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If it seems like the airlines have a few new tricks up their sleeves this summer, it's not your imagination. The Department of Transportation (DOT) may have taken some of the sting out of deceptive pricing practices, but it hasn't done much to change the fact that summer airfare is expensive—or that the airlines are still being sneaky with their fare rules and restrictions. Whether it's new carry-on bag fees, hidden fuel surcharges, or coordinated price hikes for popular travel days, the airlines are always doing something to get hold of just a little more of your money.
Fight back with these 10 tips. Some are new, some are new twists on tried-and-true strategies, and some are specific to this summer. Altogether, they'll give you a fighting chance at taming the high cost of your summer flights.
Best Day of the Week to Book
Don't let anyone tell you there's no "best day" to book airfare. There categorically is a best day (and a best time, too) for domestic flights—and that's Tuesday around 3:00 p.m. ET. It makes sense when you understand the process. Early Tuesday morning is when Southwest, AirTran, and sometimes JetBlue announce their new sales. It then takes a few hours for those creaky, lumbering behemoths known as the legacy carriers (American, Delta, United, and US Airways) to get around to matching the low-cost carriers' prices on the specific sale routes.
By midafternoon on the East Coast, the whole "fare war" machine is in full gear, giving you the best possible availability on multiple airlines competing for your business at the same sale prices. Most sales are good for 72 hours, from Tuesday through Thursday, so even if you can't purchase right at 3:00 p.m. on Tuesday, you'll still have a shot at the sale prices for a few more days—although you may have fewer low fares (and fewer airlines) to choose from.
Best Days of the Week to Fly … Except When They're Not
The cheapest days to fly are Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday. This is sound advice year-round, but it's especially worth noting in the summer when prices skyrocket. But watch out, as even those midweek days can be extra-expensive when they fall on or around a holiday—such as Tuesday, July 3, this year.
How Far in Advance to Book
When it comes to summer flights, the early bird usually gets the worm. Ideally, you should start shopping about three months in advance of your departure date if you're planning to travel on or around the highest air-traffic days (i.e., Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Labor Day). If you haven't started yet, you may have already lost out on the best deals for the first two holidays, but there's still time for that Labor Day trip. If you're not looking to travel right around the holidays, you should still be able to find a decent deal by booking about four to six weeks ahead of time.
Most summer airfare sales require a 21-day advance purchase, so waiting until the last minute is unlikely to save you money and will almost certainly cost you. The airlines have gone to great lengths in recent years to reduce capacity in order to make sure they're not flying planes with empty seats. Consequently, the seats that are available generally sell out. So don't play chicken with the airlines and hope for the best. You're at their mercy.
Pay Attention to Blackout Dates
The airlines still run sales during the summer, and the prices are often reasonable, too—as long as you observe the promotion's rules and restrictions and pay special attention to blackout dates around the holidays. This summer, those will be the days immediately before and after May 28, July 4, and September 3. If you must travel near those dates, pick the flight on the holiday for the best of the worst prices. Using a day or two of extra vacation time to gain a few days' flexibility during these holidays could save you enough to pay for an extra night at your hotel.
The New Face of Flexible Search
For travelers not committed to specific departure and return dates, the ability to search for low fares based on flexible dates within a travel window is one of the greatest tools available. But an unintended consequence of the DOT's new full-fare advertising rules is that these "flex searches" have become a lot less powerful. That's because sites like Orbitz (which once offered a 30-day flexible-search window) and Travelocity (which offered a glorious 330-day window) have reduced their search windows to just three days before and three days after your specified travel dates. Both sites likely found it too difficult to determine tax-inclusive prices on a flex search in the wake of the new DOT rules.
Three days isn't very flexible—not when a 30- or 330-day window could shave hundreds of dollars from the cost of your flight. Try the flex search offered on Hotwire's homepage (enter your travel dates and cities, then click the "Flexible Date Search" link to get a 30-day window); or use CheapAir.com for that massive 330-day search window (international searches are excluded, unfortunately). Even if you don't book with either of those sites, use them first to determine the best dates to fly.
Bonus tip: Some airlines have their own flex-search tools as well. I just saved hundreds of dollars per ticket on a flight to Iceland after researching departure and return combinations on Icelandair's website.
Know Your International Gateways
Speaking of Europe, consider making Dublin, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Madrid, London, or Vienna your arrival city. These European gateways are served by major carriers from both sides of the Atlantic, and that generates enough competition to keep prices under control—relatively speaking.
Or, fly a lesser-known carrier hungry for your business. OpenSkies, for instance, just offered a great deal for New York to Paris from $899 in July … in premium economy!
Another tip: Find out which international carriers fly directly to their home country from your nearest international airport, and then follow the cheap fares. My home airport, Boston's Logan International, generally offers great prices to Ireland because it's served directly by Aer Lingus. Again, it's all about the competition.
Ask a Travel Agent
Sometimes you need help. It's OK to admit it. If your itinerary is complicated, a travel agent's expertise could be the difference between a smooth experience and an airport disaster—not to mention an airline-fee surprise or two. Be wary of tight connections on different carriers, for example. I've seen flights from online travel agencies (OTAs) that would have allowed me to book a too-tight connection on airlines operating in completely different terminals; the OTA would keep my money and I'd be stuck waiting standby for the next flight out of Dodge because I missed my connecting flight. If you're feeling confused or overwhelmed, don't wing it and hope for the best. Get help.
Buy Airline Direct
Don't assume you've finished your homework once you've checked the major metasearch sites and Travelocity, Orbitz, and Expedia. Once you identify a flight you want, shop around directly on the airline's website for the same flight. Not all discounted flights are available to the OTAs. (Southwest, for example, doesn't sell seats on any third-party sites.) You may find an even better price, a better connection, or a better seat by booking airline-direct.
Know a Good Deal When You See One
If you find a summer flight for under $200 or $300—to or from anywhere in the U.S.—buy it. This is a good price even for short-haul routes, and a downright phenomenal one for long-haul or cross-country flights. Sure, if you wait a little longer you might find something $10 or $20 cheaper … or someone else might scoop up the last seat at that $200 range and you'll be stuck paying twice the going rate. General rule of thumb: If a price looks "pretty good," don't fret over it. Consider yourself lucky and move on to the next part of your trip planning.
Promo Codes
I've never been much of a coupon clipper, personally. But when it comes to travel, there's money to be saved through coupons—and we're not talking $0.50 off your next box of cereal. This week, Spirit offered $10 off any flight, with no restrictions, just for entering a promo code at checkout. Air Canada and Porter Airlines routinely offer 50 percent off flights for anyone willing to poke around for a special code. JetBlue recently launched a "mystery offer" that netted savings of $20 to $500 for users who got a special code through email; the carrier also recently partnered with LivingSocial to offer a $50 flight credit with zero restrictions (pay $25, get $75 off). There's no two ways about it: Promo codes are the money-saving fad du jour in the air-travel space.
Another relatively new development in the airfare savings arena is social-media deals. Have you checked your favorite airline's Facebook or Twitter pages lately? Granted, they may not be the most scintillating conversationalists, but I often find great deals just for being a fan of the major carriers. A few weeks ago, I spotted a fantastic sale for flights to Maui and Oahu from Hawaiian Airlines—and it was only being promoted on the airline's Twitter feed (and here on SmarterTravel, of course).
Readers, what are your tricks for taming summer airfares? Have any of these strategies worked for you? Do you have any questions about finding a summer deal? Share your thoughts in the space below!
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Wednesday, January 03, 2007
Is Loot Changing Me?
My guild held an "open" Molten Core run last week. You could bring your alts and your friends to the run, and all loot would be randomly rolled on. You could win one item from any of the first nine bosses, and one item from Ragnaros. I brought Coriel, because I don't have any alts anywhere near that level.
One of the non-guild friends who came on this run was a paladin. This paladin, who I will call JC (not his real name), had *really* bad gear. He was wearing a [Triune Necklace] from Scarlet Monastery, and the rest of his gear was a mixture of 40-50s blues and greens.
I think you see where this story is going.
We get to Golemagg, and [Azuresong Mageblade] drops. JC wins the roll, and gets his shiny sword.
Then we get to Ragnaros. [Judgement Legplates], the single item in Molten Core that I want, drops. I roll, and Lady Chance laughs at me. JC wins the roll and gets his Tier 2 leggings.
My reaction to this surprised me. I was actually physically upset that I had lost out on the T2 legs, and worse, someone who I thought did not deserve it had won it. And this kind of shocked me. After all, I say I raid for raidings sake, and not for loot. I am an Explorer, not an Achiever, and I am happy with that. Or so I thought.
And further more, it's just pixels on a screen, data in a server, ephemeral and transistory. I know all this, and still I felt upset.
Finally, JC was actually a decent paladin. He judged, healed and cleansed, and generally did a good job, considering his gear level. He did his best, and played by the rules. Maybe allowing the second roll on Ragnaros loot was a bad idea, but that was our call. If Lady Chance smiled on JC that day, I really can't hold it against him.
I've thought about it a lot since then, and I've resolved to try and be less concerned with loot. Somewhere on Skywall, there is a paladin running around with a [Triune Necklace], [Azuresong Mageblade], and [Judgement Legplates]. It's actually kind of funny, and I can kind of laugh about it now.
Still, this episode has perfectly illustrated to me why rolling on scarce loot is a bad idea, and why God created DKP.
10 comments:
- Joshe of Sargeras11:41 PM, January 03, 2007
I believe the best loot system on non-guild raids, 20 or 40 man, is as follows...ReplyDelete
When an item drops, everyone who wants it and can use it rolls for it, and among the players with the lowest number of items looted so far, the highest roll wins the item.
I'm sure there are better ways to explain that, but hopefully you understand what I'm saying.
As a regular reader of your blog for a long time now, I believe your outlook on loot, and everything really, is a healthy one, and will no-doubt remain that way for the entirety of your WoW career.
- Anonymous9:13 AM, January 04, 2007
Just because you were upset about the look drop doesn't disqualify you from being an 'explorer'...ReplyDelete
If I recall correctly, people are supposed to be composites of the various types. It just turns out that 'achiever' has a higher percentage of the composite than you thought. I suspect you're still primarilly 'explorer' though.
- Anonymous12:21 PM, January 04, 2007
I feel horrible about it, but I get angry every blasted time I lose a roll for a piece of paladin gear in a raid, and especially so to those who a) do not raid with my guild, or b) are guildmates that do not log on often. Let me relate a story:ReplyDelete
My guild, Prophecy, farms BWL and most of AQ40 regularly. I joined them about 3 months ago and jumped in on my first day of membership in AQ40 on a Tuesday, so it was a fresh instance. There were 7 or 8 other paladins on the roster that raided with any frequency, but 4 of them had full or 6+ pieces of Judgement, so I was optimistic about achieving my goal of acquiring full tier 2.
We killed off Skeram pretty easily and there were 4 paladins in the raid, including myself. The Hammer of Ji'zhi dropped, a very nice epic 2H mace with INT, STR, STA, and spell damage. Perfect paladin weapon for either a Holy or Retribution paladin who wants to retain a hybrid nature. My jaw dropped as no one bid. It was about to be disenchanted when I put in my bid and bitterly spent DKP to put myself in a nice hole to start my new raid career with Prophecy. No problem, I told myself, I can earn it back. They use a zero-sum DKP system, in case there was any wondering about that.
Next week we go to BWL with 5 paladins again. I've earned a little DKP back, but I'm still in the negative. 1 paladin had 8/8 tier 2, so no competition. 1 paladin had 6/8, missing only the bracers and breastplate. Then there was me, with 2/8 (helm and belt) and two other paladins with 2/8 and 1/8 respectively. BWL was kind that night, dropping a set of Judgement Bindings, Sabatons, shoulders, and 2 breastplates. Thanks to my Hammer of Ji'zhi bid, I won exactly zero pieces, and BWL went relatively dry afterward, dropping Judgement very sparingly since then. The 1/8 paladin was able to acquire 5 more pieces of Judgement... and then subsequently stopped playing. The 6/8 guy grabbed a breastplate and now plays his rogue often. It boils my blood thinking of the gear that's rotting on characters either deleted or relegated to alt status now, or not played at all, that I watched pass me by.
Its true, epic loot creates epic anger and jealousy. Maybe I need anger management when it comes to this sort of thing, but I still feel a twinge when I lose a roll and I feel like I've earned the gear.
Be happy when your class loot drops, even if you don't win, usually it brings you one roll closer to winning.ReplyDelete
The worst is when your class loot doesnt drop often, and other class loot that does drop is getting disenchanted. :(
Lol i also think that the *lust* for epic gear corrupts! :)ReplyDelete
I have added your link on my blog and I hope it is ok. If you like my blog please feel free to reciprocate!
Find it at http://worldofwarcraftguru.blogspot.com/
- Whiffle7:16 AM, January 05, 2007
As Joshe said and is, (I'm also a regular reader of your blog)ReplyDelete
No worries about the loot, your views on it are still healthy ;)
Oh, and you've been tagged!
I've been reading your blog for some time, in fact it's part of the reason I made a paladin after my other characters, and I've enjoyed your writing.ReplyDelete
Of late, I've had more experiences similar to yours because I'm still missing a few small pieces from certain raids that I'd like to pick up.
I don't think that your reaction is a result of epic loot corrupting, but more a result of the influence of an item based game with limited new content. Basically, WoW is a game driven by items and raiding. However, once you get as far as your guild can go, you start experiencing new content very slowly at endgame as you gear up a little more so that you can beat the next boss and then move on.
That leaves items as the only new thing that one can get, and requires you to run the same instances over and over, unless you get very lucky like JC did. And, I know that for me, running the same instances over and over gets old fairly quickly because once you have the strategy down, you do the same thing, over and over.
Now, this will be mitigated by more easily accessible content with the expansion and further leveling looming, but once that's finished, I don't see Blizzard bucking the trend of phat lewtz because they need something to keep people going, and their choice for that is items.
The first time I got upset about someone else winning an item that I thought I should have was when I realized that WoW has changed me as a gamer. I played an MMO previously that was not item based and after becoming emotionally invested in the little purple pixels so much that I resent my fellow gamers for getting them instead of me, I look forward to leaving WoW in favor of another MMO that ensures that I enjoy the company of my fellow gamers and I won't have to compete with them for items that really do affect gameplay.
Qhoryn - 60 paladin - Mug'thol
It appears to me that WoW is moving away from direct loot competition in changes and in new content.ReplyDelete
The new PvP loot system essentially replaced a direct player competition (the rank system) with an honor grind.
It sounds like the endgame loot in the BC will move in a similar direction with earning points towards the top-end loot.
IMO, loot doesn't change a person; rather, a person's perceptions change - over time endgame loot comes to be a goal, a symbol of accomplishment, a sign of moving forward, and a status symbol. Loot is the only way to advance in the WoW endgame (until the expansion opens up advancement to level 70).
In my own case, I'm thoroughly enjoying a run back through existing content in tandem with my wife's character (and we're trying several things I didn't in my previous run to 60). But I get pangs of regret when I see players decked-out in top-end PvP gear, because I PvP-ed for several weeks (up to Blood Guard), got 'cut off' by the patch, and didn't pick it back up after the patch. By now I could have had several more PvP pieces, but realistically I know I would not have enjoyed the PvP honor grind as much as my current play experience. It's really kind of funny that I'm having more fun playing my modestly-equipped 30-ish priest than I do playing my blues-and-epics 60 warrior.
And I have to step back and realize that people who have played the beta and looked over the new equipment agree that everything in WoW today will become obsolete (over time) in the BC. One of the things that dissuaded me from an all-out push for PvP epics (Tier 2 equivalent) was that it will be roughly the equivalent of level 65 gear. So my heart wants cool-looking status-symbol huge-upgrade epic shoulders for my warrior, and my mind says to choose fun (or something of lasting value, like epic mount training) over purely gear-oriented goals, because I'll replace *everything* I now have in the coming months. And so will everyone else...
- Laynee of EU-Durotan4:16 AM, January 12, 2007
I just landed on you blog by accident and decided to read the first few posts. Just wanted to tell you that it's nothing but normal that you are upset. Because the reason isn't that hes running around in his fancy skirt and you aren't, the reason is that he got it within one run, while you were raiding MC numerous times. Same thing if you work somewhere for 10 years and the guy who's been there gets promoted after 6 months and is now your boss. What i'm trying to say is, the purplz didn't corrupt you, your just a human who lost a competiton :)ReplyDelete
Don't think for a second that this human nature of jealousy is not only used but encouraged by Blizzard. Primarily to keep raiders raiding! The pieces of armor by themselves have a low drop chance, then you have twenty or forty other people to roll against, and when you're SO CLOSE and see it slide by you it intensifies your drive to repeat the raid, spending money and time, for another shot at the gear.ReplyDelete
A DKP system is almost necessary for this, and I wonder sometimes why blizzard didn't include one by default - randomly handing out loot to people who want it may work when it only takes two hours and five people to repeat a run, but a multi-day 40-person trip through an instance would be unbearable if you lost the very thing you're hunting for to someone on their first trip, over and over and over again based on how generous the crappy PRNG is feeling.

subset: commoncrawl


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Thank you to everyone who e-mailed me last night with such warmth and open arms.
I registered under my real name, but considering that I am not "out" among family and friends as an atheist, I changed my handle to "Two Cult Survivor." I trust you will forgive me, considering some of you have the experience of becoming atheist after a lifetime of faith and Christian fellowship.
I call myself "Two Cult Survivor" because I have personal experience worshiping in two religious organizations considered cults by mainstream Christianity. I used to think "cult" was something the big church called the little church. Later, I happened on a definition that fits the bill better: A cult is an organization in which the person at the top knows its a scam. A religion is the same thing, except that person's dead.
The two cults are the Jehovah's Witnesses and The Way International. The Way, which informed my faith as an adult, is a Christian organization that rejects the divinity of Jesus but accepts the Bible as true and the charismatic "gifts" (we called them manifestations) as available and operable in the present day. We spoke in tongues. We prophesied. And we read the bejeezus out of every single Bible verse (that we liked).
Anyway, here's the short version of my deconversion, a process I like to call "seeing the dark."
The order I present is chronological, not necessarily in order of importance.
1. The Bible is not inerrant and it is full of contradictions. It never proclaims itself to be God's Word, for to do so would have required a self-awareness its writers clearly did not have. There is nothing in the book to intimate that it has that kind of self-awareness. The writer who posited that "all scripture is given by inspiration of God" was not likely including in that elite category the very letter he was writing. Etc.
2. The stories of the Bible are not all historically true. This one revealed itself to me in waves, sometimes through common sense, sometimes through research. For me, it began when I recognized that the story of Job could not have taken place as described. It made God unspeakably cruel, allowing the devil to go on a killing spree to win a bet, and rewarding Job's loyalty by giving him new kids to replace the ones who were murdered by Satan with His blessing. No, it's an allegory. Has to be. So is Adam and Eve. There's just no way that is history. I didn't know what the implications of Genesis as myth were in terms of the need for mankind's redemption in the first place. But I held onto the belief that Jesus died and was resurrected, so the Genesis story, I reasoned, was something God wanted us to know, even if it was not literally true. Through research, I reached the conclusion that the stories of Joseph and Israel's enslavement in Egypt, leading through the Exodus, were one humongous fabrication. This one bothered me, because if it's not a true story, why tell it? But history does not back it up. I ended up rejecting quite a few of the stories, but not the life of Christ and not the resurrection. Those I retained.
3. I was lying about the charismatic gifts. I had to admit I faked speaking in tongues. I had to admit that I faked it all. I came to suspect that not only was I not alone, but in fact the experience of faking it was universal. I started to doubt that anyone did it. I started to doubt anyone could. There are still Christians who believe this, so the foundation of my faith was unaffected by this personal confession.
4. I found myself unable to condemn gay people and homosexuality. I hated neither the sinner nor the sin. It was none of my business. It was rather obvious to me that they were born this way and no amount of preaching could change them. If God made them this way and hates them for it, then He's an ass. Whole.
5. I finally looked at the Bible on the subject of slavery with open eyes, and was appalled.
6. I finally looked at the Bible on women's rights with open eyes, and was appalled.
7. Somewhere in all this, I stopped praying for any kind of miraculous healing for anyone, including a close relative diagnosed with a terminal illness. I'd seen too many prayers go unanswered to pray for a miracle and add my family's name to the list of those who just wouldn't get one.
8. I realized that, while I never really liked Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson, I was starting to look at them as truly, objectively evil people.
9. I don't remember the last time I fervently, honestly, prayed.
10. I came to realize that the history of Jesus as recounted in the New Testament, and particularly the central tenets of the life, death and resurrection, along with the all-persuasive history of the martyrdom of the first century saints (people who would be in a position to KNOW whether the resurrection had, in fact, taken place and was worth dying for or whether it was all a crock -- and they chose death!) never flipping happened.
That last one was the final turning point for me, because, as you know, if you don't have the life, death and resurrection of Christ, you don't have Christianity.
I don't have Christianity.
In the last two months, I've been catching up on a lot of reading. Richard Dawkins. Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Dan Barker, Carl Sagan (Demon Haunted World) and others. Anyone who hasn't read them (both of you, if I understand this forum correctly) is really missing out.
Last thing I should say is that I met James "The Amazing" Randi last month. Little guy, big footprints. Impressive man.
So, anyway, here I am.
Thanks again for the welcome.
Call me "Survivor." Because I am.
Views: 521
Greets and salutes, TCS; I'm glad you joined us!
Wow! Welcome survivor, glad you're enjoying life now and yes Falwell and Robertson are evil people.
What is interesting about this is that people keep looking for the ark and every now and then claim they have found it.
Glad to have you with us Survivor. There is no dogma or litany, or scripture, or apostle's creed. We are a group who have not found evidence of god. It just boils down to that.
Thanks, everyone.
Two Cult Survivor, Hi, how are you doing today? Have you found some friends on A/N with whom you feel comfortable? I'm glad you are here participating with fellow travelers.
Hello TCS
I've read your story, and "survivor" is really the name you deserve. Like a sick person fighting to recover from a terrible disease and making it, you have survived religion. So I just wanted to congratulate you, to welcome you to the world of atheism (even though I've just joined AN myself, I've been an atheist all my life), and to tell you that I really admire you.
I'm gonna cry. ;)
Thanks, Audrey.
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Giants defensive end Jason Pierre-Paul promised that blood would be spilled when the Giants and the Cowboys met on Sunday and cornerback Terrell Thomas said there was "no doubt" in his mind that the Giants would emerge victorious.
Cowboys cornerback Orlando Scandrick made note of both those comments this week and referenced them during his meeting with the media after the Cowboys' 24-21 victory. He said Thomas should "just play" instead of talking like that and wondered where Pierre-Paul was on Sunday.
"Jason Pierre-Paul was like, 'There will be bloodshed.' C'mon, man," Scandrick said, via Bart Hubbuch of the New York Post. "Did he even have a stat on the final stat sheet?"
JPP did have one tackle, but Scandrick was just getting warmed up. He took Mike Ditka to task for saying on ESPN that the Cowboys had no one who could cover Victor Cruz and said he had no "earthly idea" why a "great coach" like Tom Coughlin would allow his team to talk so much heading into the game.
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Objective-C is a superset of the C programming language and provides object-oriented capabilities and a dynamic runtime. Objective-C inherits the syntax, primitive types, and flow control statements of C and adds syntax for defining classes and methods. It also adds language-level support for object graph management and object literals while providing dynamic typing and binding, deferring many responsibilities until runtime.
What is Clojure?
Clojure is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system.
Want advice about which of these to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
What companies use Objective-C?
1053 companies on StackShare use Objective-C
What companies use Clojure?
113 companies on StackShare use Clojure
What tools integrate with Objective-C?
12 tools on StackShare integrate with Objective-C
What tools integrate with Clojure?
8 tools on StackShare integrate with Clojure
What are some alternatives to Objective-C and Clojure?
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Instacart uses Objective-C
Basically, the trajectory was we had our iOS app, which started out native, right? It started as a native app, and then we realized you have to go through a review process and it's slow, and at a very early stage, it made sense for us to make it a wrapped web view. Basically, the app would open, and it would be a web view inside of it that we could iterate on quickly and change very rapidly and not have to wait for app store view process to change it. It wasn't totally a native experience, but it was as actually a pretty good experience and lasted for a very long time and was up until recently the foundation of our current mobile web experience, which is different from our app situation. So for a long time, basically, our app store iOS Instacart app was a wrapped web view of just our store, a condensed version of our store, which meant that we could add things. We could change sales. We could change the formatting. We could change the UI really fast and not have to worry about the app store review process.
This all changed about a year ago, I would like to say, at which point it became a totally native app. We felt comfortable enough with the product and all the features that we made it a native experience and made it a fully featured app.
emidln uses Clojure
blandflakes uses Clojure
To complement Java. The REPL lets me interactively exercise Java code. I can write performant and safe libraries in Java, and then use them in Clojure. I also find the data-centric aspect of Clojure (excellent build-in structures, literal syntax for easily creating those structures, functions that act well on abstractions of those structures) good for data processing.
This fits a sweet spot between Ruby and Java.
BandSquare uses Clojure
We use Clojure mostly for its "Minority Report"-like interactive development in situations that require 'semi-automatic programming' (data inspection, admin tasks, API exploration, scrapers, etc.). We have also used Clojure successfully to build some components of our stack very quickly and reliably, in the backend and the frontend.
papaver uses Clojure
just started learning clojure, maybe around two weeks or so. i'm addicted. this is what i want to be working with and learning for the foreseeable future. the elegance of the language is refreshing. the community is really amazing. i've finally found a language that fits my passion for programming.
CloudRepo uses Clojure
Clojure simplifies and reduces the coding efforts involved in creating CloudRepo. The fact that it runs in the JVM gives us access to all the libraries that we could ever need. Our code base is much smaller and easier to reason about than it would have been had we gone with pure Java.
Refractal uses Objective-C
While the majority of our stack is now using Swift, we still love Objective-C in many cases, especially low-level software manipulation, where it's just easier. It doesn't hurt that a lot of iOS/OS X Libraries out there are written in it either.
SmartLogic uses Objective-C
We like to go native with iOS development, and Objective-C has been the only game in town until recent introduction of Swift. We're keeping an eye on Swift, but we aren't giving up on the [old way:to do:things]!
DailySMSCollection uses Objective-C
Promethean TV uses Objective-C
PrometheanTV provides SDKs for IOS devices including support for the Objective-C language.


text:
If recent history means anything, the Raiders stand a pretty good chance of finding a productive player at No. 42, with the second round pick they acquired from the Miami Dolphins on Thursday. Here's a look at the players selected at No. 42 in the past 10 NFL drafts:
2003 – FS Ken Hamlin, Seattle Seahawks
2004 – DE Travis LaBoy, Tennessee Titans
2005 – LB Kevin Burnett, Dallas Cowboys
2006 – FS Danieal Manning, Chicago Bears
2007 — OT Tony Ugoh, Indianapolis Colts
2008 – WR Eddie Royal, Denver Broncos
2009 – S Jairus Byrd, Buffalo Bills
2010 — TE Rob Gronkowski, New England Patriots
2011 – LB Brooks Reed, Houston Texans
2012 – OT Jonathan Martin, Miami Dolphins


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Starboard Quad Convertible 76
User Range
After reviewing the findings of this test, Starboard believe that the board we were supplied with may not be consistent with their production 76 and could have a problem with either the fin positioning or the shape itself (see the official response below). The board is currently being returned to Thailand to be checked and a new replacement is being sent to us to review.
Starboard have come on pretty strong this year with their Quad theme. Having had an extremely successful wave board known as the EVO, it was a bit of a surprise to find they were now dropping this and replacing it with a Quad fin wave board. It was clear that they had confidence in the new set-up.
We have already released a 'First Impressions' of the 81 Quad, which we got on with pretty well, so it was going to be interesting to see how its 76 litre counterpart was going to hold up. To add a bit more interest to this test, we chose to test the 'Quad Convertible' which comes as a Quad fin, but includes a single fin track and blanking plates for the quad fins, so that the board can be used as a single fin. The Quad convertible is only available in Wood construction, not in Starboards super light Wood Carbon.
To start with we tested this board as a Quad fin. Like the 81, this board has loads of grip in a straight line and goes upwind amazingly well. It sits quite 'nose down' in the water and feels quite planted, but is controllable and has power off the fins to push against, particularly in lulls and white water etc. It doesn't have the same release and 'free feeling' as a single fin, but also doesn't feel overly sticky or slow considering it has 4 fins and an extra fin slot!
On the wave, things are a little different. We actually had quite a lot of problems with the bottom turn on this board initially. It has a tendency when pushed hard to stop turning. This is particularly noticeable in any turn when your weight is a bit further back. For instance, when overpowered or trying to snap hard around into the section of a small wave the board seems to stop turning and almost trip the rail. After some discussion with Starboard, we realised that we had been supplied with the wrong fins for this board. Instead of the 15 & 12cm fins, we actually had 16 & 11cms. So we swapped to the correct fins.
With the correct fins, the bottom turn was a little better, but we now found it almost impossible to sail in a straight line without spinning out. Overall, it seemed to us that the bigger fins (16 & 11cm) seemed to work the best, so we put these back in and got on with the test.
Ignoring the bottom turn, there is actually quite a lot of nice features of this board. There is the straight line performance, but also on the wave, it holds speed incredibly well and less experienced riders were able to get more turns per wave out of this board than any other, so long as they didnt try to push too hard. The top turn is also good, being much tighter than a single fin and offering more grip than a twin. It is also very good in backside turns, where the fins give good grip to really snap it around on that wide, stable tail.
After spending a good deal of time on this board, we have concluded that on the wave, when going front side, the board is actually pretty good if you do a slower, wider bottom turn and aren't too powered up. Its when you try and snap it tight or are carrying a lot of power in the sail that the problems occur. Less experienced riders may find this ok, but advanced riders will have to adapt their technique to mix a slower, wider bottom turn with a more aggressive, tight top turn.
But it's not finished there, because this board can also be used as a single fin. So, we removed the 4 fins, inserted the blanking plates and selected our 21.5cm MFC 2K quiver fin to try the board in single fin set-up.
And wow, what a surprise we had! Straight away it feels very, very similar to last years EVO, which did so well in our test. In a straight line it rides a little more free and a bit faster than the Quad. It doesn't go upwind as well, but it does have a more lively exciting feel.
On the wave, it has all the merits of the EVO. It feels compact and wide underfoot, holding speed well through the turns and turning with good predictability. The bottom turn is so much better than in Quad mode, allowing you to drive the board as hard as you like without worry. The top turn isn't as tight as the Quad, but can hold its own against the other single fins in this test.
After sailing this board in single fin mode for some time, we were left wondering when we would actually use it as a Quad. The Quad goes upwind a little better, has a tighter top turn and holds a little more speed through the turns, but is considerably disadvantaged by the unpredictable bottom turn. The single fin is more exciting in a straight line, much more predictable on the wave and generally feels like a more polished and fun board to sail.
We get the impression that as a Quad, the 76 isn't quite as refined as the 81 we tried previously. It has merits that are unmatched by other boards in this test, but the unpredictable bottom turn is an issue which we would struggle to offset against the good points of this board. As a single fin however, this board is a whole different prospect and one we liked very much. For those who thought the EVO was dead...it isn't. It's now called the Quad convertible.


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Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns announced farmers may begin sign-up May 17 for four crop and livestock assistance programs designed to help producers unfortunate enough to be in the paths of the 2005 hurricanes.
Johanns authorized the programs, which will distribute $250 million in Section 32 funds, last October. He offered no explanation of why it took more than six months to begin the sign-up for the programs.
USDA is breaking the latest programs into four segments — the Livestock Indemnity Program, Feed Indemnity Program, Hurricane Indemnity Program and Tree Indemnity Program — to improve the ease of administering them across the six states that were hit by destructive hurricanes last year.
To be eligible for this assistance, a producer's loss must have occurred in one of 261 counties that received a primary presidential or secretarial disaster designation due to hurricanes Dennis, Katrina, Ophelia, Rita or Wilma. A list of the eligible counties in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina and Texas is available at: http://www.usda.gov/HurricaneInfo.xml.
The programs and targeted recipients:
The Feed Indemnity Program will provide payments to eligible livestock owners and cash lessees who suffered feed losses or increased feed costs due to the hurricanes. To calculate program payments, FSA will multiply the national payment rate established for each livestock category by the number of eligible livestock.
The Hurricane Indemnity Program will provide payments to eligible producers who suffered crop losses and received either a Federal Crop Insurance Corporation crop insurance indemnity or a FSA Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program (NAP) payment. Producers' HIP benefits will equal 30 percent of the crop insurance indemnity or 30 percent of the NAP payment.
The Tree Indemnity Program will provide payments to eligible owners of commercially grown fruit trees, nut trees, bushes and vines that produce an annual crop and were lost or damaged due to the hurricanes. FSA will base TIP payments on the crop's proximity to the hurricanes based on established tiers, which reflect the severity of damage from least to most severe.
USDA is also providing $25 million in block grants to the state governments of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina and Texas from Section 32 funds for aquaculture producers. The funds are to provide assistance to producers raising aquaculture species in a controlled environment as part of a farming operation. Governors or their designees will determine sign-up procedures for the assistance and will distribute the funds to eligible aquaculture producers to help them recover from the devastating effects of the hurricanes of 2005.
More information on the FIP, HIP, TIP and aquaculture grant programs is available in the online fact sheet at: www.fsa.usda.gov.
USDA officials said they still do not have a sign-up date for most of the $900 million in funds provided by the 2006 Defense Appropriations Act for farmers who suffered natural disaster damages from 2005 hurricanes. President Bush signed the legislation last December.
Of these funds, approximately $200 million is designated for the Emergency Conservation Program, $400 million for the Emergency Forestry Conservation Reserve Program, and $300 million for the Emergency Watershed Protection Program (which is available to communities and landowners in Tennessee, in addition to those in the six previously mentioned states).
USDA has already made $63 million in Emergency Conservation Program funds available to assist agricultural producers struck by hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico region during the calendar year 2005. Eligible agricultural producers may receive up to 100 percent cost-share to remove debris and restore fences and conservation structures.
USDA officials said farmers in southwest Louisiana who have been prevented from planting rice because of the high salt content in fields inundated by Hurricane Rita can file claims for prevented planting losses — if they had federal crop insurance coverage in 2005.
"The Risk Management Agency, which administers the federal crop insurance program, requires that producers use good farming practices to be eligible for insurance payments," the statement said. "In the case of high salinity soil, this would include documentation that the soil was indeed too high in saline content to support plant growth. More information is available at www.rma.usda.gov.
"Producers purchasing crop insurance for the first time in 2006, would not be eligible for prevented planting coverage at this time because the hurricane surge occurred before the 2006 policy coverage took effect. Farmers with questions about insurance payments for saline soil related prevented planting losses should contact their insurance company or agent and should take care to document soil tests or other means of showing that high salinity exists."
Additional information about USDA hurricane assistance is available at USDA Service Centers nationwide and online at http://www.usda.gov/HurricaneInfo.xml.
e-mail: firstname.lastname@example.com


text:
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Brother MFC-9970CDW Toner Cartridges and Parts
The following products are guaranteed to work in
the Brother MFC-9970CDW printer.
|Questions about products for this printer?
Replacing the Brother MFC 9970cdw toner cartridges is a very important part of printing successfully. A bad installation can cause problems that go from bad printing quality to damaging the toner cartridges or other printer parts.
Here are some easy steps that you can use to remove the used toner cartridges and install the new ones without damaging your printer or your toner.
Before start replacing the toner cartridges keep in mind the following safety recommendations:
- - Do not burn or throw used toner cartridges into open flames, as this may cause a fire
- - If toner gets onto your hands or clothing, wash it off immediately with cold water. Do not use warm water as this may set the toner permanently, and you may not be able to remove the toner stains
Step 1: Turn the printer on and open the front cover by pressing the button shown in the picture.
Step 2: Hold the green handle of the drum unit and pull it out until it stops. Keep in mind that you shouldn't leave the drum unit out for too long. If drum unit is exposed to sunlight or room light for a long time, the unit may be damaged.
Step 3: Hold the used toner handle to push it toward the machine to unlock it. Then pull it out of the drum unit.
Step 4: Push to release the latches of the corona wire cover, and open the cover.
Step 5: Clean the corona wire by sliding the green tab from left to right and right to left several times.
Step 6: Make sure you have returned the tab to its initial position, then close the corona wire cover.
Step 7: Unpack the new toner cartridge and shake it from side to side to distribute the toner evenly.
Step 8: Pull off the protective cover.
Step 9: By holding the handle of the toner cartridge, slide it into the drum unit and ull it toward you until it clicks into place.
Step 10: Push the drum unit in and close the front cover.
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text:
Deaths: 4
People unaccounted for: 0
Homes destroyed: 345
Homes damaged: 557
Commercial properties damaged: 33
Commercial properties destroyed: 3
Total properties assessed: 5,592
People evacuated by air: 1,102
People evacuated by road: 707
Miles of county roads damaged: Approximately 150
Cost to replace damaged county roads: $100 million to $150 million
Source: Boulder County Office of Emergency Management
Boulder flood 2013: Rain by day
Mon., Sept. 9: 0.25 inches
Tues, Sept. 10: 1.02 inches
Weds., Sept. 11: 1.92 inches
Thurs., Sept. 12: 9.08 inches
Fri., Sept. 13: 2.44 inches
Sat., Sept. 14: 0.01 inches
Sun., Sept. 15: 1.94 inches
Mon., Sept. 16: 0.49 inches
Eight-day total: 17.15 inches
Source: Meteorologist Matt Kelsch
Flood-related resources:
How to help victims of the flood
Complete coverage:
The talk on the street the first full weekend of September was about the heat. Boulder tied a record for the date with 93 degrees that Sunday.
At Folsom Field the night of Sept. 7, as the University of Colorado football team claimed its first home win in two years, many Buffs fans wore shorts, light shirts and flip-flops, and not much else.
The experts said the late-summer bake was going to ease. They talked about a cold front in the forecast for Monday, Sept. 9, likely to break the September simmer. And forecasters were looking at an unusually high level of moisture in the atmosphere. Some much-needed rain was on the horizon.
Monday dawned as one more beautiful late-summer day. But clouds began to build over the foothills by midday.
Late in the afternoon, the rain started coming down.
There was no way to know the region was in the first hours of what experts would ultimately call a 1,000-year rain and a 100-year flood.
The rain continued across the county throughout the day Tuesday, prompting Erie to close a section of the Coal Creek Trail near Parkdale Circle at midday because of standing water. Little did Erie Parks Division Manager Gary Hegner know at the time that the trail wouldn't be reopening for weeks, if not months.
"Everybody knew there was a lot of rain falling, but not to the extent of what we ended up getting," he said. "I don't think anyone could have anticipated quite the severity of what was about to happen."
Four Mile Fire Chief Bret Gibson said he and his crew of volunteer firefighters kept an eye on the falling rain late Tuesday, especially because the 13 square miles of rugged terrain his district covers is still scarred by the 2010 Fourmile Fire and susceptible to runoff and flooding. But it wasn't until Wednesday morning that Gibson realized what was shaping up outside his window was no ordinary storm.
"Monday and Tuesday, our concern levels weren't that high," he said. "By Wednesday morning, we knew we had achieved ground saturation."
Wednesday, Sept. 11: News flash: 'Storm to boost annual moisture'
"Storm gives Boulder chance at average annual moisture total" was the headline greeting Camera readers in Wednesday's morning edition.
That was after 1.27 inches of rain had fallen between 5 p.m. Monday and 5 p.m. Tuesday. Boulder's total for the year was now at 14.26 inches. "We're doing OK" for annual rainfall, said National Weather Service meteorologist Jim Kalina.
Few had noticed two days before, the NWS had issued a flash-flood watch over the middle of the day for the Hyde Park burn area to the north in Larimer County -- the first of many associated with the historic storm now underway. Forecasters saw a low-pressure system parked over the Utah Basin, fed by a southerly flow of tropical moisture, flanked by a high-pressure ridge to the northeast and upslope conditions that would keep rain in the forecast.
"The incredible expansion and activity on Wednesday is the missing element that didn't show up ahead of time," said Bob Glancy, warning coordination meteorologist for the NWS.
"So, we were reacting to that with warnings on Wednesday. We were thinking on the order of 2 to 3 inches of rain, causing flooding. We weren't thinking on the order of 8 inches of rain, causing flooding."
Earlier that day, a group of 78 fifth-graders from Louisville's Fireside Elementary School -- along with three teachers, a student teacher and 10 parents -- headed up to Cal-Wood Education Center near Jamestown. They anticipated three vigorous days of hiking and games and science-based environmental education -- and being safely back in their beds at home Friday night.
But throughout the day, it would rain. Children and adults alike were getting soaked.
"I didn't realize how much was really coming down," said Shannon Burgert, a fifth-grade teacher at Fireside. "There was nothing to indicate that maybe we shouldn't go up there or anything like that."
Soon, she said, "We were all borrowing gear. My boots fell apart."
Apart from the uncharacteristic downpour, Wednesday seemed at first like just another rainy day down in Boulder. The initial two postings that day on the city of Boulder's Facebook page congratulated CU for ranking 36th on a list of public universities. Another invited residents to design their own transit system tool.
Then came this city posting: "Holy rain Batman! As a result, trails in the Marshall Mesa, Flatirons Vista and Doudy Draw areas south of #Boulder are closed due to muddy conditions."
But the first serious sign things could tilt out of control came from Erie at 6:07 p.m. An officer had responded to a call of standing water on Vista Parkway and a manhole cover that had popped from its moorings.
Not long after that bulletin, two patrol officers checking out flooding in the Grandview neighborhood got stuck and had to call for help. At 6:25 p.m., a transformer caught fire near Erie High School, and power lines were reported down on Erie Parkway. Water on some streets was surging to 3 feet in depth.
"Things started rapidly evolving and rapidly going south on this," Erie Police Chief Marco Vasquez said. "It went from, 'We got some rain going on' to, 'This is turning into a pretty serious event.'"
Longmont was seeing much of the same and was forced to shut down the St. Vrain Greenway at 8 p.m., fearing isolated flooding.
Earlier, the city's public works director, Dale Rademacher, had walked that greenway with City Manager Harold Dominguez.
"Dale said, 'You know, they're predicting four to six inches with this.' And we both went, 'This could be an issue,'" Dominguez told the Longmont Times-Call.
Back in Boulder, the tone on the city's Facebook page would shift with the next posting: "Street flooding is occurring in parts of the City of Boulder. Motorists are urged to avoid driving through flooded areas."
Sam Sussman owns Eight Days a Week Imaging at 840 Pearl St. with his wife, Cheryl. They are no strangers to the sometimes-vicious whims of nature. Their family's home on Sugarloaf Mountain was incinerated to its foundation in the Fourmile Fire. They now live in Eldorado Springs.
"Cheryl went up to a friend's house in Nederland Wednesday night, and she assured me she was going to leave there at 8:30," Sam Sussman said. "She didn't leave until a little after 9, and narrowly made it down the canyon.
"I said, 'Do you girls ever listen to the (expletive) news?'
"She said, 'No.'"
Meanwhile, after two-plus days of steady rain, CU officials could see they were looking at a rapidly deteriorating situation. Louise Vale, vice chancellor for administration, said emergency staff members were called in at 8 p.m.
"I was talking with communications, I was talking with the police department and the facilities management crew about how bad it was, what were they were seeing, and were they going to be able to keep up," she said.
The university sent out its first campuswide text alert at 8:42 p.m., advising of a flash-flood warning in effect for the next two hours, and telling recipients to move to upper levels or higher ground on foot -- as well as to avoid driving or crossing Boulder Creek.
There were widespread reports of students playing "slip and slide" on Farrand Field and tubing in tunnels on campus.
At 9:20 p.m., a flash-flood warning was in effect for Boulder and parts of Boulder County until 10:45 p.m., with continuing rain expected.
The city of Boulder, at 10:01 p.m., activated flood sirens near Boulder Creek, urging anyone near the waterway to seek higher ground immediately. Don't try to cross the creek by any means, people were told.
It was shortly after 10 p.m. that CU launched its first wave of evacuations, with door-to-door notices by family housing managers and campus police at Faculty-Staff Court, Athens Court and the first floors of Newton Court and Marine Street. A total of 381 were forced to temporarily relocate.
"We already had a plan in place for people living there, which has been practiced -- they know where they live and they are very much aware of the (flood) potential," Vale said. "I can't imagine any of those people would say they wouldn't leave."
Boulder police officers now saw street flooding in the areas of 17th and 18th streets on University Hill, Baseline Road and Foothills Parkway, 28th Street underpasses, Ninth Street and Alpine Avenue, Manhattan Drive and Baseline. Rain was pounding the Fourmile Fire burn area.
"The thing that was somewhat of a surprise to everyone was the set-up of the really, really, really, heavy, heavy, heavy, rain over the foothills," said Glancy, of the National Weather Service. "Some areas were getting close to their annual rainfall in a three-day period. This was so far out of the ordinary.
"This was an extremely rare event."
At 10:30 p.m., the National Weather Service updated the flash-flood warning, extending it to 12:45 a.m. Thursday.
Wiyanna Nelson and Wesley Quinlan, both 19, were driving with two friends back to the city down Linden Drive from a birthday party in the hills northwest of Boulder shortly after 11 p.m. Raging water and mud surged around their Subaru.
Stuck, three of the car's occupants -- Nelson and Quinlan, as well as Nathan Jennings -- got out to seek help, while the fourth friend, Emily Briggs, stayed in the car. Nelson and Quinlan were overcome by the raging creek outside and killed as they were swept away. Briggs, who had stayed in the car, survived, as did Jennings.
The situation was worsening in other parts of Boulder County, as well.
Just before midnight, Longmont public works director Rademacher called Dominguez, the city manager, alerting him to the building danger of flooding in the city.
Dominguez had been watching coverage of the weather on television. Soon after Rademacher called him, Dominguez brought emergency manager Dan Eamon into the conversation with a conference call. The decision was made to activate the city's emergency operations center.
"What we didn't know (at the time), or fully appreciate, was the depth of this thing," Rademacher told the Times-Call.
In Lyons, former Longmont Times-Call photographer Greg Lindstrom was monitoring the area of the St. Vrain River bridge at U.S. 36.
"You could hear debris in the water slamming into and rubbing against the bridge," Lindstrom said. "For the next hour, it kept raining very hard, and you could see the water continue to rise. I remember being pretty worried about getting stuck where we were." Just before midnight, a heavy mudslide in Fourmile Canyon rendered the road impassable at Colo. 119 and Gold Hill. There were several inches of water on the roadway.
Across the foothills to the south, Gibson, the Four Mile Fire chief, was getting increasingly worried. Rain measurements had reached three-quarters of an inch per half-hour.
In Jamestown, Little James Creek was quickly swelling into a rushing river five times its normal width and many times its normal speed.
From the mountains to the city streets, the words of Boulder City Manager Jane Brautigam best summarized the deteriorating situation:
"It was all hands on deck."
Thursday, Sept. 12: Quickly going from bad to worse
Little James Creek began ripping buildings from their foundations and sending roofs plunging into basements.
One of those buildings belonged to Joseph Howlett, 72, former owner of the Jamestown Mercantile. Howlett was believed to be crushed to death early Thursday when his home collapsed on him after it was pummeled by rushing waters for hours. His body was finally pulled from the rubble six days later.
In north Boulder early Thursday, Alli Jones cursed to herself as she stood at the top of her stairs looking down to the first floor of her home on 17th Street across from Crest View Elementary.
Water was flooding her first floor. Earlier, Jones had heard the emergency bulletins. Her first plan had been -- denial. She had retreated to the second floor to do some work. But by 1 a.m., she figured she'd better take a look downstairs.
"I thought, 'What am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to turn the power off? Am I supposed to leave the lights on?' I thought, 'If I stand in the water, will I get electrocuted?'"
Soon, she was outside, aided by a family friend, digging trenches around the house. The dark was animated by dozens of teenagers and their parents, some equipped with headlamps, sandbagging, digging, rushing in a frenzy to stem the same floodwaters that were wreaking havoc on their neighborhood school.
In Longmont, just after 1 a.m., police began knocking on doors at the Royal Mobile Home Park near the St. Vrain River, warning people to get out.
"That one was probably the one we were most concerned about," said Longmont emergency manager Dan Eamon. In the foothills, emergency workers set up roadblocks in Fourmile Canyon, sent out notifications to residents and began communicating with Office of Emergency Management personnel in Boulder about what they were seeing around them.
"Because anything that falls in the mountains ends up in the city," Gibson said.
In the city, Boulder Creek was, by 1:13 a.m., roaring at a rate of 3,104 cubic feet per second, according to Boulder police Chief Mark Beckner. Two days before, it had been flowing at a leisurely 54 cfs.
At 1:40 a.m., CU officials issued a text alert ordering faculty and staff residents living in university housing near Boulder Creek to evacuate. Soon, CU and the Boulder Valley School District would both announce they were closing down.
An evacuation order in the North St. Vrain Canyon in Lyons forced residents from their homes about 2:30 a.m. Among those doing so were Gerald Boland and his wife, Cheron, who set out for a friend's home in Hygiene.
Gerald Boland, 80, never got there.
At some point, Boland turned his car around, stopping at Lyons Elementary. He had taught there for 30 years. The school was now an evacuation shelter. He was one of the first to arrive, turning on the lights for the stream of evacuees who soon would be arriving.
It's not known when he left the school, but he was not spotted again. Boland's badly battered truck would be discovered about 200 yards downstream from his home, and his body was finally recovered a week later in the St. Vrain River bed.
About the time that the Bolands evacuated from their home, Longmont activated its Emergency Operations Center.
"What we didn't know (at the time), or fully appreciate, was the depth of this thing," said public works director Rademacher.
The center was up and running by 2:30 a.m. Daylight brought a brief respite in the rainfall in Fourmile Canyon, enough for Gibson and his crew to take stock of the damage wrought to roads and infrastructure overnight.
"We had significant road cuts, we had very high streamflows, and access to the canyon was threatened or completely cut off," he said.
Gibson put out a call to Longmont search-and-rescue crews for some help in making contact with residents, some of whom were trapped behind walls of mud or isolated by gutted roads.
It was to no avail.
"When we called on them, they were already deployed for search-and-rescue operations in Hygiene and Lyons," he said.
About 5 a.m., Sheriff Joe Pelle asked that people stay off the roads in Boulder County that day: Many intersections were impassable, and crews needed access without traffic to respond to urgent calls.
And the rain wouldn't stop. A firefighter trapped in a tree in Lefthand Canyon -- where he spent much of the day, barely surviving -- reported a 15- to 20-foot "wall of water" surging through the canyon.
Up at the Cal-Wood Center near Jamestown, Burgert, the fifth-grade teacher, woke at 5:45 a.m. Going to the shower, she heard camp Executive Director Rafael Salgado on a two-way radio.
"I heard him saying, 'We need to figure out how to notify the principal and the school district,' and I didn't hear much else after that," she said. "I thought, 'Somebody's hurt.' The blood rushed out of me. I was actually relieved to find out what the reason was, because I had no idea what the situation was" down in the city.
The situation virtually everywhere was quickly going from bad to worse.
Leyla Jacobs ventured from her Jamestown home Thursday morning and headed toward town with her son when they saw that Little James Creek was now a turgid river.
"My 17-year-old son said, 'This is like Armageddon,'" she said. "We saw propane tanks that were just shooting down the river."
In Hygiene, a widening St. Vrain River hit the town and mixed with the water in the ponds at Pella Crossing, causing massive flooding along 75th Street. Picking up water from gravel ponds between Hygiene and Longmont, flooding was now headed straight for the neighborhoods east of Airport Road between Ninth and Mountain View avenues.
To the west, Lyons was completely isolated by floodwaters.
"I knew a dam had breached above Lyons," said Lindstrom, the photographer in that town. "I remember being kind of freaked out."
Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle said at a media briefing: "This is not your ordinary day. It is not your ordinary disaster." And, he cautioned, "This event is not over. It's far from over. It's continuing to build."
"I was advising people the initial peak was going to hit the city at 8 in the morning," Longmont's Rademacher said.
But 8 a.m. came and the water in his city, too, was still rising.
The NWS forecast, issued for Denver/Boulder at 9:41 a.m. Thursday, underscored Pelle's words.
It read, in part, "NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DENVER/BOULDER CO ... 941 AM MDT THU SEP 12 2013/ UPDATE/MAJOR FLOODING/FLASH FLOODING EVENT UNDERWAY AT THIS TIME WITH BIBLICAL RAINFALL AMOUNTS REPORTED IN MANY AREAS IN/NEAR THE FOOTHILLS -- THINGS ARE NOT LOOKING GOOD."
"I've been here since 1989, and this was the most significant widespread heavy precipitation I have seen," said meteorologist Glancy.
Just before 11 a.m., CU extended the closure of the Boulder campus through Friday, calling the weather in a text alert "unpredictable." Saturday's home football game versus Fresno State now was in jeopardy. It would be the first game cancellation since 9/11, the second since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Sussman, at his shop at Ninth and Pearl streets, recalled that about 11 a.m., "Someone at the St. Julien Hotel said, 'We're evacuating the spa, and there was a wall of water coming down Boulder Canyon.' We listened to the rumor and sent all the employees home -- and then we realized, we'd sent everybody home on a rumor."
A large surge of water was reported by the Office of Emergency Management at 11:30 a.m. at Logan Mill in Fourmile Creek, exploding from 100 cubic feet per second to 1,000 cfs. Residents downstream were advised to climb to higher ground. Evacuation centers began opening for Boulder, Longmont, Jamestown, Lyons and Nederland.
Gurpreet Gill, a three-year resident of Salina, a town at the junction of Fourmile Canyon and Gold Run Road, had spent the early hours of Thursday placing sandbags around her home and listening to boulders crashing down the creek. By afternoon, her only escape from her property was about to get swept away.
"My bridge had washed out, and my shed had fallen in," she said.
Gill moved her car closer to her home once water had reached the top of the tires and then went to a friend's house to discuss what to do next.
"We sat there watching this massive wall of water coming down," she said. "We saw a car, we saw a boat, we saw a propane tank."
Gill decided to move to higher ground -- her next-door neighbors' house -- where she monitored rising water levels using her car as a giant measuring stick.
The Camera tweeted word at 3:23 p.m. from the U.S. Geological Survey that the storm now qualified as what most refer to as a 100-year flood, although that agency no longer uses that terminology. That determination was based on a creek flow of 4,500 cfs Thursday morning on Boulder Creek at North 75th Street.
Flooding issues by now had caused so many problems at the Longmont wastewater treatment plant that it was shut down and evacuated.
At the NWS data collection point near the National Institute of Standards and Technology, as of 6 p.m. it showed a staggering 9.08 inches of rain had fallen since 6 p.m. Wednesday. It was the highest one-day total on record for Boulder, swamping the previous record of 4.80 inches on July 31, 1919.
Boulder police found themselves no longer able to respond to burglar alarms, harassment calls, traffic accidents and the other routine calls that typically make up the day.
"We got information that Four Mile Creek was flooding north Boulder, Boulder Creek was flooding central Boulder, and that Gregory Canyon was flooding parts of the Hill," Beckner said.
"We were scratching our heads over that one, because we had never planned for flooding that high up on the Hill."
Also, the chief said, "We were finding the flooding was worse than the data would indicate. What we were getting in the streets didn't match what the charts told us should be happening."
The water surging down from the high country was a big problem. But it wasn't the whole problem.
"What we had always trained on and practiced on and talked about, was, 'What if a cell sets up over Fourmile, or Boulder Creek, and dumps 6 inches of rain in an hour? Here's what to expect,'" Beckner said. "But the scenario we had was that the whole region was getting dumped on."
As the night wore on, a Colorado Department of Transportation staffer tried to head up Boulder Canyon but was unable to get anywhere. The second reported mudslide of the night, near the mouth of the canyon, blocked any westward progress.
Police were getting reports that floodwater was redirecting out of Boulder Creek. Now, it was rushing down Canyon Boulevard.
"We had a river on the north side of the creek. It looked like rapids were running across Central Park," Beckner said.
Arapahoe Road at 55th Street was under water. So was Foothills Highway at Baseline, and Table Mesa Drive, too. Police could no longer man every compromised intersection, and many had to be abandoned in order to handle the truly urgent calls.
"We just had to depend on the barricades and cones to do the job, and hoped people had the common sense not to drive through the water," Beckner said.
At 10:15 p.m., an emergency announcement was broadcast downtown that the section of the city from the mouth of Boulder Canyon east to Broadway, and from Marine Street north to Pearl Street, was now being ordered to evacuate. Some residents would hear it clearly, others would hear it as unintelligible garble.
Beckner later said he didn't know how many people actually did evacuate -- and would likely never know.
"What are you going to do?" asked the chief. "We called for an evacuation, but mandatory? You're not going to arrest people who don't leave. We were telling people to evacuate. But if you don't listen to us, at least we told you."
Boulder police average 318 calls for service each day. On Thursday, there were 532. The department on a typical day receives 546 phone calls. On Thursday, there were 2,955.
As midnight drew close, Beckner hopped in a Boulder police Ford Explorer with Deputy Police Chief Greg Testa and Deputy Fire Chief Mike Calderazzo. Through streets filled with water and nearly devoid of traffic, they toured some of the city's more critically affected areas.
"Even having had the reports from the field, once I saw with my own eyes what was going on, I was amazed at the amount of water coming down through the western Hill neighborhoods," Beckner said. At Ninth and Arapahoe, "We sat there watching. We had waterfalls coming off people's yards, falling off people's yards, into the streets."
Meanwhile in Salina, Gill had moved with neighbors Michelle Wieber and Eric Stevens and their two sons to a guesthouse a little farther up the hill from the couple's home. Another couple, Michelle Grainger and Steve Le Goff, joined them for the night.
Gill, equipped with a flashlight, kept watch on the rising water as her neighbors tried to settle down for a fitful night of sleep while Mother Nature raged outside. As she returned from a quick trip to the bathroom outside, she heard a sound unlike anything else she had heard all day.
"What could that be?" she said, as she hurried back inside.
Friday, Sept. 13: 'The mud kept sucking him down'
A wall of mud had slid down the hillside behind them, smashing through the back of the house and burying Stevens and Wieber. Wieber managed to pull herself out from the muck, but Stevens was stuck, both of his legs cemented in the mud.
It was 1 a.m.
For the next 21/2 hours, life would be "sheer hell," Gill said, as she and her three neighbors desperately tried to extract Stevens from the mud that engulfed him. They used spatulas and bowls from Gill's kitchen to try to move the mud to free him. They also used their hands, scraping their fingers raw in the process.
"The mud kept sucking him down as we were digging," Gill said. "And all the while, there's a fear the house could collapse on us."
Gill called 911 but was told there was no way anyone could get to where they were. She was finally able to get through to a neighbor on the phone. With three additional men digging at the mud pile surrounding Stevens, they got him free.
It was 3:30 a.m.
Throughout Fourmile Canyon, the infrastructure was degrading along with the conditions. Gibson, the Four Mile fire chief, said he had men stationed throughout his district, watching drainages and roads, but they were unable to make progress rescuing residents while the rain fell in by the buckets and the creek roared out of control.
"We don't float better than the average civilian," he said.
Also unable to move as well that Friday morning was Rod Mohney, who was trying to reach his girlfriend's house across Little James Creek from his rented cabin. A mudslide had draped itself across Main Street, blocking his way.
"I was 100 yards away from her, but I couldn't reach her," the 51-year-old roofer said.
Returning to his cabin about 1 a.m., Mohney realized he didn't have much time left before the water would be up to his doorstep. He packed his guns, some clothes and headed for higher ground.
Within hours, the creek had unhinged his cabin from its foundation and tipped it on its side. Mohney managed to find what little humor he could in the moment.
"I always wanted my cabin closer to the creek, but I didn't want it that close," he said.
Up the hill from Mohney at Cal-Wood, a gray dawn heralded a grave situation for the elementary schoolkids trapped there. They were told that road conditions had degraded so badly the only way out would be by helicopter -- but that it likely wouldn't happen until Saturday.
"That's when there were some tears," Burgert recalled. "But the other kids did such a beautiful job of consoling. The other kids really got it, and one of the parents really pointed out that people deal with different things in different ways, and kids really took that on and embraced it."
By Friday morning, Beckner implemented a decision he'd arrived at late the previous night: Officers were assigned on 12-hour shifts. The department hadn't been forced to do that since riots rocked the Hill neighborhood in 1997.
On the campus at CU, where an emergency services policy group had been gathering three times a day to update the situation, the midday meeting -- with some of the dozen or so participants "attending" by phone because they couldn't get there -- was focused in part on the day ahead. Some 30,000 people or more were expected to show up for the football game. Playing the game with limited or no attendance, playing the game elsewhere or postponing it were all on the table, said Vale, the vice chancellor for administration.
"We always look at safety first," Vale said. "The other piece was whether we would have law enforcement at that game. We knew at that point we weren't going to be able to provide security for people coming to the game. And by Friday, we thought we couldn't really predict when it was going to stop raining."
Additionally, Boulder had become increasingly isolated by a seemingly endless wave of road and highway closures.
CU police tweeted out from their account at 12:13 p.m. that the game with Fresno State was off, because of logistical challenges from the Boulder flood. The campus, too, would remain closed.
Later in the afternoon, Sussman went from his downtown Boulder business back to the home on Eldorado Springs Drive that he and his wife bought with insurance money after losing everything but their cars and the clothes on their backs in the Fourmile Fire.
"It's raining like a (expletive), and there's just a deluge of water," Sussman said. "The community ditch broke, and water is just pouring through our property. By 6, the water is up to the door."
However, he said, "There wasn't really a sense of panic. Where, with a fire, you get burned if you don't leave, the water just wasn't high enough to be panicked about."
A lot of people across the region by now were in the same situation. Not all of them, like Sussman, had quintuple bypass surgery just a few months ago.
"The neighbors (Steve Johnston, along with sons Ben and Nick) helped me, digging holes, moving big timbers, cutting fences and redirecting water to stabilize the situation. They were the cavalry, and Steve was the head of the cavalry."
Up in Salina, Gill found herself resting her aching limbs at the home she and her neighbor friends had hiked to from the mud-filled horror scene they had experienced that morning. She remembers toweling off her cat, herself, and then resting for the first time in as long as she could remember.
"I just lay down on the ground and I was filled with a sense of, 'Are you kidding me?'" she said. "'Did that just happen?'"
A few hours later, Gill was on the move again, hiking up to Melvina Hill with search-and-rescue personnel and then being driven over to Monument Hill, where she was led on to a Black Hawk helicopter and flown to Boulder Municipal Airport.
The National Guard started pulling people out of Jamestown in the afternoon.
About a half-dozen flights also lifted off out of Salina on Friday afternoon, Gibson said, with the old, the injured and the exhausted getting first seats on the choppers.
He had teams of rescuers trying to find anyone who needed help. And those they didn't find, he was poised to find the next day.
"They stayed in place so that at first light they could start operations again," Gibson said.
Saturday, Sept. 14: Largest U.S. airlift since Katrina
The weather broke Saturday. And while the day would turn out to be a big improvement over Friday, the chaos hadn't quite played itself out yet.
About 1 a.m., Sussman learned that residents of Eldorado Springs were under an evacuation order.
"But we looked outside and it was calm. There was no rushing water," Sussman said. "So we went back to bed."
Later that morning, the Sussmans had another experience that was quickly becoming commonplace throughout the county. They looked in their crawlspace and saw what their neighbor estimated to be 20,000 gallons of water. They did not have flood insurance.
About 9 a.m., the first Lyons-to-Longmont convoy reached the Colo. 66 barricade at 75th Street. Evacuees were shuttled to LifeBridge Christian Church.
"There was a pretty much audible sigh," said the Rev. Drew Depler. "But people are weathering it. They've been through a lot by now."
Back in Jamestown, the Cal-Wood group had been notified that the children should be readied in groups of 20 for loading onto helicopters. At 11 a.m., the first chopper appeared.
"The guy said, 'Give me 28 people.' They were early, and I had not made groups of 28. We had made groups of 20," Burgert said. "He said, 'Hurry, give us as many as you can; our fuel is precious.' ... Some of the kids got on Black Hawks with their parents, and most of us were on Chinooks. I ended going out with the last kids on the fourth group."
The skies over western Boulder County were alive on the first sunny morning in five days, as the National Guard mounted an airlift operation from Boulder Municipal Airport. Lt. Mitch Utterback believed it to be the largest undertaken on U.S. soil since Hurricane Katrina.
By the end of the day, the total evacuated from the battered mountain communities would reach more than 1,200, including some 500 who were driven out of Lyons, one of the most heavily damaged towns.
"It is the most unbelievable thing I've ever seen," said Sally Van Meter, who lives on a hill just outside downtown Lyons.
When the Cal-Wood crew started landing in waves of choppers at the city's airport, there was exultation.
"We landed and there was a line of emergency personnel, firefighter-type people, all in their gear, and they were slapping hands with the kids as they walked toward the terminal," Burgert said.
Fourmile Canyon saw great progress Saturday. Search-and-rescue crews had surveyed every structure in the area, Gibson said. They may not have reached every front door, but they had laid eyes on every home.
"By the end of light Saturday, we had done a primary search of Sunshine, Fourmile and Gold Hill districts," he said.
They also had begun to get a sense of the scope of the destruction in their midst. Gibson said his crew documented numerous damaged and destroyed buildings and roads that had simply disappeared under water or a debris field.
Gold Run Road got the worst of it, he said.
"There was a canyon where the road used to be," Gibson said
Late Saturday night, Longmont's Public Works and Natural Resources Department, working with the Army Corps of Engineers, cut a ditch redirecting water that had been pouring into Longmont neighborhoods near Airport Road back into the St. Vrain River channel.
Sunday, Sept. 15: A final downpour -- and frustration
Sunday morning started out looking as foreboding as the six days preceding, with the city of Boulder again on a flash-flood watch extending to 6 p.m.
At 5:35 a.m., the Colorado Office of Emergency Management announced that late the previous night, President Barack Obama had issued a disaster declaration for Boulder County, ordering federal aid for county residents, to complement state and local recovery efforts in the area affected by severe storms, flooding, landslides and mudslides.
Within a few days, more than 7,600 county residents would be applying for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The rain returned by mid-morning Sunday, and soon it was coming down once again in sheets, grounding rescue helicopters and pushing area homeowners to the brink. Rain persisted well into the afternoon before it finally relented.
Sheriff Pelle didn't sugarcoat things as the cloud cover again dropped low over the foothills.
"The major thing we're dealing with is frustration -- frustration that we can't fly," he said. "Eighty percent of what we are trying to accomplish can only be done by air, and pilots and crews are sitting on their hands."
Gibson, the fire chief, said rescues out of Fourmile Canyon continued Sunday, but by ground rather than air.
"We were hampered by a lack of aircraft," he said. "We had to hike out more people than we wanted. We felt that come Monday, we would keep the operation going so that everyone who wanted to get out, needed to get out, got out."
Frustration prevailed for the Boulder Valley School District, with transportation and structural worries triggering the announcement that schools would remain closed Monday and Tuesday.
CU, however, made official its decision late Sunday afternoon to reopen Monday for classes and normal business operations, signaling a return to something like normalcy for the state's flagship university.
As the day wound down, so did the rainfall, stopping by late afternoon, bringing a sense of relief that, however bad it was, it shouldn't get any worse.
Long road to recovery
It would rain just a bit more Monday morning, bringing Boulder's precipitation total for the year so far to 30.14 inches, topping the city's record for an entire year, which had been 29.93 inches in 1995.
From Sept. 9 through Sept. 16, the storm dropped 17.15 inches of rain on Boulder.
With the rain's end, the long road to recovery began.
Sussman, whose family has endured both cataclysmic fire and ravaging rain in the past three years, said, "I've learned if you're gonna be in a disaster, you want to be in Boulder, Colorado, because you find out that people here are actually nice."
Miraculously, Boulder would learn that no one in the city limits was killed. In Longmont, too, no lives were lost.
Beckner was asked, if the city survived this, could it survive anything?
"I wouldn't ever say that," he said.
But countywide the damage was considerable, and in some locations staggering. Communities such as Salina, Jamestown and Lyons are projecting a comeback will takes months -- at least -- and some neighborhoods in Longmont, too, face long roads to recovery
Russ Schumacher, an assistant professor in the atmospheric science department at Colorado State University, calculated that the rain the city of Boulder experienced has a less than 1-in-1,000 chance of happening in any year. That, he acknowledged, would translate to what would commonly be termed a 1,000-year rain event.
"Based on what we know about the rainfall, and since we have all the rainfall data, essentially that is a straightforward call, to find that the chance of this amount of rain occurring in this area is probably less than one in 1,000 in any given year," Schumacher said.
Glancy, at the National Weather Service, said analysis of this storm will continue for a long time to come, but he is already comfortable saying it exceeded Boulder's flood of May 1969 -- the previous largest flood most people living here can recall.
"This is one for the record books," Glancy said. "There already has been discussion whether this was a 100- or 1,000-year event ... we know it is somewhere in excess of a 100-year flood."
Boulder County, battered and more than a little bruised, had withstood perhaps the greatest storm many of its residents will ever see -- the kind of storm they'd been warned of for decades.
Boulder Mayor Matt Appelbaum summed it up this way:
"We will learn from this. And we will be better."


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"Not easily dispelled or discouraged."
That's the definition of "tenacious."
And there ought to be a photo of a finance and insurance manager beside that definition.
Take my blog last week. I discussed how the 2 percent hike in the payroll tax will mean smaller paychecks for many Americans this year. In turn, that might make it tougher to sell F&I products because some consumers won't have an additional $50 or more a month to spend on extras. But, I concluded, it would be interesting to see how F&I managers would find a way around this roadblock.
Indeed it was interesting, to say the least.
The blog garnered more than a dozen dissenting comments from F&I managers on Facebook's Ethical F&I Managers page.
Most managers politely, but doggedly, argued that tough economic times are nothing new to them, yet they always rise above the challenges to achieve F&I sales success.
As one unbowed F&I manager wrote: "The reduced take home and therefore discretionary pay is actually a boon to a professional F&I manager. It means in reality that the consumer is even LESS able to self-insure or to be able to out-of-pocket afford those potential expenses."
These poorer consumers will see more clearly the value in products such as extended-service contracts and wheel-and-tire protection, he insisted.
Another manager tested a sales pitch on me after I commented in the posts that $895 for wheel-and-tire protection is a lot of money.
"If that $895 saves a consumer from having to come out of pocket a thousand dollars to replace a tire and wheel then it was worth it, right?" wrote the manager.
In fact, the frenzied discussion compelled the first F&I manager to make a bold prediction: F&I sales will have a "banner" year in 2013 — precisely because people have less income.


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THE SQL Server Blog Spot on the Web
This morning I presented my session Manage SQL Server System and Performance Data with PowerShell at Tech Ed NA in New Orleans. We had a good sized audience who were very responsive and had many great questions. I had a great time presenting and the feedback I've gotten so far tells me the audience enjoyed it as well.
I really appreciate everyone's coming out for the session and look forward to doing it again at Tech Ed Europe in Madrid later this month. I've attached the slide deck and demos for everyone to try out.
Really enjoyed your presentation yesterday. Followed your advice and walked over the MS area and asked about PowerShell remoting. Got the skinny on that and the plans for PS 4.0.
great stuff Allen. your demos just nailed something I tried to do, but didn't have time for. Looking forward to implementing this back home. Thanks
I thoroughly enjoyed this session. It's been what I have been looking to do for a long time. Manage SQL via the powershell for the various tasks I need to perform daily or on demand. Thanks so much and I'll be looking for you at future sessions. Enjoy Madrid.
Thanks for sharing, Allen - this is great stuff.
Thanks for this it is excellent. I'm no powershell expert but am I right in thinking that the getperf.ps1 script must exist and run on every server you want to collect data from and can't be executed from a Central Management Server against a remote server? Thanks.
Thanks, Rob. You can run the script against a remote server. I've found that it's fine for up to about three servers, but gets bogged down beyond that. I generally just run it on each server, sending the data to a central database for reporting. (I put it in an Agent job that starts automatically whenever SQL Server is restarted.)
Thanks Allen that's helpful to know, I can't see where it connects to the remote server in the script but I think I just need to read through it a few more times!! thanks again
The $srv parameter you supply on the command line connects to the Windows Server and finds all SQL Server instances running on that machine. The testing I've done with multiple servers involved changing the script to supply a list of server names. It's better to just run one per machine, per my earlier comment.
I seem to be missing a couple of tables, Analysis.DatabaseUsage and Analysis.DiskUsage. How do these get created? I've created twelve tables in the Analysis schema, using the scripts you kindly provided in the zip file. Thanks.
Hi Allen,
It would be helpful for us if we have a step by step document on how to deploy the SSRS reports.
This is what I am looking for.
Thanks Allen :)


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MadSerg needed a new web page design and created a contest on 99designs.
A winner was selected from 52 designs submitted by 14 freelance designers.
We are building a new product for web, android and iphone. A wallpaper app/website. We need a nice looking, fresh design. We've been in the industry for many years and know what works, and what doesn't. We are a small team of designers, programmers and marketers. Our focus is on mobile apps right now, so we can not devote enough time to our website. We need some one to help us!
Our market is all ages. The design needs to be light and simple for everyone to understand. Use of icons is a big plus but dont over do it. The most important element of the website should be wallpapers itself, so emphasize on that the most.
Design needs to be light, colorful and fun! This is a wallpaper website and it needs to have a simple, fast loading design. We would like you to stick to our existing navigation elements we already have on our site. And that means you are welcome to use any creative way to display website elements, as long as the navigation of categories, breadcrumb and top navigation is intact.
We like colors: black, white and blue + some red or green. But if you have a great color combo in mind, do not be afraid to suggest!
You are free to create any variation of the logo. This would be a plus!
We also need some space/icons for our social network links (facebook, twitter, etc)
1. homepage - top navigation, login/password box with links to login/register pages, resolution links, wallpapers list, category links, statistics block.
2. wallpaper page - everything that homepage has + breadcrumb, wallpaper, download links/buttons, wallpaper details, rating, comments block, related wallpapers list.
We love the new design of http://www.iconspedia.com/ I think something like that would work great for us!