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The audiophile enthusiasm is a very addicting one because it provides us with a conduit for our music (which we already love), and it presents that music in a particular fashion or style – the "sound" (perceivable character) of certain technologies or formats as it is identifiable from other "sounds" of other technologies or formats. In this fashion we get to play with and appreciate the different manners of presentation of the music as well as the music itself.
As an easy example one can cite the difference in sonic characteristics between an iPod playing a commercially-produced MP3 vs. a record player playing a vinyl LP. And while this particular example may be very obvious and easy to spot, there are far more nuanced and refined, miniscule-yet-critical differences to be noticed and noted. Drilling down several hundred (or more) levels, we are talking about noticing and noting apparent sonic-differences between such infinitesimally small things such as the various stylus profiles of a phonograph cartridge (and smaller!).
Ever since the audio hobby gained mainstream popularity (probably mid-1950's, coinciding with Edgar Villchur's invention of the acoustic-suspension loudspeaker), there has been a desire and need for professional evaluation to help guide the consumer toward "good" products and away from "bad" products. As a consequence various critical journals have been published addressing the growing demand for this kind of evaluation. And just as the technology evolved historically, so have the approaches to evaluation evolved, engraving history as they went.
This history isn't necessarily interesting on its own in any broad/mainstream sense, and I therefore couldn't in good conscience recommend as page-turners books like "Sound Bites" or "Bang & Olufsen" to folks who are not already predisposed to the subject. However, there is an aspect about this history, heretofore unexamined (to my knowledge), that should be interesting to everyone: As the approaches to critical evaluation evolved, and as the language used to describe evaluated performance developed, the enthusiast reading the criticism increased their own awareness of various performance attributes and began to notice more and finer apparent aspects of performance than ever before.
This ability of language to interact with and effect perception has always been utterly fascinating to me, and it is why I've decided to write these introductory remarks before delving into the actual history I've chosen to discuss.
I was first alerted to this "hypnotic effect" that language has by the strangely fascinating writings of Robert Anton Wilson, who deftly delved into the very messy world that blossoms in the nexus between philosophy, science, psychology, mysticism, and politics. Among those writings that were early influences on the development of my emerging personal philosophy counted several of his books, not the least of which were "Prometheus Rising" and "Quantum Psychology," but for those who knew-me-back-when, the roller-coaster-ride of his "The Illuminatus! Trilogy" inspired me such that I named my first company: Illuminati (a name which still rings familiar bells for a handful of oldtimers but has otherwise been lost to the relentless abrasion of time).
During that ca: 1993-era I was also engaged in some writing. My first article for Positive-Feedback ("The Journal Of The Oregon Triode Society") was published in their Vol.4, No.2 issue and was merely a "designer's notes" article wherein I was graciously given the space to talk about my nascent company and its single (and singular) product: the "Datastream" 75 Ohm digital cable. In the same issue I also ran a full-page advert for the company on page 1, replete with foreboding "eye-in-the-triangle" mystical symbolism (inspired by Wilson's book-covers, of course), technical claims for the Datastream itself, and some contact information.
It was also in those hallowed pages that I became familiar with the writing of Mr. Clark Johnsen and, thanks to an introduction/prodding by editor and dear friend Dr. David Robinson, many long and really interesting telephone conversations were had with Clark. During that time I recall faxing to Clark the text of an article that I wanted to submit to the magazine, as I wanted him to evaluate it from an editor's perspective. A subsequent telephone call from him helped me to identify what amounted to a fairly chronic problem in my writing: the word "is"
I won't try to recall the conversation itself except to note that it was during this particular round of editorial counseling that he hipped me to the work of Alfred Korzybki as founder of General Semantics and inspiration for the invention of E-Prime by D. David Bourland. E-Prime was, at its simplest, the English language without any forms of the verb "to be" – codifying the purpose of clarifying or delineating the differences between opinion and fact with an overarching semantic "rule" of sorts.
Clark introduced me to Korzybski's writings, and Korzybski taught me about the effect of language upon perception:
One day, Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students, and he interrupted the lesson suddenly in order to retrieve a packet of biscuits, wrapped in white paper, from his briefcase. He muttered that he just had to eat something, and he asked the students on the seats in the front row if they would also like a biscuit. A few students took a biscuit. "Nice biscuit, don't you think," said Korzybski, while he took a second one. The students were chewing vigorously. Then he tore the white paper from the biscuits, in order to reveal the original packaging. On it was a big picture of a dog's head and the words "Dog Cookies." The students looked at the package, and were shocked. Two of them wanted to vomit, put their hands in front of their mouths, and ran out of the lecture hall to the toilet. "You see," Korzybski remarked, "I have just demonstrated that people don't just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter."
The Map Is Not The Territory
The Menu Is Not The Meal
From these basics I began to understand a fundamental and pervasive aspect of all language, including mathematics and music:
These are invented systems of abstractions that we, as a species, use to create representative approximations of phenomena that we imperfectly encounter through sense-perceptions –
– that, as a bad habit, we tend to confuse these essentially-symbolic abstractions ("useful models") for something we dare to call "The Truth" – a quality or condition that we are otherwise unprepared and ill-equipped to approach in actuality.
More simply stated: We have no access to The Whole Truth – so we pretend that our abstractions and linguistic modeling are sufficient proxies.
Without getting too, too esoteric and airy-fairy I relate this for two reasons:
First: to confess, as it were, sombunall of the influences that have affected my thinking about my thinking (and writing)
Second: as a somewhat of a demonstration that the evolution of the evaluative philosophy and language that was developed and employed by the most influential journalists in our industry may have directly catalyzed the development of capacities in the enthusiast/reader, enabling them to listen more sensitively and deeply.
This latter part has the potential to be important to the reader who wasn't previously aware of the history, or aware of the writings of those scribes who founded those critical tangents (and who are probably the reason that you might use words like "warm" or "liquid" or "stringent" or "steely" when describing the sound of an audio component).
The nature of our enthusiasm for things-audio seems to subdivide psychologically and philosophically into approaches that reviewers – and also, hobbyists – adopt when approaching the task of rendering an opinion about some audio "thing" they might be evaluating. As major philosophical emphases I believe these three are abundantly evident:
So : Venn Diagram, above. You can see the major emphases in the major sets, the intersection of areas, and that little portion in the middle where I suspect that most of us actually move around. One day or hour or moment you might be strictly in the middle, other days/hours/moments you might be leaning more toward an emphasis.
Examining each of these philosophies, at least as I tend to think of them :
The 20th Century: No philosophical obsession seems more entrenched as a matter fundamental to its emblematic compulsive-intellectualism (and its Cartesian anxiety) as Objectivism. Though popularized as a political and moral philosophy by Ayn Rand, it remains ostensibly a byproduct of a mechanistic-materialism that arose as a result of the methods that had been developed, evolved, and adapted out of (mostly) dispassionate 17th Century "scientific" inquiry and discipline. At its core, it demands that humans can only interact with portions of "Objective Reality" through imperfect sense-perceptions, and that knowledge about Objective Reality can only be arrived at, piecemeal, through a system of inquiry that is based upon empirical data gathering, methodical testing, and inductive logic.
Namely: Scientific Method
Among the most extreme adherents of Audio Objectivism you might find the particular philosophy emerge: If it can't be measured, it can't be heard.
Superbly reasonable, really – especially when dealing with feats of engineering such as amplifiers, loudspeakers, and (good Lord!) cables. After all, these things are designed and built with certain rules in mind and do behave predictably according to those rules. The most extreme adherents dogmatically insist as an article of faith (irony!), that if two devices of the same sort measure identically … they will perform identically. And because "The Rules" are known, and because the designers and engineers subject their devices to "The Rules," there must be very little purpose spending one's money on the more expensive of two similar options if they measure identically.
This stems from a notion pregnant within this philosophy that audio equipment of all sorts are intended to fulfill a strict purpose: to preserve, as faithfully as possible, the signal traveling from one end of the chain to the other. And because the signal is defined by and limited to the framework set forth by The Rules, measurement according to The Rules and its approved metrics are all that would be needed to determine the "fidelity" of the device under test. Very tidy little system there.
These were very compelling arguments to make, especially in the 1950's when there was much more of a general interest and hopefulness about Science-as-Savior, creating an interesting opportunity for Julian Hirsch (together with Gladden Houck) to establish a new journalistic model: laboratory testing as the arbiter of quality. They founded the Audio League, a partnership which later morphed into the now-legendary Hirsch-Houck Laboratories, out of which reviews were generated for some of the magazines of the time. Julian gained particular notoriety for his work at Stereo Review, and his philosophy and methods gradually infused somewhat of an industry-wide morality that was, perhaps, most baldly-stated by High Fidelity's Michael Riggs when, fatwa-like, he declared:
… laboratory testing (properly done) can tell us pretty much everything we need to know about the performance of a typical piece of electronics…We know what the important characteristics are, how to measure them, and how to interpret the results.
Rebelliously – if someone were to insist that there exist perceptible differences in sonic performance between components that measured the same – this would not be casually dismissed as a modest error. It would likely have been considered an outrage, an insult against the Crown, and deserving of a heretic's fate.
One heretic in particular decided to flee the compound and establish a magazine for himself, based upon a principle alien to the high-priests bearing witness to the Objectivist Canon:
That rebel was J. Gordon Holt and his magazine was named Stereophile.
No discussion about the Subjectivist school in the audio industry can be launched without paying homage to Gordon, who in 1962 established Stereophile after parting ways with Objectivist (and advert-driven) High-Fidelity Magazine.
Gordon's approach was a major departure from the lab-centric OCD-world that he left behind: he tested and judged audio components based upon the way that they sounded in his audio system and listening environment. At the time this was probably seen as quite radical, and Gordon used his own bully-pulpit to demonstrate an important point about emphasis: Although measurements with machines could be used to demonstrate how something behaved according to the accepted engineering principles of the time, review-emphasis more properly belonged upon the listening experience itself, because that is what the vast majority of consumers do. He shifted focus from the soullessness of the mechanistic priority ("to preserve, as faithfully as possible, the signal") to the humanistic priority: to communicate, as convincingly as possible, the illusion of live sound. Not one to be airy-fairy, though, Gordon also embraced ABX (double-blind) testing as a means of also testing the human being … a practice looked upon with baleful eyes and no shortage of deep skepticism.
His writing was concise, marrying his technical experience with his finely-honed listening skills. As his style evolved, so did the lexicon of words that he used to describe what it was he heard. He later penned The Audio Glossary for Stereophile to clarify his usage of language in the context of his evaluations. To call J. Gordon Holt "The Father of High End Audio" bears witness, correctly in my opinion, that his radical shift in emphasis from prioritizing measured performance to prioritizing apparent performance was the major legitimizing force that helped little-known companies later become the doyens of the industry and emblems of the new Faith. So great was Stereophile's influence and so compelling was Gordon's style and vision that a legendary, rival magazine was inspired and launched.
The Abso!ute Sound
As with Gordon, no examination of the subjectivist school of audio reviewing could possibly be complete without mention of Harry Pearson Jr. and the magazine that he had first published in 1973: The Abso!ute Sound ("TAS"). If J. Gordon Holt was a Martin Luther to Julian Hirsch's Pope Leo X, then – as a matter of contextual comparison – Harry Pearson Jr. was a Carl Jung (or, perhaps, an Aleister Crowley).
Harry was a wordsmith who was very careful about his craft, and as a result his reviews could often flow almost poetically without a wasted word to be found. However, it isn't necessarily for his manicured prose that he is best known, but rather for his credo and guiding philosophy: That the sole purpose of an audio system in the home is to faithfully recreate the illusion of live, unamplified acoustic instruments playing in a real acoustic space – a Musical Event. A shift in emphasis – slight, but critical – had occurred at Harry's Sea Cliff, NY listening-laboratory, but you could be forgiven if you missed it:
Harry's evaluations were very serious, methodical examinations of MUSIC, as projected via the sound of those objects collectively-termed "audio system" – and this emphasis, or focus-shift on music and "musicality" distinguished Harry from his subjectivist-peers who seemed to regard music as sound and, thereby, for the purposes of reviewing, interchangeable with sounds of all kinds (trains, planes, automobiles, ad nauseam). Harry's focus on "musicality" sought the artistry, communication, and meaning emanating from the music perhaps more than it sought the individual sonic elements that assembled the sonic-gestalt.
Whereas Gordon seemed the clinician after a fashion, totemizing a laundry list of sonic performance attributes with nary a mention of the particular music he used to make his evaluations, Harry adopted a different tone and manner: making the music central to the evaluation from a connoisseur's perspective was key to parsing the nuances of performance. The reviewer's dispassionate distance from the subject would no longer be tolerated, and the subject wasn't audio gear per se, it was music – and music was art. Audio gear was in service to the art. Who but a practiced lover of art could truly appreciate and evaluate the sound of a stereo?
The performance of an audio system had to be compared to the sound of live, un-amplified music in a real performance space, and its emotional effect of the music on the listener also became an important element of the overall evaluation. Between Gordon and Harry, Stereophile and The Abso!ute Sound, a phalanx against the Empire of Objectivists was formed, and the case was successfully made for evaluating components from the POV of the listener. The Stereophile/TAS standard, in its various iterations, seems to have stood as the dominant arbiter for more than four decades.
To state it plainly as regards our enthusiasm for audio and music, the Hedonist simply demands that – regardless of the objectively acquired measurements, and despite the opinions of professional reviewers as to how well a piece of gear contributes to illusion of "live music in a real space" – if the listener isn't enjoying the experience, what's the point?
And while this may seem suspiciously facile to some, there seems an almost impenetrable grace to its selfishness. Audio is considered a luxury with an aesthetic task to perform, and it will rank in importance or desirability according to the pleasure it evokes. Given the vast numbers of musicians plying their craft in the studio with virtual-instruments/synthesizers/computers (and, therefore, decidedly not "acoustic" in any way), the argument favoring the primacy of individual pleasure over any kind of broadly-applied standard can easily find sympathy, and indeed has found a few cautious champions in reviewing circles: the more recent writings from TAS' Executive Editor Jonathan Valin seem to be an effort to legitimize the hedonic-aesthetic principle as one of several ways to approach judgement and opinion for audio gear. The Hedonic-Aesthetic Principle is the New Heresy, and the Subjectivists are now the ones that cast the shadows of old dominions.
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The Jersey Bicycling magazine named one of its top modern designs. This is the jersey that holds our contradictory feeling about the sport on the two sides. The Japanese script reads Good and Bad.
A race or aero cut high performance jersey with laser-cut long sleeves designed to contour your body.

subset: commoncrawl


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Tom Martin Q&A: Sewer plan to bring big changes in city development
For many years, generations actually, Lexington's sanitary and storm water sewer systems were so improperly maintained that when it rains hard — as it can from time to time — our sewage flows directly into our streams. And in all too many instances, our homes.
These episodes are known as "Sanitary Sewer Overflows" or SSO's. And they are illegal under the federal Clean Water Act. This violation was the basis of a 2006 lawsuit filed against Lexington by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Commonwealth of Kentucky. The lawsuit was settled when the city entered into a Consent Decree in 2011, giving Lexington 10 years to untangle its sewage systems and bring them into compliance. The agreement requires the city to establish a Capacity Assurance Program. A seven-member "CAP Task Force" heard the concerns and ideas of elected and city government officials as well as a variety of stakeholders including Commerce Lexington, Fayette County Public Schools, the University of Kentucky and Transylvania, home builders, developers, the Fayette Alliance and neighborhood associations.
The task force met on 11 occasions in 2012 and produced 19 recommendations for how the CAP program should work and be managed. The city was required to submit this plan to the EPA in early January of this year and it now awaits EPA approval. Once the plan receives the agency's blessing, the city will then have 30-days to begin implementation.
That work, however, has already begun, overseen by Charles Martin, Director of the city's Division of Water Quality. He shared the details of the CAP program in an interview with Tom Martin.
Tom Martin: What is the Capacity Assurance Program?
Charles Martin: Essentially, the Consent Decree requires us to demonstrate that there is capacity in the sanitary sewer system before we allow new connections to the system, which is something we haven't done in the past. With this new CAP program, if we can't demonstrate that we have capacity then we have to make repairs in order to allow those new connections to happen. The premise is, if you're going to connect new stuff you have to it make it better than it was before that connection was made.
TM: Remedial Measures Plans were developed for each of the city's seven Urban Watersheds. What are those and are they awaiting EPA approval?
CM: They are waiting for approval, as well. And it's the list of capital projects that are intended to make sanitary sewer overflows (SSO's) essentially less frequent or less pervasive than they are today.
TM: And how many of them are there?
CM: In the Consent Decree it lists 111 recurring sanitary sewer overflows which means that they typically happened more than once in a 12-month rolling period.
TM: And so these are defects, flaws in the system, that kind of thing?
CM: Mostly they are capacity related - when there's too much rain water getting into the sanitary sewer system - it should not be there, it should be in the storm sewer system - and when it rains the system gets backed up much like a roadway gets backed up after a basketball game lets out. And instead of getting backed up at a traffic light it overflows out of a manhole or a pump station.
TM: This Capacity Assurance Program revolves around a credit banking system. What is the credit bank?
CM: Credit banks are geographic locations within the Urban Service Area that are drawn around where these recurring SSO's occur. And basically it is in some of those banks that we would be able to have enough capacity to allow somebody to connect without a credit. In other cases where we've got a negative capacity balance, there you need credits, which are in gallons-per-day, in order to move forward with the connection that you want to have.
TM: People are going to begin to see fairly soon that you have come up with a way to build into the system quite a few credits; I'm referring to storage tanks that will begin appearing around the county. Can you tell us more about those?
CM: Yeah, one of the biggest bank deficits that we have is at both treatment plants so that really makes us unable to certify capacity anywhere right now. So we've focused very early on resolving the negative balances associated with our two treatment plants. There is a project that is to begin in the middle of next year that would construct over 20 million gallons of offline storage at the town branch plant off of Old Frankfort Pike. That 20 million gallons then would be available for development in that credit bank, including the downtown area in order for them to be able to get approval for connection and to be able to continue their projects without concern about CAP. A similar type of project is about a year behind that at West Hickman.
TM: And does a gallon count as a credit unit?
CM: It depends on the circumstance. Storage has a 1 to 1 credit ratio except in West Hickman. The credits vary depending on the type of corrective action you make and also geographically where it is. Because some areas of town are much, much worse than others and EPA set it up so you'd have to do more in those worse areas.
TM: Why West Hickman?
CM: Of those 111 recurring sanitary sewer overflows I mentioned, I would say nearly 60 to 70 percent are in the West Hickman drainage area.
TM: And where is that?
CM: That is roughly starting from the New Southland Christian campus moving across Alumni Drive into the Gainesway area and ultimately down to Veterans Park.
TM: What is the Credit Harvest Date?
CM: The Consent Decree, when we signed it in 2008, was rejected by the federal judge. So there was a long appeal process. During that time we made repairs to the sanitary sewer system and we wanted to make sure that we got full credit for everything that we had done between the time of signing it and the time that the judge actually signed it, which was nearly three years. So EPA agreed to allow us to have a Credit Harvest Date that dated all the way back to 2008. And that was a change in the way the Consent Decree was written because we wouldn't have gotten those credits if we had followed the Consent Decree.
TM: Mr. Developer or Mr. Builder is coming to you and wants to engage in building a property. Will a fee or a deposit be required for a capacity request of reviews?
CM: In most cases newly developed projects that are just coming through the planning process will be required to pay a fee. There is a $450.00 administrative review fee for the application, basically because we are outsourcing a lot of that work. Many of the plans that were grandfathered, ones that were already in process that maybe hadn't built out all the way, the ordinance and the task force has decided not to impose a fee on them since they had already really been through the process. But by and large, yes. There will be fees associated with this, not only for the application but also for the privilege to reserve capacity, moving forward.
TM: When you're asked to make a capacity determination, do you have only so many days or weeks to get that done?
CM: Yes, the ordinance says that we will have 10 days to at least provide some type of response and 10 days following that. Right now we're getting responses back to people in two or three days. Our goal is to exceed that. But the ordinance does have a specific provision for that.
TM: As this comes on line do you anticipate that there's going to be a waiting list?
CM: There's the possibility of one. We don't have one yet and I'm not looking forward to it. There is some strong potential given that the economy seems to be turning around.
TM: What about the longevity of these credits, reserve credits, tap-on permits? Will they expire at some point?
CM: Once you have received a permanent allocation that you get as part of your development plan approval, they are yours forever; they stay with that property. To remove those, even if your project may not have gone through, would be considered a partial taking of the value of that property and so it needs to stay with the property.
TM: Can you transfer them? Can you sell them?
CM: No, the task force recommended not creating a third party market for this and largely it's because it's very hard for us to track where they are.
TM: What is the "Developer Earned Credit Program?"
CM: That's a program we are still working on right now but what it basically allows is a developer who potentially ends up on the wait list, if they want to move ahead and not be subject to the wait list, then it gives them a mechanism to go out and generate capacity credits on their own, based on their investment and they own them. They don't share them with anybody so they can use them for their project.
TM: How do they earn those credits?
CM: Well, a variety of different ways and it's one of the things that we are trying to put together: a guidance document that tells people how they can do that. But for example, they could go out and repair sections of sanitary sewers under our direction and then they get credits for that. You can get credits for a lot of different things whether it be a storage tank or plugging a leaking manhole. They all have different values, but any corrective action that you make that eliminates some of the water that is getting into the system has a gallon per day credit value to it.
TM: No doubt there are going to be disputes over capacity determinations. How do you plan to work those out?
CM: Well, the ordinance is specific on what the appeal process would be and that they would make their appeal to the Commissioner of Environmental Quality & Public Works and of course they also have due process of law, if necessary.
TM: Are any categories or classes of facilities excluded from CAP?
CM: Well, they're not necessarily excluded from CAP - everybody is included in CAP - but some things are considered to be essential services, public schools, health care facilities and public safety facilities, are specifically identified in the Consent Decree and I think that EPA recognizes that those things are essential fabrics of a community and that they should be able to move forward on the merits of their need. From the CAP's standpoint because they get a green light they are good to go but I still have to be able to deduct that additional flow from that CAP bank. So they have an impact to the CAP and the fact is that they might create a negative situation where somebody is having a need come moving forward.
TM: Will the ordinance that we have on the books now and the land development processes we have at LFUCG support CAP implementation? Or do you think that there are going to have to be some changes?
CM: I believe that they support them right now. There is a provision of the zoning ordinance that basically says that you can't move forward and have a development plan certified unless you have demonstrated that you've satisfied the CAP provisions. Likewise for projects that don't go through the development plan process there's the stopper at the building permit desk. You can't get a building permit without a tap-on first. And that was important for us because we didn't want people investing money in a building permit and in construction to find out they couldn't get sewer service. An aftermath though for the building community is that this was completely opposite from how they have done it in the past and so we've had to do a lot of education with builders and such to say that is different than it was before. I don't see any changes in it as much as I see we're going to have to continue to educate and work with the stakeholders to get them adjusted to the new way we are doing it.
TM: For the home builder, how many credits will be needed to build a house?
CM: For a new house it's not so much credits as a value. Under the CAP, the value of a residential single family home is 192 gallons per day. If you wanted to build a house it depends again on that geographic region, but you may have to recover as much as 600 gallons a day of flow to allow that single house to go into place because it's all about ratios. In some cases that you to have reclaim 4 gallons for every gallon that you add and that can be very conservative. But I want to make a point here: if you have an existing home and you tear your house down, you still have sewer capacity. There is a thing called a Use of Record and that was a big thing folks were worried about - 'if my house burns down, do I lose my sewer capacity?' No, you still have that as a privilege of that particular parcel.
TM: Are there different rules for urban infill versus suburban development?
CM: No, there are not. The CAP has no concept of infill versus suburban development. It's all about whether or not there is capacity within the system and it varies again within the system depending on the severity of it. Someone had mentioned to me, 'well maybe we need to expand the Urban Service Boundary and be able to avoid this CAP situation.' It doesn't matter. Because if they want public sewage that means it has to go to one of the two treatment plans and both of them have negative CAP balances right now.
TM: You've been waiting for EPA approval for about 9 months, been quite some time now. Correct?
CM: Yeah, on the Remedial Measures Plan we've been awaiting even longer than that. Sometimes because they have a lot of other things going on they are not necessarily prompt on their approvals. And I'm okay with that. We've been implementing things in a way it's kind of nice, you're playing without the clock and it's nice to win the game when the clocks not running.
TM: So you're going forward with some of this remedial work anyway? We are actually seeing some of that now.
CM: Yes, yes you are. And you're about ready to see more of it here in the very near future.
TM: As this planning was coming about by the Task Force and by all these stakeholders at the table was economic impact discussed? Was it taken into account?
CM: Yeah. I think there was a lot of concern about that because obviously recovering from the great recession, there's a lot of concern that this doesn't become an impediment of that. Unfortunately, CAP is driven by eliminating these un-permitted violations of federal law, as you pointed out. But I think even EPA recognized that even though they legally probably had the authority to put us on a moratorium, they chose not to. Instead, they recommended this CAP program that allows us to still do business, but make it better than it was before, while doing business. It's the challenges of implementing that in a challenging environment and especially trying to do it quickly because everyone's been sitting on projects for an extended period of time because of the economic conditions. Everybody's really ripe to go and that's challenging for us.
TM: What's your best guess on how long it will take to complete all this work, and the big question is how much will it all cost in the end?
CM: I think to complete the sanitary obligations under the Consent Decree that we're looking at another 10 years to be able to do that. How much it's going to cost? The original estimates for the Remedial Measures Plan alone, which is the large capital, was nearly $600 million. We're looking at every possible way to deliver the exact same product for considerably less than that. Mayor Gray's made it clear to us is that is his goal and his intention and he's helped us in a lot of ways in being able to accomplish that. One thing that folks need to understand though is that after we make whatever investment we make in our sewer system, it does not mean we will never have sanitary sewer overflows again. No city I've ever dealt with, and I've been in this business 30 years, has ever been able to get all the water out of their system. So if you have a severe enough rainstorm you're still going to have overflows. But the cost associated with potential fines during those less frequent overflows is a fraction of the cost that it would be to make this system larger than what we're recommending right now. I'll give you an example: for 3.2" of rain we had a cost estimate of $600 million. For another ½" of rain protection it was $900 million. It increases exponentially and it just didn't make sense for this community to invest that kind of money for another ½" of rain.
TM: Where is all that money going to come from?
CM: Sewer user fees. By and large, those of us who live in Fayette County and pay sewer user fees through LexServ are going to bear the burden of it. We've been able to mix some grants into that although the grant thing from the federal level is not as productive as it once was. We're also utilizing some low interest loans that have come through EPA. But ultimately the rate payers are going to bear the burden.
TM: Just to be clear, we are paying sewer use fees now, so should we anticipate that they are going to be going up?
CM: I think that it's inevitable that they will. We're working really hard to make the revenue that we have available to us right now, stretch as far as we can. We had two successive rate increases in 2009 and in 2010 and they were to last us until 2012. And here we are in the latter part of 2013 and we're not contemplating a rate increase in the near future.
TM: We're in this situation because of many, many, many years of neglect. There is really no other way to put it. Kicking the can down the road. Lexington is certainly not alone in that regard. Many, many cities have done that. How far into the future is it reasonable to expect that these repairs and these new procedures will keep us legal and clean or do you anticipate that this is going to be a matter of just ongoing vigilance and adjustment?
CM: From a CAP perspective the two year/24 hour storm which is that 3.2" of rain is the governing thing, so we're building a system that is designed to handle that design storm at full development, current Urban Service Area, 2035. So we tried to project out as far as we could and not after we spent all this money then have other CAP issues. Keeping us clean and in compliance is all relative. Environmental laws change so frequently it's hard to say but I expect that when I am finishing my career we will be finishing this Consent Decree and not be under federal order about how we go ahead and conduct our business in Fayette county. That's my goal.
TM: And we're seeing the onset of pretty consistent extraordinary weather events these days for whatever reason they are happening, they are happening more frequently and they are I would argue, more powerful than usual. That must make it difficult to anticipate remaining within that 3.2 inches.
CM: Yeah, you are right because I feel the same way as you do. It just seems like it rains harder and more frequently with that high level of intensity than it did when we were kids. Yeah, it is presenting some challenges. I met with the deputy administrator for US-EPA. And we talked about how we're merging our storm water and sanitary sewer programs together, something we did a few years ago and that's important because they are so interlinked. All of these wet weather problems with the sanitary are just that: it's wet weather. It has to do with how we convey storm water and how we go about conveying it when it just runs down the street or puddles up on the corner, those two things go hand in hand. And so we're working towards that, but it's going to be difficult.
TM:There are so many more details to this very complex new program and to those who are reading this or listening to it, you can learn more online at Lexingtonky.gov and then search on Division of Water Quality, I believe, is that correct?
CM: That is correct.


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Using the VA Scanner configuration to import assets from BigFix into QRadar has been a big help for our asset monitoring. However, I've noticed that the MAC Address is not being pulled in from BigFix at all. Since MAC addresses are weighed so heavily for asset-based rules and reconciliation, I would have thought this would be included by default.
Has anyone had any success snagging this data to automate importing of this and potentially other information from BigFix into QRadar?
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text: moodyc82 3 Posted June 13, 2013 Originally Posted by Liann03 I tooo have the ultimate wedding package... Since it only covers up to 20 people and we have 65..... We are responsible for paying for the additional 45 people. Only thing is they are charging us separately for dinner, cocktail hour, AND drinks. How many guests go u have coming to ur wedding? Our buffet option alone is $70 per person and we r being charged for children!!! How is ur $66 for everything?! Help!!! OOOOH b/c you have to have the buffet b/c your number of ppl. We have 31ppl coming. And I'd talk to you WC and say you're not paying for drinks for the kids since they will not be drinking....try and work a deal with the kids at least b/c they won't eat half of what is there probably and won't be drinking. Also, I heard a lot of ppl got out of the extra fee for the cake b/c I guess they cut very large pieces and there is also desert included in the ultimate package so it might be a bit too much Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites


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The fabric colours represented in the photos may differ slightly from the actual product. All images are taken in natural light but their appearance on-screen can vary depending on the calibration of your computer monitor. If fabric colour is important, be sure to check with us before you purchase online.
Yes we do please click on the croft mill sampling link to see more details.
Please click to see more information regarding our delivery schedule.
All orders are subject to item availability. Our website is updated during the week to reflect stock levels but as we are a mail order business we receive postal, telephone and internet orders on a daily basis which are processed in numerical order. This unfortunately means the website cannot monitor intraday stock levels including the weekends. We are sorry for this and are looking into how to improve it.
Yes we ship anywhere. Please see our shipping page for all details on delivery to the rest of the world.
We are not a retail shop and therefore are not open to the public; however arrangements can be made for you to pick up your fabric if you prefer. If you want to do this then we will be more than happy to let you look though our fabric range so please contact us to make arrangements.
No not at all, we can take your order over the phone or by post. Please see all our contact details where you can also print off an order form if you would like to post your request.
Yes we certainly do; as long as Big Al is inspired long may it reign. It is also available to read on screen or print off from the website. New catologues are posted online every 8 weeks or so as the postal one goes out. If you would like to read the present one or, if you would like us to email you a copy of the new one when it is ready please click here to read or fill in your details.
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For the average person, understanding Medicare can be confusing and complicated. However, for people in the world of clinical research administration, understanding Medicare is a necessity in order to maintain billing compliance. Medicare rules are the foundation for clinical trial billing compliance, so understanding how Medicare can impact your research is crucial. To understand how Medicare impacts clinical trials, you must first understand what Medicare is, how it is broken up, and what makes a clinical trial qualified to receive Medicare coverage.
Medicare is a single-payer, national social insurance program administered by the U.S. federal government that began with the Social Security Amendments of 1965. Under President Lyndon B. Johnson, Congress enacted Medicare under the Social Security Act to provide health insurance to people age 65 and older, regardless of medical history or income. Medicare also covers people with certain disabilities, people with end-stage renal disease, and certain qualifying clinical research studies.
Medicare is broken up into four main parts: Part A, Part B, Part C, and Part D. Part A is considered hospital insurance, and covers inpatient hospital stays, skilled nursing facility care, and hospice care. Part B is considered medical insurance, and it covers certain physician services, outpatient care, preventative services, and medical supplies. Part C, also known as Medicare Advantage Plans, is a Medicare health plan offered by a private company that contracts with Medicare. Medicare Advantage Plans provide people with the benefits of Part A and Part B, while also providing added perks such as having access to health maintenance organizations or special needs plans. The final part is Part D, which provides coverage for prescription drugs. Generally, Medicare will cover items and services that are reasonable and necessary for the patient based on their signs and symptoms.
There are several Medicare rules and regulations that apply to clinical trials. Some of these rules and regulations are research-specific and some apply to all Medicare patients. The research specific rules apply to trials that Medicare determines are qualifying. In a qualifying clinical trial, Medicare will cover the routine costs associated with the study., The instructions to determine whether a trial qualifies or not can be found within the National Coverage Determination, also known as NCD 310.1. There are four base requirements in the NCD 310.1 that need to be true for a clinical trial to be considered qualifying. The first requirement is that "the subject or purpose of the trial must be the evaluation of an item or service that falls within a Medicare benefit category". Medicare covers more than 70 categories, and these can all be found in NCD 310.1. The second requirement is that "the trial must not be designed exclusively to test toxicity or disease pathophysiology. It must have therapeutic intent". To qualify for Medicare coverage, the purpose of the clinical trial must be to improve outcomes for patients while also gaining data to send to the FDA for efficacy and safety improvements. The third requirement is that "trials of therapeutic interventions must enroll patients with the diagnosed disease rather than healthy volunteers." The fourth requirement is that the clinical trial must be deemed. When a clinical trial is deemed, it means that the protocol has the seven desirable characteristics as established by the NCD 310.1. Trials conducted under an IND, funded by a governmental agency, funded by a cooperative group supported by a governmental agency, and IND exempt studies are considered automatically deemed to meet the seven desirable characteristics. If any of these four requirements are not met, the clinical trial will not qualify for Medicare coverage.
If the clinical trial qualifies for Medicare coverage, researchers must follow all of Medicare's normal rules in additional to their research rules. The research rules expand coverage. Per NCD 310.1, Medicare will cover items that would be provided absent a study, items required for the provision of the investigational item, and "items or services needed for reasonable and necessary care arising from the provision of an investigational item or service in particular, for the diagnosis or treatment of complications."
Medicare can be very complicated, but understanding the basics behind how Medicare impacts clinical research studies can help researchers run their clinical trials more effectively and compliantly. For more information on Medicare and how it affects clinical trials, visit https://www.medicare.gov/coverage/clinical-research-studies.html.


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ABC announces first octogenarian "Bachelorette," Ruth Bader Ginsburg
LOS ANGELES -- First, ABC announced on Monday that after 33 seasons, producers of the Bachelor series had finally cast lawyer Rachel Lindsay as its first black lead.
But just when viewers thought things couldn't get any more exciting, ABC's juggernaut franchise made history again on Tuesday when producers announced that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would become the show's first octogenarian "Bachelorette" soon after.
"We all know that Ruth Bader Ginsburg is precisely the kind of smart, sexy, pro-choice career woman that millions of women across America will root for on her journey to find love," said an ABC spokesman.
The Notorious RGB season will air in 2018.
This announcement follows the liberal icon's retirement from the Supreme Court bench just last week.
A promotional reel for the new season suggests viewers will see Justice Ginsburg - her body fit from jazzercize - in a totally new light. The trailer features Ginsburg lounging on a pool inflatable, vodka cocktail in hand, surrounded by shirtless young men, while the voiceover coos: "I've judged a lot of tough cases in my lifetime, but my greatest judgments are still ahead: which of these hunks will I deem most worthy of my time?"
In an additional twist, producers will bring in a handful of washed-out politicians to compete for Ginsburg's adulation alongside the usual young, hunky suspects. Confirmed so far to appear are Eric Cantor, Michael Flynn, Eric Trump, and Mike Huckabee. In private, sources close to Ginsburg say that none of these contestants are expected to make it far in the competition.
Also on Tuesday, ABC shot down rumors that Anthony Weiner had been cast as the next "Bachelor," saying the former congressman's one-man campaign for the role had been "deeply unconvincing and heavy on dick pics."


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Master of Kitchens
Jump to navigation Jump to search
|Master of Kitchens
|Home Time
|Middle Ages
|Home Area
|Guardia Castle
|Unnamed Wife
Commander (brother)
1000 AD Chef (Descendant)
|Friends / Colleagues
|King Guardia XXI
Queen Leene
Other Cooks
The Master of Kitchens is a minor character in Chrono Trigger. As his title implies, he is the master chef for Guardia Castle in the Middle Ages. Helping in the war against Magus, he provides rations (Jerky) for the knight battalion at Zenan Bridge. The Commander, leader of the battalion, is his brother.
Along with the rations, Master of Kitchens awards Crono with a Strength Capsule for agreeing to run the rations to the knights.


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It's a Baby!!!
By: Donna Martin
Do you remember the good times that you had at your grandparents' house? I would imagine that the things your remember most are connected to some kind of emotion – something that made you laugh or cry or surprised or frightened you. We try to do things to help our children and grand children remember our times together. Some of the things we do may seem silly or crazy to our kids, but they are usually good sports and go along with our unusual ideas. Many times they surprise us with their innocent reactions. This was the case last night at our family Christmas. I had a spur of the moment idea that acting out the Christmas story would be fun. So I gathered scraps of material for impromptu costumes. We really had to use our imagination. The Shepherds wrapped material around their heads. Mary and Joseph threw material over their shoulders. The angels wore gold wrapping ribbons around their heads and draped long chiffon material strips that I had left over from making Kacie's wedding dress over their shoulders for wings. They were a rather curious cast of characters. Mike sat in the child sized rocking chair and read the Christmas story from the large family Bible while the kids and grandkids acted out the story. Of course, there was a lot of laughter and some strange antics by the actors. Caleb had a double role of Joseph and the donkey, and Brittany was fully equipped to be pregnant Mary! But the highlight of the performance was at the very end as Mike read the final phrase "The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God…" Titus, our 18 month old who was playing the part of a shepherd, discovered the doll in the manger and excitedly exclaimed ,"Baby!" as he grabbed the doll and held it high for all to see. He was one excited shepherd. And just like Marty I "treasured up that moment in my heart". I pray that as Titus grows older he will still continue to praise God for the baby He sent to be our Savior.
We hope you make some memories to treasure in your heart this Christmas season. Praise God that the baby in the manger came to be the Savior of the world.
The Martins currently present "Happy Together" Marriage Enrichment Events for churches and organizations. To schedule an event call Michael at 940-735-1515. They are certified "Prepare/Enrich" Facilitators and are available to work with couples on an individual basis using the "Prepare/Enrich Assessment." They publish a weekly "Happy Together" Blog about family and marriage issues. You can order copies of their new books Dancing With Death and 366 Tidbits We Have Learned in 14,610 Days of Marriage, read, and subscribe to their "Happy Together" Blog by logging onto the Martin's website at www.happytogethermarriage.com.


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July 30th, 2013
In Technology
1 Comment
If you enjoy this article, see the other most popular articles
If you enjoy this article, see the other most popular articles
If you enjoy this article, see the other most popular articles
An architecture of small apps
(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: firstname.lastname@example.com, or follow me on Twitter.
I am currently working at a well known magazine company. For their website we use a monstrous PHP/Symfony CMS which we call "megatron". There has been some discussion about adopting a better architecture. The current system is very slow: it takes an average of 10 seconds to render a page. The North American websites for this company get 23 million page views a month. We rely on several cache strategies, including Varnish and also the built-in cache system that is used by Symfony. Without cache it would take 230,000,000 seconds to render the web pages for everyone — that's 2662 days (7.3 years) worth of rendering that needs to be done in 30 days. Obviously that can be handled if you spin up enough web servers, but at peak traffic the sysadmins find themselves struggling to manage the load. The tech team and the sysadmins are constantly dealing with certain problems:
1.) clearing the cache — because there are so many cache strategies in use, clearing the cache is very complicated. We have a script that is suppose to clear the cache, but it has been plagued with bugs
2.) slow rendering times that lead to the pages timing out, and then these error messages get cached in Varnish, which forces us to clear the cache again
3.) warming up the cache after the cache has been cleared — when traffic is high and the cache is empty, the web servers are overwhelmed
4.) spinning up servers and then spinning servers down — sometimes an article goes viral and our traffic spikes, and which point the sysadmins must race to spin up new servers. When the traffic fades the sysadmins need to turn off the servers, so as to save money.
All of these problems have 2 sources:
a.) the software is very slow
b.) the framework is monolithic such that the full codebase must be copied to each server — you can not put the user system on one server and the slideshows on a different server — the monolithic nature of the codebase limits the freedom of the sysadmins to invent an intelligent server topology.
Internally, the tech team uses Yammer to share articles and talk about issues. We have had several conversations about the correct architecture for the company's needs. I wrote:
Many companies have moved to a model where they have many small apps, each specialized to do one thing well, and each running on a different port, and then they use Nginx to reverse proxy all of those apps to port 80, to create the illusion that the website is just a single app running on port 80.
The website Talking Points Memo had an excellent article about why the traditional CMS is broken, and why the new architecture, of small apps, is important. The article seems to be offline right now, but I found a cached version of it:
In my personal projects, I've moved to a model where I write a small Clojure app for each task that needs to happen, and run each app on a different port. For instance, user signup can be its own app, and user login can be its own app, and any background task can be its own app. For anything where you might write a cron job, I tend to write a separate app. Anything that handles email can be its own app. Slideshows can be handled by an app whose output is JSON, with a template handled by Angular.js. Any kind of admin dashboard can be its own app. For pages that do not have to update more frequently than every hour or two, it should be easy to have an app that grabs data from the database and writes static HTML files which can then be easily served in a traditional manner.
Small indepdent apps are less likely to have some feature that is unexpectedly broken by what was suppose to be an unrelated change. And small apps are easier for newly hired developers to learn about. Large, monolithic CMSs tend to impose a steep, up-front cost on developers — the developer needs to learn a lot before they can be productive. And small, indepdent apps give sysadmins far more freedom about how they spread load across servers.
One last thing: there is an important asymmetry between an architecture of small apps and an architecture of The Monolithic CMS. If you have small apps, and decide you want to move to a monolithic CMS, then you must do The Big Rewrite: the exhausting effort of reproducing all of your funtionality so that it is handled by your one, all-consuming CMS. But when you move from the monolithic CMS to an architecture of small apps, there is no need for The Big Rewrite. Instead you take some small part of your CMS, rewrite it as an independent app, set the app on its own port, use your webserver to proxy the app-on-a-port to whatever URL the CMS was previously using for that functionality, and thus you've taken a step towards a new architecture without having to rewrite anything but the functionality covered by your new, small app
One of my co-workers responded:
I think there is a disparity here between our API service providing a variety of views (REST: XML/JSON) on data gathered from a multitude of data sources (db, solr, feeds, 4d, etc.), versus the term CMS (which for us can refer to megatron/admin, a Symfony2 app served by our API service). In fact, quickly scanning the article, the closest match to the term CMS in the article we have is …ContentSectionGenerator. I agree, it needs replacing; it's clunky and slow, and awkward to develop for, but I guess met the business needs at the time. The web has moved on, and it seem to be bodging in features.
In my opinion, a multitude of small apps can lead to code duplication ("I didn't know that code already existed"), developer/qa unfamiliarity ("I've never worked on that app"), and a confusing release strategy ("which version of Y is running?") with potential integration incompatibility; a middle ground needs to be found.
Proxying multiple apps on the same port might allow a CMS user to change a small element at a time, but not construct a fully featured web page. Proxying is definitely more useful for front-end than admin, or instead the use of ESI (which Symfony supports) would allow a better inclusion of multiple components into a single page. However, there seems to be a confusion above between the use of proxying, which is great for front-end users, and the ability of an admin to build a page, say a Hub page. Also, admins don't care about maintaining CMS URLs, and replicating the same URL structure/parameters of ContentSectionGenerator would be a fallacy.
I should note: the "ContentSectionGenerator" that he mentions is an "app" inside of our Symfony system which allows our staff to create new blocks of content for the site using either text or HTML or Javascript or PHP code, and then these sections can be made to appear either in the sidebar or in the nav bar or in the main section where we show articles.
I responded:
You speak as if apps-on-different-ports-proxied-to-port-80 is a theory, but most of the big sites use a variation on this architecture. In fact, most have moved much further, to extremely complex workflows that dynamically map various ports to various workflows. I don't want to bombard you with links, but there are literally hundreds of articles I could point to regarding Facebook, Google, Yahoo, or Twitter. I will limit myself to 1 article about Twitter, which I think is an extreme case, in terms of the kinds of complex mappings that they describe:
The section under "MULTIPLEXING INCOMING REQUESTS" describes an advanced system that I'm sure goes beyond our needs, but it still an interesting read.
Regarding code duplication, as I'm sure you know, the best way to handle that is with shared gems (in Ruby) or shared jars (on the JVM). Any code that is needed by multiple apps should become its own gem/jar, in its own repository. I have worked at companies that re-wrote their code from PHP to Ruby and used shared gems to limit code redundancy — this worked fairly well.
I agree that it is a bad idea to proxy multiple apps to "construct a fully featured web page". I normally think of the different apps handling different functionality. Assuming you have the domain "example.com" then you might have an app that handles user login and you spin that up on, say, port 30000 and you map it to port 80 such that is appears as:
This same app would also be available at http://www.example.com:30000/ but we could use a firewall to block direct access to port 30000. I see no harm in allowing the app to appear http://www.example.com:30000/ except that it might cause confusion for some users, if they ever stumbled upon that URL. The normal argument for mapping everything to port 80 is that many users will be behind firewalls that limit them to ports 80 and 443 (also, if your frontend makes Ajax calls, calls to a different port run into the Same-Origin policy, so everything needs to be proxied to port 80 so your Ajax code will see it as being on the same domain as the rest of your site). Indeed, here in New York City some of my favorite coffeeshops have firewalls that block everything except 80 and 443 — I have written to some of them and explained to them the importance of leaving port 22 open, as I can not get any work done without ssh.
You might also have an app that handles user signups which you spin up on port 30001 and you map to port 80 such that it appears as:
You might also have an admin app that you spin up on port 30002 and you map to
You might also have an app that allows users to update their profile information and you spin that up on port 30003 and map that to
And perhaps you have an app that allows users to engage in live chat, so you spin that up on port 30004 and map that to
And you might have an app that publishes much of your content as static HTML files, which you spin up on no port, as it does not accept TCP/IP requests — instead it queries the database and then creates static html files, which you save to some directory such as /var/www/example.com/public_html/ and you map that to
You can see how this gives the sysadmins a lot of freedom to spread load across servers in creative ways — if 1 app becomes especially popular, or resource hungry, the sysadmins can rather easily move it to its own server (or set of servers). This is one of the main reasons most big sites move to an architecture like this — it facilitates fine grained control of what sort of requests go to a particular server.
Above, I keep saying "proxy the app to port 80″. How is that done? On one server I have, running Apache, I open this file:
And I added these lines:
ProxyPreserveHost on
ProxyPass /api/ http://127.0.0.1:34000/
ProxyPassReverse /api/ http://127.0.0.1:34000/
ProxyPass /api http://127.0.0.1:34000/
ProxyPassReverse /api http://127.0.0.1:34000/
ProxyPass /user/ http://127.0.0.1:34002/
ProxyPassReverse /user/ http://127.0.0.1:34002/
ProxyPass /user http://127.0.0.1:34002/
ProxyPassReverse /user http://127.0.0.1:34002/
So my API app, on port 34000, gets proxied to "/api" on port 80, and my "user" app, on port 34002, gets proxied to "/user" on port 80.
Finally, about this:
" developer/qa unfamiliarity ("I've never worked on that app") "
That is a good point, but of course, at a certain size, this has to happen — companies reach a size where no developer can be expected to know all of the software in the company. Specialization occurs. Our company has already reached that point where the mobile apps are concerned — the IOS developers no nothing about the website and the web developers know nothing about the mobile apps. If in 5 years the company doubles in size, I'm sure the company will be at the point where no 1 developer knows all the software in use on the web site. At some point, you simply need to accept that as a fact of life. And when that day arrives, small apps at least offer the advantage that a new developer can learn one small part of the company's code base, and learn it well, and quickly, and start making useful contributions to that part of the company's software.
One last thought: having separate apps means you can have complete separation between your dynamic pages and your static pages. Frameworks like Rails and Symfony tend to assume you have a dynamic site, and then they throw in some caching to help with the static bits. Separate apps allow you serve your static content as genuinely static content. And the real-time services you offer, and the interactions that you offer to logged in users — those can all be handled by specialized apps.
My co-worker wrote:
Another potential problem with this approach (small specialized apps) is, how do you set it up for a development environment? Since you have to set up several apps working together, what do you do? Do you set up just the app you are going to be working on and use some sort of shared development app for the others? Do you set up everything in your local environment? Any article/post on how someone has sorted this out? Thanks!
To which I responded:
Those are good questions. Before answering them, I would point out that at certain size, it is no longer possible for each programmer in a company to set up each app used by the company — at some point the programmers specialize, and only focus on a few of the apps that are in use at the company. That is already happening at our company: the mobile team is mostly separate from the web team.
But, regarding your questions, how to set up multiple apps would depend on what language/eco-system you are working with. With PHP, you would setup a bunch of different vhosts, linked to a bunch of different directories — the various directories where you have your various apps. If you are using PHP-FPM and Nginx, most of the configuration, mapping ports to directories, would happen in the Nginx config file. In most Nginx config files, for each vhost you will see the line "listen 80″ but you don't have to listen on port 80. You can change that number to any port.
I've been writing Clojure apps, where the whole things becomes easy. Instead of using Apache or Nginx, I have 1 line of code that embeds a webserver (Jetty) inside of my app, and that webserver takes its config information from what I set in the app. I can list the port number on the command line when I start the app. Because the webserver is inside of my app, if I have 10 apps running, I also have 10 different webservers running, each one differently configured.
I would start the app from the command line like this:
java -jar user-signup-app.jar 30000
That starts the signup app on port 30000. And then:
java -jar user-profile-app.jar 30001
That starts the user profile app on port 30001.
This has worked for me so far, though I have read that this is inefficient because I am running multiple JVM instances and they compete against each other for resources. The newest version of the JVM is suppose to be multi-tenant so I believe this problem will disappear in the future.
I understand you are asking how does this scale? I have never had to start more than 6 apps at once, but I think you are asking "What if I was in a complex environment where I had 200 apps and I had to start them all because they all needed services from each other?" I would offer 2 answers to that: one, you can easily write a shell script that has 200 lines, each like the examples I gave above, but, two, you should not have 200 apps that all need each other, that would be spaghetti code. Typically I only have 2 or 3 apps that the other apps depend on — the login app and an API app being 2 common apps that I need running for everything else I do.
In the land of PHP one normally deals with a lot of different software. For instance, the webserver might be Apache or Nginx, and they are configured independently of PHP. Also you have databases that are usually indepedent: MySql, Solr, MongoDb. And also, with PHP, if you want to store information in memory, you use Memcache, which has its own configuration. Also, with any of the interpreted scripting languages (PHP, Ruby, Perl, Python) you typically have to deal with thousands of files, which sometimes makes deployment a pain. With compiled languages things are different — the app manages its own memory, it doesn't need Memcache. In my Clojure apps, I've been compiling everything into 1 binary file: all of the HTML files, all of the CSS files, all of the Javascript files, all of the images, all of the code, and also the webserver, all get compiled into a single binary file that I can then put anywhere on the server.
When your whole app is only 1 file, deployment becomes very easy.
Using "java -jar" from the command line is an informal way to start an app, but it works fine when you are doing development. When you go into production, you need to daemonize your Java app. The simplest way to detach your command from the terminal (other than using hte "screen" command, which is also informal) is something like:
java -jar user-profile-app.jar 30001 </dev/null >/dev/null 2>&1 &
There are 4 main ways of running JVM apps as daemons:
1.) Use the Java Service Wrapper
2.) Use the Apache Jakarta Commons Daemon package
3.) Use a shell script
4.) start the daemon from init.d
I usually go with #4. I use the stop-start-daemon to start my other daemons, I put this in init.d:
# Provides: login_service
# X-Interactive: true
# Short-Description: Start/stop login_service server
DAEMON_ARGS=" -jar $WORK_DIR/$JAR "
#export LOGIN_SERVICE_TOKEN="
start () {
echo "Starting login_service…"
if [ ! -f $WORK_DIR/login_service.pid ]; then
start-stop-daemon –start –verbose –background –chdir $WORK_DIR –exec $DAEMON –pidfile $WORK_DIR/login_service.pid –chuid "$USER" –make-pidfile — $DAEMON_ARGS
echo "login_service is already running…"
stop () {
echo "Stopping login_service…"
start-stop-daemon –stop –exec $DAEMON –pidfile $WORK_DIR/login_service.pid
rm $WORK_DIR/login_service.pid
case $1 in
But in production you need to worry about what happens when the server dies. There are many systems that handle monitoring and automatic restarts, but I do not know the details of how you might configure something like Supervisor or Chef to manage your apps. For Ruby apps there are services like Heroku that automatically restart if your dyno dies, and for Clojure there is a similar service from Amazon called Amazon Beanstalk.
These apps on different ports need to talk to each other. They could use IP/TCP but some would argue that in this context that can be a little slow, as it involves the whole network stack. They could also use a Linux primitive like a FIFO named pipe. I have started using ZeroMQ, which despite its name is actually a network library, one that puts beautiful abstractions over some of the older inter-process communication protocols.
By the way, if you want to read about a really radically unusual kind of architecture, you should read what my friend Colin Steele wrote. He is the CTO of RoomKey.com, and at RoomKey they did something very extreme: they compiled everything, including their database, into their app. So all of their HTML, CSS, Javascript, code, webserver, and the database, all end up as one file, which they can deploy anywhere on their server. As Colin says, since the app has no outside dependencies of any kind, it is guaranteed to work anywhere there is a functioning JVM. Even if, years from now, you fetch an old copy of their app from years before, the app will simply work, since it has everything it needs inside of itself. Colin's essay is here:
The end result of RoomKey's unusual decisions:
"…resulting in a system that has scaled to nearly 700,000 uniques/day with just a handful of machines."
"Last month, when traffic shot up by over 50%, no one noticed."
Oh, and regarding this:
"how do you set it up for a development environment?"
I forgot to give you an answer for Rails. I'm sure there is a lot of ways to do this, but for me the easiest would be to use the StandAlone version of Phusion Passenger.
cd to the directory of a Rails app and start it like this on the command line:
passenger start -p 80
You can set any port number, so if you had several apps you would cd to the directory of each app and start each of them up on different ports.
Of course if you were following my advice, and building small apps, you would probably be using something like Sinatra, rather than Rails.
My co-worker wrote:
But how would you do that for a PHP application like our CMS?
I responded:
In terms of running different apps on different ports, I think the PHP eco-system lags behind in terms of making this easy. The short answer is: Nginx config. It should be possible to have different vhosts that listen on different ports. That is the point of the line "listen 80″ that you see in Nginx config files. You are specifiying the port the given app should listen on.
A different co-worker wrote:
Seems like a bit of a contradiction to say that the monolithic application has issues because one change can have far reaching effects and then claim that the mini-apps can reduce duplication by sharing libraries.
To which I responded:
The advantage is that separate apps make explicit what functionality you really need to share.
I have worked at companies where the code base was an endless maze — this happens too often. If all the code is contained within a single framework, you will often find it difficult to track the dependencies. In our own code, megatron, we have a rough guess about where the dependencies are, and yet just this month we were surprised by bugs because a change in one place caused a bug in another place — a place we assumed would be unaffected. And I recently saw a big PHP framework pulled apart into several small Ruby apps, and the dependencies were made explicit in the shared gems — and I think we were surprised at how much the dependencies could be simplified.
Likewise, I suspect, if our CMS was rewritten as a bunch of separate apps, we would be surprised at how much we could minimize the shared dependencies, and we would also gain the advantage of knowing exactly what the shared dependencies really are.
Another co-worker (an advocate for Scala) wrote:
You complain about bugs and slowness but the real problem is the use of dynamic languages. We are using Scala for some projects here in London and I would like to see more use of Scala. The strictness of Scala protects from many of the things you are complaining about. Clojure is no better than PHP or Ruby.
To which I responded:
In terms of speed, benchmarks show that Clojure runs, on average, 20 to 30 times faster than Ruby or PHP. However, with type hinting, Clojure can run as fast as the fastest Java code, which is very fast. And, if you really need to, you can use macros to generate code that is fully type-hinted. John Lawrence Aspden has written a very interesting article called Clojure Faster than Machine Code? in which he examines some very clever tricks you can do with macros and type hinting and he concludes:
This technique strikes me as very general, and very useful. All sorts of things can be represented as lookups in tables. I think that the program should be as fast as the equivalent java program would be, although I haven't got around to actually testing that, so I may have dropped the ball somewhere. The JVM is widely thought to be around the same speed as native machine code or optimized C. I'm absolutely sure that I'm not able to write the equivalent program in Java, C, or assembler without code-generation. The code generation would be very very very much harder in Java, C or assembler. And so I wonder, is Clojure the fastest computer language in the world?
As for the strictness of Scala, there are attempts being made to add typing to Clojure. Also, I find most times the strictness of static langauges goes far beyond what is practical — the language becomes verbose with very little gain in correctness. If strict typing actually eliminated all bugs then we would all be using strict typing, but of course, we all realize how far from true such an assertion is.
Added on 2014-03-31: I see that what I wrote about is now being called something like a "micro-services" approach. Martin Fowler has written about this.
Also, Check out this excellent piece on the benefits of Clojure/MongoDB and microservices.Source


text: Francisco Umbral, (Francisco Pérez Martínez), Spanish writer (born May 11, 1935, Madrid, Spain—died Aug. 28, 2007, Madrid), was known for his incisive wit and use of both classical language and contemporary slang in work that included magazine essays, newspaper columns, and more than 80 books. Umbral was almost entirely self-educated. He began his career in 1958 as a journalist for the Valladolid newspaper El Norte de Castilla. He went on to write columns for, among others, El País, Diario 16, and, from 1989, El Mundo, for which he produced "Los placers y los días," a column of acerbic social criticism. Umbral's books included Las ninfas (1975), Mortal y rosa (1975), La noche que llegué al Café Gijón (1977), and Trilogía de Madrid (1984). Umbral won numerous awards, notably the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature in 1996 and the Cervantes Prize in 2000.


text: Human populations have increased and technology as advanced over time. The United States is no longer empty and rural. We are an urban and industrial nation. The goal of many of us has been to expand into remaining undeveloped areas, leading to urban sprawl with associated boxing and fencing of remaining natrual areas. It is time for a paradigm shift. One where the population lives in high density urban areas, and the remaining land remains as intact ecosystems. Energy supplies need to change from pirmarily fossil fuels, particularly oil, into solar, wind, and nuclear energy. Wind energy should be generated above current farmland, not in open spaces. Biofuels can be part of the mixture, but are not a panacea. A mixture of energy sources is best until alternatives can be found. The cost of green energy is small in comparison to the costs of the Iraq war and other government misadventures.


text:
Mildura - Golden River Holiday Park BIG4
|Prices will be charged in AUD
|Tue 17 Sep 2019
|Wed 18 Sep 2019
|Thu 19 Sep 2019
|Fri 20 Sep 2019
|Sat 21 Sep 2019
|Sun 22 Sep 2019
|Mon 23 Sep 2019
|Tue 24 Sep 2019
|Wed 25 Sep 2019
|Thu 26 Sep 2019
|Fri 27 Sep 2019
|Sat 28 Sep 2019
|Sun 29 Sep 2019
|Mon 30 Sep 2019
|Move the mouse over the price for inclusions, occupancy and minimum stay
Property Information
** Please note Aspen Parks no longer owns Golden River Holiday Park - To make a booking please call the park directly on - 1800 621 262 ***
Golden River Holiday Park offers 4 star quality holiday accommodation in one of Australia's premier tourist parks.
Relax in seclusion at our tranquil retreat on the banks of the Mighty Murray River. Discover a friendly, spacious, well maintained park amongst trees and lawns. Indulge in the delights of the spectacular Murray River - fish, ski, bush walk or bird watch. Enjoy a bite to eat on a historic paddle steamer, travel through a lock and weir. Explore the vibrant Mildura region or sit poolside and soak up the region's warm, sunny climate.
Conveniently located just 4 kilometers from the centre of Mildura, and located on over 2.8 hectares of beautiful trees and lawns on the banks of the Murray River, Golden River provides the perfect backdrop for a relaxing holiday.
Mildura is approximately 5.5 hours from Melbourne along the Sunraysia, Calder and Murray Valley highways and offers a wide range of events and attractions for all ages. Visit National Parks, Wineries, Gardens and Antique shops, take a cruise on a paddle boat and explore the many wonders of the Murray River.
Mildura also boasts fabulous events year `round including the Mildura and Wentworth Arts Festival, Mildura Country Music Festival, Jazz Food and Wine Festival and the Mildura International Hot Air Balloon Festival.
Note: Accommodation discounts i.e. BIG4 or Top Tourist will not be honored for bookings made via third party websites.
Note: Rates quoted are for 2 persons. Extra adult & child rates apply
Property Features
- BBQ Area
- Games Room
- Guest Laundry
- Non-Smoking Rooms
- Free Parking
- Outdoor Swimming Pool
- Children Play Area
- Camp Kitchen
Accommodation Details
Terms & Conditions
Full payment (100%) will be taken at time of booking.
All transactions on our website are secured by SSL encryption
* As of 1st February 2011, bank credit card fees will be applied to all payments made by credit card.
Credit Card transaction fees will apply as follows;
•Visa & Mastercard 1.1% inc.
•AMEX & Diners 3.85% inc.
Debit Card and EFTPOS transactions do not attract fees.
* One night's accommodation will be charged if less than seven (7) days' notice of cancellation is received.
* 50% of one night's accommodation will be charged if less than fourteen days (14) notice is received.
* Full refund will be made if cancelled greater than fourteen (14) days from arrival.
* If paid by credit card, the surcharge is refundable
* No refund for early departure.
* Park Management reserves the right to relocate or cancel any booking at its discretion.
* All cancellations must be in writing direct to the property


text:
Release shipment job (known as Shipment Releasing) help managing order easier.
By default, this job wasn't actived and weknow that Episerver could set it execute automatically in a specific time. Using this job, our order shipments will be released after 1 day placing order. However, 1 day is just default configuration and we could set the timeout in configuration file: shipmentAutoReleaseTimeout in <RootSite>/Configs/ecf.order.config.


text:
Your Source for Education Design and Planning
Rockwall Independent School District
66,971 sq.ft.
This school is designed to accommodate 650 students with expansion flexibility for an additional 100 students. Bright blues, reds and oranges throughout deliver a dynamic and playful learning environment. Skylights warm the corridors with natural sunlight. As opposed to a traditional linear main corridor where distances from one end to the other can be great, ADDITIONAL INFORMATIONCOST PER SQ FT$116.03CITATIONElementary School CitationFEATURED IN2000 Architectural Portfolio2001 Educational Interiors school's corridor has a triangular shape that pulls the academic spaces together—creating a close-knit environment. This triangle encloses the library and computer lab, while the academic wings expand from each point of the triangle.
Other features include: Zigzagging walls separate every two classrooms, creating a nook in each space that gives teachers flexibility; the dining area serves as a multilevel cafetorium with a raised-platform stage; the school shares this site with a new middle school; grade-level teams minimize safety issues that develop when students of multiple ages mingle; workrooms in every grade-level wing increase staff efficiency and accessibility.
"Creative and playful interior...good use of color...efficient design."—Architectural Portfolio 2000 jury
Photographer: ©Jim Wilson
©Jim Wilson
Main corridor
© 2019 Penton Media, Inc.


text:
Pretty Tape over at Etsy. The washi tape is translucent, so I added a couple of layers. You could use any kind of tape: masking, duct, paper, fabric. Glued-up strips of paper. Use it as a stencil or a fastener. Use it as a tab.
Have some sticky fun!
Thursday, May 12, 2011
Tape! Nudge 28
5 comments:
- Kerri Love said...
ohh very fun :) I also have paper first aid tape, it can be fun to work with, the cloth first aid tape is fun too ;)
- May 12, 2011 at 3:44 PM
- Diana Trout {firstname.lastname@example.com} said...
oh yeah! first aid tape + sharpies = fun! Great suggestion
- May 12, 2011 at 4:00 PM
- Judy said...
Thanks for the link to Pretty Tape, had no idea there was such a place, and nudge 28 looks like fun.
- May 14, 2011 at 5:11 AM
- sisa said...
Wow....I like this cool spread - reminds me of a graffiti wall!
- May 16, 2011 at 1:57 PM
- Jane LaFazio said...
okay. just back from pretty tape, with ~$45 less in my pocket. thanks for the tip!
- May 24, 2011 at 2:59 PM
Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)


text:
5 - Tyler Dorsey
- Birthday: 2/14/96
- NBA Position: Shooting Guard
- Class: Sophomore
- Ht: 6-4
- Wt: 185
- Hometown: Los Angeles, CA
- High School: Pasadena Maranatha
- Team Site Profile
- Statistics
NBA Comparison: Quincy Douby
Strengths: Dorsey ended his Oregon career on fire, leading the somewhat depleted Ducks all the way to the Final Four ... He finished the year with eight straight 20-plus point games, while earning the nickname "Mr. March" for his stellar play in big games ... He continued his momentum into the NBA Combine, where he posted per 40 averages of 21.6 points, 8.5 rebounds, and 5.9 assists on 56% shooting from three-point range in two games ... Dorsey's play over the last few months has vaulted him into an intriguing possible second round option for any team looking to add shooting off the bench ... Dorsey's elevated draft stock begins with his outstanding scoring instincts ... He shot an excellent 41% from distance in his two seasons with the Ducks and is also an excellent shooter off the dribble ... While he is not an explosive athlete, he makes up for it around the rim with soft touch and craft to convert a high percentage (57.3% at the rim) of his looks inside. He does an excellent job of spotting up in transition as he has a knack for finding open spaces on the court to get his shot off, where he has deep range that should translate to the NBA arc ... He gets his feet set quickly as well, and his mechanics stay consistent with a hand in his face ... Dorsey also does a great job of running off screens to get his shot off and looks very comfortable shooting on the move ... Off the pick and roll he consistently demonstrated the ability to make defenders pay for going under the ball screen with his pull up jumper ... One also has to appreciate that he never loses confidence in his shot and that he does not need much space at all to get it off ... At the rim, he uses a lot of shot fakes and has excellent footwork to get his shot off, or draw contact and get to the free throw line (75% conversion rate) ... It is primarily Dorsey's shot making and ability to get hot in a hurry that gives him great potential as a role player in the NBA ... With NBA spacing he could thrive as a shot maker and secondary ball handler off the bench. Dorsey is not a true floor general, but he did play a lot of point guard for Oregon, so he has experience running an offense ... He is also improving as a playmaker, as he has decent vision and does not turn the ball over that frequently ... He operates well out of the pick and roll and has shown flashes of making good reads to set up his teammates ... Dorsey particularly showed during the NCAA Tournament that he is unusually poised in big moments and that he can be depended on to make big plays when it counts ... Any potential playoff team that may draft him would really appreciate the mental aspect of his game ... If Dorsey can prove that the NCAA Tournament was not a fluke and that he is really beginning to put it all together, he could carve out a nice career for himself.
Weaknesses: The most concerning aspect of Dorsey's game is his less than impressive physical tools for an NBA two-guard ... He checked in at the NBA Combine at 6-4.5 with an even more underwhelming 6-5 wingspan ... He also weighs just 183 pounds, so he may struggle to get to the rim and finish against bigger, physical guards ... This will likely prevent him from being a multi-positional defender at the next level ... His lack of length will limit his effectiveness to guard on the perimeter and be active in passing lanes ... He has already shown limitations in this area, averaging just 1.1 steals per 40 minutes in two seasons at Oregon ... With his physical profile, he is probably best suited to guard point guards, but he may not be quick enough to do so given how explosive modern-day NBA point guards are ... Dorsey also does not show a great deal of competitiveness on this end of the court either ... When switched onto bigger players he does not battle for position persistently ... He also tends to have some frequent lapses off the ball, losing shooters on the wings or giving up easy backdoor cuts. Dorsey does not project as an advanced shot creator at the NBA level either. Given his average explosiveness and shiftiness with the ball, he can get forced into some difficult shots, and he will probably have trouble finishing around the rim against NBA length/athleticism. Much of his shot selection comes via difficult contested shots given his lack of creativity with the ball and his less than ideal physical tools. He can be out of control going to the rim as well and force a lot of wild shots at the basket instead of looking to make a play for someone else. Dorsey is not a very willing passer either, which can cause him to be inefficient at times. It appears that the majority of his NBA impact will be contingent on his shot making ability. However, if he can't get hot from the outside, NBA teams might worry if there is anything else he can bring to the table.
Notes: Measured 6' 3'' barefoot, 6' 4.5'' in shoes, 182.6 lbs, 6' 5.25'' wingspan, and 8' 3.5'' standing reach at the 2017 NBA Draft Combine ... Measured 6'4.25, 178 lbs, with a 6'3.5 wingspan and 8'2.75 reach at the 2014 USA U18 tryouts ... Born in Pasadena, Calif. ... Parents are Jerrid and Samia Dorsey ... Major is business administration…2015 McDonald's All-American and Gatorade State Player of the Year in California…Pac-12 All Freshman Team and All-Conference Tournament Team in 2015-2016 season…NCAA Midwest All-Region Team, All-Pac-12 honorable mention selection, and Pac-12 All-Tournament Team in 2016-2017 season.
William P. Desautelle III 6/19/17
June 4, 2015
February 3, 2015
January 26, 2015
November 26, 2014
August 17, 2014
June 26, 2014
June 18, 2014
June 13, 2014
May 19, 2014
April 28, 2014
February 12, 2014
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December 29, 2013
September 26, 2013
June 17, 2013
March 14, 2013
August 29, 2012
February 25, 2011


text:
This cute panda loves to play volleyball! This fun volleyball hoodie is perfect for anyone that loves to play volleyball or fans that like to watch volleyball matches! Support your favorite Volleyball Team with this cute original design! You can totally customize this hoodie! Move the panda around, change the shirt color or even shirt style, add your own text or images -- make it your own! View larger image
Cute Volleyball Panda Women's Basic Long Sleeve T-Shirt: Comfortable, casual and loose fitting, our long-sleeve heavyweight t-shirt will quickly become one of your favorites. Made from 6.0 oz, pre-shrunk 100% cotton, it wears well on anyone. We've double-needle stitched the bottom and sleeve hems for extra durability. Check out other products with this design or view all .
Cute Volleyball Panda Women's Basic Long Sleeve T-Shirt by Cute Union
Satisfaction Guaranteed
This t-shirt with our Cute Volleyball Panda design is made-to-order by Zazzle.com. Zazzle offers 100% money back guarantee on our high quality Cute Union products. In case you are not happy with your purchase, you can always return your t-shirt for an exchange or refund within 30 days of receipt. See customer service for more information.


text:
I travel about 80% of the time for business and rely on mobile applications for productivity while on the road. I have tested and researched many mobility applications for the iPhone and iPad and came up with the following list for those looking to minimize the need to carry around a laptop:
What's New:
Docusign- Ink Use for signing or editing documents in most common formats, including PDF and MS Office. Alternative to computer/laptop PDF editor (such as Acrobat) and eliminates need to print, physically sign, and scan/fax. Previous recommendation for signatures was "Easysign," a Pay App. Docusign-Inc does everything EasySign does, and more, plus, it's a free App.
Xpenser- Great for expense management. No need to save receipts. Quickly record your expenses, snap a picture of your receipts, add notes, and later generate electronic or hard-copy customized reports.
Jump- Easy remote screen access to PC or MAC. This is a Pay App but best I have been able to find so far. Looking for easier, cheaper alternatives.
Password Management- In search of a better way. "1Password" is popular but I'm not there yet. Will give it a look however.
Bookmark Synchronization- "XMarks" used to be the solution for bookmark synchronization across devices and different browser types. When company changed ownership, functionality degraded so I'm using Firefox Synch and manual updates for other browsers. Looking for a better way.
Previous Unchanged Recommendations:
iMExchange2- App for keeping tasks and notes in synch with Outlook Exchange across adevices.
Evernote- Use for keeping meeting notes and documents organized, easily accessible, and in synch across devices.
DropBox- Best cloud storage application I can find, and I've used a bunch, including MobileMe.
Print n Share- Application for printing documents directly from your mobile device. You do not need to be on the same WiFi network to do so as it works over 3G.
JotNotPro- Use for scanning via a mobile camera, converting to PDF, and emailing. Eliminates need for scanner and fax.
QuickOffice– Office applications for the iPAD. Compatible with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. For iPhone, DocsToGo is best I have found.
Penultimate– Eliminates need for pad and paper. Enables digital storage and filing of handwritten notes on iPad, and conversion to digital format, including PDF. Alternate App: NoteTaker HD
Note: These applications were tested and used on an iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, Macbook Pro running Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion, and a Dell Latitude E600 Running Windows 7 Pro. I purchased them all on the Apple App Store. I expect many would be available on Android, RIM, or Microsoft App Stores.


text:
And guys...THIS BOOK! I'm SO excited for it! Not only is the description awesome, but the cover is gorgeous!! Here is more info before we get to Ooh and Aah over the cover.
Release date: December 3, 2013
Publisher: Evil Hat Productions
Ages: 12 and up
Jacket Description:
Every hero has a story. This one starts with a girl and a racing tractor.
Sally Slick knows she's meant to be more than a Midwestern farm girl. What she wants more than anything is to be an inventor when she grows up—and she has the custom-built racing tractor to prove it. But good girls in 1914 don't go off to the city in search of adventure. Everything changes when Sally's big brother comes back from Chicago with a robot in hand and mobsters on his heels. With the help of her friend, wannabe hero Jet Black, Sally will risk everything to protect the people she loves.
Those bad guys are about to get a giant wrench thrown right into their plans.
Um, tractor racing, mobsters AND a robot in 1914?! Yes, please! :)
And now, the cover...
Oooooh...the steampunk-iness! The robot army! The giant wrench! Plus, she looks like someone I want on my side when fighting any bad guys. :) I need this! *grabby hands*
What do you think? What's your favorite part?


text: Bri and Darrel first met in an airport lounge in Sydney. After travelling the world together they have now settled in the beautiful island of Majorca. They have an incredible network of family and friends from all around the world who gathered together to celebrate their wedding at a stunning finca in the Majorcan hills. We have captured so many wonderful memories from this amazing day that it was hard to choose just a few for this preview, so here is a longer than normal sneak peek.


text:
Dear Parent/Guardian,
Eastwood School is proud to announce that it will be holding a winter can drive from Monday December 1, 2014 toFriday December 12, 2014. All cans and non-perishable items will be donated to Windsor's downtown mission. Our goal is 600 cans and we hope to reach or even exceed that goal.
Yours Truly,
The Eastwood can drive team
"> "> ">


text:
http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=13935 David Ezell <firstname.lastname@example.com> changed: What |Removed |Added ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Keywords| |needsDrafting CC| |email@example.com, | |email@example.com Component|Saxon tests |Structures: XSD Part 1 Version|2006-11-06 |1.1 only firstname.lastname@example.com |firstname.lastname@example.com Product|XML Schema Test Suite |XML Schema Target Milestone|--- |PR QAContact|public-xml-schema-testsuite |www-xml-schema-comments@w3. |@w3.org |org --- Comment #4 from David Ezell <firstname.lastname@example.com> 2011-10-07 15:44:26 UTC --- Change section 3.1.4 to delete or rephrase second paragraph, in such a way so as to allow XPath expressions to address PIs and comments. -- Configure bugmail: http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are the QA contact for the bug.Received on Friday, 7 October 2011 15:44:39 UTC
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