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After a long night of work on Nov. 30, 2000, Chris Sehman sat in his car in the parking lot of his new and still unnamed bar looking at a pile of bills and on the verge of bankruptcy.
Editor's note: This is the 10th in a series of stories profiling local business people who have captured the American Dream and whose success extends well beyond Northwest Florida.
OKALOOSA ISLAND — After a long night of work on Nov. 30, 2000, Chris Sehman sat in his car in the parking lot of his new and still unnamed bar looking at a pile of bills and on the verge of bankruptcy.
His first bar, Woody's Local Safe Sex Bar in Destin, had closed in January. Between that, his new bar, college loans and medical bills, he was looking at $250,000 of debt. That night ended up becoming one of the defining moments of his life.
"As I was driving home, I just remember the phrase, saying to myself 'I feel like I've been to hell and back.' " Sehman said.
He knew instantly that he found the name for his bar that he had been looking for. The next morning when he got to work and the phone rang, he answered "Helen Back."
Within six months, he was sitting in his car again after closing for the night, but this time he had paid off all of his student loans and credit card bills. In the following days, he took care of the rest of his debt.
In the years since, Helen Back Café has become an institution for the Northwest Florida nightlife.
With the success of the Okaloosa Island location, Sehman has been able to open Helen Backs in Crestview, Navarre, Pensacola and even at Northwest Florida Regional Airport. More locations are on the way.
His staff has grown from just himself when he started to 259 employees, and that number will grow as summer approaches.
Although still a regional business, Helen Back's reach has gone national and its success encapsulates the American Dream.
In 2009, Helen Back was named one of the best bars in America by Esquire Magazine, and earlier this year Sehman was presented the Zachary and Elizabeth Fisher Distinguished Civilian Humanitarian Award at the Pentagon for his fundraising efforts for the military.
"I never would have imagined the sales figures that this store does," Sehman said. "I never would have ever thought I'd come up with something that would have multiple stores, that I'd have a conversation about a franchise. I never would have thought I'd have over 200 employees.
"I would have never thought it would have grown into what it's become," he added.
First ventures
Sehman has almost always been something of an entrepreneur.
He grew up in Maryland and started is first business, a lawn care business, when he was 12 years old. That year, he purchased a riding lawnmower and had 14 customers.
Sehman was introduced to the restaurant business the following year when he washed dishes for a steak restaurant owned by a friend of his father. That didn't last long.
"Two days later I figured out how much money the bus boys were making and I'm like, 'I'm busing tables,' " he said. "I was making $300 to $400 a week as a bus boy as a sophomore in high school. Of course I wasn't saving any of it. I blew every dime of it."
After college, Sehman was managing a restaurant and had a choice between an internship at a railroad company or an offer to manage an industrial laundry company. Instead, he went to Vail, Colo., with $400 in his pocket and his best friend to learn how to ski.
When the left Vail, he still had the $400 and the two decided to go Jazz Fest in New Orleans. After one night in the Big Easy, Sehman said he woke up hung over, sunburned on one side of his face and all of his money was gone.
They decided to drive to Niceville where Sehman's uncle lived to take showers and hopefully borrow enough money to drive back home to Virginia Beach.
Sehman loved it. He put in some applications and went to some of the bars that night. By the next morning he knew he was staying in Okaloosa County.
Sehman started working as the day bartender at Flamingo Cafe in June 1992, his first job bartending. While there he started planning to open his own bar, one that would cater to locals and where people could go to eat a good cheeseburger, drink ice-cold beer and relax and watch "Sportscenter" or listen to music.
He talked one of his customers from Flamingo's into investing in the bar. The customer wrote him a check for $75,000 and helped him secure a loan for another $60,000 to buy a liquor license. At the age of 23, Sehman opened Woody's on March 5, 1993.
"There should be a federal law that no male should own a bar at 23," Sehman said. "I don't remember being 24 at all. I have zero memories of being 24."
Sehman said every night was party, he would drink and then wake up the next morning and mop the floor at Woody's.
Early days in hell
Woody's was successful enough to stay open for seven years, but it never took off the way that Helen Back has. Sehman finally closed Woody's in January 2000, about 10 months before he opened Helen Back.
"We muddled through Woody's for seven years," Sehman said. "I didn't make any money. I call that my post-graduate degree. I got out of under-grad school, and seven years of owning your own bar and you'll figure out how (to run a business).
"I didn't realize about maintaining my inventory, managing my payroll, how to market, and I wasted a lot of money on advertising. On insurance I wasted a lot of money," he added. "And now you figure these things out and compare to the industry averages. Am I doing right? Am I doing wrong? … You learn, so when I got over here and did this I had a better understanding of how I needed to make it happen."
Sehman temporarily reopened Woody's later in 2000 on Okaloosa Island where Sammy's on the Island is now. One of his regular customers heard about another Okaloosa Island bar that was struggling, the Island Pit & Pub, and suggested Sehman open a second bar there.
Sehman worked out a deal with the former owner of the Island Pit & Pub on a cocktail napkin that he still has that had him taking over the lease there.
The early years of Helen Back were quite different than today.
The bar was about half the size and pizza, a staple of the business now, was nowhere on the menu. In its place was a full menu of what Sehman called "stick to your ribs" food, such as meatloaf and open-faced sandwiches.
However, it became too difficult to keep up with the food, especially when his cooks would disappear on Friday nights after they got paid. Ultimately, Sehman decided he didn't need to sell food at Helen Back, and about a year after he opened he closed the kitchen.
About a year later, Sehman's wife Yente Sehman was at Helen Back with some of her girlfriends and they wanted something to eat. They ended up going to the Waffle House, but she tried to talk Sehman into reopening his kitchen and recommended he make pizzas.
John Seeling, the owner of the original Fat Daddy's Pizza, had given Sehman his pizza recipe because he was moving to Cincinnati. Sehman tweaked the recipe and offered his pizza at Woody's, but it was overshadowed and greatly outsold by the quesadillas, grilled chicken fingers and burgers.
Sehman brought over his old pizza equipment from Woody's and started making pies on a Friday night. Initially, he made 10 and gave them away to see what the feedback would be.
Everyone loved them.
He doubled the order and did it again the next night, and the reception was the same. That Monday, Helen Back started selling pizzas
"That's when it blew up," Sehman said.
Helen Back now sells more than 100,000 pizzas a year at its five locations. That's on top of the roughly 10,000 Sehman gives away to the military each year for various fundraisers and its Military Mondays, where military members get free pizza.
One thing that separates a Helen Back pizza from other pies is their crust, which is brushed with a garlic and oil mixture and then sprinkled with kosher salt.
Sehman said a survey was conducted by Pizza Magazine that showed 50 percent of Americans eat their crust. At Helen Back, he said 95 percent of the people eat the crust.
The future in hell
After pizza was introduced, Helen Back's success really started to take off.
The Okaloosa Island location has doubled in size and the other locations came onboard. Sehman also owns the Shoal River Lanes Bowling Alley and the Stinky's Fish Camp in Navarre.
Four years ago, Sehman spent money to franchise the Helen Back concept. So far, he has been the whole or part owner of all Helen Back Cafes.
Interest from people wanting to buy a Helen Back franchise slowed with the recession but has started to pick back up. Sehman has been in talks with someone who wants to purchase a Helen Back franchise store for Nine Mile Road in north Pensacola.
Sehman has had conversations about placing Helen Backs in New Orleans, Orlando and as far away as North Carolina. An Atlanta businessman is interested in putting a Helen Back franchise there, and Sehman was planning to look at three locations with him while he was in the city this weekend.
"My crowd is military, bar and restaurant crowd and college kids," Sehman said. "That's the sports bar crowd. Good beer on tap, pretty good selection of liquor, live music and from what I understand the pizza's pretty good. It seems to work.
"That's kind of my formula as I go into a different town," he added. "It's probably not as etched in stone as putting in a Fridays or a franchise of that nature where they need a true demographics, the number of people at an intersection and all that. I don't need that. If I get the sense that the crowd is there, even if there's a pizza joint down the road, they're different than mine."
Sehman has considered putting a Helen Back in Niceville, and would like put one in Destin. He has also had discussions about someone opening a Helen Back franchise in South Walton.
"I think we live in the absolute best community in the country," Sehman said. "There's no better blend of the prettiest beach and tourism and the safest community in the world surrounded by four or five phenomenal military bases from Pensacola to Panama City. It's a great group of people, and when you put all of that together and I'm giving away pizza and pouring shots, I like it that I've become an epicenter of trying to bring them together. Tourists, locals, and not just locals but the military."
Contact Daily News Business Editor Dusty Ricketts at 850-315-4448 or firstname.lastname@example.com. Follow him on Twitter @DustyRnwfdn.


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subset: commoncrawl


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Bob Schieffer all but broke out the death certificate for Mitt Romney's campaign on Tuesday's CBS Evening News and Wednesday's CBS This Morning, emphasizing the negative impact of the secretly-recorded videos released by the left-wing magazine Mother Jones: "I just can't think of anything that he could have said that could have hurt his cause more than what he said."
Schieffer claimed that "this was just an extraordinary moment," and later added that "it would seem to confirm the perception that a lot of people have, and it seems to confirm the image that the Obama campaign has been pushing...that he is out of touch, that...he doesn't have to deal with the kind of problems that other people do...I think it's a very serious thing here."
CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley brought on the Face the Nation host for just over a minute. The veteran journalist wasted little time in playing up its impact, and cited two Republican-leaning pundits to support his point:
SCHIEFFER: Scott, I'll tell you, for a candidate, who has fought the perception from the very beginning he's just a rich guy, who doesn't understand the average folks, I cannot imagine what he could have said that would have hurt his cause more. As the very Republican Bill Kristol, editor of the very Republican Weekly Standard, and conservative columnist David Brooks have pointed out today, the 47 percent of the people who pay no federal income tax are not all moochers - not by a long shot. Many are traditional Republican supporters: old people living on Social Security; retired members of the military; as well as poor families who, once they are docked for payroll, state, and local taxes, just don't make enough money to owe federal taxes.
When Romney says he can't worry about these people, because he'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility for their lives, you have to wonder if he actually knew who he was talking to. Maybe he didn't mean it the way it sounded, but whatever he meant, writing off half the electorate is just not smart politics.
Over twelve hours later, Schieffer gave extended versions of the same points to anchors Charlie Rose and Norah O'Donnell on CBS This Morning. O'Donnell assisted her colleague by spotlighting Karl Rove's reaction to the issue:
SCHIEFFER: ...I tell you, this is – this was just an extraordinary moment. I mean, you know, if there was one thing that Mitt Romney has been fighting from the very beginning, Charlie, it was that he's this rich guy who's, sort of, out of touch with the rest of America. I mean, we went through the thing - the car elevators in his vacation home; he said before, I'm not worried about the poor.
I just can't think of anything that he could have said that could have hurt his cause more than what he said, because it just seemed to confirm that he really hadn't – I mean, I just wonder, did he understand who he was talking about? I mean, when you write off half the electorate and say, well, there's no way I'm going get their vote, and then, you say – you hear him say, you know, these people won't take responsibility for their own lives – I mean, did he understand who he was talking about? Retired people on Social Security, retired military families – a lot of those people were Republican voters and were for him. So, I think he's got a lot of work to do to dig out of this hole, and I don't think he's out of it yet.
NORAH O'DONNELL: You know, Bob, Karl Rove, who is involved in a super PAC that helps fund campaign ads that support Mitt Romney's election – I mean, even he said Americans who don't pay income taxes are part of the GOP coalition. So there – it's not just pundits and columnists. You have strategists, like Karl Rove, who suggested this is a problem. Do you think it changes the dynamic of this race? Is this a turning point, or can Romney recover?
SCHIEFFER: I don't know. I sincerely do not know the answer to that question, but I think Karl Rove is right. You've also noticed Linda McMahon, who's running for the Senate, in a very tight Senate race up in Connecticut – she said, not my view. Scott Brown, who's in that tight Senate race up in Massachusetts – you might have expected this from him. He's the much more liberal Republican since [sic] some of the other candidates out there this year. He said, you know, that was not his view. This is a serious problem. I mean, why – I mean, you – go back to the question. Peggy Noonan, in the Wall Street Journal this morning, says it's an incompetent campaign. That may be a little bit strong, but you have to wonder, what was the thinking behind this? Why would someone say something like this? It takes you back to, you know, why would you – it's just – I can't figure out why anyone would have said this.
ROSE: Well, he seemed not to know whether to double down, on one side, or try to move on, and you find the situation in which even the people that he listens to seem to be concerned about this, and it seems, in this case, to, in a sense, go to the heart, as they say, of a gaffe where it simply confirms what the story that has been – being told by the opposition says.
SCHIEFFER: Well, exactly – I mean, it would seem to confirm the perception that a lot of people have, and it seems to confirm the image that the Obama campaign has been pushing. This is what the Obama people want people to think about Mitt Romney - that he is out of touch, that – you know, he doesn't have to deal with the kind of problems that other people do. And so, this – I think it's a very serious thing here.
This is the second time in less than a week that Schieffer has been caught hyping supposedly positive news for President Obama. Five days earlier, he trumpeted "some of the best polling news that the President has seen in quite a while" on CBS Evening News, even though one of the figures he played up has remained the same since July 2012.


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Power foods do more than satisfy the stomach. While the flavors and textures are enjoyable, these foods boast the added benefits of fighting cancer, heart disease, and osteoporosis -- and they keep you in optimum health for decades to come.
Strawberries rival citrus fruits for vitamin C content, and they're packed with antioxidants, too.
Strawberry Recipes
Strawberry Muffins
Strawberry, Fennel, and Orange Salad
Strawberry Granita
Berry Pizza
Compared to most fruits, avocados have higher concentrations of many B vitamins, as well as beta-carotene, magnesium, and vitamins E and K. These nutrients support and sustain your overall health, not to mention your energy, metabolic functioning, and bones.
Avocado Recipes
Chilled Avocado Soup
Spiced Avocado Sandwich
Avocado, Shrimp, and Endive Salad
Ripe papayas contain nearly a three-day supply of vitamin C and a significant amount of vitamins E and A (the latter generally comes in the form of beta-carotene, which contributes to the oblong fruit's bright color).
Papaya Recipes
Papaya-Berry Yogurt Parfaits
Papaya, Shrimp, and Soba Salad
Golden Papaya and Crab Salad
An elegant member of the aster family, the artichoke is low in calories, a good source of vitamins and minerals, and replete with nutrients that ease digestion and lower cholesterol, among other wellness rewards.
Red peppers supply abundant amounts of beta-carotene, which your body converts to vitamin A -- a nutrient crucial for night vision.
Cherries offer a hearty helping of anthocyanins, the antioxidant responsible for their rich, reddish-purple color. Believed to ease inflammation and prevent chronic illnesses, anthocyanins also block the same enzymes targeted by aspirin.
Cherry Recipes
Bulgur Salad with Cherries
Cherry Compote
Warm Barley Cereal with Dried Cherries
This fragile, peachlike stone fruit contains its fair share of minerals, most notably potassium. An electrolyte, potassium helps regulate blood pressure, maintains muscle function, and converts blood sugar into glycogen, a type of energy that the body stores and uses when needed.
Apricot Recipes
Simple Poached Apricots
Grilled Apricots and Pork Tenderloin
Roasted Apricots with Dulce de Leche
Nutritionally speaking, shiitakes have a lot to offer in the way of fiber and protein. They also contain some iron, as well as a fair dose of potassium and a significant amount of zinc, the latter of which helps maintain the body's immune system and boosts neurological function.
Shiitake Mushroom Recipes
Roasted Shiitakes and Pacific Cod
Shiitake Fried Rice
These tasty spears help fight cardiovascular disease, strengthen bones, and may even boost the libido.
Asparagus Recipes
Asparagus with Shiitakes, Shallots, and Peas
Roasted Asparagus and Eggs
Asparagus and Crab Salad
Spring Barley Risotto
Tomatoes have an abundance of lycopene -- a phytochemical that has the ability to counter oxidative stress and is thought to be largely responsible for its role in fighting cancer and heart disease.
Tomato Recipes
Healthy Tomato Soup
Spicy Tomato Soup
Tomato and Bean Salad with Grilled Tuna
Tomato-Paprika Salad Dressing
Dark chocolate contains a high concentration of stearic acid (a saturated fatty acid with a neutral effect on cholesterol), essential minerals including magnesium, copper, potassium, manganese, and most significant, flavonoids.
Dark Chocolate Recipes
Double Dark-Chocolate and Ginger Biscotti
Spiced Hot Dark Chocolate
The benefits of eating walnuts extend beyond good fat. They provide a concentrated source of disease-fighting antioxidants, including gammatocopherol, a type of vitamin E.
Walnut Recipes
Walnut-Date Muffins
Spiced Walnuts
Goat Cheese, Cranberry, and Walnut Canapes
Paprika Shrimp with Walnuts
Quinoa seeds contain twice the protein of rice, though it's the quality of the protein that stands out. With all nine essential amino acids, including lysine, quinoa is considered a complete protein.
Quinoa Recipes
Quinoa Pudding
Greek-Style Quinoa Burgers
Quinoa Salad with Toasted Almonds
Black Cod with Quinoa and Kiwi Salsa
The big news with broccoli rabe is its cancer-preventing potential. Like all Brassicas, it's a rich source of glucosinolates, which your body converts to cancer-fighting sulforophanes and indoles.
Broccoli Rabe Recipes
Hearty Peasant Soup
Broccoli Rabe Saute with Chicken Sausage
Apples contain an ample dose of fiber (two-thirds of which is in the peel), some potassium, and a modest amount of vitamin C.
Apple Recipes
Apple, Walnut, and Endive Salad
Apple, Leek, and Butternut Squash Gratin
Apple, Date, and Ginger Crisp
Apple-Cranberry Pie
Ginger has been used to treat patients with numerous conditions, including nausea, motion sickness, colds, joint pain, and circulation problems.
Ginger Recipes
Forbidden Rice
Roasted Pepper, Ginger, and Tea Sauce
Ginger Ice Milk
This oblong treat delivers a whopping dose of vitamin C -- more per serving than an orange.
Kiwi Recipes
Kiwi Summer Roll
Black Cod with Quinoa and Kiwi Salsa
Yogurt Cones with Kiwis
For being small, eggs house plenty of nutrition. The yolk contains all the egg's fat (about 5 grams) and cholesterol (about 210 milligrams), but also ample amounts of vitamins B2 and B12. B2, an antioxidant commonly called riboflavin, promotes healthy skin; B12 helps create red blood cells and control homocysteine levels, an indicator of heart disease and stroke.
Egg Recipes
Spinach Soup with Egg Strips
Mexican Potato Omelette
Spinach and Herb Omelet
Swiss Chard Frittata
Few sources offer more vitamin K than spinach does. K is essential for blood clotting and bone health.
Spinach Recipes
Spinach Pesto with Whole-Wheat Pasta
"Creamy" Spinach Curry
"Creamed" Spinach
Spinach Dill Pie
As you might have guessed, grapefruits are full of vitamin C, a major antioxidant that helps fight infection, may shorten the duration of colds, and protects against free radicals.
Grapefruit Recipes
Warm Grapefruit Tea
Glazed Salmon with a Spicy Grapefruit Relish
Scallops with Red Grapefruit


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Minor league baseball team to wear selfie jerseys
KALAMAZOO, Mich. (AP) -- A Michigan minor league baseball team's players will be taking their fans on to the diamond during a game this summer.
Or at least pictures of them.
The Kalamazoo Growlers are asking for fans to take selfies and post them to one of the team's social media accounts.
The Growlers will collect the selfies through April 1, then build a mosaic-style jersey assembled entirely from the photos entered in the promotion.
The jerseys will be worn July 24 when the Growlers take on the Wisconsin Woodchucks on Salute to Selfie Night at Homer Stryker Field.


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Depositional Environments of the Jordan Formation, Winona, MN
This activity was selected for the On the Cutting Edge Reviewed Teaching Collection
This activity has received positive reviews in a peer review process involving five review categories. The five categories included in the process are
- Scientific Accuracy
- Alignment of Learning Goals, Activities, and Assessments
- Pedagogic Effectiveness
- Robustness (usability and dependability of all components)
- Completeness of the ActivitySheet web page
For more information about the peer review process itself, please see http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/review.html.
This page first made public: Aug 24, 2005
Skills and concepts that students must have mastered
How the activity is situated in the course
Content/concepts goals for this activity
- Measure a detailed section and interpret it in terms of grain size, bedding style and other sedimentary structures.
- Correlate two or more sections and interpret lateral variability
Higher order thinking skills goals for this activity
Other skills goals for this activity
Description of the activity/assignment
This project involves a field trip to the Jordan Formation in Winona, MN. Student teams are assigned a section of the outcrop from which they are to determine a stratigraphic column. The class then performs a lateral analysis and builds a composite stratigraphic column for the formation. As a final product, the students write up the class's observations about the formation.
- Project Webpages
- Project Summary and Write-up Outline (Acrobat (PDF) 115kB Jul7 05)
- Instructor Notes for Project (Acrobat (PDF) 91kB Jul7 05)
- Outlines and Notes (Acrobat (PDF) 1.1MB Jul7 05) for each class session for this project
Determining whether students have met the goals
Download teaching materials and tips
Other Materials
- Bedforms and Cross Stratification ( 21.7MB Jul7 05): Lecture presentation with embedded movie files']
- A quicktime movie pan of the formation is available but is too large for downloading. A copy can be obtained by contacting the author.
- Pictures of braided stream systems (Acrobat (PDF) 6.9MB Aug24 05)
- Pictures of meandering stream system (Acrobat (PDF) 2.2MB Aug24 05)
Supporting references/URLs
Page of References for students to use (Acrobat (PDF) 43kB Jul7 05)
Other links related to this project:


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You spent hours playing Pitfall on an Intellivision or an Atari 2600 back in the day, imprinting your impressionable brain with a fear of crocodiles that not even delicious Choco-diles snacks can't conquer. Also you love gold. A lot.
You want more Pitfall. It's coming… to the phone you carry in your pocket everyday.
Per MCVUK, a new Actvision studio in Great Britain has been working on a new Pitfall game targeted at smartphones. The article quotes Activision's Martyn Brown as saying:
"The first game we are making is in fact Pitfall, which is 30 years old this year."
"We've been working on Pitfall since earlier in the year when we set up and it has been really good to revisit that and bring it to a modern audience."
Previous latter-day efforts to recapture that first Pitfall's mix of fearful jumping and gold-lust haven't been well-received but hopefully this new release will helop us all remember why we fell in love with platformers — and all video games — in the first place. No pressure, Activision.


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#168 Multitasking in Mac OS X
May 07, 2013
The current version of Mac OS X contains a feature called Mission Control that helps organize apps and windows in different workspaces. But here are some extra shortcuts to help you multitask:
- Command+` (tilde key above Tab): Switch between open windows in an application
- Option+Command+M: Minimize all open windows in an application
- Option+Command+W: Close all open windows in an application
- Command+H: Hide the active application (restore by clicking on Dock icon)
- Option+Command+H: Hide all applications except for the active application
Note: The difference between hiding an application and minimizing it, is that minimizing takes up space in your dock. When you minimize multiple windows, your dock can quickly become cluttered.
For more information on Mission Control, please visit Apple's support article.


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Teacher resources and professional development across the curriculum
Teacher professional development and classroom resources across the curriculum
Observing Student Connections
|Introduction | Hexominos | Sorting Hexominos | Student Work | Problem Reflection #1 | Hexominos Into Cubes | Problem Reflection #2 | Classroom Practice | Observe a Classroom | Your Journal
As we look at the Connections Standard, we will consider several aspects of connections in mathematical learning and teaching. We want students to recognize that mathematical ideas connect and build on one another. Additionally, connecting mathematics to other subject areas as well as to applications in the world outside the classroom is equally important. Mathematics instruction that focuses on the relationships between concepts helps students develop a deeper understanding of those concepts.
We will begin with an introduction to a two-dimensional shape called a hexomino, and then present two examples of upper elementary student work for you to consider. As you observe these problems, think about the range of possible connections: among mathematical topics, to the process standards, and beyond mathematics.
|Teaching Math Home | Grades 3-5 | Connections | Site Map | © |
© Annenberg Foundation 2017. All rights reserved. Legal Policy


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Tal Bergman
Joe Bonamassa
Tal Bergman has toured and recorded with some of the most exciting performers on the music scene, including Billy Idol, Joe Zawinul, Simple Minds, LL Cool J, Rod Stewart, Chaka Khan and Terrence Trent DArby.
His musical versatility spans hard rock, funk, R&B and jazz. He is also the associate producer and drummer on the platinum and Grammy nominated album (7 million world wide) It Had To Be You - The Great American Songbook by Rod Stewart.
As a drummer, Bergman has worked with Herb Alpert, Belinda Carlisle, Peter Certera, Phranc, and MC Solaar to name a few. His film credits as composer include "The Circle" (2005), "Dancing at the Blue Blue Iguana" (2000), "Wedding Bell Blues" (1996), "Kill Me Later" (2001) and "The Untold" (2002).


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The Hague GRAND SLAM | 11 - 16 June 2013
The Hague, the Netherlands, June 7, 2013 – Dutch veterans Richard Schuil and Reinder Nummerdor are all set for a comeback on the FIVB World Tour next week in The Hague. The former European champions were seriously considering ending their careers after losing the bronze medal match at the 2012 London Olympic Games, but changed their mind during the winter.
''In the end we enjoy the game too much'', 40-year-old Schuil said. ''We will see how far we get, maybe we might even play on till the Olympics in Rio. As long as I stay fit, we play.'' Since The Hague is their first event since the Olympics last summer, their expectations are not too high.
While Nummerdor spent most of the winter in Baku, Azerbeijan, where his girlfriend and volleyball player Manon Flier was contracted, Schuil kept fit with new coach Casper Groenhuijzen. ''We have not been training together for long, so we do not expect too much in The Hague. But we hope to really be there at the World Championships in Poland in July.''
Alison and Emanuel
Schuil, who won the Dutch open event in 2009 with Nummerdor, sees world champions Alison Cerutti and Emanuel Rego as one of the favourites for the Grand Slam title in The Hague. ''They showed good form, winning the World Cup Final last week after Alison's injury. But I also think Dalhausser and Rosenthal will do well. I think they are a stronger combination than Dalhausser and Rogers used to be.''
The Americans lead the field in the men's competition. Around 80 men's teams entered The Hague Transavia Grand Slam 2013 presented by Bas van der Goor Foundation. Among the 61 women's teams are World Cup winners Maria Antonelli and Talita Antunes. The Brazilian pair won the open event in The Hague in 2010 and finished second in 2009.
This year they both teamed up with new partners, except for the little reunion at the World Cup Final last week. Antonelli leads the field in The Hague with Agatha Bednarczuk, after finishing second at the Grand Slam in Corrientes, Argentina. Talita won the Shanghai Grand Slam with her new partner Taiana Lima.
Meppelink and Van Gestel
Corrientes champions Madelein Meppelink and Sophie van Gestel have high hopes for the Grand Slam on home soil. ''After winning in Argentina we consider ourselves as one of the favourites'', Van Gestel said. The Hague is their home base and they can count on a lot of support from friends and family. Meppelink: ''We want to show everyone what we are capable of and prove Corrientes was not just good luck.''
Among the other teams that entered the Transavia Grand Slam, are Olympic silver medallists Jennifer Kessy and April Ross from USA and European champions Sanne Keizer and Marleen van Iersel from the Netherlands. Also competing in the men's event are Jake Gibb and Casey Patterson, who won the Shanghai Grand Slam this year, Corrientes gold medallists Janis Smedins and Aleksandrs Samoilovs from Latvia and Olympic champion Julius Brink and his new partner Sebastian Fuchs from Germany.
Third Grand Slam
The Transavia Grand Slam (June 11-16) is the third Grand Slam on the 2013 World Tour calendar after Shanghai and Corrientes. The Hague is hosting a Grand Slam for the first time after Open events in 2009 and 2010 and the European Championships in 2012. The city is one of four venues for the FIVB Beach Volleyball World Championships in 2015. All matches are staged at the beach of Scheveningen.
All Dutch teams will play with mourning bands in memory of record international volleyball player Ingrid Visser. The former Dutch international and her partner Lodewijk Severein were found murdered near the Spanish town of Murcia last month.
FIVB NF Ranking - Women
The Hague Grand Slam Women - Main Draw
The Hague Grand Slam Women - Qualification
The Hague Grand Slam Women - Reserve
??FIVB NF Ranking - Men
The Hague Grand Slam Men - Main Draw
The Hague Grand Slam Men - Qualification
The Hague Grand Slam Men - Reserve
FIVB Beach Volleyball Handbook 2013
16.06.2013 19:24:02
Brazil claims two gold medals in The Hague
The Hague, the Netherlands, June 16, 2013 – Brazil added two more gold and one silver medal to its already impressive honour list this weekend. ... More...
16.06.2013 18:42:00
Brazil's Pedro and Bruno beat Corrientes champions to claim Dutch gold
The Hague, the Netherlands, June 16, 2013 – Brazil's Pedro Solberg and Bruno Oscar Schmidt defeated Corrientes champions Janis Smedins and Aleksandrs ... More...
16.06.2013 17:44:10
Four out of four for Brazil's Talita in The Hague
The Hague, the Netherlands, June 16, 2013 – In an all-Brazilian final Talita Antunes and Taiana Lima claimed their second gold medal this season. The ... More...
16.06.2013 15:05:08
Poland's Fijalek and Prudel take bronze in The Hague
16.06.2013 13:43:55
Holtwick and Semmler claim first German medal in The Hague
15.06.2013 22:54:24
Three Brazilian teams in The Hague Grand Slam finals
15.06.2013 22:03:00
All-Brazilian women's final in The Hague
15.06.2013 21:09:59
Latvia on track for back-to-back gold
15.06.2013 17:18:22
First semifinal ever for Dutch Van der Vlist and Wesselink
15.06.2013 13:00:02
Austrian qualifiers Huber and Seidl reach semifinal
14.06.2013 22:39:47
Brazil well represented in The Hague quarterfinals
14.06.2013 21:46:05
Dreams put on hold for Meppelink and Van Gestel
14.06.2013 17:56:09
Quarterfinal plus a nice bonus for Dutch Van der Vlist and Wesselink
14.06.2013 14:35:51
Swiss team shocks Dalhausser and Rosenthal
14.06.2013 12:35:13
Alison and Emanuel back on track
13.06.2013 21:28:42
Germany and Latvia only pool winners with three straight victories
13.06.2013 19:44:10
Moral boost for Dutch scratch team
13.06.2013 17:48:25
Talita has a special connection with The Hague
13.06.2013 16:42:32
Salgado sisters beat Germany to claim top position in pool C
13.06.2013 11:59:06
Austria's Doppler and Horst upset Brazilian world champions
13.06.2013 10:52:40
Kubala back on the sand after surgery
12.06.2013 21:48:58
No major upsets on first day of main draw in The Hague
12.06.2013 21:36:42
Schuil and Nummerdor lose comeback match
12.06.2013 21:08:22
City court great promotion for The Hague
12.06.2013 20:19:17
Meppelink and Van Gestel shake of the jitters to remain unbeaten in The Hague
12.06.2013 16:48:49
Surprise win for Fuchs and Kaczmarek
12.06.2013 15:42:42
Back to zero again for Smedins and Samoilovs
12.06.2013 12:16:25
Former team mates Agatha and Seixas on opposite sides of the net
11.06.2013 20:23:03
Main draw The Hague Grand Slam completed with qualification teams
11.06.2013 19:12:37
Dutch girls through after marathon match against Kazakhstan
11.06.2013 19:04:46
Honeymoon phase does not stop Canadians from winning
11.06.2013 15:17:58
Van de Goor to continue as The Hague tournament director
11.06.2013 13:20:51
Herrera: Glad to be back
27.05.2013 18:08:23
Meppelink and Van Gestel the team to beat in The Hague
26.03.2013 15:51:29
Van de Goor appointed The Hague Tournament Director


text: Carlos Fernandes is arguably the greatest soccer player to ever step on the field for UMass Boston. The four-year player enjoyed his greatest season as a senior, leading the Beacons to a school-record 13 victories and a first-ever ECAC tournament berth, while earning Third Team All-America status in 1996. Fernandes was named to the All-New England First Team and the Little East Conference took notice as well, naming him the league's unanimous Player of the Year, while selecting him to the Little East Conference First Team. Following a move to the backfield, he was an LEC first teamer as a junior, after finishing fourth among conference scoring leaders as a sweeper, and was honored as an NSCAA/Umbro Division III All-New England Third Team performer as well. The 1999 graduate caught his first glimpse of the spotlight as a sophomore when he was named to the Little East Conference Second Team, following the first of three seasons as team captain. The four-time team Most Valuable Player saw action in more games at UMass Boston than any other soccer player in history with 72 and, following his exemplary playing career, became just the third athlete at UMB to have his uniform number retired. Fernandes, who led the Beacons in scoring three times, still ranks among the all-time scoring leaders with 70 career points and 29 goals to rank third in each category at UMass Boston.


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text:
Hi! My name is Cédric Bozzi, I make websites and iOS apps, and this is my blog about technology (mostly a Twitter archive, really).
Words with Friends HD makes me want to play Scrabble again — nothing very special about it, it just looks good. But there are really negative comments about the iPhone version (yeah, I do know that scaling servers is hard when you do social stuff) and I wonder if the board's squares aren't going to be a little too small for your fingers' comfort.
Game Table is something I really wish I had thought of doing (well, not really, because then I'd be competing with that app and it looks good enough). No artificial intelligence to program, no hurdles, just a bunch of images that you move with your fingers. It looks nice and, if you've got an iPad, why wouldn't you want to carry a multipurpose board game in your bag?
Design Brief is another app for designers that doesn't look so good. (And you should remember that, without a stylus, the iPad just isn't really for designers. Even though designers like to develop for iPhone OS.)
Yellow Pages makes a half-assed attempt at a physical metaphor that I find worse than doing nothing: if you're gonna pretend that the user is interacting with paper, then I don't think you can afford to have standard toolbars at the top and bottom. It doesn't work for your pseudo-book to only have vertical edges.
I have no idea how Globetrotters is supposed to work, but I just can't imagine it very fun or convenient to have four people play at the same time on one iPad screen. Two people, no problem; four, I think it's too small.
Air Harp is nice.
Neon wallpapewwwww.
Commandments, an iPad app that only shows the ten commandments. On stone tablets. Well, to be honest, it looks pretty, but… oh, why the hell not.
You'd think the ClickToFlash developers would have a better grasp of what makes software annoying.
I'm gonna have to dismiss this dialog for every single app I use that's based on WebKit. That's many. And, presumably, I'll have repeat the entire process on April 2nd when you release an update that un-updates this update.
ClickToFlash is a lifesaver, the best plug-in that was ever written, and it has become essential to my sanity as I browse the web on my old G5 — not to mention the security advantages. I'm
forever grateful to everyone involved for creating it. Yet I'll have to repeat this:
Fuck. You.
(And no, I'm not going to check the auto-update box. I don't do it for any piece of software, because I like to know what's happening on my computer — you know, that's kinda why I've installed ClickToFlash in the first place — and I'm especially not gonna do it for developers who like to post frivolous updates. Just because you provide a useful service for free doesn't give you unlimited access to my computer to do with it whatever you think is hilarious.)
P.S. Oh, and it's buggy, too. And it's a known bug that doesn't deter them from running jokes like this. Fantastic.
I don't know why I'm surprised that so many publications already had a review iPad — not like the device was secret. It's mostly jealousy.
"The accessories make the iPad close to complete"
I'm slightly disappointed to learn that many but not all of the universal command-key equivalents have been implemented. Cut, copy and paste can be done via command-X, command-C and command-V. But out of sheer reflex, I was tapping command-R to reply to messages in Mail and command-B to boldface a word in Pages… to no effect. This isn't a limitation of the keyboard or the OS; Apple tells me that developers are free to support any keyboard shortcuts they like. It just seems funny that Apple didn't support them aggressively in their own apps.
Ooh, I didn't expect that.
I had never bothered to convert the iPad's weight [into kilograms], and I can't believe it isn't heavier than the paper notepad I used as a device mockup.
Memeo looks lovely (ignoring the exaggerated drop shadows) and makes me want to use Google Apps more. Unless there's a catch — and there has to be one, if they intend to release an app like this for free.
CourseNotes looks even lovelier and may be my first must-buy if it's versatile enough. I particularly like how you can apparently set any given article to become a to-do with a due date.
smartNotes feels to me like a dedicated, limited version of Illustrator, and that's the wrong way to go about it. But there's probably a market for it, in geeks who wish they had a touch-screen MacBook and bought an iPad without understanding what's good about it.
Auditorium has nice graphics and evidently records audio while you take notes, which is the only (efficient) way I can imagine for anyone to take notes on an iPad during a meeting or lecture — no matter how big the virtual keyboard is, you'll never be able to type reliably without keeping your eyes on the screen. And bringing a dock and keyboard along with you isn't that convenient.
Things for iPad looks pretty and simple, which is a good way to go. Now the question is how well the user interaction has been adapted to the iPad, and whether it's really worth $20. (I mean, as a standalone, I'm sure it is, but if you've already paid for the Mac app?)
The Early Edition looks like a fine way to read RSS news, but I'm sure there will be other offerings with an even more thought-out interface. Not a fan at all of the page slider at the bottom, in particular.
AIM is nice, but who cares?
More App Store leaks: the AP app looks pretty, but weird (i.e., hard to judge from screenshots)
AppStarAwards Finalists: Nothing of interest. (Well, the Thumbelina interactive book looks cute. The iPad is obviously a perfect fit for pop-up books.)
The danger of offering your paid iPhone app for free as a launch promotion: http://twitpic.com/1ch27i
"Apple Files For A New Gaming Accessory Patent"
Of course it shouldn't be patentable (but who cares, nobody else will need it), and the accompanying image ignores the existence of analog sticks, but that's still such an overdue development.
I'm not sure if the date (April 1st) shows when Apple applied for the patent, or when it was registered by the USPTO. Do you think Apple would register frivolous patents it doesn't intend to develop as an April's Fools? (Okay, I think they would; but would it be that patent?)
Of course, I'm aware that just because they're trying to patent it doesn't mean they're going to release it, sadly. But it's at least an official acknowledgment that the iPhone lacks something button-shaped in the gaming department.
"First Blood: Apple Says No To iPad Multitasking – Pulls Dashboard Apps"
Indeed, we're hearing rumors today that Apple has apparently decided not to tolerate the so called "dashboard apps" on the iPad. These apps, like Mini apps or Desktop, allowed you to execute multiple tasks on a same screen through a system of self-made widgets and sounded like a very nice workaround.
When I'd heard about those, my first thought had been that I couldn't believe Apple would approve apps that essentially spat in the face of the iPad's most essential paradigms.
Well, there you go.
The selection is more and more random, as apps are pretty much public now, there are apparently thousands of them (with each new estimate my hopes of striking gold in the Second Great Gold Rush are further dashed), and I just notice some of them and not others.
Twittelator looked ugly and weird on the small thumbnails I'd seen, but real screenshots seem nice. Reading Twitter doesn't require a full iPad screen (just like you're not going to run it full-screen on your computer), so having a lot of prettied-up empty space makes perfect sense.
…unless of course you're a TweetDeck kind of guy. This looks good for power users, if the performance on a real device is adequate (which the developers can't have tested, obviously). I'm downloading it right away, since it's free.
Box.net has a — oh my god, run for your lives! — giant Windows icon as a home screen. Guys, who did you think the iPad's early adopters would be?
Evernote looks prettier than I would have expected. (Though, for the record: blending in with the environment is good, but it becomes an issue when each new declination of the client looks completely different from every other version.) With its syncing abilities and cross-platform compatibility, you're probably not going to need anything else. Too bad I find the Mac client a little too bloated for my taste, so I'm reluctant to switch.
Weather HD makes a very interesting choice for its home page, with a huge background and a tiny operational window, which works perfectly for the app's purpose. And the graphics inside are very nice (although some work should probably be done on the text legibility). I'm surprised it isn't more expensive.
The Wall Street Journal app looks splendid, and I'm glad they let you play a bit with the free version. (I don't care about the outlandish subscription prices, since I was never going to be interested anyway.)
The New York Times is much less fun. (Okay, "fun" is definitely not the right word there.)
Zen Bound doesn't make a huge deal of sense to me on the iPad. I know that it was originally on PC, so it was played on even bigger screens, but I just feel that having it in your hand, in the iPhone's format, was the perfect venue for that game.
And I also feel that its fifteen minutes of fame have passed.
The Gmail web app looks fine and that was nicely reactive of Google. Of course, it will also work on Chrome OS-based tablets, I'm sure.
Does the new iTunes have trouble downloading apps for you, too? Mine regularly gets stuck on "Accessing iTunes Store."
Again, it's likely that the device is using 256 MB memory chips with a portion of the total being used for other purposes, such as video memory. Also, developers have noted that all of the 200 MB of user memory is not available for use by apps. The OS and background apps make use of a large portion of that memory.
Still only 256 megabytes, in 2010?
Makes you wonder if they're really planning to have multitasking in OS 4.0.
Fact: Buying an iPad will actually improve the battery life of your iPhone. Amazing!
I hereby patent the idea of an iPad app+accessory that transforms it into a multitrack podcast recording studio.
Just caved in, added user-agent sniffing and a Javascript timer so that my blog looks okay both on iPad and iPhone.
Every Apple product launch is an opportunity to pare down the list of People Worth Listening To.
Yay! It took me two days to get a fucking OpenGL view to display a fucking image on my iPhone! (Simulator — it might not work on a device.)
"Apple holding iPhone OS 4 event, April 8th!"
The team collectively dropped an "OMG" when we saw this news, as it's pretty unusual to see such a big event coming from Apple right on the heels of something like the iPad launch.
That's odd timing indeed.
Wonder if Jobs wants to boost first-week sales of the iPad by announcing immediately what will be available as a free update in a couple of months.
"Aggressive, spiky button vs. rounded corner button"
That's a very interesting idea. That kind of warning is usually conveyed by coloring the button red, but that's often undesirable as it also makes the button more prominent (not so much in the case of a confirmation dialog like the example given, but in a more general context — like Gmail's infamously unassuming Delete and Report Spam buttons).
Using more subtle yet instinctive cues to indicate that a button's action has harmful results could work very well, especially in the iPad era. Think razor blades, urchins, etc.
"iWork Pages for the iPad: Good for Casual Writing but Lacks a Few Essential Features"
Footnotes and endnotes, for example, are simply deleted, making Pages for the iPad almost useless for a lot of students and academics. Tables of content simply become part of the text, which means that they don't auto-update any more.
I'm sure it's temporary (porting iWork to a completely different platform is a lot of work, and some stuff has to end up on a waiting list), but it really sucks when Pages and Numbers are the killer apps of the iPad as a productivity device — and when students make up a big part of its supposed target audience.
The way Time and GQ look completely different whether you view them in portrait or landscape orientation is mind-boggling.
I'm currently thinking about what would be required to make a simple magazine publication system on the iPad, and I'm curious about how much work it takes, or doesn't, to do something like the Popular Science contents — monthly.
"Crippled iWorks apps for iPad causes confusion and frustration for new owners"
My Keynote and Pages documents are altered when they are converted to the iPad version. Grouped objects are ungrouped (this for me is a big issue given my complex presentations), endnotes and footnotes are not imported in Pages, Table of Content changes to regular text, some fonts cannot be used on the iPad, etc.
That doesn't really lessen the achievement of having a quite functional version of Keynote or Pages running on the iPad, but it's a pity, and made much worse by the fact that Apple's communication about the apps, both on the website and in the keynote, has indeed been misleading.
"Exclusive: The Making of The Elements, One of the iPad's Most Magical Apps"
I wanted to make Harry Potter's magic books a reality, and do it in 60 days flat. Here's how we pulled it off.
With all the hype about the Elements app on iPad, I didn't realize it was essentially the work of a single geek. A lunatic who managed the whole thing in Mathematica, even. And all in the little two-month window that us small developers had to deal with.
I had always assumed (naively?) it was a big production by a publishing house. This 2GB e-book suddenly looks several orders of magnitude cooler.
"Apple rejected iPad app for using pinch to expand gesture"
When the application was initially rejected from the App Store, Apple sent a letter to the developers noting that the pinch to expand feature is "associated solely with Apple applications." The form letter-like e-mail also mistakenly named another application, leading Sykora to assume that Web Albums HD is not the only software that has been rejected for its use of pinch to expand.
That's just fucking demented.
Not a fan of how they're implementing pseudo multitasking. But at least I didn't program push notifications on @nopicnodial for nothing.
Well, that was rather less spectacular than I expected/hoped — as usual. Congratulations to Apple for the 450,000 iPads sold, that's a nice number, and for the three million iPad apps sold, of which a whopping fifty sales or so were mine, oh yay.
The preview page on Apple's site is surprisingly succinct; somewhat appropriate to the amount of changes in the new OS, but not to its version number.
Multitasking: As a developer, I'm not immensely excited by the way they've implemented it, because it's limited to whatever Apple has thought of providing (and I'm incidentally curious to see if/how the API restricts your choices when it comes to VoIP standards and streaming formats). But, as a user, I must admit that it's somewhat elegant and well designed.
It's very interesting that location-tracking background processes will be limited to cell tower triangulation instead of having access to the GPS hardware (except for navigation systems, of course); that sounds like a clever way to save power.
And I can't wait to see how fast application switching is implemented from a developer's point of view — if it's simple and reliable enough, it could provide a pretty awesome user experience.
I'm sad, but not really surprised, that none of this will be available on my old iPhone 3G; I always expected that they would have a hard time fitting any kind of multitasking within its limited RAM and CPU. It was time to upgrade anyway.
Folders: Well, that was overdue, wasn't it? I find the graphics a little odd, and I agree that "Stacks" would have made more sense and been prettier, but who cares when all we ever wanted was some way to organize our goddamn deluge of iPhone apps.
I'm not sure it's been mentioned, but judging from the 2,160 app limit (surely someone somewhere will manage to reach that ceiling, and possibly complain about it) it seems like you can't have more than twelve apps per folder; I guess that's okay. Multiple pages plus multiples folders — and, most important of all, the ability to have folders in the dock — sounds like it should be enough to handle the organizational needs of most people.
Mail: His Steveness had pre-announced the unified inbox not long ago, so no surprise there. And I'm not sure I've ever even tried to have Mail display message threads on my Mac. In short, unlike Jobs, I don't really "live in Mail" so I don't care too much as long as I can receive messages and occasionally reply to them.
iBooks: Obviously.
Enterprise: Interesting that, still today, business improvements get mentioned prominently at the keynote, and even deserve a whole separate page on Apple's site. I guess, with businesses finally beginning to acknowledge non-BlackBerry, non-Windows smartphones, this isn't the time to let Android slip into any cracks.
I'm curious about the data encryption APIs, and surprised that SSL VPNs weren't already available.
Game Center: What? Now I didn't see that coming. (Funny, it's not mentioned on Apple's page.) If there's one thing I would never have envisioned Apple getting into, it's automatic matchmaking and game achievements.
That's good news because I hate most existing "networks" on the iPhone (OpenFeint et al., with the exception of Facebook Connect, which absolutely every game should integrate), and even better news in that it shows that Apple is actually listening, sometimes, to all those game developers that have been invited to iPhone keynotes over the years.
Who knows, that recent patent for a PSP-like shell to snap around your iPhone could actually be a real upcoming product.
iAd: Really, that's one of the seven "tentpoles" (ugh) of OS 4.0? By which I mean, really, it's part of the OS at all? That's just weird, and awkward, and ethically dubious, and this whole thing rubs me in a lot of wrong ways.
It makes me wonder if they're not running this thing, not because they want to profit, but purely and solely in order to fuck with Google some more. And, on some level, I think I'd rather that was really their main motivation.
Yet, for all the borderline abuse of monopoly, it's going to be really convenient for developers, so I have to acknowledge that it does have merit. Still, ugh.
And what wasn't there: No new iPhone. Which, apparently (I can't be bothered to remember or check), is the usual way Apple handles those iPhone OS announcements.
But, if Apple was a couple of months away from launching an iPhone HD — which would undoubtedly require a little work from third-party developers to take advantage of the extra pixels — you'd think the release of a beta SDK would be a perfect time to mention it.
Just before the keynote, John Gruber predicted:
If I'm right that the next-gen iPhone will have a 960 × 640 display, they might start talking about higher-res iPhone apps today, and spin it as a way to make iPhone apps look sharper when run on iPads.
Yes, that would have made sense, wouldn't it.
"His Dashboard App For iPad Rejected, Developer Publishes Code On GitHub"
I'm somewhat impressed by how well the thing seems to be programmed, but come on: the guy lifted the Dashboard widgets straight off of MacOS (not even bothering to fix the CSS for missing fonts) along with the rest of the graphics and the user experience, and he thought his app could ever be approved?!
If you're missing the "Convert to…" option from iTunes 9.1's contextual menu, it's been relegated to the Advanced menu. (Which makes sense.)
I'm happy to say that as of today Twitter is the proud owner of Tweetie — and I'm joining their mobile team and starting work on turning Tweetie.app into Twitter.app, for iPhone and iPad.
I can't quite make up my mind on the principle of the thing — on the one hand, Twitter is what it is thanks to its API and thanks to the plethora of third-party clients (which are used by a minority of users, but those users are the, uh, "influencers" who bring the masses), and it's more than a bit ungrateful to suddenly upstage all third-party developers now; on the other hand, it's unquestionably good for Twitter, and its users, to have an official free client app that looks and works great, so it's hard to resent them.
But, more importantly, what the hell does it mean for Tweetie Mac? Ah, it's still on [via]. But I'm not sure how tenable a position it is to be Twitter's lead iPhone developer and make and sell one of the two most prominent Mac clients on the side.
Combine Pastebot [on iPhone] with the free Pastebot Sync companion app for your Mac and truly wield the power of copy & paste! With Pastebot Sync, magically push text and images to your phone over wifi by simply copying them [to your clipboard].
In case you were looking for an example of useful functionality that won't be able to fit within the restrictions of iPhone OS 4.0 multitasking.
Egretlist is an iPhone to-do app that syncs with Evernote.
You can keep the things you need to do in the same place you store all your memories and ideas.
That looks very interesting, and very pretty. I'm buying it.
If I could also find an alternate desktop client for Evernote, I'd be set. (I've tried Evernote's own app several times, and always got discouraged within minutes.)
Alternatively, a parallel-universe version of Egretlist that would use text files synchronized by Dropbox would be even cooler.
"New in iPhone OS 4: The Full App-by-App Breakdown"
Nothing particularly new here, but you're not an Apple fan if you're not dissecting every new screenshot of a major system update. I don't expect to install OS 4.0 before it comes out (I've got enough work already with the iPad SDK), so I like to look at the pretty pictures from someone else who went through the trouble.
Hmmm. So giving Apple control over the iPhone is bad, but giving Adobe control over rich content on the web is fine. Hmmm.
The server now has
50% 200% more load than before I changed the configuration, and web pages load… faster.
I hate system administration.
Microsoft Kin One and Kin Two announced: Windows Phone roots with a social slant
I can't figure out why they're launching those phones under the Microsoft brand. Sure, the Sidekick name is pretty much dead after the recent cloud fiasco (and it belongs to T-Mobile, which is probably not that interested in working with Redmond again), but there are other names, and how can it make sense to anyone that the only phones that directly bear Microsoft's logo are not really running any of the OSes known Windows? (Yes, according to the articles, technically they are, but nobody cares about that.) If at least the platform was officially known as "Zune phone," it would be defendable. But a new brand? (With yet another awful name?)
As for the phones themselves, they seem like they would be the ideal teenagerphones… if the iPhone didn't exist. The interface is nicely visual, and the scrapbook-like mosaic of your friends' photos is a nice idea — but it seems to be very laggy. And the iPhone does exist.
The "Spot" is a nice concept, and indeed reminiscent of the Courier's dock/hinge. I just hope that is not the only thing we'll ever see out of the tablet concept.
"Microsoft Kin Studio saves all your phone content to the web"
That looks cool and fun, and it's a huge missed opportunity: why limit this thing to the couple of people who will get a Kin phone (making it that much more useless even for them, since their friends won't be there), when you could launch it as a full-scale social network?
But then it's based on Silverlight, so nobody would use it anyway.
"Microsoft Kin One and Kin Two first hands-on"
The front of both devices is graced with a single metallic button to offset an otherwise clean glossy black bezel – this button functions as Back, not Home, so if you're multiple levels deep into the UI you'll only be taken back one. You can still hold the button down to get back to the home screen.
Maybe I wish the iPhone did that.
"Twitter Also Acquired Tweetie for Mac, But It Won't Be Renamed"
To be clear, Tweetie for the iPhone and its developer, Loren Brichter, were the focus of our acquisition, but as part of the deal we also got Tweetie for Mac.
Loren had been hard at work on a new version of Tweetie for Mac that he was going to release soon. Our plan is to still release the new version and it will continue to be called Tweetie (not renamed to Twitter). We will also discontinue the paid version.
Wait — huh? They're keeping it, but not renaming it, but making it free?
"HTC May Buy Palm to Fight Apple"
However, the most interesting bidder is HTC by far. The reason: HTC may find in Palm the patent portfolio it needs to battle Apple's lawsuit.
Wouldn't it be funny if Palm and webOS ended up being rescued solely because of the sudden aggressivity of Apple's lawyers? (Remember that webOS was developed by renegade Cupertino engineers.)
On the flip side, this is exactly what webOS needs: good phones. HTC knows how to make pretty hardware, and they've shown that they have no qualms about offering phones running every operating system they can get their hands on.
That may just be the one and only possibility for webOS to get a second chance, an opportunity to show what it's capable of on the market. Please make it so.
I couldn't find a single page listing all the improvements, so here it goes, app by app (that I care about).
Photoshop: Everybody already knew about content-aware fill, but puppet warp looks extra-fun. (Like everything that uses the new content-aware algorithms, it's not gonna be enough, by itself, for professional work on photos, but it's going to be a huge time-saver for everyone.) And I can't wait to see if the new magical selection is finally the real thing — just like CS4's new selection tools were supposed to be, and CS3's (or CS2's? not sure) Extract filter before it. Someday they'll give us something that really just works.
Illustrator: Looks like they're taking a few hints from Flash to simplify vector drawing and compositing, which is great. ("Draw inside" was an amazing revolution when Macromedia introduced it in Flash, like, twenty years ago.) But the most important thing here will be "Align to Pixel Grid"… if it's also in Photoshop's vector layers — and I'd bet that will not be the case until CS6.
InDesign: Nothing major, but multiple page sizes in a single document is going to be useful for a project I'm currently thinking about. And I'm quite curious (conceptually, not for practical purposes, of course) about the ability to export to Flash.
Flash: No, of course I don't care. I'm just curious. Ooh, elaborate text controls with flowing text boxes — I would have been so excited about that, five years ago.
Dreamweaver: Come on, it's called intellectual curiosity! Besides, if the WordPress / Joomla / Drupal integration really works as you would want it to (there isn't enough of a description to confirm that), it could be a selling point all by itself.
For that matter, BrowserLab could also be a selling point. It makes a lot of sense for Adobe to offer its own service for previewing your site in different browsers, and it looks like they did it rather well — love the "onion skin" view. (Even though, as sites are more and more interactive, those quick and easy solutions are less and less appropriate for real-world development; nothing can replace testing locally on virtual machines.)
CS Live: Not sure what's new or not in this list, but what exactly is "Adobe Story"? With a name like this, it should be an editor for movie scripts, but the description doesn't make it sound like one. Oh, and CS Review sounds like it could be a contender to replace Version Cue as this year's iteration of the framework that Adobe embeds into all its apps and that you'd pay to be allowed to disable.
But none of that will run on my iMac, of course. And that's even the suite's strongest selling point, as I believe it's the version that's supposed to have finally been rewritten from scratch in Cocoa and should be stable on Intel machines.
It's not a coincidence that I received a check on the same day Apple introduced new MacBooks Pro, is it?
Was flicking through my iPhone's home screen, and — whoa, eye of Sauron! Ah, wait, it's just Opera Mini.
"Opera Mini for iPhone approved, will be available for free"
That's a surprise.
I expected Opera Mini to be approved because I thought it used the system's WebKit component to display pages after they went through Opera's servers; but it's very obvious when you use the app that it renders the data itself. Possibly faster than WebKit, but clearly uglier. Makes it odd therefore that Apple would set a precedent of allowing a third-party browser engine on the iPhone; will they be able — or want — to reject Firefox after that?
Anyway, here's what it comes down to: the interface is nice enough, but the multitouch is pretty awful (scrolling and pinch-zooming are both unpleasant, because Opera doesn't use the system algorithms that make the iPhone so… right), my website looks ugly as sin in the browser, and all your data goes through Opera's servers. In exchange, you get a possible speed increase on very slow connections.
The only people who'll think it's worth the tradeoff are the people who choose to buy Android phones.
"MacBook Pro Core i7 unboxing and preview"
Other additions to the laptops include "inertial scrolling" (a la iPhone), which feels like a software change to us, but is apparently related to new trackpads on these models.
Tying intertial scrolling to new hardware has to be bullshit — but, more importantly, I can't decide if it's a good or a bad idea to have it at all on the desktop.
Damn. CameraBag is available for iPad, and I'm not nearly done with my Snap Filters rewrite. Fail. Again.
When you launched Photoshop in the olden days, the splash screen emphasized that you were about to make pretty pictures. It was gratifying and inspirational. Now you just feel like you're entering the Borg.
And CS5 makes it even worse than CS4 in that respect — did you know: lotsa sharp angles doesn't feel very friendly.
Faced with this surprisingly strong US demand, we have made the difficult decision to postpone the international launch of iPad by one month, until the end of May. We will announce international pricing and begin taking online pre-orders on Monday, May 10.
I hate Apple, I've always hated Apple, I've always wanted a ChromeOS tablet anyway, and we have always been at war with Eastasia.
If an app requires processing while in the background, then it must also have a service component. A service on Android is like a separate small application that runs without a user interface in the background (though not actually a separate application). The service has a server/client relationship with the app.
Oh. That's exactly the way I expected / hoped multitasking would work on iPhone OS 4.0, without knowing it was already implemented by Android.
I'm not surprised that Apple went with a more restrictive model that's designed to actively prevent developers from wasting battery power, but at the same time the author is right to note that Apple's system also makes it much easier for programmers to add multitasking to their apps.
So everybody wins, if you count as a win that you'll never have an iPhone IM client keeping open connections in the background (and thus draining your battery) instead of relying on push notifications.
In other words, in descending weight order, approximately: 28% glass, 22% LCD screen, 21% battery, 20% back panel, 9% other components (presumably the 3G model's slightly higher weight is mostly here)
Oh, there is interesting information in iFixit's teardown of the iPad. You'd have thought the battery was the heaviest part, but in fact half the device's weight is structural integrity.
I'm sure Apple's industrial design staff battled with these issues for a long time before deciding on the iPad's form factor, and they probably came to the same conclusions: while this is heavier than the ideal weight, there's very little that can realistically be removed without fatal compromises.
I'll poke you back once because, sure, why the hell not, but if you poke me back-back, I'll put a contract on your head. What is this, 2008?
Aw, but I don't wanna launch Photoshop right now, I just rebooted and my Mac is all responsive and stuff.
all those rumors flying around that the iPhone 4G we'd spotted was no more than a Japanese knock-off of an Apple product, it was starting to look like this thing was too good to be true. That is until one of the Engadget editors spotted what seems to be solid proof that this is — in fact — the next iPhone.
Come on! This thing looks like crap, it's full of seams and the buttons are repulsive, that's unpossible!
Or, to quote someone dear to us: "
Are you nuts?"
"Engadget Posts Pictures of Purported Next-Gen iPhone"
I think it's a testbed frame — thicker, with visible (un-Apple-like) seams, meant to fit in 3GS cases so as to disguise units out in the wild. It's hard to tell from the photos. But I think it is the real deal in terms of the internals and display being next-gen iPhone hardware.
This is exactly what I thought: that it could be a test mule, not the enclosure designed for customers. But I couldn't figure out why Apple would have test mules of the next-generation iPhone out in the open. Well, here it is: if that phone does have a 960x640 screen, it makes sense that they would need to test it a lot out of the lab for compatibility with existing apps.
But John Gruber seems to believe this design could have something to do with the final product — that it would be a rough draft — and I still disagree with that. I think that thing's form is not indicative of anything, and just motivated by the need to easily assemble technical prototypes.
"Twitter launching annotation feature, streaming API"
Each individual annotation will be structured as a triple, consisting of a namespace, a key, and a value. When the feature is launched, the total combined size of the annotations will be limited to 512 bytes. Twitter says that it intends to eventually expand the capacity to 2 kilobytes. Some potential uses include transmitting extended message text, sharing vCards, conducting polls, and embedding full-length links.
That's clever. (Except for calling it "annotations" instead of, I don't know, "metadata.")
In order to be truly useful, annotations that are not application-specific will have to be supported by multiple client implementations. That means that there will have to be a process for building consensus and devising standards.
Twitter says that such an effort will be left as an exercise to the community.
That's stupid. I understand that Twitter's always been very hands-off over that sort of thing, but (1) hey guys, you just bought out the leading iPhone client, so that time is gone, and (2) the limitation to 2KB makes it essential that some basic formats be clearly defined (e.g., long links) because developers can't afford to include redundant alternate versions of the same data, as is done for example in RSS.
Or does (1+2) simply mean that Loren Brichter will end up defining the Twitter standard in next versions of the app, but Twitter itself just doesn't want to put a completely official stamp on that spec?
I don't mind ads in @echofon on principle but I'm not okay with 140 Proof serving me the samenews ad 4 times over 4 days.
"Facebook Asks You To 'Become A Fan' Of All Your Interests"
Next time you sign in to your Facebook account, Facebook will look at your entered interests, find the matching Facebook Pages, and prompt you to link these to your profile.
Ugh. I do not like Pages, I do not want to link to Pages or add them to my news feed, and most importantly nobody's going to enjoy having a big popup asking them to add all those Pages to their profile — with the option to decline hidden very passive-aggressively.
But that's not the worst part.
Unfortunately Facebook is removing the ability to list an interest without having it tied to a Facebook Page, so your Interests section will be blank if you [don't add the Pages].
Come on, Facebook, why are you so intent on having every one of your users eventually hate you? I'm pretty sure, when the dialog comes up, I'm going to purposefully decline adding all the pages, basically out of spite; if the interests disappear from my profile, well, it's your loss, isn't it, since you're supposed to be in the business of using that information. Just not in such annoying ways.
Could we stop discussing the ethics of Gizmodo and just acknowledge that they haven't had any for quite a while?
If you're the kind of person who forgets that you edited your hosts file [to block a website], use Marco Arment's IP address of 184.108.40.206 instead of 127.0.0.1.
Ooh, excellent!
The iPhone is already the highest-DPI display that Apple sells, and to double its resolution is very expensive: the panel costs more, it's likely to use more power, it places higher demand on the CPU for rendering, it needs much more memory for frame buffers and textures, and it incurs big costs on developers [or possibly not — ed.] and Apple's developer-tools and developer-support teams. In other words, it strains nearly everything that is already strained.
Those are all the reasons why I didn't think it likely that the iPhone would get a higher-resolution screen, but there's a simple thing that trumps all:
Steve Jobs has seen a Droid or Nexus One, and he wants his own iPhone to get a higher-resolution screen.
While the iPhone App Store interface won't update to an app version that your phone can't run, iTunes will. And on its next sync, it just deletes any apps from the device whose most recent version, as downloaded by iTunes, isn't compatible with the device's OS version.
I was wondering about that — every time a developer updates an iPhone app, they have to decide which minimum OS version to support, weighing the pros and cons of new APIs vs. installed base. I intended to wait a while before I supported OS 4.0 functionality; looks like I was right.
The way it's done is pretty stupid (well, what do you expect from iTunes, anyway), but… you've got to admit it's not a trivial problem to tackle, either.
I guess the upshot is that you should never use iTunes to update your apps, and only do it on your device. That would be easier if my iPhone 3G was among the hundreds? thousands? millions? that lost wi-fi capability with one of the latest software updates.
"Daring Fireball: Gizmodo and the Prototype iPhone"
"DVT" stands for "design verification test", an Apple production milestone. The DVT milestone is very late in the game; based on this, I now believe that this unit very closely, if not exactly, resembles what Apple plans to release.
No. No. No. No.
No Pic No Dial n'est pas Facebook : la suppression du profil n'est pas cachée, elle n'est pas dissuasive (bon, le site commence par proposer de désactiver temporairement le profil au lieu de le supprimer, mais je vois ça comme un service — je pars du principe qu'une des premières motivations pour supprimer son profil est le fait d'avoir trouvé un mec, et c'est plus simple de désactiver son profil que d'avoir à le recréer un mois plus tard, et oups c'est peut-être un peu cynique / désabusé en fait ?), tout ce que vous avez à faire pour quitter le site, c'est cliquer sur le bouton bien visible dans la page de gestion du profil, et taper votre mot de passe pour confirmer.
Pourtant, une fois par semaine, j'en ai un qui vient me poser la question, parce qu'une fois qu'il a décidé de se désinscrire il ne veut plus chercher. Il a réussi à créer son profil tout seul, à le remplir, à mettre ses photos, à discuter, mais, non, maintenant qu'il veut partir, il est hors de question qu'il se serve de son cerveau.
(Ma réponse était plus longue et aimable, les premières fois, parce que je pensais que ça devait être ma faute, mais elle est devenue de plus en plus laconique au fil des itérations, et la conversation d'aujourd'hui prouve qu'il n'y a pas besoin de plus : son profil a disparu du site dans les dix secondes.)
"Fabulis Launches Social Network For Gay Men"
I can't figure out what the point of this thing is supposed to be. (But I can tell that the process that imports your data from Facebook is broken, so that everyone seems to have an empty profile with no photos.)
I agree with most of that article; the only problem is that it's written like a memo from an editor-in-chief to their staff, instead of trying to convince readers by explaining why you should do the things you should do.
That I can buy a song while on the toilet using my phone means no one is really working on cancer, are they?
We geeks need to support and defend Flash.
It'll be so much harder to block intrusive animated ads when they're done in HTML.
"Microsoft confirms, kills Courier in one fell swoop"
"The "Courier" project is an example of this type of effort and its technologies will be evaluated for use in future Microsoft offerings, but we have no plans to build such a device at this time."
It seems, however, that things just didn't manage to take shape, and word was handed down very recently that the incubation period had reached its conclusion — sans product — and resources would be directed elsewhere.
We wouldn't want Microsoft to be offering a cool, innovative product, would we? I mean, that console thing, fine, it's for those damn brainless gamers anyway, it doesn't matter that it's competent, but a productivity thing that's better than anything else on the market? Not for us. Let's market the hell out of those Kin phones instead.
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The Work-Sharing Boom: Exit Ramp to a New Economy?
Twenty months into the United States' worst recession since the 1930s, standard approaches for putting people back to work are proving increasingly inadequate. Corporate bailouts, tax cuts, government spending, and stimulative monetary policy have been the mainstays of the government's response to the downturn. But unemployment has remained stubbornly high, and job creation has been far below what is needed to return the labor market to its pre-crash state.
There is one bright spot on the policy agenda: work sharing. Government policies that encourage companies to reduce hours rather than lay people off are getting a new look.
Operated through the regular unemployment insurance system, state-based work sharing programs are a straightforward way of spreading and diffusing the impact of downsizing: Workers whose hours have been reduced in order to save jobs at their company are able to claim unemployment benefits for the lost hours, retaining a portion—typically half—of their lost wages. Companies have to maintain benefits for these workers; depending on the state, there can be some other requirements as well.
Shorter work time (SWT) schemes have been around for years, although they have tended to be a little known, even esoteric part of labor market policy. They are far more prevalent in Europe, where they originated in the early 20th century and expanded after World War II. SWT schemes didn't come to the U.S. until the late 1970s, when California implemented an informal version to cope with stagflation, followed by a formalized policy in 1982. Ten years later, the federal government made these schemes a permanent part of labor market policy through an amendment to the Social Security Act.
After the Crash: A Work-Sharing Boom
The National Association of State Workforce Agencies estimates that work sharing resulted in 166,000 jobs saved in 2009—a record number, and almost triple the number from 2008. New York, in particular, has been aggressively pushing its program, and use has also exploded in a number of other states.
Before the crash, 17 states allowed workers to collect unemployment insurance on the wages they lost when their hours were cut. (Those states were Arkansas, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Massachusetts, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Texas, Vermont, Washington). Two more states, Colorado and New Hampshire, have passed work-sharing policies in recent months, and both programs are already operating. Five more states—Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Hawaii, Ohio, and Oklahoma—are considering adopting similar policies. As of this writing, the Pennsylvania bill had passed the state's lower chamber and was awaiting action in the Senate.
Common Sense for Saving Jobs
SWT won't do too much to put today's unemployed back to work directly. But it can play an important role in preventing more layoffs, which in turn improves job prospects for all. Still, timing is crucial. SWT is most effective during the early months of a recession, when companies are deciding how to respond. If the economy goes into a double-dip and weakens even further, SWT could be an important stabilizer. Getting more states involved and expanding awareness of the programs that do exist should be urgent priorities.
Germany—which responded to the crash primarily through the adjustment of hours, and whose unemployment rate barely increased—is an outstanding example of how to do this. A federal scheme to replace lost wages (Kurzarbeit) accounted for about 20 percent of the reduction in hours; private bargains between employers and unions, canceled overtime, and flexible use of vacation and other time off was responsible for the remainder.
Nor was Germany the only country to use schedule changes to cushion the collapse. Korea, Norway, and the Slovak Republic also used hours for more than 95 percent of their labor market adjustment; Belgium, Italy, Finland and Japan were also big "hours" (rather than jobs) adjusters. By contrast, in the U.S., employers responded almost wholly with layoffs.
Even with the growth in work-share programs, SWT has not yet been used in the U.S. nearly to the extent that it could be. Jack Reed (D-RI), has introduced a bill in Congress to encourage more states to join the program and to ensure its continued funding.
The politics of work sharing are encouraging for their broader application in the U.S. Such programs are cost-neutral for badly-stretched unemployment insurance funds, so they don't run afoul of anti-spending sentiment. Though they have historically been associated with the progressive side of the fence, they appear ideologically neutral. Ben Bernanke has given them his seal of approval; businesses often like them because they save on re-hiring costs. They are also, rightly, perceived as fair—rather than concentrating the pain of unemployment in a small number of people, they allow it to be shared equally. In the parlance of the day, they're generally considered to be win-wins.
Exit Ramp to a New Economy
Work-share programs are probably the best way to respond to a short-term reduction in economic activity. But they also form a key pathway to a saner economy.
Reducing work hours improves work-life balance for many overworked, overstressed employees. Americans frequently report that what they most sense to be missing from their lives is the time necessary to enjoy them; research on well-being also indicates that adequate time is at the core of a healthy, happy life. Overworked employees report more family tension, less happiness, and more stress. This is a particular problem for Americans, who work between 100 and 350 more hours each year than workers in comparably wealthy countries.
Between Overworked and Out of Work
Instead of 10 percent unemployment, what if we worked 10 percent fewer hours?
Surveys done before the crash indicate that between 30 and 50 percent of Americans say they would prefer to work fewer hours, even for less pay. However, the structure of the labor market—including the need to work full-time to receive benefits—has made that difficult. That's why taking advantage of SWT now, at a time when hours have fallen due to the shortfall in demand, is a golden opportunity.
Reduced hours can also lead to smaller ecological footprints, as I explain in my recent book Plenitude. Productivity has been on the rise for decades, but we've been using the benefits of increased productivity to consume ever more stuff—which we often don't even have time to enjoy. Those additional material goods (not to mention those extra miles of commuting) have a major impact on the environment. Research shows that longer work hours are associated with more ecological degradation. Working less typically leads to reduced spending and also a shift to lower-impact forms of consumption: taking the bike instead of the car; cooking at home instead of buying fast food. For the ecologically aware, the preference for SWT over standard job creation measures such as stimulus spending or tax cuts should be clear.
By helping to institute a new, shorter hours regime, in which increases in productivity result in time off the job rather than more material output, work-sharing programs help maintain labor market balance even if economic activity is stable or falling. That's the win-win that has yet to factor into the mainstream discourse on shorter work hours—and the reason why reducing hours equitably in a recession is an exit ramp to a new economy.
- : Along with paid vacation, we're missing out on happiness, better health, and a more sustainable society.
- : Why—and how—to make sure the stimulus creates jobs that are both green and equitable.


text:
Dina Wakley Media Stencil - Dollops£5.99
Dina Wakley Media Stencil - Scribbled Faces£5.99
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By SoloGraphix - Tue May 13, 2014 8:00 pm
- Tue May 13, 2014 8:00 pm #120332
I wanted to get this thread started so I could chronicle the build for myself and you all. First thing first, here is my $40 craigslist Silverado. All works, battery was shot and definitely needs the sag addressed.


text:
Aesop Rock Admits That Copying Others Is How He Makes Music
from the good-for-him deptWe've discussed many times how creators copy all the time, and mentioned the T.S. Eliot quote:
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.This is often shortened to something along the lines of "good artists copy, great artists steal" (and attributed to Picasso). Even so, outside of pure mashup artists, it's rare to see artists admit that they copy others for inspiration. However, Jon Lawrence points us to a cool "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) session at Reddit by the famed hip hop artist Aesop Rock (who, I never realized until now, attended high school at the same time I did, just one town over). At one point, someone asks him "what inspires your beats," and Aesop gives him a straightforward answer:
i just listen to old music til i hear a sound i like - then i steal it. rinse, repeat.The thing is, assuming he means "copy" and not "steal" (sorry, sticking point around here), that's true of tons of creators, though just as Aesop does, they then do something cool and amazing with it. Still it's nice to see an artist of Aesop's stature willing to admit it up front. It's just too bad that those who don't understand how art works keep wanting to make this illegal.
Filed Under: aesop rock, copying, music


text:
New Zealand needs to take responsibility for its human rights obligations in Afghanistan following the executions of 14 men in an Kabul prison this week, local advocates say.
Since the Taliban fell in 2001, executions in the country have been rare.
However, 14 prisoners were hanged in Kabul this week, raising questions about the New Zealand's on-going support for the Afghan government.
Afghanistan officials say those executed were criminals guilty of serious offences, and not linked to al-Qaeda or the Taliban, the BBC reported.
Their offences included rape and "crimes against the people, especially women and children".
But concerns around the Afghan justice system are raising questions in New Zealand.
Amnesty International's New Zealand executive director Grant Bayldon says the widespread use of torture in to extract confessions means there is simply no way of guaranteeing a fair trial.
The New Zealand Government has had a "strong international voice" against the death penalty and Amnesty International believes it should be making its concerns known, he says.
Bayldon says New Zealanders need to be confident that their forces in Afghanistan aren't handing prisoners over to execution and while a Ministry of Defence report released last year states arrests are technically carried out by Afghan forces, Bayldon says this could be seen as a "clever way to avoid responsibility".
"Amnesty International doesn't believe that would wash with most new Zealanders and it's not even certain that it would stand up in international human rights law.
"Even if we don't put on the handcuffs, we still have responsibilites."
Given the world trend is moving away from the death penalty, the direction Afghanistan is heading is "deeply disturbing", he says.
Amnesty International is calling for an independent investigation into the operations by the SAS which involve the transfer of prisoners to the Afghan forces.
The Green Party is also urging the Government to protest the death penalty in Afghanistan.
"Defence Minister Jonathan Coleman should seek formal assurances from Afghan authorities that no prisoners handed over by New Zealand's Defence Forces will suffer the death penalty," Green Party global affairs spokesperson Dr Kennedy Graham said today.
"The resumption of the use of the death penalty by the Karzai regime is yet another reason why it is time to bring our soldiers back from Afghanistan now."
The United Nation has also decried the executions.
UN human rights chief Navi Pillay has issued a statement condemning the executions, calling on Afghan President Hamid Karzai to end capital punishment.
"I urge President Karzai to show that the rule of law can also be built on clemency and humanity, and that Afghanistan too will join the worldwide trend against the death penalty," he said.
The Ministry of Defence could not be contacted for comment.