text:
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The road to recovery can be measured in exclamations, some of execration, some of joy.
"It's like a living hell," said Latoya Miller, 29, of Red Hook, one of the New York neighborhoods submerged by the rising sea during Superstorm Sandy. "If it wasn't for the people giving out food and blankets, I don't know what we would do. There'd be a riot out here."
When it comes to what went right, what went wrong and what remains to be done, disaster victims are keeping score for the authorities, and President Barack Obama may receive a progress report first hand when he visits New York City's devastated coastline on Thursday.
"Let there be lights! Lord Jesus! Sixteen days without lights," whooped Blanca Martin, 41, performing a victory dance on Tuesday when the lights finally came back on at her public housing in Coney Island.
The results to date show tens of thousands of homeless or displaced, more still without power. Tonnes of debris piling up in the streets. A fuel supply chain still disrupted, the Red Cross under fire and parts of the transport system under severe strain.
At least 120 people died.
New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo estimated the storm caused $50 billion in damage and economic loss, $33 billion of that in the state, setting up the next conflict. Who will pay?
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is meant to reimburse some victims and local governments for damage but only has about $8.1 billion available, meaning the U.S. Congress would have to appropriate more money at a time when much of the talk is of fiscal restraint in Washington.
The gigantic storm - a hurricane nearly 1,000 miles wide that combined with another storm system and came ashore with high tide under a full moon - brought a record seawater surge that inundated lower Manhattan, rearranged the New Jersey shore and Long Island, and tore up neighborhoods in far-flung areas of New York City's outer boroughs.
"I think the shore will look OK next summer, but it won't look the same," New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said of the Jersey Shore, a major tourist destination.
Some of the damaged areas were insular beach communities such as New York's Breezy Point that were content to be detached from the outside world - until disaster struck. Some 111 homes there burned to the ground.
Others, such as parts of the Rockaways, were just poor, where the working class start their long-distance commute.
The storm has claimed other casualties, such as the New York City Marathon, scheduled for November 4 but canceled when officials sustained withering public criticism for diverting resources to such an event when masses of people were suffering.
At least two officials lost their jobs. The chief operating officer of the state-owned utility Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) quit under fire for the company's slow response in restoring power, and Cuomo fired his emergency management chief for using state workers to clear a tree from his driveway.
The stresses also weighed on the relationships of top officials. Joseph Lhota, chairman of New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), apologized to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg after being quoted in the New York Times saying Bloomberg had predicted "like an idiot" that a flooded vehicle tunnel would soon reopen.
Politicians have praised the tireless effort of rescue workers and civil servants who have saved lives and restored battered infrastructure. For example the MTA partially restored service on the city's 108-year-old subway system three days after the storm, even though seven tunnels under the East River filled with water.
"They brought all of the transportation systems back into operation so fast. The damage was really very, very big. It was unprecedented," said Mysore Nagaraja, former president of the MTA's Capital Construction Company. "To really get the systems back on again was a great feat."
Each success story has a flip side.
New Jersey Transit lagged for days in restoring service, creating hours-long waits for commuters to board buses after the storm impacted 25 percent of its rail cars. The system is still far from normal.
PATH, another commuter rail that crosses the Hudson River between New York and New Jersey, remains less than completely operational.
Consolidated Edison, the power utility for New York City and its Westchester County suburb, restored power to about 1 million customers who lost electricity in Sandy and a snow storm that struck 10 days later, but not to 16,300 customers in flooded portions of Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island where homeowners and building managers needed to find contractors to repair, test and certify damaged equipment.
Others yet to come back include skyscrapers in the Wall Street district of Manhattan, the symbolic pulse of the economy. Throughout the historic neighborhood, buildings remain closed or operate on generators. Many companies, including major law firms, have had to find alternative premises.
In the outer boroughs, people may remain in the cold and dark for weeks or even months more because they cannot find or afford an electrician.
Many drivers felt frustrated upon waiting hours for gasoline after the storm disrupted the fuel supply chain. The lines have receded, but the storm exposed vulnerabilities, such as the Gulf Oil terminal in Linden, New Jersey, where Sandy destroyed the interior workspace, halting shipments to filling stations.
A lack of generators at many filling stations meant that even if they had gas they couldn't pump it.
Even the American Red Cross, one of the country's most venerated charities, has come under criticism for what some victims found to be a disappointing performance.
Only now, more than two weeks after the storm, do some of the worst-hit neighborhoods appear to be inching back to life after losing power, heat and hot water.
On Tuesday night, Bloomberg's office announced power had been restored to all residential high rises controlled by the New York City Housing Authority, an agency that houses the city's poor. Still, 81 public housing buildings lacked heat as of Wednesday night, leaving 15,743 people in the cold.
By contrast, most privately owned high-rises that lost electricity and heat had it all back on more than a week ago.
"No power and it is freezing!" said Diane Gregg, 55, who lives at a Red Hook building without power.
"You can't sleep. It's too cold," said her son, Jason Smith, 32.
Bloomberg estimated up to 40,000 New Yorkers may be homeless, leading to an emergency meeting of city, state and federal officials last week about the resulting housing crisis.
Talk inevitably will turn to larger infrastructure projects designed to keep the sea at bay, said Steven Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board of New York.
"I have no objection to having a long-term plan that will help the city of New York, but ... how do you talk about putting up (sea) walls when people in Breezy Point are looking at burned-out buildings," Spinola said. "The first thing that has to be done is to care for the people that have been devastated."
Additional reporting by Ilaina Jonas, Chris Francescani, Joshua Schneyer, Ian Simpson and Beth Pinsker Gladstone; Writing by Daniel Trotta; Editing by Martin Howell and Jim Loney


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RED BLUFF — Two Tehama County Sheriff"s deputies were taken to the hospital Tuesday night following an altercation with a man, resulting in the arrest of three people.
One of the deputies was hit in the face and scratched, and the other was bitten, by Jose Luis Hernandez, Tehama County Sheriff"s Department Public Information Officer Lt. Dave Greer said.
They were taken to St. Elizabeth Community Hospital, where they were treated and released.
Deputies were sent at 6:18 p.m. to the 21700 block of Hatfield Road in the Red Bluff area for reports of a disturbance between Shawna Marie Anaya, 40, and Jaime Ibarra Barragan, 32, Greer said.
While investigating the incident, a third person identified as Hernandez, who was recently released on post-release community supervision, was located hiding in a closet in the residence.
Hernandez began attacking the deputies as soon as he was discovered and at one point in the fight, tried unsuccessfully to take a collapsible baton from one of the deputies, Greer said.
The 24-year-old Gerber man, who was found in possession of 0.2 grams of methamphetamine, was eventually taken into custody and taken to the hospital for medical clearance before being booked into Tehama County Jail.
Hernandez was booked on the charges of battery on a peace officer, taking or possessing a peace officer"s weapon: not firearm, two counts of resisting, obstructing or delaying a peace officer, possession of a controlled substance and a no-bail post-release community supervision hold.
Bail was set at $130,000.
Barragan and Anaya, also known as Shawna Marie Guiol and Shawna Marie Partridge, were both arrested and booked into jail on the charge of resisting, obstructing or delaying a peace officer.
Bail was $3,000 for Anaya and $8,000 for Barragan.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
About Me
Emacs is the one.
My name is Xue Fuqiao. I have been a GNU/Linux user since 2008. I've been an Emacsite since 2009 and began to write programs in Emacs Lisp since 2011. Started with XEmacs, switched to SXEmacs, back to XEmacs, and now I'm using GNU Emacs and Guile-based Emacs. I don't like using the Emacs Lisp package manager. Instead, I like install additional Lisp packages by hand, which is flexible. I prefer to learn new things from reference manuals, instead of tutorials. My favorite font is proggy_tiny. Currently I use GNU Emacs on a laptop with a Colemak layout.
I'm a software developer and software freedom activist. And I'm currently a student of NCUT. My major is Communication Engineering.
I'm a Free Software Supporter.
My GNU Emacs Installation
./configure --with-x-toolkit=no --without-toolkit-scroll-bars --with-wide-int
src/emacs -Q
make install
My GNU Emacs Invocation
emacsclient -c -a ""
My Accounts
- Stack Overflow
- Savannah
Started physiotherapy on June, 2012.
- There is no system but GNU, and Linux is one of its kernel.
- I've used Emacs for many years now, but have never reached its maximum potential.
- It is a logical impossibility to make a language more powerful by omitting features, no matter how bad they may be.
My Init Files
Coming soon.
My ~/.Xdefaults
Emacs.bitmapIcon: off Emacs.font: ProggyTinyTT-12 Emacs*menubar.margin: 0 Emacs*toolBar: 0 Emacs.useXIM: off
My ~/.sawfish/rc
Coming soon.
I Use
- savannah.el
- po-mode+.el
- yaml-mode.el
- sml-mode
- auto-compile
- bang
- bookmark+
- csharp-mode
- backup-each-save.el
- df-mode.el
- do-not-edit.el
- ucs-cmds.el
- arc-lzh-exe.el
- defaultcontent.el
- my-site-start
- xml-rpc
- html-helper-mode
- printing.el
- spell-number.el
- Tramp mode
- IPA.el
- wuxch-bookmark.el


text:
3D printing is a hot topic at the moment, especially as the price of the hardware continues to fall. There's also a few popular gadgets coming out that will benefit from 3D printing, a prime example is the Raspberry Pi which ships without a case.
But while consumers may be looking for the largest 3D printing area they can get for their budget, researchers at the Vienna University of Technology are going in the opposite direction. A team there has managed to perfect printing 3D objects precisely at the nanoscale.
Their nano 3D printer can create complex objects that are no bigger than a grain of sand. Yet, they actually depict very complex structures. Examples include a racing car, a model of St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, and the Tower Bridge in London.
The ability to model such complex objects at this scale has been made possible by two-photon lithography. The team have managed to create a system whereby a laser is directed by a series of mirrors through a liquid resin which then hits a surface and leaves behind a "polymerized line of solid polymer." The thickness of that line is just a few hundred nanometers.
The printer isn't slow, either. In just 4 minutes it can print 100 layers consisting of 200 lines per layer. That translates into five meters of polymer printed in one second, which is actually a world record.
The biggest hurdle that had to be overcome to achieve this precision and speed was controlling the movement of the mirrors. As they are constantly in motion to direct the laser beam, their movement had to be very fast while remaining precise.
With the technique now perfected, the researchers are starting to experiment with bio-compatible resins. That means one day soon we may have a super-fast 3D printer capable of producing biological parts for use in our bodies.
Read more at the Vienna University of Technology, via TGDaily


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According to Rick Santorum, if Obama is re-elected Americans will be forced to fill up their heads with gasoline
Probably inspired by Hunger Games mania, Rick Santorum recently released the most dystopian campaign video we've seen in quite a while. Called "Obamaville," the video depicts the bleak world of 2014: President Obama has been re-elected, the playgrounds sit empty, freedom of religion is under attack, and apparently we're all cyborgs powered by putting gasoliine directly into our heads. THANKS A LOT OBAMA!
As a fan of apocalyptic fiction, I watched closely and noticed a few interesting images that the campaign chose to include in the video. Some of the weirder images are below. If you notice the same timecode for some images it's because these images were only up for 2 or 3 frames, and trust me, that's where the gold is!
You can watch the entire video here, though it's labeled as "unlisted" for some odd reason.
Men smoking! Indoors, no less! (00:13)
Wait, are those Bob Casey posters behind them? Casey was the guy who unseated Santorum in 2006, but something tells me this is a photo staged by the Santorum campaign.
Hooverville, USA (00:22)
The Santorum campaign is clearly trying to make "Obamaville" into an everyday term in the way that Hooverville was a term critical of President Herbert Hoover during the Great Depression.
Old media! (00:38)
Whoever lives here really loves newspapers and old televisions and are those... vinyl records? I can only assume that this is the episode of Hoarders where the law student is studying Texas v. Johnson.
Termination notice (00:48)
Wait, is that Latin? Pig Latin? Oh, it's filler text that designers use!
Another smoking guy (00:52)
This video sure has a lot of smoking, but I'm not sure what the message is here.
Piggy bank (00:52)
If Obama is re-elected he will literally come to your house and smash your child's piggy bank on the floor. And there's nothing you can do about it.
Chasing children through the woods (00:52)
In one of the creepiest shots from the video, we're watching from the perspective of someone chasing a child through the woods.
Meat grinder (00:53)
This video just keeps getting weirder and weirder. It's only a couple of frames long, but I'm not sure what this meat is supposed to represent in Santorum's dystopia of the year 2014. Is he campaigning against pink slime?
General disgust (00:53)
Again, what's going on here? Just stock photos of people looking disgusted? This was supposed to be a hellish dystopia of the future!
We see four shots of Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the video. On two of those four occasions an image of President Obama is flashed in juxaposition to Ahmadinejad.
Santorum spokesperson Hogan Gidley said it was "absurd" to think that the Santorum campaign was comparing Obama to Ahmadinejad. If you're going to make a video saying that if President Obama is elected that the United States will become a dystopia of epic proportions I'm not sure why you wouldn't just own that comparison. Which they're clearly making:
Frankly I think every politician should make a scary apocalyptic campaign video. If you've ever seen LBJ's "Daisey" ad from 1964 you know that at least they're not new.


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Join us Friday, April 14 at 10 a.m. for our Friday Financial Forum. We will meet at the Friday Forum Room at Arvest's East Side Branch, located at 4225 S.E. Adams Rd. in Bartlesville, Okla.*
Our featured program this week will be Main Street Bartlesville, presented by Mark Haskell, board chair, and Sharon Hurst, board vice-chair, who will bring updates on the activities of the organization.
In 2010 after a highly competitive process, Bartlesville was selected as an official Main Street city. Downtown Bartlesville, Inc. (DBI) was established as Bartlesville Main Street's non-profit organization. In 2015, the organization name was changed to Main Street Bartlesville to better reflect our mission of bringing together downtown business and property owners, community leaders and Bartlesville area residents in revitalizing the downtown business district using the Main Street approach.
The mission of Main Street Bartlesville is to work inclusively with community and resources to plan, develop and promote an economically thriving downtown district as the unique center of our community by preserving and enhancing our historic legacy, creating a focus for local pride and a destination for residents and visitors.
Downtown Bartlesville is a unique destination for exceptional arts, culture, and entertainment, diverse dining experiences, distinctive retail shopping, and inviting work and living spaces that integrate historic architecture with a modern corporate environment.
What you can also expect at the event:
Invite a friend and come enjoy delicious homemade cookies and hear about what's going on in the Bartlesville area! If you have any questions or would like to be included on the invitation email list, please contact Billie Roane at (918) 337-4358. We look forward to seeing you there!
Links marked with * go to a third-party site not operated or endorsed by Arvest Bank, an FDIC-insured institution.
**Josh Randolph Oklahoma Insurance License #122041 and Sonya Reed Oklahoma Insurance License # 111796
Submitted questions will be answered by an Arvest banker and may appear on the Arvest Blog.
All Arvest banks are Equal Housing Lenders and Member FDIC.
Investment products and services are provided by Arvest Investments, Inc., doing business as Arvest Asset Management, member FINRA/SIPC, an SEC registered investment adviser and a subsidiary of Arvest Bank. Trust services are provided by Arvest Bank. Insurance products are made available through Arvest Insurance, Inc., which is registered as an insurance agency. Insurance products are marketed through Arvest Insurance, Inc., but are underwritten by insurance companies.
Securities and Insurance Products: Not Insured by FDIC or any Federal Government Agency, May Lose Value, Not a Deposit of or Guaranteed by a Bank or any Bank Affiliate.


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Resurrected rides: Group shows passion for bikes
As many Christians celebrated Easter with yellow Peeps, a famous yellow-themed program is seeing a resurrection of its own. The City's Yellow Bikes program, which had literally disappeared, will be hitting the streets once more. But there's a twist: They won't be yellow.
"It's going to be more of a library thing," says Alexis Zeiglar, new head of the nonprofit Community Yellow Bikes of the Piedmont, who says the bikes will now be called just "community bikes."
In a storage space behind the Hampton Inn on West Main Street, hundreds of future community bikes await "checking out." But whereas once volunteers would have fixed them up, painted them yellow, and put them out on the street for anyone to use on the honor system, the community bikes will actually become the property of anyone who wants to put the time into fixing them.
Kids, says Zeiglar, are key to the program.
"If they work on it themselves," he explains, "they become invested in it, and they take care of it."
It seems that may have been the problem with the Yellow Bikes. Although 180 were launched in March and September 2002, by early 2003 no one the Hook talked to had seen a yellow bike in months.
Theft and vandalism seemed the likeliest culprits, and city planning guru Satyendra Huja, a proponent of the program, expressed disappointment at the time that "so many were stolen or destroyed."
Zeiglar says the Yellow Bikes program could have worked had there been the funds to support it– and to replenish the quickly disappearing resource.
"Yellow Bikes works where they can put hundreds of thousands of dollars into it," he explains. Charlottesville, he says, does not have "that kind of resources."
The shop off West Main is open Thursday and Saturday from 2-5pm. Zeiglar says the program currently has approximately 10 volunteers, but he's actively "shopping for more."
If you have a bike that's not working, Zeiglar says, you have two options: You can donate it, or you can bring it in and get some help fixing it.
And if you don't have a bike?
Volunteering for "a minimum of an hour," says Zieglar, "will get you a bike."
Yellow bikes are gone, but the yellow racks await new "community bikes."


text:
Soulsby's Shell station in tiny Mt. Olive, Ill., seems like an unlikely attraction for international tourists. The gasoline pumps, which first started dispensing fuel in 1926, have been dry since 1991. But its position alongside historic Route 66 draws scores of visitors from every corner of the globe each spring, summer, and fall.
Between 1927 to 1985, Route 66 stretched 2,448 miles from Chicago to Los Angeles and was a major thoroughfare for Americans traveling west. A John Steinbeck novel, a hit song, a television show, and several movies helped transform the stretch of pavement into an international symbol of American wanderlust.
Today, tourists who want to experience the thrill of the wide-open road for themselves have taken to motoring what's left of the distance – sometimes even in vintage cars or astride Harley-Davidson motorcycles bought or rented especially for the trip.
"For the four of us it was the desire to see the 'real' America and to experience for ourselves the amazing pioneering spirit Americans had and to try to appreciate the trials endured on their search for a better life out West," says Michael French of southern England, who rented Harleys for a 2008 trip with his wife, Vanessa, and another British couple.
The international interest in Route 66 is extensive. There are Route 66 clubs in Norway and devoted websites in Romania and the Czech Republic. A Belgian man created the Historic Route 66 website (www.historic66.com), which has complete turn-by-turn descriptions of the highway to help in trip planning.
With this kind of cult following, it's hardly a surprise that a now-defunct gas station on a remote stretch of highway has become a retro motorist's mecca.
Mike Dragovich, the owner of Soulsby's, says the little building that once pumped gasoline for travelers "is better known overseas than it is in this country."
Soulsby's status as an original Route 66 icon is exactly the type of attraction international Route 66 groupies want to see in person.
Linda Persson from Sweden and a friend rumbled along old 66 in 2007 in a 1975 Pontiac purchased especially for the trip. "Route 66 is just something everyone has heard about," says Ms. Persson. "When I told my grandmother what I was going to do, she knew right away what it was."
Swa Frantzen, who created the Historic Route 66 website, has made the trip twice with his wife. "Route 66 is seen everywhere as a symbol for adventure, freedom, being a rebel, being on the road, even rock 'n' roll," he says.
'Mother Road' legacy
The legendary pavement first aroused international interest in 1939 with the publication of John Steinbeck's novel, "The Grapes of Wrath." Steinbeck referred to the highway as the "Mother Road," and described how it represented a path of opportunity for people seeking a new life in the American West as they fled the Dust Bowl during the Depression.
The 1946 song "Get Your Kicks on Route 66," a musical travelogue of a journey along the highway, has been recorded by more than 200 singers in several languages.
The early 1960s weekly television show "Route 66" featured two young men traveling across America in a Corvette and was rebroadcast overseas.
The 1969 movie, "Easy Rider," and more recently the 2006 animated feature, "Cars," featured the old road, too.
Friendly locals along the road
Of course, it isn't just the road, it's the communities and access to the people who live along it that overseas visitors feel is part of the draw as they drive across eight states (Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California) and through three time zones. Add scenery that includes forests, prairies, desert, and mountains, plus the promise of a journey of a lifetime, and many feel it is a package hard to resist.
Persson says that as soon as she stopped to take pictures and talk to the locals, she knew exactly what Route 66 was all about. "It's the people. The more people we talked to the more fulfilling our trip was."
Mom-and-pop diners and 1940s-style motels still thrive along the route.
At Skippy's Route 66 restaurant in tiny Leasburg, Mo., Denise Basham goes out of her way to engage international visitors in conversation and to make them feel welcome. She recalls four men from Spain who spoke no English. She had no idea what they wanted to eat until one said, "Moo!" "I brought out a hamburger and a steak, and they pointed to the steak. I added French fries and a salad and everyone was happy," she says.
Original stretches of pavement predominate as cherished vacation memories. Persson says her favorite part was a section in Oklahoma that dated from the 1930s. "It is the longest preserved stretch of all of 66. I just loved driving it," she says.
Motorcycles are a popular way to make the journey. One-way rentals of a Harley-Davidsons are big business at the EagleRider Motorcycle Rental in Chicago, where about 60 percent of the customers for the Route 66 trip are foreigners.
Mr. French, the English motorcyclist, says that a trip on Route 66 had long been a dream of his. And because his wife had read "The Grapes of Wrath," she was eager to go, too.
In Springfield, Mo., Dominick Cricchio, who manages the sale of clothing at Denney's Harley-Davidson store, says that he's had visits by several groups of at least 50 motorcyclists from Norway.
"Last year we had a group of 10 from Mexico," he adds. "Instead of stopping for repairs, most want to buy dealership patches and pins or T-shirts to show where they were. One group of Japanese riders stopped to trade pins and patches."
A famous Englishman also made the trip in 2008. Paul McCartney drove the entire route, leaving a legacy of memories at the Route 66 stops he made.
Yet one of the more unusual contingents to make the trip were 10 men and women from England who shipped five Austin 7's to the US and drove the highway at 50 m.p.h. in the vintage cars. One of the couples enjoyed the adventure so much that they returned to do it again in 2008 – but in a full-size rental car.