under the principle that all strings internally are not encoded until the very last moment before they are sent to an HTML page, and that's probably the right architecture.
We really need to be able to keep things around in unsafe format for a while.
OK. I'll try again.
Possible Solution #2
What if we made a coding convention that said that when you write out any string you have to encode it?
s = Request("name")
// much later:
Write Encode(s)
Now whenever you see a naked Write without the Encode you know something is amiss.
Well, that doesn't quite work… sometimes you have little bits of HTML around in your code and you can't encode them:
If mode = "linebreak" Then prefix = "
"
// much later:
Write prefix
This looks wrong according to our convention, which requires us to encode strings on the way out:
Write Encode(prefix)
But now the "
", which is supposed to start a new line, gets encoded to
 and appears to the user as a literal . That's not right either.
So, sometimes you can't encode a string when you read it in, and sometimes you can't encode it when you write it out, so neither of these proposals works. And without a convention, we're still running the risk that you do this:
s = Request("name")
...pages later...
name = s
...pages later...
recordset("name") = name // store name in db in a column "name"
...days later...
theName = recordset("name")
...pages or even months later...
Write theName
Did we remember to encode the string? There's no single place where you can look to see the bug. There's no place to sniff. If you have a lot of code like this, it takes a ton of detective work to trace the origin of every string that is ever written out to make sure it has been encoded.
The Real Solution
So let me suggest a coding convention that works. We'll have just one rule:
All strings that come from the user must be stored in variables (or database columns) with a name starting with the prefix "us" (for Unsafe String). All strings that have been HTML encoded or which came from a known-safe location must be stored in variables with a name starting with the prefix "s" (for Safe string).
Let me rewrite that same code, changing nothing but the variable names to match our new convention.
us = Request("name")
...pages later...
usName = us
...pages later...
recordset("usName") = usName
...days later...
sName = Encode(recordset("usName"))
...pages or even months later...
Write sName
The thing I want you to notice about the new convention is that now, if you make a mistake with an unsafe string, you can always see it on some single line of code, as long as the coding convention is adhered to:
s = Request("name")
is a priori wrong, because you see the result of Request being assigned to a variable whose name begins with s, which is against the rules. The result of Request is always unsafe so it must always be assigned to a variable whose name begins with "us".
us = Request("name")
is always OK.
usName = us
is always OK.
sName = us
is certainly wrong.
sName = Encode(us)
is certainly correct.
Write usName
is certainly wrong.
Write sName
is OK, as is
Write Encode(usName)
Every line of code can be inspected by itself, and if every line of code is correct, the entire body of code is correct.
Eventually, with this coding convention, your eyes learn to see the Write usXXX and know that it's wrong, and you instantly know how to fix it, too. I know, it's a little bit hard to see the wrong code at first, but do this for three weeks, and your eyes will adapt, just like the bakery workers who learned to look at a giant bread factory and instantly say, "jay-zuss, nobody cleaned insahd rounduh fo-ah! What the hayl kine a opparashun y'awls runnin' heey-uh?"
In fact we can extend the rule a bit, and rename (or wrap) the Request and Encodefunctions to be UsRequest and SEncode… in other words, functions that return an unsafe string or a safe string will start with Us and S, just like variables. Now look at the code:
us = UsRequest("name")
usName = us
recordset("usName") = usName
sName = SEncode(recordset("usName"))
Write sName
See what I did? Now you can look to see that both sides of the equal sign start with the same prefix to see mistakes.
us = UsRequest("name") // ok, both sides start with US
s = UsRequest("name") // bug
usName = us // ok
sName = us // certainly wrong.
sName = SEncode(us) // certainly correct.
Heck, I can take it one step further, by naming Write to WriteS and renaming SEncode to SFromUs:
us = UsRequest("name")
usName = us
recordset("usName") = usName
sName = SFromUs(recordset("usName"))
WriteS sName
This makes mistakes even more visible. Your eyes will learn to "see" smelly code, and this will help you find obscure security bugs just through the normal process of writing code and reading code.
Making wrong code look wrong is nice, but it's not necessarily the best possible solution to every security problem. It doesn't catch every possible bug or mistake, because you might not look at every line of code. But it's sure a heck of a lot better than nothing, and I'd much rather have a coding convention where wrong code, at least, looked wrong. You instantly gain the incremental benefit that every time a programmer's eyes pass over a line of code, that particular bug is checked for and prevented.
A General Rule
This business of making wrong code look wrong depends on getting the right things close together in one place on the screen. When I'm looking at a string, in order to get the code right, I need to know, everywhere I see that string, whether it's safe or unsafe. I don't want that information to be in another file or on another page that I would have to scroll to. I have to be able to see it right there and that means a variable naming convention.
There are a lot of other examples where you can improve code by moving things next to each other. Most coding conventions include rules like:
- Keep functions short.
- Declare your variables as close as possible to the place where you will use them.
- Don't use macros to create your own personal programming language.
- Don't use goto.
- Don't put closing braces more than one screen away from the matching opening brace.
What all these rules have in common is that they are trying to get the relevant information about what a line of code really does physically as close together as possible. This improves the chances that your eyeballs will be able to figure out everything that's going on.
In general, I have to admit that I'm a little bit scared of language features that hide things. When you see the code
i = j * 5;
… in C you know, at least, that j is being multiplied by five and the results stored in i.
But if you see that same snippet of code in C++, you don't know anything. Nothing. The only way to know what's really happening in C++ is to find out what types i and j are, something which might be declared somewhere altogether else. That's because j might be of a type that has operator* overloaded and it does something terribly witty when you try to multiply it. And i might be of a type that has operator= overloaded, and the types might not be compatible so an automatic type coercion function might end up being called. And the only way to find out is not only to check the type of the variables, but to find the code that implements that type, and God help you if there's inheritance somewhere, because now you have to traipse all the way up the class hierarchy all by yourself trying to find where that code really is, and if there's polymorphism somewhere, you're really in trouble because it's not enough to know what type i and j are declared, you have to know what type they are right now, which might involve inspecting an arbitrary amount of code and you can never really be sure if you've looked everywhere thanks to the halting problem (phew!).
When you see i=j*5 in C++ you are really on your own, bubby, and that, in my mind, reduces the ability to detect possible problems just by looking at code.
None of this was supposed to matter, of course. When you do clever-schoolboy things like override operator*, this is meant to be to help you provide a nice waterproof abstraction. Golly, j is a Unicode String type, and multiplying a Unicode String by an integer is obviously a good abstraction for converting Traditional Chinese to Standard Chinese, right?
The trouble is, of course, that waterproof abstractions aren't. I've already talked about this extensively in The Law of Leaky Abstractions so I won't repeat myself here.
Scott Meyers has made a whole career out of showing you all the ways they fail and bite you, in C++ at least. (By the way, the third edition of Scott's book Effective C++ just came out; it's completely rewritten; get your copy today!)
I'm losing track. I better summarize The Story Until Now:
Look for coding conventions that make wrong code look wrong. Getting the right information collocated all together in the same place on screen in your code lets you see certain types of problems and fix them right away.
I'm Hungary
So now we get back to the infamous Hungarian notation.
Hungarian notation was invented by Microsoft programmer Charles Simonyi. One of the major projects Simonyi worked on at Microsoft was Word; in fact he led the project to create the world's first WYSIWYG word processor, something called Bravo at Xerox Parc.
In WYSIWYG word processing, you have scrollable windows, so every coordinate has to be interpreted as either relative to the window or relative to the page, and that makes a big difference, and keeping them straight is pretty important.
Which, I surmise, is one of the many good reasons Simonyi started using something that came to be called Hungarian notation. It looked like Hungarian, and Simonyi was from Hungary, thus the name. In Simonyi's version of Hungarian notation, every variable was prefixed with a lower case tag that indicated the kind of thing that the variable contained.
I'm using the word kind on purpose, there, because Simonyi mistakenly used the word type in his paper, and generations of programmers misunderstood what he meant.
If you read Simonyi's paper closely, what he was getting at was the same kind of naming convention as I used in my example above where we decided that us meant "unsafe string" and s meant "safe string." They're both of type string. The compiler won't help you if you assign one to the other and Intellisense won't tell you bupkis. But they are semantically different; they need to be interpreted differently and treated differently and some kind of conversion function will need to be called if you assign one to the other or you will have a runtime bug. If you're lucky.
Simonyi's original concept for Hungarian notation was called, inside Microsoft, Apps Hungarian, because it was used in the Applications Division, to wit, Word and Excel. In Excel's source code you see a lot of rw and col and when you see those you know that they refer to rows and columns. Yep, they're both integers, but it never makes sense to assign between them. In Word, I'm told, you see a lot of xl and xw, where xl means "horizontal coordinates relative to the layout" and xw means "horizontal coordinates relative to the window." Both ints. Not interchangeable. In both apps you see a lot of cb meaning "count of bytes." Yep, it's an int again, but you know so much more about it just by looking at the variable name. It's a count of bytes: a buffer size. And if you see xl = cb, well, blow the Bad Code Whistle, that is obviously wrong code, because even though xl and cb are both integers, it's completely crazy to set a horizontal offset in pixels to a count of bytes.
In Apps Hungarian prefixes are used for functions, as well as variables. So, to tell you the truth, I've never seen the Word source code, but I'll bet you dollars to donuts there's a function called YlFromYw which converts from vertical window coordinates to vertical layout coordinates. Apps Hungarian requires the notation TypeFromType instead of the more traditional TypeToType so that every function name could begin with the type of thing that it was returning, just like I did earlier in the example when I renamed Encode SFromUs. In fact in proper Apps Hungarian the Encode function would have to be named SFromUs. Apps Hungarian wouldn't really give you a choice in how to name this function. That's a good thing, because it's one less thing you need to remember, and you don't have to wonder what kind of encoding is being referred to by the word Encode: you have something much more precise.
Apps Hungarian was extremely valuable, especially in the days of C programming where the compiler didn't provide a very useful type system.
But then something kind of wrong happened.
The dark side took over Hungarian Notation.
Nobody seems to know why or how, but it appears that the documentation writers on the Windows team inadvertently invented what came to be known as Systems Hungarian.
Somebody, somewhere, read Simonyi's paper, where he used the word "type," and thought he meant type, like class, like in a type system, like the type checking that the compiler does. He did not. He explained very carefully exactly what he meant by the word "type," but it didn't help. The damage was done.
Apps Hungarian had very useful, meaningful prefixes like "ix" to mean an index into an array, "c" to mean a count, "d" to mean the difference between two numbers (for example "dx" meant "width"), and so forth.
Systems Hungarian had far less useful prefixes like "l" for long and "ul" for "unsigned long" and "dw" for double word, which is, actually, uh, an unsigned long. In Systems Hungarian, the only thing that the prefix told you was the actual data type of the variable.
This was a subtle but complete misunderstanding of Simonyi's intention and practice, and it just goes to show you that if you write convoluted, dense academic prose nobody will understand it and your ideas will be misinterpreted and then the misinterpreted ideas will be ridiculed even when they weren't your ideas. So in Systems Hungarian you got a lot of dwFoo meaning "double word foo," and doggone it, the fact that a variable is a double word tells you darn near nothing useful at all. So it's no wonder people rebelled against Systems Hungarian.
Systems Hungarian was promulgated far and wide; it is the standard throughout the Windows programming documentation; it was spread extensively by books like Charles Petzold's Programming Windows, the bible for learning Windows programming, and it rapidly became the dominant form of Hungarian, even inside Microsoft, where very few programmers outside the Word and Excel teams understood just what a mistake they had made.
And then came The Great Rebellion. Eventually, programmers who never understood Hungarian in the first place noticed that the misunderstood subset they were using was Pretty Dang Annoying and Well-Nigh Useless, and they revolted against it. Now, there are still some nice qualities in Systems Hungarian, which help you see bugs. At the very least, if you use Systems Hungarian, you'll know the type of a variable at the spot where you're using it. But it's not nearly as valuable as Apps Hungarian.
The Great Rebellion hit its peak with the first release of .NET. Microsoft finally started telling people, "Hungarian Notation Is Not Recommended." There was much rejoicing. I don't even think they bothered saying why. They just went through the naming guidelines section of the document and wrote, "Do Not Use Hungarian Notation" in every entry. Hungarian Notation was so doggone unpopular by this point that nobody really complained, and everybody in the world outside of Excel and Word were relieved at no longer having to use an awkward naming convention that, they thought, was unnecessary in the days of strong type checking and Intellisense.
But there's still a tremendous amount of value to Apps Hungarian, in that it increases collocation in code, which makes the code easier to read, write, debug, and maintain, and, most importantly, it makes wrong code look wrong.
Before we go, there's one more thing I promised to do, which is to bash exceptions one more time. The last time I did that I got in a lot of trouble. In an off-the-cuff remark on the Joel on Software homepage, I wrote that I don't like exceptions because they are, effectively, an invisible goto, which, I reasoned, is even worse than a goto you can see. Of course millions of people jumped down my throat. The only person in the world who leapt to my defense was, of course, Raymond Chen, who is, by the way, the best programmer in the world, so that has to say something, right?
Here's the thing with exceptions, in the context of this article. Your eyes learn to see wrong things, as long as there is something to see, and this prevents bugs. In order to make code really, really robust, when you code-review it, you need to have coding conventions that allow collocation. In other words, the more information about what code is doing is located right in front of your eyes, the better a job you'll do at finding the mistakes. When you have code that says
… your eyes tell you, what's wrong with that? We always clean up! But the possibility that dosomething might throw an exception means that cleanupmight not get called. And that's easily fixable, using finally or whatnot, but that's not my point: my point is that the only way to know that cleanup is definitely called is to investigate the entire call tree of dosomething to see if there's anything in there, anywhere, which can throw an exception, and that's ok, and there are things like checked exceptions to make it less painful, but the real point is that exceptions eliminate collocation. You have to look somewhere else to answer a question of whether code is doing the right thing, so you're not able to take advantage of your eye's built-in ability to learn to see wrong code, because there's nothing to see.
Now, when I'm writing a dinky script to gather up a bunch of data and print it once a day, heck yeah, exceptions are great. I like nothing more than to ignore all possible wrong things that can happen and just wrap up the whole damn program in a big ol' try/catch that emails me if anything ever goes wrong. Exceptions are fine for quick-and-dirty code, for scripts, and for code that is neither mission critical nor life-sustaining. But if you're writing an operating system, or a nuclear power plant, or the software to control a high speed circular saw used in open heart surgery, exceptions are extremely dangerous.
I know people will assume that I'm a lame programmer for failing to understand exceptions properly and failing to understand all the ways they can improve my life if only I was willing to let exceptions into my heart, but, too bad. The way to write really reliable code is to try to use simple tools that take into account typical human frailty, not complex tools with hidden side effects and leaky abstractions that assume an infallible programmer.
More Reading
If you're still all gung-ho about exceptions, read Raymond Chen's essay Cleaner, more elegant, and harder to recognize. "It is extraordinarily difficult to see the difference between bad exception-based code and not-bad exception-based code… exceptions are too hard and I'm not smart enough to handle them."
Raymond's rant about Death by Macros, A rant against flow control macros, is about another case where failing to get information all in the same place makes code unmaintainable. "When you see code that uses [macros], you have to go dig through header files to figure out what they do."
For background on the history of Hungarian notation, start with Simonyi's original paper, Hungarian Notation. Doug Klunder introduced this to the Excel team in a somewhat clearer paper. For more stories about Hungarian and how it got ruined by documentation writers, read Larry Osterman's post, especially Scott Ludwig's comment, or Rick Schaut's post.

subset: commoncrawl


text: Back BNP (Blood) Does this test have other names? B-type natriuretic peptide What is this test? This test looks for the protein BNP in your blood. BNP is made inside the pumping chambers of your heart when pressure builds up from heart failure. The test is an important tool for doctors to diagnose heart failure quickly. Heart failure occurs when your heart is not pumping blood well. This causes cells inside your heart to release BNP, which opens up blood vessels in your body to take pressure off your heart. A BNP blood test correctly indicates heart failure about 90 percent of the time. The BNP test can help your doctor diagnose heart failure, plan treatment, evaluate how well the treatment is working, and determine when it is safe for you to leave the hospital. The BNP test can show how serious your heart failure is now and how severe your heart failure will be in the future. A BNP test is quite accurate and it only takes about 15 minutes to get the results. Why do I need this test? You may need this test if your doctor suspects that you have heart failure. The main symptom of heart failure is difficulty breathing, or dyspnea. If you go to your doctor's office or the emergency room with trouble breathing, your doctor will want to know the cause as quickly as possible. Many conditions can cause breathing difficulties, but if you also have a blood test that is positive for BNP, heart failure is likely causing your symptoms. You may also need this test so that your doctor can see how well the your heart failure therapy is working. What other tests might I have along with this test? You may have a blood test called ANF. ANF is a protein similar to BNP, but it is made in a different part of the heart. You may also have other blood tests, a chest X-ray, an electrocardiogram, or an echocardiogram, which is an ultrasound of the heart. What do my test results mean? Many things may affect your lab test results. These include the method each lab uses to do the test. Even if your test results are different from the normal value, you may not have a problem. To learn what the results mean for you, talk with your health care provider. BNP is measured in picograms per milliliter (pg/mL) or nanograms per liter (ng/L). Less than 100 pg/mL is considered normal. In general, the more serious your heart failure, the higher your levels of BNP will be. According to some experts on heart failure: BNP under 100 pg/mL means that you have a 96 percent chance that your symptoms aren't caused by heart failure. BNP above 100 pg/mL means you have a 90 percent chance that your symptoms are caused by heart failure. BNP above 700 pg/mL may mean serious heart failure that should be treated in the hospital. If your BNP has gone below 500 pg/mL after treatment, it may mean that you are ready to leave the hospital. How is this test done? The test requires a blood sample, which is drawn through a needle from a vein in your arm. Does this test pose any risks? Taking a blood sample with a needle carries risks that include bleeding, infection, bruising, or feeling dizzy. When the needle pricks your arm, you may feel a slight stinging sensation or pain. Afterward, the site may be slightly sore. What might affect my test results? Other things besides heart failure can cause your BNP to rise, including: Kidney failure or being on dialysis Long-term, or chronic, heart failure Nesiritide (Natrecor), a synthetic form of BNP used to treat heart failure How do I get ready for this test? You don't need t prepare for this test.


text:
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Waxing Poetic jewelry, charms, objects, candles, housewares, and general amusements come to you from Carpinteria, California, by way of designer Patti Pagliei Simpson, her intimate coterie of friends and family (sisters in particular): like-minded artists, dreamers, adventurers, and raconteurs. We make things we love, and hope you like them too.We believe that faith, risk, hope, and joy are inextricably bound, and never mutually exclusive. Adventure and routine are strange, and sometimes lovely, cousins. There is a way to write the lines in between all of us, and in our own small way, we want to make links. If we can make things to share, to pass in between, we can do more than we ever hoped – and then some.Our jewelry is fabricated by an incredible batch of Balinese craftspersons, truly part of our extended 'family'. These incredible people devote themselves and their lives to beauty, both in action and intent. Somehow we were blessed to have them join forces with us. Our Bali artisans are paid several times more than minimum wage, and treated with respect, dignity, and most importantly, gratitude. We work closely with the Bali wing of the WP family in both refining our designs, and in building aesthetic sensibility based not only on concept, but also on construction, and shared content.Waxing Poetic believes in community–not just ours, but the overall global adventure version of community. We want to be fair, to be good, and to be grateful. We do our best, but know we can always do better. Much of that better, really and truly, is thanks to you. Visit Waxing Poetic


text:
The Hush - John Hart
Autor: John Hart
Carpeta dura, 422 páginas
New York Times bestseller
The only writer in history to win consecutive Edgar Awards for Best Novel, New York Times bestselling author John Hart returns to the world of his most beloved novel, The Last Child
Building on the world first seen in The Last Child ("A magnificent creation" ―The Washington Post), John Hart delivers a stunning vision of a secret world, rarely seen.
It's been ten years since the events that changed Johnny Merrimon's life and rocked his hometown to the core. Since then, Johnny has fought to maintain his privacy, but books have been written of his exploits; the fascination remains. Living alone on six thousand acres of once-sacred land, Johnny's only connection to normal life is his old friend, Jack. They're not boys anymore, but the bonds remain. What they shared. What they lost.
But Jack sees danger in the wild places Johnny calls home; he senses darkness and hunger, an intractable intent. Johnny will discuss none of it, but there are the things he knows, the things he can do. A lesser friend might accept such abilities as a gift, but Jack has felt what moves in the swamp: the cold of it, the unspeakable fear.
More than an exploration of friendship, persistence, and forgotten power, The Hush leaves all categories behind, and cements Hart's status as a writer of unique power.


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Aurelius Augustine (AD 354-430), one of the most important figures in western Christianity and philosophy, was the son of a pagan, Patricius of Tagaste, and his Christian wife, Monnica. While studying to become a rhetorician, he plunged into a turmoil of philosophical and psychological doubts, leading him to Manichaeism. In 383 he moved to Rome and then Milan to teach rhetoric. Despite exploring classical philosophical systems, especially skepticism and neoplatonism, his studies of Paul's letters with his friend Alypius, and the preaching of Bishop Ambrose, led in 386 to his momentous conversion from mixed beliefs to Christianity. He soon returned to Tagaste and founded a religious community, and in 395 or 396 became Bishop of Hippo.Confessions, composed ca. 397, is a spiritual autobiography of Augustine's early life, family, personal and intellectual associations, and explorations of alternative religious and theological viewpoints as he moved toward his conversion. Cast as a prayer addressed to God, though always conscious of its readers, Confessions offers a gripping personal story and a philosophical exploration destined to have broad and lasting impact, delivered with Augustine's characteristic brilliance as a stylist. This edition replaces the earlier Loeb Classical Library edition of Confessions by William Watts.


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A daily papercrafting blog which features my handmade cards showcasing Creative Expression's products including my own line of cutting dies and embossing folders, Cosmic Shimmer, Ranger and more which use various techniques and ideas to hopefully inspire the creativity in you.
- Home
- My Ribbon Flower Tutorial
- Fancy Nestie
- Blossoms Five Flower Bud
- Blossoms Five Full Flower
- Easel Tutorial
- Wax Paper Embossing Folder Tutorial
- Caught In Crystal
- Shaving Foam Tutorial
- Quilt Card Tutorial
- Paved Pearl Technique
- Faux Leather Technique
- Plaited Ribbon Wreath Tutorial
- Paper Rose Tutorial
Saturday, 31 July 2010
As Promised
4 1/4'', 6'' and 8 1/4'' and then fold on the score lines in a concertina manner. You will have three mountain folds and two valley folds for your card. After that, it is just up to you and your creativity to fill up the three front sides of the mountain folds. The glittery twinkles on my spotlights did not photograph very well, but I hope this inspires you to give it a go anyways! All for now, Sue x
Posted by Particraft at 22:09 21 comments:
Tuesday, 27 July 2010
Girl's Night In!
Posted by Particraft at 15:02 27 comments:
Sunday, 25 July 2010
The Time Has Come!!!
We are here, finally at 1000 followers. I want to thank everyone for following the blog and supporting it all this time. I won't waste anymore time because I know that everyone wants to see the winners. Like always, we are going to do the third place winner, then the second place winner and then the grand prize winner. Without anymore delay, the winner of the THIRD prize is ........................................
Ms. Jen
The winner of the SECOND prize is..........................................................
And finally, the winner of the grand FIRST prize is.................................................
.................. .............................
Thanks to everyone for playing along. If your name has been drawn, please email me at email@example.com to verify your shipping addresses. All for now, Sue x
Ms. Jen
The winner of the SECOND prize is..........................................................
And finally, the winner of the grand FIRST prize is.................................................
.................. .............................
Thanks to everyone for playing along. If your name has been drawn, please email me at email@example.com to verify your shipping addresses. All for now, Sue x
Posted by Particraft at 21:42 27 comments:
Friday, 23 July 2010
SO-O-O-O Close!
Just a quick post to give everyone a (hopefully) last chance to leave a few more comments before the end of this blog candy. It is getting very close now so if you want to put another entry into the contest, just leave a comment on the blog. I thought I would just show another card from the Create and Craft show I am doing on Tuesday morning at 9am using the new movie and showtime stamp sets. I had a bit of fun with this card. I don't do shaped cards very often, but I thought what fun it would be to do a giant popcorn container complete with 3D pieces of faux popcorn on it. You should see them in real life, they look almost good enough to eat! I have some fun demos lined up for the show, including one I'm calling faux granite that I came up with.
There have been a few comments left from followers that are outside the UK that have expressed interest in seeing the show. Just to let everyone know, you can watch the show on your computer at http://www.createandcraft.tv/ but it is live so you will have to know what the time difference is and simply make the necessary adjustments for your area to view the program. They do repeat most shows later in the day also. You can go to their website and check on their tv schedule listing and find it at a more convenient time later in the day also. All for now, Sue x
Posted by Particraft at 22:16 73 comments:
Thursday, 15 July 2010
Lights, Camera, Action!
Particraft has just released several new stamp sets this week. This sample is from the Showtime set. Aren't they fab?! I have been playing away with these as I have an upcoming show on Create and Craft using them. The show is on July 27th at 9am if you are interested in having a look. I have several fun demos planned showcasing these new stamp sets and some great products as well. If you have a scroll down you can see the stamp sets and all the great images on them. They were both designed by Sam Poole. Can't you just taste the hot buttered popcorn right now!
Posted by Particraft at 18:06 98 comments:
Saturday, 10 July 2010
Smooshed Flower Card
As promised, here is a pic of the card that I made using the smooshed (spelling?) flower technique. I really like the way it came out. It has a very romantic, watercolour feel to it. If you weren't able to see the show on Thursday, I put a fresh flower and stem through my Wizard machine and this is what it produced. There is quite a bit of fluid that comes out from this technique so you want to be careful about what types of flowers you use for this. Nothing too succulent for this and also nothing too thick as it could conceivably get stuck in your machine. Have a few pieces of kitchen roll at hand to wipe down the machine and the mats when you are finished also. I hope you give it a go and let me know how you get on with it.
We are doing really well on our contest, almost half way there. Don't forget that you get extra entries for letting me know that you have been by the blog by leaving a comment. All for now, Sue x
Posted by Particraft at 18:04 102 comments:
Wednesday, 7 July 2010
More Show Stuff!
Here are the pics of the two new stamp plates for the show on Thursday. It's a good thing I don't rely on my photography skills for a living, huh?! A little wonky, but you get the idea. The large solid floral stamp in the top left hand corner is worth the price of the multi buy alone! I could have used that one for practically every card and still not run out of ideas for it. It is truly my favourite as .....you can see below.
Just to tease you a bit though, I have something planned for one of tomorrows demos that is really different. You are going to think that I have absolutely lost the plot! I am hoping it will shock (maybe a little) and delight (maybe a lot) all who watch. I'm not going to give any details (hopefully so you will have to watch!) but I will post the card after the show so you can get a good look at it. Kind of like the ribbon ruffling from a few posts back, I am hoping to have all of England doing this after they see it! Ambitious I know, but everyone needs a goal, right?!
Enough said on that, but I do want to say quite a few people left comments about the paper roses. I just want to let everyone know that you can find a tutorial on the paper roses that were on my card on the last post on Maria Holder's blog. She has a lovely tutorial on her blog (so well written that I was able to learn to do them from it alone) which you can get to by clicking on it on my sidebar. It is called Imagine, Create , Inspire. While I would love to take the credit for these (as they are my favourite new addition to most of my cards), it is Maria that has come up with the idea and put it into an easy to follow tutorial form.
Remember, this is a new post and more chances at that candy if you leave comments. All for now, Sue x
Posted by Particraft at 16:24 105 comments:
Tuesday, 6 July 2010
Thursday's Show on Create and Craft
Just a quick post to show you a few sneak peeks at some of the card samples for my show on Create and Craft Thursday morning at 10am. We are premiering Sam Poole's new stamp sets called whimsical florals and arty florals. These two sets are absolutely great for technique based cards. Between you and I, I could have used a two hour slot for this one because I have a boatload of fun stuff to show! The stamps on these plates are perfect for all kinds of card making from elegant to absolutely grungey and everything in between! I will try to post some pics of the actual plates with a few more samples before the actual show, but I hope you will tune in either way. Also, this is a new post and another chance to get additional entries into the blog candy contest if you leave a comment. All for now, Sue x
Posted by Particraft at 20:35 99 comments:
Monday, 5 July 2010
My Biggest Blog Candy Ever!
Just look at this loot, would you! I'm not even going to list everything in here as it would take me days! My camera couldn't even get everything in the shot it is so big! But I am going to change the contest for this one only just a bit. So pay attention here, this is very important. For this candy only, I am going to set aside all the previous entries. You will only be entered if you leave a comment on my blog sometime between now and whenever we reach the magic number of 1000 followers. After each new blog within that time frame, you will receive an additional entry if you leave another comment. This candy deserves to go to someone who regularly reads the blog and this method will ensure that it happens. Your comment can be anything just as long as your name is on it. Let's start the Big Blog Candy Contest NOW!!!! Thanks for stopping by, Sue x
Posted by Particraft at 17:12 248 comments:
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Welcome to The Marks Project, www.themarksproject.org, A Dictionary of American Ceramics, 1946-present. Our website includes marks (stamps, chops and/or signatures, etc.) usually found on the bottom of ceramic objects created by potters, ceramic artists and sculptors. We welcome your feedback on the website, its search functions, and appearance. Give us your suggestions on how to make it better. We will continue to improve your search experience and to add new Artists' Pages to the database.
This website is dedicated to two functions search and documentation of American contemporary and studio ceramics, 1946 to present. For the researcher, collector or serendipitous visitor, the site offers access to an ever growing catalog of American studio ceramists and their marks. For the ceramic artists and their heirs the site offers a documentation service to record ceramic work, mark(s) and professional data to establish a work and mark history and an artist's legacy. To be included in the database and create a link to your website select Submit Your Work above and complete the Questionnaire.
Use our CONTACT page or email us at [email protected] to submit feedback, questions or comments.
Be a part of The Marks Project make a tax-deductible contribution today. The Marks Project, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit educational organization. Select DONATE button above or send a check to The Marks Project, 1117 East Putnam Ave., #491, Riverside, CT 06878, USA.
TMP, a division of The Marks Project, Inc., has created and maintains TMP (themarksproject.org ) website to provide a research tool to assist in the identification and attribution of American studio ceramics and ceramic makers, working from 1946 to present. TMP is not a valuation tool. TMP is not an authentication tool.
By accessing and using this website and its content you are agreeing to comply with and be bound by the following terms, which TMP may change at any time. read more »


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Thursday, February 27, 2014
Valentine's Day ~ A Whole New Perspective
Mr.TRH and I have big date night planned for end of this month. So we decided to stay home on the Valentine's day and do pizza & movie night as a family. He came home and just before we started eating, he gave me a flower and a card. It made me so happy, but I had hungry kids waiting to eat, so I set the card to the side and started serving the pizza. Then I noticed that Mr.TRH disappeared somewhere. When he came back to the kitchen again after a few minutes he had his hands behind his back.
At this point, the boys had already started to eat.
"Hey, what are you doing?" I asked. Then, he pulled out a white rose and gave it to our 8 year old daughter, Rachel. I was surprised, but Rachel had a shocked look (in a good way), she dropped her pizza and said "Thank you" in a small voice. It sounded like "thank you, but why?". I know this is the very first flower that she received just for herself in her life time.
During this time, her two older brothers were stuffing their faces with pizza, there was no sign of slowing down or stopping. Then Michael mumbled, "Is that real?".
While Rachel was still admiring the flower, Mr.TRH pulled out the other hand and handed her a card. This time, she gasped and said thank you and start opening her card (the boys continued to chomp down pizza). Then she read the card out loud with smile on her face. The card it self was cute and sweet, but Mr.TRH wrote how proud he was of her, and how she is growing up.
I thought, "ok, it is over I am going to sit down and start eating too." Then, I noticed that Rachel put the card on the table, both hand on her lap and her head bowed.
"Rachel, are you ok?" I asked.
She replied with a very weak voice. "The card is going to make me... cry..." Then, she started crying.
I knelt down beside her and asked, "Are you happy? Is that why you are crying?" She just nodded several times with tears streaming down on her cheeks.
Then, one of the boys asked "why is she crying?" STILL no sign of slowing down, well, I felt like they sped up on their eating pizza like "quick! Three of them are not eating, now is the chance... hehehe".
This was an unexpected reaction for Mr.TRH and I. The thoughtful act of a father's love touched his 8 year old girl's heart so much that she was crying. I was touched and I too started to tear up.
Of couse the boys kept eating while we were having this beautiful moment on the other side of the dining table; I just think it is so funny how boys and girls are so different. Even at such a young age.
The next few days Mr.TRH and I caught her looking at her flowers and card when she thought no one was watching. It was just so cute to know that meant so much to her. Also, the day after Valentine's day, she wrote "I love you mom and dad" with a heart on the white board in the office as a surprise. She is so blessed to have such a loving and attentive father. Mr.TRH is not a really romantic type person, but I told him several times he out did himself. What he did for our little girl, and how she received the gift made me feel warm inside. I thought that was way better than going out for Valentine dinner.
The flower will wither, but I know the loving gesture a father showed his daughter will have a lasting impact. I think I will never forget this Valentine's day.
P.S Are you all wondering if we gave anything to the boys? Yes we did. In the past, I gave them sweet cards, but I could tell they didn't care much about them. So I just gave them a heart shaped box of chocolates with message like "hugs" and "cool dude" and they were so excited. :)
If you haven't entered for a chance to win a $1000 gift card from Suave, make sure to check out my last post. Don't miss out!
Monday, February 24, 2014
Spring Hair Clip Project
When I was putting my sewing room together, I came across a bunch of things that I forgot about. These are one of them and it gave me an idea of what I can make with them. Where I live, the last few days have been pretty sunny and I kept longing for Spring.
All you need are metal hair clips, skeins (or any type of yarn), glue that will hold metal and fiber. It is super easy and simple; you could do this project with young girls and have fun together as well. Are you ready to have fun?
1. First, cut 1 yard of skeins then put glue on the back of the metal clip where you pinch to open. Put the tip of the skeins and wait 5 minutes or so until it sticks to the metal and is more stable. It makes it easier to work with when this part of the glue is dry.
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
My Sewing Room Tour
Are you ready?
On the left hand side there are shelves from Ikea and a cupboard that Mr. TRH and I created in the past. I looked everywhere for storage solutions when I was brain storming on how I was going to design my sewing room. Ikea has a great selection of shelves and storage bins. I am so happy to see most of my fabric stored nicely. There are things that I am not perfectly happy about and I might make some changes later.
Décor Allure) for an idea of what to use. This design board is light weight, and I used metal clips on both sides of the board, hanging hooks from 3M on the wall to hang it. Very easy to take it down, just in case when I want to work in a different room. This girl loves flexibilities and options. :)
I promise, I will get good use out of this room... pinky promise.
Friday, February 14, 2014
Good News from Australia ~ Homespun Magazine~
Go check out their website and Facebook page to see their exciting content.
In my next post, I will share more pictures of my sewing space. I. am. so. ready. to SEW!! I will see you at my next post. :)
P.S If you haven't entered for the chance to win a $1000 gift card for Suave, make sure to check out my last post. Don't miss out!
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Review & $1000 Gift Card Giveaway / Suave Professionals® Moroccan Infusion Body Care
A little over 18 years ago, I moved from Japan which has more moisture in the air than Utah. I remember the first winter was the worst... my skin itched like crazy and if I wasn't careful my hands would quickly crack. Over the years my skin adapted to the new area somewhat, but I still need to moisturize it constantly. Based on my experience in the past, the moisturizers that work well cost more... and to tell you the truth, I usually pass the Suave® shelf area when I am shopping. When I was given a chance to review the new Suave Professionals® line, I was very much interested. Seriously, if we can find a great product that is wallet friendly; what could be better than that??
The Suave Professionals® Moroccan Infusion Body Care line includes Body Lotion, a daily moisturizer that absorbs quickly for up to 24 hours of non-greasy hydration, and Dry Body Oil Spray. The Dry Body Oil Spray is perfect for special occasions such as adding a radiant sheen to legs. These awesome products create silky and radiant skin. Let's talk about this Body Oil Spray... I LOVE IT!! I don't like to push the product I don't care for, but I seriously am in love with this. The Body Lotion is wonderful too, it absorb quickly into the skin and keeps my skin hydrated for 24 hours (it really does!), the Dry Body Oil Spray... after each shower, I put the oil on my elbows and the next morning, I touch them and they were lot silkier than normal! I thought maybe I was imagining (you know, when we use new products we feel like it's working) so I did this every single day, and my elbows are very soft.
The new Suave Professionals® Moroccan Infusion Body Care products, clinically proven to moisturize as well as Moroccanoil®1, feature a light, luxurious fragrance and are infused with authentic Moroccan argan oil. Aragan oil a lightweight miracle oil known to be rich in nutrients and antioxidants. You can find out more information about the Suave Professionals® Moroccan Infusion Body Care products at their Facebook page. Leave a comment on my blog and let me know which of the Suave Professionals® Moroccan Infusion Body Care products you would most like to try! You will be automatically entered into a random drawing for a $1,000 gift card (across all participating blogs). Good luck everyone! :)
Sweepstakes Rules:
No duplicate comments.
You may receive (2) total entries by selecting from the following entry methods:
- Leave a comment in response to the sweepstakes prompt on this post
- Tweet (public message) about this promotion; including exactly the following unique term in your tweet message: "#SweepstakesEntry"; and leave the URL to that tweet in a comment on this post
- Blog about this promotion, including a disclosure that you are receiving a sweepstakes entry in exchange for writing the blog post, and leave the URL to that post in a comment on this post
- For those with no Twitter or blog, read the official rules to learn about an alternate form of entry.
This giveaway is open to US Residents age 18 or older. Winners will be selected via random draw, and will be notified by e-mail. You have 72 hours to get back to me, otherwise a new winner will be selected.
The Official Rules are available here.
This sweepstakes runs from 2/7/2014-2/28/2014.
Be sure to visit the Suave Professionals® brand page on BlogHer.com where you can read other bloggers' posts!
1When clinically tested vs. comparable Moroccanoil® products. Moroccanoil® is a registered trademark of Moroccanoil®.
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
Chair Makeover
when I was at a thrift shop last week I found this chair:
Cons: The fabric was in bad shape(and not my style AT ALL).
I have been looking for a chair for my sewing room, for a guest... which mainly will be Rachel since I am planning to sew with her a lot more often. I didn't want to spend a lot but I wanted a sturdy chair. This chair has potential.
I went home and looked through my stash and found the perfect fabric for it. When I bought it I didn't know what I was going to use it for but I had the perfect amount of fabric for this project.
After less than an hour, I got a new chair with personality!
If you are contemplating attacking your stash, absolutely DO! You will love the end result. :)


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Story highlights
General Stonewall Jackson was shot at the battle of Chancellorsville
The angle of the moonlight proved fateful on May 2, 1863, an astronomer says
It obscured the view of his own men, researchers say
Confederate infantrymen mistook him for the enemy and opened fire
A full moon hung just right in the night sky as the fierce Southern Army faced the encroaching Union troops in the spring of 1863.
Though they were outmanned and outgunned, the momentum of the war seemed to be on the side of Generals Robert E. Lee and "Stonewall" Jackson in Northern Virginia.
But the tide turned in the American Civil War not long after Jackson's own men inadvertently shot him that May night at the battle of Chancellorsville in Virginia.
And for that, say two researchers, Americans can thank that full moon.
It's an intriguing concept put forth by astronomer Don Olson and researcher Laurie E. Jasinski from Texas State University in a study appearing in this month's issue of Sky & Telescope magazine.
They say that when the men of the 18th North Carolina Infantry Regiment fired upon Jackson, the whitish lunar light likely obscured the target.
They didn't know it was him.
In other words, they say, a moon phase is partly responsible for the molding of a nation "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," as President Abraham Lincoln put it in the Gettysburg Address.
The two reconstructed the scene of the shooting using moon phases and maps, and published the results 150 years after the incident.
Moonlight or no?
History seems divided on whether or not the moon shone bright that night, the researchers say, but they back up their hypothesis with recorded anecdotal accounts.
"The Moon was shining very brightly, rendering all objects in our immediate vicinity distinct…," one confederate captain wrote years later. "The Moon poured a flood of light upon the wide, open turnpike."
Jackson rode out with a party of officers on a scouting mission to see if the Confederate Army could find a way to cut off Union Army troops, according to the National Park Service, which cares for the nation's Civil War battlegrounds.
They were shot as they returned.
Olson and Jasinski say that a Confederate officer spotted them in the moonlight and ordered his men to open fire.
Jackson was wounded in his left arm, which had to be amputated, according to the Virginia Military Institute, where Jackson taught.
He died from complications on May 10, 1863.
His arm was buried separate from the rest of his body.
The South went on to win the Battle of Chancellorsville, but without Jackson, took a decisive blow in July 1863 at the bloody Battle of Gettysburg, often thought of as the turning point of the war.
Back lighting
If Jackson's reconnaissance party was riding in bright moonlight, then his own men should have recognized them as they returned from the Union's side, but Olson and Jasinski say they did not – for good reason.
"The 18th North Carolina was looking to the southeast, directly toward the rising moon," they said. It stood at "25 degrees above the horizon" at the time, just at the wrong angle.
"The bright moon would've silhouetted Jackson and his officers, completely obscuring their identities."
The Confederate infantrymen likely thought their own men returning were Union cavalrymen on the approach.
"Our astronomical analysis partially absolves the 18th North Carolina from blame for the wounding of Jackson," Olson says.
It comes too late for the man who gave the order to fire.
Maj. John D. Barry died at age 27 – just two years after the end of the war.
"His family believed his death was a result of the depression and guilt he suffered as a consequence of having given the order to fire," the Virginia Military Institute site says.
Stonewall Jackson may have appreciated the Texas State researchers' hypothesis, not only because it would have alleviated the conscience of the men who took his life.
Before joining the Confederate Army, he was a science professor.


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Windows Server 2012
You'll be introduced to the Windows 2012 Server.
Build Your TCP/IP Port Knowledge
You'll test your knowledge of some common TCP/IP protocols and numbers.
Interference Causing Materials
You'll learn to identify if common objects may or may not cause interference with wireless networks.
EIGRP Millionaire
A game to test your knowledge about Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP)
VPN Millionaire
A game to test your knowledge about VPN and IPsec technology.
OSPF Millionaire
A game to test your knowledge about OSPF and link-state protocols.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence is intelligence exhibited by machines, rather than humans.
Комп'ютерні Mережі (Computer Networks)
Перевірка теоретичної готовності
Networking Basics
Networking basics


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Guide to the Donald E. Wilson Earth Resources Survey Program Papers, 1972-1983
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Table of contents
This collection includes reports, correspondence, newsletters, maps, and imagery documenting the applications of remote sensing of earth resources and technology transfer efforts to establish Landsat data analysis capabilities in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. The collection is arranged in six series that reflect the administration, programs, and records related to these earth resources survey applications projects, as well as the activities of Donald E. Wilson during his career at the NASA Ames Research Center.
Donald E. Wilson began his career at the NASA Ames Research Center as a member of the Entry Simulation Team (Code ESB) in 1962. From 1963 to 1971, Wilson worked in the Materials Research Branch (Code SVM) of the Vehicle and Environment Division (Code SV) under the Astronautics Directorate (Code S). It was renamed the Materials Science Branch (Code STS) and reassigned to the Thermo- and Gas-Dynamics Division (Code ST) in 1972, when the Vehicle and Environment Division, which had supported the Apollo missions, was eliminated. During the course of his materials science research, Wilson co-authored technical reports on the thermal analysis of polymeric materials, as well as a study on low temperature cooling techniques.
Number of containers: 10
Volume: 4 cubic feet
Copyright does not apply to United States government records. For non-government material, researcher must contact the original creator.
Collection is open for research.
Collection Overview
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Arrangement of the Donald E. Wilson Earth Resources Survey Program Papers
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Applications Aircraft Support Programs Office (AASPO)
Pacific Northwest (PNW) Region
Land Resources Inventory Demonstration Projects (LRIDP) / Landsat Applications Program (LAP)
Pixel Facts Newsletter
Miscellaneous Files
Container List
I. Applications Aircraft Support Programs Office (AASPO)
1. Aircraft Earth Resources Technology Satellite (ERTS) Support
2. Land Use
II. Pacific Northwest (PNW) Region
1. Pacific Northwest Regional Commission (PNRC) Reviews
2. Technology Transfer Task Force
3. Reviews for NASA Headquarters
III. Land Resources Inventory Demonstration Projects (LRIDP) / Landsat Applications Program (LAP)
1. Washington State
2. Oregon State
3. Idaho State
4. Consortium Agreements
5. LAP Computing Systems
IV. Imagery
V. Pixel Facts Newsletter
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Kevork Djansezian, Getty Images Congrats are in order for Halestorm , who were the winners of the Grammy for the Best Hard Rock / Metal Performance at the 55th annual Grammy Awards Sunday night (Feb. 10). The full band was on hand to accept the honor during the pre-telecast ceremony, with frontwoman Lzzy Hale and her drummer brother Arejay Hale delivering the bulk of their acceptance speech. Arejay opened the speech, shocked at their victory stating, "Oh Christ, did not completely expect this." The drummer mentioned that he had written something down that was on his phone, but he mostly went off the cuff. He thanked his and Lzzy's parents, stating, "Thanks to our parents for turning us onto great music. Most parents want their kids to be doctors and lawyers and our parents encouraged us to join the circus." Lzzy Hale meanwhile dedicated the award to the "Halestorm freaks," exclaiming "Here's to us." She also shouted out fellow nominees Iron Maiden and Lamb of God , stating, "If it wasn't for your inspiration … we wouldn't have written this song and been in this category." In addition to Halestorm, the category included Anthrax 's 'I'm Alive,' Iron Maiden's 'Blood Brothers,' Lamb of God's 'Ghost Walking,' Marilyn Manson 's 'No Reflection' and Megadeth 's 'Whose Life (Is It Anyway?).' In the Grammy press room, Lzzy added, "[This] wouldn't have been possible without these people, specifically, Lamb of God. We were inspired by the guitar part … and we wouldn't have gotten into hard rock if it wasn't for Megadeth and Iron Maiden, so it's just amazing." Talking about the camaraderie in the genre, Lzzy explained, "It's an incredible genre to be a part of because rock isn't always the most popular genre. Sometimes we're underground, but we all work really hard on the road. We all look out for one another." In addition, Lzzy answered questions about the band's newfound Grammy cred, stating, "If I sit this in the back of any meetings, you know in the political business…" to which Arejay Hale interjected, "It's like, 'Oh yeah? You don't like that song? Oh, let's ask Mr. Grammy.'" Elsewhere during the Grammy pre-telecast ceremony, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross won for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media for 'Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.' Though not there in person, Reznor tweeted , "Why thanks, y'all." Black Keys also won a pair of Grammys during the opening ceremonies, taking home Best Rock Song for 'Lonely Boy' and Best Rock Album for 'El Camino.' In addition, Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach won the Grammy for Producer of the Year, Non-Classical. [button href="http://loudwire.com/halestorm-lzzy-hale-on-grammy-nomination-personal-victory-for-the-four-of-us/" title="Next: Halestorm's Lzzy Hale Discusses Reaction to Grammy Nomination" align="center"]
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Halestorm's 'Love Bites (So Do I)' Wins 2013 Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock / Metal Performance


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Snow to Come ? - Memories of Last Year's Snow, a photo by linfrye on Flickr.
1/4 Sheet
Arches 140#CP
No, no snow here, just the cold and damp following our heavy rains yesterday. Instead of white, our world is grey and only those long-clinging leaves on the oaks and beech trees give our evergreen woodlands a bit of autumnal memory.
Snow fell in our mountains, and according to 'weather signs' - like the inside of persimmons seeds, we're to have a snowy winter. I like snow -- of course - when I don't have to shovel it, when the power holds, when I don't have to go out in it. So in the warmth of my office and no snow in the forecast, I can DREAM of snow, remember it from last year, and anticipate its falling this winter.
It's been a busy, productive week - designing portions of the ethnobotanic garden, preparing a wreath as a sample for our class, year-end reports and the like. Tonight, we hold our soap crafting class - and if it goes like those in the past, it will be a late, late night --- but a lot of good, clean fun! LOL
Temps will remain cold today but the sun should be up soon ...
Hope your day is bright!


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August 02, 2018
Twenty-five years ago, the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) went into effect. The law had a transformative effect on the US workplace. For the first time, employers were required to provide covered employees with unpaid leave for medical- and family-related purposes. This meant that that working people were now able to take up to 12 weeks of leave a year to bond with a new child, recover from serious illness, or care for a child, partner or parent suffering from a serious illness without fear of losing their jobs. Since implementation, women and men have used the FMLA for leave over 200 million times. The FMLA provides greater freedom for those employees covered and remains a remarkable first step towards the goal of balancing "the needs of the workplace with the needs of families." But the law was just that, a first step.
Despite the new protections the law gave to working people, the United States continues to lag behind most other nations. In fact, we are the only country besides Papua New Guinea that offers no nation-wide paid maternity leave.
While the FMLA did give some protections to millions of working people, 40 percent of workers were left uncovered because they worked less than 1250 hours in the year or their workplaces have less than 50 employees. Many low-wage workers are challenged to choose between their paycheck and unpaid leave, especially if they work part-time. These are the workers who would benefit most from paid leave but only 6 percent of them have access to such policies.
It is increasingly clear that the US needs a comprehensive, universal, paid family leave policy at the federal level. Six jurisdictions are paving the way: California, New Jersey, Rhode Island, New York, Washington State and the District of Columbia have passed legislation creating paid family and medical leave programs. In a manner similar to unemployment insurance, workers in these states make small contributions to an insurance pool from which they can draw during their leave. This allows working people to take paid leave with little to no negative impact on the employer, as Eileen Appelbaum and Ruth Milkman demonstrate in the chart below from their examination of California's experience with paid family leave.
The Family and Medical Insurance Leave (FAMILY) Act would take the intent behind the FMLA a step further, extending the benefits of these state programs to the rest of the nation. The Family Act – sponsored by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) would give workers 12 weeks of partial income when on leave. It would be funded by employee and employer payroll contributions of less than $1.50 per week and cover all workplaces.
Perhaps in recognition of overwhelming support for paid leave policies, alternative leave proposals have emerged from more conservative corners. President Trump's February Budget Blueprint called for six weeks of paid leave. Aside from only offering six weeks, the plan's funding mechanism would draw from states' unemployment insurance programs, further jeopardizing unemployment benefits for people who lose their jobs.
The President's daughter, Ivanka, has often touted the need for paid leave in talks, briefings and hearings. But the leave envisioned by the younger Trump and Sen. Marco Rubio (D-FL) would allow people to pay for their leaves by drawing from their future Social Security benefits, thus threatening the retirement security of millions, particularly the most vulnerable. The plan would only cover new children, or 75 percent of the leaves covered by the FAMILY Act, and fails to protect workers from retaliation by their employers if they take leave.
This August 5th, we should rightly celebrate the FMLA's implementation. But we should also remember that we must aim higher until the US catches up to the rest of the world. Though legislators on both sides of the aisle are now voicing their support for paid family leave, the FAMILY Act remains the best realization of the FMLA's promise of providing truly universal and comprehensive paid leave.


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Reliv will announce the third product to contain LunaRich™ soy powder on Monday, April 16 at 10 am Central — and you can be part of the excitement! Join the conversation and share the big news via Reliv's social media channels. Then dial in to a special Monday Night Call that night featuring Reliv's Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Carl Hastings to learn how the enhanced product can benefit you and the people you know.
Stir up anticipation for Monday's product announcement with this cool new video starring Dr. Alfredo Galvez, the renowned research scientist behind LunaRich. Learn from Dr. Galvez:
- • How LunaRich improves cardiovascular health
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The actor died about 9:25 p.m. PDT Wednesday at his Las Vegas area home of a cardiac arrest, Clark County Coroner Mike Murphy said Thursday.
After a series of frivolous movies that exploited his handsome physique and appealing personality, Curtis moved to more substantial roles, starting in 1957 in the harrowing show business tale "Sweet Smell of Success."
In 1958, "The Defiant Ones" brought him an Academy Award nomination as best actor for his portrayal of a white racist escaped convict handcuffed to a black escapee, Sidney Poitier. The following year, he donned women's clothing and sparred with Marilyn Monroe in one of the most acclaimed film comedies ever, Billy Wilder's "Some Like It Hot."
His first wife was actress Janet Leigh of "Psycho" fame; actress Jamie Leigh Curtis is their daughter.
In later years, he returned to film and television as a character actor after battling drug and alcohol abuse. His brash optimism returned, and he allowed his once-shiny black hair to turn silver.
"I'm not ready to settle down like an elderly Jewish gentleman, sitting on a bench and leaning on a cane," he said at 60. "I've got a helluva lot of living to do."
He also became a painter whose canvasses sold for as much as $20,000.
"He was a fine actor … I shall miss him," said British actor Roger Moore, who starred alongside Curtis in TV's "The Persuaders."
"He was great fun to work with, a great sense of humour and wonderful ad libs," Moore told Sky News. "We had the best of times."
Curtis perfected his craft in forgettable films such as "Francis," 'I Was a Shoplifter," 'No Room for the Groom" and "Son of Ali Baba."
He first attracted critical notice as Sidney Falco, the press agent seeking favor with a sadistic columnist, played by Burt Lancaster, in the 1957 classic "Sweet Smell of Success."
In her book "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," Pauline Kael wrote that in the film, "Curtis grew up into an actor and gave the best performance of his career."
Other prestigious films followed: Stanley Kubrick's "Spartacus," 'Captain Newman, M.D.," 'The Vikings," 'Kings Go Forth," 'Operation Petticoat" and "Some Like It Hot." He also found time to do a voice acting gig as his prehistoric lookalike, Stony Curtis, in an episode of "The Flintstones."
The Definat Ones
"The Defiant Ones" remained his only Oscar-nominated role. "I think it has nothing to do with good performances or bad performances," he told The Washington Post in 2002. "After the number of movies I made where I thought there should be some acknowledgment, there was nothing from the Academy." "My happiness and privilege is that my audience around the world is supportive of me, so I don't need the Academy."
In 2000, an American Film Institute survey of the funniest films in history ranked "Some Like It Hot" at No. 1. Curtis — famously imitating Cary Grant's accent — and Jack Lemmon play jazz musicians who dress up as women to escape retribution after witnessing a gangland massacre. Monroe was their co-star, and he and Lemmon were repeatedly kept waiting as Monroe lingered in her dressing room out of fear and insecurity. Curtis fumed over her unprofessionalism. When someone remarked that it must be thrilling to kiss Monroe in the film's love scenes, the actor snapped, "It's like kissing Hitler." In later years, his opinion of Monroe softened, and in interviews he praised her unique talent.
In 2002, Curtis toured in "Some Like It Hot" — a revised and retitled version of the 1972 Broadway musical "Sugar," which was based on the film. In the touring show, the actor graduated to the role of Osgood Fielding III, the part played in the movie by Joe E. Brown. After his star faded in the late 1960s, Curtis shifted to lesser roles. With jobs harder to find, he fell into drug and alcohol addiction.
"From 22 to about 37, I was lucky," Curtis told Interview magazine in the 1980s, "but by the middle '60s, I wasn't getting the kind of parts I wanted, and it kind of soured me. … But I had to go through the drug inundation before I was able to come to grips with it and realize that it had nothing to do with me, that people weren't picking on me."
He recovered in the early '80s after a 30-day treatment at the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage.
"Mine was a textbook case," he said in a 1985 interview. "My life had become unmanageable because of booze and dope. Work became a strain and a struggle. Because I didn't want to face the challenge, I simply made myself unavailable."
One role during that era of struggle did bring him an Emmy nomination: his portrayal of David O. Selznick in the TV movie "The Scarlett O'Hara War," in 1980.
His health remained vigorous, though he did get heart bypass surgery in 1994.
Curtis took a fatherly pride in daughter Jamie Leigh's success. They were estranged for a long period, then reconciled. "I understand him better now," she said, "perhaps not as a father but as a man."
He also had five other children. Daughters Kelly, also with Leigh, and Allegra, with second wife Christine Kaufmann, also became actresses. His other wives were Leslie Allen, Lisa Deutsch and Jill VandenBerg, whom he married in 1998.
He had married Janet Leigh in 1951, when they were both rising young stars; they divorced in 1963.
"Tony and I had a wonderful time together; it was an exciting, glamorous period in Hollywood," Leigh, who died in 2004, once said. "A lot of great things happened, most of all, two beautiful children."
Curtis was born Bernard Schwartz in the Bronx in 1925, the son of Hungarian Jews who had emigrated to the United States after World War I. His father, Manny Schwartz, had yearned to be an actor, but work was hard to find with his heavy accent. He settled for tailoring jobs, moving the family repeatedly as he sought work.
"I was always the new kid on the block, so I got beat up by the other kids," Curtis recalled in 1959. "I had to figure a way to avoid getting my nose broken. So I became the crazy new kid on the block."
His sidewalk histrionics helped avoid beatings and led to acting in plays at a settlement house. He also grew to love movies. "My whole culture as a boy was movies," he said. "For 11 cents, you could sit in the front row of a theater for 10 hours, which I did constantly."
After serving in the Pacific during World War II and being wounded at Guam, he returned to New York and studied acting under the G.I. Bill. He appeared in summer stock theater and on the Borscht Circuit in the Catskills. Then an agent lined up an audition with a Universal-International talent scout. In 1948, at 23, he signed a seven-year contract with the studio, starting at $100 a week.
Bernie Schwartz sounded too Jewish for a movie actor, so the studio gave him a new name: Anthony Curtis, taken from his favorite novel, "Anthony Adverse," and the Anglicized name of a favorite uncle. After his eighth film, he became Tony Curtis.
The studio helped smooth the rough edges off the ambitious young actor. The last to go was his street-tinged Bronx accent. His diction became a Hollywood joke, as when he uttered to Piper Laurie in a medieval potboiler "The Prince Who Was a Thief": "Yonder lies the castle of my fodder."
Curtis pursued another career as an artist, creating Matisse-like still lifes with astonishing speed. "I'm a recovering alcoholic," he said in 1990 as he concluded a painting in 40 minutes in the garden of the Bel-Air Hotel. "Painting has given me such a great pleasure in life, helped me to recover."
He also turned to writing, producing a 1977 novel, "Kid Cody and Julie Sparrow." In 1993, he wrote "Tony Curtis: The Autobiography."


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Today the Contiki team announced the release of Contiki 3.0, the latest version of the open source IoT operating system! The 3.0 release is a huge step up from the 2.x branch and brings support for new and exciting hardware, a set of new network protocols, a bunch of improvements in the low-power mesh networking protocols, along with a large number of general stability improvements. This is, by far, the best Contiki release ever!
Contiki is the open source operating system for the Internet of Things, used by developers to bring low-power wireless connectivity to their products and projects. Read more about Contiki here.
Since the the previous 2.7 release, which came out in November 2013, the Contiki team has merged some 500 pull requests with new code, bug fixes, and improvements.
New and Exciting Hardware
As the wireless world evolves, so does its hardware. Recently, many new Systems-on-a-Chip (SoCs) have been released, which makes hardware design much easier, as you only need a single chip for both radio communication and control.
Contiki 3.0 adds support for two new interesting hardware plaforms: the Texas Instruments Sensortag and the Zolertia ReMote.
Texas Instruments Sensortag
The Texas Instruments Sensortag platform is exciting in many ways. It packs a whole bunch of sensors in an inexpensive package, which is great for building a quick demo and as a starting point for more tailored designs. But more importantly, it features a brand new System-on-a-Chip design called CC2650 that has a radio that supports both 802.15.4 (6lowpan) and Bluetooth, while having a lower power consumption than previous chips.
The Sensortag comes at a very nice price point of $29 per unit, making prototyping quicker and easier than ever before. The Sensortag port was developed and contributed by Texas Instruments.
Revolutionary feature: Contiki mesh + Bluetooth beacons
The TI CC26xx platform is the dual IEEE 802.15.4 and Bluetooth radio, which makes it possible to do both Contiki IPv6 meshing and Bluetooth beacons - at the same time. Bluetooth beacons can be picked up by iOS and Android apps.
This allows Contiki devices to be discovered with an iOS or Android smartphone app, without any additional hardware or software. This is revolutionary as it makes user onboarding both quicker than ever before, but also significantly more secure.
The Thingsquare platform, a commercial connected product platform that uses Contiki, use this to securely discover and authenticate nearby devices which then use the low-power mesh for data access, through a smartphone app.
A bunch of sensors
The Sensortag has an an array of built-in sensors, for which the Contiki 3.0 release adds device drivers that are ready to be used out of the box: infrared ambient temperature sensor, ambient light sensor, humidity sensor, barometric pressure sensor, a magnet sensor, and a 9-axis accelerometer and gyroscope.
Zolertia ReMote
The Zolertia ReMote platform is unique in that it provides both a 2.4 GHz SoC (TI CC2538) and a sub-GHz radio chip (TI CC1120). This makes it possible to use it both for shorter range 2.4 GHz communication and long-range sub-GHz networking. For example, in this test, the ReMote was able to achieve an impressive 3.14159 kilometer transmission range.
The ReMote platform also has a number of expansion ports, including two Phidget ports for external sensors and other devices.
(Device driver support for the TI CC1120 radio is not available in Contiki 3.0, but is scheduled for the next upcoming release. The upcoming version of the ReMote has a TI CC1200 sub-GHz radio, for which drivers will be in the next upcoming Contiki release.)
Encryption and security
Encryption and security support was always sorely lacking in the previous versions of Contiki. Contiki 3.0 brings much needed support for 802.15.4 link layer encryption with AES128, available in software for all platforms and hardware-accellerated for those platforms that support it (primarily the TI CC2538).
Read more about the encryption support here.
New Network Protocols
The Contiki 3.0 release adds support for the IP64/NAT64/DNS64 set of protocols that make it possible to connect Contiki IPv6 mesh networks directly to IPv4 networks, such as the Internet, without the need for a special translation proxy. The protocols operate directly at the IP layer to create a seamless translation between the mesh and the Internet. Alongside, device driver support for the ENC26j80 Ethernet chip has been added, to make it easy to connect Contiki mesh networks to Ethernet networks.
For application layer connectivity, support for the MQTT protocol, a new HTTP socket module, and an updated CoAP module has been added. New socket APIs for TCP and UDP sockets make network programming significantly easier than in the past.
The IPv6 mesh networking support has been massively reworked and improved. The RPL mesh routing protocol has seen many bugfixes and stability improvements. Support for new IPv6 mesh multicast mechanisms has been added. Many internal improvements to the IPv6 stack has been added.
Internal Changes
The structure of the code has seen a rework, with a new module system that makes it easier to selectively use only parts of the code. Instead of using C macros and #defines to select whether to use the IPv6 or IPv4 stack, the new module system uses Makefile settings, which makes compilation more efficient and the code easier to read.
The radio API has been updated to better match the way the radio duty cycling protocols use the radio. For example, the previous radio API lacked a clean way to set the radio channel, which now is part of the new API.
We also cleaned up a number of old hardware platforms that were not used anymore and dropped a bunch of examples that weren't relevant any longer. We also added a bunch of new regression tests to ensure the continued stability of the system.
The full source code for Contiki 3.0 is available at github.
To get started with Contiki 3.0, use the Instant Contiki 3.0 development environment, which contains all the necessary compilers and tool chains. (Warning: 3 Gb download.) Instructions for getting started with Instant Contiki are available here.
Get Involved
To get involved with Contiki, join the contiki-developers mailing list and join the contiki-os project at github!
For press inquiries, contact Adam Dunkels <email@example.com>.
Full disclosure: the author of this post is also CEO and co-founder of Thingsquare.


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Reviewer Lida Maxwell (Department of Political Science, Trinity College), introduces the book as follows:
In A BRIEF HISTORY OF LIBERTY, the philosophers David Schmidtz and Jason Brennan seek to offer a brief "history of liberty, not a history of theorizing about liberty" for a general readership (p.1). By this, Schmidtz and Brennan mean that they want to tell a story about how liberty arose on the ground and, from telling this story, teach us something about how we should understand the conditions and problems of liberty today. The authors admit at the outset that they are telling "a story of liberty" (my emphasis, p.18) and not the story of liberty. Their story, as they make clear, is a story of the rise of negative liberty, which they define as individual liberty, secured by the rule of law and property rights: "The point of negative liberty has less to do with what liberty guarantees and more to do with what liberty gives people the chance to do for themselves" (p.9). Yet they also want to make the case that securing negative liberty encourages the development of positive liberty, which they understand as the development of the capacities to live a good life through having meaningful choices about what kind of life to live. Securing negative liberty, they suggest, "has a history of enabling people to achieve positive freedom. That is to say, in (negatively) free countries, people generally have more real choice" insofar as they have "options together with the capacities to exercise these options successfully" (p.17).In Maxwell's view, this volume "may be appropriate to use in an undergraduate upper level course on theories of freedom" or "as one exemplar of a liberal view of liberty, again in an undergraduate course."
You can access the full review here. You can find another review, written from the philosopher's perspective, here.