text:
Stars turn out to salute songwriter Carole King
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Carole King's gift as a songwriter is all about connection — friends, lovers, strangers experiencing deep emotions not often exposed to each other.
Over the decades, King has made that connection with untold millions of fans. Some of those fans came out to honor the songwriter as MusiCares person of the year Friday night as part of the build up to Sunday's Grammy Awards. Among them, lifelong friend James Taylor, Gloria Estefan, Alicia Keys and Lady Gaga, who thanked King for getting her through some difficult years before she found fame as a songwriter herself.
Gaga told the crowd she used to lock herself in her father's man room as a high school student and listen to "You've Got a Friend" over and over.
"And I would crank up this song so loud," Gaga said as she sat at a white baby grand piano in the center of the room wearing steampunk sunglasses and a flowing white dress. "And I really believed so much, Carole, that you were my friend. So thank you so much for the way you sing right to us in your music."
Toward the end of the song, Gaga modified the lyrics: "You've got a friend, yes you do, Carole, I love you."
Lady Gaga earned the first of a handful of standing ovations at the annual event, a fundraiser benefiting The Recording Academy's musician-oriented charity.
A silent auction and other activities before the dinner and concert raised $5.5 million and the audience pushed that number higher before the singing started with a live auction that included $120,000 for a copy of King's landmark "Tapestry" album on vinyl with a set of lyrics handwritten by King. Zac Brown bought an Acura specially equipped in honor of the event for $70,000, and the car maker kicked in an extra $30,000 to the charity.
Estefan, a former MusiCares person of the year, sang "It's Too Late," and told the crowd "Tapestry" was "the No.1 most impactful" album she'd ever heard. Keys nailed "Natural Woman," a song most identified with Aretha Franklin, also modifying the lyrics at the end to pay tribute to King. And Train's Pat Monahan left the stage to serenade the 71-year-old singer-songwriter directly on "I Feel the Earth Move."
Many of the night's most interesting performances came from the pairing of artists. Album of the year nominee Sara Bareilles, Jason Mraz and Zac Brown joined together on a stripped-down "Beautiful." Will.I.Am was joined on stage by protege Leah McFall and added a rapped verse to King's "Love Makes the World." Miranda Lambert, Jennifer Nettles, Amy Grant and Martina McBride joined together in a medley of songs. King's daughter, Louise Goffin, and Jakob Dylan sang "Going Back." And Miguel and Kacey Musgraves dueted on "I'll Do My Crying in the Rain," a song King and Taylor performed together.
King also was in a collaborative mood. She brought a pair of Egyptian musicians on stage to add an Arabic flavor to "Home Again." Taylor joined her next, finishing the evening as a part of her band.
"As a songwriter my dream was always and still is to hear great singers perform my songs," King told the crowd. "It does not get any better than this folks."
Follow AP Music Writer Chris Talbott: http://twitter.com/Chris_Talbott.


text:
The Great Debate: Not Even a Question
Decades after the first open office launched a thousand workplace conversations, Herman Miller dives into the challenges—and opportunities—of the office of today, tomorrow, and the day after.
Written by: Eva Hagberg Fisher
Artwork by: Elena Boils
"It's both and," says Joseph White of the open-versus-closed debate that has dominated conversations about the workspace since, seemingly, time immemorial. (Though in actuality, it's just been going on for a few years.) As Director of Workplace Strategy, Design, and Management at Herman Miller, he believes in the idea of purposeful variety, a practical concept developed over decades across the organization's many disciplines—and formalized now as a key concept within what Herman Miller calls Living Office®. Purposeful variety runs across all variables—from furniture selection to color to organization to layout—and at its core is a deep and profound understanding of how people in the workplace operate, and what they need.
A timeline: First, in the 1960s, there was the corner office and rows of desks. (Think Mad Men). Then, in the 1980s, there were standardized cubicles with salespeople screaming at each other (Think The Wolf of Wall Street). And then in the late 1990s and early 2000s came the advent of the open office. (Think The Intern, in which retiree Robert DeNiro comes to work in Anne Hathaway's adaptively reused brick warehouse). The arguments, as played out in the pages of The New Yorker, Harvard Business Review, and more: the workplace needs democracy and to create democracy we need openness; the workplace needs privacy and to create privacy we need walls and doors; the workplace needs a blend of both; the workplace shouldn't even exist; the workplace absolutely should exist. The debate often led back to a few evergreen ideas; chief among them, serendipity as a driver of innovation—often exemplified by the iconic story about Steve Jobs requesting a single pair of bathrooms for the entire company be installed in the Pixar atrium so that everyone would be forced to run into each other. Pixar did end up with more than one set of restrooms, but it was Jobs's idea of serendipity that took major hold.
That idea, that chance encounters will spark the next big thing, has been a profound driver of workplace design for nearly a decade. When The New York Times building, designed by Renzo Piano in collaboration with interior architects Gensler, opened in New York in 2007, the open office became even more interconnected. The architect designed huge staircases to create space for that same kind of randomly productive run-in. Indeed, there is power in serendipity and randomness and collaboration, and architects and designers can design to unleash it. As the most successful examples show, this approach works best when it also accommodates the multiplicity of ever-changing individuals, whose own identities shift and morph throughout the workday, depending on personal stress, professional projects, and the ineffable nature of being a human in this world.
Yet much of the conversation has stalled between open and closed, instead of, as White suggests, transcending both. Leaders across multiple design firms as well as companies like Herman Miller are poised on the edge of a new frontier, one in which an unprecedented amount of attention is being given to not only the flexibility that various companies require in terms of design, but the flexibility and control that each particular individual will need. The next step is how to both accurately evaluate what workers need, and then very carefully and thoughtfully be able to provide a space in which they can take exactly what they require, and leave the rest behind—open, closed, and everything in between.
"I think we have to transcend our role as designers, and realize that there's another role that we're responsible for. We have a depth of knowledge around how people perform work, and we can codify that information on areas of design practice."
- Todd Heiser, Gensler
How does an office respond to the needs of its participants? And more importantly, how do the designers and the enterprise leaders who work with them figure out what those needs are?
These are the questions that Todd Heiser and his team at Gensler set out to answer with a gaming-inspired anthropological approach to figuring out a client's needs. Asked how he begins understanding the culture of a client, Heiser says that now it comes down to adopting a research role, and differentiates between abstractly reading a company's explicit strategy and "being really embedded in their process." As Firmwide Leader of Gensler's Consumer Goods Practice (and Contract magazine's 2016 Designer of the Year), Heiser is well aware of the disconnect between what a majority of people believe we need, versus what we actually need. "I don't think we role-play enough," Heiser says, explaining why he feels there is such a marked gap between what people believe about themselves and what is actually true. To help him and his team on a recent project, he asked his clients to track what they actually did, not what they thought they did. The results were illuminating. The participant who said he couldn't get his work done if he was interrupted one more time by his coworkers? It turned out, once he kept track, that he was being interrupted an average of 57 times per day by the pinging of his phone, not his coworkers whom he had thought were behind his distractions. Even the most ruthless self-documenter might skip recording those five minutes of staring into space, or the seemingly 30 seconds of scrolling and liking on Facebook that actually clocked in at 20 minutes. To prevent such lapses in self-examination, Heiser's team asked team members to do partner observations.
To prevent this kind of observation from feeling Big Brother-like, Heiser approached it playfully, comparing it to having a personal trainer. The process of having colleagues track each other, Heiser says, "demystifies some of that" research and observation—so central to every designer's approach—and gave everyone a sense of being in it together. "I think we have to transcend our role as designers, and realize that there's another role that we're responsible for," he says. "We have a depth of knowledge around how people perform work, and we can codify that information on areas of design practice." Instead of looking at the office as just a place to go, Heiser thinks about "the office as a tool, a series of machines or objects that actually get us someplace." His role, then, is similar to that of the tech-savvy whiz-kid who knows how all the bells and whistles on the iPhone work, except instead of an iPhone, it's an office. For his team, flexibility is key—as is the idea that design needs to be more of a "subscription," rather than a static one-time thing.
As office designers quantify and address the massive range of human experience, many are starting to bridle against the "learned helplessness" of the office, says Andrea Vanecko, a designer at NBBJ. In college, she points out, students are taught to find the work schedule that works for them. "You go to the library because you know you need to," she says. "You then go to the café because you know you need that stimulation." And then, "as soon as you go to the work world they say, 'You're going to sit in this cube for eight hours a day, and be productive, and it's going to be 73.6 degrees, and that is going to work for you eight hours a day.'" When she lays it out like that it seems beyond draconian, but without spelling it out it's easy to see how that level of across-the-board, lowest common denominator has been absolute standard practice for decades.
The next and the most ideal office environment, according to Vanecko, "can be far more fluid because people will know how to use it." She talks about a project she and her team worked on for Starbucks, who sought to expand capacity without expanding their footprint. In the beginning, she and her team showed the client traditional team areas: "a bunch of desks and right next to them are a couple of focus rooms and a project room." And then they jumped to the next level, and bundled the huddle rooms and team rooms into one area, collecting all the "dynamic and more flexible environments together," and then introduced private areas to line the perimeter. And there, instead of desks, "there are big library tables," that three people can share. Vanecko's distinction is in having a more careful mix of standard and non-standard office furniture so that workers can begin to understand the cues and realize that a really nice wood library table, even if it isn't in a totally silent space, is enough of a design cue that people will stay quiet and focused while sitting there.
"It's completely secluded the way it's laid out," she says. "It's organized so you really do feel private."
Designer Betsy Vohs of Minneapolis-based Studio BV takes a deeply psychological approach partially informed by her sister, psychologist Kathleen Vohs' research on depletion. Workers end up using self-control throughout the day to deal with distractions and interruptions, leaving them emotionally depleted and unable to make simple decisions by the end of the day.
Vohs (the designer) has sought to understand exactly what tires people out and how to reduce the number of tiny distractions and decisions they need to make, so they can truly focus on the work at hand. Her design work is about how to minimize ultimately distracting thoughts while still maximizing flexibility—so that the privacy hound can have total silence, while the natural collaborator can find her people. "People don't change every three years, but their business is constantly changing," Vohs says. "What is the box going to be to you now, and what is it going to be in five years?" The crucial factor for her, then, is embracing "the flexibility of these roles and the volatility of people's business," and using the work environment "to overcome and create a safe space for those things to happen." For Vohs, that flexibility comes in modularity and adaptability of the tools: furniture, movable walls, adaptive technology. And resisting decision fatigue comes in having thoughtful designers show each worker the possibilities and the ropes, and gently nudging them towards what will truly be the best spatial organization.
"People don't change every three years, but their business is constantly changing"
- Betsy Vohs, Studio BV
With Living Office, Herman Miller unites this ongoing dialog around how designers and furniture makers can understand and support workers' needs with decades of its own research and knowledge leadership. Living Office provides a systematized framework for making sense of the complexities of modern work life through a customized "discovery process" that ultimately enables the creation of places where both individual people and companies of any size can prosper.
But how to figure out what people actually need? Living Office provides organizations and their design partners with a practical and effective way to understand, prioritize, and support these needs within their own unique contexts. Through a process of research and observation, Herman Miller has identified six fundamental human needs that exist across all people and all organizations—a kind of human operating system that we all run on. These are: achievement, autonomy, belonging, status, purpose, and security. The fundamental human needs are the baseline, but Living Office also takes into account the purpose, character, and activities that are unique to each person and organization, and that's where flexibility—and purposeful variety—comes in. Through this codified system that synthesizes the big picture with the little ones, Herman Miller has increasingly been able to address those ephemeral and hard-to-capture individual habits of the kind Todd Heiser picked up on.
By thoughtfully applying this framework to office design, organizations and their design partners can transform place from an overhead expense to a strategic business asset, helping a company to drive goals and business priorities. In other words, the design ultimately helps serve a greater purpose than simply housing people during the workday.
To illustrate the point of purposeful variety, White brings up the power of biodiversity, in which each plant and animal plays a specific role in a larger ecosystem. In other words, a truly innovative company needs both the people who thrive on seven hours of heads-down work, and those who can't stand a moment of silence, and everyone else who falls somewhere in between that spectrum. And it needs a design that's flexible and varied enough to accommodate for all of them.
Living Office also provides an understanding of how and when to deliver the intended support for individuals and groups through a flexible offering of settings in which to work. White points out that many workers haven't been given any options for so long that "when a wide array of open and closed options are offered, some people don't really know what to choose."
He sees part of Herman Miller's mandate as deeply understanding different working styles in order to synthesize and provide individual guidance to each customer. Once designers and workers can understand how important both autonomy and belonging are, for example, then interventions like Vanecko's line of library tables ringing that central Starbucks team space makes perfect sense. Design can be used to create context for human interactions and provide cues for intuitive use in other ways: by differentiating visual privacy from acoustic privacy, and total silence from a low and soothing hum of background noise. Or by using color as a way of drawing someone's focus inward (as cooler colors tend to do) or engaging them with a more energetic vibe (as saturated hues do). White also points to the use of materials—slick, shiny, and hard versus soft, supple, and plush—as a way of instilling cues that people begin to automatically understand.
"It's our responsibility to take our clients down this new path of being more self-aware,"
-Andrea Vanecko, NBBJ
With so much flexibility and personal choice coming down the design pipeline, will people continue to go to the office? White points out that without both solo time and group interaction, "you're not going to be a healthy human or a helpful collaborator." He and the team at Herman Miller have found it useful to think of workplace independence and interaction like an accordion—a constant "flexing apart and then coming back together, and it's just continuous, going back and forth."
More than that, Vanecko says that counter to the trend of the last 10 years, in which "companies sent people home to save real estate costs, I think companies in general have gone the other way to say, 'No, we really do want a headquarters; no, we want to make sure we're bringing people together to comingle in an environment intentionally.'" Physical place holds the heart of an organizations culture. Without it, our needs cannot be fully supported as individual members of a collective whole.
All of this raises a fundamental issue: Does the person control the environment, or does the environment control the person? We're reaching a new level, one never before seen in the world of contract furniture and office spaces, where we are realizing that what needs to drive the next generation of office design is a total synergy between person and environment, and between the depth of what a person believes she needs versus what she actually needs.
"It's our responsibility to take them down this new path of being more self-aware," Vanecko says. She has been working with clients to produce designs that they can grow with. "How do they keep track? How do they grow with furniture?"
As it turns out, the reason we need to control our environment is precisely because it controls us. "People have so much control over things that five years ago didn't exist," Vohs says. "We're trying to figure out, How do we give people control back and how is the environment designed to empower you to make those decisions?" Once you give people control, Vanecko predicts that you'll start to get that elusive metric of productivity. "I think it's an opportunity to rejuvenate the soul of the company," she says of expanding the depth and breadth of the conversation around workplace environments.
Ultimately it comes down to always asking the next question, rather than getting stuck in a debate that's really beside the point. The notion of privacy, for instance, is one that has come up in thousands of conversations about office design, and yet the designers we spoke to pointed out that "privacy" has become a substitute word for "quiet" or "concentrated focus"—styles that don't actually require privacy, which is a much deeper philosophical notion. What we need may be an hour or two of quiet, or it may be silencing our phones so that, as Heiser's example shows, we don't get interrupted 57 times and then blame it on our coworkers, or it may actually be an energizing and stimulating change of scene that ramps up our brains and puts us into a 25-minute burst of creative excitement.
And so the answer is to offer solutions that better meet the needs of whoever's using them (even if that means altering them), but that still exist within the framework established by an organization's design partners. "Companies can't provide 7,482 options per floor when they have a million square feet of real estate," Vanecko says." But some manufacturers, including Herman Miller, are creating options that are closer to a kit-of-parts than an entire system. Then you have something closer to "here are these 14 components and each of them actually can be used three different ways," as Vanecko says. "So now you have all these variations and then the scenarios that they're in are even more extensive."
The trick is to have a deep understanding of how people actually operate and what they actually need—those six fundamentals worked out by Herman Miller—and then how to offer a purposeful mix of variety in surroundings, furnishings, and tools so that each company, no matter how large or small, no matter how flexible or focused, can use the environment in a way that is thoughtfully controlled, and at the same time gently nudges its inhabitants in exactly the direction in which they need to grow.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
November 27, 2009
Google Calendar Sneak Preview
"We're working a new feature that makes it easier to schedule events with guests. The new event page will include a calendar right next to your guest list, so you can see when people are free," explains Google.
"Sneak preview" helps you schedule events and it lets you find a better time for an event using drag and drop.
{ Thanks, Keith, Melle and Owen. }
31 comments:
Thanks Nice Post Thanks Google :DReplyDelete
Thanks Google...ReplyDelete
I think you guys are doing a great job. If you have not done so already I believe the authors of this blog should become Google Ambassadors. As Google Ambassadors you can freelance all that you know and continue to learn through the program. It starts next week but the Blog and group are already open. http://googleambassadors.blogspot.com/ReplyDelete
Great Google. Keep it up. Thanks.ReplyDelete
This is really a very nice feature. I have tested it and the experience has been very nice.ReplyDelete
good feature, anything that makes life easier is a good..ReplyDelete
I don't really thinks it's better :)ReplyDelete
We can create event in main calendar after that edit it right there.
About guest's calendar , we can do at main calendar too :)
Google always comes with new idea.ReplyDelete
Great Feature.
We've created some videos about how to use these new features here - http://www.youtube.com/user/ditollc#p/c/E610D83D3D83A6EDReplyDelete
Google is "Previewing" so many things right now. And, it sounds like it would be a very useful feature although at the same time it just seems as though it wouldn't be used all that much by the average person. I am hoping that Google begins to focus on completing 1 or 2 projects to their fruition.ReplyDelete
I turned on the sneak preview and now everytime I try to edit an existing event in my google calendar it takes me to the sneak preview screen and will not let me edit ANYTHING. If I try to click on go back to the old version nothing happens. Does anyone have any idea how to fix this. I rely on google calendar everyday and this is getting very frustrating.ReplyDelete
this is great feature. Microsoft also include this in their new outlook 2010ReplyDelete
Personally I don't like it, won't use it, and have no need of it... AND I'd like to get rid of the "sneak peak" notice as well. Very few other people I know actually use Google calendars & I don't schedule meetings often. So this is an unnecessary intrusion into an otherwise perfect calendar system.ReplyDelete
If I wanted Outlook, I'd use Outlook. Keep that in mind, please.
One other thought... why wasn't this just added as a Labs item? That would make it oh so much easier for those that want it to enable it and those that don't to get rid of it.ReplyDelete
Please enable Tasks to be shared with Calendars. This would be a REALLY useful feature, evidenced by the many forum posts to this effect!ReplyDelete
Would be great to be able to sync with Blackberry via bluetoothReplyDelete
I'm having the same problem Courtney is having. How do I turn it off?ReplyDelete
If you open your Google Calendar in Mozilla Firefox you can turn that feature off. If you don't have Firefox you may have to install it but it definitely fixed it on mine!
And now it's gone! How am I supposed to change meeting times if I can't see what times are available without closing the meeting and going back to the calendar?ReplyDelete
How do I turn it back on???
I too would like to turn this feature back on in Chrome or Firefox. Please post how to. Thanks.ReplyDelete
- AnonymousMarch 25, 2010 at 3:19 AM
I have inadverteanly switched it off and now cannot turn it back on.ReplyDelete
Any tips on how to switch the sneak preview back on?
- AnonymousMarch 25, 2010 at 4:43 PM
aaaahhhhh it's gone for me too. I'm already missing it!ReplyDelete
- AnonymousMarch 26, 2010 at 7:03 AM
i want it back!!!!ReplyDelete
- AnonymousApril 5, 2010 at 4:04 PM
same here, I want it back!!! Please tell us on how to tell "Sneak Preview" back on; It's really really useful!ReplyDelete
- AnonymousApril 13, 2010 at 12:37 PM
I know you gave us ample warning that it was going to go away. But now that it's gone, I realize how much I use it (as a Google Apps user). Please let us continue to use the sneak preview and do your improvements in the background!ReplyDelete
I want the preview back! this stinks not having it!!!ReplyDelete
- AnonymousMay 18, 2010 at 11:42 AM
Sneak preview was indeed very useful. Hope you bring it back soon! Any idea of when it will be back up?ReplyDelete
- StuartMay 20, 2010 at 6:53 AM
We anxiously await the return of the improved room and resource service, with whatever tweaks you're doing to it. It's so much more user-friendly for our users.ReplyDelete
OK - I get it... 'the sneak preview has ended.'... could you PLEASE get this message off of my screen please? There seems to be no way to tell it not to show this message again.ReplyDelete
Any time I edit an event, I see the message.
yes I cannot get rid of that message eitherReplyDelete
is this something that my employees can use internally....just curiousReplyDelete


text:
No Products in the Cart
For fans of The World According to Humphrey, Obi's newest escapade is taking her into uncharted territory— the classroom! Obi the gerbil just has to know if she is Rachel's favorite pet. She'll do anything to find out—even if that means going to school as a stowaway in Rachel's backpack. She quickly finds that there's a lot to learn as she is thrust into a world filled with stampeding children, a secret society of class pets, and a whoopee cushion. Worst of all, Obi becomes trapped in the school overnight! With the same wits, determination, and bravery that make her first two books so appealing, Obi the Jedi gerbil's humorous adventures continue, peppered with the same comical cartoon illustrations that make each page a delight.


text:
SEC Issues Risk Alert and Investor Bulletin on Investment Adviser Custody Rule
Washington, D.C., March 4, 2013 —
The Securities and Exchange Commission today issued a Risk Alert on compliance with its custody rule for investment advisers and it also issued an Investor Bulletin about the rule, which is designed to protect advisory clients from theft or misuse of their funds and securities.
The alert by the SEC's Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations (OCIE) comes after a review of recent examinations where significant deficiencies were identified showed custody-related issues in about one-third of the firms examined. The advisers' deficiencies included:
- Failure to recognize that they have custody, such as situations where the adviser serves as trustee, is authorized to write or sign checks for clients, or is authorized to make withdrawals from a client's account as part of bill-paying services
- Failure to meet the custody rule's surprise examination requirements
- Failure to satisfy the custody rule's qualified custodian requirements, for instance, by commingling client, proprietary, and employee assets in a single account, or by lacking a reasonable basis to believe that a qualified custodian is sending quarterly account statements to the client.
In addition, for advisers to audited pooled investment vehicles, the examinations found some failed to meet requirements to engage an independent accountant and demonstrate that financial statements were distributed to all fund investors.
"Because the safeguarding of assets is central to investor protection, it is critical that investment advisers follow our rules when they maintain custody of their clients' funds," said SEC Chairman Elisse B. Walter.
"We take deficiencies in this area very seriously and want to put advisers on alert about the importance of complying with the custody rule," said OCIE Director Carlo V. di Florio. "It is a key component of our investment adviser examination program."
The alert notes that the recent findings of custody deficiencies have resulted in a range of actions. These included remedial measures by advisers, such as drafting, amending or enhancing their written compliance procedures, policies or processes, changing their business practices, or devoting more resources or attention to custody issues. OCIE's National Exam Program also has made referrals to the SEC's Division of Enforcement where appropriate.
The bulletin by the SEC's Office of Investor Education and Advocacy (OIEA) describes the requirements of the custody rule, including the requirement for custodians to send account statements to investment advisory clients at least every quarter. The bulletin notes that even though the custody rule provides enhanced protections to investors, it is not a substitute for investors' own oversight and monitoring of their investments.
"Investors should always ask questions — including questions about the custody issues discussed in this Investor Bulletin — when considering an investment," said OIEA Director Lori Schock. "Asking questions and monitoring investments are key ways to protect yourself from investment fraud."
* * *
To be notified about new Risk Alerts or Investor Bulletins via email or SMA/text message, subscribe here.
When selecting subscription preferences, click the box by "OCIE Staff Letters and Risk Alerts" under the heading "Industry Guidance and Information."
For Investor Bulletins, click "Investor Bulletins" under the heading "Information for Investors."


text:
Let's be honest: many of us watch reality television to fulfill a voyeuristic need to peer into other people's lives, and perhaps to feel better about our own. The staggering success of Bravo's Real Housewives franchise would seem to prove this, just as the cable channel's reality shows tap this universal human need within the context of competition.
We've seen pastry chefs break down about Red Hots, fashion designers make competitors' mothers cry (Project Runway's Jeffrey Sebelia, we're looking at you), but the drama has perhaps never seemed quite so real or the participants quite so tortured as the artists on Bravo's highly addictive Work of Art, currently airing its second season Wednesday nights at 9 p.m.
Work of Art, from executive producer Sarah Jessica Parker (who occasionally glides down from fairy-godmother heaven to make an on-camera appearance or two) and the Magical Elves (the producers of Top Chef and many other reality shows), purports to be about the search for the next great artist, but it's actually about having creative types jump through ever-tightening hoops as they're made to mesh their individual styles with a series of artistic challenges designed to break them down. Art, as well as inspiration, after all, takes time, so being forced to create functional renditions of street art or pop art using a limited window of time while cameras are filming your every move isn't exactly a true estimation of the creative process.
But that's also where the unexpected habit-forming quality of Work of Art emerges, as it's impossible to look away from this show. While the erudite, artsy angle may turn some viewers away, this is perhaps the most revealing reality-television show to come along in some time.
While it follows a similar reality-TV format as Top Chef or Project Runway, Work of Art takes the audience on the same sensory journey as the judges'. Unlike on Top Chef, where the dishes can't be tasted, here you have the same experience of discovery as the panel (which includes noted art critic Jerry Saltz and gallery owner Bill Powers), as the finished product is digested in roughly the same fashion on your television set as it is in the gallery. It empowers the audience.
That aside, it's the zaniness of the contestants that make Work of Art such an engaging nonguilty guilty pleasure. Last year, outsider Miles ejaculated on his assignment in order to add his "essence" to the piece. This season, self-proclaimed "supervillain" The Sucklord (né Morgan Phillips), a vainglorious nerd god with a penchant for using childhood icons and action figures in his art, was revealed to be little more than a kid in hipster's clothing, when Saltz told him to stop using Star Wars toys and create his own world. (He was largely undone, ironically, by a challenge in the Nov. 2 episode, in which he has to re-create a child's artwork. Taking his toys away from him renders him unable to cope or create.)
Bratty Lola—whose mother, we're told, once dated Al Pacino—unwittingly re-created her own childhood experiences by fulfilling the role of Mean Girl, putting stickers on competitor Kymia's artwork in what she claimed was an expression of street art's "naughtiness." (Incidentally, Kymia, between breast-bearing incidents and crying jags, co-created a stunning piece of art depicting a family uprooted by a homogenized bureaucratic presence.) Kathryn, a sufferer of IBS, recycled imagery of bloody intestines until she was reduced to a sobbing, gasping mess during the judges' critique. (It was this show's equivalent of "The Red Hots were for my mommy!" from Top Chef Just Desserts.) Michelle, a survivor of a hit-and-run incident, unsurprisingly utilizes morbid imagery in her work, but she was recently only too willing to draw tiger penises and surreal scenes of imagined debauchery with her cohort Lola, landing them both in the bottom in the challenge on the Nov. 16 episode.
It's these moments—the artists in front of their critics—that provide Work of Art with a sharp crackle, even more so than similar showdowns on Bravo's other reality programs. While these are inherently tense, awkward situations, Work of Art makes these critiques intensely personal, given how much the artists attempt to put of themselves in their individual pieces. (Taking that to an extreme, Season 1's Jaclyn only seemed to be able to create art when it included photos of her naked breasts.) Mental breakdowns (such as Kathryn's) are de rigueur here, as are teary remonstrations, pleas for leniency, and arrogant defiance, as well as brutal honesty on the part of the judges, who are only too willing to share their harsh assessments.
Even when the art is lackluster, there's pleasure to be had from seeing just what judge Powers (known to rock some awesomely vivid green shoes on occasion) and host China Chow will be wearing each week. Powers's eclectic style has informed his wife Cynthia Rowley's recent menswear collection, while Chow shows up each week wearing something provocative and often head-scratching: a dress sculpted in the shape of a swath of paper for the New York Times newspaper challenge, or a white sheath dress that she then invited contestants to spray-paint on in the latest episode. Chow isn't the most expressive host (she appears to have audited a class or two at the Katie Lee Joel School of Reality Show Hosting) but her quirkiness and willingness to engage with the contestants (she giggled heartily as The Sucklord spray-painted nipples on the white canvas of her dress) gives the show an additional layer of unpredictability.
Additionally, Work of Art has given the artists a mentor in renowned auctioneer Simon de Pury, a gleefully energetic and winking presence who resembles a sharply dressed (the double-breasted suits!) and slightly dotty Swiss noble with an encyclopedic knowledge of fine art and a bottomless well of enthusiasm. His catchphrases—among them, "Go for it!," "Mmmm, yes," and "Be bold! Be brave! Be amazing!"—may not have the same weight as Tim Gunn's purred "Make it work," but these have nonetheless become European-accented bons mots all the same.
And, every now and then, Work of Art has been known to produce an actual work of art. For every failed project, like Bayeté's church doors or The Sucklord's overtly obvious oil-dripping money sculpture, there is a sensational piece of art that is shocking and provocative. These twinklings of genius give the show some artistic heft, and most typically these are when the contestants start focusing less on competing and more on the actual work, unloading themselves emotionally, politically, or psychologically. (Or, in the case of the aforementioned Miles, physically.) I'm thinking of the genuine instances of self-activation, such as when Michelle transformed a piece of "bad art" into The Eternal Woodsman, a mixed-media display of painted statue, cloudy backdrop, and a skeleton, sculpted entirely out of paper, of a woodsman crawling to his own grave.
Heady? Yes, but it's also a moment of truth, something Simon de Pury would celebrate. (I can just see him excitedly jumping up and down, brightly colored spectacles in his hand.) Boldness is the watchword here, both in terms of the artwork on display and Work of Art itself. It might not be museum-quality, but as populist art, this show is aces.


text:
Fillet Polyline
The Fillet Polyline (FP) command allows you to quickly draw a radius blend (i.e. fillet) at all corners of the polyline. In Autodesk® AutoCAD® there is the existing _Fillet command, which even has the _Polyline option, i.e. theoretically can fillet all corners of a polyline at once, but this command is unreliable. This is a feature required by users, especially those who want to prepare the contours for milling and want to see how the round cutter passes in the corners. For the inlay of the milled parts into each other, and for the luminous letters in the walls, it is also necessary to fillet all the corners, otherwise, the parts simply do not fit into each other. This plugin is intended for everyone who faces these problems.
Features of the program:
- Fillet corners between arcs and lines
- Fillet all the corners of the polyline from the side of the cutter passage or from both sides.
- Fillet a corner between two pre-selected polyline segments. Moreover, the segments do not have to be contiguous, and you can skip the chain of segments.
- The program will increase the radius of all too small arcs of the polyline to the given one.
- The program itself can skip too obtuse angles.
- The small trash segments of the polyline at the corner will be absorbed.
- Original contours can be saved if you want.
- The program will show on the command line how many fillets are made, how many corners are missing and how many failed to fillet.
- The program has common settings with all my CNC contour processing commands
- You can switch between "CNC styles" (sets of settings) directly from the command line while selecting objects.
- Outside Loop (OSL) and CNC Prepare (NCP) commands can call the FP program themselves.
The FP command is also included in the A>V>C> Pro pack.
Próbaverzió leírása
You can download and use the program for free, but the activation window will periodically appear. If you donate $10, you can turn off this window.
Verzió 2021.12.03, 2023. 03. 29.
Added 2024 support.
0 értékelés
értékelés írásához jelentkezzen be Műszaki segítségnyújtás


text:
Fujitsu today is a dominant market leader in its sales of document scanners, With a well-known reputation for reliability
and an extensive experience of 18 years. Fujitsu scanners are manufactured to the highest quality standards. Its continuous
rigorous efforts in R&D have produced scanners with the latest advanced technology, and this has helped Fujitsu maintain its
leadership position in today's competitive environment.
Kodak's Document Imaging business is the industry's leader of innovative document capture products, software and services.
Kodak has the broadest portfolio of document capture products, software, capture-based solutions, and service and support
to provide the most easy to use, accessible, scaleable and affordable solutions for its customers to better capture, manage,
archive and deliver critical business information.
Kodak Service and Support enables businesses to maximize technology investments by protecting and extending their lifespan through
reliable products, comprehensive service and support through "one-call-does-it-all" capabilities to give customers a single source
for all of their service needs on a global basis.
Kodak has the widest service network which covers more than 100 cities across India. Service and support is available for
Mumbai, Delhi, Lucknow, Raipur, Chennai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Goa, Ahemedabad, Vadodara, Amritsar, Jaipur, Nagpur, Bhubaneshwar, Trivendrum and many more cities across India.
High speed, ease of use and efficient. Reliable, versatile and super-fast high-performance desktop scanning for busy offices.
Robust, top-of-the-line model for high speed, high volume document scanning.
Ultra-compact, streamlined network scanner with touch screen.
Canon has pioneered in 'imaging' technology which drives Canon's cutting-edge technology products. With over more than 200 registered
patented technologies in scanners. Canon has emerged as one of the leading technology innovators in the digital imaging space worldwide.
HP's high quality scanners meet your every scanning and imaging need whether for home or for office use.
The HP Scanners are reliable document scanners offers a larger array of scanning choices than most of the units.
HP scanners allow you to select searchable PDFs as one of your scanning options and send electronic files to cloud or desktop storage.
Brother We ScannerWorld (A division of Alchemist Softwares Private Limited) authorised partner for Brother International (India) Private Limited for
all range of products.
For more than a century, Brother(bold) has won recognition as a brand synonymous with delivering product innovation and
customer satisfaction. Founded in 1908, Brother is now a leading brand that produces quality innovative products for
the print and imaging, labelling and sewing markets. Key products include Scanners, laser printers, Multi-Function Centres (MFCs),
fax machines, labellers, label printers, and a wide range of home and industrial sewing machines. A trusted brand worldwide
that believes in the "Customer First" approach in all aspects of our business, Brother has continuously met the varied needs
of our customers through our comprehensive range of quality solutions.
Brother International (India) Private Limited operates with fully integrated sales, marketing and service capabilities.
Brother H.O. is Located in Mumbai, with sales office in major cities in India. we work with authorized distributors across India.
Brother International (India) Private Limited's parent company, Brother Industries LTD. Japan is a multinational company
with sales in over 100 countries, operations in over 30 countries, with state-of-the art ISO 14001, 14002 and ISO9001
certified factories in Japan, Taiwan, China, Korea, Malaysia, and the UK.
Brother Industries Limited's commitment to cutting-edge technology, state-of-the art innovation and design has been acknowledged by several
awards for product excellence awarded by independent bodies such as PC Magazine, Windows Magazine, PC Quest,
and many others in Asia –Pacific, Europe, United States of America and the Middle East.
� 2010, Alchemist Software, All Rights Reserved.
Designed by Alchemist Software Pvt. Ltd.
Home | Products |
Expert Guide | Scanner Demo |
Download Drivers |
About Us |
Contact Us |
Privacy Policy


text:
The pool of online data analysis services available for corporate users is about to grow larger, with HP set to offer two of its own, key products as hosted cloud services by early next year.
The company's high-performance columnar database, Vertica, will be available as a hosted offering starting early in 2015, as HP Vertica OnDemand.
The company will also offer selected functions of its IDOL (Intelligent Data Operating Layer) text processing software as discrete services that can be embedded into mobile and desktop computing applications, in a package called IDOL OnDemand, already available to selected developers.
The new services "are the next significant steps in our big data strategy," said Jeff Veis, HP vice president of marketing for the company's new big data business unit. The company announced the new offerings at its HP Discover Barcelona conference held this week.
Like its on-premises counterpart, HP Vertica OnDemand provides a way to quickly analyze very large tracts of structured data. The service is designed to manage terabytes of data. A Vertica database can be set up online within 30 minutes, and can easily accommodate 10 terabytes in a single implementation, Veis said. "It has a huge focus on simplicity and ease-of-use," he said. "You can get up and running very quickly."
HP Vertica OnDemand comes with a number of built-in analysis tools. Veis noted that the company will offer a range of pricing models, based on either the amount of data stored or the amount of data queries executed, starting at US$999 per month. The company will also offer a version of the service that can be accessed as a virtual private cloud service, for organizations with highly sensitive data.
While Vertica OnDemand was designed for deep and quick data analysis of structured data, IDOL OnDemand is aimed more at Web developers who may want to harness some of IDOL's text analysis and processing functionality for their own apps. The service is a set of APIs (application programming interfaces) culled from the core IDOL platform that can be called from external applications. IDOL offers services such as image analysis, format conversions, text analysis and search capabilities.
HP started quietly testing IDOL OnDemand earlier this year and thus far has attracted over 5,000 developers.
The data processing and analysis services fall under the company's HP Haven OnDemand line of data processing services. All these cloud offerings run on the company's Helion OpenStack-based portfolio of cloud infrastructure software.
As with IBM, Microsoft and most other large IT companies with a focus on enterprise software, HP has been vigorously setting up cloud services based on its software portfolio, offering customers either the ability to purchase the software to run on premises or to run the software as a service from HP's data centers.
HP's plan to break into two separate companies next year will help its efforts to gain a foothold in the emerging market for enterprise cloud computing services, wrote Technology Business Research analyst Cassandra Mooshian in a report on HP's latest quarterly results, issued last week.
With a greater emphasis on the cloud, HP Enterprise is expected to be able to more quickly ramp up new offerings and will be able to work with a wider array of technology partners, which will be essential given the heterogeneous array of technologies that customers prefer for the cloud.
HP faces some stiff competition in the arena of data analysis services. Microsoft is launching a set of machine-learning APIs for its Azure cloud service. IBM continues to aggressively commercialize the technologies built around its Watson cognitive computing technology stack. Google has also commercialized its own software for analyzing terabyte-size data tables, in a service called BigQuery.
HP's new OnDemand services are one of a number of product updates that the company is announcing at its Barcelona conference.
The company is updating the HP ArcSight ESM (Enterprise Security Management) software to handle big data repositories -- the new HP ArcSight ESM 6.8c will be available in January. HP has released a new bundle for content management, one that combines HP StoreAll, HP ControlPoint, HP Records Manager and HP Haven analytics for managing the full lifecycle of corporate information.
HP also announced that it will start incorporating Chef, a popular open source IT automation software, into its HP Datacenter Care line of technology integration services, potentially providing a way for customers to more quickly and reconfigure their IT resources.


text:
With the estimated 510 million live websites at last year-end, and 280,000 new ones being added every day, the biggest challenge for an entrepreneur is to get found, and get some credibility for a new startup. I can attest from experience that publishing a regular blog to properly showcase your brand value, even before you have it, is a most cost effective approach in time and money.
The biggest excuse most startup founders mention is too much to do building a product, mapping strategy, investors, etc. For blogging to work, you need to do it consistently and frequently, at least once a week, or the value evaporates. I know that finding time is hard, and good writing is simply not what most people do. But here are some key reasons for giving it a priority early:
You can validate the need and your solution before spending money. Too many entrepreneurs spend big money on development, only to find out that the solution isn't quite right. Feedback from your blog will tell you quickly whether anyone agrees with your assessment, and whether you have a customer base waiting.
Find potential partners. Most of the people you would want as co-founders are now cruising the relevant blogs for ideas and partners. It's a great way to find like-minded people, and get a dialog going. From a networking standpoint, it's a lot more efficient than going to seminars and other industry events.
Populate your team. Smart potential employees are also reading blogs to stay up-to-date in their field, and find the new leaders. More and more, employees work for people they respect, rather than companies. Take the initiative to put yourself out there. Of course, ultimately you want employees who can blog for you and your company as well.
Cultivate early customers. It's never too early to start a dialog with customers, as long as you don't mislead them about where you are in the cycle. Build your brand and get leads today. There's also the opportunity to do some consulting with interested customers to provide needed revenue while the product is still under development.
Build your credibility with investors. A blog is an excellent vehicle to meet investors, before you are ready to ask them for money. You will also learn about competitors, who can't resist responding to a well-written blog. Once you gain real traction as an expert in your space through the blog, investors will put you at the top of their funding list.
Hone your communication skills. Writing a blog is all about communication, and that's your number one job as founder of a new startup. Trying to write something down for someone else to understand quickly, will tell you if you really understand it yourself. Even if you use a ghost writer for your blog, the briefing process will enhance your skills.
Your Google ranking will go up dramatically. Whereas Google and other search engines may take two or three weeks to list your new website in search results, new blog sites and new blog entries are indexed every day. From comments, you will accumulate external links both into and out of your site, and get additional ranking from Google.
Since a startup by definition is not a recognized brand, you are the brand, based on the social media culture of today. People assume your startup is real, if they see real people, and they will attribute credibility to your startup, based on your own credentials and the quality of information you offer through your blog. No person and no blog puts your startup at the bottom of a long list.
The best part is that all this is not a revenue drain. The major blog platforms, including WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad are free, and can be linked directly into an existing domain name to consolidate your overall SEO impact. In fact, many people are now using WordPress as their base website, as well as their blog. This eliminates even the standard site hosting fees.
Business blogging, or value-blogging, is all about helping others and helping yourself at the same time. I wonder how many of the high percentage of startups that fail in the first five years don't have a blog? What's holding you back?
Marty Zwilling


text:
Energized Bundle
- Regular Price
- $27.00
- Sale Price
- $27.00
- Regular Price
- Unit Price
- Translation missing: en.general.accessibility.unit_price_separator
Match your favorite sleeve with an official GS headband and save money while being dripped out head to hand. Each bundle comes with 1 sleeve and 1 headband.
Sleeve Sizing
Large fits most. Small and Medium recommended for youth and people with smaller builds. Chart available in product pictures. Compression gaming sleeves should contain a comfortable stretch for a good fit.
Headband Sizing
We only offer Large. This size is designed for adults.
Minimize Friction and Drag
Our optimal blend of polyester and spandex allows your arm to effortlessly flick across your gaming setup without getting caught on the edge of your mouse pad or desk. The only thing you need to worry about is hitting those epic trick-shots and clutching those crucial 1v5 moments.
Improve Aim and Consistency
The compression applied by gaming sleeves help facilitate blood flow and mitigate muscle fatigue during a 12 hour grind fest with the squad. This keeps your arm fresh longer, while allowing your physical body to keep up with the fast signals your eyes and brain are sending.
Gamer Sleeve uses 4-way-stitching in all of our sleeves. So, regardless if you're moving side to side or up and down you'll never experience any decrease in speed and dexterity. Additionally; many gamers find their forearms getting stuck to their desk and irritating their wrist. Gamer Sleeve gives you that added protection to truly make your gaming experience as comfortable as possible.


text: 1933 Troop 48 Cabin By Mark 4 years ago Continue ReadingPrevious 1933 Troop 48 CabinLeave a Reply Cancel replyYour email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *CommentName * Email * Website Notify me of new posts by email. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.


text:
A "grrrl" is a strong and independent young woman who is comfortable with her sexuality.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Word of the Gay: "Grrrl"
Posted by Queers United at 12:00 AM
1 comment:
- Snooker said...
That's the way of the Grrrrrl!
- September 14, 2009 at 3:02 AM
Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)


text:
UHV education professor, museum pair for 'Look, Think, Do' books
|Jill Fox, left, a University of Houston-Victoria education professor, shows one of the "Look, Think, Do" activity books for fourth-graders that she produced with Lisa Brimberry, education coordinator at the Museum of the Coastal Bend.
By fourth grade, many children view simple coloring books as "not cool."
But a partnership between a University of Houston-Victoria education professor and the Museum of the Coastal Bend at Victoria College combines art, science, math and more to spur an interest in the area's colorful history.
|An illustration of an American Indian boy helps students think about math, history and art.
"Look, Think, Do" books are being created by Jill Fox, a UHV School of Education & Human Development professor, and Lisa Brimberry, the Museum of the Coastal Bend's education coordinator.
"I'm having such a good time with this," said Fox, who specializes in early childhood education. "Being new to the Coastal Bend area, I've learned so much. I've seen what a resource the Museum of the Coastal Bend is to the community."
The idea for the books came after a visit by Brimberry to an area city's museum in which coloring books were the only thing offered for fourth-grade students. Brimberry and Fox decided to team up to offer something more demanding.
"One big challenge at any museum, and one of our goals, has been to develop activities that are cross-curricular," Brimberry said. "Teachers who bring their students here on field trips want activities like that, and we are doing our best to work with them."
One of the lessons from the first book, "Early People of the Coastal Bend," shows an American Indian child using an atlatl to help throw a hunting dart. Children use math skills to gauge how much the atlatl can improve the velocity and distance of the dart.
"We targeted fourth-grade students with exercises that began with history but quickly became interdisciplinary, adding math, language arts and science," said Fox, who also serves as director of assessment in UHV's newly created Office of Institutional Effectiveness, which oversees accreditation efforts.
Museum Director Sue Prudhomme said more than 2,500 fourth-graders visit the museum each year. To offset some of the printing costs, the partnership has applied for a grant to pay for printing of the books. For now, the "Look, Think, Do" books are self-published, but Prudhomme hopes to find an education publisher in the future.
"If the grant comes through, we would like to give them to every fourth-grader who visits the museum, as well as make them available for purchase in our museum store," she said. "We view them as a true educational resource for classrooms and parents."
The books focus on the museum's permanent exhibits. The first book is followed by one about explorer Robert Cavelier de la Salle and Fort St. Louis, the first French settlement on Texas soil. A third book will be about the South Texas cattle boom, a museum exhibit that will be on display through December 2012.
Two local authorities also pitched in with advice. Bill Birmingham, a steward for local archaeology efforts, and Dennis Riedesel, a UHV associate professor of education who specializes in increasing student achievement, offered advice on text and format.
Each book begins with an introduction for both children and adults, followed by sketch pages with information and blank pages for taking notes or doing activities.
Fox's drawings are used throughout the book, another skill she picked up recently and has enjoyed using. She began drawing only five years ago as a hobby when she took a drawing class.
Brimberry said children are used as subjects in illustrations, where possible, to help young learners relate to what they are studying.
"There were children at Fort St. Louis," Brimberry said. "When those at the fort were massacred by the Karankawa, some of the children were adopted by the Indians. When the Spanish came over about a year later, they searched for the children, but some of them had lived with the Indians so long they had forgotten how to speak French."
Fox, who came to UHV in fall 2010, also has learned much about the area's history in researching the books.
"The project is a wonderful example of collaboration between the entities and its people," Prudomme said. "We have great minds and enthusiastic spirits working together."
The University of Houston-Victoria, located in the heart of the Coastal Bend region since 1973 in Victoria, Texas, offers courses leading to more than 80 academic programs in the schools of Arts & Sciences; Business Administration; and Education, Health Professions & Human Development. UHV provides face-to-face classes at its Victoria campus, as well as an instructional site in Katy, Texas, and online classes that students can take from anywhere. UHV supports the American Association of State Colleges and Universities Opportunities for All initiative to increase awareness about state colleges and universities and the important role they have in providing a high-quality and accessible education to an increasingly diverse student population, as well as contributing to regional and state economic development.
Ken Cooke 361-570-4342


text:
The Fine Art of the Manhattan
Guest blog post #2 from author Dustin Cann @dustincann
I'm a big fan of wine, I really am. I love the way it can be so complex, yet so simple. I love the way it smells and the way it can make great food even better. But when I'm on the road, there's absolutely nothing that centers me after a long day better than a well-made Manhattan. See, I spend a great deal of my time bouncing between my home in Memphis and client sites in cities like San Francisco, DC, Detroit, as far away as India. And in the world of a road warrior, you have to accept a certain degree of mediocrity. Yes, my status with airlines, car rental companies, and hotels means I get upgraded more often than not. Yeah, I get to hit restaurants and bars that would be a bit pricey for me to frequent on my own dime. But I spend a lot of time on planes, breathing re-circulated air and drinking Skyy+Coke Zeroes with filthy ice next to some schmuck who thinks I'd rather talk about his sailboat than just close my eyes and rest only to spend my days navigating client politics and compromising the ideal for the realistic. Any more insight and we're running the risk of therapy, and my therapist wouldn't appreciate that. Back to that Manhattan.
A properly made Manhattan is apparently a tough thing to accomplish. It's the balls-out quality of one of these beauties that often makes me appreciate them even more than the finest of wines. In recent years, bartenders all over the world seem to have either forgotten how to make them right, or become timid in a world where vodka is the preferred cocktail base and sweet beats bitter.
The process itself is rather simple. Start with a chilled martini glass. A tumbler or a highball won't encourage the right circulation or allow it to open up right. So you splash a bit of sweet red vermouth in your glass and spin it around a few times. Now dump it out. That's right, dump it out. I'm indulgent like that. I like the RUMOUR of vermouth, not vermouth itself. Next, add a dash of bitters, preferably Angostura. This is the part that a lot of modern bartenders are afraid of. "Bitter is bad, right?" Wrong. Bitter is character. Bitter is tangible. Bitter is the magic. Skimp on this, and you've just got some sweet whiskey. A Manhattan you do not have. So, bitters to about the 1/6th mark. We're doing this by feel, not by measure.
Now for the whiskey. Rye whiskey. Not bourbon, please. I'm not snobby here, so Jim Beam is fine. I'll take finer, but in a Manhattan, I'd prefer Jim Beam to a Kentucky bourbon or *gasp* scotch. New Yorkers had access to rye whiskey when this drink was born, and that's the way I like it. I want it slightly cool, but not cold. Add your whiskey to your glass that's already flirted with vermouth and felt a bit of bitterness. Fill it to just over the ¾ mark. Any more and you're being greedy (and you'll probably commit the sin of spillage), any less and I feel ripped off.
Now add two little ice cubes, one if it's large, and stir. Gently. We're not tumbling this sucker, lads and lasses. We're being soft. You don't want to bruise the spirits, just to mix them and cool it down a bit. Pull out the ice cube(s) with a slotted spoon and add a lemon twist. Prepare to be impressed.
A few common misconceptions (some may call them preferences, but my way is the right way, I assure you):
- Some bartenders make this in a mixing glass and strain into your martini glass. But a gentle mix in the glass is sufficient and clean and requires a level of class and patience not found in the mixing glass. Remember, I'm talking about the perfect Manhattan, the one that lets me clear my head and simply appreciate it. So make it in the glass, and take your time. It's sexier that way.
- Traditional Manhattans are garnished with cherries, not lemon twists. Okay, true. But if you walk into the average bar, a cherry in your Manhattan is all but guaranteed to bring with it a heavy vermouth hand and a light bitters hand. A bartender who gives you a twist knows how to balance properly. Or they're out of cherries, which is a different story altogether.
- There are theories that a lime rim is okay. It is not. Not at all.
Manhattans aren't for everyone. They're not meant to be a fast drink, so take your time to enjoy them. And a lot of barkeeps don't get them right. But there's nothing more opposite of dry dirty air and a bad airline cocktail. And there's no glass of wine that can make me appreciate an artistic bartender or a timeless recipe the same way.
About the Author
Dustin Cann is a traveling business consultant (39 trips in the 52 weeks of 2009) who loves his work, but would rather be a rock star. He's a foodie and an appreciator of both haute cuisine and pub food. When he's home, he plays around in recording studios and relaxes on the lake with a blind pug called Honey. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee with his partner of eight years and almost surely needs to drink fewer Manhattans.
Tags: Guest Blogger, Non-Wine
15 comments on "The Fine Art of the Manhattan"
Joshua S Sweeney
You know, I have never had a Manhattan before. I'm anxious to give one a try now. As long as it's done right, of course.
"There are theories that a lime rim is okay. It is not. Not at all."
And I'll take that advice to heart.
Pingback: uberVU - social comments
Your recipe sounds KILLER, I'm so making one of these tonight. But seriously, I can appreciate that cocktails don't always need the top shelfy-shelf booze, but what are some other Rye whiskies that you would recommend? I love my bourbon, I'm starting to appreciate the nuances of scotch, I don't know jack about Rye.
See Josh, I do read better after 2 cups of coffee, at least I didn't say, wow your really channeling your bartender today!
Cheers mate, love the guest bloggers!
Joshua S – you simply must remedy this immediately! In fact, where are you? I'll come mix one up for ya right now!
Josh W – Thanks for having me, sir. It was a pleasure. Looking forward to being your periodic "non-wine" guy!
Your eloquence & poetic words regarding the humble Manhattan makes me realize that it is a far superior & underrated cocktail. I prefer mine garnished with bacon.
Pingback: Tweets that mention The Fine Art of the Manhattan | Drink Nectar -- Topsy.com
I've heard of this, yes. Michael is teasing me, as he knows well that I'm currently hunting desperately for just such a cocktail in San Francisco! He's my go to vino aficionado in Memphis. (http://midtownstomp.blogspot.com, in the spirit of community building!)
Michael – glad you dropped by. You'll love Josh's blog!
speaking of rye
I love love Sazerac rye
Hi Brian!
Sorry for the late response, spent a lot of the last few days in the air!
I like rye whiskeys in mixed drinks. They've got bold spicy and fruity characteristics that hold up to the mix a little betteer than most scotches and bourbons (which I prefer neat of with a drop or two of water to open them up).
Here's a pretty good list of brands to experiment with: http://www.mindspring.com/~mccarthys/whiskey/rye.htm
I recommend buying a few of those adorable little sample bottles to see what you like. Have fun!
Michael – word.
Pingback: Moscow Mule and Memories | Drink Nectar


text:
One of the difficulties employers face in defending wage and hour lawsuits alleging "off-the-clock" work is how to prove a negative. The employees say, "We worked during our lunch breaks," (for example), and the employer says, "No they weren't." The trick, however, is how to prove that negative.
Could social media provide some help? If employees are posting to Facebook, Twitter, etc. at time during which they claim to have been working, can an employer argue that the posts help establish that the employees could not have been "working" during those times?
In Jewell v. Aaron's, Inc. (N.D. Ga. 7/19/13) [pdf], the employer attempt to make that exact argument. To help prove its claim that the employee-class members did not work through their lunch breaks, Aarons sought an order compelling the production of the plaintiffs' social media activities "during their working hours."
Despite the limited nature of the request to "working hours" only, the district court still rejected this request:
Even though certain social media content may be available for public view, the Federal Rules do not grant a requesting party "a generalized right to rummage at will through information…." Defendant has not made a sufficient predicate showing that the broad nature of material it seeks is reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence…. The exemplar evidence of Kurtis Jewell's Facebook activity does not persuade the Court that the Facebook postings will show, contrary to Plaintiffs' claims, that they were not forced to work through their meal periods. The Court agrees with Plaintiff that whether or not an opt-in plaintiff made a Facebook post during work may have no bearing on whether or not the opt-in plaintiff received a bona fide meal period may have no bearing on whether or not the opt-in plaintiff received a bona fide meal period…."
If this employer was merely guessing that there might exist something useful in the plaintiff's Facebook account, I would have a easier time understanding the Court's belief that the employer was fishing. This employer, however, was relying on actual time-stamped examples from the lead plaintiff's Facebook profile [pdf].
I applaud this employer's attorneys attempted creative use of social media to defend this wage-and-hour claim, and am troubled by this Court's unfair hamstringing of that effort.


text:
No arrests have been made connected to the Playstation outage, Kotaku has confirmed, despite a story making the rounds that claims FBI and others have issues warrants and made arrests.
Speaking to the FBI this morning, Kotaku confirmed there have been no arrests in the U.S.
The story, which seemed to first pop up on website Gamesthirst, claims that the FBI are looking into the case, issues 40 arrest warrants for members of Anonymous in America and that some members of the hactivist group were already arrested in the UK.
The story bears a striking resemblance to a press release sent out by the FBI in January about their investigation into Anonymous, spurred by the group's distributed denial of service attacks on U.S. companies.
That release begins:
"FBI agents today executed more than 40 search warrants throughout the United States as part of an ongoing investigation into recent coordinated cyber attacks against major companies and organizations. Also today, the United Kingdom's Metropolitan Police Service executed additional search warrants and arrested five people for their alleged role in the attacks."
In that case, Anonymous publicly claimed responsibility for the attack. While Anonymous initially called for an attack on Sony, they've since said they were not responsible for the outage. Of course, the leaderless structure of the group could mean that an off-shoot of the group is responsible.


text:
My generation of comics fans had a reading list. In grade school, we dug Chris Claremont's S&M take on the X-Men and reprints of Jack Kirby's Fantastic Four. When we were 12, we picked up Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, and Maus, which dealt with the things 12 year olds think of as adult, like fascism, the military industrial complex, and the Holocaust. In either our senior year of high school or freshman year of college, a friend turned us on to Neil Gaiman, Adrian Tomine's short stories, and, because it's fun to see Betty Boop actually have sex, reprints of the Tijuana Bibles. A teaching assistant in a public policy class assigned Joe Sacco's Palestine, which came with a foreword from Edward Said. There were a few other milestones that brought our interests into the literary mainstream, like Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Art Spiegelman's September 11 New Yorker cover, Fun Home, as well as two novels, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. We had always kept copies of Eightball next to our issues of Granta. Now the rest of the world does the same.
The roster of Drawn and Quarterly — Lynda Barry, Kate Beaton, Chester Brown, Daniel Clowes, Julie Doucet, Jason Lutes, Joe Matt, Joe Sacco, Seth, James Sturm, Jillian Tamaki, Adrian Tomine, and Chris Ware — represents at least a quarter of this high-art, high-literary comics renaissance in the Anglophone world. This summer, the Montreal-based independent comics publisher released a 776-page anthology in celebration of its silver anniversary, Drawn and Quarterly: Twenty-Five Years of Contemporary Cartooning, Comics, and Graphic Novels. It's a fun book, filled with old and new work by the house's artists and appreciation essays from scholars, fellow travelers, and novelists.
A publisher's anthology of its own work will be a hagiography. That's okay. There are other places for brutal criticism of comics. The mainstream press is learning to develop a more discerning eye towards the form, to not declare every new graphic novel by a semi-famous artist a groundbreaking innovation. The Internet has many take-down podcasts. D&Q's anthology reads like a high school yearbook, complete with scrapbook-level photographs. The personal essays describe career changes that are more interesting to their authors than to their readers. With that said, the book also provides an important service. The initial phase of the comics renaissance is over, and the publication of this anthology offers an opportunity for understanding what defined D&Q, what we readers were looking for in comics throughout the past 25 years, and what we are looking for now.
Chris Oliveros, the founding editor of D&Q, was smart, industrious, and he had an excellent eye for talent, but there were others before him. Fantagraphics had been around for awhile when Oliveros started his project and it published The Comics Journal, an exuberant and angry forum for comics journalism and criticism. Fantagraphics's premiere artists, Los Bros. Hernandez, were Latino children of the punk scene. Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly edited RAW. Robert Crumb, Peter Bagge, and Aline Kominsky-Crumb edited Weirdo. Alison Bechdel and Howard Cruse had homes in the niche gay press. There were places for ferocious comics creators who told stories other people weren't telling, but those spaces were limited. D&Q was a welcome addition to the comics world.
D&Q began in April 1990 as a black-and-white comics anthology. It fit the standard newsstand magazine size at 8.5″ x 11″. It was 32 pages long. It had a glossy cover. In its first issue, Oliveros, who was then in his early-20s, called for higher standards for the comics medium and lamented the "private boys' club" that characterized the comics industry. The manifesto set a tone for what the company eventually became.
The magazine's sales were based on the "direct market," comic-book specialty stores which would buy the magazine on a non-returnable basis. It was the most economically viable option at the time, but it also limited the magazine's reach. Soon after the first issue of the anthology, Oliveros started publishing single-artist comic books. In a few years, the original anthology magazine went to color and D&Q found inroads into Virgin Megastores (which have disappeared from North America), Tower Records (which are all now gone), and pre-monopoly Amazon. Oliveros started compiling serialized stories in quality paperbacks and hardcovers and published stand-alone graphic novels. Storeowners didn't quite know what to do with these comics, how to sell them to the people who read literary novels. Peggy Burns, a publicist at DC Comics, came to D&Q in 2003 and in 2005 she negotiated a distribution deal with FSG. The people who published Jonathan Franzen also worked with Adrian Tomine, which was as it should be.
The essays here claim D&Q treats its creators well. D&Q allows its artists to do what they want to do, letting some of them design their books in meticulous detail, determining paper type, size, and printer quality. They are book-makers at heart. D&Q's artists are good to their fans. They get to know them at conventions and spend a long time inscribing their books with cartoons during signings. The audience who reads this anthology has probably also read the major popular comics histories of the last few years and it knows that a comics publisher that allows creators space for their genius, doesn't force them to hire a lawyer, and doesn't populate its staff with misogynists is a special publisher.
No one agrees why D&Q was so good. The testimonials contradict each other.
Jason Lutes, the author of Berlin and Jar of Fools: "They were the kind of comics I was hungry for — taking a cue from the precedent set by Art Spiegelman's RAW magazine, but stepping out from under the influence of the American underground, which had overshadowed so much of 'alternative comics' up to that point."
TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe on his introduction to D&Q: "From then on I only wanted to read and make 'underground' comics, watch and make 'underground' films, listen to 'underground' music, and basically soak up anything that seemed even a little bit subversive."
Anders Nilsen describes the publisher's "quiet, understated commitment to quality work."
It's not always clear who is on the inside and who is on the outside, what is dangerous and what is just new. Those contradictions define D&Q.
Let's start with Kate Beaton, who uses the comic-strip format and her naïve style to take down the myths of Western high culture. In her appreciation essay, Margaret Atwood writes, "Let she who has never drawn arms and a moustache on a picture of the Venus de Milo in her Latin book cast the first rubber eraser." In one of Beaton's parodies of The Great Gatsby, our hero complains that the green light gives him seizures. Beaton's work isn't that subversive. A hip teacher would hand that strip to her students. She would smile when her students told her the strip is better than the corresponding passage in the book. Atwood goes on, "Of course, in order to burlesque a work of literature or an historic event, you have to know it and, in some sense, love it — or at least understand its inner workings."
In the early '90s, Adrian Tomine was a prodigy scribbling away at his grim mini-comics and taking notes from Oliveros by mail. His work has grown more somber and mature through the years and now he is a master of narrative in different permutations of the comics form. Françoise Mouly describes the "handsome, stripped-down aesthetics" of his New Yorker covers, which "form a paean to the poignancy of daily life in the big city." The moments he captures in these covers are pregnant with ambiguity, and he "finds the humanity of a small town within the big one." His stories depict human beings who struggle with their own mediocrity. Tomine's work is even-keeled. The lines are careful. The page layouts and panel organization don't invite any confusion. He has a gentle, classical style and he can bring you just to the edge of tears.
Jonathan Lethem describes Chester Brown as a "citizen of the timeless nation of the dissident soul, as much as Dostoevsky's underground man. At the same time, he's also a citizen of a nation of one: Chesterbrownton, or Chesterbrownsylvania, a desolate but charged region he seems to have no choice but to inhabit." Brown's subjects veer between the respectable and the borderline subversive. His best-known book Louis Riel is now a staple of Canadian public schools. Paying for It is a memoir of his life as a john. The anthology includes "The Zombie Who Liked the Arts," a tale from 2007 about a zombie's infatuation with a human female. These are stories about lonely men, a would-be revolutionary who fights madness, and lovers who dislike their own bodies. Brown's connection to the underground may be less tenuous, but unlike the folks at RAW and Weirdo, unlike Fyodor Dostoevsky for that matter, he doesn't hide his polish.
Are these books threatening? In his 2005 book Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, Charles Hatfield noted that the appeal of the comix underground in the 1970s required the medium of the traditional comic book itself, and the ironies that involved using a medium associated with the "jejune" to discuss illicit, "adult" topics. "[T]he package was inherently at odds with the sort of material the artists wanted to handle, and this gave the comix books their unique edge." I don't know if the packaging still matters in the same way, if the placement of Tomine's mature, sad stories within the firm pages of a graphic novel causes such a disjuncture.
My special edition of Julie Doucet's exploration of sexual insanity Lève Ta Jambe Mon, Poisson Est Mort! comes complete with a lithograph of a nude belly dancer on the frontispiece and a rave review from ArtForum on the jacket cover. Sean Rogers describes Doucet's "beguiling forays into an untrammeled imagination, rich with fantastic displays of menstrual flow, severed unmentionable body parts, and inanimate objects forced into service for pleasure." Doucet is one of D&Q's more anarchic writers and it may be true that this finely crafted hardbound edition cannot contain her sexuality. But I don't know if it's any more scandalous to read Leaves of Grass or Portnoy's Complaint in a Library of America edition.
The packaging of these books matters for other reasons. Eleanor Davis, the author of How to Be Happy, explains why:
Loving a book containing prose is like loving a cup filled with a wonderful drink: the cup and drink are only connected by circumstance. Loving a comic book is different. The content and the form of a comic are connected inextricably. The little autonomous drawings are held tightly in the pages of the book the comic is printed in, and they cannot get away. When you hold the comic book, you hold those worlds. They are yours.
Drawn and Quarterly publishes extraordinary comics. And because they are an extraordinary company they know to make extraordinary books for these comics to live in.
It's not irony that makes the fine hardcover editions of Beaton, Tomine, Brown and Doucet so good, it's the craftsmanship that marries the content comfortably with the medium, a craftsmanship that understands that a small, standard, novel-size hardcover is appropriate for the spare intimate melancholy of Brown's I Never Liked You, and that a large, flat, Tintin-like edition is appropriate for the grim fantasy of Daniel Clowes's The Death-Ray. The various forms of packaging in D&Q's catalogue simply offers an added texture to each of their creators' distinct voices.
After 25 years, the D&Q artists' formalist methods, their wry sense of humor, their careful delineation of human emotions, their firm grasp of the comic book/graphic novel as a medium have become not just familiar to comics readers but also the standard for quality comics. Their content, for the most part, is not shocking, and even the subversive voices are much less threatening now than they were before. Brown's discussion of prostitution is no more provocative than Dan Savage's. Doucet's frank discussion of female sexuality was more shocking in the early '90s than it will ever be again. These artists were never revolutionaries. They were never reactionaries either. They are Burkean liberals of the comics form.
For all its self-congratulation, the anthology does have a sense of humor about itself, the comics industry, and comics celebrity. The book contains a new story from Jillian Tamaki about a D&Q intern who finds fame and fortune after Oliveros fires her for writing a blog post critical of the company. It includes a handwritten note from Spiegelman to Oliveros declining the editor's request. "I'm a big fan of Julie's work and I can probably be bullied into giving a quote but would appreciate being left off the hook only because I've had to write so many damn blurbs recently. I dunno." The book begins with a short strip by Chester Brown, "A History of Drawn & Quarterly in Six Panels," which depicts Oliveros's advance from youth to middle-age. In the final panel, Oliveros stands alone on a cold, quiet Montreal street.
Oliveros is retiring this year. Peggy Burns, the publicist who moved to D&Q from DC Comics, will now head the company. This anthology stands as a monument to Oliveros and what he accomplished. He discovered extraordinary talent, he widened the audience for non-superhero comics, he created a minor Canadian institution, and he published forgotten comics that would otherwise have been left to the archives. (D&Q has a secondary role as an NYRB Classics of comics, publishing reprints of vintage American comics creators like John Stanley and translations of classic foreign artists and writers like the Finnish author Tove Jansson.) With those accomplishments behind him, the message of Brown's strip is ambiguous, but I take it to be this: The comics industry doesn't really change anything. Most of the world is indifferent to your work just as most of the world is indifferent to poetry. This art form of comics will not bring you any closer to enlightenment and it will not bring you any great happiness. It won't bring you any misery either. Comics makers and comics readers will grow older and come a little bit closer to death, the same way they would if they followed another vocation or indulged in another pastime.
Some of D&Q's comics may have educated a few minds, but most of the publisher's craftsmen embrace their own irrelevance. When I was young, I read Maus, Watchmen, and The Dark Knight Returns because they were about mass death, because they were strange, because they treated violence in a way that I thought was real. I still have them on my shelf and thumb through them now and again, but their appeal has changed. Watchmen, I realize now, is a comedy. The Dark Knight Returns is pretty funny too. Maus is as much about the horrors of the present as it is about the horrors of the past. I read Beaton, Brown, Tomine, and the rest because, in every well-placed line, in every well-told joke, they remind me that monotony has its own pleasures and comics don't have to be important.


text:
This comprehensive manual covers many different ways to preserve a wide variety of fruits and vegetables. It provides detailed instruction on drying, freezing and canning methods, along with tips and recipes to suit almost any taste, whether you prefer your preserves sweet, sour, dilled, pickled, peppered, reduced to syrup or fermented. It presents an illustrated guide to key preparation methods (blanching, quick-cooking, hot-packing, cold-packing and fermenting) and preservation techniques (refrigeration, freezing, infusing, drying and canning), each with clever tips, suggested ingredients and storage advice.
It also offers more than 160 recipes, listed by main ingredient so you can easily look up an array of choices for nearly anything you happen to have a lot of, from apples to watermelons. A practical resource, whether putting up traditional favorites such as tomatoes, beans and cucumbers or experimenting with lesser-known specialties such as mushroom confit, drunken cherries or salsa verde.
Softcover, 7 1/2" × 9", 303 pages, 2010.


text:
Transportation and Land Use
Useful Links
- Land developers information center
- Access management regulations
- Land use permit regulations
- Secondary street acceptance requirements – Chapter 382
- Traffic impact analysis regulations – Chapter 527
- Local / state plan and program consistency – Chapter 729
- Transportation efficient land use and design
- Land Development Inspection Documentation Best Practices Manual
- LandTrack - VDOT's review of Chapter 527 traffic impact analysis studies on proposed land development.
- VDOT Coordinating Transportation and Land Use Planning Forum
Legislation and Regulations
During the 2012 session, the Virginia General Assembly approved legislation directing local comprehensive plans to include elements from state plans and programming documents and for VDOT to review the transportation plan sections of locality comprehensive plans.
Information on this requirement is contained in the "Local/state plan and program consistency" link above.
Also, during the 2011 session, the General Assembly approved legislation directing the Commonwealth Transportation Board and VDOT to revise access management regulations, the secondary street acceptance requirements and the traffic impact analysis regulations. These are all implemented by VDOT.
The revised regulations became effective Dec. 31, 2011.
Major 2011 changes to the regulations: VDOT Land Use Regulations presentation
If you have questions or comments regarding the regulations, email firstname.lastname@example.com.
The planning and construction of new highways and transportation improvements affects existing land uses and plans for future development.
Types and pattern of development influence and impact travel patterns and demand for transportation facilities.
In Virginia, land use is the prerogative of local governments, while transportation decisions are generally made at the state level.
Improving the coordination between transportation and land-use planning is essential for ensuring mobility throughout the commonwealth.
VDOT works with various stakeholders to develop and implement regulations to improve the coordination between transportation and land-use planning in Virginia.
The goal of the regulations and informational resource is to provide a balanced and efficient transportation system for citizens of the commonwealth.
- Robert W. Hofrichter firstname.lastname@example.com


text:
Are you looking for a PhD studentship in political science, linked to the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and focusing on participation and learning in ecosystem management? Then have a look at the ad below. The student will be based at the Department of Political Science (Stockholm university), supervised by Andreas Duit, and will be embedded in a research team that consists of Lisen Schultz (systems ecologist at the SRC), Örjan Bodin (systems ecologist at the SRC), Cecilia Lundholm (educational scientist), Matthew Plowey (GIS student) and Simon West (PhD student in Natural Resource Management).
Applications are due on December 1st.
The Department of Political Science, Stockholm university, announces an externally funded PhD studentship in comparative ecosystem governance.
Project title
GLEAN — A Global Survey of Learning, Participation and Ecosystem Management (http://www.statsvet.su.se/English/Research/glean.htm)
Project description
The PhD-position is funded by the research programe GLEAN — A Global Survey of Learning, Participation and Ecosystem Management, which is financed by the National Science Council and directed by Associate Professor Andreas Duit.
The programme is hosted by the Department of Political Science in collaboration with Stockholm Resilience Centre and is carried out by a cross-disciplinary research team during the period 2012—2016.
The GLEAN project, in which the PhD project will be embedded, aims to analyse the effect of stakeholder participation in natural resource management programmes on outcomes in ecosystems and learning processes.
By combining a cross-national panel survey of BR-areas in 55 countries, longitudinal biodiversity mapping using satellite imagery, and context-sensitive field work in strategically selected cases studies, the contested role of stakeholder participation in natural resource management will be examined in with a much higher degree of precision and generalizability than previously possible.
Criteria for selection
Applications will be assessed based on the following criteria:
– analytical ability (scientific reports, papers, or degree project thesis)
– practical experience and knowledge related to the project
– knowledge of scientific theory and method
– personal references and gender equality aspects
Eligibility requirements
– completed academic degree at advanced level
– completed courses equivalent to 240 Swedish university credits (of which at least 60 credits at advanced level), or have acquired the equivalent knowledge in another way in Sweden or elsewhere. There are some regulations regarding transition.
For further information on eligibility criteria, application process etc please see http://www.stockholmresilience.org/21/about-us/vacancies/phd-studentship-in-political-science.html


text:
- Availability: All ready stock
- Material: Imported Titanium Steel
- Plating: 18k Rosegold: non-allergenic & durable
- Size: Bracelet diameter- 5.7cm
- Closure: Secure with hinge closure
- Style: Minimal stylish with elegent design
- Occasion: Suitable for casual outing, daily wear, dating, dinner, party
- Color: Available in rosegold only
- Packaging: YOUNIQ premium gift box - suitable as gift
YOUNIQ offers premier titanium ETERNAL series by offering the finest selection of delicate 18K rosegold plated titanium bracelet. When it comes to personal accessories and gifts for their loved ones, we always want the quality which is why our products are all hand-crafted, made from the titanium at the best prices available.
What is Titanium Jewelry?
1. Hypoallergenic
Our titanium jewelry pieces are hypoallergenic. The metal is not prone to discoloration and will not cause any allergic reaction, skin irritations or discomfort. It is absolutely safe for those who suffer from nickel allergy.
2. Strong and Durable
Our jewelry pieces are made of alloy & titanium. Knowing that jewelry will be a part of your daily routine, we've made sure to use an alloy that will keep our titanium pieces in shape. They will also stay flawless over time.
3. Affordable
Being a metal used in industrial applications, titanium may seem expensive. However, titanium jewelry is actually affordable. We have also have basic designs with cubic zirconia.
Basic Care Instructions for Jewelry
We recommend that customers remove jewelry before going to bed or participating in physical activity. Exposure to certain harsh chemicals or environments will result in compromising the integrity of your jewelry. This includes, but is not limited to the following: perspiration, perfumes, cleaning agents, chlorine, salt water, and silver polish.
Cleaning Your Jewelry
Pour a small amount of mild soup into lukewarm water and use a small, soft toothbrush to clean your jewelry. Toothbrushes are idea for cleaning jewelry with intricate details, which can otherwise be difficult to clean. If the dirt is hard to remove, soak the jewelry in clean water. A jewelry-polishing cloth is a great tool to make your jewelry shine again if the pieces have become dull. However, it will not remove scratches. Jewelry-polishing cloths may be purchased from any of your local goldsmith.
What's in the box:
- 1 x YOUNIQ Romans 18K Rosegold Titanium Bangle
- 1 x YOUNIQ Premium Gift Box