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In his novel The Heroes of Henley's Woods, Mike Worden recalls one memorable Warren summer filled with sandlot baseball, adolescent camaraderie, and idealized mid-century innocence. Worden's portrayal of Warren — Michigan's third largest city — as a respectable community where people raise families and live quietly, cleanly, and safely would probably resonate with most Warren residents. Like many of the bedroom communities sprawling from the Detroit city limits, Warren is a city of remarkable homogeneity; its citizens are very much the same in social status, income, education, and, most glaringly, race. More than ninety percent of Warren residents are white, eighty percent of Detroiters are black. The contrast could not be starker.
Though they share a border (the famous Eight Mile Road), Detroit and Warren are worlds apart. The relationship between the two cities has a Cold War feel, ruled by an atmosphere of fear and suspicion on both sides. Warren grew directly out of the disintegration of Detroit's communities and industry in the second half of the twentieth century and seemed to offer people the security they felt they were losing in a failing city. As whites fled Detroit for the ordered neighborhoods of Warren, the city's reputation as a racist community grew as some residents actively, and sometimes violently, tried to exclude blacks (Sugrue 266). In his short story "Good Neighbor," Jim Daniels, a Warren native, shows how subtly this can occur when he describes the uncomfortable situation of a guilt-ridden man returning to apologize to his old neighbors for selling his home to a black man (Detroit Tales 93-99).
In his poem "Time, Temperature," Daniels describes the border between the neighboring cities:
Eight Mile Road. Six lanes wide. The long barbed shout, pale slab, sizzling fuse I didn't know a black person till I was nineteen. I could have almost shouted from my porch. (M-80 31)
"Time, Temperature" depicts the relationship between Detroit and Warren as a constant struggle: "In Detroit, it has always been a matter / of taking sides" (36). Daniels illustrates the intensity of the relationship with repeated reference to violent force: National Guardsmen arriving in helicopters during the 1967 riots, a neighbor passing out rifles in fear of the spreading violence, a liquor store employee robbed at gunpoint. Daniels' work challenges the more idyllic view of Warren and suburban life in general. For many residents, the reality of a quiet suburban life — barely eked out — is constantly endangered by tenuous employment, racial fear, and general disenchantment with what life has to offer. In "All Packed," a story about an aimless young man, Daniels shows how many in Warren face limited options, whether real or perceived. The main character, Andy, equally dreads the prospects of factory life and a college education. Unemployed, his life going nowhere, he is trying to shake the feeling that he is destined for misery by planning a move to Houston to find work. He describes his hometown: "...this street was the same as a street five miles over — Eight Mile Road, Nine Mile Road, Ten Mile Road, all the way up to 32 Mile Road. The square boxy houses, schools, grocery stores, the cinder-box bars, tool-and-die shops, and the long flat blur of factories" (No Pets 53). The homogeneity that is the promise of Warren can be suffocating and even debilitating.
The young and unemployed are not the only Warren residents who experience these feelings. In Daniels' series of Digger poems, he focuses on the life of one blue- collar family man to show the dissatisfaction and fear that, for many, is at the center of suburban living. In these poems, Daniels brashly contrasts the promise of the American Dream with Digger's working-life reality. Digger is constantly wracked with anxiety related to work, his family life is filled with antagonisms, and there is constant reference to alcoholism. "Digger's Melted Ice" ends: "Your son asked you once / why you drink so much. / Part of my job, you said." (M-80 52). Despite occasional punctuations of happiness, the poems are dominated by an overarching hopelessness and images of work and death. "Digger Thinks about Numbers," describes the workday:
Every day you're supposed to make 800 axle housings tubes. If you make 800 you sit down for the rest of the day. Some days you try to make it and do. Some days you try but the machine breaks down. Some days you break down. And every day you start back at zero like you never made those parts the day before. (Places/Everyone 52)
And in "Digger Shovels the Snow," even as he watches his daughters happily making snow angels and playing in the yard, Digger laments: "You bend down again / for that heart attack / you know will kill you" (Places/Everyone 37).
Daniels' writings on Warren are important for giving a literary voice to the white working-class population of greater Detroit. Though thematically his work is often bleak and harsh, there is hope in his honesty and his willingness to take on the tough, complex problems that have tainted the relationship between Warren and Detroit for half a century.
vJeffrey R. Zachwieja, a reference librarian at Marygrove College, is a lifelong resident of Warren, Michigan.
Daniels, Jim. M-80. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1993.
---. Places/Everyone. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1985.
Daniels, Jim Ray. Detroit Tales. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2003.
---. No Pets. Huron, OH: Bottom Dog, 1999.
Sugrue, Thomas J. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1996.
Worden, Mike. The Heroes of Henley's Woods. Mt. Clemens, MI: Gold Leaf, 1998.


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The Almaden Valley Athletic Club in San Jose, CA, introduced a nutrition program designed to provide individualized diet prescriptions aimed at disease prevention, weight loss and improving overall health and quality of life. Nutritionist and personal trainer Vesna Mardesic joined the club's staff to oversee the program.
The West Chester Area YMCA in West Chester, PA, launched a $2.5 million capital campaign to pay for its new campus in East Goshen township. The new facility, which will open in fall 2007, will be about the same size as its current facility but will feature free parking, better locker rooms and workout areas and two pools.
Life Fitness' Signature Series strength line won a 2005 Silver IDEA in the annual Industrial Design Excellence Awards. Sponsored by BusinessWeek magazine and run independently by the Industrial Designers Society of America, these awards "represent the best of the best from the U.S., Asia and Europe," according to the magazine.
Octane Fitness, a manufacturer of elliptical cross trainers, added Edward O'Connor as its new chief financial officer, and Shawn Patton as its vice president of sales. The company also moved to a new corporate headquarters in Brooklyn Park, MN, to accommodate its growth.
FitRewards, the official rewards program of IHRSA, and Retention Management have partnered to provide fitness centers with fully integrated active retention service.
The American Council on Exercise (ACE) was selected as a winner in the 12th annual National Health Information Awards. The program recognizes the nation's best consumer health information materials and outreach. ACE received a Merit Award for Best Television Public Service Announcement for its "Active Kids" piece.
Knowing that aging feet can stay pain-free and support an active lifestyle, the International Council on Active Aging has joined forces with the Institute for Preventive Foot Health and THOR·LO Inc. to launch a Web site on preventive and therapeutic foot health. For more information, visit http://www.icaa.cc/footcare.htm.
The second World Aquatic Health™ Conference attracted 231 leaders from eight countries and 33 states who participated in 40 seminars in September at the Pacific Palms Conference Resort in City of Industry, CA. Seminar sessions included research on recreational water illness prevention, health benefits of aquatic activities and effective public pool and spa inspections.
Efi Sports Medicine donated $80,000 worth of exercise equipment to Marine and Army troops in Iraq. After receiving requests from soldiers overseas who wanted to stay in shape but couldn't take bulky exercise equipment, the company sent at least 160 Total Gym 9000 exercise units to Marines based at Camp Pendleton and Army units out of Fort Carson.
The Waldo County YMCA in Maine is partnering with three school districts, local health care providers and parents to launch a new program to address obesity-related health issues, in particular the growing number of diabetic children and young adults in the county. FLASH, a community-based educational program for youth and their families, is designed to develop good eating habits, regular physical activity and media literacy, and improve self-esteem and promote positive thinking. Participants will receive a 12-week free membership to the Y and learn how to make permanent changes in their eating and exercise habits.
Lenny Silberman, the assistant vice president of program services for the Jewish Community Center, was honored as the National Youth Sports Administrator of the Year. He received the STRIVE award, which is given to leaders for their passion and commitment to help children succeed in youth sports activities. He created the Day of Caring, a Day of Sharing at the JCC Maccabi Games and has helped to improve the Israel Sport Center for the Disabled, a rehabilitation facility in Israel.
The YMCA Lamar-Dixon branch in Gonzales, LA, created a physical education program for home-schooled students. Forty-seven children from 25 families registered for the twice-a-week program. The branch is offering the classes due to the growing number of home-schooled children in the area and parental demand for a structured physical education class for the children.
SCIFIT Systems Inc. selected Randy Yost as vice president of operations. Yost will be responsible for the service and quality of the products. Previously, Yost spent 12 years with Stairmaster/Nautilus, beginning as director of materials management and leaving as the general plant manager.

subset: commoncrawl


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Aprilaire 700
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|5 Years


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There was a time when movie fans would thrill to Warner Bros., for the sake of Jimmy Cagney, or to M-G-M, for musicals; but who now would go to a picture because it was made by Universal, or Twentieth Century Fox? Most of us, as we leave the theatre, can no more remember which company produced the film we just saw than we could tell you who manufactured the hand dryer in the men's room. The exception is Pixar, the only studio whose products people actively seek out. Everyone knows Pixar.
The company has made short movies, and it used to make commercials; if you enjoyed "Ratatouille," for example, you might pause to reflect that its artistry was honed in the service of Listerine. But the crown of Pixar is its roster of feature films. The first was "Toy Story" (1995), followed by "A Bug's Life" (1998), "Toy Story 2" (1999), "Monsters, Inc." (2001), "Finding Nemo" (2003), "The Incredibles" (2004), "Cars" (2006), "Ratatouille" (2007), "Wall-E" (2008), "Up" (2009), and, in the completion of a trilogy, "Toy Story 3" (2010). The total income from these, like the lamb in "Boundin'," Pixar's Oscar-nominated short of 2003, has now bounced cheerfully out of sight, having last been seen passing the six-billion-dollar mark.
Of the eleven full-length features, eight have been eligible for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, which was established only in 2001. All eight received nominations. Six of them won, and two of those—"Up" and "Toy Story 3"—were also nominated for Best Picture, a distinction that signals a growing bewilderment not just in our prize-giving but in our choices as filmgoers. To put the matter baldly: as a frightening proportion of supposedly grownup movies have reverted to the childish, so a disarming proportion of supposedly child-friendly movies have found friends in an adult audience. Any acquaintances to whom I recommended "Sucker Punch," say, would emerge from the screening, call their lawyer, and sue me for grievous mental harm. Whereas I could pack them off to "Wall-E," with or without their children, and fully expect chocolates and a thank-you note the next morning. Pixar's canniest construction work has been to apply fresh cement between the generations; a boy whose viewing habits could not be further from his grandmother's, and whose iPod would give her a migraine, will eagerly accompany her to "Up," which is itself about the bonding of young and old. She will dab her eyes during the marriage-story that takes up the first ten minutes; he will warm to the villain's airship and the talking dog.
So what do they put in the coffee at Pixar that jacks up the average earnings of a movie to more than two hundred and fifty million dollars in America alone? The answer is to find the coffee and then smell it, and to do that you take the Bay Bridge out of San Francisco, to the orderly town of Emeryville. Almost a toy town, you might say. I arrived in early April, and, watching the trains glide and stop at the railroad station, after dark, with nobody alighting or boarding, I felt as if I were staring down at a model railway. The next morning, the streets were hushed and unjammed. The taxi passed the featureless blocks of pharmaceutical companies—Bayer, Novartis—and came to the fortress of legend. "Pixar," the iron letters above the gates read. The driver looked grim. "Welcome to the U.S. Army base," he said.
How you get a job at Pixar, nobody knows. The most reliable method is to be born there, preferably in a cupboard full of office supplies, then to sit tight for twenty years before sneaking out over Christmas and finding space at a workstation. You could apply to the effects team, say, but only if the number of doctorates you hold is divisible by three. Even the lone visitor, effusively welcomed and ushered around, is an intruder: the sticker on my lapel bore the phrase "A stranger from the outside!" Ninety-nine per cent of that is a joke—it's a direct quotation from "Toy Story," chirruped by the trio of silly green aliens—but the one per cent was menacing enough to give me pause. And, certainly, were I to stand in the atrium of the main building and cry out, "I have never even used PowerPoint! Or Excel! I am not an animator! I am a man!," retaliatory action would be swift. Special forces in yellow hazmat suits would drop from the ceiling on ropes, isolate me under an airtight dome, evaporate me, and vacuum up the remains, as they do in "Monsters, Inc.," when the sock of a human child—a menace to health and security—is found on the factory floor.
At Pixar, as in New York City, Brooklyn is the place to be. Pixar is a campus, with facilities parcelled out to different buildings, and it was decided that they should carry the warmth of real names. Brooklyn has only just opened: a calm concoction of brick and reclaimed wood, with swanlike stairways and vertical seas of glass. The scripts and storyboards will soon be written here, although how writers, of all creatures, could be housed in such a cathedral is beyond my ken. Woe betide the first person who throws his Coke against a wall. When I toured Brooklyn, the staff had not yet moved in, and Craig Payne, the senior design project manager, had been able to show people around what was, in essence, a platonic ideal—a space like an architect's drawing, unblotted by man. The previous week, one visitor had turned to Payne and said, "Thank you for ruining the rest of my life."
The idea behind Brooklyn is that Pixar employees, after a hard day at the utopian rockface, will stay around to unwind. They could, for instance, open the vast metal doors behind the fireplace, on the ground floor, which whine like the gates of Castle Dracula. (The whining isn't real. It's recorded.) Inside, a video feed is linked to a rooftop camera, which gazes westward, allowing the weary to sit downstairs and watch the changing weather over the Golden Gate Bridge. Hardier souls, meanwhile, will ascend to the open-air deck on the top floor, take a drink from the bar, and survey their domain. Below them, to one side, lies the Pixar soccer pitch, now nearing completion. On another side is the Pixar pool, and a small golden court for games of Pixar beach volleyball. And beyond that, in the West Village building, is Pixar University. Yes, there is a Pixar University: all those worries about the right choice of college for your child solved at one stroke. The only catch is that, in order to reap its blessings, students need to be at Pixar already. Once in situ, they can finish their tasks for the day, in any department of the company, and then head over to P.U. for a course in live-action moviemaking, sculpting, fencing, or whatever. "Why are we teaching filmmaking to accountants? Well, if you treat accountants like accountants, they're going to act like accountants." So said Randy Nelson, the first person to head the program, which started in 1995. He used to be a juggler.
Whether your accountant, having spent his leisure time at a life-drawing class, will now file your quarterly-earnings reports with extra zing is open to debate; but it seems to work for the folks at Pixar. According to Adrienne Ranft, a manager of P.U., "It helps them to do their job and get away from their job." Nor does the corporate nurturing stop there. As I ambled with her through the Cardio Room, the Massage Room, the Weights Room, and the Breathing Room, I began to wonder if there was any bodily function with which Pixar was not pleased to assist. Might there not be something creepy about an institution that pokes into every cranny of its workers' contentment? Is there not, in short, a dark underbelly to the Pixar state of bliss?
If there is one, it is well concealed. I found nothing but overbellies at every turn—not least in the main building, home to the majority of Pixar's workforce. If Brooklyn is a giant iPad2, this is the original, and its cavernous central hall remains the place where the buzz of ideas is most pronounced. The view from the gantry that stretches overhead looks like a still from "A Bug's Life." The hope is that, as you head toward storyboarding, you will bump into the woman from the art department whose craving for a Danish has lured her to the café, and the film on which you are both toiling will be advanced a notch as your paths intersect. This is not a new notion but the retooling of a used one: any Roman schooled in the pullulation of the Forum would feel right at home here, and the six-foot sculptures of Woody and Buzz, made from Lego, would, I'm sure, strike him as a decent substitute for the Arch of Augustus. Every age deserves its monuments.
The funkiest parish in the building is where the animators, a hundred and twenty in number, dwell, and where their fancies are encouraged to sprout. Each den is decorated in accordance with the whim, or the exotic id, of its occupant; thus, one has a Tiki theme, another is lined with Japanese movie posters, and several are built inside garden sheds. (If you want to see the opposite of this, the sum of all Pixar's fears, watch the office scenes in "The Incredibles," where the vast Bob Parr, alias Mr. Incredible, crouches wretchedly in the mouse-gray box of his workspace, like Jack Lemmon at the start of "The Apartment.") Here the animators—who, like the members of every other department in the company, believe themselves to be the heart and motor of the place—breathe inspiration into the images delivered by the layout department. "When they come to us, they're dead—they're a blank slate, without emotion," Shawn Krause, an animator, told me.
Krause led me into one of the dens, at the end of which was a bust of Shakespeare. Following instructions, I yanked the head of the Bard. Hidden beneath his brain was a small green switch. This I pulled. Behind him, a wall of bookshelves swung open, like the one in "High Society." We passed through into what appeared to be a speakeasy: velvet banquettes, a blackjack table, framed photographs on the wall, and, in one corner, a cluster of malt whiskies. This was the famous Lucky 7: a retro rival to the Love Lounge, another refuge a few partitions away, which guests must enter on their hands and knees, through a mini-door at wainscot level. The walls of the Love Lounge were scrawled with the signatures of distinguished visitors, the most recent being Malia and Sasha Obama. What did the First Daughters make of this environment—not just the hideaways but the open spaces of Pixar? Did they think, These lucky grownups. How do they get to live like kids? Or did they think, These kids. When will they grow up?
This is how you make a Pixar movie. First, you have an idea: toys that talk, piscine parenting, the last robot in the world. That kind of thing. Then you write a script, which you kick around in the company of friends. The begetters of "Toy Story 3," for instance, left Emeryville and headed north. Fifty miles away is a cabin called the Poet's Loft, and that is where the director, Lee Unkrich, retired to with the rest of the gang in order to thrash out a plot. It could be that Michael Bay went to the Poet's Loft when he was musing on the narrative beauties of "Armageddon," but I can't prove it.
Having hatched your tale, you create a storyboard, which in turn leads to a story reel: a rough series of images, with sound to match, that can be shown more or less like a flip book. Voices are provided in-house by Pixar employees, on a temporary basis. The art department then delves into detailed research, the set dressers fill in the backgrounds, the modellers work on the characters, while the guys in layout provide basic form and motion. Quite a while later, actors come in to record the lines, and they can expect to be called back for re-recording as the film proceeds; the peculiar pace of Pixar, as stately as a royal barge, is enough to freak out the novice.
Next, the animators give the whole thing juice and spark. Sometimes, when everything is firing, they can create as much as two seconds of footage per day. True, they tend to rip it up the next morning and start afresh, like stubbled sonneteers crumpling their drafts after a late night, but pickiness always pays. Some of the more intractable animation work goes to effects. When everyone is done, the result is delivered to the folks at lighting. And, when they are done, it's rendering time. Not to be confused with the rendering of animal waste, this means that animated images are transformed—or, as one employee described it to me, "smooshed"—into a flat digital frame. A film runs at twenty-four frames a second, and there are individual frames in Pixar films so crammed with visual information that they require almost forty hours to render. An average frame, however, is done in a flash. A flash lasts about seven hours. The last stage in the process belongs to the mixers, who layer the music, dialogue, and sound effects into an audio track. And that's how you make a Pixar movie. Easy. Normally, it takes about four years.
Some Pixar projects remain secret until they are wheeled out, but others can be glimpsed in snatches. I met with Brian Larsen, a storyboard artist on "Brave"—a Pixar film that is due for release in June of 2012, and the first to feature a heroine in the lead role. She is called Merida, and I saw her leave a Scottish castle, on horseback, and race through twisted woods until she is thrown from her mount to land in a circle of ancient stones, from where a mysterious flame lures her to a nearby cottage. The sequence, containing three hundred and eighty-six frames, lasted a couple of minutes, and the images—strong, soundless, near-colorless, and unadorned—jerked rather than flowed onward, but the thrust of it was clear. "In animation, we have this luxury of constantly wanting to change everything," Larsen said, and, to prove his point, he took a pen and, like a surgeon with a lancet, attended to Merida's face. "She's too sad. Let's make her more angry." With a decisive flourish, he added a harder, straighter line to the eye and the brow, and bingo: she looked like thunder, and immediately twice as Scottish. "The story starts telling you what it wants to become," Larsen explained—a strange and graceful concept that I have heard on the lips of novelists, possessed by their own tales, but seldom from the makers of films. Larsen was eager to be led on, like Merida, by his own light. As for me, I wanted to know only one thing: was the cottage a safe haven, or a trap?
What needs to be emphasized is that none of this exists. Sure, Larsen exists, a genial and bearish figure in a woollen cap. The animators exist. Pixar exists. But the storyboard? It's not there. What Larsen drew on was a digital sketch pad, and he held an electronic pen. There was no board. Likewise, the flip book is not a sheaf of whispering pages that you leaf through at speed but a parade of digitized frames which proceeds at the poke of a button. Everything that you see, when you view a Pixar movie, is what an empiricist philosopher of the eighteenth century would call an impression. It was born and cradled in the mind of a computer, and there it lived and grew. When Robert Anderson, the director of photography on "Brave," took me through the same sequence with Merida, and discussed camera angles, we entered into a wonkish discussion of focal lengths on the lenses available to him. ("On 'Wall-E,' they shot with a very narrow depth of field, racking the focus like crazy," Anderson said.) But there are no lenses, or none that you can hold in your palm. They are purely options on a toolbar, and you scroll between them. To someone from the outside world, we must have sounded like Alice and the White King, talking about an empty road. "To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too!" the King remarks.
This looking-glass sensation was redoubled as I spoke to Sharon Calahan, the queen of lighting, who has been at Pixar for nearly seventeen years. She was the director of photography of "A Bug's Life," back when everyone was struggling to pin down, on a computer, precisely how the sun shines through greenery. (As Lee Unkrich recalls, "She'd only go home to do her laundry.") She held the same position on "Cars 2," the latest Pixar release, which comes out on June 24th. To demonstrate the effects of her work, she brought up, onscreen, before-and-after shots from the new film. "We think of it as normal moviemaking," she said, sounding like an astronaut explaining that, yes, he does prefer to eat lunch out of a tube. You wouldn't expect a story about cars to open at sea, but this one does, with a boat approaching an oil rig, and it threw up instant challenges. "We had to hand-plant twenty-two hundred industrial lights on this oil platform: thousands of individual lights that we've added one at a time," Calahan said. She switched them on, with a click, and the platform bloomed from an illustration into a place. For her next trick, she showed me an elevator scene, in a museum. "I wanted to do a glowing, underlit floor in the elevator," she confessed.
"Because it looks cool."
That was the most clarifying moment of my time at Pixar. Nobody can resist the tidal pull of that aesthetic: it looks cool. I felt it in the character-modelling department, where Andrew H. Schmidt, the senior modeller on "Cars 2," talked about Lightning McQueen, the sporty leading vehicle from "Cars," who returns for the new installment. This time, Schmidt said, "McQueen looked kind of dorky up against the international cars—very ugly, very Nascar—so I made him a little bit sexier." That meant reconfiguring the geometric net of points—the spots where lines converge onscreen—which is the modeller's essential tool. Schmidt presented a simple sketch of a car, consisting of around two hundred points. And how many would you need, say, for a complete McQueen? "Around a hundred and fifty thousand," Schmidt said. He had also played God with Holley Shiftwell, a luscious new car, to whom he had assigned, he said proudly, "female hips." Sharon Calahan took over: "We really blinged out her headlights, so it looks like she's wearing jewelry." The outcome was a joy to Emily Mortimer, who provided Holley with her purring voice. "I will never look so glamorous again," Mortimer told me. In animated films, she said, with a sigh of relief, "there's no hair to worry about."
Well, not for her. There are people at Pixar who worry about little else. One of the ironies of computer animation is that the more homely the detail you desire the more difficult it will be to represent. You want to show the end of the world, with nuclear firestorms and collapsing cities? No problem. You want a kid in a T-shirt stroking a cat? Hmm. Nothing tests an animator more than the daily ingredients of our sensory experience: hair, skin, water, clothing, tears. I sat with Dave Mullins, one of the animators—and, to judge by the walls of his den, a Hitchcock fiend—as he showed me a rough draft of a scene from "The Incredibles," on which he had labored for six weeks. Nothing explosive, just a brief domestic fumble, in which Helen Parr, Bob's wife, whispers the name of her alter ego, Elastigirl, into the phone, and then almost drops the handset. Mullins had a video of himself in a corner of his computer screen, performing the same action, the better to grasp its dynamics. (He could also draw on live-action footage of Holly Hunter, the actress behind Elastigirl, since all voice contributors at Pixar are filmed as they speak their lines.) As for the minuscule detail of Helen, immediately afterward, smoothing her hair behind her ears, as women tend to do when deflustering: was that acting, or animation? Either way, it was Pixar proving that it can rub its digital fingertips against the textures of everyday being.
Elastigirl matters a lot, since she is the best character in the best film that Pixar has yet made. She is also a single-handed rebuke to the charge—proved elsewhere—that Pixar has failed to place female heroes at the hub of its stories. Just as her doomy daughter, Violet, has the magic ability to make herself vanish, because that is what all self-hating teen-agers would love to do, so Helen, with bendy limbs adaptable for both vacuuming and fistfights, is a living joke about society's expectation that women should have it all, or do it all, and never take a break. There is, of course, another skill that she could master with her natural sinuosity, but that is never mentioned. Back in 2004, some of us in the movie theatre wanted to shout, "Bob, she's wearing a black mask and thigh-highs. What are you waiting for, man?" For the sake of the kids, though, we kept quiet. Bedrooms, in Pixar, are places where you chat to monsters, or horse around with your toys: not perspiring rumpus rooms, where Mr. and Mrs. Incredible play adults-only Twister.
Does such a sequence exist? If so, it would have been a job for the effects team. "What I call a special effect is something that is too difficult to animate by hand. So we devise algorithms that can cope with huge amounts of information," Apurva Shah, the supervising technical director on "Cars 2," told me. I nodded, trying to give an accurate impersonation of someone who remembered what an algorithm was. So where could I find this information? In dust, it turned out, or in raindrops pinging off a street—"contact splashes," as Shah calls them. Fortunately, he said, "a guy working for us has a Ph.D. from Berkeley in fluid dynamics," so the rain is safe. The ocean, at the start of "Cars 2," is another matter. "With 'Finding Nemo,' people said, 'My God, the water was amazing'—but now, if you check it out, it's just not good enough," Shah said. This time, with a heaving swell to animate, the animators had to do better: "We guide the birth of waves," he said modestly, as if reading from the Book of Genesis. In "Cars 2," two ships are dropped into the sea, and the contact splashes that they make have to look convincing. One man worked on nothing but that spray of foam for three months, according to Shah. His colleague Gary Bruins disagreed: "Four months, maybe."
How can this be worth it? What is it that drives each employee at Pixar to take more pains than the next one—to pedantry, and beyond? The fact is that the persnickety strain, in computer animation, is a condition of the medium. As Derek Williams, the set supervisor on "Brave," confessed to me, "Nothing really happens by accident. You have to place every root, every tree, like a set dresser." He summed up his work on rowan trees and bracken: "Forests are expensive." In the same vein, a lead archivist at Pixar, Christine Freeman, handed me an old memo concerning Roz, the humongous, snail-like overseer of the factory that employs Mike and his pal Sulley, in "Monsters, Inc." The memo is titled "Shader Notes," and it reads like this, in part:
Roz's mouth has painted lips that are very small size relative to the size of her mouth. Those lips should be quite glossy. Go ahead and add some small wrinkling to the lips as they transition into the mouth bag. Mouth bag is standard fare. It needs to be darker in value as it recedes into the body. Don't worry about providing tons of painted detail in the mouth. She is a mumbling character.
Note the criteria that fuel this description; what matters is not that Roz is gross but that she retains the pathos of aging vanity (those glossy lips), and that a lifetime of professional weariness resounds in her mumbling drawl. Character is action. The same goes for Sulley's turquoise fur—a famous test for the Pixar software engineers, who had to write new simulation programs to engender 2.3 million separate strands. But Sulley isn't furry because Pixar wanted to march ahead with the technology; that was merely a happy offshoot of the task. ("Could computer graphics be cuddly?" Pete Docter, the director, asked himself. He got his reply.) Sulley is furry because the tiny human who befriends him, Boo, needs to have something to grip as she clings, unnoticed, to his back. He's a horned beast, but she calls him Kitty, and we have to understand why. Nobody in the audience, even those of Boo's age, thinks that Sulley and Roz are real. For that matter, nobody watching "Up" thinks that a house can be lifted by balloons. As Adrienne Ranft pointed out, though, "we're not going for realistic here. We're going for believable." I heard the same refrain from Harley Jessup, the production designer on "Cars 2," who said, "John's thing is creating a believable world. He wants people to forget that there's anything artificial." So that's what Pixar is all about. It's John's Thing.
This is how Pixar began. John Lasseter was a cartoon-crazy kid from Whittier, California, who was one of the first people to enroll in the character-animation program at CalArts, thus proving that dreams, as Walt Disney promised, really do come true. CalArts was established by Disney himself, in the early nineteen-sixties, and it has nourished his truest heirs. Lasseter's fellow-students included Brad Bird, who went on to make "The Incredibles," at Pixar; John Musker, who went on to make "Aladdin" and "The Little Mermaid," at Disney; and Tim Burton, who went on being Tim Burton.
Lasseter became a skipper on the Jungle Cruise, at Disneyland, still one of the best preparations for a life in the movie business, where the crocodiles wear suits. He then worked as an in-house animator, saw the dailies from "Tron," and became excited by the prospect of computer animation, using it to develop a couple of projects (including an adaptation of "Where the Wild Things Are"). He was promptly sacked for pursuing this newfangled passion, although, as he now says, "It was plain as day to me, this is what Walt was waiting for." He was hired by Ed Catmull, a soft-spoken genius who had arrived at the computer division of Lucasfilm via the University of Utah and New York Institute of Technology. Lucasfilm was based in San Francisco, which, for Lasseter, meant not so much a migration as an escape. "When I first started working at Disney, I had these ideas I kept pushing, and the answer was always 'No, we can't do that, that's not the way it's done.' As soon as I got up there, to Northern California, especially the Bay Area, there was a culture of 'Yeah, give it a try, why not?' " he says. He and Catmull put together a film called "The Adventures of André and Wally B.," which showed, unfinished, at an industry conference, SIGGRAPH, in 1984. The place went as crazy as the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics possibly can.
Consider Wally today, and what hits you is not his simplicity—he is fashioned from cylinders, cones, and other basic shapes—but the air of bright, wicked innocence upon which he floats and hums. He is, after all, a bee. His legs hover just below his abdomen, unconnected yet clearly part of him; twenty-four years later, the head and the body of EVE, the white robotic paramour of Wall-E, were likewise linked by nothing but gravitational pull. Yet animation was only a minor segment of the computer division at Lucasfilm; a more sizable chunk was devoted to hardware—actual computers, including the Pixar Imaging Computer, an unlovely gray block that might, it was hoped, be of use in medical research. When George Lucas agreed to sell off the division, in 1986, one of the buyers sniffing around was General Motors. So there you have it. With a tweak of history, the people who brought us "The Incredibles" and "Ratatouille" could have been scanning our brains instead, or mapping the airflow on the windshield of our cars.
The man who did buy the company was Steve Jobs. He paid ten million dollars. (According to Andrew Stanton, a co-director of "A Bug's Life" and "Finding Nemo" and the director of "Wall-E," Jobs has declared, "It's our job to know what people want before they do.") For a while, though, his new acquisition lost money, and it wasn't until the hardware side of the business was sold, in 1990, that Pixar was streamlined into the animating machine that we know. Even then, further investment was required, and, in 1991, Lasseter's former employer, Disney, stepped in with a three-picture deal, worth twenty-six million dollars. Disney would finance and distribute the movies. All that Pixar had to do was make them.
To disentangle the dealings between Disney and Pixar is perfectly straightforward, so long as you have trained yourself by studying, say, the history of Anglo-Irish relations. There you will find the same blend of mistrust, possessiveness, and rancor; the same wish, on the part of the larger body, to lord it over the smaller; and, finally, against all odds, the same exhausted arrival at a state of peace—the Anglo-Irish agreement, signed in 1998, or Disney's outright purchase of Pixar, in 2006, for $7.4 billion, which led to Lasseter's becoming the chief creative officer of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, and Catmull, likewise, becoming the president of both.
The earliest omens were not good. The first project was "Toy Story," and Lasseter had gathered a squad of animators and story experts, including Stanton and Pete Docter, who went on to direct not only "Monsters, Inc." but "Up." Docter said, "The entire crew was green," adding, "Less than half had even used computers before." They would labor on their reels of footage, then fly down to Burbank—Pixar, before it moved to Emeryville, was based in Point Richmond, across the bay from San Francisco—with the results. On "the famous day that we showed early reels of 'Toy Story' down at Disney," Lasseter remembers, "they said, first, 'You absolutely can't have "Toy" in the title, because no teenager or young adult will come see the movie.' And, second, we had to make the characters more 'edgy.' " Rule one of modern drama: avoid anyone who talks about edge, apart from a practicing mountaineer.
Lasseter continues, "There was this development executive with a clipboard, with Jeffrey Katzenberg's and all these people's notes, and you had to follow them. We had to fill in how you were addressing that note, and there was a checkmark." Katzenberg, now the C.E.O. of DreamWorks Animation, was then the head of Disney Animation, and Lasseter's version of events is contested by someone who was working at Disney at the time, and who told me, "There were many folks that didn't want the film to move forward, but Jeffrey always believed in the film. He was a champion of the movie from the get-go." To imply that Katzenberg was not supportive, he added, is "simply not true."
What is not in dispute is the Woody who emerged from these sessions. Paper sketches on the walls at Pixar show a slob in a cowboy hat, bleary of eye, heavy and dark of jowl: he could be a long-lost, hard-drinking cousin of Richard Nixon. (The thirty-seventh President grew up in the same town as Lasseter.) The discontent at Disney persisted; at one point, executives threatened to put the production on hold. The Pixar team asked for two weeks to save it. "We went back to what we wanted, and that was: the characters liked each other. Because we liked each other," Lasseter said. A couple of weeks later, a sleepless Pixar crew delivered the slimline, sober, buoyant Woody who has passed into animated myth. One has the sense, throughout the saga of Pixar, of vertiginous near-misses—crevasses down which some of the films, or the entire company, could have tumbled. The realization, for instance, that Disney, cleaving to the contract signed in 1991, and to the sequel rights that came with it, pressed ahead with a plan to release "Toy Story 2" as a direct-to-video production still makes some people, not just children, go faint. Think of Jessie the cowgirl and Bullseye the wonder horse, turning dusty and inflammable inside a plastic cassette.
Yet it didn't happen. The plot of that film, which climaxes, like that of so many Pixar movies, in a wondrous flurry of close shaves, was repeated in life. In the end, "Toy Story 2" pulled in a worldwide gross of four hundred and eighty-five million bucks.
Every Pixar film begins with a lamp, which hops into view and bounces on the "i" of Pixar, apparently enjoying the squeak. The sequence is a tribute to "Luxo Jr.," a short work that Lasseter first showed at SIGGRAPH in 1986, after Jobs had invested in Pixar. It starred a bouncing ball and a pair of desk lamps, one—the elder—obviously trying to rein in the other. After the screening, Lasseter watched in trepidation as Jim Blinn, a computer scientist he knew, approached. What would Blinn want to talk about: rendering algorithms? Z-buffers? Jaggies? But Blinn had only one question: "John, was the parent lamp a mother or a father?"
And that was that. Pixar was on track. "We go to great, great pains, and jump through hoops, and guys have to work for months to do one little thing, and it's all in the service of the story," Lasseter said. How about that time-consuming splash, in "Cars 2"? "It's there to tell us that the hero is up against these big, big guys, and it was important for them to feel big. When you do your job right, and get something perfect, the audience won't notice it. But if it's not right they will notice it, popping out of the movie."
Lasseter was sitting in a studio, in Los Angeles, as the score of "Cars 2" was being recorded, and making sure that nothing popped. A hefty fellow of fifty-four—with a face as round and frank as a full moon, set off by scholarly spectacles—he wore a short-sleeved shirt, covered in drawings of little cars, and sucked a Jamba Juice through a straw. The composer, Michael Giacchino, who wrote the music for three earlier Pixar movies, stood beside him at the mixing board, in plaid shirt, jeans, and sneakers. Giacchino's children stopped by; Lasseter turned to the youngest, bent down, and exchanged a low high-five. Beyond the glass, in front of them, a conductor took a ninety-three-piece orchestra—including the great George Doering, on surf guitar—through one brisk take after another, in an atmosphere of easy expertise and near-hilarity. When the violins came in early, Giacchino leaned forward and pushed the intercom button. "Nice work, strings. Beautiful take," he said. One of the horns responded with a sliding parp, as if to signal a pratfall in a silent movie. You wanted to cry out, Does nobody at Pixar ever have crappy days? And is this why Lasseter so often wears Hawaiian shirts—because his job feels like a vacation?
Well, yes. "The people at Pixar are my best friends," he said. "Not only do I want to see them every day—I can't wait to see them every day—but, when my wife, Nancy, and I make a list of whom we are going to take on vacation, the top group is Pixar. We just want to be together all the time." In the mouths of most bosses, such sentiments would be mush, or self-delusion, but Lasseter, like his movies, is there to be believed. When he talks like this, he doesn't sound like a movie supremo. He sounds like Buzz Lightyear. The key to Pixar, I came to realize, is that what it seeks to enact, as corporate policy, and what it strives to dramatize, in its art, spring from a common purpose, and a single clarion call: You've got a friend in me.
In cinema, as in fiction, friendship is a more durable substance than we give it credit for, and often more resilient than love. Indeed, it may be the hardiest strain of love that we possess, untroubled by erotic fragrance; once Huck Finn and Jim—to take the most obvious ancestors of Woody and Buzz—meet on Jackson's Island, they don't declare their friendship to one another, or let it disturb their sleep. They just get on with it. That practical momentum, conservative in its emotions but radical in its taste for adventure, runs through Westerns, Andy Hardy movies, "The Flintstones," and "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," before arriving at the land of Pixar. It is there in Mike and Sulley; in the anxious Marlin and the brainless Dory, in "Finding Nemo"; in Remy the rat and Linguini the kitchen boy, in "Ratatouille"; in the aging grouch and the tubby little scout, in "Up"; and in Lightning and Mater, the rusty pickup truck, in both servings of "Cars."
Childhood is, or should be, the era in which friendship is easiest to come by, and, once you spend a while at Pixar, you notice the readiness with which its workers revert to the trope of youth. During the making of "Cars 2," according to its associate producer, Mark Nielsen, Lasseter was "like a kid in a candy store. I've never seen him happier." Andrew Schmidt, the modeller, was informed on his first day at Pixar that "it's like John's sandbox, and we're all invited to play." Lasseter's office, in the main building, is an Aladdin's cave overflowing with toys, including a Lego model of his own head; it is reported that, when one of his kids lost a tooth, Lasseter took a toy car, inked its wheels, and ran it back and forth over the pillow, so as to leave the waking child with physical proof that the Tooth Fairy had driven up, deposited a dollar beneath, and then sped away. This child's-eye view of the world is no less apparent in the company that he helps to run: when I asked where the spiritual core of Pixar lay, everyone directed me, without hesitation, to the cereal bar, on the right side of the atrium—a row of your favorite cereals, on tap, anytime you want. There was once a new arrival at the company, who thought the bowls provided at the bar were too small, and registered his displeasure in an e-mail. He didn't last. In Lasseter's words, "If you're that upset about how big the bowl for your free cereal is, leave."
Considering the above, a case could doubtless be made about the profound infantilizing of American culture, with Pixar as Exhibit No. 1. Listen to Lasseter, as he talks about the viewing of daily footage, when Pixar itself was young: "We had a screening room with a very big screen, and at the time Pixar couldn't afford theatre seats, so I went around on the weekends and said, 'If anyone is getting rid of an old couch, let us know and we'll come pick it up.' Within a couple of months, we had filled this screening room with ugly old couches, and it was awesome. You felt like everybody should climb on them and stuff." What he is recalling, however, is not a free-for-all; it is a democratic initiative, whereby those who make the movie at ground level—the animators, and other interested parties—should get to watch the movie, and buff it up, as they go along. No mandatory notes, no development executives, no clipboard. In short, it is the filmmakers who run the show. In the week I visited, Pixar was welcoming a guest lecturer, Vice-Admiral Robert Spane, who would be speaking on the theme of "Military Leadership: Does it have any application at Pixar?" A word in your ear, Admiral: No.
The cause of Pixar's success, perhaps, is that it extends this communal bonhomie not just into the films but outward into the audience. That is the view of John Ratzenberger, the studio's lucky charm, who has lent his voice to a character in every one of its movies, beginning with Hamm, the no-nonsense pig, in "Toy Story." Pixar, he told me, has "the backbone of a small town: Get up and go to work. That's what brought us to the dance; the audience they play to is the majority of Americans." To sum up, "They really should be running Western civilization." That's how many people felt about Disney, too, in its pioneering heyday, although others felt—and still feel, especially when they visit Disneyland—smothered by its lunging moral drive. Pixar, on the other hand, stays cool, its employees armed not with weapons of cultural imperialism but with shafts of knowing wit. But what do they know, these super-educated Peter Pans, up in the Bay Area, hammering out their perfectionist fables, high on Cocoa Puffs and single malt? They know what Geppetto—the life-giving puppeteer, in Disney's "Pinocchio"—knew: that the angel is in the detail. As I left John Lasseter and Michael Giacchino, in their Los Angeles sound booth, they were on Take No. 310. ♦


text:
At this year's Motek, the automation company Pilz will be exhibiting products and solutions for complete automation – from sensor and control technology to drive technology, including operation and visualisation. The stand in Stuttgart will focus on safe drive solutions with safe motion and safe sensor technology PSEN. Visitors to the stand will also be able to obtain comprehensive information about machinery safety and the corresponding range of services, including for drive solutions.
Ostfildern, Aug 9, 2016
Pilz at Motek 2016 – safe drive solutions for assembly and handling technology – Move it like Pilz!
The drive portfolio of the Ostfildern-based automation company – including motion control, control systems, servo amplifiers and servo motors – is the focus of the exhibition stand in Stuttgart.
More power for the drive!
At Motek Pilz will be exhibiting two new products from the motion control systems range, which are now equipped with a 1.3 GHz Intel Atom processor, so offering higher performance.
As an open, external control system, the new motion control system PMCprimo MC stands in contrast to the previous drive-integrated control system PMCprimo C, plus it also now offers improved performance. With PMCprimo C, the motion control card can simply be plugged into the servo amplifier PMCprotego D. In conjunction with the safety card PMCprotego S, the result is a safe, compact drive solution.
Open and efficient for higher productivity
So the motion control systems can now be used in a wide range of additional applications. Complete applications can now be implemented in all drive environments, such as pick and place applications, which comprise the control functions of a PLC as well as motion control functions. It's also possible to achieve higher cycle numbers thanks to the enhanced performance. Productivity rises as a result.
PMC is open, it even has an interface for Profinet. If the application is safety-related, users can add safe motion functions to the servo amplifier PMCprotego D with the safety card PMCprotego S.
As a result, Pilz motion control offers complete, energy-efficient solutions for automation.
Take on the automated Pilz team – Kick it!
Visitors to the international trade fair for automation in production and assembly will be able to experience the safe interaction of sensor, control and drive technology by competing against the "automated Pilz team": Some perfect moves comprising sensor, control and drive technology plus visualisation can be tried out on the Pilz table football, which is equipped with Pilz products.
Safe drive services
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Visit Pilz at Motek in Hall 8, Stand 8410.
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By Dane Stevens on October 11 2019 17:53:59
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These are Samsung's latest memory chips. They might not look much, but they're 20 percent smaller and 30 percent faster than the current standard—and they're already destined to appear in your next phone.
Their secret lies in a shrinking manufacturing technique, which allows adjacent features on the chip to be packed closer together; for the nerds out there, Samsung has shifted from a 20 nanometer process to 10 nanometer process. That means a bump in efficiency—giving speeds a 30 percent kick in the butt—while also allowing the devices to shrink.
That means they take up 20 percent less space, which is all important in the crazy-thin devices we're used to. They went in to full-scale production last month, too, and not just for Sammy—so they'll turn up in a smartphone or tablet near you soon, whatever the brand. [Engagdget]


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I will try my best to include everything necessary to get started with Neo4j. This is not meant to be a guide on how to program with C#, Visual Basic, Java, Cypher, or Gremlin. You will need to either have prior experience with those languages or read other resources to learn about them. If you don't understand some of the computer science jargon, please let me know and I will try and make the wording more clear.
I'm not going to go into too much graph theory in this tutorial. You should have a basic understanding of what a directed graph is and how to create a data model since you seem to be interested in graph databases. All that you really need to know about graph theory is that a graph is a set of related nodes representing entities with relationships connecting the nodes.
Graph databases are an excellent way to model social data compared traditional relational databases. Social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook use graph dbs for quickly querying through millions of users and their relationships to other objects or users. It would be much slower to use an RDBMS for a website like Facebook because of the need to select from tables with millions of records and perform joins on those tables. Joins are expensive operations in SQL databases and graph databases don't require explicit joins due to the nature of a graph's structure.
About Tools
Java is a programming language that runs in a virtual environment allowing it to run on thousands of different devices that have a Java virtual machine. Neo4j is an enterprise level graph database written in Java. Neo4jClient is a .NET client for interfacing with Neo4j's REST API.
About Neo4jClient
Neo4jClient serializes and deserializes objects to and from JSON to interact with the server which makes it very easy to store and retrieve objects.
I'm assuming you already have Java installed, but if you don't, you will need the JRE for Windows installed in order to run Neo4j. You can download the JRE from Oracle. When downloading the JRE, you can choose either the standalone JRE or the JDK, which includes the JRE. The JDK is mainly for Java developers and is not required if you don't do Java development. Also, about whether to choose x86 or x64, I'd recommend that you choose x86 for simplicity. Most likely, you won't need 64-bit addressing with your Java installation. This would only be if you have another project that requires the x64 release. The easiest download is any of the .exe installers as it will guide you through the installation process. Installation should take about 5 minutes and then you'll be ready to move to setting up Neo4j.
Next, you should download Neo4j from neo4j.org. Unless you want to be bleeding edge, it's recommended to download the Major Stable Community Version. At the time of writing, this is version 1.8.1. Make sure to get the Windows specific download. Follow the directions on the download page and open up a command prompt with administrator privileges to start your newly installed Neo4j server. Once you have started the server, you can browse to your web admin interface at http://localhost:7474. From there, you can use the Data browser page to create nodes and relationships. In the console tab, you can query your database using Cypher or traverse the graph using Gremlin. You can even send HTTP requests to the REST API if you want to learn about how to talk to Neo4j from other tools. In the Indexes tab, you can create indexes for fast retrieval of nodes or relationships. I will talk more about indexes later. You are now ready to setup Neo4jClient.
Visual Studio and Neo4jClient
You need to have Visual Studio 2010 Professional or higher or Visual C# 2012 Express Edition (free) installed to be able to install Neo4jClient using the Nuget package manager. Unfortunately, Nuget does not work with Visual C# 2010 Express Edition.
Create a new Visual C# or Visual Basic project and then proceed to installing Neo4jClient. You can install Neo4jClient by managing Nuget packages on your project or by running the following command in the Package Manager Console:
Install-Package Neo4jClient
Brief Overview of Neo4j and Neo4jClient
Indexes are created for fast retrieval of information at a later point. This is extremely useful when querying a graph database on the order of millions of nodes. Manual traversal is slower and less efficient. One of the advantages of graph databases is speed and it is important to utilize indexes to increase speed.
Full text vs. Exact
A full text index is for searching on a node's properties text, allowing partial or complete text to be searched. For example, if you have a set of nodes representing the Star Wars movies, if you search for nodes in the Movie index with a name like "Star Wars" with a full text index, you will get all nodes containing the text "Star Wars" in the name property.
However, an exact index requires that you search on a node's properties text with exact text. For example, if you have a set of nodes representing the Star Wars movies, if you search for just the text "Star Wars" in an exact index, it will not return anything because there are no nodes with just the text "Star Wars"
Relationship Properties
In addition to adding properties to nodes, relationships can also have properties. This can be helpful if you are trying to better describe a relationship. If you want a more complex data model, you can add a payload class to your relationship class to store properties on your relationship. This is often referred to as attributes of a relationship in graph theory.
For example, you could add a property called "comment" to the Directed relationship to add extra information about the direction of a movie from a director. This would improve the data model to provide more information about movies as a whole.
Sample Database Setup
Once Neo4jClient is installed, you can setup a sample database by using the following code:
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using Neo4jClient;
using Neo4jClient_Tutorial.Models;
using Neo4jClient_Tutorial.Models.Relationships;
namespace Neo4jClient_Tutorial.DAL
/// <summary>
/// Class to provide sample data for the graph
/// </summary>
public class Scaffolding
GraphClient client;
public Scaffolding()
client = new GraphClient(new Uri("http://localhost:7474/db/data"));
private void CreateNodesRelationshipsIndexes()
// Create Indexes
client.CreateIndex("Movie", new IndexConfiguration() { Provider = IndexProvider.lucene, Type = IndexType.fulltext }, IndexFor.Node); // full text node index
client.CreateIndex("Director", new IndexConfiguration() { Provider = IndexProvider.lucene, Type = IndexType.exact }, IndexFor.Node); // exact node index
client.CreateIndex("Genre", new IndexConfiguration() { Provider = IndexProvider.lucene, Type = IndexType.fulltext }, IndexFor.Node); // full text node index
// Create Entities
// Movies
Movie swI = new Movie() { Name = "Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace", Description = "Begins the story of Anakin Skywalker" };
var starWarsEpisodeI = client.Create(swI,
new IRelationshipAllowingParticipantNode<Movie>[0],
new []
new IndexEntry("Movie")
{ "Name", swI.Name },
{ "Description", swI.Description },
{ "Id", swI.Id.ToString() }
Movie swIV = new Movie() { Name = "Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope", Description = "First Starwars movie to debut on the big screen" };
var starWarsEpisodeIV = client.Create(swIV,
new IRelationshipAllowingParticipantNode<Movie>[0],
new []
new IndexEntry("Movie")
{ "Name", swIV.Name },
{ "Description", swIV.Description },
{ "Id", swIV.Id.ToString() }
Movie indy = new Movie() { Name = "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom", Description = "Second movie in the original Indiana Jones trilogy" };
var indianaJonesTempleOfDoom = client.Create(indy,
new IRelationshipAllowingParticipantNode<Movie>[0],
new IndexEntry("Movie")
{ "Name", indy.Name },
{ "Description", indy.Description },
{ "Id", indy.Id.ToString() }
Movie jp = new Movie() { Name = "Jurassic Park", Description = "First Jurassic park movie" };
var jurassicPark = client.Create(jp,
new IRelationshipAllowingParticipantNode<Movie>[0],
new IndexEntry("Movie")
{ "Name", jp.Name },
{ "Description", jp.Description },
{ "Id", jp.Id.ToString() }
Movie et = new Movie() { Name = "ET", Description = "ET phone home" };
var ET = client.Create(et,
new IRelationshipAllowingParticipantNode<Movie>[0],
new IndexEntry("Movie")
{ "Name", et.Name },
{ "Description", et.Description },
{ "Id", et.Id.ToString() }
// Directors
Director lucas = new Director() { Name = "George Lucas" };
var georgeLucas = client.Create(lucas,
new IRelationshipAllowingParticipantNode<Director>[0],
new IndexEntry("Director")
{ "Name", lucas.Name },
{ "Id", lucas.Id.ToString() }
Director spielberg = new Director() { Name = "Steven Spielberg" };
var stevenSpielberg = client.Create(spielberg,
new IRelationshipAllowingParticipantNode<Director>[0],
new IndexEntry("Director")
{ "Name", spielberg.Name },
{ "Id", spielberg.Id.ToString() }
// Genres
Genre sf = new Genre() { Name = "Science Fiction" };
var sciFi = client.Create(sf,
new IRelationshipAllowingParticipantNode<Genre>[0],
new IndexEntry("Genre")
{ "Name", sf.Name },
{ "Id", sf.Id.ToString() }
Genre adv = new Genre() { Name = "Adventure" };
var adventure = client.Create(adv,
new IRelationshipAllowingParticipantNode<Genre>[0],
new IndexEntry("Genre")
{ "Name", adv.Name },
{ "Id", adv.Id.ToString() }
// Create Relationships
client.CreateRelationship(starWarsEpisodeI, new PartOf(sciFi));
client.CreateRelationship(starWarsEpisodeIV, new PartOf(sciFi));
client.CreateRelationship(indianaJonesTempleOfDoom, new PartOf(adventure));
client.CreateRelationship(jurassicPark, new PartOf(sciFi));
client.CreateRelationship(jurassicPark, new PartOf(adventure));
client.CreateRelationship(ET, new PartOf(sciFi));
client.CreateRelationship(georgeLucas, new Directed(starWarsEpisodeI, new Models.Payloads.Payload() { Comment = "George Lucas' second Star Wars trilogy" }));
client.CreateRelationship(georgeLucas, new Directed(starWarsEpisodeIV, new Models.Payloads.Payload() { Comment = "First Starwars movie that George Lucas directed" })); client.CreateRelationship(stevenSpielberg, new Directed(indianaJonesTempleOfDoom, new Models.Payloads.Payload() { Comment = "Lucas wrote the story while Spielberg directed" }));
client.CreateRelationship(stevenSpielberg, new Directed(jurassicPark, new Models.Payloads.Payload() { Comment = "Huge box office success" }));
client.CreateRelationship(stevenSpielberg, new Directed(ET, new Models.Payloads.Payload() { Comment = "One of Spielberg's most successful movies" }));
I've attached a sample ASP.NET MVC 4 project for Visual Studio 2012, but you should be able to get it working in Visual Studio 2010 by importing the code without any issues. It includes all entity, relationship, and payload models. I added a few basic views for visualizing the data. Feel free to fill out the method stubs to create views to view the rest of the entities. I will look at creating another tutorial building on this project for adding/deleting/updating items from the database. I've also attached an image of the final graph. It should be easy to determine which nodes are what type of entity based on the relationship definitions. Please let me know if you have questions in the comments below.
Neo4jClient Tutorial.zip (12.48 mb)


text:
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Step up to superior three-way sound with the compact M3-6 studio monitor from M-Audio. Savor the improved fidelity, enhanced imaging, and super-wide sweet spot of this exceptional three-way studio monitor as you mix your sessions and laydown tracks. Track and mix with the enhanced accuracy and superior imaging that only a three-way monitor can provide. Using an efficient inline design, the space-saving M3-6 Studio Reference Monitors provide truly spectacular three-way sound in the same space as a standard two-way monitor.Twin-Line Design
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text:
夢之實 15% 日本宮崎縣
More posts
- A find, just because of the name, but a great bottle of wine. Enjoyed with Asian Mussels & rice
- Semi-sweet pear, with a little bit of a spice taste. Taste great chilled.
- A sweet white, Asian pear wine. This winery only uses Asian pears for their wines.. This one is spiced. Outside by fire.
- Pear wine Sheila on wine tour.
- Good but not as good as the raspberry


text:
Have you seen the Muffin Man, the Muffin Man, the Muffin Man? Have you seen the Muffin Man who lives in an off-campus apartment in Bakersfield?
Drury Lane got a bit dreary for the Muffin Man, so he picked up his baking supplies, and moved to Bakersfield. When he realized Bakersfield was not exclusively for bakers, the Muffin Man threw up his hands and enrolled in California State University, Bakersfield. Sick of the art of muffinry anyway, the Muffin Man was excited to get a fresh start and be able to study anything from modern languages and literatures, to public policy administration, to philosophy, to chemistry, to criminal justice, to ethics. Making the switch from one career path to another was overwhelming, but our guy was happy to find that academic and career advisors were readily available to help! The Muffin Man found CSU-Bakersfield to be a great launching pad to start a whole new life!
Though ready-made fields of cakes do not surround the Muffin Man's off-campus apartment, parks, malls, movie theatres, bowling alleys, shops, and restaurants do. For the first time, the Muffin Man found himself in a place where he could learn, be independent, have privacy, and afford rent and food. With apartments so inexpensive and available, why wouldn't he choose to live off-campus? The Muffin Man does not have any special powers to cook up an apartment, so for help learning how to find his new place he turned to our apartment search guides!
When the weekend comes to Bakersfield, the Muffin Man knows it is time to have fun. He has been working hard all week, and it is his time to relax and hang out with all of his new friends. On-campus student clubs and organizations often put on weekend events, and the Muffin Man's IM dodgeball team meets on Saturdays. When the night falls, the Muffin Man likes to head over to places like Sandrini's on 1918 Eye St for some good food and live music. Later he might check out Goose Loonies Olympian Sports Café at 816 18th St. to catch the game!
One of the smaller American universities, Bakersfield College is part of the California Community College system. It is renowned for its athletics program, and the college football team, the Renegades, are known as formidable competitors.
Bakersfield is set right in the centre of Los Angeles and Fresno, and is currently one of the fastest growing areas in the United States. Bakersfield is a manufacturing and agriculture city, but is also known for turning out great country music singers like Merle Haggard and Buck Owens, as well as plenty of pro footballers.
The city of Bakersfield is growing fast, and that means that infrastructure has a long way to go to catch up to population. If you bring your car to Bakersfield, though, you'll have the freedom of the entire city, as well as the option to travel to Fresno or LA for anything you need.
If you put your walking legs on, you have just over half a mile to go to get to most grocery stores, restaurants and coffee shops around Bakersfield Community College. Gyms are all sadly more than a mile and a half away - by the time you get there you won't need it!
Bakersfield real estate prices thankfully haven't caught up to the size of the city yet either. Apartments for rent in California are seldom found for under $700 per month, however Bakersfield has quite a few options from $500 to $600 per month.
Apartments are scattered all around the edges of the city, with no particular area having a concentration of rentals - however there are a couple more apartment options in the east and south of Bakersfield.
You'll want to hop in your wheels (and make sure you have a designated driver) to get to most of the nightspots around Bakersfield. For a quick hit after school, Amestoy's Frank Bar is only a block or two away from Bakersfield College and is very well priced. Charly's is close also, and the Red Pepper Cocktail Lounge is great for a more upmarket night on the town.
Sandrini's and Guthrie Alley Cat are in the center of town, and popular with students.
You have two Chinese cuisine options close to school if you are looking for something to fill your belly - otherwise you'll need to head right into town
Bakersfield is famous for it's Basque cuisine; check out Benji's French Basque Restaurant out on the Rosedale Highway.


text:
Memphis, Tenn., September 8, 2012 — Junior Lukas Stockhausen booted a 37-yard field in overtime as Rhodes College posted a 20-17 come-from-behind victory over the Washington University in St. Louis football team on Saturday afternoon at Fargason Field in Memphis, Tenn.
Washington U.'s defense forced a three-and-out on Rhodes' possession in overtime before Stockhausen kicked the game-winner. The Bears drive started on the 25-yard line in overtime, and picked up one yard on a run by senior Chris Castelluccio. A holding call pushed the Bears back to the Rhodes 34-yard line, and then a 26-yard personal foul was called on the ensuing play putting WUSTL out of field goal range. Senior quarterback Dan Burkett tossed a pair of incompletions to end the game.
Washington University's offense struggled for the second-straight game picking up just 214 yards of total offense (104 passing, 110 passing). Burkett was 10-of-25 for 104 yards and was sacked three times. Castelluccio was the lone bright spot on offense, rushing 23 times for 72 yards and two touchdowns.
The Bears took advantage of a fumble by Rhodes College on its own 30-yard line late in the first quarter to score its first touchdown of the 2012 season. Castelluccio picked up 15 yards on three carries during the drive, including a one-yard plunge with 1:04 to play to make it 7-0. The touchdown for Castelluccio was the first since his sophomore year.
Rhodes, who was playing its season opener, found the end zone with 7:00 remaining before half following an 11-play, 98-yard drive. Kevin Vieira capped the drive with a four-yard touchdown run.
An interception by junior defensive back Andrew Skalman on the Rhodes 34-yard line set up a field goal just before halftime for Washington U. senior Eric Chalifour split the up rights with a 22-yard field goal with three seconds remaining to make it 10-7 at the intermission. The key play of the drive was a 20-yard completion from Burkett to sophomore wide receiver Conor Sapp on 3rd-and-16.
Stockhausen converted a 32-yard field goal with 7:09 left in the third quarter to knot the score at 10-10, but Washington U. answered right back with an 11-play, 75 yard drive. Castelluccio capped the drive with a seven-yard touchdown run to give the Bears the lead back at 17-10.
Washington U.'s defense stopped the Lynx early in the fourth quarter after having the ball first and goal at the one. A tackle for loss by senior William Small on first down pushed the ball back to the two, and then a fumble on second down was recovered by Rhodes on the nine-yard line. Blake Box completed a five-yard pass to Dane Wilson to move the ball to the WUSTL four-yard line, but on 4th-and-goal, Washington U. stopped Jack Lartigue a yard short of the end zone to keep the score at 17-10.
The Bears held onto a seven-point lead until late in the fourth, when Dane Wilson scored from one yard out to make it a one-point game. Stockhausen added the extra point to tie the game for the third time at 17-17.
Rhodes racked up 356 yards of total offense, and had a 32:01-27:59 advantage in time of possession. Washington U. was called for seven penalties for 84 yards in the loss. Wilson ran for 141 yards on 30 carries and a TD in the win, as the Bears allowed a 100-yard rusher for the second-straight game.
Sophomore linebacker Fade Oluokun made a career-high 16 tackles in the loss, while sophomore defensive lineman Tommy O'Hern added a career-best 10 stops. Small also had a career game with nine tackles and a sack of three yards in the loss for Washington U.
Washington University (0-2) begins a two-game homestand against Coe College on Saturday, Sept. 15. Kickoff is set for 1 p.m. at Francis Field.
Bear Notebook: This marked the first overtime game for Washington U. since a 20-13 victory over Carnegie Mellon on Oct. 30, 2010 … WUSTL and Rhodes met for the 49th time in school history and for the 25th-straight season … Rhodes leads the all-time series between the two teams 25-23-1 … Washington U. has lost its last four games in Memphis by a combined 29 points, including three losses by five or less points … The Bears are 0-2 for the first time since 1989.


text:
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text:
Over the past year, my involvement in NARN has lead me down an interesting and somewhat painful path to self knowledge. It's taken time, but I've had to define and redefine the nature of my activism, and my place within the animal rights movement. A lot has changed for me since I became an activist, especially because I live with a form of muscular dystrophy, a degenerative muscle disorder causing muscle weakness and wasting. (I'm lucky to have a mild form of the disease.)
For over a year now, I've been attending demonstrations despite the fact that it's physically difficult and exhausting for me (and if I'm not very careful, painful afterward). Some people might be tempted to view this as admirable or determined, but it was largely my stubbornness and slowness to learn that were responsible, along with a slight disregard for my own health.
Several months into the foie gras campaign, the frequency of the demos picked up, and after attending two in the same weekend, I was left completely exhausted well into the next week. That's what it took to make me realize that I might need to take my condition and health more seriously. I was emotionally burned out, too, and it was clear I needed to reconsider my role within NARN. The obvious answer was to spend more of my time doing technical work, particularly on the NARN web site.
There's never a shortage of things to do for the VegSeattle and NARN.org websites, and I was already having a hard time keeping up, so it was the obvious choice. But it still wasn't easy to talk myself out of demoing in favor of sitting at my desk–I do enough of that at my day job–but I was left with little other choice if I was to take proper care of myself. Although somewhat resigned, I stuck to my decision.
This is perhaps the first major lesson many activists must learn: take care of yourself first. I believe Kim McCoy (of Sea Shepherd) emphasized this at the opener for the Let Live Animal Rights Conference in Portland, Oregon. It's clear why this is advice that should be taken to heart: if you don't find a balance in your life and take care of yourself, you won't be an effective animal advocate. There was a lot of talk at the conference about knowing your strengths, doing what you're good at, and constantly re-evaluating what you're doing to see if it works. While a lot of this was focused at the campaign level, it clearly hit me on a more personal level.
Other aspects of Let Live helped me gain additional perspective on my situation, and renewed inspiration. It felt like I gained a new lease on life, although it also left me exhausted (from the drive to Portland, not getting enough sleep, and the sheer number of people attending). I also found it difficult to socialize in this state, which led me to realize that perhaps I wasn't cut out to network on behalf of NARN–so the same big questions were on my mind that weekend and I plenty of time to ponder them: what was my role? What were my strengths? It was pretty clear that web sitework was one. Writing has also long been a passion of mine–fiction and otherwise–and Let Live provided me with a few pathways to learn more about how these areas intersect with activism.
I attended workshops on design (by Josh Hooten of Herbivore, whose clothing I wore on several occasions during the conference) and writing (by Jasmin Singer of Farm Sanctuary). What both of these had in common was behind-the-scenes work. While often less glamorous and less recognized, supporting the infrastructure of the movement is as important as having people at protests. It also offers opportunities for nearly anyone to be involved—regardless of their abilities. The internet has opened Pandora's box on this front: blogs, social networking sites, content writing and IT work for websites; the list goes on. And this is on top of other forms of office activism: preparing literature, sending letters and emails, doing basic administrative and financial work for animal rights organizations, etc. The possibilities are almost unlimited.
So if you're new to activism and looking to get involved, realize that you have a host of options—including things as simple as encouraging friends and families to adopt a more compassionate lifestyle, the most basic form of activism. Prospective activists should also be made aware of the various ways in which they can contribute, although demand for such work usually ensures that it's sought out (NARN certainly has some such opportunities, and we're happy to accept help from volunteers). What's more, this can make it easier to participate in animal advocacy without leaving your home, and without having to so much as leave your comfort zone. You can work when you want to on your own schedule, and if I sound like an ad for a job stuffing envelopes at home, it's only because I'm excited about my new found focus on this sort of work.
I hope my experiences will inspire anyone reading this to do more – and do whatever you can to help animals. I wrote above that you don't have to leave your comfort zone to do activism, but I hope all activists will choose to challenge themselves: you can always do more by trying things you're not initially comfortable with. You might feel like you're too shy or otherwise not good for front line activism, but don't discount it without trying it. If you don't like it, try it again, and remember that some forms of activism will never be comfortable or easy–but they are worthwhile. Even if it was unhealthy for me, I value what I learned about the movement and myself on the front lines.
So do what you can–and don't run yourself into the ground. Remember, the animals are counting on us to be our best.
-Bryan Schultz


text:
Wednesday, July 13, 2016
"Waiting On" Wednesday: Small Great Things
"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.
This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:
Small Great Things
By Jodi Picoult
Publication Date: October 11
From Amazon:
Ruth Jefferson is a labor and delivery nurse at a Connecticut hospital with more than 20 years' experience. During her shift, Ruth begins a routine checkup on a newborn, only to be told a few minutes later that she's been reassigned to another patient. The parents are white supremacists and don't want Ruth, who is African American, to touch their child. The hospital complies with their request, but the next day, the baby goes into cardiac distress while Ruth is alone in the nursery. Does she obey orders or does she intervene?
With incredible empathy, intelligence, and candor, Jodi Picoult tackles race, privilege, prejudice, justice, and compassion—and doesn't offer easy answers.
What's your "waiting on" pick this week?
Want to participate? Grab the logo, post your own WoW entry on your blog, and leave your link below!
20 comments:
- Literary Dust said...
I need to add this!
- July 13, 2016 at 12:02 AM
- Bonnie R said...
I've never actually read anything by this author! Need to fix that. :)
- July 13, 2016 at 12:03 AM
- Renee said...
It's been awhile since I ready anything by Jodi Picoult but this book sounds too good to pass by. Definitely adding this one to my TBR. Thanks for sharing and hosting this meme!
- July 13, 2016 at 12:20 AM
- Di Hewlett said...
Thanks for hosting this great meme. I need to pick up a Jodi Picoult one day. It's embarrassing that I haven't done so yet! Thanks for the pick.
- July 13, 2016 at 4:13 AM
- Stephanie - Bookfever said...
YES! I can't wait for Small Great Things. It's going to be amazing, I think!
- July 13, 2016 at 5:30 AM
- Tina's Blog said...
I think this one sounds fantastic. I've got an ARC of Small Great Things but haven't found time to get to it yet!
- July 13, 2016 at 6:05 AM
- Lekeisha said...
Great pick! I just added this to my list yesterday.
- July 13, 2016 at 7:46 AM
- Angela Lawrence said...
I just came across this yesterday! I'm looking forward to it.
- July 13, 2016 at 7:51 AM
- Jackie at Fire & Ice Book Reviews said...
This looks amazing!
- July 13, 2016 at 7:53 AM
- Lisa Mandina said...
I love the cover, although I'm not a Jodi Picoult reader. I know there will be a lot of people excited for this!
- July 13, 2016 at 8:38 AM
- Angie @ BadassBookReviews said...
This looks like it's going to be heart-wrenching.
- July 13, 2016 at 9:08 AM
- Miranda said...
I haven't heard of this book until now. I'm not normally once for contemporaries but this one has be super intrigued! Great pick! :)
- July 13, 2016 at 9:09 AM
- Eve said...
I've heard great things about her books especially the one with her daughter but I haven't gotten around to picking one up yet but I look forward to doing so and I hope you love this one!
- July 13, 2016 at 9:21 AM
- Shane Morgan said...
Oh wow! This sounds intense. I'm definitely curious about this story too. Thanks for sharing.
- July 13, 2016 at 9:56 AM
Posted my first WoW today! Thank you for getting this started. Also, going to recommend this one to my mom—she loves Picoult!
- July 13, 2016 at 10:48 AM
- AngelErin said...
I love Jodi Picoult's books! I haven't heard of this one yet. Great pick.
- July 13, 2016 at 12:52 PM
- Beth Jones said...
Jodi Picoult and I either really get along plot-wise or really hate each other plot-wise. This one sounds good though. My pick for this week's WOW tends to make people have very combative feelings too.
- July 13, 2016 at 4:47 PM
- Suzanne at Reads in the Family said...
- This comment has been removed by the author.
- July 13, 2016 at 5:18 PM
- Suzanne at Reads in the Family said...
I have my eye on this one as well. Love Jodi Picoult!
- July 13, 2016 at 5:19 PM
this sounds intriguing, but I always seem to end up disappointed by JP books because a definitive resolution always seems just out of reach (but maybe that's just me) :)
- July 13, 2016 at 7:27 PM