The Meskwaki Probation Department provides guidance to Tribal Court probationers by encouraging them to be successful community members. Probationers are provided access to a variety of resources and services that not only address their offenses, but also promote healthy lifestyles and helps reconnect them with the community.
We believe that offenders who maintain and/or build strong family relationships are less likely to re-offend. We believe that without targeted intervention, there is a higher risk that previous patterns of behaviors are likely to be repeated and/or passed on to the next generation. The Probation Department works as a resource to offenders by targeting educational and cultural opportunities to reduce the chances of re-offending by promoting lifelong learning, employment, counseling, mentoring, and social inclusion practices.
You'll find docent reports, forms, pay tickets and more.
For more information, contact Misty Jefferson at (641) 484.9300.
Diabetes Program Cooking Demo has been rescheduled to Thursday, April 25th. It will start at 12:00 pm and be in the Tribal Center Kitchen. Menu: Zesty Shrimp Saute, Zucchini Noodles and an Easter-themed treat!


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NM ranching family to feds over plan to protect endangered mouse: 'Don't fence us out'
July 3, 2014 | by Rob Port
DON'T FENCE US OUT: The Lucero family (from left to right, Orlando, Mike and Manuel) say the U.S. Forest Service is going overboard with a proposed 8-foot-high fence in the Santa Fe National Forest. Photo by Rob Nikolewski.
By Rob Nikolewski │ New Mexico Watchdog
SANTA FE NATIONAL FOREST, N.M. – For more than a century, the Lucero family has grazed livestock in the majestic landscape near Fenton Lake in the Santa Fe National Forest. They started with sheep and, in the 1920s, switched to cattle.
But that may all come to an end because of an endangered mouse.
"You're taking a lot of heritage away," said Mike Lucero, as he looks over the creek that cuts through the meadow accompanied by his brother Manuel and cousin Orlando, who have brought their family's cattle to this spot since they were children.
Last month, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the meadow jumping mouse as an endangered species. Now, the U.S. Forest Service, which oversees the Santa Fe National Forest, is considering erecting a series of 8-foot high fences to protect the mouse's habitat.
THE MOUSE IN QUESTION: The meadow jumping mouse has recently been listed under the Endangered Species Act.
The Luceros, members of the San Diego Cattleman's Association and holders of grazing permits with the federal government, say the fences will lock out their cattle – as well as those of other permit holders – from ever returning to the meadow where the livestock graze for 20 days in the spring and up to 40 days in the fall.
"We're not insensitive to protecting the mouse," Orlando Lucero said. "But let's work on something that keeps everyone's interests in mind."
Forest Service officials in Albuquerque say no final decision has been made but, at the same time, they are required by law to comply with the Endangered Species Act. Since the meadow jumping mouse is now listed as endangered, the Forest Service is bound to take steps to protect its habitat.
Grazing was listed as one of the "a primary threats" to the mouse, said Robert Trujillo, the acting director of Wildlife, Fish and Rare Plants for the Southwest Region of the U.S. Forest Service.
"It's been our experience that a fence like that to protect that occupied habitat seems to be the best way we can do our affirmative duty and protect that habitat," Trujillo said.
But the Luceros say putting up a fence is an example of federal government overkill.
"At first, they were talking about a 300-yard fence on eight feet of either side (of the Rio Cebolla, a creek that feeds the meadow)," Manuel Lucero said. "But you look at the (Forest Service) map now and it goes on for three and a half miles – and that's just for this allotment."
FUTURE FENCING SPOT?: The San Antonio Campground is a popular spot for families and outdoor enthusiasts. Photo by Rob Nikolewski.
In fact, the Forest Service proposal could potentially put up fencing over large swaths of the forest, including the San Antonio Campground, a popular destination for families and outdoors enthusiasts in northern New Mexico.
"The San Antonio area, from what I've seen, is in the upper portion of that occupied habitat," Trujillo said. "It possibly could (be affected) but no decision has been made on that."
"I don't think the public realizes the San Antonio Campground is being considered," Mike Lucero said. "If they did, I think there would be a lot upset people."
The Luceros complain the Forest Service has not done enough to inform the public about the proposed fencing.
"Let's protect the mouse but we don't need to take the whole valley," Orlando Lucero said.
Trujillo said the Forest Service has just started what it calls its "scoping process" to elicit comments. "No decision will be made without gathering input from affected individuals," he said.
The meadow jumping mouse has plenty of support among environmentalists.
"Saving the New Mexico meadow jumping mouse and the streamside habitat it needs to survive is long overdue," said Jay Lininger, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity when the mouse received endangered status. "When we protect this tiny animal, we're also helping people, because we all rely on clean water for survival."
Trujillo says the mouse is active three to four months out of the year and spends the rest of its time hibernating.
This is the second time in the space of two months that the meadow jumping mouse has raised hackles among people with grazing permits in the state.
Some 275 miles south, in Otero County, the Forest Service reinforced locked gates to keep out cattle from a creek called the Agua Chiquita to protect the mouse's habitat. The move angered ranchers who tend over herds thirsty from a prolonged drought.
An attorney for Otero County says the state of New Mexico – not the federal government – has the right to access to the water to the creek and a lawsuit may be in the offing.
While the locked gate in the Otero County controversy keeps out only cattle, the Luceros complain 8-foot fencing in the Forest Service proposal in the Santa Fe Forest would keep out just about all forms of wildlife, including elk.
But the difference, Trujillo said, is that "the elk and deer get in there, get water and get out. They don't tend to lounge around and graze heavily. Cows will sit in there and graze."
So when will the feds make a decision? Trujillo said it could range anywhere from 30 days to 8 months, depending on how long the assessments take.
"I want to reiterate, we're committed to working with our permitees and all other stakeholders to really find where that sweet spot is," Trujillo said.
But the Lucero family is skeptical.
"I think they're afraid of getting sued" by environmental organizations, Mike Lucero said.
And if the fence is erected, will the Luceros stop ranching?
"Why would we give it up after four generations?" Orlando Lucero said. "We were here before the (Forest Service), back during land grants. We're not going to go nowhere."
Here's New Mexico Watchdog video of Mike Lucero:
Contact Rob Nikolewski at rnikolewski@watchdog.org and follow him on Twitter @robnikolewski

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Discussion in 'QRZ Operating Awards' started by VK3XZ, May 28, 2016.
Make sure the web address //ieframe.dll/dnserror.htm# is correct.
I have found the source of your issue and you should now be able to use the apply and analyze buttons without issue.
Salve, io ho lo stesso problema, non riesco ad andare avanti per la richiesta del premio cartaceo, arrivo alla fine quando è richiesto il pagamento e li rimango.
C'è qualcosa che sbaglio, chi mi può dare una mano grazie.
Hi, I have the same problem, I can not go on for the paper prize request, arrive at the end when payment is required and stay there.
There is something wrong, who can help me thanks.


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Trent University International Global Citizen Scholarships In Canada 2020/2021 | Ongoing
Trent University International Global Citizen Scholarships In Canada 2020/2021: Trent University is offering the Trent International Global Citizen Scholarships and Awards in Canada to eligible students for admission to undergraduate studies.
If you are interested in expanding your international learning and understanding, then you should enjoy being a part of Trent International.
The grant is a highly competitive, prestigious, and international award program open to incoming international students who demonstrate high academic achievement, outstanding community and international service, strong leadership, as well as financial need.
As one of Canada's top universities, Trent University was founded in 1964 and promotes life-changing experiences and careers at all levels. For its undergraduate study, it ranks #3 in Canada.
Why at Trent University? At Trent, students have the opportunity to gain a life-changing experience with a variety of clubs and groups, including many theatre groups, social interest groups, newspapers, religious groups, political chapters and academic societies, and Greeks.
READ International Mathematical Union Abel Visiting Scholar Program in US, 2020
Postgraduate Scholarships 2019/2020 for Nigerian Students To Study In UK
$400k Mike Rowe Scholarship Program 2019 [UPDATED]
Redhead Scholarship 2019 | USA Scholarships
Trent University International Global Citizen Scholarships In Canada 2020/2021 Application Deadline: February 15, 2020, for September 2020 entry
University or Organization: Trent University
Department: NA
Award: $24,000 per academic year
Access Mode: Online
Number of Awards: A limited number of awards
Nationality: International
The award can be taken in Canada
Eligible Countries: Applications from all nationalities are welcome
Acceptable Course or Subjects: The award will be awarded for the degree program in any subject offered by the university
Admissible Criteria: To be eligible, the applicants must meet all the given criteria:
Students who have been admitted to undergraduate studies will be considered for awards
Applicants must have a high school diploma for admission to a bachelor's degree
Applicants must have a minimum grade as outlined in country-specific admissions requirements
READ HFFA Scholarships Haute Future Fashion Academy in Italy, 2019
How to Apply: To get this award applicant at Trent University applicants need to take admission for an undergraduate degree course in which you want to study. After that to apply for the grant, applicants are required to download the application form (in pdf or word format) and submit to [email protected]
Supporting Documents: A completed application includes all the following and sends as one file (pdf. or word):
An essay (maximum 1 page, up to 500 words) on the following: 1) outline your academic aspirations and future career goals and 2) how Trent University can help you in achieving these goals.
A record of your most recent (last 2 years) extra-curricular activities, community service, and leadership (maximum 1 page).
An essay indicating how your service or leadership has been a meaningful part of your education and personal growth. The committee is most interested in specific examples of your accomplishments (maximum 1 page, up to 500 words).
An essay discussing a local, national or international issue and its personal importance to you (maximum 1 page; up to 500 words).
Two letters of reference, including at least one from teachers/former teachers. Reference letters can be e-mailed directly by the referee to [email protected] and must state the full name of the student in the Subject line. (Download reference form as a word or pdf format)
READ Hubert Humphery Fellowships for International Students, USA
Documentation of Income: Official statement of annual salary from the parent(s) employer(s) on company letterhead or most recent statement of income tax returns from the parent(s).
Admission Requirements: Before applying for a course, applicants must check general, program and country-specific admission requirements are posted under apply now.
Language Requirement: Applicants must meet Trent University's academic and English proficiency requirements at the time of application.
Benefits: Trent University will award up to $ 24,000 per academic year that is determined upon financial need assessment and may include tuition and supporting fees excluding housing.
Massey University Canada Offers Ph.D. Positions in Plant Pathology 2019 | Ongoing
Pershing Square Scholarship In Oxford 2020/2021 | Ongoing
Mechanical Supervisor at SPIE Oil & Gas Services
NYSC 1Dokita Healthcare Ltd Internship
Title VIII Research Scholar Program, 2020


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Q: String Concatenation - valueOf or not So I just perused for a while, all the different questions on here about .valueOf with strings, but they all seem to be about conversions. Comparing .valueOf to just + "".
I want to know if it is worth it or at all necessary to use .valueOf if it is a concatenation.
Example:
LOGGER.info("Final Score: " + String.valueOf(Math.round(finalScore * 100)) + "%");

VS
LOGGER.info("Final Score: " + Math.round(finalScore * 100) + "%");

It seems as though using String.valueOf is unnecessary if you have actual strings to go along with it. I understand it may be better to use .valueOf if you were just converting it and intended to use an empty string.

A: When we concatenate strings, the compiler actually translates it to StringBuffer.append().
The underlying implementations for StringBuffer.append(int) and String.valueOf(int) both eventually end up calling Integer.getChars(int,int,char[]) except that in case of String.valueOf(), there is a call to Integer.toString(int) first.
To conclude, for the given scenario, directly concatenating would be the way to go. But if you intend to be conscious about memory, then use string-builder to concatenate values first and then log it.

A: The source code for String#valueOf(Object) looks like this:
public static String valueOf(Object obj) {
    return (obj == null) ? "null" : obj.toString();
}

So the only difference between valueOf and toString is that valueOf is null-safe. So let's see which one is used if we concatenate a string and an object.
Object foo = null;
System.out.println("foo " + foo); //foo null, no exception thrown
System.out.println("foo " + String.valueOf(foo)); //foo null, no exception thrown

So it looks like there's no difference whatsoever between concatenation and using valueOf in this context.

A: you are correct. When you are combining strings and other datatypes, the valueOf is not necessary. For only an int, I think the valueOf works, but anecdotally, the 2nd example is a lot more common
@Test
public void testStringValueOF(){
    int num = 123;

    // this works...
    String test = String.valueOf(num);

    // but this is more common
    String test2 = "" + num;
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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We are so sorry for your loss. Our deepest sympathy. Our thoughts and prayers are with you and your family at this difficult time.
Aunt Vonnie, Gord, Jane, Rick and families. So sorry to hear of Uncle Roy's passing. Thinking of you all and remembering you in our prayers.
Just want to pass on my condolences to Roy's family . I had the privilege of knowing both Roy and his brother John as a cadet with RCSC Lion, I consider them both as mentors and had the greatest respect for them.


text:
Uncategorized ·Netflix
What if TV can't be 'everywhere?'
BYJoe Marchese
July 10, 2014, 7:20 PM UTC
ODD ANDERSEN AFP— Getty Images
During the World Cup games, many of us broke away from the workday to catch the emotional matches. At my office, like at many other companies large and small, we played the games' live streams from the ESPN app on a big projector. Sure enough, the lag has been bad, as demand has swamped the servers. WatchESPN was outright crashing during the U.S.-Germany game last month.
I'm guessing nobody is really surprised, given, as some might recall, the Oscars livestream crashed; HBO Go fizzled during the True Detective finale and Veronica Mars movie backers couldn't get their free digital downloads on time.
We're used to these delays. The Internet literally can't handle the amount of TV we watch; the idea behind "TV everywhere," where television broadcasters provide viewers with access to online content via live or on-demand, may be impossible with our current infrastructure.
Netflix (NFLX) takes up about 30% of home Internet bandwidth in North America, and data from Procera estimates that anywhere from 6% to 10% of the online streaming service's subscribers watched at least one episode of House of Cards Season 2 in its first weekend. Yet House of Cards doesn't have nearly as many viewers as a moderately successful TV show. A total of 4.6 million people watched the premiere of USA's Suits, for example, which for a series, is an impressive but not gargantuan hit (but one of my personal favorites!). And that's not even broadcast, it's cable. A highly anticipated episode of How I Met Your Mother could pull in close to 11 million viewers.Given such viewership, it seems the Internet literally cannot handle television.
Because it takes up that whopping 30% of home Internet bandwidth, Netflix is disrupting traditional "peering" structures whereby two or more networks, which are required to be connected at a hardware level, exchange traffic for free. The networks that Netflix connects to are sending significantly more traffic to their peering partners than they're receiving in return. The extra traffic forces many of these last-mile providers to either spend money to upgrade their infrastructure, or their users will suffer from a degraded viewing experience.
Earlier this year, Comcast (CMCSA)and Netflix signed a paid peering agreement designed to improve Netflix's performance, but that doesn't change the fact that we are consistently at the limits of bandwidth when it comes to streaming high-quality video. Sure enough, a few months later, images of Netflix error messages blaming Verizon for slow bandwidth started going viral online.
I binge-watched the latest season of House of Cards. Even though my wife and I pay for an upgraded Verizon FiOS Internet package, every episode came through in painfully grainy quality. Every now and then, when the scenery barely moved, it would snap into much better focus, only to remind me how bad the viewing quality was. Obviously, as we later learned, the issue wasn't Verizon to my house, but Netflix to Verizon.
The problem is potentially bigger: Cord-cutters like to talk about being free of the constraints of cable bundles, but the trend I'm seeing is that bandwidth deals could turn into bundles themselves. Imagine you move into a new neighborhood and have a choice of Internet service providers; before you select, you need to do some homework on who has deals in place with the video content companies you like to watch over the Internet.
We truly want "TV everywhere." Yet when most people talk about problems with Netflix and its ilk, they're talking about concerns that their subscription rates are going to go up or that some studio is going to pull their favorite movies from on-demand streaming. With the Aereo U.S. Supreme Court decision, cord-cutters are now quickly hunting down their next best options. But as long as these bandwidth problems are as glaring as they are (and getting worse) we're not going to make the strides we need, and the industry won't be able to deliver the experience that consumers are hungry for. And judging by the fact that Netflix more than doubled its Emmy nomination haul this year, I'd wager they (we) are pretty hungry.
Joe Marchese is the CEO of true[X], a Los Angeles and New York City-based digital advertising company he co-founded in 2007. He has also served as senior vice president of digital and advertising at the cable network Fuse TV, where he led consumer marketing, digital and multi-platform development.


text:
Bernard Lang, né le  à Linz (Autriche), est un compositeur autrichien de musique expérimentale et d'avant-garde, particulièrement reconnu pour son style agressif-répétitif. Il est depuis 2003 professeur de composition à l'université de Graz.

Sa musique est caractérisée par la répétition brutale de petites phrases. Il collabore régulièrement avec des chorégraphes, des cinéastes ainsi qu'un nombre de musiciens de musique électronique. Il tire sa renommée de son opéra provovocateur, I Hate Mozart, composé pour le festival de Vienne consacré à Mozart en 2006.

Il compose par ailleurs sur commande. À titre d'exemple le Differenz/Wiederholung 6b (letter code #2), pour l'association italienne de musique contemporaine, Repertorio Zero.

Liens externes

Compositeur autrichien de musique classique de la période contemporaine
Professeur à l'université de Graz
Musicien expérimental
Naissance en février 1957
Naissance à Linz

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


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layout: default
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{% include portfolio.html tag="frank" %}

    {{ content }}

{% include timeline.html %}
{% include services.html %}
{% include call-to-action.html %}
{% include contact.html %}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Public liability insurance is essential for most businesses. It's a type of insurance that covers you in case a customer or member of the public suffers an injury or loss while on your premises, or while you are performing any kind of business activity.
If you're a sole trader or self-employed and working from home, public liability insurance is still essential because even if everything is going right for your business, there's always the chance of something happening. With the correct level of cover this type of commercial insurance lets you operate your business confidently, safe in the knowledge that if the worst were to happen, you and your customers are sufficiently covered: medical costs can be paid for, possessions replaced and property repaired.
You own a hairdressing salon and one of your stylists accidentally injures a client during a haircut.
You're the owner of a fast food takeaway and a customer walks into your shop and falls and injures themselves.
You're an electrician who, when working on a refurbishment project for a client's new house, connects the fuse box incorrectly and the owner makes a claim against you for the blown circuits that have caused damage to the property.
You're a sole trader IT support engineer, and while on a customer site, you knock over a cup of tea on to some computer equipment and damage the hardware beyond repair.
Every policy can be tailored to the individual and specific requirements of each business but, in general, public liability insurance covers a business' legal liability to pay damages to any customers or members of the public for death and for injury as well as any loss arising from the misconduct, negligence or recklessness that has resulted from the its activities. It's important to note that public liability insurance only covers third party claims, and not those made by your own employees. So if your business owns delivery vans and one of your drivers injures someone whilst they're driving, then you won't be covered unless your policy also includes Employers' Liability insurance. If not, it's essential that you arrange for this separately.
The amount of cover you need will vary according to your business type and other factors. Many small businesses will take out a minimum of £1 million of cover, although in some circumstances you may be required to take out £5 million or £10 million of cover, for example, if it's specified in contracts between you and certain customers.
Cover, from such insurers as Swinton public liability insurance, is not particularly expensive, and you may make significant savings by buying a general insurance policy for your business, which typically includes office insurance and employers' liability, as well as public liability cover.
Posted by george on Jul 10 2012. Filed under Small Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.


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O'Brien Coin Guide: The Irish Decimal Twopence
The Old Currency Exchange / April 22, 2015
In 1971, Ireland decimalised its currency in parallel with the UK. We did this because we were tied to the UK Pound at that time and, of course, all of our coins were minted at the Royal Mint in the UK. Decimalisation also brought all of our coins back in line with the UK coin specifications, i.e. some of the Irish pre-decimal coins were different from their UK counterparts, e.g. the threepence and sixpence. Both the threepence and sixpence were discontinued.
The twopence (2p) (Irish: dhá phingin) coin was the third smallest denomination of the Irish (decimal) pound. It was first issued when the Irish currency was decimalised on Decimal Day, 15 February 1971. The coin was minted until 2000. It was the third of three new designs introduced all in bronze, the others being the halfpenny and penny. All featured ornamental birds on the reverse.
1971 Ireland decimal twopence. The coin was designed by the Irish artist Gabriel Hayes and the design is adapted from the Second Bible of Charles the Baldheld at Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris..
2 pence
(Bronze) 1.85 mm
(Steel) 2.03 mm
Bronze (1971–1989) – an alloy of copper, tin and zinc
Copper-plated steel (1990–2000)
In 1990 the decision was taken to produce the coin on a copper plated steel base since bronze had become too expensive. The steel-based coins are magnetic and, for some, it is a quick (and fun) way to sort the coins, i.e. use a big magnet to lift the 1990's coins out of the mixtures. After reducing the size of the five and ten pence coins introduced in the early 1990s, the two pence coin was the fourth largest Irish coin, with only the twenty and fifty pence and the pound coin coins being larger in the series.
Year Mintage
The 2p coin, alongwith all of the other decimal coins, was withdrawn for the euro in 2000
April 22, 2015 in 20th C, coins, decimal, twopence. Tags: #1971, #1975, #1976, #1977, #1978, #1979, #1980, #1982, #1985, #1986, #1988, #1990, #1992, #1995, #1996, #1998, #2000, #coin, #irish, decimal, Ireland
O'Brien Rare Coin Review: Why is the 1992 Irish 10p coin so valuable?
O'Brien Coin Guide: Irish Decimal Fivepence
← O'Brien Coin Guide: Irish €2 Coins
Euro Zone €2 commemorative design competition – VOTE NOW ! →


text:
Domingo Pérez és un municipi de la província de Toledo, a la comunitat autònoma de Castella la Manxa. Limita amb Otero al nord, Santa Olalla a l'est, Erustes i Cebolla al sud, i Illán de Vacas a l'oest.

Demografia

Administració

Referències

Municipis de la Comarca de Torrijos


text:
ShopHQ Homepage > 684-950
Invicta Jewelry Men's Choice of Size Pyrite & Hematite Beaded Stretch Bracelet
Web Only Price: $ 43.93 -
$ $43.93 + S&H: + FREE Standard S&H
Gleaming with a subtle luster, pyrite beads interspersed with hematite accents make this piece a treasure for your collection! The subdued colors will match with your favorite gold-tone, silver-tone or even black Invicta watches! And to ensure you get a perfect fit, this piece has a little bit of stretch to it!
Material Content: Stainless Steel
Pyrite: 8mm.
Hematite: 8mm.
PYRITE L - 8"- 8.49": 8.75" (8" Inner Circumference)
PYRITE M - 7.5"- 7.99": 8.25" (7.25" Inner Circumference)
Width: 0.33in.
Height: 0.33in.
Bracelets 825inchesover Hematite StainlessSteel Beaded
Bracelet Clasp Types
A clasp is more than a practical device used to fasten your jewelry. It is part of the overall design and can be a very important focal point. Be sure to consider if it will suit your needs of durability, fashion, comfort and peace of mind.
Barrel Clasp: Used on most rope chains to make the chain more secure. The barrel clasp looks like part of the chain and twists to get a pendant on and off.
Lobster Claw Clasp: As a traditional clasp style found in bracelets and necklaces, the lobster claw is generally reserved for heavier styles that may need added strength. The closure's shape is more oblong, similar to a teardrop shape, and is controlled by a tip that opens and closes the spring in the clasp. This type is also considered a more expensive finding that can add to the overall value of the jewelry piece.
Magnetic Clasp: The popularity of the magnetic clasp has greatly increased in recent years. It is a quick and easy way to secure jewelry while not having to fuss with a tiny clasp, which can be difficult if you have long fingernails, arthritic hands or other mobility challenges. A magnetic clasp relies on a strong internal magnet that works to pull both ends of the clasp together. In most cases, a magnetic clasp is used for light to medium weight jewelry pieces that do not put excessive stress on the magnet.
S-Clasp: An S-shaped piece of metal that connects a chain by hooking metal rings on each end of the S-shape.
Slide Insert Clasp: This type of clasp is exactly as it sounds. With a box-like shape that is hollow on the inside, the wearer will slide the nearly-flat tab into the box until it clicks, indicating a secure closure. On some jewelry, a slide insert clasp will be accompanied by a side safety catch, which adds strength and security to the clasp. Although this type of clasp is found on both bracelets and necklaces, it is particularly popular on bracelet styles. These types of clasps are often reserved for more expensive jewelry.
Spring Ring Clasp: One of the most common closure types, the spring ring clasp is typically used for light to medium weight bracelets or necklaces. It is round in its design and features a small tip which controls the opening and closing of the spring. The circle then closes around another smaller loop or link at the other end of the strand.
Toggle Clasp: A toggle clasp is a narrow piece of metal, usually designed in the shape of a bar, which is then pushed through a circular ring to act as a fastener. Unlike the lobster claw or spring ring clasps, a toggle clasp is not controlled by a spring. The pretty design is less secure than other closure types, but is usually meant to be a big part of the design and is meant to "show". The clasp is an attractive way to secure a chunkier link bracelet or necklace.
To measure for a bracelet, wrap a soft, flexible tape measure around your wrist bone. Then, add 3/4" to 1" to that measurement to determine your bracelet size. Generally, 7" is considered a standard women's size and 8" is considered a standard men's size.
Another way to get an ideal fit is to measure the length of a bracelet you own. For bracelets that are to be slipped over the hand, measure the widest part of your hand to ensure the bracelet will fit over it.
Keep in mind that different bracelet styles tend to fit differently depending upon the clasp and materials used. Bracelets with adjustable clasps are usually one size fits all. Those with large beads or stones have less room for your wrist. Also, bracelets with links can usually be shortened by removing one or more links.
Hematite gets its name from the Greek word meaning "blood-like" because of the red color of its powder. American Indians used to crush hematite and mix it with animal fat to produce red and brown paint for their artwork and bodies. Interestingly, red hematite is essentially rust. Its reddish brown and orange colors appear when its high iron content comes into contact with water and oxygen. But when the stone is smooth and polished, hematite features a beautiful steel gray color with a metallic and earthy luster. It is this exquisite gray color that is most often used in jewelry.
Although both red and gray hematite is common on Earth, it also occurs everywhere on Mars, making it responsible for the planet's distinctive red color. The reddish landscape of Mars is due to the oxidized iron on its surface, proving that water and oxygen must have been present on the Red Planet at one time. In 2004, NASA's Mars rover Opportunity discovered small spheres believed to be made partly or mostly of hematite, proving that Mars was once a wetter world long ago.
Grey hematite usually forms over long periods of time in the presence of liquid water. It is typically found in layers at the bottom of standing water, such as lakes or mineral hot springs. Hematite can also occur as the result of volcanic activity. While England is the best-known supplier, hematite is also found in Germany, Norway, Sweden, Spain, Brazil, New Zealand and the United States.
Hematite is the most important source of iron ore in the world, which leads to the production of steel, and is therefore vital to the economy of major countries. Because of its high iron content, hematite has magnetic attraction. It is often fashioned into carvings, cameos, intaglios and beads and ranks a hardness of 5.0-6.5 on the Mohs Scale.
It was once believed that large deposits of hematite were formed in places where battles had been fought. The subsequent blood that flowed into the ground was thought to turn into the stone. Hematite is a symbol for the Roman god of war and is thought to be a stone of protection, a belief originating from the Roman belief that it could strengthen warriors going into battle. Ancient warriors even used to rub their bodies with hematite believing it would protect them.
Since the silvery-gray stones can be polished to such a high sheen, they were long ago used as mirrors. Because of this reflective quality, it is believed today to help deflect the emotions of others. It is said to deepen the connection between spirit and body while balancing yin/yang energies and emotions. Folklore also says that hematite can transform and dissolve negativity. It is considered an excellent "worry stone" with emotional grounding properties that calm the mind and clear it of stress. Hematite is also thought to be a "lawyer's stone" that brings positive judgments and helps one remain true to his or her inner self.
Stainless steel, also called corrosion resistant steel, is a steel alloy with added iron and chromium. The metal is low maintenance, rust-resistant, durable, highly lustrous and extremely hygienic, making it ideal for items such as cookware, knives, surgical instruments, jewelry and watches.
The nearly-indestructible and masculine nature of stainless steel is appealing for many jewelry styles. It has a similar appearance to platinum and polishes to a glistening sheen. Any scratches that may occur from day to day wear can be easily buffed away without endangering the piece. Unlike traditional gold, silver or platinum jewelry, stainless steel jewelry is not poured into molds, but is usually hand-cut from a solid piece of steel, leaving no seams or weak spots. With stainless steel, your jewelry will last a lifetime.
Stainless steel was first recognized in France in 1821 by metallurgist Pierre Berthier. He realized the iron-chromium alloys maintained resistance from acids and recommended their use in cutlery. After several corrosion-resistance related discoveries and patents in Europe and the United States, Harry Brearley in England discovered a modern blend of stainless steel alloy. When it was announced by The New York Times in January of 1915, he was officially credited with the invention of this impressive modern metal.
Necklace & Bracelet Clasp Types


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14 Oct 2016 Award-Winning Director Aaron Biebert Hosts "Winston Man" and Dr. Sally Satel for Panel on October 28th about Saving A Billion Lives
Posted at 13:33h in Health by The National Center
National Center for Public Policy Research's Jeff Stier to Chair New York City Host Committee
Critically-Acclaimed Documentary Film Begins Theatrical Debut on October 28th at the Cinepolis Chelsea Theater in New York City
New York, NY – The award-winning documentary feature film "A Billion Lives" is kicking off its worldwide theatrical release on Friday, October 28, 2016, with a one-week limited engagement playing in New York City at the Cinepolis Chelsea until November 4th. To kick off this special engagement, members of the media and concerned thought leaders are invited to join award-winning Director Aaron Biebert for an exclusive screening and panel discussion.
The National Center for Public Policy Research is pleased to announce that the NYC Host Committee is being chaired by Manhattan resident Jeff Stier, a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research. Stier, who appears in the film, is a leading proponent of market-based approaches to public health and a thought leader on tobacco harm reduction.
Stier recently authored a chapter in the Adam Smith Institute report, "Sinnovation, how markets can solve public health problems – but government gets in the way."
In the report, Stier wrote that "E-cigarettes have split the public health lobby in two. On one side are those focused on harm reduction, who see e-cigs as a substantially safer alternative to cigarettes for people who are already smokers. On the other are those who see fundamental lifestyle change as the goal for smokers, and e-cigs as an obstacle to that."
"In 'A Billion Lives,' producer Aaron Biebert beautifully depicts the magnitude of the divide," says Stier.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that a billion lives will be lost this century due to smoking-related illnesses. Meanwhile, smoke-free alternatives, like e-cigarettes and vapor technology that are helping people quit smoking, are estimated to be 95% safer than smoking cigarettes, yet are being banned, restricted, and unfairly maligned as "a gateway to smoking" and "dangerous."
Director Aaron Biebert, whose critically-acclaimed film is igniting a worldwide movement to save a billion lives, is hosting a panel to discuss these issues and more. The experts joining him who appear in the film include:
Dr. Sally Satel, MD, an authority on mental health and domestic drug policies in the U.S. A practicing psychiatrist and lecturer at the Yale University School of Medicine, she examines political trends in medicine and has a lot to say about what is exposed in "A Billion Lives."
David Goerlitz, a retired professional model known around the world as the "Winston Man" throughout the 80's, was the first representative of the tobacco industry to not only quit smoking, but to advocate against smoking while employed by a cigarette company.
The panel, which will begin immediately after the 8pm screening, will be moderated by Jared Meyer, a public policy expert with the Manhattan Institute and author of the recent Forbes Magazine article titled, "Government Puts Tobacco Interests Above A Billion Lives."
Interview opportunities with Aaron Biebert, Dr. Sally Satel, David Goerlitz and Jeff Stier are available upon request.
The media is invited to attend the "A Billion Lives" premiere/panel discussion on Friday, October 28th at the Cinepolis Chelsea Theatre. Seating is limited so please RSVP by October 24th. For additional information, visit ABillionLives.com/New-York-City.
View the trailer at ABillionLives.com. Film screeners are available upon request.
Independently funded by the Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based production company Attention Era Media, "A Billion Lives" continues to rack up top honors:
Supreme Jury Prize at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival in Australia
Best International Documentary at the Jozi Film Festival in Johannesburg, South Africa
Best Director at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival in Australia
The Dorn Award from the Global Forum on Nicotine
Jeff Stier is a Senior Fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research in Washington, D.C., and heads its Risk Analysis Division. His National Center op-eds have been published in top outlets including The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, the New York Post, Forbes, the Washington Examiner and National Review Online. His more scholarly writing has been published in the Hoover Institution's journal, Defining Ideas, The Cato Institute's Regulation, and Springer's Cancer Causes and Control. He has testified before many bodies at the city, state and international level and has appeared on the Fox News Channel, CNN, CNBC and other television networks and is a guest on talk radio programs approximately 100 times a year.


The best part of ordinary is when you stop, take a closer look and realise just how truly amazing the ordinary really is.
Hi. My name is MV. Welcome to my little part of the internet.
Books organised by the month I started them this year with thoughts before during and after.
Every February for a bit of fun I judge all the books I read last year and in the spirit of all award ceremonies hand out my own. The Ordinaries!
"You can choose to focus on the surprises and pleasures, or the frustrations. And you can choose to appreciate the smallest scraps of experience, the everyday moments or to value only the grandest, most stirring ones "
The most important book on being happy that I have read deserves a proper attempt at a professional summary.
A self help book that promises that you can have it all should send the alarm bells ringing. But The Secret has spent 2800 days in the Amazon Top 100 lists and sold 23m so there must be something in it right?
The BBC website had a fascinating article on how to read more books. I look at its conclusions and my own thoughts and tips on how to read more and still enjoy it.


An integrated web-based platform, eEnviPer, aims to provide for the application, administration and consultation of environmental permits, thereby making the environmental permitting process more transparent, more accessible and more efficient. The platform will be available in early 2014 after intensive field tests in five European countries (Croatia, Greece, Italy, Serbia and Turkey). eEnviPer uses innovative technical approaches such as public sector cloud services and service-oriented architecture (SOA) to build open, flexible and collaborative eGovernment services while at the same time lowering information and communication technology (ICT) costs.
The use of an internet-enabled platform can be a first step for municipalities and authorities to make their permitting processes more cost effective, transparent and user-friendly. The system offers the possibility for public administrations to easily deploy both new services and existing procedures as shared services. The platform can also access locally available data sources such as geospatial information through industry-standard XML-based interfaces. This paper examines the cloud computing aspects of the eEnviPer platform in detail. The first section introduces cloud computing, cloud based services and deployment models. The second section analyses the transition and the benefits of government services into cloud implementation. Finally, the last section focuses on features of the eEnviPer platform as a cloud based service.
Cloud computing is a hosting service that enables users to use hardware and software resources remotely over a network connection without investing in processing power, software or hardware themselves. Cloud service providers therefore allow organizations to meet their information technology requirements (such as hardware capacities, software and file storage needs) without the cost of the initial investment. Instead, customers usually sign up for a flexible rental or fee-based payment contract.
With such a rental model, one also has the advantage of continuous service delivery and maintenance without paying extra fees for upgrades or troubleshooting. In the face of changing business needs, cloud computing provides a flexible structure and adaptive capacity for information technologies.
allowing consumers to flexibly expand or shrink their resources based on their changing business requirements and monitor these resources to control and optimise the usage.
Software as a Service (SaaS): to use an application without controlling the operating system, hardware or network infrastructure on which the application is running. Consumers are only allowed to use the software provided on the cloud architecture, without any need for managing the hardware and the platform resources. Consumers can access the SaaS applications via several clients including thin clients, browsers and mobile hand-held devices.
Platform as a Service (PaaS): to use a hosting environment for the applications without controlling the operating system, hardware or infrastructure on which the application is running. Consumers are allowed to deploy their own applications on PaaS platforms created using databases, application development languages, services, libraries and tools that are supported by the cloud provider. Consumers are not allowed to manage the network, hardware and operating system components in this model.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): to use computing resources on a virtual machine, such as processing power, storage and network without controlling the cloud infrastructure. Consumers are allowed to provision processing, storage, network resources to run their own platform and/or software on the cloud environment. The consumer is not allowed to manage the cloud platform itself but has a maximum flexibility to control the resources in the cloud platform.
Each service model includes different services, from data and applications to storage and networking. Today, egovernment services are slowly moving from traditional IT via other cloud service models to SaaS solutions.
private cloud: the cloud infrastructure is operated solely for a single organization, may be managed by a third party or by the hosting organization itself; today, most e-government services are deployed on private clouds.
Hybrid cloud: the cloud infrastructure combines two or more private, public or community clouds that remain unique entities, but enables data and application portability such as load balancing between clouds.
Thanks to these characteristics, cloud computing platforms deploying e-government services are an affordable and flexible solution to the huge ICT infrastructure costs in the deployment, upgrading and maintenance of e-government services.
The public sector has an important role to play in shaping the cloud computing market. As the EU's largest buyer of IT services, it can set stringent requirements for features, performance, security, interoperability, data portability and compliance with technical requirements. The European Commission underlines the importance of cloud computing in the report "Unleashing the Potential of Cloud Computing in Europe"6. The report identifies the Promotion of Common Public Sector Leadership through a European Cloud Partnership as one of three key actions to be taken in the cloud strategy; it states that pooling public requirements could bring higher efficiency and that common sectoral requirements (e.g., eHealth, social care, assisted living, and eGovernment services such as open data) would reduce costs and enable interoperability.
In general, the major benefits of cloud computing for e-government services are considered to be: cost effectiveness – reducing capital expenditure, on-demand self-service, scalability, quality of service, ease of implementation and implementation speed, innovation, device and location independency, green savings, reliability and business continuity, as well as efficiency and security.
These benefits are of major interest for the public sector. This is evident from the various strategies that have already been adopted by governments in Europe and beyond, including the Cloud First Strategy (US), G-Cloud (UK), Andromede (FR) and Trusted Cloud (DE)7. In all these cases, the incentives cited are more efficient data center utilization as well as re-use of applications to standardize and keep costs lower. For example, the UK quotes estimates of IT standard infrastructure utilization of less than 10%8. Most government organizations spend a significant portion of their technology budgets on procuring and maintaining IT infrastructure, platforms and applications.
Purchasing hardware, upgrading software and hiring administrators is a major undertaking, often consuming significant resources. Public authorities can deploy cloud-based solutions such as eEnviPer easily without any need to configure hardware and other software resources. Therefore, the most immediate saving of introducing a cloud based model would be in terms of lower IT costs by reducing or even eliminating capital and operating expenditure and increasing hardware utiliztion rates, by paying only for the services they use and, potentially, by reducing or redeploying their IT staff.
From the sustainability perspective, cloud computing offers more flexibility (often called "elasticity") in matching IT resources to business functions than earlier computing methods, and provides access to the platform from a wide range of locations and/or clients. Resources and services can be rapidly and elastically provisioned to quickly scale-up and rapidly released to quickly scale-down, for example as organizations grow or their business requirements change. From the performance perspective, user will be able to access more top-end IT capabilities – such as higher-caliber hardware, software and IT staff – than they can attract and/or afford themselves.
To the e-government service provider, the resources and services available in a cloud platform often appear to be unlimited and can be purchased in any quantity at any time. As the ability to run data centers and to develop and manage software applications is rarely a core competence of public organizations, cloud computing can make it much easier to reduce or shed these functions, allowing organizations to concentrate on critical issues such as the development of policy and the delivery of public services. Besides the numerous advantages of cloud computing, there are still significant concerns about e-government services. Data security, reliability, privacy and legal issues were rated as the top concerns for cloud based solutions investments. Other concerns include are lack of control, lack of standards, lack of transparency, lack of skills, availability of experienced vendors, portability and interoperability issues.
Generally, there is no one-size-fits-all cloud solution that removes all concerns of government managers. Managers will need to balance their need for a competitive advantage and faster turnaround for their organizations with the wish for a comprehensive cloud strategy in place that makes sense for their unique needs and citizens. While IT managers will want to maintain the relevancy of IT within the larger organization, they also need to manage the rate of growth of their IT infrastructure, the costs of managing it, low resource utilization and the necessary flexibility to meet the rapidly changing needs and outreach required of the agency or department. Cloud computing can be a solution for these concerns, but it needs to be carefully considered and introduced in line with the organization's needs.
The eEnviPer platform is offered as a cloud SaaS solution, i.e., delivered over the internet and accessible through a secure connection with a web browser. It is a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)13 based cloud computing platform based on DOTFRAMEWORK. This platform is based on open source technologies such as PHP, Smarty, jQuery and Ext JS, in order to create a solid and reliable operation platform that would be scalable to fit eEnviPer needs.
knowledge management systems (KMS) that empower environmental engineers during the elaboration of environmental impact studies.
Furthermore, eEnviPer's SOA-based cloud platform provides access to eEnviPer data through REST-ful services and makes it available for use by authenticated external systems. With this feature, SOAP Web Services and REST-ful application programming interfaces (APIs) can be easily configured and made available for almost any part of the data storage layer. The eEnviPer platform also provides a geographic decision support system for public authorities: DOT WebGIS, a simple online GIS interface to provide geographic information about land use in a certain region. This could include protected areas, existing environmental permits, infrastructure and geographic features. This GIS module presents geographical data on a map and provides users with a comprehensive tool to interact with. The eEnviPer platform integrates GIS layers or existing systems that support environment-related permit procedures and provide digital services for permitting authorities at different levels, enterprises, consulting services and civil society.
It has been designed to be compatible with SDI and INSPIRE and the eEnviPer framework has been designed to support the OGC standards (WMS, WFS, WCS, KML). As an example, the eEnviPer platform GIS component might access a data source containing all Natura 2000 areas in Europe using cloud services. In the pilot phase, the eEnviPer platform operates from a server provided by DRAXIS Environmental Technologies in Greece.
This server provides centrally the user interface and computation. Ultimately, eEnviPer can be installed on any server fulfilling the system requirements. Where commercial hosts are not an option for security and confidentiality reasons, clients could decide to host a central eEnviPer cloud platform for all municipalities. The use of an internet-enabled platform such as eEnviPer can be a first step for municipalities and permitting authorities to make their permitting processes more transparent and user-friendly. eEnviPer takes the ongoing standardization of the environmental permit workflow and of permit–related data into account to provide more efficient and more sustainable e-government processes.


text:
package com.shunwang.api.response.recharge;

import com.shunwang.api.response.AbstractSWResponse;

/**
 * @author min.da
 * @since 2015-12-14
 */
public class SWAbandonCouponResponse extends AbstractSWResponse {
    private static final long serialVersionUID = 4346203406455413337L;
}


Good news for our area: FHA is on its way to increasing their loan limit from $625,500 to $729,750 (its 'temporary' level prior to October 1, 2011). The measure would be in place through 2013.
According to Reuters, a bipartisan panel of Congress agreed on a measure yesterday that would increase the limit. The increase would apply only to FHA, NOT to loans backed by Fannie and Freddie. It still has to pass the House & Senate, but indications of passing are good.
This is important for our local market, which is considered high priced. When loan limits dropped to $625,500, it meant less purchasing power for buyers trying to borrow more. This primarily affected homes in the $750-900k price range, which, after the drop meant that even with 20% down, in order to get the very best rates buyers were limited to homes under $750k (unless they came up with more cash.) At the new $729k limit, buyers can purchase up to about $875k with 20% down and still get extremely competitive (historical lows, actually) interest rates.
Stay tuned to see if the measure passes.
This entry was posted in FHA, financing resources, Loans & Financing. Bookmark the permalink.


text:
Thoughts from upside down
Odd thoughts about flying, aerobatics, software engineering and other things that cross my mind.
The Porkolab: all of our agents are busy helping other customers
You've all called the "customer service" number for some faceless monolith like AT&T or Comcast and heard, over and over, "all our agents are busy helping other customers". The useful content - the denotative significance, as semanticists would say (though it might take them a couple of goes, especially if they've already started on the semiotic cocktails) - is "so you're just going to have to hang on for another hour or two". But what else is it saying? Why did they choose this rather than just stopping at "all our our agents are busy right now"?
The answer is of course that it is subtle psychological manipulation. If they just said "all our agents are busy", you could reasonably get cross after the third full cycle of hold music, asking yourself why they don't hire more agents. But because they say "helping other customers", there's an instinctive reaction - even amongst cynical uber-rationalist grouches such as myself - that this wouldn't quite be cricket. The subtext is "the other people they're helping are just as important as you are, you have no right to expect that you should be served any quicker". Clever, huh? Instead of being mad at Comcast for being such cheapskates and not hiring enough people, you feel guilty because you were putting yourself above your fellow man.
I'm sure they pay psychologists a lot of money to come up with this. It's amazing how easy it is to manipulate people's feelings without them realising - there are various recent books about this, though offhand I can't remember any of their titles.
Another good one is "your call is important to us". I don't actually care whether my call is important to them - I just care that it's important to me, because otherwise I would long since have given up listening to cheesy electronic renditions of classical music. But it really does work - even though you know it's a blatant lie, and the only reason your call has the slightest importance is because of the remote chance that you might transfer your custom elsewhere, it still takes a little of the edge off your impatience and anger.
Then there's "please listen carefully, because our menu has changed". Without knowing you personally, how can they possibly know whether it has changed since the last time you were obliged to take your cardiac health in your hands and call them? Nearly always, you can short-circuit all of the "press 1 to pay your bill, press 2 to order a new service, press 872344100000019461111 to complain about your existing service" by just banging away on the 0 button - guess how I know. But the subtext here is that not listening carefully would be on a par with conspicuously keeping your iPod earphones on during the cabin safety announcement. Not only would you be imperilling your own safety, but you would also be acting irresponsibly to society at large. You would be a Bad Person.
You may wonder how they decide exactly what subtle implicit psychological lies they decide to use. Do they have batteries of simulated users, with blood pressure monitors and positron scanners? Probably. I was inspired to write this partly by having to deal with Comcast, but also by a piece of business spam I got today (you know the kind of thing, very professional-looking emails inviting you to vitally important conferences about the latest developments in HR). It was from someone called Porkolab (a somewhat uncommon Hungarian family name, so I've learned). In British English, a "porkie" is rhyming slang for a lie (via "porky pie"). I'm sure the "porkolab" is just the place where they try out all these messages.
"Hey, we're getting a lot of complaints from Islamabad about people being rude to the call centre operators. I think we need some new decoy messages."
"OK, let's get on to the Porkolab and see what they can come up with."
Posted by n5296s at 16:23 1 comment:
Labels: ergonomics, psychology
Comcast - such awful customer service that words fail me
So yesterday, while I was eating breakfast, my Internet service went down. The lights on the cable modem weren't blinking, and indeed nothing worked. It was time to go the office anyway, so I figured they would have fixed it by the time I got home.
But they hadn't. Still nothing worked. After the usual "press 1 for this" hell, and a ten minute wait, I finally got to talk to someone. "Oh yes," he said, "we discovered a signal leak back in February, and you hadn't made a service appointment, so we turned off the service."
Hang on... "Did you tell me about the problem?" "Oh, we probably left something on the door."
"And what about reminders, like on each of the five bills I've paid in the meantime, or an email?" "Yeah, that would probably be a good idea, but we don't do that."
"OK, so now I've made a service appointment, can you reconnect the service?" "Oh no, we have to wait for the technician to inspect it".
So... they may or may not have told me, for sure I never saw anything. Then they sit on their hands for five months, and then cut off the service without warning. And this passes for their idea of customer service!
The service guy did come on time, though he called the wrong number to warn me he was on his way! And guess what... his conclusion was that a different service guy needed to come, maybe in a day or two, maybe not. And no, of course they can't restore the service even though it was working fine for five months with whatever fault exists.
Comcast is outrageously expensive, the only thing that stops me switching right away to AT&T is that I know for sure that their customer service is even worse. Sigh.
Posted by n5296s at 17:39 No comments:
Labels: comcast, ergonomics
Cross Country to Alturas
About a year ago I finally decided to get serious about my Commercial Pilot's License (CPL). Not that I have any ambitions for a second career as a pilot, but with well over 1000 hours of flying under my belt it just seemed like an appropriate thing to do.
Getting a CPL involves a checkride with an examiner, a written test, and a bunch of experience requirements, such as a minimum of 250 hours of flying. Most of the training goes towards the checkride. For single-engine planes, this requires a bunch of new things which don't form part of the Private Pilot checkride, specifically some not-quite-aerobatic maneuvers: chandelles, lazy-eights, eights-on-pylons.These are actually pretty hard to fly to the required standard, but after struggling with them for a while I can begin to see some point to them: they definitely do make for a finer touch in aircraft handling.
One of the experience requirements is a long cross-country flight, at least 300 miles round trip with the furthest point at least 250 miles away. Oh, those are nautical miles, of 6080 feet or about 15% more than the everyday statute mile. Why flying uses nautical rather than statute miles - and the corresponding unit of speed, knots (nautical miles per hour) rather than mph - is lost in the mists of history. And not all the time, by the way - some things, such as visibility requirements, are expressed in statute miles. More on that later.
There are a bunch of other requirements associated with this flight, such that, although I have many flights of this length, none of them qualifies. There have to be at least three landings, it has to be day VFR, and it has to be solo - nobody else on board, not even a non-pilot passenger. I suppose this is intended as a test of flight planning and navigation skills. The FAA, or the part that deals with "airman certification" anyway, doesn't seem to have heard of GPS, and doesn't know that nowadays all you need to do is enter the code for the destination airport and follow the resulting magenta line on the screen. Well, almost - it's as well to take things like mountains and restricted airspace into consideration, and to make sure you have enough fuel. So anyway... in the preparation for my checkride, I needed to make such a flight.
There are lots of places I could go. The LA area is over 250 miles, so a round trip to say Santa Monica would qualify, or to southern Oregon, or to somewhere in Nevada like Elko. I've done all of those, though. It would be nice to do something I've never done before. Looking at my wall-map of California, with pins for the airports I've been to, showed one big pin-free expanse, the north-east of the state. There a very few towns and it's not even on the way to anywhere. Alturas, the north-eastern most town in California, is 251 miles from Palo Alto, so just qualifies.
A straight line from Palo Alto to Alturas passes overhead Livermore, east of Mount Diablo, overhead Sacramento and Grass Valley, then across 8-9000 foot mountains to Quincy. The mountains are gradually replaced by high plains at around 4000' with the occasional pointy story-book volcanic peak. You can't fly in quite a straight line because of the TFR for the pilotless aircraft testing centre at Chico, so I flew a slight dogleg to the south which also kept me out of the big military training areas in the region. The easy way to do this is to find a waypoint in about the right place for the desired route. My route ended up as KPAO-SUNOL-HAGAN (the waypoint in question)-KAAT (Alturas).
The flight northwards was uneventful but beautiful. Crossing the mountains is always a bit scary - there really aren't too many good options if the engine stops. Luckily it didn't. I flew just to the south of Quincy airport. That's a scary place too - I went there one Saturday when I was on my own. It's the only airport I know that has mountains in the traffic pattern! You can't fly left traffic at approach speed, if you tried you'd quite literally hit a mountain.
Past Quincy, there was really almost nothing. I picked out Susanville to my right. There were just vast, green grassy plains, a few lakes, the very occasional small settlement and a few roads. For nearly a hundred miles I didn't pass within ten miles of a town. The last part of the flight, over the high plains, was very bumpy, too much for the autopilot, so I hand flew. Finally Alturas came into sight. It's a tiny place and the runways are narrow, so it took a while to find the airport. Needless to say I was the only person flying.
It was with great relief that I pulled up to the fuel pump and stopped. It had been an enjoyable flight but it's a long time to sit in the same position. The airport was completely deserted - a sign gave the number to call for fuel, and it took about 15 minutes for the fueller - who is also the county building inspector - to show up. Later the airport manager showed up too. I ended up spending nearly an hour on the ground, which allowed me to witness the arrival of another airplane. It's a quiet place, and beautiful in a Swiss, mountainous kind of way.
It would have been nice to walk into the town, which is only about a mile away, but it would all have been closed by then and anyway I wanted to get back before dark. Alturas would make a nice destination for a quiet weekend, except that unfortunately there is no car rental. Without a car there is really not much you could do, and as far as I can tell the nearest are at Klamath Falls, over 60 miles away.
So after saying my farewells - it's hard to imagine I'll ever go back, although it's a pretty place - I set off on the next leg. I'd decided to hop over the mountain to Cedarville. It's only about 30 miles but the Warner Mountains are in the way, ascending to 9000 feet, so the whole flight is spent first climbing then descending. Cedarville is an even tinier place, population 514 - the kind of place you'd retreat to when you just couldn't stand the bustle and crowds of Alturas (pop 2827). It's in the centre of a long narrow valley mainly occupied by three large alkali dry lakes, imaginatively called the Lower, Middle and Upper Alkali Lakes. Unsurprisingly, the airport was deserted, the narrow runway further limited by high weeds at the edges. I turned straight around and set off on my next leg, to Susanville.
I chose to fly down the eastern side of the mountains, just for a change of view. At the end of June there was still plenty of snow above 8000 feet. Once out of the valley I quite literally saw no human presence until I was close to Susanville, a hundred miles south.
Susanville has a huge prison, like so many small, remote California towns. California of course has the highest per capita prison population in the world, higher than China or Soviet Russia, thanks to some seriously misguided right-wing politics and the even more misguided "war on drugs". The state is bankrupt and can't afford to run even the most basic services, but is still not willing to reduce its prison population. But that's not really a topic for this post.
The prison did however make a convenient visual aiming point. When I landed there were still a few people around the airport, and a very friendly dog. But I didn't linger - I was getting hungry as well as tired.
The rest of the flight was uneventful - back across the slightly scary mountains, then over Sacramento, to the left of Mount Diablo, and so home. The landing was spectacularly beautiful - by good luck I landed exactly as the sun set, disappearing under the horizon as I descended on short final.
When not flying, I'm working on my written - actually a computer based multiple-choice test. Fortunately, all the possible questions are published by the FAA, and assembled into a book called Gleim, which also has (one hopes) the correct answers and the reasons behind them. The majority of the questions are perfectly reasonable, having to do with things like the airspace rules and how to read charts. But others are ghosts of a former age. There is not a single question about the use of GPS, even though probably 90% or more of long flights are made using it. But there are dozens of questions on a nearly-obsolete device called the "Automatic Direction Finder", a miracle of 1940s vacuum-tube electronics. The operational side of the FAA is busy closing down the corresponding radio beacons as fast as it can. New planes (sold in the US anyway - the rest of the world is a different story) haven't had ADF equipment in them for well over a decade. Mine had one when it was new, in 1980, but I had it removed when it developed a fault about five years ago.
Not only is the ADF obsolete, but the questions are about ways of using it that nobody has ever done in flight, complicated trigonometric exercises to do with angles of intercept. Flying a plane looks easy enough but it actually takes a lot of concentration. The idea of doing complicated mental math at the same time is as absurd as it would be to do the crossword. (Airline pilots do of course, but they have at least one extra pilot and three autopilots which they are obliged to use in cruise. And they are not constantly looking for reasonable places to land if the engine stops, since they have several of them).
My pilot friend Bill thinks that a lot of the regulations, and the questions that go with them, are just a thinly-veiled intelligence test. For example, there are three definitions of "night" (sunset, civil twilight which is about 30 minutes later, and one hour after sunset). There are many things you must or must not do at night, but which definition applies to which activity is pretty much random and just something you have to learn off by heart. The same applies to the various sources of aviation weather information. These exist both on the ground (via phone and now the Internet) and in the air, from various different places. Each one provides slightly different permutations of all the available information, without rhyme or reason. There are of course numerous questions on these. And, as you probably guessed, there are no questions at all either on Internet data sources, or on in-flight satellite based weather - which between them probably account for 90% of what pilots actually use nowadays.
The written will be my next step, in another few weeks - whatever one may think of it, it just has to be done. I don't expect it to be as enjoyable as my cross country flight to Alturas. More pictures from the trip here.
Posted by n5296s at 23:59 2 comments:
Labels: flying
Worst-ever Dining Experiences: #2, Mouleydier, France
One of the nice things about eating out in France is that pretty much any restaurant you go to will serve an enjoyable meal, corresponding to the price you pay and sometimes even a lot better. They have to - the French take their food very seriously, and a restaurant that disappoints its customers will see very little repeat business. It follows that tourist traps are an exception, since they don't really depend on repeats. But even in Paris I can only think of one meal where I've been disappointed - often we've just dropped into a restaurant round the corner from where we're staying because it looks nice, and been delighted with the food. Of course it could be because Paris just has such a fantastic ambience anyway - but I think there's more to it than that.
The same is true outside Paris. Even when I first used to visit France, before my French was up to very much, I remember some spectacularly good dining experiences. We'll gloss over the restaurant in a small town in Brittany that was - I swear - closed for lunch, preferring to remember a hotel in the same town where we had an assiette de fruits de mer that took all evening to eat, there was just so much wonderful stuff.
But of course there are always exceptions. This one happened a very long time ago when my daughter - now in her late 20s and a mother herself - was just a bump. We went on a last-time-as-just-the-two-of-us holiday to the Dordogne, renting a cottage outside the town of Bergerac for a couple of weeks. It was a wonderful holiday, and filled with equally wonderful meals in the picturesque, ancient towns that litter the area. I've never had a chance to go back to the area, but I loved it.
Some way into the holiday, buoyed by the confidence of having eaten so well in restaurants chosen fairly randomly, we decided to eat at a place we'd noticed in the nearby village of Mouleydier. It looked nice enough, nestled in a corner near the station. Probably it was called Cafe de la Gare - it seems to have disappeared now, for which we should be thankful.
We should have been suspicious straight away. Instead of the customary buzz and crowded tables, the place was deserted. It felt chilly, despite the pleasant June weather. It was nothing fancy, with cheap checked table cloths, but in itself that doesn't mean a thing. The Cafe de Commerce in Geneva - an old favourite from when I used to visit there regularly - was just like that. Their speciality was delicious lake trout. The portions seemed a bit small, but when you'd finished the first one, they brought you another.
And worse, we were the only people there, though another group did come in later. But that was it. The service was surly, the waitress (most likely the proprietress) was sloppily dressed and didn't even seem especially clean. She certainly didn't seem to be taking any pride in anything she did. I've mercifully forgotten the main course, though I do remember that neither of us found it very appetising.
What does remain in my memory is the cheese board. France is a country that famously has hundreds of cheeses, all of them delicious even if some are a bit of an acquired taste. My first ever business trip to France took me to Annecy, where a restaurant chosen completely at random served an extraordinary cheese called Explorateur. It's about 99% fat (or so it seems), extraordinarily creamy and with a delicious nutty taste. Sadly, it's essentially unobtainable in the US - on the rare occasions when you do see it, it's invariably past its best. Creamy cheeses like that neither last long nor travel well. But in France it can be truly ecstatic.
The Mouleydier restaurant didn't have Explorateur, nor any other of the hundreds of delicious French cheeses. They had a Brie of some kind, dried up to a crusty yellow on the outside and definitely inedible. They had a couple of dried up goat cheeses. Soft, creamy goat cheeses with just a faint nutty taste are one thing. Well-matured ones are quite another, and most definitely an acquired taste. The theory, so I'm told, is that just a single small piece on the tip of a knife will taste so strong that it will seem like you ate a whole cheese. Back in the times when the art of eating was to make a few vegetables and a scrap of meat seem like a feast, this mattered a lot. But well-matured and then dried out is never going to be a good combination.
The final cheese, and the only one that could conceivably be eaten, was some kind of Tôme, a fairly hard cheese eaten like Cheddar. I can still remember that there was a black wax rind, which had at least partly protected it from drying out completely. We dared to take a piece of this each, but even after cutting away the driest of the exterior, it was old and dry and not up to much.
By the time we left, we were once again the only people there - the group of three or four guys who had come in after us had evidently had enough of a good thing, and already left.
The following night we went back to the excellent restaurant in the centre of Beaumont, a town a few kilometres away. Mouleydier remains the only place in France where I've been offered - in a proper restaurant at least - a truly awful meal. (The story of the fast food cafe in Entrevaux will have to wait for another time).
Labels: restaurants
Worst-ever Dining Experiences: #1, Janos, Tucson - Pretentious to die for
I chose the title carefully... not necessarily worst-ever meals, but considering the whole experience (including in some cases the extended period of discomfort afterwards).
So... we visited Tucson, Arizona. Our main reason was to go to an Indian Rodeo in Sells on the Tohone O'Odham reservation, which was quite an experience. But that's not important right now. On our first night, we asked the hotel to recommend a restaurant. We had trouble finding it, because it was nowhere near the town centre, but in the hills quite a way to the north in a fancy golf resort hotel kind of place.
There's one advantage to the location... Tucson is quite a pleasant small-ish town, but one of the main trunk rail lines goes literally through the middle of it, with level crossings every few hundred yards. This means that several times per hour, a mile-long freight train passes through, horn blaring, not just audible but loud through the whole city. All night long. Amazingly, you get used to it.
Anyway, it was obvious as soon as we arrived that this was a very pretentious place. It just had that air about it. We both get easily irritated by places whose pretentiousness greatly exceeds their quality, and this place had it stamped all over. We took our huge, pretentious seats, in the pretentiously decorated dining room, led by the pretentious hostess.
As we suspected, the meal was so-so. Nothing wrong with it, but nothing special either. For half the price and a tenth the pretentiousness, we would probably have quite enjoyed it. And of course the wines were over-priced. A dead giveaway for a restaurant that takes itself much too seriously is that the wines are priced at about double what you'd reasonably expect. I can only suppose that people who like pretentious places want to pay more for wine, I guess it makes them feel superior or something.
What elevates this place from merely annoying to the short, distinguished list of The Best of the Worst, though, was the total contrast between the airs and graces they gave themselves, and the actual quality of the service. Our waiter was a kid, maybe 19, who had clearly received little or no training. Probably he'd learned on the job at Denny's or some such, then managed to talk his way into a job at the restaurant. The service would have been perfectly acceptable, if we'd been at Denny's and paying Denny's prices. He had no idea how to serve and kept getting things wrong.
One thing which drives my wife absolutely nuts is when she's still eating and the server says "You still workin' on that?" It would annoy her even in Denny's, but frankly eating a meal in Denny's is more work than pleasure so it may make sense. At a fancy restaurant, even a legitimately fancy one, it is just so inappropriate. Maybe a Jeeves-like "Is Madam still profiting from the enjoyment of her repast?" would be better, but simply observing that she has not put her knife and fork down beside each other, and is still chewing, and saying nothing at all, would be even better. You can guess, of course, that our Denny's waiter came by not just once but several times to ask, "You still workin' on that?".
Finally I ordered dessert, I can't really imagine why since by then we were thoroughly fed up with the whole place. The waiter served it, but didn't bring anything to eat it with. After waiting a while - I wasn't in a hurry anyway - I finally helped myself from the next table. Nobody even noticed.
We didn't leave a tip. That doesn't happen often. We were just relieved to escape the overwhelming pretentiousness combined with total ineptitude.
The next day was delightfully different. We had lunch at a diner in the middle of nowhere on the way to Sells, for less than the tip would have been the night before. And in the evening we went to a very unpretentious restaurant near the university - it pains me that I can't seem to find it now, and it probably isn't there any more. The tables were small, the waitress was friendly, and the food was excellent. What a contrast!
Jeppesen Customer Service (not!)
One of the first things I did when I bought my plane was to install a then state-of-the-art GPS navigator, a Garmin GNS530. This complemented the smaller GNS430 which was already there, albeit lacking some necessary approvals. The data for these comes on little data cartridges, slightly bigger than an SD card and completely proprietary to Garmin. I signed up with Jeppesen, the universal and only provider of aviation navigation service, to send me updated cartridges every month. Until about a year ago, this worked perfectly. I would take the new cards to my plane, swapping them for the old ones which I then sent back to Jepp. Once a year I sent them a check for quite a lot of money, and everything was flawless.
A couple of years ago, Jepp was acquired by Boeing. I presume that the new owner sent in the usual bean-counters who proceeded to look for "economies", of course at the expense of the customer, whose only role after all is to pay the bills.
The first sign that things weren't right came with last year's bill. I've always had a substantial discount for having two GPSs in the plane, which makes it only about 25% more than a single one. This had been forgotten, and the bill was for twice the single-unit price. I called, listening to hold music for about half-an-hour, interrupted occasionally by the usual pathetic excuse about "increased call volume" - the latter caused, of course, by the fact that they had messed up their complete order management system. Finally I spoke to someone who apologised, took my credit card number, and told me it was fixed.
I got various bills and reminders, which I ignored, until eventually the supply of new data cartridges dried up. I called again. This time I got someone very unhelpful who accused me of not paying my bill. Luckily I'd kept notes of the previous conversation, and eventually all was restored.
That was last year. This year they had a new trick, aimed no doubt at saving a few more dimes. They have suspended the data cartridge service altogether, replacing it with an online service where you update your own cartridges. They sent me a USB thingy to plug the cartridges into, and told me to call them for more information. It actually took several calls to get the service set up. Tonight, I finally tried to download into my cartridges. One worked fine. But then, I only had the right to a single cartridge! So we're back to where we were before.
I'm sure that all the calls to try and straighten things out have already wiped out the savings from not sending me the data cards. So I have to spend more time, not to mention hours on the phone to Jeppesen, and it costs them more money. If there was an alternative, I'd already be there - the disadvantage of monopolies.
But I'm sure that somewhere there's an accountant who's jolly pleased with himself.
Telephony, the definitive work
One of the treasures of my youth was the Harold Hill public library, which I should really write about some time. For some unknowable reason, their collection included the two-volume definitive work on the UK telephone system, Atkinson's Telephony, published in 1949. I've always been fascinated by complex electro-mechanical devices, and I borrowed these books dozens of times. Of course that may be why I'm fascinated by them.
Telephones are run by computers now, but back then everything was done with relays and stepping switches. A telephone exchange was a vast hall filled with them. The noise was just unimaginable as the switches followed the subscribers' dial pulses (telephone users have always been called subscribers) then rocketted off on their own to look for the next free switch, later clattering back to their rest position at the end of a call.
The automatic telephone system was invented, improbably, by an undertaker called Strowger. The story has it that the telephone operator in his small town just happened to be the wife of his rival. In those pre-automation times, people would call the operator and say "connect me to the undertaker". You can guess who got the business. The telephone dial and the clever two-dimensional stepping switch that interpreted it were his invention, and the system was forever after called the "Strowger System".
Manual telephone exchanges were still very much present when I was a teenager. I had a friend who lived in the next town, Brentwood, which was one of the very last places to be converted to automatic operation, in the 1970s. Even manual exchanges involved some complex electro-mechanical gadgetry, though, to detect when the user picked up their phone, make it ring and so on. Atkinson deals at length with this, and the problems of interconnecting manual and automatic systems. Operators are always referred to as "she" - not sexist, in itself anyway, just a reflection of the fact that all telephone operators were women back then. And not outsourced to Bangalore either - every telephone exchange, even automatic ones, had a hall full of operator positions to handle long-distance calls and other odd cases.
About half of the first volume deals with the basics - cable design, network organisation, and of course the relay. A relay is just an electro-mechanical switch, a bunch of contacts operated by a coil when electricity is applied. They're still used extensively today - a car has dozens of them - but in the telephone system there were millions of them, implementing complex logic functions that today would be a few dozen lines of C code. The basic idea is simple enough but the realities of the telephone system called for great subtlety in their design. There were relays that were quick to engage but slow to release, and vice versa, relays specially designed to respond quickly to dial pulses - all done by varying the windings, the magnetic arrangements and the contacts. Their design is a lost art now.
The rest of the first volume deals with the circuits and arrangements for manual exchanges. The real excitement is in the second volume, the circuits for automatic exchanges. Just how do you build an electro-mechanical telephone exchange? The basic concept seems simple - the pulses generated by a telephone dial operate Strowger switches, until all digits are dialled and the final switch - called a final selector because it works very differently from all the others - has made a connection to the called number. But actually making it all work, dealing with all the real-life complications, was a phenomenal achievement. It's not surprising that the first ever computers - built to crack German codes during World War II - were designed by engineers from the Post Office Research Laboratory. They were the only people to have designed circuits of this level of logical complexity.
It's worth commenting on the difference in the scale of the phone system in those days. The book uses the city of Derby as an example. Its population then was over 100,000 people. The telephone exchange had a maximum capacity of 4000 lines, or one for every 25 people. In 1949, ordinary people never had their own phone. Businesses did, and a small minority of better off people would have a phone at home. For ordinary people working- and middle-class people, there were phone boxes. (The book includes a lengthy section on the classic British phone box design, including its weight - being made largely of cast iron, it weighed 13 cwt, or about 660 kg). My parents didn't have a phone at home until about 1965.
There are lengthy chapters on the design of small rural exchanges, partly I suppose because they were small enough that the book could describe them in complete detail - each of the hundreds of selectors and relays. There are complete circuit diagrams, and text to explain the function of every last relay contact and selector. It is the best technical design documentation I have ever seen, bar none.
The smallest of the rural exchanges, designed to occupy a small brick building somewhere on the outskirts of a village, had just 100 lines. It replaced an operator in the back of the post office working a manual plug-and-socket switchboard, disproportionately expensive and only available during the day time. At night, the doctor would be plugged straight through to the main circuit, and everyone else would just have to wait until morning. There were always telegrams for anything urgent that might arise. (My wife tells the story of her father using just such a rural manual exchange, fuming as he waited for the operator, grumbling "She's knitting, I just know it, she's finishing her row before she answers". And he was probably right).
Sadly, the book was never updated to discuss the nec plus ultra of electromechanical telephony, Subscriber Trunk Dialling (STD). When it was written, trunk calls - anything further than the next town - were handled manually. You would dial 0 for the operator, and say in your best BBC voice, "Derby 6543 please". If there was a circuit available you'd be connected. More likely, she would call you back later when a circuit became free.
The first STD installation was in 1958, and the first public long-distance call was made by the Queen, from Bristol. It came to my home town in 1964, I can still remember the presentation in the local Post Office. It made no practical difference to us, nor to most people - the furthest we ever called was my aunt in London. Although calls were automatic, they were still ferociously expensive.
The implementation of STD relied on a magnificent piece of equipment called a register/translator, or its "marketing" name of GRACE. Each unit was a box about two feet square, packed full of relays and miniature uniselectors. As the subscriber dialled, each digit was remembered on a mechanical switch. As soon as the first three digits had been collected - the STD code, or as we would now call it, the area code - it could start translating them into the actual routing code which would switch the call through the trunk network to its destination. Once that was done, the remainder of the digits would be replayed, one by one, from the switches that stored them. Sadly there seems to be no detailed technical description of these systems still available. I was told by someone who joined the Post Office in the seventies that the schematics, spread out, occupied the whole floor of a large office. It was truly a tour de force of the available technology at the time.
It was thanks to my curiosity about the design of trunk network that a friend and I became "phreaks" in the 1960s, long before we knew the term existed. But that is a story for another time. For now, back to reading Atkinson... there are a couple of details of the UAX14 exchange design that I'm not clear about...
Labels: telephones
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n5296s
Career software and systems engineer, 1500 hour private pilot including helicopter and aerobatics in the Pitts, linguist, generally curious about almost everything.


Online phone book. Search for people and businesses in Santo Stefano al Mare - Liguria, Italy. Italian white pages with phone numbers and addresses. Including reverse phone lookup. Find person and addresses by phone number.


Tropical forestry in Indonesia is facing challenges in terms of sustainability and the survival of its inhabitant, indigenous people, not least because the perception of policymakers is that, since the 1970s, forests have provided a major solution to economic development by producing timber, conversion forest land for agriculture, mining, and other non-forest land use. Consequently, the forest and its resources have been undervalued and its monetary potential has been underestimated. This has led to overexploitation and conversion, which ultimately results in the loss of biodiversity and threatens the survival of indigenous people. This study, conducted in a small forest protection area in Gunung Lumut in the Pasir District of East Kalimantan, focuses on the poor indigenous people in this region and reveals the crucial role that the forest plays in both the economic and non-economic dimensions of the lives of the indigenous people of Paser. Indeed, the forest contributes to the Paser household economy in almost all aspects of life. Forests are so much more than trees and timber, and the Gunung Lumut protection forest goes far beyond providing food and materials for construction. It is the backdrop for the Paser people's spirits and cosmovision. This study suggests that conversion or other land use options for forest land should begin with an evaluation process, in order to reveal the 'true' value of the forest – economically and environmentally – for the livelihoods of indigenous people. These values must be part of the toolkit for developing policies for land and forest use. In addition, such an evaluation process boosts the negotiating capacity of the indigenous people to prevent further losses from forest conversion. This study shows that monetary valuation also benefits forest management by preventing unnecessary conversion of forest land and further loss of biodiversity in tropical forests. It provides indigenous people with a bargaining tool in the context of compensation for the loss of their resources.


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In a tragic incident a Radio Mirchi employeeTania khanna died in Noida in the early hours of Wednesday after her car fell into a 10-feet-deep drain as she taking a turn near the Sector 85 according to media reports.
According to the police report deceased, identified as 26-year-old Tania Khanna, was a sales manager and a resident of Kavi Nagar in Ghaziabad. Tani's was driving to a friend's house when the incident occurred. She was returning from Gurgaon and was heading to greater Noida. Taniya's Family members blamed negligence of civic officials.
Tania Khanna. Image courtesy .Facebook/Zeenews.


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