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FabTrol Insights
Steel fabrication thoughts and insights
FabTrol - Brian Williams
Brian Williams has spent his adult life working in steel fabrication and technology. Starting as a grinder/wire brush operator in college he worked as a fitter, CNC programmer, production control manager, and VP of Operations for a 4-shop industrial plate and structural fabricator. At FabTrol he has delivered training and implementation services to some of FabTrol's largest customers and designed software as FabTrol's Product Manager. Today, he continues to work in product management and serves as the General Manager of FabTrol Systems.
Previous: Capturing insights by connecting things and people (5 of 7): Automatic analysis of integrated data
FabTrol uses an "Agile" development process. This doesn't mean we have no process—in fact it requires knowing exactly where we are on each of the tasks at hand, delivering quality completed work more often and knowing what's next if we finish this task.
Process agility is:
- Accepting that change is inevitable and driving rather than resisting it
- Using a process that divides tasks into smaller phases of work to deliver some progress sooner and allow for easy re-prioritization
- Making a habit of incremental changes to the process itself, so those can be delivered sooner, results measured and new adjustments made
- Embracing the discovery that you've taken a small step in the wrong direction, as positive.
Many people and processes assume that the more prep, review and depth of work achieved, prior to delivery--the lower the risk. Perhaps the prep and review helps, but making too much progress prior to delivering something often buries problems and assumptions deep under further progress. Mistakes become more and more difficult--expensive--to unravel and are often so ingrained by the time of discovery that entire projects and products are abandoned or the problem is institutionalized and the cost of dealing with it accommodated for months and years to come.
Process agility does not mean that you can't have a six-month or two-year plan for your fabrication shop. It does mean that no one can work on something for months before you acknowledge the impact of unforeseen events or find out whether it will take another six months. The point is to deliver many small changes sooner rather than delaying change until it is so large and scary that people over-complicate and resist it.
In previous posts I've talked about integrated, instantly analyzed data that connects feedback from things, people and processes throughout your business. Process agility is what makes it all worthwhile.
Production Example
Without instant analysis of integrated data you pretty much have to follow the common course of tossing work over the wall, into the shop as soon as the documents are approved, and materials are inbound to match the cutting plan. Rather than driving and managing your delivery and production schedules with well-timed releases of work, all work is released ASAP and paperwork and meetings convey prioritization to the shop, often after the shop has made its own decision about what to do next.
With accurate real-time feedback about the current shop load, anyone can open the left-to-do form and click on the bottleneck in their shop (yours will be different from the next guys) and see the key indicator of how effectively the shop is loaded right now. This means work can be released precisely when you know it is needed--one week, one day or one hour before it will impact your bottleneck. This preserves scheduling flexibility, increases efficiency as everyone collaborates around the same priorities and gives late-breaking revisions their best chance of being known before work is started.
Document Example: "On Demand"
Shops receive approved documents ASAP to "make sure no one in the shop is waiting on drawings (work)". The downside is needing to revise the documents one or more times before anyone looks at them and the possibility that this process will fail and the old revision be left in production. Enabling the shop to print the drawings they need (right now or perhaps for the day at hand) or better, fetch them to an iPad, removes the entire process of maintaining the right revision on the shop floor. If you retrieve the drawing as late as possible and the software is tasked with maintaining the latest revision every time there is an update from the model, you increase the likelihood that workers have the right revision while eliminating the process of destroying or removing the old copy and replacing it. Plus you achieve the original goal of making sure they always have work--a "Drawing Release" or "Work Order" document that lists drawings or assemblies that they are authorized to use/work on is all that is required. No more waiting for the drawing office to print or copy drawings, the shop can pull the drawings to a printer or their iPad at will.
When is On Demand better?
This applies to nc data, cut lists, anything you have a formal process for "revising and replacing". Delivering the lengths to the saw when it's time to cut the bar means the parts will be cut according to the latest, greatest information. Plus it takes less work to fetch the cut lengths as bars are loaded on the saw than it does to sift through a stack of cut lists and manage revisions to a partially cut page.
Drive your shop
When you release work at precisely the moment that will drive production efficiently--but no sooner--and continuously deliver process improvements, one small step at a time, you don't just embrace change, you drive it. Process agility means change is your tool, not something you resist or only react to.
Coming next week: Capturing insights by connecting things and people (7 of 7): Bringing it all together
Previous: Capturing insights by connecting things and people (4 of 7): Integrated data from people, processes and things
Many shops gather and crunch data once per week. Meetings are held, courses are corrected and everyone guesses how adrift they are until the next weekly update and new course correction. Others go through this every day—obviously they see great value in the integrated data, regularly updated.
If the process was automated they could retrieve it on demand at any time, with less effort. Formally reviewing it every day would be easy and it would be just as easy to get up to date information, on one critical project, a few hours later.
Without automation, what does the summary report mean? When the shop reports that production batch 12 is 80% fit, does this mean that 80% of the assemblies are fit or that 80% of the fit-up hours are expended? Since it's necessary to track man-hours for payroll, it's often the latter and no one really knows if batch 12 is actually complete and ahead on the hours or the progress estimate is nonsense and batch 12 is barely underway.
Without automation, information isn't available to check when you are first aware of a potential problem. If the purchasing agent is over budget and keeps hearing that "Change Orders will cover it"—can they look and find out or must they remember to check the report at the end of the month? What about a project manager who just won the production meeting battle and got his critical production batch moved to the top of the list? When he comes in tomorrow, how much effort will it take to learn if the shop is acting on the new plan? The load just left, when and how confidently will the project manager know whether that critical assembly was on it?
Having the data together in one place is fundamental—but lists have to be crunched into summaries and the meaningful information presented in the right context. This can be available for the asking, all of the time.
One you commit to connecting feedback from machines, people and processes like change order submittals, shipping and purchasing, together in one place, software like FabTrol Pro can mine that data for instant, up-to-date, analysis. Hundreds of reports, included in the software or tweaked by you to address your unique concerns, are possible. FabTrol Pro also saves your filters or "queries". You can design a report, for instance, that lists assemblies completed through welding today and FabTrol can re-use your "0 to -1 days" filter again and again.
Capturing insights by connecting things and people (4 of 7): Integrated data from people, processes and things
Some shops drive production based on material cutting progress—because that is something that they track well. Others are fundamentally drawing approval based. Drawings go to purchasing ASAP and are then thrown over the wall into the shop as soon drawings reach a certain status (like "approved") and materials are in-bound. Still others monitor shipping closely and drive production based on that.
Most shops review a spreadsheet, every week, in a production or planning meeting. The spreadsheet communicates progress on erection sequences or production batches (or "drawing releases"). A percentage of progress is represented for things like cutting and painting. Human judgement is used to correlate whatever data does exist for those things into a percentage of completion. Sometimes this is based on labor expended vs. labor in the budget but just as often it is the result of a seasoned weather eye summing up what is visible on the shop floor.
Previous posts covered how inexpensive it is to collect data from machines, every minute of every day and how easy it can be to sell people on processes and tools that shrink their workload while collecting more data. But what's the point?
- Push-button access to a one page, real-time overview of your project covering: RFIs, labor hours, change orders, shipping status, materials on hand, purchasing and more.
- Instant access to real-time production progress summarized by erection sequence or production batch. Questions about the details? Need to know which specific assembly is keeping that Batch marked "in process"? Just a click away.
- Constant, effortless dashboard feedback about which jobs are shipping and how the work that you need for your shop is flowing through engineering and approvals.
- Confident material multing/nesting/allocation knowing that material-on-hand data is accurate, right now.
- Click on a part or assembly in the BOM and find out its production status.
- Click on a task or work area on the Production left-to-do form and know how much work is currently available to process through the saw or fit-up bay.
- A list of assemblies welded, today, so far.
And it's all available from one source, full of insightful reports that can easily be customized to deliver even proprietary information that you know is the key to your particular business and customers.
Data is valuable, in and of itself. But it's also overwhelming in this new world where you can collect so much, so fast. This can discourage steel fabricators from accumulating the information. If you can't get on demand, automated analysis and easily add more reports to answer different questions, then there's little point in collecting more data than you can easily review and understand in a few minutes. Instant analysis is possible though. For more, read the post coming next week: Capturing insights by connecting things and people (5 of 7): Automated analysis.
Capturing insights by connecting things and people (3 of 7): Feedback from connected people and processes
Previous: Capturing insights by connecting things and people (2 of 7): Feedback from connected things
In the last post about connected things, I hope it was apparent that machines can quietly increase visibility into your part production status and performance with no impact to their productivity. If this data is accessible in conjunction with what you know about change orders, shipping, labor hours and other factors from your business, the advantageous cost (virtually none on a day to day basis) to benefit (important facts at your fingertips in the context of other important facts) ratio is obvious.
People are different. They get tired, experience stress and forget things. Often, and certainly in my case, in that order. Add something else for the machine software to collect and communicate and you won't stress it or impact it's productivity. For a person it can be the straw that breaks the camel's back. People know this and will resist new tasks, especially if they can't see the benefit to them and their work.
There is a magic bullet
I recently read an interesting blog that claimed there was a magic bullet for learning multiple languages. Nonsense, right? Actually you probably already know that they are right. Take any 2 year old and have them spend much of their time with someone who only speaks an alternate language. No special curriculum or teaching method is required. The child learns both languages because that's the period of their life when they absorb these things as part of all of the necessary daily interaction.
Capturing data about people and processes can also be a side-effect, something people can do without even thinking about it. This is easier to set-up than a machine and there is almost always a direct effort-saving benefit to the person doing the work.
It requires a different way of thinking though:
Stop using software after the work is done, to record and communicate your work. Instead, insist that the software is used to do the work and expect logging and data capture to be automatic.
Already doing this? Let's find out:
- Does someone in your office find and gather the latest revisions of fabrication drawings into a single file folder from time to time?
- Is there a regular process of pulling change order summaries together into a document that accounting or management can consume?
- Does someone update a spreadsheet with percentage of completion information (data? or guesses?) before every production meeting?
- Do you find out that sometimes fit-up is reported as 80% complete because 80% of the labor budget is spent and in fact you do not really know where your are on fit-up of that critical batch or sequence?
- When you send a transmittal, is the status impact on each drawing tracked? If so, does someone go on to note the change in status for each of the drawings on that transmittal?
- When a machine operator processes a part or cuts raw material, do they search on the network (or a thumb drive) to find the CNC files to match the paper cut list or production list they are looking at?
These are all signs that you use software to record and communicate your data--but not to do the work itself.
You can eliminate much of this effort and gather more accurate and up-to-date data as a side effect.
If software was doing the work:
- The latest drawing revision would be available to the iPad in your shop without relying on someone to organize the latest revisions into file folders.
- Budget impact of change order requests would automatically be apparent as they are submitted and approved or denied.
- Percentage of completion could be fetched on demand and would be based on actual work complete vs work scheduled on a batch.
- Sending a transmittal would automatically update the status of drawings on that transmittal and add a record of that status change to the drawing log.
- Files to process the next beam into parts would automatically arrive at the machine together with the relevant line on the cutting plan or production plan.
Thinking this way, it's easier to connect feedback from people than to connect feedback from machines. Why? The processes and tools that collect this data make it easier to do their daily work. They see the direct positive impact to the speed and quality of their own effort, and don't have to remember to pull together summaries or log what they did. Then the connected data starts flowing and delivering the valuable insights you need to drive your business.
We've been assuming that the data from these connected things, people and processes isn't isolated by vendor, brand or department. For more about that, read the next post, Capturing insights by connecting things and people (4of 7): Integrated data from the things, processes and people.
Previous: Capturing insights by connecting things and people: Integration and the internet of everything
Connected things are everywhere but steel fabrication shops are full of disconnected things, even when those things are driven by a computer.
Our photos are automatically uploaded to cloud storage and our calendar sends text messages to our phone. We can see graphs online representing how many steps we have climbed today. Cameras capture our speed and license plate number and then computers automatically send us traffic citations.
In fabrication shops, though, we see people programming by hand, right at the CNC machine controller, while the attached, tireless machine waits for instructions. Files are delivered to the machine on a thumb drive, much like we used to receive faxes in a physical in-box on our desk.
Other steel fabrication shops have machines that know the next dozen beams lined up to go through the saw. Sometimes the machine, not the operator, guides cut beams on to the drill line and others past it, straight to fabrication. As the beams are processed, the machine removes them from the queue and knows not to process that beam again. A network based server is updated as more beams are loaded and lined up for processing. When it's all working, the operator looks bored, may not even be near the machine or is doing work to get ready for a part or some raw material that will be processed hours from now. Progress, and the time it took to do it, is logged.
This is pretty sophisticated for a job shop but the data collected from the CNC machine work cell, while valuable, is often disconnected from the rest of the business.
The CNC machine server knows that a part is complete but can you view that together with the rest of the assembly or project story? Are the other parts, not processed by a machine or at least this brand of machine, ready for fit-up? Are the latest revision of relevant documents available to the shop? Anything on hold? How long did it take to complete that complicated column, including the processing time the machine captured, the fit-up, painting and welding?
It's possible to capture all of this from machines and bring it together with other data about a project, assembly, or overall shipping progress across all projects. It's almost effortless after you set it up.
And there's the rub, investing time in the original setup. If you had this data for the next three months, with dashboards and reports making it unnecessary to get out of your chair, pick up a phone or send an email to find out everything that happened to 100B1 (onsite and too short) or whether loads for any of the projects you monitor shipped this week, you would never go back. Once the system is working, it's better than free. It takes minimal effort to use everyday and repeatedly helps you avoid mistakes, save money and save time.
What about delivering data to the machine? Is the "thing" connected to the rest of your material and production plan? Can it receive cut lists and production batch plans electronically? How does the operator find this data and how much effort is expended making sure that the right CNC file is used? Is this in sync with how documents and data are delivered to other processes and machines? With the proper setup, much of the effort to deliver this data to the machine is eliminated. This means better quality and better coordination between all of the people, departments, fabrication bays and machines working together to deliver multiple projects to different job sites.
FabTrol's current software implementation staff has used FabTrol software to deliver this kind of value to hundreds of steel fabrication companies world wide. Once it is working, it does need revisiting every year or so, but day to day data capture from machines just happens quietly, with no extra human effort, as a side effect of doing the work you have to do anyway. The software literally does this data capture work for you and pulls this feedback together with data from processes and people throughout your company.
Next: Capturing insights by connecting things and people (3 of 7): Feedback from connected people


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With no detail forgotten, poolside at Hotel ZaZa was bathed in shades of carnation, rose and fuchsia for the annual "Party in Pink" summer soiree benefiting the Susan G. Komen Foundation.
As promised on the invite, Marilyn (as in a Monroe impersonator) made an appearance posing with pink ladies like Cindi Rose, Varda Dror and Yasmine Haddad (sporting coordinated turquoise and pink eyeshadow).
Fortune teller Angela Flores looked into the PIPs' futures ("Pretty In Pink") while other pink panthers doled out the George Washingtons at the kissing booth for a smooch with a Dynamo player such as Mike Chabala.
For those who enjoyed the mocktail libations, seeing pink duckies was not a figment of their imagination. The favored bathtub buddies — tinted a festive pink — filled the ZaZa pool.


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This show that opened June 10th is being posted in July because June was a crazy bad-ass month. Not only was there a mini survey show at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence and a large new project at the IMA in Indianapolis – but we also hung a solo show at Sadie Coles HQ in London. It is hard to chose a single representative image of this show – but here is a shot at it. I liked this body of work because it was all about representation and experience which is something that I've been struggling with in my work forever.
And there was a video. I mean a real video-video (not a powerpoint style video), which is sort of a first. Each show I try to make one work that scares the shit out of me (generally something that might be doomed to fail) This time that work was a video called "Clutch" – thanks to the superb cinematography of Giovanni Jance I think it actually worked.


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Podcast: Frontiers in Astrophysics–Tracking Asteroids with Richard Binzel main content.
by AMNH on
Space dust and asteroid fragments reach Earth's surface every day, but only rarely do extraterrestrial objects cause serious harm. In this podcast from the spring, MIT professor Richard Binzel evaluates the threat of asteroids and makes a case for how they might actually be useful to humans.
Dr. Binzel's talk, "Tracking Asteroids," from the Frontiers in Astrophysics lecture series, took place at the Hayden Planetarium on April 16, 2012.


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WASHINGTON By the time the campaign tracked down the small-city Indiana mayor, Bill Clinton was in a lather. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton had lost the North Carolina primary that evening and was eager to offset it with a win in Indiana. But a vote-counting delay in one county threatened to rob her of a prime-time victory speech.
The Clinton campaign called a supporter for help. "I've got an angry president here and a candidate who wants to know whether or not she won," a local campaign representative told the mayor, Thomas McDermott Jr. of Hammond, Ind. Mr. McDermott could hear Mr. Clinton railing in the background. "It's not very often you basically have a former president yelling at you to get the numbers out," he recalled.
The yelling was for naught. Mr. McDermott said he had no control over the vote count and, in the end, the late results cemented a negative narrative for an evening dominated by the North Carolina defeat with little attention focused on the eventual Indiana victory. The night of May 6 became the moment that Mrs. Clinton's desperate comeback bid for the Democratic presidential nomination finally crashed against the reality of delegate math. All she had left was the perception of momentum, and suddenly, that was gone.
Hers was a campaign of destiny that fell achingly short, garnering nearly 18 million votes in her quest to become the first woman to hold the presidency. "Although we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest ceiling this time, thanks to you, it's got about 18 million cracks in it," Mrs. Clinton said as she ended her campaign on Saturday.
Yet while she emphasized its trailblazing nature as she exited the race, her campaign also represented a back-to-the-future effort to restore the Democratic dynasty of the 1990s that could never quite escape the past. Although Mrs. Clinton proved a more agile candidate than many had expected, she built a campaign that was suffused in overconfidence, riven by acrimony and weighted by the emotional baggage of a marriage between former and would-be presidents.
As she flew from town halls to rallies on the road, she did little to stop the infighting back home among advisers who nursed grudges from their White House days. The aides grew distracted from battling Senator Barack Obama while they hurled expletives at one another, stormed out of meetings and schemed to get one another fired.
The Clintons struggled to adapt their successful formula to a new era against a new kind of opponent. They found their message of hope and change co-opted, and they found it hard to break out of the news media's old image of them. Mrs. Clinton variously tried presenting herself as the friend having conversations with the American people, then the experienced hand and tough warrior before settling on heroine of the working class.
Mr. Clinton vented frustrations and, still not one to use e-mail, much less a BlackBerry, found his famed instincts inadequate in a blogosphere age that amplified every intemperate outburst.
While Mr. Obama had mastered Internet fund-raising, it took Mrs. Clinton a year to do the same.
And as they tried to master a new political era, the Clintons demanded loyalty from those who once surrounded them and felt betrayed by people they assumed would be with them again.
"What hurt them was their sense of entitlement that the presidency was theirs and all the acolytes should fall in line," said Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, a former Clinton cabinet officer who endorsed Mr. Obama only to be branded a Judas by James Carville, the architect of Mr. Clinton's original rise to power. "Instead of accepting it, they turned on the acolytes. It was their war room mentality, to attack when something doesn't go their way, and it just reminded me of the old days."
In those days that mentality combined with grit and perseverance usually proved enough to win the day. If Gennifer Flowers, Newt Gingrich and Monica Lewinsky taught the Clintons anything, it was never to give in, no matter how many people told them to. This time, it was not enough, as Mrs. Clinton's three-month effort to salvage her campaign after a cascading series of defeats in February fell short.
"Bill and I share a character trait of being determined and committed and not easily deterred or discouraged," she said in an interview in the waning days of the race. Asked about onetime friends who had abandoned her, she said, with a note of resignation in her voice, "That happens in politics."
These past three months played out with classic Clintonian drama. Her staff conducted rival polls while debating how much to campaign in North Carolina. Unlike her opponents, Mrs. Clinton refused to make solicitation calls to donors and had to be talked into calling the party officials known as superdelegates. Aides busily blamed one another for strategic mistakes that put her so far behind.
By many metrics, Mrs. Clinton actually won those three months. She beat Mr. Obama in the popular vote in 9 of the final 16 contests, collecting 600,000 more votes than he did along the way and racking up 509 primary and caucus delegates to his 472 in that period.
She found a groove as the candidate of the 1990s establishment finally reinvented herself as the populist champion. And she tapped into a deep well of support, particularly among women, that leaves her a formidable force in American politics.
"In the last three months, she just relaxed and let it rip," said Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania, a key Clinton ally. "She became almost a Hubert Humphrey, a happy warrior, and people responded to it."
It was politics on the edge. "The gun was to our heads many Tuesdays," said Terry McAuliffe, her campaign chairman. "If we didn't win, we were dead. And we kept winning."
But in the end, they were still dead.
The Old Team
As Mrs. Clinton assembled her campaign to take back the White House, she brought together much of the old team, led by her chief strategist, Mark J. Penn, who had orchestrated her husband's 1996 re-election. Just as they did in 1992, the Clintons were offering two for the price of one. As Mr. Clinton surveyed the field, he could not quite believe that an upstart, inexperienced senator from Illinois could be a serious alternative to such an accomplished figure as his wife.
The campaign was built on the assumption of overwhelming force. Strategists believed that the first four contests would be decisive and that she would wrap up the nomination by Feb. 5, when more than 20 states were to hold nominating contests.
Mr. Penn shaped a message that she was "ready to lead" a nation "ready for change," talking in early meetings about her need to spark a "movement" and dismissing Mr. Obama as a glamorous personality who would not connect with working-class voters the way she could, campaign officials said. "He may be the J.F.K. in the race," Mr. Penn told Mrs. Clinton last year, according to an insider, "but you are the Bobby."
Backed by Bill Clinton, Mr. Penn pushed for aggressive attacks on Mr. Obama, something other advisers resisted. At one point, Mr. Penn argued that Mrs. Clinton should find subtle ways to exploit what he called Mr. Obama's "lack of American roots," referring to his Kenyan father and his childhood years in Indonesia and even the offshore state of Hawaii, the campaign officials said. Mr. Penn recommended that Mrs. Clinton own the word "American" she should talk about the "American century" and her "American Strategic Energy Fund," and so forth. She should add flag symbols to her logo, he suggested.
Along the way, though, the campaign succeeded in defining Mrs. Clinton as a leader but not as an agent of change, and it hesitated in attacking Mr. Obama, who became the one leading a movement. Her logo was adorned with a flag, but her energy fund remained just an energy fund. Her strategists underestimated Mr. Obama's strength and spent too much money before the voting even began.
In a March 2007 memorandum summing up the campaign's consensus "key assumptions," the Clinton adviser Harold Ickes wrote that Iowa would be better for Mrs. Clinton than New Hampshire and projected that the campaign would raise $75 million in 2007 with $25 million left at the end heading into the first contests. In reality, she finished third in Iowa while winning New Hampshire. The campaign raised $100 million in 2007 but spent so much in Iowa that it was broke soon after the new year.
The Clinton team that had been so successful in the 1990s arrived at that moment bearing all the resentments of the old days. Mr. Penn, a sometimes brusque number cruncher with centrist corporate sensibilities, had few friends inside the campaign other than the candidate and her husband. Mr. Ickes, a bare-knuckled liberal friend of labor, had despised Mr. Penn since their days in the Clinton White House and did nothing to hide it, regularly mocking "our vaunted chief strategist" and at least once engaging in a profanity-laden shouting match with him.
There were other fault lines. Aides to Mrs. Clinton took umbrage at Mr. Clinton's freelancing and deemed his office uncooperative at one point, they complained, his people would not allow one of her people to ride on his plane to campaign stops. His aides, on the other hand, stewed over what they saw as her people's disregard for the advice of one of this generation's great political minds and bristled at surrendering control of his schedule.
The squabbling got so bad that it spilled into public view. "This makes me sick," Robert B. Barnett, Mrs. Clinton's lawyer and debate coach, wrote in an e-mail message to top campaign advisers, according to someone who read it. "My message is simple: Stop it, please."
As for Mr. Clinton, he boiled with resentment that a candidate with as little experience as Mr. Obama was given what he considered a free pass by the news media. Yet his tone struck some as dismissive. When Mr. Clinton referred publicly to Mr. Obama as a "kid," Representative James E. Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina, recalled in an interview that a fellow black congressman said, "I don't know why he didn't just call him 'boy' and get it over with."
In private, Mr. Clinton was making matters worse. On the night of the South Carolina primary, Mr. Clinton called and Mr. Clyburn said he told him to tone down his rhetoric against Mr. Obama. Mr. Clinton responded by calling him a rude name that Mr. Clyburn would not repeat in an interview. Mr. Clinton called back a few days later for what Mr. Clyburn called "a much more pleasant conversation," but the damage was done. "Clinton was using code words that most of us in the South can recognize when we hear that kind of stuff," Mr. Clyburn said.
A New Landscape
This was no longer an environment the Clintons were accustomed to. Black voters had always been the most loyal part of Mr. Clinton's base, and the accusations of racism wounded him deeply. The Clintons had little experience with caucuses in the 1990s and failed even to compete in most states holding them this year, allowing Mr. Obama to rack up a mass of uncontested delegates. Rather than sealing the nomination for Mrs. Clinton, the Feb. 5 coast-to-coast voting led into an 11-contest, monthlong losing streak.
Mrs. Clinton dumped her campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, who had been with her since 1992, and the two have not spoken since. Maggie Williams, the first lady's chief of staff in the 1990s, was brought in to take over. Mrs. Clinton finally agreed to attack Mr. Obama in a more sustained way and scratched out victories in the Ohio and Texas primaries on March 4 to keep her bid alive.
The day of those votes, Mr. Clinton called Representative Jason Altmire, a freshman Democrat from Pennsylvania, the next state to hold a primary. "You could hear it in his voice how happy he was," Mr. Altmire recalled. "He said, 'Now we're coming to Pennsylvania and I know you might be leaning one way or another. I think you should keep your powder dry and hopefully we can win your support.' "
The campaign shifted to a contest for the superdelegates, or party elders and elected officials like Mr. Altmire who can vote at the convention. Mrs. Clinton was too far behind to catch up to Mr. Obama among delegates selected by primaries and caucuses, so she hoped to persuade the superdelegates that she would be the stronger candidate in the fall. Only then did she agree to start calling superdelegates personally, something Mr. Obama had been doing for months.
Behind the scenes, Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, was pushing other superdelegates to announce their choices as quickly as possible in hopes of settling the nomination without added delay. Some Clinton aides viewed Mr. Dean as sympathetic to Mr. Obama and suspected his motives.
Tensions boiled over at a meeting in April between Mr. Dean and fund-raisers for the two campaigns at the Upper East Side apartment of the prominent Clinton supporters Steven Rattner and Maureen White. What was supposed to be a moment of unity quickly deteriorated when one of Mrs. Clinton's national finance chairmen, Hassan Nemazee, confronted Mr. Dean about the disputed Florida and Michigan primaries.
"I said to him, 'It seems to me that you as the chair need to exert some leadership and produce some resolution to this problem,' " Mr. Nemazee recalled. The two argued over Mr. Dean's reply that Mr. Nemazee was trying to force him to choose sides, Mr. Nemazee and party officials said.
The campaign swung in unpredictable directions during the seven-week campaign in Pennsylvania. Radical sermons by Mr. Obama's minister generated days of cable television coverage, but Mrs. Clinton's false account of an under-fire trip to Bosnia stepped on her momentum. Mr. Penn pushed to go after Mr. Obama more directly for his association with the minister, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., but Howard Wolfson, the communications director, Mandy Grunwald, the media chief, and others resisted.
The rancor within the campaign escalated a few days later when Mrs. Clinton learned that Mr. Penn had met with Colombian officials as part of a contract to promote a free trade pact that the candidate opposed. Her aides fumed. One adviser, Tina Flournoy, walked out of campaign headquarters in anger. Mr. Penn's many enemies seized on the chance to get him demoted. Colleagues rejoiced. "People felt like the sun came out a little more," said one. Geoff Garin, another pollster, and Mr. Wolfson took over the direction of the campaign, although Mr. Penn remained part of the operation.
While Mr. Penn had pushed to go on offense against Mr. Obama, seeing that as the only way to change the dynamics of the race, Mr. Garin steered in the other direction. "There were lots of people who spent a lot of time thinking about what to say about Barack Obama and not enough people waking up every morning thinking about how to make the case for Hillary Clinton," he said in an interview.
As the race wore on, Mr. Clinton played a growing role in shaping strategy. Flying to events or at the local campaign headquarters, he would pore over maps of Pennsylvania with Governor Rendell, pushing for more time and resources in the Philadelphia suburbs. He crisscrossed the state, hitting small towns and pressing superdelegates.
At one point, the former president visited Mr. Altmire's district, giving what the congressman called "the hard sell."
While riding with Mr. Clinton in his car to an event, Mr. Altmire said, he asked how Mr. Obama's learning curve at the White House would stack up with that of the former president, who was 46 when he took office. "I made a lot of mistakes when I started out," Mr. Clinton replied, according to Mr. Altmire. "And I did some things in office that were politically naïve, and I would have a fear that Senator Obama would have the same experience."
On election night, Mr. Clinton grew playfully competitive with his wife over who had done more events or had had more impact, Mr. Rendell said. Mrs. Clinton was superstitious and rarely watched election night coverage, but in the hotel suite, Mr. Rendell showed her husband county-by-county returns.
"The president wanted to know exactly what the returns were in the places he had been and Hillary hadn't been," Mr. Rendell said. "He kept showing Hillary, and she would laugh."
Election night brought home the varied complex personal and political dynamics at play. Mr. Penn, once the most influential voice in the Clinton universe, showed up at campaign headquarters outside Washington to watch the returns but virtually no one would talk with him and he left early.
Mrs. Clinton handily beat Mr. Obama in Pennsylvania on April 22, but she could not translate that into gains with the critical superdelegates. The next day, she met with Mr. Altmire. She had won his district by some 31 percentage points and assumed that he would now commit his convention vote as a superdelegate to her. But he still refused.
"I think that was the frustration they were experiencing in that campaign," Mr. Altmire said. "They kept winning state after state and they expected others to start turning their way and it just didn't happen."
Losing While Winning
For Mrs. Clinton and her campaign staff, it was a surreal period. With each win, pundits would tell her to get out. The former president and his wife's strategists became convinced that the news media, suffering from sexism, Clinton fatigue and Obama mania, were unfairly trying to hasten the end of their campaign. One day around a conference table, a group of advisers burst out in angry defiance. They started calling out the big states she had won California, New York and fired each other up.
"It just became, 'You get out! Look at these states. You get out,' " recalled one person in the room. "It got everyone pumped up."
Mrs. Clinton recognized the odds. But she was being encouraged by emotional supporters along the rope lines and came to believe she had an obligation to stay in, aides said. At every stop, someone would say, "Don't you quit!" and aides said she internalized the message. "The psychology of it all is very complicated," one said. "I'm sure you don't want to slow down because once you do, you start to think about things."
Advisers shied from suggesting she quit. "You're a persona non grata if you bring up getting out," another aide said. "It just wasn't talked about." But the real mission remained unclear. "What's peace with honor here?" the aide asked.
If Mrs. Clinton ever thought about giving up, she seems to have kept it to herself. "We kept winning if you're winning, why should she leave?" asked Mr. McAuliffe, the campaign chairman and a close family friend. She never expressed doubt in front of him. "She never did. Never, never, never."
Mr. McAuliffe served as morale officer, regularly visiting headquarters and taking dejected aides to dinner. His feisty, manic television appearances became so ubiquitous that aides developed "Terry Bingo" with 25 boxes listing his most common lines of spin "More electable," "Can still win" and marked the boxes as he uttered them again and again.
Mrs. Clinton's last real chance to change the shape of the race would come in Indiana and North Carolina. She started eight points down in internal polls in Indiana, which would prove to be the first state she would win after trailing.
North Carolina was the question mark. Mr. Clinton, unwilling to give up on his native South, believed they could whittle down her double-digit deficit and insisted on spending more time there. Mr. Garin took polls and reported back in an April 25 e-mail message that "we are on track to narrow this to single digits." Mr. Penn argued it was not possible and took his own shadow poll to prove his point.
On election night, North Carolina proved far beyond her grasp, and the Indiana results were lagging from a pro-Obama county. When Mrs. Clinton's aides looked up at the television and heard what Tim Russert was saying on MSNBC, they realized they were losing the perception battle. "She did not get the game-changer she wanted tonight," Mr. Russert said on air.
No More Illusions
Deep in debt and no longer harboring even illusions of winning the nomination, Mrs. Clinton stopped attacks on Mr. Obama to avoid alienating him or the party. With only a handful of primaries left, Mr. Clinton began focusing on how to win as much of the popular vote for his wife as possible. "He wanted to at least put her in the position of being the vice president, and that was one way to do that," said an adviser.
Mrs. Clinton's elation at each new victory was stemmed by some painful new setback. She crushed Mr. Obama in West Virginia. But as she celebrated, Mr. Obama upstaged her by appearing in Grand Rapids, Mich., the next day with a surprise endorser, former Senator John Edwards.
Mrs. Clinton noticed, however, that Elizabeth Edwards did not join her husband. Mrs. Edwards in recent months had grown to like Mrs. Clinton, an Edwards adviser said, and so the campaign reached out to see if she might back the New York senator.
Mrs. Edwards would not go that far. But the disaffection of other women over the pressure on Mrs. Clinton to step aside only stiffened her determination to press on. She received angry messages on her BlackBerry from friends like Ellen R. Malcolm, the president of Emily's List, an abortion rights group that supports like-minded women seeking election. Ms. Malcolm said she vented in an e-mail message about how the news media were unfairly diminishing Mrs. Clinton's victories.
Joe Andrew, a former Democratic Party chairman who had switched allegiance to Mr. Obama from Mrs. Clinton, faced the wrath of her supporters firsthand when he drove up to the Washington hotel where party officials were meeting last weekend to resolve how to count Florida and Michigan delegates. Protesters shouting "traitor" descended upon his Chrysler minivan, denting it with punches and kicks, he said.
The tensions fed a sense of defiance within the campaign. The Friday before Memorial Day, an aide was dispatched to the New York offices of People magazine to dispute a single word attributed to Mr. Clinton that left an impression of female frailty. The magazine quoted him saying Chelsea Clinton "bawled" after her mother's loss in Iowa; the campaign said that Ms. Clinton had not cried and maintained that he had said "appalled." The quotation stood.
The Withdrawal Plan
By last week, though, anger had given way to resignation. Even before the final primaries on Tuesday, aides said Mrs. Clinton knew she could not continue. But she told them she would not concede that evening in the college gymnasium where she was to give her speech celebrating victory in South Dakota. She and her supporters, she told aides, had earned the right to their own day, and she planned to take two weeks to think through her options.
The next day, though, Democratic supporters in Congress pressed her on a conference call to give up quickly. She gave in, hung up and asked top advisers to prepare a plan to withdraw. They met with her at campaign headquarters, where every member of her inner circle recommended she pull out and endorse Mr. Obama without preconditions or negotiations every member except Mr. Penn, who said she should hold out for concessions.
But Mrs. Clinton was, at last, ready to call it quits and switch focus to the general election, two aides recalled. "Let's get on with it," she said.


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Tide time; Alcohol ink abstract painting A4.
This piece was created having watched the tide go in at the seaside. The waves and water patterns are made using alcohol inks in bright hues of blue and turquoise.
Hello I'm Alana and I live in Greater London. I'm an ink and watercolour artist and I mainly paint portraits and brightly patterned abstracts.
I developed my style and technique at school during my art A-levels and continued on to do my Art and Design foundation diploma; after completing that however, I have been mainly self-taught. During this time I have found my love for painting using inks on non porous surfaces to create vivid and interesting art pieces, which due to the technique used with them, create really unique pieces that cannot be replicated again.
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The BCS is about to be pulled off the respirator. The strange amalgam of profit motive, computer dweebiness and institutional corruption has one more year before it goes in the ground.
But don't for a second think that the flaws in the system overshadow the verdict delivered on the field Monday night.
Alabama won its second championship in three years by routing LSU, a 21-0 sleeper hold that did little for TV ratings, but put this team and coach Nick Saban in the record books. AP voters who had threatened a revolt to bring about a split championship largely fell into line. The Tide's domination gave them little choice.
And yet the Occupy BCS critics, though in far fewer numbers, were back waving their signs this morning, choosing once again to concentrate on the flaws of a system rather than the superiority of a particular team in college football's winner-takes-all stage.
Alabama was that good. In November, the Tide exposed the one flaw in LSU's arsenal -- the lack of a balanced offense. This time they fully exploited it. When LSU couldn't run, quarterback Jordan Jefferson had no hope of consistently throwing the ball down the field. It would have taken a big play -- Alabama's extraordinary defense gave the Tigers no air to breathe -- or a transformational mistake -- unlike November, the Tide was not in a giving mood -- for the tide, so to speak, to change.
Next season, Alabama and LSU will contend for the last BCS title. Alabama will lose key players across what might be the best college defense of all time. LSU needs to find a quarterback. If it does, the Tigers will be awfully hard to beat.
But so will Alabama, and Arkansas, and Florida and Georgia, and Texas A&M on the road, and on and on and on. It's the SEC, after all. Big Boy stuff. And whatever the new system, that's not likely to change.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Bad system or not, we have a deserving champion
The BCS is about to be pulled off the respirator. The strange amalgam of profit motive, computer dweebiness and institutional corruption has one more year before it goes in the ground.
11 comments:
- Bama Brother said...
Nothing to add to that other than a resounding, "Here! Here!"
- January 10, 2012 at 10:41 AM
- Anonymous said...
I really hate Alabama. Like that does me any good. And the complete domination they are doing in recruiting this year makes it even worse. Oh, well, at least there will be little reason to invest in cases of Maalox, as 'Bama will win 4 Iron Bowls and at least 1 more national title in the next 4 years. But I'd better invest heavily in Pepto Bismol. At least we no longer have Ted Roof to botch the defense. So we'll only lose the Iron Bowls 31-14 instead of 42-14. Roll Tide. Ugh.
- January 10, 2012 at 11:38 AM
- Michael said...
J, I know how hard that was to write.
You're growing before our eyes.
- January 10, 2012 at 2:24 PM
- Bama Brother said...
Had to share this comment from an LSU fan website:
"This game was so boring. How boring was it?
I switched over to an Australian cricket match.
I read a CNN article about investing in annuities.
I tweeted Kim Kardashian.
I painted a wall in my kitchen and watched it dry.
I called my doctor and asked if eating grass renders you incapable of making good decisions under pressure.
Later tonight, I'll kneel beside my bed and pray for Miles to go before I sleep."
- January 10, 2012 at 10:34 PM
- Anonymous said...
If you weren't a GRIT..this was tooooo boring to watch......LSU offense was dreadful..and Bama offense was so so, at best ....YAWN !!!!
- January 10, 2012 at 11:15 PM
- Anonymous said...
Last year was nothing but some lying scammer thief pay for play one shot wonder from Auburn who went on to play for some loser criminal outfit in the NFL.
At least you got a real legitmate NCAA Champ and not a crooked CHEAT who didnt pay for their crimes either !!!
- January 11, 2012 at 6:20 AM
- Mike said...
Yes, Alabama dominated a team with no offense, but a schedule that includes wins over Kent State, North Texas, Georgia Southern outside the SEC, bottom feeding Vandy, Miss, Miss State and Tennessee in conference--only quality wins were Penn State, who turns out to be mediocre, Auburn (very mediocre) and Arkansas (great record with equally lame schedule) did not deserve to be in championship game. Don't tell me they only lost to LSU--Clemson could have played that schedule and only lost to LSU. Yes, the SEC is the best conference, but no Georgia, no SC on Schedule? OSU would have run away from LSU--and I am no fan of theirs, just telling the truth.
- January 11, 2012 at 8:08 AM
- Anonymous said...
Anon 6:20 - please take the following steps to heal yourself:
1) Stop talking to Harvey Updyke. Not only is he clouding your judgment, he'll start calling you collect when he gets to jail.
2) See a doctor.
3) Zoloft. Paxil. Lexapro. Prozac. Ask for one.
4) Get some sleep.
- January 11, 2012 at 1:00 PM
- Bud said...
- This comment has been removed by the author.
- January 11, 2012 at 1:30 PM
- Bud said...
The Bama defense versus LSU played the best game I've ever seen a college team play. But I need to talk about UGA now that everything is said and done (not that anybody cares). We played 4 teams this year that finished in the top 25 and lost to all of them. We played 10 teams not ranked in the top 25 and beat all of them. This year's greatness was smoke and mirrors. I saw some guy on ESPN this week talking about next year's top 5 in the nation and he had UGA # 3. You know what that means? It means the UGA fans are going to be more disappointed next year than they have been for the past 3. The Dawgs may be # 3 on paper with 15 starters returning but Mark Richt and his coaching staff are not capable of winning the SEC, much less finishing 3rd nationally. I'm ready to fire Richt today if we could convince Kirby Smart, Bama defensive coordinator and UGA alum, to be our head coach. But it ain't gonna happen because the UGA Athletic Director and the UGA President have fallen for Richt's smoke and mirrors season hook line and sinker.
- January 11, 2012 at 1:34 PM
- Bama Brother said...
Joe Strauss is the lead baseball writer for the St. Louis Post Dispatch, but football surfaces in his baseball chats, and I imagine we'll see more, with an SEC slant, in the months ahead.
Slip Kid: Joe
That was an anti-climatic BCS title game the other night. Surely Okie State with their high powered offense could have dented the end zone at least once against the Tide. Maybe even given them more of a battle then the vaunted Tigers did, what say you?
Joe Strauss: I say two offenses that looked pedestrian against one another Monday would have put up a pinball score against the OK State defense. A two touchdown outcome, at least. To me, Stanford outclassed the Okies. The Cardinal just forgot to win the game. 'Bama-LSU was big boy football. LSU's defense played very well also. However, Bama's dominance deprived the game of electricity.
- January 14, 2012 at 12:34 AM


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Just thinking about this dessert makes my mouth water…
¾ cup margarine
1 cup butterscotch chips
1-1/2 cups flour
2/3 cup brown sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 cups miniature marshmallows
2 cups semisweet chocolate chips
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 15 x 10-inch baking pan. Melt together margarine and butterscotch chips and stir until smooth. Cool. In a mixing bowl or stand mixer, stir together the flour, brown sugar and baking powder. Beat in eggs, vanilla and melted margarine and butterscotch chips. Mix well. Fold in marshmallows and chocolate chips. Spread in prepared pan. Bake for about 20 minutes. Cool on wire rack and cut into bars.


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A new Facebook scam is rapidly spreading on Facebook where users are sharing a video on their timeline with the message "OMG. this is really gross GlRL HAS A SPlDER LlVlNG lNSlDE OF HER SKlN".
The following update is written in all capital letters and has replaced the word "I" with an "L". The video also warns users that it has Mature Content. However, don't fall for it, since it is nothing but Facebook Spam. The scam is similar to earlier scams like the OMFG: A Girl Raped by Her Teacher in the Classroom and Brother Rapes and Kills His Sister scam.
It tries to generate curiosity in users and then redirects them to a site where they are asked to fill out surveys before they can watch the video. As a user, you might fill out the survey and make money for the scammer, but there will be no video to view in the end.
It is recommended that you DO NOT click on such links or scam messages on Facebook. If you come across this scam message, please delete/remove the scam from your Facebook news feed immediately. Alternately, you can report the scam to Facebook Security.
Here is an article about Avoiding Facebook Likejacking and Clickjacking scams. We have also compiled a list of Most Actively Spreading Scams on Facebook on Facebook for you to look through and avoid. You might also want to use a security application for protecting you from Facebook scams. As a precautionary measure, always check which applications you use and remove unwanted or suspicious ones. If you aren't sure how to do it, you can always check our guide on removing apps from Facebook.


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asarva necesitaba un nuevo diseño de otro y lanzó un concurso de diseño en 99designs.
Un ganador ha sido elegido entre 35 diseños de 16 diseñadores freelance.
We are making an email program that works on a smartphone. We are looking for design ideas for key screen shots. Top 2 designs win prize, and opportunity to design full UI.
Accepted File Formats:
Standard Web Formats (.jpg, .gif or .png)
We have complete wireframes for an email UI on a custom mobile device and are looking for design concepts focusing on the following categories: icons (e.g., sent, received, network signal indicator, battery charge indicator), window objects (menu, information bar across top of screen, data entry fields, buttons), text format (font, color, spacing), and color schemes (include bright green as one palette option).
Unlike many mobile applications, this is not to be deployed on a smartphone OS like Windows or Symbian. Assume we have total control over the look of the UI -- no soft key buttons, no file structure menu on top, nothing.
Wireframes at this link
The wireframes show all the content that needs to be on each screen.
Action screens would include: menus, submenus, pop-up window alerts, folder message lists.
Pictograms/icons should inlcude: network, battery, sending (email) / working, arrows, scrolling
See attached PDF document for wireframes
Display details: color, backlit, 32K colors, 320 x 240 pixels, about 1.25 inches by 2.5 inches
$600 -- First place prize
$400 -- Second place prize
or $1000 winner take all for really great design
Designs we like include: flickr, tivo UI, pandora, iphon.
Have questions? Email John using the address mckenna at txtbl dot com


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Welcome to Decco
Serving three distinct markets, high street retailers, garden centres and building and engineering companies we operate from thirteen strategic locations around the country.
We operate a highly decentralised business philosophy that gives our local managers the responsibility for making all of the important decisions relating to their business. Our regional presence and our management style allows us to build meaningful local relationships with both customers and suppliers.
Click here to learn more about our Home and Garden division or here for our Construction and Industrial Supplies division.


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Georgia offers mobile app for auto accidents
ATLANTA – The Georgia Insurance Commission is offering a new free app for to help remove the guesswork after an automobile accident.
Created by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, the app is designed to give smartphone users the basic steps of information sharing after an accident.
"The last thing you're probably thinking about following a car accident is protecting your privacy," said Insurance Commissioner Ralph Hudgens. "Understanding what information to share, and with whom, will help keep you safe after an accident and decrease some of the challenges of filing a claim later on. The WreckCheck app will take the guess work out of what information to give following a car accident."
Last year, a survey showed motorists were unsure about auto accident best practices, such as when to call the police or what personal information to exchange with the other driver after an accident.
Consumers generally need only share their names and correct vehicle insurance information, which should include the phone numbers of insurance providers. Sharing additional personal information, such as driver's license numbers and home addresses, puts consumers, their property and their safety at risk.
The most common misperceptions and associated risks were:
- Nearly 40 percent of respondents felt they should share their driver's licenses; one in six would allow the other driver to photograph their licenses as a convenient way to exchange information. The risk, however, is that many retailers accept driver's license information as a common way to verify identity over the phone.
- Twenty-five percent of consumers would share their home addresses. Unfortunately, sharing this information gives identity thieves the physical location of one's mail or garbage, which often is where they look for personal or financial information about their victims. It also means they know where their victim lives, putting his or her personal safety in jeopardy.
- Almost 30 percent of drivers think they are required to share their personal phone numbers. In fact, sharing personal phone numbers is not necessary.
- Close to 20 percent of people believe the only reason to call the police after an accident is if someone is injured. However, filing a police report can help facilitate the insurance claims process.
The new WreckCheck mobile application outlines what to do immediately following an auto accident and takes users through a step-by-step process to create their own accident report. It also provides tips for staying calm, safe and smart on the road, and makes it easy to capture photos and document the necessary information to file an insurance claim.
Additionally, the app lets users email a completed accident report directly to themselves and their insurance agents. The app is free and available for both iPhone® and Android® smartphone users.
Consumers with questions about insurance can call the Department's Consumer Services hotline toll-free at 800-656-2298 or reach them online at oci.ga.gov.
Copyright 2013 by News4Jax.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


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We're passionate about North America's national parks, a passion shared with guests on our national park journeys. When you experience the parks firsthand... sunrise over the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone in winter, nature's best in Banff, the awe and wonder known as Yosemite... a powerful emotional connection is made. And the memory of who you explored that national park with will stay with you forever. America's National Park Service turned 100 in 2016, and in 2017 we're celebrating with Parks Canada the 150th anniversary of the Canadian confederation – we're proud to call them both travel partners. Discover what's different about exploring North America's national parks with Tauck... we look forward to having you join us!
When you travel inside the national parks, there's a difference with Tauck. Enjoy experience and access you just can't get on your own, with accommodations at lodges and hotels inside the park. Tauck makes it easy – and Tauck does it all for you, handling every detail so you totally immerse in the national parks, sunrise to sunset.
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It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
What is the status of the forum currently? Are new registrations still banned?
As soon as I opened it up again there was spam. That's with captchas, email verification (they're literally verifying then spamming...), all social logins disabled, and the spam plugins enabled and configured. We really need a replacement for Vanilla Forums at this point that can import the old content over...
Manually approving applicants would be okay, but Vanilla Forums just sucks for managing them, and we're at 17626 applicants at this point. That's just crazy!
17626 applicants! Yikes. It's a shame because I think active forums help enliven projects. I wonder how other Vanilla sites do it...
I'm willing to help with this; just not sure the best way to do so. (Willing to help with other things, too -- do you have a list of things you're looking for help with?)
I'm not sure, but it's definitely a lost cause sorting all those applicants. I've read everything I could find on Vanilla Forums and spam prevention, so I'm not sure there's much left to try there. I'm open to suggestions for a replacement for the forum! ;)
Other than that, I'm just updating all the docs and then getting the new website up. The new site is just on my laptop for now, but if you want to see where the documentation is so far, you can clone it into an Elefant site via
git clone https://github.com/jbroadway/elefant-docs.git apps/docs then visit
/docs. I haven't thought much past those things just yet, but I'll keep you posted.
One forum I'm active on uses MyBB. It seems fine. It does get some spam. I (very) occasionally participate at a couple of vBulletin forums -- they seem fine, too, but vBulletin is not free.
Here's a discussion of free forum packages at Low End Talk: http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/16889/which-is-the-best-free-forum-software LET is also a Vanilla forum, but I think they've had some trouble with it.
I'm not sure how many forums have importers for Vanilla.
I also found a couple of spambot stoppers for Vanilla, but maybe you're already using them: http://vanillaforums.org/addon/botstop-plugin and http://vanillaforums.org/addon/registrationrestrictlogger-plugin
A comment on the second one says, "Used in conjunction with BotStop, it has so far blocked all spam attempts."
I think I'll look at MyBB, FluxBB and SMF more closely. I'm sure I could whip up an importer if need be. It's the user accounts that could be trickier to move over, but I guess I could just create new accounts for all active users and email everyone with their initial info, that way we keep our post histories as members.
One of my first projects after I went solo used punbb, which was later forked into fluxbb. It seemed clean and well-coded at the time (2003-2004).
What about not moving people over? Just let active users create new accounts in the new forum. Leave the vanilla forum online, archived, but not active.
That'd be pretty fast and easy to implement and might get the new forum up and running a little quicker than otherwise.
I may do something like that soon. Just realized I had no message for new visitors so I added that quickly. Need more hours in the day! Small but unexpected things keep popping up and throwing me off track... :P
I understand completely. I'm still interested in helping any way that would be useful, although time is short for me, too, right now.
That chat app requires write access to github, which is a little disturbing. I can't imagine too many people signing up for it.
Seems this is an issue with Github permissions that there isn't a good workaround for: http://blog.gitter.im/the-write-stuff/
Is there any other way people could get in touch with you?
My email address is listed on my github profile, although I wanted to discourage new users from just emailing me since that can be a slippery slope ;)
Well, requiring github write permissions will certainly rule out the spammers!
I didn't actually look at the permissions as closely as I usually do. Usually I'm fairly cautious and notice things like that.
It seems like Gitter is aiming to be *the* chat tool for Github projects, so I thought this would be a good test trial . I tried running an IRC channel for a while, but my time online is fairly inconsistent so there were always large chunks of time when I wasn't around. This will probably suffer from the same issue, but thought it was worth trying out.
I guess it depends what the membership for the forum is going to be composed of. Gitter might be good for developers, but it might scare away people that are just trying to use elefant to build a site.
I guess I looked at the github integration as an easy solution since us developers tend to be github users already. Perhaps something like this might work better?
It seems like chat could be a good secondary form of support on an ongoing basis, in addition to a forum fix, so it would be good to find one that fits us well. I suppose reopening an IRC channel is also an option, and there is an existing page on the site setup for quick access to it (just not linked to from anywhere):
What do you think?
They all seem like decent options, but it's all pretty new to me, so my opinion is fairly uninformed. (I didn't have a github account until I started using elefant.) I guess I'm thinking of other noobs like me that are used to forums, email, and that's about it. ;) But that may not be elefant's target audience, and it will hopefully be somewhat moot once the new forum is in place. Or would glassboard, gitter, and/or irc be the replacement for vanilla?
I don't think these would replace a forum (and I definitely need to get on migrating that *soon*). Here's a quick assessment of our chat options:
May be best not to invest too much into this and just get the forum moved to something new. I think I'll leave Gitter as the choice for the time being, and worry about the forum instead :)
Sounds like a good plan, although glassboard seems like a good option for now, too.
Don't think you should rule out VBulletin. It is solid, well-supported, and comes with a full range of import options. It is relatively inexpensive for what you get, and it is extrememly configurable. We have VBulletin forums with over 20,000 users that have been running fine for more than a decade. I'd certainly chip in some dollars towards a licence.
I've cleaned up some stuff in the database. Might tackle the user table tomorrow.
Wokkie, do you mean that you're working on the vanilla database for this site?


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Two data points and a question.
Point one: Daniel Ellsberg yesterday in the Washington Post, in a piece on the Snowden case, referred to what might, surprisingly, be called the more easygoing legal climate of 1971, when he gave the Pentagon papers to the New York Times, the Washington Post and 17 other newspapers. For 13 days, while he distributed copies, he was in hiding, the last few as "a fugitive from justice." He surrendered himself in Boston and was released the same day on personal-recognizance bond. Later, as charges against him mounted, his bond was increased to $50,000. But for the next two years, under indictment and awaiting trial, he was able to go wherever he liked. "I was free to speak to the media and at rallies and public lectures." That isn't the kind of treatment Edward Snowden would receive, he said, or Bradley Manning has received.
Ellsberg misses that "different America": "There is no chance that experience could be reproduced today, let alone that a trial could be terminated by the revelation of White House actions against a defendant that were clearly criminal."
Ellsberg didn't go into the criminal actions taken against him. The domestic side of Richard Nixon's White House, from policy to politics, had the aspects of a kind of malevolent screwball comedy. In August 1971, aides to Nixon discussed a covert operation to get damaging information on Ellsberg from his psychiatrist. The following month they burgled the office of Lewis Fielding. They didn't find anything.
Ellsberg went on trial in early 1973, charged with theft of classified documents, conspiracy, and other charges related to espionage. During the trial the break-in of Dr. Fielding's office was revealed. So was evidence that Ellsberg had been wiretapped without a court order. His defense team, learning all this for the first time, was incensed, and the judge himself either felt or imitated umbrage. The government's actions, he said, "offend a sense of justice." The events surrounding the case were "bizarre" and had "incurably infected the prosecution of this case."
He then dismissed all charges against Daniel Ellsberg, whistleblower.
Point two, the other whistleblower case that came to light Sunday. It came from Foreign Policy magazine's online news site, The Cable, which noted that the office of a law firm that represents State Department whistleblower Aurelia Fedenisn had been broken into. Citing the reporting of a local Fox TV affiliate in Dallas, The Cable said the burglars took three computers and broke into a locked metal filing cabinet. Other items of value—silver bars, electronic and video equipment—were left untouched. KDFW aired video footage from a security camera showing two people, a man and a woman, entering the office building in which the law firm, Schulman & Mathias, is located.
Cary Schulman, Fedenisn's lawyer, told The Cable: "It's a crazy, strange and suspicious situation." He said he thinks whoever broke in was "somebody looking for information and not money." His most "high-profile case" is Fedenisn's, and he couldn't think of "any other case where someone would go to these threat lengths to get our information."
So what did whitleblower Aurelia Fedenisn blow the whistle on?
She is a former investigator in the Inspector General's office in the State Department. Agents for the department had been working on investigations that uncovered serious and criminal wrongdoing. Their work, they said, was subject to influence and manipulation by higher-ups at the department. Agents told the IG's office they were told to stop investigating a U.S. ambassador in a sensitive post who solicited prostitutes in a public park. Fedenisn, a 26 year veteran at State, went public. John Miller of CBS News broke the story on June 11.
Schulman says that since Fedenisn blew the whistle, she has been subject to attempts at intimidation. "They had law-enforcement officers camp out in front of her house, harass her children, and attempt to incriminate herself," he said.
After the Miller story, State Department spokesman Jen Psaki denied the department was doing anything wrong.
Tuesday, in a telephone interview, Schulman told me the break-in was "odd—curious." Adding to the strangeness, the burglars seem to have come not once but three separate times over the weekend of June 28-30. That's "high risk behavior for a burglar," he said. "I have never seen a commercial burglary where they come back multiple times."
The burglars took three Apple computers, forced open a locked metal file cabinet, and took one credit card, leaving others behind.
The burglary has been reported to local police and the FBI.
Maybe it was just a third-rate if highly original burglary. Maybe it was related somehow to another case, though Schulman says he can't think what that case might be.
Still, the Nixon-era whistleblower whose psychiatrist's office was broken into has some tough words, in an op-ed piece, for the current administration—just as word comes…


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The Philadelphia Committee on City Policy (PCCP) is a long standing civic affairs organization with roots dating back to 1905, that holds monthly luncheon discussion meetings with speakers focusing on current issues and public policy facing the city and region. Featured speakers come from all aspects of city and regional government, non-profits, private sector and other public interest groups.
Timely topics affecting the city and region are presented by experts in the field with an opportunity to question and discuss the topic at hand with the speaker in a very up close and unique setting.
PCCP 's mission is to "keep our members and other interested parties informed on matters involving city and regional public policy, serve as a bridge between government , non-profits and the private sector, and be a catalyst for sound public discussion".
Our season begins in September of each year through the following May, and unless otherwise notified we meet on the 3rd Thursday of the month with meetings held at the Racquet Club, 215 South 16th Street, Philadelphia at 12 noon. A buffet lunch is provided and membership entitles you to a discount.


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Working with Chase Paymentech
Chase Paymentech® is an automated credit card payment gateway that integrates with your existing Quick Shopping Cart® account, allowing you to accept credit card payments through your storefront.
For more information, see Using Chase Paymentech.
Note: You must have an SSL certificate attached to your account to use this payment gateway and accept credit cards online. For information on obtaining an SSL certificate, see Requesting Your SSL Certificate.
To use Chase Paymentech, you need a Chase account. Connect your Quick Shopping Cart account to your Chase account, and you are ready to accept credit card payments.
To Connect Your Quick Shopping Cart Account to Your Chase Paymentech Account
- Log in to your Account Manager.
- Click Quick Shopping Cart.
- In the Quick Shopping Cart Account list, click Manage next to the Quick Shopping Cart account you want to use.
- From the Set Up menu, in the Operations section, select Payment Options.
- Click Set Up in the Credit Card section.
- Select Chase Payment Gateway.
Note: You can have only one payment gateway enabled at a time.
- Enter your Merchant Account Number.
- On the Advanced Settings tab, select the credit cards that you accept. Only select credit cards that you have agreed to accept through your merchant bank. Otherwise, customers can enter credit cards that your merchant does not accept.
- Click Save.
Note: If you experience difficulty verifying your Chase account, contact the Chase 24-Hour Gateway Support Help Desk: 1-866-645-1314. You will need to provide Chase with the origination IP subnet address: 188.8.131.52..


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Will the Arab Spring end in an Islamist-dominated, backward-looking, grey winter? Despite the Islamists' recent successes in the first free elections in the Arab world, Qantara.de's Loay Mudhoon feels that this is unlikely to be the case
Almost a year after the start of the Arab Spring, have the results of the first truly free elections in Egypt destroyed the new Arab democracy movements' dream of freedom, the rule of law and a life of dignity?
One might feel that they have, at least since the surprising success of the radical Islamist Salafists in the first round of parliamentary elections in Egypt. But that would be a premature and overly simplistic conclusion to draw, especially in view of the unclear political situation in post-revolutionary Arab nations.
It is true that the ultra-conservative Salafists' understanding of Islam in Egypt is without doubt too narrow-minded to allow for constructive participation in a democratic political process. However, unlike the success of the politically inexperienced Salafists, the election victory of the Muslim Brotherhood's "Freedom and Justice" party was to be expected. This was also the case with the victory of the Justice and Development Party (PJD) in Morocco and the Ennahda movement in Tunisia.
Loay Mudhoon puts the success of the Islamists in the first round of elections in Egypt down to the fact that they are well rooted in society, well known and considered not to be corrupt
Islamists played to their strengths
These movements are mainstream parties which are deeply rooted in the population thanks to their network of mosques, kindergartens and other charitable institutions. They are also well-organized and are not considered corrupt.
During the short campaign period, the Islamists were able to deflect attention away from the actual socio-economic problems by focussing on their populist discourse. Questions such as "who are we?" were as fiercely debated before the elections as if Arab societies were facing a hostile takeover! That explains why these movements were able to mobilize their supporters better than the newly formed liberal and civil youth parties, which were far less active during the campaign.
But panic or even hysteria are out of place in this historic situation. After all, none of the Islamist election winners in any Arab country will be able to determine the rules of the democracies to be established on their own.
Adapt and survive
According to Loay Mudhoon, Islamists will have to "practice the art of painful compromise" in order to develop the ability to solve problems
In Tunisia, Ennahda has to enter a coalition with other secular parties. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood will have to clearly distance itself from the Stone Age-Salafists if it wants to show itself to be a credible, reliable force for change and avoid confrontation with both the revolutionary movement and the military council.
More importantly, experience shows that democracy has to include major societal movements in the political system. There's no way around it. Only then do these fundamentalist oppositional forces learn what it really means to assume political responsibility. They have to practice the art of painful compromise and only then can they develop the ability to solve problems. In short: the normative power of reality inevitably makes them more pragmatic.
This means that the Arab neo-Islamists now have to decide: either they adapt to their changed environment or they continue to cling to their obsolete ideological concepts. Should they choose the second option, they will certainly fail to rise to the major challenges of the day, most notably the development of functioning institutions and the stimulation of the economy.
Loay Mudhoon
© Deutsche Welle 2011
Editor: Aingeal Flanagan/Qantara.de
Source Qantara de


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Dylan O'Brien, the star of "The Maze Runner" franchise, was injured badly on set, E! News confirms.
The 24-year-old actor, who also appears on "Teen Wolf," was in an accident while filming a scene for the forthcoming installment of the post-apocalyptic film series.
"Dylan O'Brien was injured yesterday while filming 'Maze Runner: The Death Cure' in Vancouver, Canada," a spokesperson for 20th Century Fox said in a statement. "He was immediately transferred to a local hospital for observation and treatment. Production on the film will be shut down while he recovers. Our thoughts go out to Dylan for a full and speedy recovery."
U.S. & World
O'Brien apparently fell off the back of a set that was supposed to look like the back of a train and fractured either his cheekbone or orbital socket, according to a Deadline report.
Full details of his injuries were not immediately made available.


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Hi I am writing a java program with a GUI.
I have wrote a program in objective C using Xcode and the view pane/ click and drag for buttons was VERY helpful.
I normally use eclipse for Java, does eclipse have a similar WISIWYG style feature or can I use Xcode for JAva?


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... to the LitWorks.com website, which provides literature and language resources to students worldwide working towards external examinations – and to their teachers.
What students?
Grades 11-13
Sixth Form
Further Education College
What examinations?
International Baccalaureate
US Advanced Placement
UK GCE Advanced Level
What resources?
- Are you studying or teaching Shakespeare's Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet or King Lear?
- Is Jane Austen's Persuasion or Chaucer's Canterbury Tales on your exam texts list?
- Is close textual analysis (of poetry, prose and non-literary writing) an important part of your English course?
These downloadable books are designed to help you...
Click on any of the book covers alongside to find out more.
Five of the study guides have been fully and independently reviewed by the US College Board. If you would like to read the reviews, click here to reach the AP Central website. Go to the green button AP COURSES AND EXAMS, then to Teachers' Resources, and put Wordsmith in the Search box.
New Resources
We have selected a variety of literature texts commonly studied in Grade 9 upwards, and produced for them a series of study tasks based on actual classroom work as well as on past IB, AP and A level assessments.
'These prompts are a terrific tool for generating class discussions, creating short answer exams, or longer essay assignments. I have purchased a number of them and am impressed with each one.'
From our Commendations section
The Prompts are not book-length study commentaries like The WordSmith Guides. Rather, they are outline resources, consisting of a range of questions and assignments designed to take students into the heart of each chapter of a novel (or each scene of a play, or each poem in a collection) as they have finished reading it. Together they help build up an overview of each of the five SCASI aspects of the whole piece of writing (Setting, Character, Action, Style and Ideas - the fundamental structure of The WordSmith Guides themselves).
Prompts are available for works by the following authors (and we are steadily adding more authors and texts to the list):
For more details, click on the WordSmith Prompts book cover to the right.


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Steve linked to Michael Ward's Create Your Own Thomas Friedman Column a while back. Ward's template tended to demonstrate the formulaic nature of Friedman's columns, but it required a little work on the part of the reader to select the variations on Friedman's themes. Ward's work inspired Brian Mayer to create the Thomas Friedman Op Ed Generator. If you want to reduce your effort to one click, check out the Generator. Ward and Mayer helpfully explain: "Because this is what his writing actually looks like."
"Obama's moment" is a timely column attributed to the Generator. It begins: "An interesting thought occurred to me today—what if small business owners sat down with ordinary people like you and me and ironed out some real solutions to our healthcare crisis?" Hey, it only hurts when I laugh.
JOHN adds: OMG! This is hilarious! I generated a column titled "Bangladesh Is Japan," which reads uncannily like a Friedman column. And it doesn't make any sense, either, so it's pure Friedman. Try it!


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Sedan (SHS) Class of 1950 Alumni List
Help us Update the Sedan 1950 Class List by adding any names missing from the list below:
Registered Alumni
1950 Class List
Know Sedan Class of 1950 graduates that are NOT on this List? Help us Update the 1950 Class List by adding missing names.
The top movie in theaters during 1950 was Cinderella, grossing over $85,000,000 in its lifetime. The most popular television series for 1950 was The Texaco Star Theater
Reunions and Sedan High School News
More 1950 alumni from Sedan HS have posted profiles on Classmates.com®. Click here to register for free at Classmates.com® and view other 1950 alumni.
The Sedan High class of '50 alumni are listed below. These are former students from Sedan High in Sedan, KS who graduated in 1950. Alumni listings below have either been searched for or they registered as members of this directory.
You can also find out what other graduates are doing now, share memories with other alumn, upload pictures from Sedan High and find other alumni.