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Moore, Jennings reach Majors for Rays
Pair continues trend of homegrown talent contributing in bigs
By David Heck / Special to MLB.com | December 15, 2011 5:00 AM
Competing in the American League East against high-spending clubs like the Yankees and Red Sox, the Rays have found success by cultivating talent from within. Evan Longoria, David Price, James Shields and B.J. Upton are all homegrown players who have helped Tampa Bay reach the playoffs three times in the past four years and win a pair of division titles.
This past season, the club utilized a new wave of talent from its Minor League system. Outfielder Desmond Jennings was a key player during the Rays' stretch run, while left-hander Matt Moore started Game 1 of the AL Division Series.
The organization's Minor League teams also thrived, with Triple-A Durham and Class A Bowling Green posting a combined 157-122 record en route to playoff berths. Here are some of the players who most contributed to the Rays' success down on the farm.
Rays Organization All-Stars
Catcher -- Stephen Vogt, Montgomery (97 games), Durham (31 games): A 2007 12th-round pick, Vogt not only was the best offensive catcher in the system but one of the best offensive players overall. The 27-year-old led the organization with 105 RBIs -- 19 more than anyone else -- while hitting .298 (sixth) with 17 homers (third). While dividing time at catcher, the outfield and DH, he amassed a system-leading 252 total bases en route to being named a Southern League midseason and postseason All-Star.
"He did an outstanding job offensively in Double-A and then that carried over into Triple-A," said Mitch Lukevics, the Rays' director of Minor League operations. "It's tough to see the forecast and the future, but he's going to come into Spring Training on the 40-man roster for the first time. He's been there in the past, but I think when you're on the 40-man, that's a whole different ballgame."
First baseman -- Dan Johnson, Durham (93 games), Tampa Bay (31 games): Johnson has had three healthy years in the Rays system, playing more Minor League games than Major League ones in each of them. He followed up on his International League MVP campaign in 2010 by hitting .273 with 13 homers, 52 RBIs and an .842 OPS this season. He batted just .119 in the bigs, but he came through with a pretty important home run for the Rays.
Second baseman -- Tyler Bortnick, Charlotte (132 games): Bortnick provided everything one would want from a top-of-the-order hitter, displaying both patience and speed for the Stone Crabs. The 24-year-old posted a .423 on-base percentage and stole a system-leading 43 bases while getting caught only four times. Although he hit only four homers, he smacked 34 doubles and seven triples en route to 205 total bases. He also batted .306 to rank fourth in the organization.
"Tyler's the grind-it-out type of player," Lukevics said. "He's a hustle player that can beat you in many different ways -- get on base, steal bases, very aggressive. A high-energy type of player. We're really pleased from Tyler and how he did in the Florida State League."
Third baseman -- Russ Canzler, Durham (131 games), Tampa Bay (three games): After posting a .938 OPS at Double-A in 2010, Canzler put together another impressive offensive year, compiling a .930 OPS. He was among the Rays' leaders in a number of offensive categories, including average (.314, second), homers (18, second), RBIs (83, fourth) and total bases (251, second). He was named International League MVP and earned a spot on the midseason and postseason All-Star teams.
"Russ showed everybody that he can swing the bat," Lukevics said. "He hit for average and he also hit for power. When the game was on the line, he has the ability to drive in runs. That's a really good year when you're not only a league MVP but the International League MVP."
Shortstop -- Hak-Ju Lee, Charlotte (97 games), Montgomery (24 games): Acquired from the Cubs in the Matt Garza trade, Lee batted .292 with five homers, 17 doubles, 15 triples and 30 RBIs in 121 games. Hitting at the top of the order, he led the organization with 98 runs scored and checked in second with 33 steals. He earned spots on the Florida State League midseason and postseason All-Star teams and also participated in the All-Star Futures Game for the second straight year.
"He did everything you would want to see from a shortstop and more," Lukevics said. "Defensively, he has plus tools. Offensively, he knows how to get on base and has great speed to steal bases. When he went to Double-A, it was a whole different challenge for Hak. I think some of the deficiencies in Double-A, by physically maturing and gaining some strength, he will take care of that."
Brandon Guyer, Durham (107 games), Tampa Bay (15 games): Another player who came over in the Garza trade, Guyer's .312 average for the Bulls placed him third among Rays Minor Leaguers. He was a solid all-around player at Triple-A, collecting 14 homers, 61 RBIs, 78 runs scored and 16 steals. And his .905 OPS led all players in the organization who played at least 70 games.
"He's a great athlete," Lukevics said. "He has the ability to hit, he's an excellent defender and he can really run the bases. He offers a lot of things in both halves of the innings."
Desmond Jennings, Durham (89 games), Tampa Bay (63 games): Though he spent such a large part of the year in the Majors, Jennings' Minor League numbers still placed him firmly among the Rays' top outfielders on the farm. His 12 homers quadrupled the total from the previous season, when he was dealing with a sore shoulder. The 25-year-old also hit .275 and swiped 17 bases before batting .259 with 10 dingers and 20 steals in the bigs. Between the Majors and Minors, he totaled 64 RBIs and 112 runs scored.
"He was healthy for the entire year for the first time since his Columbus year, when he played in Low-A," Lukevics noted. "He's been nicked up, banged up, and that's kind of derailed him somewhat. What he showed last year was the type of player we all thought he would be, the type of athlete he is, and that he has the ability make an enormous contribution."
Kyeong Kang, Montgomery (99 games): Selected in the 15th round of the 2006 Draft, Kang was a lighter version of the other two outfielders on this list -- though he did not excel at any one aspect of the game, he was generally solid in a number of areas. The 23-year-old smacked 11 homers, 14 doubles and four triples while stealing six bases. He got on base at a strong .384 clip, helping him to an .821 OPS.
"He came out this year not in a starting role and he earned his way into a starting role and performed very well for us in 2011," Lukevics said. "Look at the on-base percentage, the ability to take a walk, to drive a baseball. He had a very good year, and in his first Double-A season."
Utility -- Tim Beckham, Montgomery (107 games), Durham (24 games): The No. 1 overall pick in 2008, Beckham regained some of his prospect status by hitting .271 with 12 homers and 17 steals in 22 tries. Though his average dropped from .275 to .255 after his promotion, his power improved drastically -- he hit five homers at Triple-A, compared to seven in more than four times as many games at Double-A. Overall, he scored 94 runs (third in system), drove in 70 runs (ninth) and compiled 214 total bases (sixth). He joined Lee in representing the Rays at the All-Star Futures Game.
"I think you see a young high school kid who has matured, both physically and mentally," Lukevics said. "I think with that, you saw a more consistent baseball player. He shored up his weaknesses on defense, showed the ability to drive the ball, and we expect bigger and better things in his future. He was in Triple-A last year at 21, when a lot of 21-year-olds come into the Draft. And he was competing at a high level in Triple-A."
Right-handed starting pitcher -- Alexander Colome, Charlotte (19 games), Montgomery (nine games): Colome, the nephew of former Rays reliever Jesus Colome, was solid if unspectacular in his second full professional season. The 22-year-old posted a 3.82 ERA with 123 strikeouts in 157 2/3 innings, racking up 12 wins to rank second in the system. He had some trouble with walks, issuing 72, but was able to counteract that wildness by allowing opponents to hit just .216.
"He has plus stuff; there's no question about Alexander's stuff," Lukevics said. "Now he's at the point where you take that good stuff and refine the delivery so he's able to throw quality strikes. And when he does that -- and we're confident that he can do that -- he's going to be a really good big league pitcher."
Left-handed starting pitcher -- Matt Moore, Montgomery (18 games), Durham (nine games), Tampa Bay (three games): The Rays had other strong southpaws in Alex Torres and C.J. Riefenhauser, but Moore was far and away the best pitcher in the Minor Leagues. He ranked second in the Minors with a 1.90 ERA and 210 strikeouts, combining for 155 innings between Double-A and Triple-A.
The highlight of his season might have been his nine-inning, 11-strikeout no-hitter against Mobile on June 17 or it might have been the seven shutout innings he threw against the Rangers in Game 1 of the ALDS that gave the Rays their only playoff win. In October, he was given the J.G. Taylor Spink Award as the Topps Minor League Player of the Year.
"He's a kid that pitched two years in the [Rookie-level] Appalachian League with our Princeton affiliate," Lukevics said. "With a great work ethic and great attitude, with some help from his coaches, the world saw his ability in the first game of the [ALDS] against the Rangers. What more can you say? The future is bright."
Relief pitcher -- Chris Rearick, Bowling Green (50 games): The 24-year-old right-hander shared the organization lead with 20 saves while tallying seven wins out of the Hot Rods' bullpen. He put together a strong strikeout rate while limiting his wildness, fanning 89 and walking 16 batters over 81 1/3 innings. Rearick's 1.66 ERA was the best of any Rays reliever who appeared in at least 20 games, and his efforts earned him a spot of the Midwest League postseason All-Star team.
"He showed us a plus fastball at times and a plus breaking ball," Lukevics said. "He learned a lot about himself, a lot about his delivery. We saw him more consistent in the strike zone. Throwing it within the strike zone, more times than not you get good results. I'm happy for him and what he did for us this past year."
David Heck is a contributor to MLB.com. This story was not subject to the approval of the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues or its clubs.View More


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By changing its approach to project management, an energy service company improves on-time performance while lowering cost - seven during peak demand time.
Preparing for peak summer loads was difficult, inefficient, and costly when TXU Electric & Gas scheduled jobs by hand. With more than nine million customers in the United States, Europe and Australia, TXU is the fourth-largest supplier of essential energy services in the United States and the world's ninth-largest energy service company. Imagine tracking 21,000MW of diversified generation capacity and electricity for 2.5 million customers and natural gas for 1.4 million customers manually. Obviously, switching to an automated project management system equaled big cost-savings for the company.
TXU especially benefited from the project management software's "enterprise-wide view." If you manage many projects, you can't treat each one as a fully resourced job. You only have so many resources to draw from to complete all projects, and that can mean resource timing problems. Because TXU lacked the tools to provide such a view before, projects often clashed with each other. This is not the case today.
The enterprise-wide view helps TXU predict workloads in each geographic area and realign crews accordingly. Increased efficiency in scheduling (combined with an interface to the work management and outage management system) slashed the time required to schedule and prioritize jobs. TXU now resolves resource clashes in the planning stage - where resolution costs are negligible. What are resource clashes? Think of what happens if you schedule specialized workers (Photo 1, below) or capital equipment (Photo 2, right) to be in two or three places at once.
PLANNING VERSUS WAITING TXU's crews handle new construction, scheduled maintenance, and emergency repairs. Previously, emergencies made it difficult to maintain progress on capital projects.
"Just as a crew was starting a planned job, something reactive would come up and we'd have to reassign them. "The materials for the planned work would often go to the reactive job instead," says Sue Jackman, project coordinator for TXU Electric, Construction Services. "There were so many changes that crews frequently arrived in the morning not knowing what they were going to do that day. They spent considerable time waiting for their assignment, and then locating needed materials, before actually reaching the job site."
Planners at local service centers faced a logistical nightmare in handling the paperwork for the 25,000 activities in process at any given time. The manual system made it hard to determine appropriate staffing levels and adjust them to meet requirements. As a result, crews rarely shared work between service centers. Crews in one region ran out of work, while others in adjacent areas missed schedule dates.
Several years ago, TXU began automating engineering design operations to deliver better customer service while reducing costs. It purchased a work management system to automate the engineering department's flow of work requests. The staff began a process improvement program to streamline processes and improve productivity. This program identified the need for improved job scheduling and resource management. The new scheduling process allows five construction analysts (schedulers) at multiple sites to manage 455 crews while maintaining an enterprise view of the system.
Along another path, a team formed to evaluate potential project management software vendors. The team selected one particular vendor because its wide range of capabilities met all requirements without customization. This saved time and money during implementation and allowed TXU to take full advantage of software upgrades, using the vendor's technical support and project management expertise.
Because the vendor's representatives were familiar with situations like TXU's, they discussed some extended benefits made possible by companion products from third-party developers. One product allowed TXU to build two major interfaces into the project management system. One interface is for the outage management system; the other is for the work management system. The two interfaces provide automatic updates to the project management system, allowing TXU to leverage their software investment even further.
The interfaces eliminated rekeying data from the outage management system or the engineering staff.
"This dramatically streamlines the task of the construction analysts (schedulers), previously buried in the paperwork required to monitor thousands of activities every week," says Jackman. "Now, they can assign activities by selecting them and clicking on the crew that they want to do the job. With activities automatically flowing through the system, analysts can focus their talents on real problems - ensuring we achieve customer-required dates."
The system for distributing information to the crews improved drastically. TXU set up the project management software to automatically post work schedules to its intranet. Material planners and managers can access these schedules from their desktops. They now order the required parts and equipment so crews have these items when they begin a job.
Crews proactively plan their entire week, promoting synergy between jobs. For example, they piggyback trips that share some common routes to eliminate retraveling that "first leg" to sites along the same trajectory. Crews can frequently move from one assignment to another without returning to the service center.
Field crews use the system's progress reporting feature to report activity status daily. The feature allows crews to view all projects or project components assigned to them. They can assign themselves to jobs without waiting for construction analysts - who sometimes can't process incoming jobs fast enough. This situation might occur when a storm creates a tidal wave of outage calls. The software also allows workers to view comments sent by the construction analyst and provide feedback.
Metroplex views. The software allows TXU to manage its resources within a single database. Thus, managers can view the entire metroplex from a workload and resource commitment standpoint. Managers spot an imbalance of work between different areas and reassign other crews and equipment to compensate. For example, a big wire pull creates a "bulge" in human resources requirements. Borrowing people from a project in a "slack" phase to assist with one in a "bulge" phase ultimately lowers overall costs to the company.
"The improved flow of scheduling information has substantially increased the efficiency of our crews," says Jackman. "In particular, we shrank the backlog of repair jobs that are not `lights-out.' Every year, we initiate a series of major projects to prepare for increased loads we expect to see during the hot Texas summer. Previously, we couldn't complete many of these jobs.
"This is the first year that all of these projects, with the exception of some with external permitting issues, are on track. We are better prepared than ever to meet our customers' electrical requirements."
Jackman explains the successful use of automated scheduling is seeding other applications throughout the company. TXU plans to incorporate about 200 engineers into the scheduling system, which will make it possible to more accurately plan all projects and prepare long-range construction forecasts.
"We are planning to bring other work groups online, such as gas construction, vegetation management and construction inspection," she says. "We have a nearly endless list of other process groups who want to use the tool to enhance their operations."
1. Establish your view. If you manage multiple projects, your software needs an "enterprise view." If you manage a single project or a few projects with no interdependencies, a simpler package may suffice.
2. Examine your resources. What resources are critical to each project, and how do all projects compete for those resources? What resource problems do you have, and what problems do you anticipate? Traditional project planning is weak on resource assessment, but today's tools can alleviate resource conflicts and timing problems.
3. Examine your work methods. Use the software to improve how you run jobs. With the ability to automate Critical Path Method (CPM) and easily adjust it with Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) and other tools, you can maximize project efficiency. That means delivering quality to your clients at less cost.
4. Embrace the marketplace. Projects are more demanding in shorter time-frames on thinner margins. To beat the com-petition, you must surpass clients' expectations. As you gain efficiencies through advanced planning techniques, invest some of that windfall into delighting customers. This alone can make the software investment pay for itself many times over.

subset: commoncrawl


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Although the British had ordered their wives and daughters out of Baghdad, there were nineteen women among the crowds who found shelter in the British Embassy, in late April, 1941, soon after the Iraqi government went over to the Germans. A pro-Nazi coup had occurred a few weeks earlier, in relative calm, but an increase in anti-British hostility and the sudden appearance of armed Iraqi soldiers had brought tensions in the city to an intolerable level, especially since the British—heavily engaged in Libya and Greece—had few reinforcements to spare. The Iraqi Army had already surrounded the nearby Royal Air Force base when, at dawn on May 3rd, the well-known explorer Freya Stark raced through the deserted streets, arriving just in time to make it through the Embassy's side door.
The main gates had been locked; sandbags and barbed wire were frantically being placed within; and a mountain of documents was burning in the courtyard. The Persian gardeners, however, continued to water the flowering verbena and, as days and then weeks went by, kept the lawn (despite the number of people sleeping on it) brilliantly green. Living quarters were uncomfortable, with some three hundred and fifty people enduring intense heat, sniper fire, and the not so distant thud of bombs as British planes attempted to retake the airfield. News over the wireless was grim. Yet there was no end of attempts to cheer the trapped and frightened population. One night, there was a lecture, given by Stark; another night, there was a concert. (As a bonus, a cache of rifles was discovered in the grand piano.) Basic provisions were allowed in daily, and Stark, adept at chatting up the Iraqi guards who monitored the prisoners' fate, boldly requested a quantity of soap and face powder for the women. The extra packages were duly delivered. This small victory for Western womanhood was marred, however, by the policeman at the gate, who remarked that he couldn't imagine how the harem could think about such things, since they were all to be murdered in a few days.
Freya Stark had come to prominence a few years earlier, with the publication of her first book, "The Valleys of the Assassins" (1934), a study in Islamic history and geography related with the excitement of an adventure story. The book was a popular hit, as were two books that she wrote, along similar lines, soon thereafter—"The Southern Gates of Arabia" (1936) and "A Winter in Arabia" (1940). All these books were about the contemporary Arab world as well. Stark had travelled through Syria, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and Yemen at a time when national borders retained a fictive quality, and no one could be sure what political or cultural forces would prevail. British power, just beginning to show the strains of its extended glory, still held firm regional sway—although Stark's more dangerous explorations were conducted in spite of its warnings and behind its imperial back.
Stark could talk her way into any situation and, most of the time, out again, in a remarkable number of languages. She had just talked her way back to Baghdad from Tehran, when, hellbent on safety among her friends and colleagues in the Baghdad Embassy, she was stopped by Iraqi police at the frontier. All British citizens were barred from proceeding further, and she was officially in custody; others, she learned, had been put in prison camps. Yet she cajoled the station attendant into bringing her tea and her police guard into sharing it, and informed the guard of the sheer impossibility of staying on without a ladies' maid. Surely he could see her problem and wished to be civilized? His people were not, after all, Germans. And the policeman—no longer guarding a prisoner but protecting a lady—put her on the next train to Baghdad. "The great and almost only comfort about being a woman," Stark reflected, in a maxim that encompasses many such events in her illustrious career, "is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised."
As an explorer, Stark could claim no major discoveries, but her acute observations and her surveying skills had earned her professional respect and, for cartographic contributions, a Royal Geographical Society award. She had located unmarked villages and unsuspected mountains, taken compass bearings and photographs. Once, she had re-situated an entire misplaced mountain range to the correct side of a valley. But this was not why people read her books then, or why they continue to read them now. Stark did not even reliably make it to her intended goals: the routes—usually travelled by camel or donkey—were astonishingly harsh, malaria was rife, and a host of other ailments took their toll. Yet for Stark, despite the bitter disappointment of being beaten to a destination, the cliché that the journey is more important than the goal was irrefutably true. She was a vivid describer of scenes and landscapes. More, she was a connoisseur of people: she knew how to draw them out and listened closely when they spoke. Today, one may be able to gain more scholarly and updated history from other authors. Bernard Lewis's "The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam" covers much of the same material as Stark's first book (and its subtitle is guaranteed to catch the modern eye), but it would be a mistake to think that she has been replaced.
Readers of Stark's reissued works—Modern Library offers the two earliest books, and I. B. Tauris is in the midst of publishing nine others—will find a writer who endows everyone in her field of vision with the heightened interest that she felt herself. Peasants, Bedouins, tribal leaders, guides, soldiers, and slaves make up a society that is both impossibly strange and palpably near, in the simple and not so simple human sense. Stark was not an objective observer—how could she have been?—but, far more sophisticated than the surveying tools she carried, she was a finely calibrated recording instrument in a land that was just awakening to the changes being wrought by paved roads, nation-states, and oil.
The largest-looming figures in this record are the wives. Stark was frequently the first European woman to be seen in the places that she went, and she just as frequently found, upon arrival, that the only area immediately open to her—comprising the only people eager to speak with her, if also to touch her, sniff her, and examine her clothes—was the harem. She became, in time, something of a specialist in the unconsidered trifles of its customs and its days. Here were whole sections of life not on the Royal Geographical Society's agenda: polygamous domestic arrangements, gossip, laughter, jewelry, bridal costumes, bridal terrors, children.
Stark was not an anthropologist, and she was certainly not a feminist. Like many extraordinary women of her era—she was born in 1892—she had little patience with the dully ordinary women whose fate she had worked hard to escape. (Stark's famed predecessor in Arabian exploration, Gertrude Bell, was a founding member of London's Anti-Suffrage League, and Stark, too, briefly came into its circle.) In part, the harem was for Stark merely a means of gaining trust and approaching the powerful men who were the primary subjects of her visit. But her feeling for feminine rites and habits and, particularly, wardrobes was unfeigned. "There are few sorrows," she wrote, "through which a new dress or hat will not send a little gleam of hope, however fugitive." And as an unmarried female from the British tribes, whose trials in life included lack of wealth, beauty, and position, Stark had her own experience of social invisibility, which enabled her to see these women with compassion and, at times perhaps, a touch of envy.
In some ways, the British were more exotic to Stark than the Arabs. This quintessentially British woman, as she appeared to the Arab eye, spoke English with an accent: the language of her nursery was German, thanks to a beloved grandmother and an early governess, and she had grown up mostly in Italy. True, her parents were English, but, as aspiring painters and confirmed bohemians, they had felt no need to settle down. Stark's earliest life was a blurred succession of houses and countries. The home she remembered, later on, with the poignancy of a childhood lost, was one that her father had built on the moors of his native Devon, all horses and heather and bluebells, and with a bedstead painted by her mother—who despised the cozy, bourgeois place—with sailing ships. Freya was ten when her mother ended this idyll by running off with a twenty-three-year-old impoverished Italian count. Both Freya and her younger sister were forcibly moved to a dour little town in Piedmont, in the Italian north, where the count used their mother's money—or, rather, their father's money, before it was cut off—to set up a factory. The girls lived there in dispirited poverty, with some minimal education from the French nuns in the town, and no escape.
To redouble the catastrophe, Freya, visiting the factory just before she turned thirteen, got her long hair caught in some machinery, and was yanked free so fiercely that her scalp was torn and her right ear ripped entirely off. The repairing surgery required painful skin grafts, and afterward she always combed her hair carefully over the right side, and wore little bonnets or, later on, big hats. She took refuge in books, completed correspondence courses, and finally managed to go off to college in London; she would have preferred Grenoble, but her father, declaring her already "too foreign," would pay only for an English school. The climactically gothic episode of her mother's escapade took place shortly after she left, when her sister, Vera, just turned eighteen—the good and docile daughter—was married to their mother's Italian count.
Stark's two diligent biographers, Jane Fletcher Geniesse and Molly Izzard, strongly disagree on the circumstances that led to these unholy nuptials, and on how they affected Stark. Either the count first made advances to Freya (as she implied, years later) or he passed her over for her more attractive sister: take your choice of poisons. Afterward, as Izzard argues, Vera had a satisfying life with her husband and four children, making Freya's spinsterhood all the harder to bear; or, in Geniesse's version, Vera had a dismally confined and dreadful married life, which brought Freya a different sort of suffering. Whatever the reality, Freya veered for years between the urge to decisive, self-fulfilling action—she studied nursing and served, during the Great War, at the Italian front—and a tendency toward illness and breakdown that made her appear headed for the life of a typically quashed female hysteric.
She was nearly thirty when she began to study Arabic. A professor had suggested that she take up a non-European language: he favored Icelandic. But Britain's long romance with Arab lands was at its height after the war, as the exploits of Lawrence of Arabia and even Gertrude Bell—a primary power in the creation of modern Iraq, in 1921, and hailed as its "uncrowned queen"—made headlines. Stark, who was then working a flower farm she'd bought in northern Italy, literally struggling in the dirt to make a living, said that she chose Arabic in the hope that it would somehow lead her out of drudgery. The hope was based partly on an astute assessment of contemporary geopolitics, partly on her illustrated childhood copy of "The Arabian Nights," and partly on a desire to get as far away as she could. The mere sight of a good map, she said, filled her with "a certain madness." But it was only when Vera died, after a miscarriage, in 1926, aged thirty-three, that Freya took herself in hand. Vera had died, Freya wrote, because she had let other people decide how she would live. She was not going to make the same mistake. In November, 1927, after years of thinking and planning and scraping together the funds, she boarded a cargo ship and, three weeks later, disembarked in Beirut.
Stark was received with warmth by the local population, having come, as she noted, "neither to improve nor to rob." All she wanted was to study Arabic (and, very soon, Persian) in preparation for exploring the "genuine Orient"; Beirut, alas—with its French and high heels and missionaries—seemed to her a soul-divided East-West hybrid. Still, she found the city exhilarating. Despite weeks of freezing cold and rain, her health quickly improved and she was nearly giddy with the joy of being "free all day long to do my own work; this alone was worth travelling across the world for." Every street, every stranger beckoned with mystery. It was delightful even to be arrested, on her very first adventure, travelling into Syria in search of the native Druse, who had recently led a rebellion against the ruling French.
Since the end of the war, with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the French had controlled Syria and Lebanon under a League of Nations "mandate," as the British controlled Iraq, Palestine, and Jordan—a division of spoils that shamelessly betrayed the wartime promises of Arab independence made (most famously by Lawrence of Arabia) to keep Arab insurgents fighting against the German-allied Turks. These countries were not colonies; the mandates were supposed to be temporary. But, almost a decade after the war, the occupying powers showed few signs of clearing out. The Druse had been brutally suppressed, and their mountainous area placed under martial law and officially closed to travellers.
Stark's approach to this problem was to set off from Damascus surreptitiously, via donkey, with a Druse guide and an English woman friend who had arrived just for the trip. Stark was proud of travelling without servants or extra baggage—she compared herself favorably in this regard to the ever-daunting Gertrude Bell, who, as an Oxford-educated aristocrat, had made a similar trip, Stark noted, with "three baggage mules, two tents, and three servants: so I consider we were the more adventurous." (Stark never met Bell, who died the year before Stark got to Beirut.) The essential items that Stark learned to carry were plenty of medications, letters of introduction (preferably embossed), and penny-trinket gifts.
The little group took the rougher, more hidden routes through a countryside more than rough enough. At night, they slept in hospitable village houses. The French Army officers who finally caught up with them were confounded by the British ladies (one quite pretty, one speaking French and Arabic), who claimed to have been misdirected by their Thomas Cook guidebook. Suspected of being spies, they were confined to Army barracks for three days that quickly resolved into horseback rides, convivial dinners, and visits to local villages, where the leading officer discoursed on the benefits of civilization that the French were bringing to the barbarous land. Farewells were nearly tender. And Stark got more from the experience than she had bargained for: permission to continue on her way, plus the trust of the commiserating Druse for having been imprisoned by the hated French.
Her first published article, in an English magazine, in 1928, excoriated the agents of the French "imperium"—the word was used contemptuously, in place of "mandate"—for their authoritarian approach and their many abuses of the Syrians, which included forced labor, economic indifference to the agriculture that sustained the peasants, tank attacks, and terrible manners, all symptoms of an inability to see their subjects as human beings. By contrast, British rule in the mandates (which she confessed she had not yet experienced) was alert to compromise and to the living spirit of the native people. She was, nevertheless, presenting the English audience with a cautionary tale.
Stark was not really concerned with politics, beyond a desire to assuage the injustices she saw immediately before her. And even after she had come to know British rule and rulers well, she rarely gave any sign that local people chafed under their control, or that, beyond the smug unpleasantness of British wives, they had reason to do so. (On one occasion, in Yemen, sleeping outdoors, she awoke to find a knife-wielding member of a "tribe the R.A.F. has been bombing" squatting beside her. But the man merely inquired whether she belonged to the tribe of the British commander—she did not record her presumably sensible reply—and immediately vanished, along with his history and his motives.) The great archeological discoveries of the modern era were Stark's abiding interest; she read Marco Polo's "Travels" the way Schliemann had read Homer to locate Troy. And it was in this spirit that she took on the biggest semi-mythic quests she could find.
Accounts of the Assassins, a medieval sect of political murderers, first filtered back to Europe from the East with the Crusades. Our English word "assassin" is derived from the Arabic hashish, under the influence of which this long-defunct Islamic cult—"history's first terrorists," to cite the jacket copy of Bernard Lewis's book—was believed to commit its atrocious acts. The ruins of the Assassins' castles, on a nearly inaccessible ridge in the Elburz Mountains, in northwest Iran, had not gone entirely unvisited by Europeans, but both the memory and the maps were sketchy until Stark wrote her book. Yet the success of "The Valleys of the Assassins" (Modern Library; $15) depended more on details picked up along the way: a felt rug laid on the grass in sunshine, tea from a samovar set among boulders, and the local people talking happily about the lack of civilization in neighboring Iraq, or about why the lady visitor was not married. There was the poor old man who had travelled miles to beg the foreigner known for carrying medicines to save his son from snakebite, and the impoverished mother who, following the laws of hospitality, fed the few tomatoes from the family's garden to her guests, then sneakingly offered one of her hungry sons her fingers to lick, for the slight tomato savor that remained. "As for the daughter," who stood by while the boys divided the remains that Stark had left discreetly on her plate, "she had learnt already what is what in this world," Stark adds. "She neither got nor expected a share."
All Stark's books offer just such a mixture of romance and harsh reality. Her quest, in "The Southern Gates of Arabia" (Modern Library; $15), was for the origins of the ancient and historically perfumed frankincense trade route, deep in the "gaunt, leopard-colored lands" of present-day Yemen. The fragrant resin had once been required for the incense that burned on altars from Jerusalem and Cairo to Rome, a substance so precious that it made a fitting gift from a King of the East to a new-born god. At first, the trip went well, even its commonplace locomotion yielding pleasures that, with her strength and philosophical aplomb, Stark made seem easy:
There is a cheerful quality in the neat brisk sound of trotting donkey feet on hard ground. And it is pleasant too, to sit on a donkey pack, when you know how to do it, without rigidity, meeting the jolts and caprices of your companion with an elastic temper and a capacity for balance; riding, in fact, as one rides through life, with a calm eye for accidents and a taste for enjoyment in the meantime.
All too soon, however, she contracted measles from a child in a harem where she stopped to visit, and then a bad case of dysentery, and finally had to be airlifted to the nearest British hospital, in Aden. As a result, she failed to reach the old, sand-covered trading post of Shabwa, which, to add to its allure and her regret, was very possibly the capital of the Queen of Sheba. But she didn't give up.
"A Winter in Arabia" (Tauris Parke; $17) recounts how, bored and disillusioned by an expedition with a trained archeologist and with its painstakingly inglorious achievements ("The pots are so depressingly ugly"), Stark set off again to explore the frankincense lands. Acting against British counsel—peace among the Yemeni tribes was fragile, and anything might incite them—pushing herself through more illness (dengue fever, apparently), and going as much as twenty-two hours on camelback in two days, she pondered such questions as whether it was "a passion for mystery chiefly which explains the optimism of human beings toward both polygamy and travel." For her, and for her readers, the mere sound of many of the words—Shabwa, Sheba, frankincense—was part of the driving mystery.
Like previous generations of British writers who romanticized the desert Arabs, Stark often saw the people, too, clothed in mystery and enchantment. The Bedouin, to her eyes, moved with a "natural Arab freedom," displaying a "genuine aloofness from the trappings of existence." A latter-day type of the noble savage, that mythical figure repeatedly conjured by Westerners out of the discontents of their own civilization—machines, office jobs, sexual repression—the Bedouins, like Tahitian islanders or Negro jazz musicians, represented an untamed freedom that their rapt admirers believed themselves to have lost. If there is occasionally a sexual frisson to Stark's description of these Arab men—"Their beauty was in the bare torso, the muscles rippling in freedom under a skin to which a perpetual treatment of indigo, sun and oil gives a bloom neither brown nor blue, but something like a dark plum"—she sees in the women the same exemplary freedom. Even under their veils and heavy drapes, "no one in all that busy moving world wore either shoes or corsets; and it was this, I concluded, which gave them that grace and swallow-like motion." But Stark was far from blind to the pains and restrictions of this graceful world: in the daily lives of the women (not one of those she met could read), in the lives of the nearly starving poor, and in the lives of slaves.
In the Hadhramaut—the large central area of Yemen, where she was travelling—"a small slave or servant is given to every infant member of any well-to-do family," she records, and it is jarring to recall that the year is 1934. Nearly all the slaves are black Africans, and, while slaves were no longer imported into the country, she informs us, "a certain number still remain, gradually disappearing." Yet, during the course of her travels, the very uncertain number expands to include the Sultan of Makalla's bodyguards, five hundred slaves in Tarim who had revolted just the year before, and the especially ill-treated slaves who labor in the Bedouins' fields, since the proud nomads scorn working with their hands. And then there is Mubarak the Slave, who comes to Stark for medicine for his wife; he cannot take her to a doctor in the nearest town, because he is "a slave belonging to this earth and cannot move," as he has been told, a claim of questionable legality that Stark can only hope some future visiting British authority will dismiss. Indeed, the most startling image in these books occurs when the Bedouins' slaves, having heard that the R.A.F. might liberate them, come pouring across a field to kiss the author's knees and garments as she passes.
The persistence of slavery posed a moral predicament for someone who wished to avoid any intimation of cultural advantage, and it was clearly causing Stark a struggle. When she allowed herself to think about the subject, rather than simply to mention its existence, she argued that the West had rid itself of slavery only when religion declined—when enough people understood that they had to deal with the causes of sorrow in the world themselves, since God would not. The Middle East was still a formidably religious society, but it was changing fast—perhaps too fast, owing to the interference of foreigners like her. When asked by a Bedouin man, around a campfire, if she was indeed one of those foreigners who had come "to make us free our slaves, and pay taxes, and make our women do as they please," Stark replied with an evasive joke, saying that she didn't know about the first two, "but I know that your women do as they please already, because I am a woman myself." The man laughed, and the conversation continued. Politics just got in the way.
Until politics was all that mattered. In 1939, when war was threatening, Stark offered her services to the British government, and was assigned to the Middle East Propaganda Section of the Ministry of Information. She was by then an illustrious personage among Britons in the Middle East, yet had maintained an identity apart; she had even published a book of teasing "Baghdad Sketches" (Tauris Parke; $16), making light of the complacent British community there. But the British no longer had cause for complacency. Arab sentiment had grown vehemently anti-British in the years leading up to the war, because of unyielding control in the region, but also because of British policy in Palestine.
British support for Jewish immigration dated from before the Balfour Declaration, in 1917, and had culminated in harsh reprisals against Palestinian Arab revolts during the late thirties, when desperate Jewish refugees were flooding into the land. But in 1939, faced with the disruption of vital oil supplies and the loss of strategic bases should Arab states side with the Axis, the British reversed their policy, bringing Jewish immigration virtually to a halt. The Germans had already exploited the situation, however, to win wide Arab support. And they continued to tighten their hold with fiercely effective anti-British and anti-Semitic propaganda—in Baghdad, a German-owned Arabic newspaper had serialized parts of "Mein Kampf"—which Stark's new job was to help overcome.
She translated Reuters news reports for broadcasting; she sneaked British propaganda films into walled-off, imam-ruled Yemeni territory (she sneaked in the projector, too, claiming it was a portable commode). But her proudest accomplishment was the Brotherhood of Freedom, an organization that she set up along the lines of the Muslim Brotherhood, which, begun in Cairo and pledged to Islam, had been training Arab fighters against foreign domination since the twenties. Britain's best attempts to ban the Muslim Brotherhood's militant activities had failed; Stark, admiring its irrepressibility, and also starting out in Cairo, closely duplicated its structure of ideological cells. The members of her network, however, were pledged to personal freedom and secular democracy. And the method of spreading these values was Stark's great specialty: talk.
Tea parties, discussion groups, and informal social gatherings mixed local people of every social stratum (street sweepers, students, Army officers) with friendly British operatives who were ready to answer questions, parry objections, and instill confidence that Britain would win the war—especially important during the first two years of fighting, when it seemed as likely that Britain would lose, and many people cared only about backing the winning side. It is difficult to determine the Brotherhood of Freedom's ultimate effectiveness, if any, but by the middle of the war it claimed tens of thousands of members, and major branches of the Foreign Office competed for Stark's overseeing presence.
She had just arrived in Baghdad to start a new chapter when the city's pro-Nazi coup took place. The palace was seized, the British-backed regent fled, and shopkeepers tore pro-British posters out of their windows. As foreigners held their breath, hoping for diplomatic intercession, Stark—never one to resist danger—took a quick recreational jaunt to Tehran, returning barely in time to pass the fearful month of May, 1941, among the captives in the British Embassy, waiting to see which side's reinforcements would come through. It turned out that Baghdad's Nazi contingent had known no more than anyone else about German military plans. Hitler, preparing to send huge numbers of troops to the Soviet Union, could spare only two squadrons of planes for Iraq, and these were unable to stop a makeshift British battalion sent from Palestine—it included buses from the streets of Haifa—as it made its way across the desert to Baghdad. By the end of the month, the government had changed hands again. The Embassy gates were thrown open on June 1st. More than ever convinced of the importance of getting people to talk—a matter of saving not one but two civilizations—Stark celebrated the release by buying three new hats on her way back to work.
Stark's most difficult assignment as a propagandist was to sell Britain's altered position on Palestine in a notably hostile environment: the United States. She made an official tour of the country in 1943, and while she was greeted in the press as "the female Lawrence of Arabia," and even credited with keeping Rommel out of Cairo, her speeches about the need to put stringent quotas on Jewish immigration did not go over well in New York, Washington, or San Francisco. Stark was not just a Ministry of Information mouthpiece; she believed in what she said. Early in her government service, she had notified her superiors, with evident astonishment, that "every Yemeni I have spoken to has put Palestine in front even of the question of his own borderland!" She was offering personal, burning knowledge about an issue of world importance—or about one side of it. For, even lacking a broader understanding of what was happening to European Jewry, Stark was defending a policy that, the year before, had caused more than seven hundred Romanian Jews to drown when a ship attempting to reach Palestine was turned away by the British, and sank. It was impossible for her to talk these deaths away. She insisted that she was not anti-Zionist: she merely believed that Arab consent should be required before large-scale Jewish immigration resumed. This consent was likely to be granted, she predicted, with the formation of an Arab federation after the war—if the Allies won.
Many Americans found her views politically naïve, or worse. She was heckled and rebutted on a variety of issues, from the Iraqi-Nazi accord and British rule in India to the British lust for oil. Yet, in spite of it all, her letters reveal that she took a liking to American women and—the irony was not lost on her—that "the really sympathique people I have met in this country are Jews." She was taken aback at being labelled a "Judeaphobe" and an "agent provocateur," charges that made it to the U.S. Congress. In turn, she pointed out that America had far more room for refugees than Palestine, and was closed off only by its own obdurately excluding immigration laws. But continual arguing to no avail was a profoundly wearying experience. The tour lasted six months, after which Stark wrote a "little book, popular and personal," summing up her recent history and beliefs. (In America, the book was called "The Arabian Isle"; in England it was titled "East Is West," reversing Kipling's dictum that "never the twain shall meet.") Throughout the following decades, however, she kept silent about the Middle East, and she never wrote a book about Arabia again.
After the war, she moved back to Italy, living in a villa in the Veneto that she had inherited from a family friend, hosting an international beau monde and cultivating a reputation for charming eccentricity. Even before leaving the Middle East, she had become known not only for her work but for her gaiety, her social skills, and, above all, her extravagant hats: most famous was a pale-blue cartwheel with embroidered clock hands (in pink) mischievously set at five and seven, the early-evening hours when—according to popular legend—wives were free to meet their lovers because their husbands were out doing the same.
Stark was a notorious flirt but also something of an innocent. In her mid-fifties, she married a British civil servant and fellow-Arabist who was known to all, except the bride, to be homosexual. Thrilled as she was to shed her spinster status, Stark was not prepared for a mariage blanc, or for the life of a civil servant's wife. After a few attempts to make the relationship work, she got a divorce and returned to her old life, although she now styled herself Mrs. Freya Stark. It was a serious blow, but she was not one to lick her wounds for long. "I had an idea that my proper work was to love and be loved but it isn't," she wrote to a friend, who also happened to be her publisher; "it is just to write books, so what is the point of not doing so?"
During the nineteen-fifties, she travelled in Turkey and produced four books, all very different from her earlier work, in that, for the first time in her authorial career, she could not speak the native language. Deprived of contemporary voices, these later books rely on history and introspection—which gives way, at times, to literary strain—and Stark seems more than usually intent on ruins and on the silence that surrounds them. She had always taken wonderful photographs, and the ones she used as illustrations add tremendous richness to the text (even in the reduced and smudgy versions of the reprints). In "Ionia" (Tauris Parke; $17), for example, a photograph mysteriously captioned "Gryneium: Temple of Apollo" appears to show nothing but a young shepherd sitting before his flock in an open field on a roll of hay; only on close inspection does the roll reveal itself as the broken drum of an ancient marble column. There is a quiet melancholy to these books—an unshakable sense of cultures irretrievably lost, and of the ruthlessness of time, which seems to arise both from the nature of the subject and from the nature of the traveller growing old.
Stark's introspective bent continued with four volumes of autobiography and eight volumes of letters, the last of which appeared in 1985, when Stark was ninety-three. She had travelled until she was ninety-two, and lived to be a hundred. In her later years, she loved to take trips with her many godchildren—"The young," she said, "must be illuminated"—an illuminating Auntie Mame hauling her charges over the Acropolis or waking them in the middle of the night to watch the sun rise over Troy.
Her last important trip was to Afghanistan, in the summer of 1968, when she was seventy-five. She went to see a twelfth-century minaret that had been discovered by archeologists only in the previous decade—she heard that it had been spotted from the air by a pilot flying off course—in a semi-deserted region of the country. The book Stark wrote about her experience, "The Minaret of Djam" (Tauris Parke; $16), is filled with history and introspection but also with people, albeit the British fellow-travellers whom she met as she waited in Kabul, trying to figure out how she could get to the exceedingly remote location, studying Dari, and watching the English-speaking population rehearse a production of "Twelfth Night" for a performance at the British Embassy. She finally reached the minaret, thanks to a highly suggestible couple with a Land Rover who had wandered into one of the rehearsals. And, despite the occasional asphalt road ("to tempt the lazier tourist") and four-wheel drive, the trip proved a sufficiently daunting adventure.
But the heart of the book lies in Kabul, where Stark looks out over the garden of the British Embassy, with its lawns and roses and its giant plane trees, which have gone on growing "while the empire that planted them has become a thin voice of the air." Contemplating the actors in their bluejeans peeling back the centuries and rediscovering the poetry of their own tongue, she cannot help but note how well Shakespeare is suited to the East. There is no need to labor to create a sharpened, otherworldly atmosphere; nor is there disbelief when a wholly unexpected, life-overturning event occurs, since the usual insurances and protections have been cast aside. This was, after all, why she was there. She had come because "this was Illyria"—every open, uncharted mile of it—"and anything might happen." ♦


text: 12/14/2010 (09:00PM - 11:00PM) (Tuesday) : "THE BIGGEST LOSER" REVEALED IN EXCITING SEASON FINALE - In this must-see, exciting live finale, all of the contestants from this season return for a special reunion and a chance to weigh in one last time - and show America how much weight they've all lost since beginning their weight-loss journeys. There are four contestants left, but America has voted on the two that fell below the yellow line in last week's episode to choose who will be the third finalist in the game. After America's vote is revealed and the third finalist is announced, the eliminated player will then weigh in with the other 18 eliminated contestants to compete for the $100,000 "at home" prize. Then it's the moment viewers have been waiting for, when one of the three finalists will be named this season's "Biggest Loser" and win the coveted grand prize of $250,000! Alison Sweeney is the host, and trainers Bob Harper and Jillian Michaels also star.


text:
The million-dollar app that says 'yo'
NEW YORK — Can you really call it a messaging app when there's no actual message-writing taking place?
A new mobile app called Yo lets users interact with friends and contacts in zero characters — yes zero. And you thought 140 characters was tough! In place of an actual message, users send and receive push notifications with one simple, single, predetermined greeting: "Yo."
Here's how it works according to the app's how-to lesson; "Wanna say 'Good morning' to friends? JUST YO THEM. Wanna say 'Thinking 'bout you' to your love? JUST YO. Wanna say 'Are you up?' YO."
Yes, "yo" (present participle "yoing") is now a verb. No, it's not a joke.
Yo has garnered $1 million from investors according to its creator, Or Arbel. He just moved to San Francisco from Tel Aviv last week to pursue Yo full-time after quitting his gig as the co-founder and chief technology officer of a social investment startup.
"The 'yo' means everything," says Arbel. That's a profound statement coming from the guy who first called the idea for the app "stupid."
The former iOS engineer at Mobli was asked by the company's CEO, Moshe Hogeg, to quickly cook him up an app he could use to ping his personal assistant in lieu of cumbersome texts and phone calls. After dismissing the idea and getting on with his busy schedule, Arbel eventually realized the genius. After an eight-hour coding session, Yo was born.
There is no email registration, no connecting with Facebook or Twitter. You actually don't even have to open the app itself to reap its benefits. The "yo" can mean anything to anyone. It's totally up to you. It can mean you've arrived to meet your friend at the movies. Your kid is ready to be picked up from school. It's the new passing notes in class. The new smartphone side-eye without the side-eye emoji.
Arbel sees real potential for the app to change communications beyond the social sphere, as well. Imagine ordering a tall double caramel macchiato at Starbucks and simply waiting for a "Yo" to come through your phone when it's ready, instead of straining to listen for a barista to shout your name. Or receiving a "Yo" from your airline at the airport when it's time to board your flight. In a recent real-life iteration, the user WORLDCUP is now sending out "Yo"s every time a team scores a goal in a championship football match.
The app is currently available for download from the Apple app store and Google Play.
If you still don't get it, don't worry. "In the beginning, I didn't get it either," Arbel admits. It'll hit you soon…


text:
Plant safety and security
Manufacturing operations are under pressure to make their buildings and facilities safer, due to physical threats in the workplace, potential theft of physical and intellectual property, and to meet the stringent and ever-changing regulatory environment for security and reporting.
- Intelligent Video Analytics: Through automated digital screening and filtering, analytics can identify specific conditions and notify operators of potential situations.
- Property Security Cameras and Surveillance Systems: Advanced features for outdoor, indoor and underground applications.
- Process Cameras: Explosion-proof/ thermal/ thermography.
- Video Management Systems: Mission-critical surveillance operations requiring around-the-clock monitoring and unwavering reliability.
- Access Control Management: Seamless integration between surveillance, access control and identity management.
Value Proposition
- Schneider Electric delivers integrated surveillance solutions for harsh environments that must meet the safety requirements, for protection of man and machine.
- Video analytics and thermography bring additional value by delivering information from process control, environmental and emission systems.
- Integration between surveillance and access control.
- Coupled solutions for process supervision and image analytics.
- Customized solutions for specific applications.
- Unparalleled quality and robustness.
- Highest-quality video, even in harsh environments and challenging lighting conditions.
Personnel safety.
Asset and plant safety.
Prevention of theft and vandalism.
Better access control of both contractors and employees.
Process monitoring and optimization. Environmental monitoring.


text:
4 Bonless chicken breasts
2 Packets of Taco Seasoning
1 Can of jalapeno peppers
1 packet of cheese or cheese slices
1 bottle of mild or hot sala
Coat breasts in taco seasoning. Put into baking pan and cover in sala and jalapeno peppers.
Bake at 325 for 40 minutes.


text:
(→Packaging of Fonts)
m (→Packaging of Fonts: added a new font packager)
|Line 35:
|Line 35:
| [[Letters Laughing fonts]] || [[User:Herlo|Clint Savage]]
| [[Letters Laughing fonts]] || [[User:Herlo|Clint Savage]]
| [[WoodardWorks Laconic fonts]] ||
| [[WoodardWorks Laconic fonts]] ||
| the Dustin Norlander [http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/t/ttf-dustin/ttf-dustin_20030517.orig.tar.gz fonts] not packaged in Fedora yet (Sven Lankes' two Dustin packages should provide good examples) ||
| the Dustin Norlander [http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/t/ttf-dustin/ttf-dustin_20030517.orig.tar.gz fonts] not packaged in Fedora yet (Sven Lankes' two Dustin packages should provide good examples) ||
Revision as of 00:10, 21 February 2009
FAD SCaLE Details
- Date: Friday, February 20, 2009
- Place: Midway Room, Mezzanine Level, Westin Los Angeles Airport
- Time: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Note: A Fedora Birds of a Feather meeting will take place from 7-8 p.m. on Friday at the Midway Room -- either a continuation of work will or just a social hour will take place there
At the end of your participation in the FAD we are asking you to take the brief Post FAD survey for SCaLE 7x.
Tasks currently target: Fedora 12 User Guide
Task List
The task list below has four stages:
- Fact Check
- This stage just changes all factual information so that it syncs up with the facts for F12. If the default browser happens to be Dillo instead of Firefox for this release, the Fact Check stage should reflect this after completion.
- (Re)write Chapter
- This stage is for two things: re-fact checking and then editing the formatting and organization of sections so that it lines up with all of our conventions. This could mean anything from fixing headers to putting in admons (like the ones at the bottom of this page) to making sure that the standard installation process is referenced instead of including it inline.
- Edit/Wordsmith
- This is for the English majors. Make the page grammatically sound while keeping our conventions and a technical writing style in mind. Extra points go for stylizing the writing as long as it doesn't conflict with the core goals of readability and simplicity in comprehension.
- Edit Format/XML Conversion
- Somebody get this chapter into DocBook XML!
|Fact check
|(Re)write chapter
|Edit format/XML conversion
|User Guide - Introduction
|Done, provisionally
|Do again before XML
|Done (danielsmw)
|(do this last)
|User Guide - The Fedora Desktops
|User Guide - Logging in
|In progress
|Rewritten (danielsmw)
|Assign me!
|Not ready
|User Guide - Tour of the GNOME Desktop
|User Guide - Tour of the KDE Desktop
|User Guide - Tour of the Xfce Desktop
|User Guide - Media
|User Guide - Connecting to the Internet
|User Guide - Accessing the Web
|User Guide - Communications
|User Guide - Office Tools
|User Guide - Financial Software
|User Guide - Playing Multimedia
|User Guide - Playing Games
|User Guide - Managing Photos
|User Guide - Sharing Your Desktop
|User Guide - Customizing the Desktop
|User Guide - Managing Software
Notes to Contributors
Application Installations
Whenever we discuss an application not installed by default, we should put a note about having to install it. The note should look like this:
- To install the package claws-mail, read the chapter on managing software. You can install claws-mail by either using the PackageKit application or on the command line by using Yum. More information about Claws Mail is available at: http://claws-mail.org/.
Of course, this should be edited according to the application name, package name, and application home page, but try to use this template for consistency's sake.
- Also note that I just made this convention up, so don't feel like you should have known this before. If you have suggestions or comments, let me know.
--Danielsmw 15:08, 25 February 2009 (UTC)
Advanced Topics
Whenever we add something that would be nice to have in the user's guide but isn't necessary for the basic desktop user who just migrated fresh from Windows (example: discussion of FTP programs, advanced discussion of yum on the command line), we should add a template to let the confused user know not to worry about this section if they don't want to. This is what I've come up with right now:
That, again, is just my current idea until someone suggests or comments on that. Let me know in IRC or on the list. --Danielsmw 15:08, 25 February 2009 (UTC)
The items below will be going on from around 9am - 5pm. There will be breaks and such, but they are treated much like a sprint. We're here to get something accomplished so it may be longer, or shorter. Come on by and help us out for an hour or all day, we'd love to have you there!
Packaging of Fonts
There are approximately 50-75 fonts that are not packaged in Fedora. These fonts are generally easy to package and take about 30-60 minutes a piece. The expected amount of fonts to be packaged at the Font Packaging FAD will be around 10-15.
Some fonts we may be able to package
|Who's Packaging
|Banana Peels fonts
|Joseph Smidt
|Rubbing fonts
|Jay Hankinson
|Goody Bookletter 1911 fonts - There's actually 4 or 5 fonts from the crufty fonts list
|Letters Laughing fonts
|Clint Savage
|WoodardWorks Laconic fonts
|Corey Justin Chandler
|the Dustin Norlander fonts not packaged in Fedora yet (Sven Lankes' two Dustin packages should provide good examples)
An updated spec template set has been built for F9 and F10, but may not have hit mirrors yet. In that case use the koji versions directly.
The Fedora User Guide is developed on the wiki, edited in place, and prepared for conversion to DocBook XML. We are going to work on starting and completing chapters for the User Guide. Our goal is to make a significant dent in the User Guide tasks and possibly some of the project tasks.
|Breakfast and getting organized
|Introductions and getting started
|Introduction to working with a wiki
|User Guide write and edit
|User Guide write and edit; completed chapters conversion to XML
|User Guide write and edit; completed chapters converted to XML
|Short intro to RPM Font Packaging
|Build your first Font Package Tutorial
|First Font Package Complete and Built
|Submit Bugzilla Ticket for Package Review
|Font Packaging / Docs Stuff
|Font Packaging / Docs Stuff
|Font Packaging / Docs Stuff
|Font Packaging / Docs Stuff
|FAD success dinner
- Larry Cafiero - Docs and packaging (will need training on both)
- Clint Savage - Packaging Sprint. Likely Fonts.
- Karsten Wade - Docs, wants to package fonts.
- John Stanley - Packaging Fonts
- Tom "spot" Callaway' - Packaging
- Joseph Smidt - Learning Packaging
- [Add next attendee here]


text:
13 Selkirk Ave. P.O. Box 369
Terrace Bay, ON P0T 2W0
807-825-3315 x222
My favourites lets you save items you like, tag them and group them into collections for your own personal use. Viewing "My favourites" will open in a new tab.
Login here or start a My favourites account.


text:
|: +603 2331 8080
|: +603 2331 1723
|: email@example.com
|: +603 2331 8080
|: +603 2331 1723
|: firstname.lastname@example.com
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Earn Credit with this Free Course
Harvesting Rainwater: System Design for Strategic Rainwater Capture.
Learn the basics about how rainwater collection can conserve and make use of our most critical natural resource.
San Francisco Pier 27
On San Francisco's celebrated waterfront, Pier 27 now has a new role. On it is the new, ultra-modern landmark: the James R. Herman cruise ship terminal.
Studio 804
Professor Dan Rockhill and 23 students in the graduate design/build program, Studio 804, began designing the University of Kansas' new Center for Design Research.
Naco Border Patrol Station
In October of 2010, ground was broken for a new $40 million, 58,000 square-foot facility, the Naco Border Patrol Station.


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Nikita Ostapenco
Chisinau, Moldova
I was born into a family of artists but never attended an art school. Paint on the reverse side of glass with some tweaks and each of my artwork have frames that I produce myself. Actually I do not even know how such a technique is called and does the name exist at all. Mostly I draw animals but everyone can see in them human images. With the help of my works I try to make life brighter.


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While the health benefits of fruit are widely known and accepted, can an apple each day truly keep the doctor away? Is there something about the "forbidden fruit"—above and beyond other types of fruit and healthful foods—that is ideal for lowering your risk of poor health?
As part of a healthful diet and lifestyle, apples really can fight a number of diseases and help keep you healthy and away from the doctor.
Evidence for the Health Claim
Studies have long shown that diets rich in fresh fruits and vegetables can lower the risk of numerous chronic conditions. But more detailed studies show that apples, in particular, may be particularly protective of good health.
Apples, particularly their skins, are an excellent source of antioxidants . Antioxidants are believed to prevent damage to cells and tissues and help defend the body from cancer , cardiovascular disease, and possibly Alzheimer's disease . Apple varieties vary in their antioxidant content, with Red Delicious having one of the highest levels. In addition, the flavonoids in apples, which possess antioxidant properties, are believed to protect the body against allergens and viral infections. Apples may also improve lung function.
In a study conducted in Finland, researchers investigated the relationship between apple consumption and the risk of stroke in over 9,200 men and women. Those individuals who consumed the highest number of apples showed a lower risk of stroke over a 28-year period compared to those who consumed the least number of apples. The researchers suggest that this benefit may come from the "phytonutrients" contained in apples, possibly including flavonoids. Two other Finnish studies showed that apple consumption may also reduce the risk of heart disease and lung cancer .
Evidence Against the Health Claim
There are many other foods—including other fruits—that contain the same antioxidants and offer the same benefits as apples. Beverages like coffee and black tea, and fruits including blueberries, cranberries, red grapes, strawberries, and bananas, are all rich in antioxidant flavonoids. Cranberries, studies show, are even higher in antioxidants than apples.
Of note, most of the nutritional benefit of apples appears to come from their skin, so peeled apples, apple juice, and applesauce lack the rich levels of antioxidants that the whole fruit contains.
Apples alone can't keep anyone healthy, as no single food can, and apples can't be expected to reverse previous damage caused by poor diet and lifestyle. Diets rich in trans fats, salt, and sugar—even with an apple a day—don't lead to good health. Regular apple consumption, of course, is only beneficial as part of an overall healthful diet and exercise regimen .
Apples are a great choice for a healthful, low-fat, low-calorie snack. They're rich in fiber and antioxidants, both of which may be protective against a variety of chronic diseases. To receive the maximum health benefits from apples, eating the whole fruit—including the skin—is recommended.
But remember, apples are no substitute for a balanced diet and regular exercise. And, even this is no guarantee. People who live impeccable lifestyles still suffer from heart disease and cancer, and keeping your doctor completely away makes it difficult to receive preventive services, like screening tests. Seeing your doctor regularly (but not too often) will allow him to possibly uncover conditions that can harm you in the future, even if you feel perfectly well while munching on that Red Delicious.


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The nine-game losing streak is over. Rutgers put a Big East win on the board by swatting Notre Dame and Luke Harangody back to Indiana 74-73. Six thoughts and six quotes:
— This win started in the middle, where Hamady N'Diaye simply kicked Harangody's tail (8-of-26, just six rebounds). Let's be honest: Harangody is softer than Frosty the Snowman on a 60-degree day whenever he sees Rutgers' 7-footer. He ran for the hills again tonight, settling for jumpers and short-arming rebounds and loose balls. Clearly intimidated, his body language was bad and what's more, his unwillingness to attack N'Diaye allowed the big fella to avoid foul trouble and log a season-high 38 minutes.
For the record: In four games against N'Diaye, the All-American shot 23-of-86 (26 percent).
N'Diaye's fine work allowed Rutgers' other defenders to stay out on Notre Dame's shooters, and the result was a subpar 41 percent performance for a team that usually scores 80 per game.
— The old Mike Rosario was on display, shooting an efficient 8-of-15 and grabbing seven boards. He was inspired by the presence of legendary Jersey City sportswriter/personality Ed "The Faa" Ford, who had a pre-game chat with the former St. Anthony star. It wasn't a gentle chat either. This was a butt-kicking pep talk, Jersey City-style. Basically, from what we can gather, the Faa told Rosario to quit sulking and take advantage of the golden opportunity he had to be the featured player on a Big East team. It worked, at least on this night, as Rosario played hard, took good shots and set up his teammates when Notre Dame threw the diamond-and-one on him.
— James Beatty showed he can be a legitimate Big East point guard, posting 10 points, nine boards, five assists, three steals and just two turnovers in 33 minutes. Beatty and Rosario were big reasons why Rutgers posted a 46-37 edge on the glass—-the first time the Scarlet Knights have outrebounded a Big East foe this season. The guards were aggressive in gathering in the long rebounds from ND's jump-shot failures.
— It's indicative of just how football-oriented Notre Dame is that Mike Brey doesn't get more heat. In the two minutes N'Diaye sat, in the first half, Notre Dame had three possessions and Harangody didn't touch the ball even though Austin Johnson was defending him one-on-one. Brey always has a lot of talent and, aside from one run to the Sweet 16, pretty much nothing to show for it over his 10 seasons at ND other than a consistently soft team that can't defend and can't win on the road.
— A good source indicated that Muhamed Hasani won't be back this season and possibly ever. We're still not sure of the specific reason though.
— Governor Chris Christie was on hand and squeezed himself into a seat in Section 104, across from Notre Dame's bench. Dressed casually, in person, he's much wider than he looks on TV. Former governor and athletic bon vivant Richard Corey was there as well. Maybe he was scouting for a new Seton Hall AD?
"It feels great to go out there and bounce back from all the losses. We finally cracked the rock, like Coach Hill says. We've been trying to crack the rock for the longest, the longest, the longest. We kept pushing and we finally did it."
"It really helped to get off to a good start. I was saying to myself, 'OK the Faa is here.' That's one of the guys that was really in my corner ever since I was young. To see him at my game tonight gave me another relief because he almost died a couple of months ago. I was bringing every bit of it tonight because I wanted to show him what he was missing out on . . . He was like, Go out there and be a Jersey City kid and play hard. I got off to a good start and once I felt it, once I knew I was there, I was like, I've got to keep it going."
On Harangody: "I'm a natural defensive player, I love playing defense, but I also studied him a lot (on film). . . After the first couple of blocks that I had, they decided to shy away from the basket, and that's the effect that a shot blocker is supposed to have. Once people are taking all jump shots I know I'm doing my job."
"I know it's hard for you guys to see, I know we've gotten beat by a lot of points, but we're playing a certain way. It's not the points that you lose by. We're playing a certain way, there's more possessions in the game. Instead of losing by eight and everybody think it's respectable, we're trying to win, and if we don't play that way we're not winning the game tonight."
"We all know its' a tough stretch, but that's why I talk about us having great kids. When they go through tough stretches you can hang your head, you can pack it in in practice. Our practices have been great, they're working hard, and I'm really happy for them that they got rewarded for their mental toughness."
On the shot-clock malfunction that forced a lengthy official timeout with Rosario on the free-throw line and 2:40 left: "Only in the RAC. Maybe you guys can all chip in and buy us a new scoreboard. Only here can we freeze out our own guy on the line."
MIKE BREY on Hamady: "He big guy changes the game, almost Thabeet-like."


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With the launch of Google Drive, the new cloud storage service unveiled today by Google, mainstream tech users will soon find themselves engaging in cloud storage and file synchronization among mobile, laptop and desktop systems.
And that will likely change the way we use the Internet, analysts say.
"Personal cloud is far more than just storage; it's synchronization, it's streaming, it's sharing files. Those ultimately become more important to the consumer than things like the personal computer," said Gartner Research Director Michael Gartenberg. "The age of the personal cloud becomes far more important than the personal computer."
After years of rumors and speculation, Google officially launched its cloud storage and file sharing service, Google Drive, offering users 5GB of free storage space. More importantly, Google Drive is tied into all of Google's other services.
The new service, for instance, will allow users to collaborate on spreadsheets, presentations and video, as the company's existing Google Docs service is built into Google Drive.
Once you choose to share content with others, you can add and reply to comments on anything, such as PDFs, images or video files, and receive notifications when other people comment on shared items, Google said.
Users can start with the initial 5GB of space. (By comparison, Microsoft offers 7GB of free capacity with its SkyDrive offering, Apple offers 5GB of space, and DropBox offers 2GB.)
For users who need more room for their digital content, Google allows an upgrade to 25GB for $2.49 a month, 100GB for $4.99 a month or 1TB for $49.99 a month. When you upgrade to a paid account, your Gmail account storage will also expand to 25GB.
"At those prices points, for the cost of cup of coffee a month you can get 100GB of online storage and synchronization from Google and have it work on your Mac and PC and on your iPhone and your Android device," Gartenberg said. "This is where they're pretty disruptive in terms of price compared to competitors."
Google Drive can be installed on a Mac or PC; users can also download the Drive application to an Android phone or tablet. Google already has an API for developers and said it's "working hard" on an app for iOS devices.
"And regardless of platform, blind users can access Drive with a screen reader," Google said.
Just yesterday, Microsoft announced it had done away with its convoluted Live Mesh system and adopted a consumer-friendly service -- SkyDrive -- that's closer to what Dropbox offers. The company also announced an app for Windows and for Mac OS X that integrates SkyDrive with the local OS.
Just as with Dropbox, files can be stored in the SkyDrive folder, and they will be uploaded to the cloud storage service as well as synchronized to a user's other mobile and desktop devices.
While other pundits have said that Google was "out to lunch" when it came to offering a comprehensive cloud storage service, Gartenberg said it was worth the wait as the company has hit the mark on every important feature.
Google Drive enables ubiquitous search
Frank Gillett, an analyst with Forrester Research, agreed. "What's very interesting is having such a capability tied to one of the largest email offerings on the planet," he said. "Microsoft's SkyDrive [has] been around for a while and linked to Hotmail, but this more significant than that."
Unique to Google Drive is its ability to search email, access Google Docs, and use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for scanned documents and image recognition through Google Goggles. The image recognition also allows users to search photographs to identify geographical locations.
Gillett said he'd like to see tighter integration between Gmail and Google Drive, such as the ability to right click on a document and be able to automatically embed it in an email.
"This is pretty cool to have a Google Doc experience and your email in the same account and to be able to do file synchronization and have integrated search," Gillett said. "That's unique."
The launch of Google Drive puts the Google in direct competition with Apple and its iCloud offering, which ties a cloud storage and file synchronization service with its other services, such as its iTunes online music offering. The challenge Google has now is that it must evangelize its service to consumers just as Apple has with iCloud, explaining in common terms how it works.
"Apple has commercials running now about iCloud, and synchronization and how it moves from device to device and screen to screen and how your content can flow," Gartenberg said.
Smaller cloud services threatened
While Google Drive competes with Microsoft's SkyDrive and Apple's iCloud, the companies that are more at risk are smaller consumer service providers, such as DropBox, Box.net, SugarSync and YouSendIt. Those sites have appealed more to technology enthusiasts, not average consumers. But when it comes to adoption, relationships matter.
Hundreds of millions of consumers already have a relationship with Google through its email, document storage and search services in much the same way other users have relationships with Apple and Microsoft.
"They don't have much of a relationship with theses smaller [cloud] companies," Gartenberg said. "The challenge for these smaller companies is reaching out to consumers or shifting to somewhat of a different market; the problem is that Google also wants the business market, the small business market and ultimately the enterprise IT market."
Brad Nisbet, an analyst with market research firm IDC, said a business offering is the one place where Google Drive falls somewhat flat. What often happens is that employees begin using a consumer-class cloud service for storing personal photos, music and documents and then want to use it in their work place.
IT administrators have struggled in recent months with allowing consumer cloud storage services behind their firewalls because the offerings lack administrative controls, such as the ability to securely collaborate through encrypted documents, remotely delete files and control who can access what. In more recent months, consumer-oriented services such as SpiderOak and Dropbox with its Dropbox for Teams, have begun adding those capabilities.
Cloud-based backup services such as Mozy and Carbonite have also made strides in the business market.
"From Google's perspective, what I think is important to point out is they're going to need to develop those levels of control, which will be attractive to an IT organization," Nisbet said. "I think that's what's becoming more appealing to the IT organizations in all types of businesses. They want to maintain a level of control."
Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed. His e-mail address is email@example.com.
See more by Lucas Mearian on Computerworld.com.
Read more about cloud computing in Computerworld's Cloud Computing Topic Center.
Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.


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Nationals eager to get to know new manager Williams
Werth, Desmond like what they hear; skipper to meet with bench coach Knorr
WASHINGTON -- Nationals bench coach Randy Knorr, outfielder Jayson Werth, shortstop Ian Desmond and right-hander Tanner Roark attended Matt Williams' news conference at Nationals Park on Friday afternoon, when Williams was introduced as the team's sixth manager.
Williams announced that he and Knorr are going to meet next week in Arizona to strategize about the 2014 season. Through Knorr, Williams will get an idea how the players are on and off the field.
"We have a chance to win if we can do things right," Williams said. "I think it's evident with everybody in this room ... that this is a very talented group of young men. So we are going to refine some things; we are going to take those next steps that we need to take."
Knorr, who also interviewed for the managerial job, made it known that he didn't want the story to be about him Friday. He said he was disappointed he didn't get the job, but he pointed out that Williams reached out to him after the word spread last Friday that Williams had the job as manager.
"I'm his bench coach and I will support him 100 percent. ... I didn't want any focus on me. I really want it on him."
Williams talked as if he wants to be a player's manager. He wants players to come to him whenever there is a problem and vice versa.
Many of the Nationals players wanted Knorr to become their manager because he managed many of them in the Minor Leagues. But they have accepted Williams as the manager.
"Today is really the first day I really talked to him or had a chance to meet him," Werth said. "As time goes on, I'll get to know him better and find out who he really is. But he is saying all the right things. He is articulate; he is doing a good job so far. So far, so good, I guess."
Williams' only experience as a manager was in the Arizona Fall League in 2012, when he guided the Salt River Rafters to the league finals, and that doesn't seem to bother Werth or Desmond.
"The only way to learn this game is to play it. He qualifies there, for sure," Werth said. "The character that he has ... I don't think that X's and O's are going to be a problem. He has Randy right behind him. ... I think those two guys at the helm is going to be great.
"Retaining Randy as bench coach -- he has been here a long time. Keeping all the coaches is going to help add to the club, the chemistry and ultimately winning. I think we are on the right track."
Desmond said he is willing to try something different. All he wants is a World Series title.
"I think Matt is going to do great. I'm intrigued by all the things he has said," Desmond said. "This is the first time I've had the opportunity to hear his game plan. I think everything he said makes sense. It's going to be a breath of fresh air, I think.
"We've played well over the last two years, but we haven't been to the championship game. I don't think there is anyone in our clubhouse or in this organization that isn't open to trying something new. ... We know that we are a better team than what we have done. Even in the 98-win season in 2012, we didn't get to where we wanted to go. We are all hungry. We understand that the window is going to be open for certain amount of time. I'm personally willing to try anything to make the most of it."


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Washington D.C., Aug 20, 2012 / 05:31 pm (CNA).- A report examining court cases from recent years has found that hostility towards religion has grown to unprecedented levels in the United States.
The newly-updated Survey of Religious Hostility in America serves as "a testament to the radical shift in our culture's worldview" on religion, said Kelly Shackelford, president of Liberty Institute, and Tony Perkins, president of Family Research Council.
On Aug. 20, Shackelford and Perkins announced the release of the updated analysis, describing "more than 600 recent examples of religious hostility" in the U.S., most occurring in the last decade.
The survey arose out of Shackelford's 2004 testimony before the U.S. Senate on the rise in religious hostility in the U.S. Some members of the Senate claimed that the examples given were "simply isolated incidents." In response, the report was developed, documenting the "very real problem" that the issue poses.
The updated survey reveals that eight years later, "hostility against religious liberty has reached an all-time high," said Perkins and Shackelford.
The report observed a "new front" of attacks against churches and religious ministries in recent years.
Five years ago, it said, it would have been "unthinkable" for the federal government to claim that it could "tell churches and synagogues which pastors and rabbis it can hire and fire."
Yet this was the argument made by the U.S. Department of Justice in the recent Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC case, in which the federal government fought against the "ministerial exception" that allows churches to select their leaders without government interference, it said.
The Supreme Court unanimously ruled against the Justice Department and defended ministerial exception in January.
The survey also documented an "explosion" within the last decade of "cases involving local governments discriminating against churches, particularly in the local governments' use of zoning laws and granting of permits."
In one case, a Texas law required all seminaries to receive "state approval of their curriculum, board members, and professors."
Furthermore, the report documented increasing attacks on religious freedom in the public sphere, pushing "the boundaries of religious hostility" to new limits.
In one instance, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs banned funerals at national cemeteries from including religious content, even if the grieving family wanted the ceremony to include references to God.
In addition, multiple challenges have been brought against veterans' memorials containing crosses and displays of the Ten Commandments at state courthouses and capitols.
The survey observed the shift in attitude towards these monuments, pointing out that even a decade ago, veterans' memorials in the shape of a cross "were widely accepted as fitting symbols of the sacrifices made by so many for this country."
It also noted several cases challenging prayer to open legislative assemblies, despite the fact that Congress has opened with prayer since the nation's beginning.
One case showed how senior citizens at an elderly center in Balch Springs, Texas, were told that they could not pray over their meals because "religion is banned in public buildings." City officials told the senior citizens that praying over government-funded food violated the "separation of church and state" and might result in the meals being taken away from them.
The report also noted the "alarming frequency" of attacks on religious liberty within schools. These cases, which often involve school officials preventing parents, teachers or students from speaking about their faith, are frequently the result of "misinformation" and threats of lawsuits from "secularist organizations," it said.
In one case, a federal judge threatened a high school valedictorian with "incarceration" if she did not remove references to Jesus from her graduation speech. In another, a student was asked "what Easter meant to her" and told that she could not say "Jesus."
Another instance documented a public school district in Greenville, Texas, which told a woman that she could only have an assistant principal position if she took her children out of a private Christian school.
The survey also found multiple instances of schools banning Christmas cards and gifts with religious content.
Although these cases indicate a significant increase in religious hostility in the U.S., the report's authors said, those who stand up for religious freedom "are winning" in court.
"As dark as this survey is, there is much light," they noted.
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