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Home SUCCESS Women Entrepreneurs Women Entrepreneur Successes
Switch2Health: Jane Austin and Samantha Durkin
by Nadine von Moltke-Todd
in Women Entrepreneur Successes
How Women Can Take Charge Of Their Financial Future By Building A Startup
How 2 South African Entrepreneurs Went From Idea To Start-up In 8 Months
Watch List: 50 Black African Women Entrepreneurs To Watch
Getting out of corporate
Samantha Durkin spent her years in the corporate world thinking up ways to launch her own business. She left her job in 2010 and began consulting with clients privately. "I was working from home, assisting clients with brand activations and their marketing campaigns." She had met most of these clients during her corporate years, but still, this was a stop-gap. She was looking for her 'big idea'.
As it turns out, that big idea was a new health product called Switch2Health that was designed to make people in the US more active. "I was ferociously reading about exciting new products, and this struck a chord. I was interested in health and wellness, it's a great product, and I believed I could really make a difference in South Africa with it as well." The product was actually named one of Entrepreneur US's 100 Brilliant Companies in 2011.
Bouncing around ideas
At this point Samantha's sister, Jane, entered the story as a sounding board for Samantha's ideas. "We worked on the business proposal for S2H together," says Jane. "At this point we hadn't even discussed my joining the company, but we were having a great time conceptualising what the business would look like, and securing a licence agreement with the product holders in the US."
Launching locally
S2H agreed to give Samantha exclusive rights to the product in South Africa, and for her to operate under the Switch2Health name. She used her own savings, money she was making from her consultancy, as well as an investment from a family member to be able to launch with enough inventory.
Two partners
By August 2011 Samantha had done her market research, had a number of corporate sponsors onboard who liked the idea and wanted to offer loyalty rewards, and was ready to launch officially. Jane resigned from her own corporate position to join the business full time. In October Switch2Health officially launched in South Africa.
The customer model
A pedometer or a wrist band measures your steps or time spent being active respectively. Targets need to be reached in order to receive a code that equates to points and these points can be swapped for rewards.
For consumers, a once-off purchase fee gets them the product, and thereafter reward codes are entered onto the Switch2Health website and can be exchanged for discounts and vouchers. Reward partners already include Woolworths, NetFlorist and NetGifts, iPad and Xbox, as well as the MTN Lions and more.
Focused on corporates
Schools and corporates can set up personalised websites with challenges and leader boards that get everyone active and build team spirit. While the product is retailed to corporates and schools at a discount, a monthly fee is charged to manage a personalised website. "Corporates can sponsor schools as well," says Jane. "The idea is to get South Africa active, and to make it fun at the same time."
Samantha and Jane have big plans for Switch2Health. Eventually they hope to create inter-school competitions and even use reward codes to help corporates donate funds to underprivileged schools. "We respect things we have earned more than things that are simply given to us," says Samantha.
"This is a way for underprivileged children to actively participate in the funding their schools receive. It gives them something to work towards and be proud of, while being active at the same time."
Players: Jane Austin and Samantha Durkin
Company: Switch2Health
Launched: October 2011
Concept: Motivating people to get active through use of activity trackers and an online reward programme
Contact: +27 (0)71 892 8487; info@switch2health.co.za; switch2health.com
Nadine von Moltke-Todd
Nadine von Moltke-Todd is the Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur Media South Africa. She has interviewed over 400 entrepreneurs, senior executives, investors and subject matter experts over the course of a decade. She was the managing editor of the award-winning Entrepreneur magazine from June 2010 until January 2019, its final print issue. Nadine's expertise lies in curating insightful and unique business content and distilling it into actionable insights that business readers can implement in their own organisations.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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There Is No Alternative
Politics, Speculative Fiction & Pop Culture
← How to suppress a protest movement: part two
The Lie of Iceland – and what it might mean for the UK →
How to suppress a protest movement: part three
Posted on September 4, 2011 | 1 Comment
<—Read Part One Here—>
<—Read Part Two Here—>
Destroy trust within a broad movement and between more and less radical activists:
Some of the easiest protesters to smear are the "unwashed" in squats, with the tabloid phrasing linking back to a long history of anti-working class sentiment. With the wealth gap in the UK dramatically increasing, and the same picture repeating around the world, such sentiment is likely to increase. The most violent societies tend to be the most unequal, and while the needs of the poor remain unaccounted for in mainstream politics it seems unlikely that class prejudice and violence will decrease on their own.
Not only are the poor the most affected by cuts, but they are alo the most affected by aggressive protest policing due to differential treatment by race and class. With poverty associated with increased stress, greater likelihood of being the victim of violence, being unable to escape other forms of violence, and with having less time and energy for organising, it is unsurprising that those most affected by cuts are not always able to protest in huge numbers.
When protesters are more privileged, a new narrative comes into play, with charges of hypocrisy being made and smears targeted at prominent protesters. As previously stated, UK tabloids have typified all of the student protesters as "rich", playing into a culture which charges all left-wingers with hypocrisy and demands that they constantly prove their credentials or else have "no right to complain". When the actions of one protester are held to be the actions of all, it becomes both easy to drive wedges both among protesters and between them and the public at large.
While a few protesters are given the media spotlight, the police certain to be infiltrating their ranks are cloaked in secrecy. With the budget of the NPOIU, a body tasked with combating "domestic extremism" having more than doubled in the last four years, all that is certain is that there are a number of undercover officers tasked with infiltrating the protest movement. While the unit has been brought into the Metropolitan Police, its structure has not changed: one unit has a role "similar to the 'counter subversion' functions formerly carried out by MI5" in the 60s and 70s, and which involves working alongside MI5, likely to compile dossiers on large numbers of student and left wing activists.
To secure convictions, officers must be involved in planning actions and can be key to them happening at all. Police outside the UK have admitted to disguising themselves as demonstrators, and there are videos of them acting as agent provocatours. Whether police in the UK are acting to incite violence as part of undercover operations is unknown.
What is certain is that both courts and the media often come out against "career protesters", even the Daily Mail and a former policeman admit that the picture of activists is mixed. This is a picture that does not fit with the news coverage of the student protests.
Another striking thing from the student protests were the attacks on activists for being "too serious" and "party poopers", for having a negative attitude and making life difficult for the majority. This occurs even when many activists are also comedians, and when many actions are fun and entertaining.
Questioning the official narrative is allowed, but offering another in its place is not. Moreover, all questioning is depressing negativity on the behalf of the questioner, a personal failing. All other narratives can be is either fanaticism or the delusions of harmless hippies. When Obama's adviser stated that "liberal naysayers" ought to be "drug tested", it made news only because he conflated his attacks on hippies and party-poopers, rather than making them separately.
These attacks centre around the difficult to oppose idea of "reasonableness" in politics, which pushes discourse towards the centre. When the centre is always unspokenly moving to the right, the end result is a narrative that drifts rightwards over time with no counter to prevent it.
I cannot comment on cases coming to court, but there are a history of arrests that are unfounded but serve to stigmatise movement. The numbers of arrests can be announced in the media, and immediately a perception of "they must have arrested them for something" is established. When the media print numbers of unfounded arrests, this is never corrected, just as untrue press releases are never followed up on.
(At the time of posting, prosecutions have been dropped against over 100 of the Fortnum and Mason arrestees.)
Taken together with bail conditions preventing further protest, and punitive strategies by law enforcement, this renders political protest extremely difficult.
People can also be put off protest not only by the difficulty, but by alienation from experienced activists who often have strongly negative views of the police. When individual police decide to punish experienced activists for being too assertive, it can include takedowns, hands around their necks, use of pressure points for asking for police numbers (which they are legally obliged to give), and standing on people's feet. Police have acted to disrupt benefit gigs for activists, and a smash EDO protest way back in 2010 saw all the now-standard tactics: kettling, mass arrests followed by release without charge, denial of toilets and water combined with press statements that proved flatly untrue.
The us-and-them mentality of police occurs any time that police anticipate conflict. In one anti-terror raid, police were rightly concerned about armed attack by one subject following the death by stabbing of another arresting officer months earlier. When he surrendered, evidence attests that police proceeded to violently beat and abuse the suspect once he was cuffed and kneeling, and again once he was in his cell.
The effects of the expectation of conflict, antagonism, and adrenaline produce brutal results, as the Stanford Prison Experiment and successors show.
There is extensive evidence behind differential treatment by police forces. Obama mentioned this in relation to race. There is no doubt that an antagonistic culture emerges between police and activists.
While checks and balances exist, many IPCC staff are ex-police, especially those in senior roles. Despite there being over 400 deaths following police contact in the last ten years, no police officer has ever been convicted of murder or manslaughter. There are also serving officers with dozens of complaints against them, none of which have been upheld.
When peaceful protest is constantly challenged and faced with violence, and the agenda is removed from the hands of the public, it is unsurprising that violence emerges. No effective mainstream non-violent action or debate is ever taken to stop violence emerging.
This is shown in sharper relief after the recent rioting to which the political response has largely been punitive, with little thought given to examining evidence or to preventing violence from happening again. The evidence on public order policing shows firmly that low-key approaches are far more effective than punitive ones. The causes of the UK riots are many and beyond the scope of this piece. It is worth noting that the effect of stop-and-search on crime reduction is doubted by criminologists, while those stopped multiple times report feeling angry and alienated just as people are by patterns of racial stereotyping.
While black bloc is a controversial tactic, masking up is often in direct response to FIT teams and surveillance. After the recent riots, the legality of masking up may face more questions, leaving police FIT tactics facing less opposition.
These police tactics are international, forming patterns of violence which replicate over the globe. Activists talk of structural and symbolic violence. Removing all of these forms of violence would constitute a systemic change in the way in which the world is governed, and talking about them explains, while it does not justify, violence by various groups of people including the violence the police are called upon to perform.
Suppression in action:
All of these systemic pressures on protest have combined, in the anti-cuts movement, to result in protester numbers being reduced to a core who are middle class, predominantly white, well educated, well informed on the history of protest movements and the UK law – a minority of people which are easily contained and controlled. The other result is that people who persist in protest must have both a strong narrative behind them and supportive friends, which alienates them from potential protesters.
None of the societal forces behind this are "natural". Some are explicitly intentional. Many others occur simply through the isolated actions of well-meaning people, actions that have systemic effects which are usually not challenged. Some acts of violence are held to be more moral than others.
These circumstances result in moves which have public supermajorities against often being implemented. NHS blood services are set to be privatised with 64% to 74% against. A majority support renationalising UK railways outright in 2009. While support hovers around 50% for bringing back the death penalty, whether this would persist after a wider societal debate is unclear. At the same time voter turnout has fallen significantly in the last 30 years.
While opinion at the time was divided the Iraq war was pushed through against mass protest, but not direct action. Regardless of the conclusions of the Iraq enquiry, there have been hundreds of thousands of deaths while massive numbers of private security contractors remain, and war rages on elsewhere.
Even without direct pressure from right-wing forces such as Rupert Murdoch's News Corp these forces serve to skew the functioning of a society intended to be both free and open. Direct collusion between police, the media and politicians serves to distort, repress and perpetrate injustice to a far higher degree. This piece was written before the current scandal engulfing the British political class and News International, and the degree to which intentional corruption and collusion has played in the suppression of the anti-cuts movement remains to be seen.
While it is well established that we live in a world of growing inequality and changing climate, our decisions are made in a framework which demands constant growth, and where that growth is increasingly measured with reference to ever more speculative bank holdings. These measures ignore human and environmental costs as "externalities". As the implications of this continue to be ignored, rational questions have to be asked about how truly adaptive our society's behaviour is.
All the facts behind the current News International scandal have been in the public domain for a long time, yet it has not been news. The effects of war, oil depletion, or cuts are only news long after the event. This is too late to change our behaviour, or even to consider how our society functions and these decisions are made.
We seem to be a society which keeps trying the same thing while expecting different results, yet in many cases the damage has already been done and we cannot go back.
This is what democracy looks like.
One response to "How to suppress a protest movement: part three"
rogerglewis | October 3, 2011 at 6:55 pm | Reply
Welcome to your Friendly Neighbour hood Fascist State.
Corporate Fascism 1- Democracy 0
And we have sleep walked into it so far cocking a snook at the chance of electoral reform in the Pr referendum.
A depressing but all to true analysis of the pigs that run the world right now.
Statement concerning DWP transphobia, 2016
Why you shouldn't get Cancer under the coalition.
Two Key Points for 21st Century Marxism
A few notes on New Communism and Feminism
Margaret Thatcher and Mourning; a meditation on loss, historicity, and time.
Sexism and the Left
A Million Caesars: Phillida Lloyd's Julius Caesar
On Being Working Poor
Some brief notes on "Pure rationality".
Abandoned Buildings – Sean Bonney
Abyssinia, Henry
Another Angry Woman
Cheryl's Mewsings
CN Lester
Coilhouse (Archive – now on hiatus.)
Infinite Th0ught – Nina Power. (Defunct, some archive here.)
K-punk
keep your bridges burning
Lies Journal
Penny Red
Pierce Penniless
Querything
rejectamentalist manifesto
Requires Hate
Sam Ambreen – Left at the Lights
The Future Fire (Editors Blog)
The Multicultural Politic
This Day – Wail Qasim
UK Uncut


You're not crazy. The words premium and snack really are popping up on chain-restaurant menus everywhere. Crazy is making some appearances too.
Why are these the latest restaurant buzzwords? And why are they supposed to resonate with customers? Let's take a look.
Sensible food is boring. Fast-food fans — young ones especially — supposedly want something different, something a little, well, crazy. A Fortune post noted that crazy and similar terms have accordingly been showing up on chain-restaurant menus. Most obviously, there's Pizza Hut's new Crazy Cheesy Crust Pizza, which features 16 dough pockets stuffed with extra cheese around the pizza — a design that indeed seems pretty crazy.
One of the fast-food players known for being "extreme" a few years back was Pizza Hut's sister at Yum Brands, Taco Bell. The chain began offering items like the Extreme Cheese and Beef Quesadilla in the late '00s. It has since moved on to menu offerings that are "crazy," or more precisely "loco," with last year's introduction of the highly successful Doritos Locos Taco.
A 2011 Technomic report found that premium was the most persuasive menu term for getting customers to order an item with beef; 28% of surveyed consumers said they'd be more likely to order beef with the word premium, and they'd be willing to pay a 5% premium for their premium order. Well, surprise, surprise, a study conducted by Mintel for BurgerBusiness last year reported that usage of the word premium on restaurant-chain menus has soared. By its count, there were 138 "premium" offerings on chain menus last year, compared with just 69 in 2007.
Today's fast-food "premium" selections go well beyond beef. In a recent count at the McDonald's menu, there were 12 "premium" sandwiches and wraps, plus nine "premium" salads, as well as "premium" roast coffee and "premium" roast iced coffee. Burger King, meanwhile, boasts the Premium Alaskan Fish Sandwich, and Sonic Drive-In has a lineup of "premium beef" hotdogs.
Snack has been proliferating at restaurants for several years now, with usage of the word tripling from 2007 to 2010 on fast-food menus. McDonald's now has 10 varieties of "snack wraps" and snack-size orders of items like Fish McBites. For that matter, bites, a word that signifies food that's easy for snacking, is also popular on menus — Pretzelmaker Bites, KFC Original Recipe Bites and so on.
Why the rise in menu items that aren't quite meals? One reason is that restaurants are trying to attract customers during the normally dead moments of the day that aren't quite mealtimes — the in-between hours when diners aren't up for a full meal, but could go for a quick snack. Snacks can also serve as up-sell items that customers add on in addition to their meal order. And, most of all, snack is spreading because the word is appealing to consumers on two key levels: it's easy on the waistline and wallet alike. It's "just a snack," after all.
Nation's Restaurant News reported that Arby's is now testing the possibility of launching a "snack 'n' save" menu as a replacement for its value menu — value being another buzzword that fast-food customers are well acquainted with.


Just as the media fragments that make their way to the outside fail to represent the structures of power responsible for the increasingly obscure political and social narratives that define everyday life in Colombia, this particular selection of videos does not seek to describe anything like new tendencies in art-making practices from there. And yet the media reference is apt to describe the inadequacy of representation that always implies a potentially hegemonic function. On the work of José Alejandro Restrepo Paulo Herkenhoff has written, "There are steps that must be taken to make visible what was consigned to the shadows or to obscurity. Perhaps his most striking temporal modality is to impede the filing away of the present itself."
Whether it be through the recuperation of audiovisual memory—the collective, urban trauma of Burbano and Bravo or the intimate, familiar accounts of Hernández and Vargas mediated by the passing of time and the filters of memory—or the recontextualization of images that are appropriated from other sources or uses (Arenas, Díaz, Restrepo), these works desire to glean more subtle, intricate narratives from the visual noise that surrounds us.


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1950 Triumph Thunderbird Motorcycle
There are some moments that just can't help but go down in pop culture history.
In the 1950s, the film The Wild One was an instant hit, and cemented itself into the cultural lexicon.
Starring leading man Marlon Brando in the character of Johnny Strabler, the 1953 film noir was directed by Hungarian László Benedek. The Wild One is considered the OG of outlaw biker films, and the first to critically examine motorcycle gang violence. With a screenplay based on Frank Rooney's celebrated short story "The Cyclists' Raid" (first published in the January 1951 issue of Harper's Magazine, the story was inspired by the sensationalised media coverage of a motorcycle rally held over the Fourth of July weekend in Hollister, California, that turned violent. The film itself was so controversial – and considered by authorities to be likely to inspire similar juvenile delinquency – that it was even banned by censors in the United Kingdom until 1968, 15 years after its first release.
But back to a brooding Brando.
As Johnny Strabler, his character was the epitome of danger and cool – and his bike of choice? None other than a jet black Triumph 6T Thunderbird.
While the 1950 Triumph Thunderbird found within the Classic Motorcycle Mecca collection can't lay claim to being the motorcycle used in the iconic film, this is your chance to get up close and personal with the model that Brando made famous.
This example was restored by one of New Zealand's most renowned restorers in 1992 and had covered 17,000 miles and won several awards since then when it was purchased for the Nelson's NZ Classic Motorcycles collection from a private vendor in Eltham, Taranaki, in March 2008.
Nothing's as good as seeing the real deal: to admire this beauty up close and to find out more technical details, make sure you come on into Classic Motorcycle Mecca – the leading classic motorcycle collection in the Southern Hemisphere.
We've done our utmost to ensure details about each bike in our extensive collection are accurate: but if you spot something that's not quite right, we'd love to hear from you.
Other Triumph Motorcycles Collection
1965 Triumph Tigress 175
1948 Triumph Speed Twin
1916 Triumph Model H


Over the last few years, we have discovered how hard information security has become, as the attackers have so many attack vectors into an organization. Some even have more resources and capabilities than many organizations that are being attacked. The attackers always have more time at their disposal and better focus than any organization, which leads to the current state, where the organizations are 'under attack all the time.' Successful information security is about hard work, lots of hard work. The days are gone when technology would save the day and let you sleep well at night. So, where is an organization to start? What should the focus be on? What is going to make a difference? The best answer is one of everything, plus many more people, but this is neither practical nor fiscally responsible for any organization. So, let us develop a few tenants for security.
Every organization is different and therefore needs a different security program. There is never 'one size fits all'; security programs will always be custom-tailored or at least altered to fit the organization. Security has three simple areas: people, processes, and technology. Most of the organization's efforts are spent addressing new technology, when we should be addressing all areas equally. Just as we can have older or legacy technology, the same can be said for processes that are no longer needed or should be changed or areas where there is a need for a new process.
The first step in better security is to have a plan; doing things ad hoc style in security just makes a mess of your organization and its capabilities. So, let us focus on an area that is often overlooked that will most likely bring the "biggest bang for the buck" to your organization. The attackers want to access and control your endpoints. This is where your credentials, information, and trust are stored. The protection is almost impossible today, so adding enhanced visibility is a requirement for any security program today.
Why do they target the endpoints, not the servers or the network? The cybercrime war is being carried out on the endpoints. It is the easiest attack vector into an organization, as many times you are attacking the end user, and may be doing so from outside the organization; therefore usually outside many protections that are in place at the organization. So, adding visibility to these targets is highly important for a successful cyber security program. At the basic level, we are just figuring out what that device is doing 24 hours a day, what happens at the hotel, coffee shop, or home. This allows for an easier effort in searching for the cybercriminals on your devices, and in many cases, it shortens the time of how quickly you can respond to the issue, which minimizes the damages.
Many times when you find an endpoint that has been compromised by an attacker, the next step is to figure out how it happened and whether anything was taken and make the move to another endpoint. In many cases, the attacker has taken the information and erased his/her tracks or hidden the malware; these forces you to use a slower forensics view of what happened that can also be very expensive and very time-consuming.
Having the ability to look for traffic to an IP address, a running process, or an executable on all endpoints in your environment is the new requirement for a cyber security program. These are simple and efficient abilities, but many organizations struggle with this activity due to disparate sources of information and security technologies that are not designed for this capability. These gives the cybercriminals a huge advantage over the organization and usually result in a much longer and widespread compromise, resulting in more damage.
The battle is not won by technology alone, so once you can gain visibility, you have only solved part of the problem. You now need a plan to respond to what you have found. This can be a chaotic and time-consuming process; in some cases, an unplanned response process could do more damage than solving the issue by destroying evidence, alerting the attacker, or even forcing the attacker to take more destructive actions. Creating a plan for what the organization should do when the attacker is found, is much more important than the tools that give you the visibility on the end point.
We have moved from the "You may be attacked" to the "You have been attacked" cyber security strategy. Looking across your endpoints is a great way to have visibility on these devices, giving you the visibility you need to find the attackers lurking in your environment. A clear response plan is required as without it; you will be overrun with alerts, alarms, and the need to work very quickly, which will result in ignorance, long delays, or more damages. Visibility at the endpoint is the key for detecting and defeating the attackers.
Motorola [NYSE: MSI], incorporated in 1928, designs and sells wireless network equipment such as cellular transmission base stations and signal amplifiers. It is an American multinational telecommunications company based in Chicago, Illinois.


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Test Track 2.0 at Epcot (With Photos And Video)
Herb Leibacher December 10, 2012
With the same track layout but a completely new design, Test Track 2.0 looks like a brand new ride....
Disney RoundupEpcot
Joyful! A Gospel Celebration of the Season (With Video)
Herb Leibacher December 4, 2012
Joyful! is an upbeat take on some Christmas classics. It's a show with plenty of energy....
Top Eight Tributes To Walt Disney, The Man, In Disney World
Some say that "it all started with a mouse." But it really started with a man - Walt. The Disney Company has paid many tributes to its founder. Let's take a look at some of them....
Disney World Vacations
Gone But Not Forgotten: Journey Into Imagination
Joe Notaro November 27, 2012
Epcot's Imagination pavilion has gone through several transformations. Let's take a fond look back at the first - and probably most popular - edition of this ride....
Reedy Creek Improvement District & The Two Cities On Disney Property
Herb Leibacher November 26, 2012
When Walt Disney opened Disneyland in Anaheim, California in 1955, it was the ultimate escape to a world of family-friendly fantasy and adventure. But it wasn't long before the outside world began to encroach upon the Disney property, limiting the possibilities for expansion and interfering with the uncompromised retreat that Walt had envisioned....
Other Disney Fun
Six Not-So-Secret Shortcuts At Walt Disney World
With all the people who visit Disney World, there aren't many hidden short cuts. But there are a few lesser-known ways around that can be fun to try....
Disney's Animal KingdomDisney's Hollywood StudiosEpcotMagic Kingdom
New Food Option Coming To France Pavilion In Epcot
Herb Leibacher November 2, 2012
If you like French food, and aren't one for super fancy dining, you might like the changes coming to Epcot....
The Fascinating Mosaic At The Entrance To The Land
Before you rush by to get your FastPass for Soarin, take a few minutes to admire the beautiful mosaic artwork leading to the entrance doors for The Land....
Five Great Things To Love About Epcot
Herb Leibacher October 26, 2012
There are many reasons to love Epcot. Let's take a look at some of the top picks....
Is Disney Not Investing Enough In Disney World?
We would always like to see more new attractions, but is Disney World getting enough?...
Disney Resort HotelsDisney RoundupDisney World VacationsDisney's Animal KingdomDisney's Hollywood StudiosEpcotMagic Kingdom
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Disney's Virtual Queue: Will It Finally Eliminate Waiting in Line?
20 Reasons to Visit Disney World in 2020
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Fun Facts About The Disney Springs Resort Area and The ESPN Wide World of Sports Resort Area!
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The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks: that's right, "ham burgers"
It's hard to choose a favorite thing about this sign, but I'm going with how long it took me to figure out what they meant by "ham burgers." I wonder if they are really made out of ham. Thanks to Beth, who also reports that the "turkey legs" appeared to be actual turkey and were very good.
I particularly like the fact that the word "delicious" is in quotes, as it makes it seem sarcastic.
Not to mention "bottle water" which in my world is called "bottled water." Maybe bottle water is code for moonshine or something?


This article was contributed by Sarah Karney of BigCommerce. Sarah is a content consultant and writer, serving BigCommerce and other leading technology providers as part of Dreamtown Creative.
As an online merchant, you know better than anyone the opportunities that come with each holiday season as interested shoppers flock to your store. But the opportunities don't have to end when the new year begins.
By setting up the ability to identify and segment your visitors, create personalized drip email campaigns and fulfill the resulting orders efficiently, you can build loyal customers year-round. Here's how to do it.
Segmenting your audience means dividing your online visitors into subgroups based on their online behavior and the customer information and data you have, in order to better market to their wants and needs. There are many ways you can segment your traffic into audiences that make the most sense for your business, but the main point is to sift through and utilize data to identify and sell to your most valuable customers.
Type of visitor: Segment your audience between new visitors coming to your site for the first time, returning visitors who have never purchased anything and returning visitors who are already customers. Offers, landing pages and messaging should all be determined based on the type of visitor coming to your site.
Traffic source: The traffic source is how customers found and accessed your store, which can give you more information into their intent to purchase or what type of marketing is most effective. This can include customers coming from social media, an email campaign, direct (typing in your URL), Pay Per Click (PPC) ads, searching for products and finding your site (organic search) and referral (clicking a link on another site that directs them to your site).
Location: Segment by language, city, country and more to display accurate prices in the customer's currency or properly use colloqualisms and correct spellings.
Behavior: Dive deeper into customers' behavior to further segment your audience. There is a large amount of data that can be used as you wish, but some options include segmenting by the amount a customer usually spends on your site or how long it has been since they last made a purchase to find your most invested customers.
Device: Learning if a customer is visiting your site on their mobile device, tablet or desktop helps you create a better shopping experience for them by incorporating social media login options or making sure their desktop and mobile histories and favorites are synced.
UTM parameters: UTM parameters create links you can use to segment your audience by source, medium, term, campaign and more. This is especially helpful if you are running specific campaigns and want to measure effectiveness e.g. a holiday sale. Learn more about UTM parameters and how to create links on Google.
To capture the email address that goes along with each visitor's traffic patterns, install either a modal pop-up or slider pop-under on your ecommerce site.
These pop-ups can be triggered based on the type of customer visiting your site (e.g. free shipping for first-time visitors if they sign up with their email, or the ability to save their cart by signing up for an account). You may also ask for additional information if you desire (e.g. birthdays, so you can send out a birthday-related offer or age-relevant products).
Check out the BigCommerce blog to learn more about using email addresses for personalized segmentation.
Side note: Want to go even deeper? You can further segment your audience to determine which visitors are most likely to spend the most money shopping with you. Your top customers usually account for 60-80% of your revenue, so specifically targeting these customers – or online visitors who fit the same profile – can be worth every bit of time and effort. You can learn more about finding your most valuable customers on the BigCommerce blog.
Now that customers have signed up and you have set up tracking on your site through Google Analytics, you can track visitors' online behavior, segment them into subgroups and create targeted emails to fit their interests. Emails that are personalized are 26% more likely to be opened and 760% better at generating revenue than typical mass emails.
Drip campaigns are a set of automated emails triggered based on the cues and interests that a customer gives you with his or her online habits. A combination of online behavior, such as what products they click on or how often they abandon their cart; email behavior, such as what offers or products they click on; and what type or how valuable of a customer they are should all be considered when creating drip campaigns.
Abandoned cart: You can create a one-off email or series for customers with items left in their carts to remind them to check out. Abandoned cart emails have the highest conversion rate (2.63%) of any triggered ecommerce email.
Promotional offer: Use a promotional offer to unveil new merchandise or a secret discount to your select email list. You can also use this type of campaign to note low stock on items the customer may have added to their favorites list or cart but never purchased to encourage them to act quickly.
Customer loyalty and re-engagement: This type of campaign builds upon an existing relationship you have with a customer by re-engaging them on what you already know about them. This can include a discount for their birthday, a "win back" email for those who haven't shopped with you in a while and a replenish email for items they have bought from you in the past that you know are now expired.
Up-sell and cross-sell: Once a customer has made a purchase with you, send up-sell and cross-sell emails related to their purchase to prompt them to return to your site for more. Send them items that are often purchased along with whatever they originally purchased, or include images of your other related products in your emailed receipt.
Personalizing your customer's experience does more than close the sale. When you are able to continually provide exactly what the customer is looking for in their ideal price range at the ideal time, it can add the personal touch that customers feel when stepping into their favorite brick and mortar and keep them coming back for more.
The customer's experience doesn't end until they have the desired products in hand at the desired time. Complete a great customer experience by utilizing ShipStation for your fulfillment needs. Now available in the control panel for BigCommerce users, ShipStation makes your ecommerce shipping and fulfillment for shops of all sizes easy by automatically importing orders from all of your channels, comparing prices of different carriers for you and printing hundreds labels and return slips from any printer with a single click.
Happy, satisfied customers are more likely to remember a personalized shopping experience and tell their circles about your store. They're also more likely to return in the future, especially if you can reduce stress and save them time during the holiday season. Take advantage of the many free tools available for segmenting your audience to create a great online shopping experience for your customers, and you'll be on your way to keeping that holiday magic alive all year.


text:
Dems Try to Undo 2016 Election By Probing Trump's Inaugural
Tom Winston
- July 17th, 2019
Even nearly three years later, Republicans still savor and chuckle at the video of the woman in a winter coat and glasses, howling a primordial "Nooooo!" into the cold January air as Donald Trump was inaugurated.
For Democrats, though, Inauguration Day 2017 remains a special kind of wound. As has often been said for going on three years, the Democrats have been trying—with all of the deep state and mainstream media power at their disposal—to undo the 2016 election of Donald Trump.
Democrats feel their opponents must be discredited and destroyed, and their preferred method is lawfare and media innuendo. And, as the ceaseless investigations and legal harassment of the last few years have shown, they have had the power of law enforcement and highly partisan elements of the Department of Justice with which they can exact revenge on Donald Trump and his supporters.
For the first time in memory, Democrats in the Senate have been bullying and frantically urging the Justice Department to investigate all aspects of the opposition party's inauguration, from individuals connected to the inauguration committee to employees of the Trump Organization, high profile donors and fundraisers, and members of the post-campaign transition team.
For months, federal prosecutors in New York have been on the hunt. Hundreds of news articles breathlessly reporting the inevitable downfall of these officials were created from leaks by deep state operatives in the Justice Department.
Unsurprisingly, it always amounted to nothing.
In a late Friday night news dump last week, prosecutors sheepishly admitted there would probably be no charges filed against anyone in the Trump Organization for inauguration-related activity.
Where do the people who have been targeted by bogus, partisan investigations go to get their reputations back? Who pays their legal fees, and compensates them for months of time, stress, and worry?
Now, Democrats and these same activist, partisan lawyers are moving on to Republican donors, again hounding them using the legal system. These donors might have more resources with which to fight such harassment, but any wealthy individual runs up against the limitless means with which the United States government can apply pressure.
In April 2018, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Dick Blumenthal (D-Conn.) authored a letter to then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, demanding an investigation into Elliott Broidy, a prominent GOP fundraiser and donor to pro-Israel causes. Of course, the two senators weren't really writing to Sessions. They were sending a signal to Democratic Party loyalists in the Justice Department—then, as now, crammed full of Obama appointees.
As Liz Sheld at American Greatness asked, "Is this a fight to end corruption or a fight to use government agencies as weapons against political enemies?"
The attack on people like Broidy is strategic: Democrats wish to frighten potential Republican contributors with the prospect of invasive and costly investigations. If "the process is the punishment," as they say, it's better to just stop donating to conservative or Republican causes, keep your head down and allow the Left to prevail over American politics uncontested.
People like former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn, who have been the target of this kind of politically motivated prosecution and investigation by the rogue prosecutors, know how daunting it is to face the limitless resources of the U.S. government. If a partisan prosecutor is determined to get you, odds are he will.
The parallels to RussiaGate are alarming, too. That started as a Democrat-funded opposition research project. Christopher Steele, Glenn Simpson, and the gang at FusionGPS—all former intelligence operators or investigative journalists for hire—concocted a narrative and created official-looking "dossiers" to peddle their fanciful stories to the media. It was dishonest, sure, but it was well within the subterranean workings of a political campaign.
But what made RussiaGate a scandal—rife with illegality and alarming threats to American liberty—was how a phony "dossier" served as the basis for official investigations by the national security bureaucracy. This anti-American politicization of the legitimate functions of government should alarm us all.
"Regardless of the merits of the case," wrote Streiff at Red State, "campaigning on using your personal clout to strong-arm the Justice Department into investigating someone who is a political opponent is something that just isn't done in American politics."
Photo credit: Tom Watson/Getty Images
Tom Winston is a pseudonym for a former political appointee in a Republican administration.


text:
Q: How to call a subroutine with a variable pre-assigned to some value? In Perl, when one uses the sort function with a custom comparison, the variables $a and $b are already assigned to the current pair of elements to compare, e.g. in:
@decreasing = sort { $b <=> $a } @list;

How can I write other subroutines with a similar functionality? For example, imagine that I want to write sort of process_and_store function that does something special with each item of a list and then stores it in a database; and where the variable $item is already assigned to the current item being processed. I would like to write for example something like:
process_and_store { do_something_with($item); } @list;

Rather than
process_and_store { my $item = shift; do_something_with($item); } @list;

How should I go about doing this?

UPDATE: For completeness, although flesk's answer works without problems, in order to "properly" localize the changes I make to the $item variable I had to follow the advice from Axeman. In SomePackage.pm I placed something like:
package SomePackage;

use strict;

require Exporter;
our @ISA = qw/Exporter/;
our @EXPORT = qw(process_and_store);

our $item;

sub import {
  my $import_caller = caller();
  {   no strict 'refs';
    *{ $import_caller . '::item' } = \*item;
  }
  # Now, cue Exporter!
  goto &{ Exporter->can( 'import' ) };
}

sub process_and_store (&@) {
  my $code = shift;
  for my $x (@_) {
    local *item = \$x;
    $code->();
    print "stored: $item\n"
  }
}

1;

Then I call this from main.pl with something like:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use SomePackage;

process_and_store { print "seen: $item\n"; } (1, 2, 3);

And get the expected result:
seen: 1
stored: 1
seen: 2
stored: 2
seen: 3
stored: 3

A: In my "associative array" processing library, I do something similar. The user can export the variables $k and $v (key-value) so that they can do things like this:
each_pair { "$k => $v" } some_source_list()

Here's how I do it:

*

*I declare our ( $k, $v ) in the implementing package.

*In import I allow packages to export those symbols and alias them in the
receiving package: *{$import_caller.'::'.$name} = \*{ $name };

*In the pair processors, I do the following:
local *::_ = \$_[0];
local *k   = \$_[0];
local *v   = \$_[1];
@res = $block->( $_[0], $_[1] );

Thus $k and $v are aliases of what's in the queue. If this doesn't have to be the case, then you might be happy enough with something like the following:
local ( $k, $v ) = splice( @_, 0, 2 );
local $_         = $k;

But modifiable copies also allow me to do things like:
each_pair { substr( $k, 0, 1 ) eq '-' and $v++ } %some_hash;

UPDATE:
It seems that you're neglecting step #2. You have to make sure that the symbol in the client package maps to your symbol. It can be as simple as:
our $item;

sub import {
    my $import_caller = caller();
    {   no strict 'refs';
        *{ $import_caller . '::item' } = \*item;
    }
    # Now, cue Exporter!
    goto &{ Exporter->can( 'import' ) };
}

Then when you localize your own symbol, the aliased symbol in the client package is localized as well.
The main way that I can see that it would work without the local, is if you were calling it from the same package. Otherwise, $SomePackage::item and $ClientPackage::item are two distinct things.

A: I think it's a bit of a hack, but you could do something like this:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $item;

sub process_and_store(&@) {
    my $code = shift;
    for (@_) {
        $item = $_;
        &$code();
    }
    undef $item;
}

The thing is, $item has to be a global scalar for this to work, so process_and_store has to update that scalar while looping over the list. You should also undef $item at the end of the sub routine to limit any potential side-effects. If I were to write something like this, I'd tuck it away in a module and make it possible to define the iterator variable, so as to limit name conflicts.
Test:
my @list = qw(apples pears bananas);
process_and_store { do_something_with($item) } @list;

sub do_something_with {
    my $fruit = shift;
    print "$fruit\n";
}

Output:
apples
pears
bananas

A: The $a and $b variables are special in Perl; they're real global variables and hence exempt from use strict, and also used specifically by the sort() function.
Most other similar uses in Perl would use the $_ global for this sort of thing:
process_and_store { do_something_with( $_ ) } @list;

Which is already handled by the normal $_ rules. Don't forget to localise $_:
sub process_and_store(&@)
{
  my $code = shift;
  foreach my $item (@_) {
    local $_ = $item;
    $code->();
  }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


I've always been baffled by that challenge since it seems so easy to refute (seriously, you're gonna try to use the Bible to SUPPORT abortion???), but there are many professing Christians who use it to support their pro-abortion belief… which is even more baffling (or not).
Once we remove that claim, we can then move onto SLED and other helpful tactics to take the roof off, which typically would come first in the conversation since this Exodus ploy seems like its a last ditch effort.
At the end of the day when all the arguments are presented, someone who is pro-abortion must come to the conclusion they are ok with killing a human life and that all human life is not equal based on their subjective moral view. We just can't let them borrow our terminology and continue to believe they're being intellectually honest by holding to conflicting beliefs, ie murder is "wrong", but abortion is ok.


Any new nominations for committee should be proposed and seconded in writing (e-mail acceptable) and received by the Secretary no later than Saturday 20 April 2019. The consent of the nominee must be obtained and included in the nomination.
Any items for the agenda need to be received by the Secretary no later than Saturday 20 April 2019 and must be proposed and seconded and presented by the proposer or seconder at the AGM to the membership present on the day.


text:
Many Different Hearts Beating
Kingdom Come are one of the most unique bands in heavy music. Their works defy classification – neither critics nor musicians themselves are able to put them in a specific genre. The one to blame for that is, of course, Lenny Wolf, the band's founder, main songwriter and irreplaceable frontman. It's been two years since the last Kingdom Come album saw the light of (or even four years, if we do not count a compilation, even with a few....
Рецензии на "Outlier"
Слава и богатство никогда не имели особого значения для главного вдохновителя Kingdom Come гера Ленни Вольфа. Все более чем 30 лет, в течение которых он являлся основным художником хард-рока, его основным желанием было продолжать развиваться. Его кредо всегда было: честность перед коммерческими соображениями. «Естественно, нет никого счастливее меня, ведь мою музыку боготворят столько поклонников, – говорит он, – но даже этот аспект ....
Interview with Lenny. May 2013
Kingdom Come's 1988 debut album made them a household name internationally. With a catchy, commercial appeal and a similarity to the heavy blues of Led Zeppelin, the band immediately shot to the top (the single "Get It On" was a radio darling for quite some time). But with quick stardom comes envious peers and sharp critics. Vocalist Lenny Wolf took the critiques in stride and has persevered, as he has turned Kingdom Come into a long....
"Outlier" review by Powerplay May 2013
Back in 1988, Kingdom Come came out of nowhere and nil hard with their debut. Fans, MTV, and radio loved it, but many critics hated it. The world was looking for the next Led Zeppelin and Kingdom Come was it. They, unabashedly, look Page's rhythms, Bonham's drum patterns, and Plant's vocal inflections and made them their own. The band and album soared lo incomprehensible heights in a very short period of time. However, as ....
"Outlier" (2013) reviews
Of all the characters to emerge in the ongoing soap opera that is the hard rock world in
the last three decades, few are more enigmatic
or harder to pigeonhole than Lenny Wolf. His
Robert Plant infused voice first hit international
radar screens with Stone Fury in the mid 80s; their brief two album tenure - 'Burns Like A
Star' in '84 and 'Let Them Ta....
Blowin' Wind With Lenny Wolf of Kingdom Come, March 2011
Kingdom Come might be a name you remember from the past. They put out two albums in the US that charted well for them and spawned hit singles like "Get It On", "What Love Can Be" and "Do You Like It?" Very few may know that For well over 20 years, Lenny Wolf has been releasing music with his band Kingdom Come for well over 20 years. Lenny Wolf still manages to bring his creative vision to life releasing some amazing albums such as "H....
Kingdom Come | Led Zeppelin - Myths & Facts
I guess these are the most known and still unexploded myths about Kingdom Come...
MYTH: In one of their first big interviews the band Kingdom Come have said that they have never heard Led Zeppelin!
FACT: In fact, it was a cut from a Danny Stag's phrase (lead guitar), when the band was asked for a thousand time about the Led Zeppelin "cloning" he couldn't stand anymore and started kidding, saing "Oh, no! Not this q....
File-O-Facts: Lenny Wolf
of Kingdom Come
Name: Lenny Wolf
. Star sign: Pisces - Rising sign: Sagittarius
. Place of birth: Hamburg-Germany
. Now based at: Hamburg - and still a little LA
. Level of education: below average - street wise;-)
.
First instrument played: Accordion
. Current instrument: Vocal, rhythm guitar, bass, little keyboard. Last venue played at: Rock festival in Sweden
. Last gig attended: Rock festival in Sweden
.
Turn On: L....
"Ain't Crying For The Moon" (2006) reviews
Lenny Wolf strikes back with a new Kingdom Come album, this is more of a soloalbum from Lenny where he has done most of the work by himself with a little help from various unknown musicians. I really like Lenny's two albums with Stone Fury that I think is great AOR/MHR albums and the first 4 albums with Kingdom Come are good stuff. But after Bad Image (1993) I have lost my faith in K.C and the following albums has been pretty w....
"Magnified" (2009) reviews
When I listen to Kingdom Come's latest release Magnified, I can't help but feel this is how Steelheart's last album should have sounded. Both CDs are far removed from the band's original days, but in the case of Kingdom Come vocalist Lenny Wolf hasn't changed a bit. His voice isn't hidden in distortion and overdubs, and even though the music itself has 'matured', at least fans can still relate to that voice. That simple fact mak....
"Independent" (2002) reviews
It's funny how things comes back like cycles, many bands returns to their sound in the beginnings. And so do Lenny Wolf with his Kingdom Come, it's his 8th album under that name but for those who remember his works before that know about the 2 great Stone Fury albums he did with Bruce Gowdy (Unruly Child).
As a matter of fact so does this new album sound a bit like Stone fury at some moments and also the magnificent thi....
Interview with Lenny Wolf, may 2011
Back in 1988 and soon after a young German rocker moved to LA to pursue his musical ambitions, Lenny Wolf achieved his dream when the debut album of his new band Kingdom Come reached platinum status. The comparisons with Led Zeppelin were inevitable and in the end, this lead to the band's demise years Joter. Returning to his hometown of Hamburg, Lenny has not surrendered and still waves the Kingdom Come flag, releasing albums and pla....
"Perpetual" (2004) reviews
Let's be brutal: Kingdom Come blew their career 16 years ago, with the release of their self-titled debut album, and misfiring marketing campaign that saw the band alienate so many rock fans in America and Britain.
A musical tragedy, because while that controversial first record mimicked Led Zeppelin to the point of plagiarism, subsequently they've developed, refined and embellished their style to the point where they've hard....
Interview with Lenny Wolf by Classic Rock, 2007
Ten albums on from their debut, and now a very different band, but the 'Led clones' millstone still hangs round their neck.
If truth be told, Kingdom Come committed musical suicide a long time ago; in 1988, to be precise, when their self-titled debut album was sent to American radio stations, attached to a rumour that this was Led Zeppelin secretly back together. Compounding that 'felony', the band amazingly denied there was ....
"Too" (2000) review by Classic Rock
The hard rock world never really forgave Kingdom Come for their opportunistic attempt at ransacking the Led Zeppelin legacy during the late 1980s. But the group's sole remaining member, vocalist Lenny Wolf, refuses to throw in the towel and still enjoys moderate success in his native Germany.
While 1989's 'In Your Face' opus has stood the test of time astonishingly well, that album and the group's eponymous debut were the pla....
"Rendered Waters" (2011) reviews
When you think to back in the day and remember bands that made an impact right from the start with kick-ass music and stunning vocals, one band comes to mind and that is KINGDOM COME. Yeah, you heard the claims they are LED ZEPPELIN clones but people found out differently as time went by. Ever since that self-titled debut in 1988 fans still to this day go back to that release and reminisce. With many releases under their belt s....
Exclusive Interview to our site
Hello everybody who can hear us!
Today we're happy to talk with a real genius, outstanding man, who doesn't do the same again & again, he's always growing up, not following to the trends. His self development is more important to him than a commercial success. With a man who's faithfully on his Mission during the years... He shares a part of him with us. He shares his deepest feelings and emotions, his wise ....
Lenny Wolf's biography
I was born March 11, 1962 in Hamburg, Germany. The day I was born, the city experienced a catastrophe - a huge flood in Hamburg.
I went to several public schools in Hamburg, since nobody wanted to keep an eye on me ( I wonder why ) and was finally put into a school for difficult children when I was 14 years old. The good thing about it was that they really supported my need to play the guitar, to keep me cool. My first instru....
Full in bloom, April 4th, 2009
FIB MUSIC: What's new? Tell us about the new album. When can we expect to see you touring?
Lenny: Don't really like talking much about music. It's something you should "listen" too. But it surely is another growing step for me, in regards of combining sounds and building a bridge between the 80's and 2009. I think Kingdom Come has developed a unique approach of writing. Not doing the same thing over and over again, and taki....
Kingdom Come History
In 1988, after having been signed to Polygram Records, New York by Derek Shulman, Lenny Wolf and his manager Marty Wolff (no relation), were asked to put a new band together. The players he chose for his new band were: James Kottak on drums, Danny Stag on lead guitar, Rick Steier on rhythm guitar and Johnny B.Frank on the bass guitar (for more background see Lenny Wolf Biography).
A very lucky event happened when Lenny ....
Published on Friday, 16 March 2012 21:36 | Written by Kate | | | Hits: 3671
When I listen to Kingdom Come's latest release Magnified, I can't help but feel this is how Steelheart's last album should have sounded. Both CDs are far removed from the band's original days, but in the case of Kingdom Come vocalist Lenny Wolf hasn't changed a bit. His voice isn't hidden in distortion and overdubs, and even though the music itself has 'matured', at least fans can still relate to that voice. That simple fact makes all the difference in the world.
If you are expecting to hear "Get It On" or "Do You Like It" all over again you'll be disappointed. To call this a hard rock album would be expanding the definition of the genre. Magnified is what it is, a fairly mellow and somber offering, a collection of songs that likely wouldn't work fans into a frenzy at a live gig, but it may bring out some lighters.
As a whole Magnified doesn't offer much variety, yet it does manage to draw the listener in. "24 Hours", "Over You" and "Unwritten Language" could all be considered heartfelt ballads with the former not that far removed from the band's humble beginnings. Meanwhile, "So Unreal" is the type of song that always gave Kingdom Come the Led Zeppelin 'clone' tag. As far as actual rock songs go, there are only a few like "No Murderer I Kiss", "Sweet Killing" and "Hey Mama" (which includes one of the few memorable guitar riffs).
Magnified may at times seem like Kingdom Come is trying too hard to be current, yet it isn't a completely unexpected release from Lenny Wolf and his latest collection of sidekicks. If any bands want to evolve/change their sound, this CD is the perfect example of how to do it successfully. Be forewarned though, you'll need an open mind to get into Magnified.
Reviewed by This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for Sleaze Roxx, March 2009
Up to now, Lenny Wolf´s Kingdom Come has gone through 8 different record labels, around 20 musicians in different line-ups and released 11 albums including this new one "Magnified". But ever since the 2002 album "Independent", all albums has been performed and recorded by Lenny himself. If the previous record "Ain´t crying for the moon" was KC´s heaviest record, then the new album is the most laid back album with loops and a more keyboard based sound. Lenny releases "Magnified" on the new label Planet Music and even if it doesn´t match his best albums "Hands of time" (1991), "Independent" (2002) and Kingdom Come (1988) - the new one is in fact real good. But will the fans welcome this new more soft sound? I don´t mind.
I noticed that the album grows for each spin so don´t give up on it the first time you hear it, Lenny rocks hard on the first tracks "Living dynamite" and "No murderer I kiss" but I wonder if the ballad "Unwritten language" isn´t the best song after all. I love the atmosphere in this song!
If you still prefer the early albums of KC, then the riffrocker "Hey mama" will please you for sure. There´s another version of "24 hours" recorded that I hope Lenny will release as a bonus for a future release, this one is one of the best songs on the new album. If you took away Lenny´s voice on "The machine inside", you couldn´t guess it was KC - I welcome new thinking so thumbs up Lenny!
Reviewer Kaj Roth (Staff)


text:
LhARA; a transformation approach to precision, personalised particle-beam therapy
Gwyddoniaeth a Pheirianneg - Faculty of Science and Engineering
A. Giacca, Oxford Institute of Radiation Oncology
K. Long, Imperial College London and STFC
From: 6 Jan 2023, 2 p.m.
To: 6 Jan 2023, 5 p.m.
Location: Glyndwr C Vivian Building Singleton Campus Swansea University, Other
Cancer is the second most common cause of death globally. In 2018, 18.1 million new cancer cases were diagnosed, 9.6 million people died of cancer-related disease, and 43.8 million people were living with cancer. Radiotherapy (RT) is used in 50% of cancer patients and is involved in 40% of cancer cures. It is estimated that 26.9 million life-years could be saved in low- and middle-income countries if capacity could be scaled up.
The beam characteristics that can be exploited in proton- and ion-beam therapy (IBT) facilities today are restricted to low dose rates, a small number of temporal schemes, and a small number of spatial distributions. The use of novel beams with strikingly different characteristics has led to exciting evidence of enhanced therapeutic benefit. This evidence, together with developments in our understanding of personalised medicine based on the biology of individual tumours, now provides the impetus for a radical transformation of IBT.
The 'Laser-hybrid Accelerator for Radiobiological Applications', LhARA, is conceived as a novel, uniquely flexible facility dedicated to the study of radiobiology. The technologies that will be demonstrated in LhARA have the potential to allow particle-beam therapy to be delivered in a completely new regime, combining a variety of ion species in a single treatment fraction and exploiting ultra-high dose rates. The laser-hybrid approach will allow the exploration of the vast "terra incognita" of the mechanisms by which the biological response is modulated by the physical characteristics of the beam. We will describe the motivation for LhARA, present the status of its development and summarise the programme upon which the LhARA consortium has embarked to drive a step-change in clinical capability.
Contact: Christopher Baker (Email: c.baker@swansea.ac.uk)
Event created by: l.v.meynell


text:
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


This photo of Creepy Halloween Cat Coloring Pages is really great cat coloring pages for your kids. You get permit to download for nothing by clicking the DOWNLOAD button under the picture. It will give access to a new window. Do right click on the snapshot, then pick save picture as… After that you are allowed to revise the file name and the folder where you want to store the file. Then click the save button.
Check out these snapshots linked to Creepy Halloween Cat Coloring Pages, may be useful..


I had the pleasure of being a part of my youth group, Elevate Youth Ministries Fall leadership training last night. Our youth pastors, Justin and Jessica, spoke about some key steps that us as leaders are to take and I couldn't help but think about the fact that the items they addressed shouldn't be a youth leader thing, they should be everyday standards that all christians, men and women, should attempt to live by in order to be better people in our communities, workplaces, schools and churches.
There were two items that Justin brought up. Item # 1 was: My Example. If someone you don't know, maybe in the lobby at your job or as a passenger on a bus or train, or someone they see at your kids school when you pick them up or drop them off; what example do they see in your from a distance? What is the perception about the person you appear to be?
Item #2 bridges into My Interactions. Now if you happen to meet and speak with others, how are the questions above answered by the person you speak with? Without you telling anyone that you're a Christian, are you setting an example in your interactions that tell others that you are someone that they won't dislike. Are you training up your kids by your own example, based on your everyday encounters.
Rick Warren made a tweet this week that said "The more loving you are, the more attractive you are". If you are liked, people will want to be more like you and when you eventually are presented with an opportunity to present your faith to them, you'd be surprised how much easier it would be for them to receive your word and encouragement, if they like you.
As a Christian, we don't always have the ability to talk about Jesus to everyone we come in contact with or people who see us but don't know us. But that doesn't mean you can't let your light shine through. The last point that Justin made that I had to share is a point on consistency.
So many people see one person on a Sunday morning at church and another at work the next Monday afternoon.
I'll raise my hand as an example of someone that's fallen to the above. I've personally been fighting to change my temper and anger that can sometimes get the best of me. I might blow a fuse on the phone on a Monday afternoon, while working with someone that is not doing their job, not realizing that even though I'm talking with someone I likely would never meet half way around the world, I'm not setting a good example in my interaction with the person on the other end of that line. I've got to do a better job of making sure all my interactions are better ones going forward, as I'm attempting to set an example of how a christian should live.
Let's all keep growing in our faith and know that you are blessed. Have a great day and know that Jesus loves you.
Special Thanks to Justin and Jessica McAuliff for the message that was shared.


text:
Q: new ubuntu install on an IBM T 42 Thinkpad I have tried installing 3 or 4 versions of ubuntu from my flash drive but am unsuccessful.  Is there anyone who has a step by step guide as to how this is done and what version?  I kept going back version by version due to a CPA error for the processor, I look around online for others who have done this and mostly I find statements that Ubuntu works great on their T 42 but no explanation as to how that was accomplished.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.  My T 42 has XP and I would like to try running Ubuntu from a stick or installed along with XP before I commit completely to the Linux OS..  Thanks so much!! - John

A: You can use your flash drive to boot from it, without having to install anything, and feel if Ubuntu is right for you or not.
If you, then, decide to give it a go, there's a lot of tutorials. However, I'd recommend you to watch a couple of videos on YouTube, just to check your steps. Maybe you're just missing some small step.
I'm not leaving any link because I'm not the author, nor responsible for their content.


text:
Q: Wrong git user commits are lost I was doing commits as I was developing a project for sometime. But later I discovered I was committing under the wrong GitHub user. So, before I pushed my project to GitHub I changed my credentials, but when I published the project, it shows the wrong user as a contributor. Is there a way to associate all the commits with the right user only?

A: How to correct your past commits to be associated with YOUR account
Important note — I have only performed this on projects where I am the only contributor. It is not advised to perform this batch update action on a repo where you are collaborating with others as the action is destructive to the whole repo's history! You've been warned!
Step 1 — Open up Terminal
Step 2 — 'cd' into wherever your project file is sitting
Step 3 — Create a clone of your repository
git clone --bare https://github.com/user/repo.git
cd repo.git

Step 4 — Copy and paste this script and replace OLD_EMAIL, CORRECT_NAME and CORRECT_EMAIL with the correct information.
#!/bin/sh
git filter-branch --env-filter '
OLD_EMAIL="your-old-email@example.com"
CORRECT_NAME="Your Correct Name"
CORRECT_EMAIL="your-correct-email@example.com"
if [ "$GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL" = "$OLD_EMAIL" ]
then
    export GIT_COMMITTER_NAME="$CORRECT_NAME"
    export GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL="$CORRECT_EMAIL"
fi
if [ "$GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL" = "$OLD_EMAIL" ]
then
    export GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="$CORRECT_NAME"
    export GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="$CORRECT_EMAIL"
fi
' --tag-name-filter cat -- --branches --tags

How to check for the "OLD_EMAIL":
Step 4a — In your command line, enter $ git log --pretty="format:%ae" to get a list of all email addresses associated with all past commits for this repo
Image1
Step 4b — Therefore I will assign the variable OLD_EMAIL = "github email address"
Step 5 — Hit Enter
A successful update looks like this (each branch in the repo will be rewritten):
Image2
Step 6 — Push the corrected history to your original repository:
git push --force --tags origin 'refs/heads/*'

What a successful push looks like:
Image3
Step 7 — Remove the temporary clone from your machine
cd ..
rm -rf repo.git

Step 8 — Check your repo on GitHub to check if the commit details have been successfully updated. You should be able to see your correct username against each commit but more importantly — all the green squares!


I believe that there is a subtle error in this calculation. The calculation implicitly assumes that the number of souls in hell at any given time is fixed, and thus the calculation has been executed in the canonical ensemble. However it seems that the number of souls in hell at any given time is not fixed, but rather that souls can wander in and out of hell, according to the current value of the chemical potential mu soul with respect to the chemical potential of souls in various other places. Else, how is it possible that Nola Demoney told me where to go one week, and the next week……well, I certainly was not there. Thus, this calculation must be reconsidered in the context of a grand thermodynamic ensemble.
In fact, the issue of the evidence of Ms. Banyan may indicate that there is not even a well-defined temperature in hell. In this case, it could be true both that all hell has broken loose ("hotter than hell") and that hell has frozen over. Hence the phrase "come hell or high water", indicating that hell may involve either ice or water vapour, but not liquid water.
It should be clear, at least to those among us who subscribe to religions which canonically condemn self-inflicted mortality, just where it is that Ludwig and Paul are calculating their partition functions these days. In fact, as has been previously reported (and how could this be known other than by a momentary fluctuation of a soul out of hell to provide a report?), there is a particular department of hell reserved for students of probability and statistics. Each morning, all residents of said department file into an auditorium, where they spend the entire day watching a hundred blindfolded monkeys peck away, totally at random, at a hundred computer keyboards. At the end of the day, one hundred members of the audience chosen, of course, at random, relieve one monkey each from their random pecking and print out the resulting file. The printing inmate finds, to his severe disappointment, that each monkey has, in that day of totally random pecking, produced an absolutely error-free reproduction of one of Shakespeare's plays or sonnets (first folio edition). This should give pause to those who use the expression "A snowball's chance in hell" to describe an event that cannot reasonably be expected to occur.
Or, to summarize, in the words of the ballad of 5.60 – "Glory, glory, dear old thermo, we'll pass you by and by".


This listing is for a set of round stickers with the text "handcrafted kombucha". These stickers are perfect for adding a lovely note to your homemade kombucha. There's also a space for writing the date and ingredients.


Designed with legendary photographer Chris Burkard, the Kit Cube Large is a certifiably durable, water resistant camera cube that offers unmatched protection, organization, and compatibility. Pack the Kit Cube in virtually any bag, pack, or piece of luggage to stay light on your feet while keeping your camera gear safe.
We all have our own way of doing things. The Kit Cube Large's padded compartment and internal divider allows you to customize your camera carry options with maximum protection. Toss the Kit Cube in the Tanuck 40 or any carry-on sized luggage or backpack and to turn any pack into a camera bag. The water resistant exterior and CORDURA® fabric adds extreme durability to keep your lenses, light stands, cameras, and photography essentials safe. Whether you're commuting, traveling, or venturing in the backcountry, stay light and stay organized with the cube's color-coded pockets, allowing you to keep track of new versus used memory cards, storage devices, batteries, and more. Add this to the high visibility yellow-lined interior and fully zippered closure and your camera gear will be easily accessible on every adventure.
Color-coded pockets to organize new vs used memory cards, storage devices, etc.


Accutrench Contracting Llc is a Carrier truck company located in Seaford, DE. Accutrench Contracting Llc's United States DOT (Department of Transportation) number is 1234788, and it's current operating status is Inactive USDOT Number per 49 CFR 390.19(b)(4); Biennial update of MCS-150 data not completed. Accutrench Contracting Llc employs 4 truck drivers as owner operators or company drivers. Leasing opportunities may be available. Accutrench Contracting Llc's commercial over-the-road transportation services may include specialized, flatbed, or heavy haul driving. 4 of Accutrench Contracting Llc's trucks include auxiliary power units. The last MCS-150 form date is listed as 5/3/2016. The listed MCS-150 Mileage and year for Accutrench Contracting Llc is 20,000 (2015).


Selecting a course in which you would like to embed your international project.
Finding a colleague to participate as your international project co-lead.
Defining the aims of the project in line with the module's internationalized learning outcomes.
Deciding on time-span for the project.
Designing Collaborative interactions, for instance: Online interviews with students from other countries/cultures studying in the same professional area; Online multicultural teams set problem solving tasks related to the professional area; Students participate in an online simulation in which they take the role of someone from another culture they have researched previously; Scenarios from professional practice, with obvious intercultural issues embedded within them.
Designing activity for critical reflection on the intercultural experience.
Testing tools and resources before use.
Teachers create a collaborative project with colleagues of at least another country involving students working on mixed groups, identifying and analysing issues, and producing an intercultural work. The project could be developed by matching similar courses or combining different courses at undergrad or postgraduate level.
The interaction could be organized at different levels of complexity: one single interaction vs. series of activities, asynchronous or synchronous, for a small number or high number of participants, with one or several partners.
From the beginning, both partners must communicate timely and openly about their needs, expectations and the objectives they want to achieve; often this kind of activity fails because of a lack of a good understanding about the tasks and of clear agreement on advance.
A common vision on learning outcomes and how to evaluate them is essential.
Teachers must inform their students about the objectives, activities and difficulties that could emerge during the collaboration.
Teachers should remain available to support their students and to monitor the whole process; collaborative online learning is time consuming, but, as it doesn't require extra funding, its impact can reach substantial number of students.
Teachers and students must be flexible but rigorous and especially with deadlines; online collaboration demands discipline.


text:
Q: How to get matplotlib figure size For a project, I need to know the current size (in pixels) of my matplotlib figure, but I can't find how to do this.
Does anyone know how to do this ?

A: import matplotlib.plt
fig = plt.figure()
size = fig.get_size_inches()*fig.dpi # size in pixels

To do it for the current figure,
fig = plt.gcf()
size = fig.get_size_inches()*fig.dpi # size in pixels

You can get the same info by doing:
bbox = fig.get_window_extent().transformed(fig.dpi_scale_trans.inverted())
width, height = bbox.width*fig.dpi, bbox.height*fig.dpi

A: Quickly extract figure size in inches
To get width and height in inches I just use:
fig_width, fig_height = plt.gcf().get_size_inches()
print(fig_width, fig_height)

I put this here because this question is the first result that pops up when you search 'get matplotlib figure size', and the api most naturally works in inches, not pixels.

A: Maybe this animation might help:


text:
Announcements | 14 September 2018
Five panelised terraced homes a first
September 14, Auckland
Fletcher Living has successfully trialled New Zealand's first quick-build of five panelised terraced homes, following the successful trial of two panelised duplexes last year.
Fletcher Residential and Land Development Chief Executive Steve Evans says: "This is the first time we have done anything like this with a multi-tenancy building in New Zealand.
"When we built the duplexes last year, we erected one in one day and other in two days.
"This month's terraced house trial saw panels for five terraced homes assembled on site in five days, spread over two weeks. Panels include electrical wiring and plumbing.
"The aim of these trials is to help meet the high demand for new homes by speeding up the house building process while maintaining quality and ensuring regulatory compliance.
"The time saving for a panelised home is significant: it will now take one to four days to weatherproof a home compared to 50 for a standard built duplex home. Finishing requires a further six weeks to complete - compared to a total 22 weeks for a conventional build.
"The use of integrated design software based on a Designed for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA) approach, efficient use of materials, and state of the art equipment all reduce the volume of materials. Transport to the site is also reduced – the home arrives in four or five consignments using purpose built trailers and lifting gear."
The successful trial concludes the proof of concept stage for Fletcher Building's new factory, which will initially produce around 500 houses a year. Equipment has been ordered through Germany and the first panels off this new production line will be produced in mid 2019. Further expansion of the plant is possible to meet demand from government and other group home builders.
Panelised homes timelapse
The row of five panelised terraced homes that we completed last week, clear the way to open our panelisation factory that will turn out more than 500 houses a year.
Aleida White
aleida.white@fbu.com


text:
Nanology Labs Takes Home First Prize at RBC Pitch Competition
Nanology Labs' CEO and Founder, Mohammad Amini, presented his cancer-treating nanotechnology startup with an air of confidence and insightful clarity in the RBC Prize for Innovation & Entrepreneurship, which is an annual pitch competition as the finale of the True Blue Expo, the capstone event of U of T Entrepreneurship Week.
Nanology Labs won the $25,000 Later Stage first prize victory due to its idea of "non-toxic MRI contrast agent" called Manganescan that is more effective in detecting early-stage brain tumors addressing the current societal problem of merely detecting brain cancer in the advance stage. On top of Nanology Labs' already developed prototype that has been pre-clinically validated, it will begin scaling up production this year and validate its safety in dogs. Amini aims to manufacture formula for clinical trials by 2021 and launch the product by 2024. With a conservative estimate, the company is expected to bring in $120 million to $150 million annually by 2029.
Nanology Labs
© 2019 nanologylabs.com


What Is Intravenous Light Therapy?
The UVLrx system is a term that is going to become frequently heard in the medical world. This system is a form of intravenous therapy that introduces low light energy into the circulatory system. This injection supports red blood cell oxygenation and a healthy immune system. The Model UVL1500 in used in assisting post-surgical and non-surgical patient recovery. The system helps inflammation, pain, and speeds up the wound healing process. This system is making headlines and quickly making a name for itself with it's harm-free nature, low risk rates, and impeccable results.
The system does more than reduce inflammation post cosmetic changes. It can also fight infections, brain disorders, chronic conditions, and more.
The health institute goes on to explain how light therapy works by activating our photoreceptors. Examples of these photoreceptors are flavoproteins, porphyrins, hemoglobin, and flavins. When these receptors are exposed to light they come excited. This excitement affects all of the biochemical pathways directly and indirectly connected with the receptors.
Our photoreceptors can absorb a certain amount of light. This absorption spectrum defines the wavelength of light and color they need. Each wavelength of light is important and targets certain cells in order to drive extremely specific biological pathways. This also helps us line up colors with our wavelength therapy.
Red (635 nm): Used to regulate cell bioenergetics. Supports immune response and cell repair.
UVA (365 nm): Kills foreign particles like bacteria, fungi, and virus.
Green (535 nm): Affects blood components and hemodynamics. Helps repair and stabilize pathways.
All 3 forms of wavelengths are delivered during each intravenous light therapy treatment. This creates a thorough and comprehensive treatment.
The UVLrx Station Model UVL1500 is the first system to offer intravenous and concurrent delivery of ultraviolet-A or UVA and multiple visible light wavelengths. It is used to treat a wide array of medical conditions and it is the first for many things. This system uses an adapter and a standard IV catheter to treat blood intravenously. There is no longer a need to remove blood from the body in order to treat it. The UVLrx intravenous light therapy system is a pioneering treatment program.
Diabetic Ulcers, or Diabetic Foot Ulcers occur for a variety of reasons. They occur in about 15% of people who suffer from diabetes These ulcers are open sores or wounds and are commonly located on the bottom of the foot. 6% of people who suffer from diabetic foot ulcers are hospitalized due to infection or other ulcer-related complications.
These are some pretty high numbers and if there is a way to decrease these statistics, life will be easier for those suffering from diabetes.
People with diabetes related kidney, eye, and heart diseases.
The main goal in ulcer treatment is to help the ulcer heal as quickly as possible. The faster the wound heals, the less time there is for infection to occur. At this time, most people are using traditional forms of treatment for ulcers.
Many patients are required to wear special footwear, braces, castings, use wheelchairs, or use crutches. While all of these options discussed above help reduce pressure and irritation on the ulcer and can speed up the healing process, they are far from fun and can make continuing on with your every day life very difficult. Living with diabetes is difficult enough without having to constantly keep an eye on your foot. This is where light therapy is changing the game for ulcer victims.
Phototherapy, or light therapy, is being proven to speed up the healing process for diabetic foot ulcers. When light therapy is combined with some of the simple forms of treatment for ulcers, such as keeping it clean, a wound can be healed rather quickly. While light therapy has been proven effective at treating ulcers with no other help from traditional forms of treatment, the process will be sped up and more effective when combined with some traditional medical treatment.
Light therapy is a non-invasive form of treatment and it is harm free, making it an incredible option for ulcer treatment. This form of treatment works by exposing affected body parts to daylight or a specific wavelength of light in a device at home or in a doctor's office.
Red light therapy will not treat ulcers or other wounds immediately. However, if used on a consistent schedule, patients can see results in 24 hours to 2 months depending on the intensity of the ulcer and the treatment regime.
While the list of benefits for red light therapy is nearly endless, the adverse side effects are nonexistent. There have been no reported cases of light therapy harming anyone attempting to treat diabetic foot ulcers. Interestingly enough, there are no reported negative side affects for red light therapy in general!
The promise that light therapy shows in treating wounds such as diabetic foot ulcers is remarkable. If light therapy can stop infection, heal wounds, help us keep all of our limbs, and make diabetics' lives easier, what can't it do?!


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LOCAL DEMOCRACY WEEK: St HELENS YOUNGSTERS PUT IN DEMOCRATIC HOT SEAT
Youngsters from across St Helens have been taking part in their own ...
Youngsters from across St Helens have been taking part in their own
'youth council' debating key issues of the day.
St Helens MBC was one of more than 250 councils listening to 'tomorrow's
voters today' during Local Democracy Week.
This year's focus was on young people and aims to raise awareness of the
key role councils play in communities and to give the public, especially
young people, a better understanding of local government.
Says leader Marie Rimmer: 'It's about ensuring that local people feel they
have a real stake in the democratic process and a real say about the
services provided by their local council. To encourage people to vote
they need to feel that they can make a difference and one way of achieving
this is to make sure they understand how the process works and the vital
role people have to play.'
With the fall in interest in local and national politics and the decline in
turnout for elections the spotlight is being put on the potential young
people have to shape the future of society and help redress this trend.
St Helens MBC invited all secondary schools to take part in a special
Youth Council and visits to London and Brussels are also planned. Dave
Watts MP and Terry Wynn MEP joined Councillor Rimmer in opening the event.
Councillors and officers also took part in debates with subjects ranging
from racism, sex education, bullying, education, housing and
homelessness,
jobs and training, libraries , drugs and alcohol, social services, teenage
pregnancy, transport, vandalism and young peoples' welfare.
Comments from youngsters taking part in the event included 'brilliant' and
'cool' with the majority saying that they had a far better understanding
of how councils worked, and vitally, that they appreciated the role the
community can play in helping to deliver a service to meet the needs of
the people.
Brokenshire: next PM should do more to prevent council failure
3 July 2019Jessica Hill
James Brokenshire has declared that central government "can and should do more" to identify and support struggling councils earlier, to prevent failure and protect residents.
2 July 2019Mark Smulian, Sarah Calkin, Jon Bunn, Jessica Hill
Who are the independent councillors who did so well at May's polls, and why did voters back them? LGC investigates
Rallings & Thrasher: voters turned their backs on the main two parties
7 May 2019Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher
Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher, associate members of Nuffield College, Oxford, give their analysis of last Thursday's council elections.
Hundreds of seats won 'without a single ballot being cast'
Just over a third of district councils do not have enough candidates to ensure all seats will be fully contested in next month's local elections, new analysis from the Electoral Reform Society has found.