Hello my friends!! Hope you all are having a great night. Yesterday, I taught a stamping class, 11 ladies from church came to my house and we stamped for more than 3 hours. It was a lot of fun.
Here is one of the cards I taught yesterday. I used the sketch from 2S4U and I made an Easel card.
The stamps I used are from smARTworks. I stamped the butterfly(from Cone flowers Set) in a white piece of CS, then cut it out and glue (I used Diamond Glaze) all three, making a 3D butterfly. The saying is from Daisy Trio #2.
Card Stock: White (SU), Riding Hood Red (SU).
Stamps: Daisy Trio #2, Cone Flowers (smARTworks).
Ink: Riding Hood Red (SU), Ginger (Adirondack).
Embellishments: Sherry Satin Ribbon (Offray), Pink Rhinestones (Kaiser Crafts).
Accessories: Border Punch (Fiskars), Square Nestabilities, Pointy scissors, Diamond Glaze, Mini glue dots, Square foam, daubers.
Marianne!!! Congrats Marianne. Please e-mail your address and I will send your goodies right away!
Thanks so much to all who entered the Blog Candy. I am very thankful for all your kind comments.
Happy Blogoversary to me and Blog Candy!!
Hello my friends!! I am still here, just finishing organizing my craft room. I will post pictures and my whole adventure tomorrow.
But, today is my blogoversary!!! I can't believe it has been 2 years blogging. Thanks so much for all your support and for all the great friends I have met here. You are the best.
Well, cleaning my craft area, I have found tons of stuff I haven't used and I will be giving a great giveaway! I haven't taken the picture yet, but just post a comment here about what you like about my blog, or what would you like to see or maybe not see and I will be including your name in the drawing. Believe me, it is great!! I will be keeping this post until Jan. 28 and on the 29th I will be announcing the winner!!
This blog candy is closed now, winner has been posted, Thanks!
A card and a Greek delish!
Hello my friends, hope your day is much better than mine, I don't want to bore you with my things, so we go direct with the card i have for you today.
I made this card few weeks ago and never posted it. It is a Birthday card with not the colors I like to use often, but I think it turned out pretty good! Actually, I really like it.
For this card I used the Flourish images from Flourishes Set by Inkadinkado, I stamped the image in Broken China Distress Ink and immediately added some Clear embossing powder, heated and you get a really shiny and pretty image. The sentiment is from Verve.
The colors I used are: White, Gray, Turquoise and Black, nice color combo, what do you think? Do you like it?
Card Stock: White, Turquoise, Black, Gray.
Ink: Broken China (Tim Holtz), Stazon Black.
Accessories: Border Punch (Fiskars), Clear embossing powder, embossing gun, mini glue dots.
Labels: Inkadinkado Stamps, recipes, Verve Stamps.
Hello my friends, it feels great to be back into the blog world. I have been busy as always, and then when things were looking more relaxed, my daughter got sick, so she is feeling much better now, although she still has the runny nose and cough. Today, after many many days, she is back into her nap time routine, I wish she could take them more often.
Anyway, I have managed some time to stamp during the night in the last 2 days, but sadly I can't show you those projects yet, but I think you are going to like them. Instead, I have a quick and pretty card. Few weeks ago, I got the next smARTworks Cookie Sheet #2: Vintage Variety. This sheet has cute and cool images, and with Valentine's Day coming soon, I thought this card would be perfect.
I stamped the cute squirrel onto a piece of PP in Espresso Ink. Then I took a piece of Mellow Moss CS and stitched them together. I added a piece of the same PP (back side), punch the borders and added some Liquid pearls. Finally I stamped the sentiment on the Twill Tape.
Accessories: Border Punch (Fiskars), Sewing machine, white thread, Dimensionals.
PS: Don't forget about my Blog Candy Giveaway!!
Anyway, here is my new and remodeled craft area.
Don't forget about the Blog Candy, I will post the picture of it later.
Hello my friends, I hope you all are having a great day! Lately, I've been suffering from Sinus Headache, I would say that I've been feeling miserable. No energy, and no time for stamping. But today, I am feeling a lot better, my headache is not too bad, so I decided to stamp!! I think this is the best therapy when you are not feeling well.
Card Stock: Pure Luxury White, Pure Luxury Brown.
Accessories: Sewing machine, white thread, Border Punch (Fiskars), Nestabilities (Circle and Square), Dimensionals, daubers.
Mini Vintage Book: I cut 4 piece of 3"x3" Pure Luxury White CS. Then I stamped the BG images, after that I stamped the main images in Rich Cocoa. After that I sponged the borders and the inside of each square. Finally I punched every corner and added some Gold Cording and made a bow at the end.
Card Stock: Pure Luxury White.
Stamps: On the desk (Cornish Heritage Farms), BG-12 Weave and BG -14 Marble (smARTworks).
Ink: Rich Cocoa (Memento), Ginger (Adirondack), Peeled Paint Distress Ink (Ranger), Real Red (SU).
PS: I will be absent for few days, DH and I are going to paint our Office/Craft Room, I am planning on buying some furniture for my crafts. I am looking forward to spending some fun time with my husband. I will be back next Tuesday.
Labels: Blog Challenge, CHF Stamps, smARTworks stamps.
I have created 2 cards for this Blog Hop, they are Monochromatic and I used my favorite set "A Year of Flowers" designed by Melanie Muenchinger.
Both cards have the same image and sentiment, hope you don't find them boring.
For this card I stamped the image onto PL Ivory CS using White craft Ink, then I added some White ep, heated and sponged around the image using Red Ink. After I got the BG color I wanted I used a piece of cloth and cleaned the image so the pretty white could pop up. Stitches were added, ribbon and pearls.
Card Stock: Pure Luxury Rocket Red, Pure Luxury Ivory.
Embellishments: Pure Luxury White Organdy Ribbon, Pearls (Kaiser Crafts), Clear glitter.
Ink: Real Red, White Craft.
Accessories: Sewing machine, White thread, White Embossing powder, Embossing gun, Corner punch, Mini glue dots.
For this card I stamped the image using Broken China Distress Ink, then I added the sentiment in Brown for a little contrast, cut and embossed the image. I sponged the borders a little bit. The BG was created with am embossing folder and a Cuttlebug.
Card Stock: Bashful Blue, Pure Luxury White.
Embellishments: White Satin Ribbon, Blue Satin Ribbon (Offray), Clear Rhinestones (Kaiser Crafts), Clear Glitter.
Hope you like my cards and enjoy the Blog Hop!!
Hello my friends and Happy Wednesday! I have a couple of cards for you today! showcasing some smARTworks stamps: Stella and Tulip Square sets.
The backgrounds of my cards were made with the Stella set and the sentiments are from Tulip Square set.
Ink: Ginger, Memento Desert Sand, Memento Rich cocoa.
Embellishments: Chocolate Chip Satin Ribbon (SU), staples, daubers.
Card Stock: White, Crushed Curry, Pure Luxury Gold.
Ink: Crushed Curry, Memento Rich Cocoa.
Accessories: Sewing machine, white thread, daubers, Circle and Square Nestabilities.
Hello my friends and Happy Tuesday! Today, I have another Monochromatic card for you. This time I made a Baby card. I got the sketch from one of Gina K. challenges over at SCS. For my card I used "Hip to be Square " set by Gina K. Designs. I stamp the face on Pure Luxury White CS using Pretty in Pink Ink. The sentiment was stamps in Real Red Ink. I used a pair of mini scallop scissors to shape the borders of my panels.
I am playing again the Monochromatic Challenge over at Lucy's card Blog. She has a great blog!!
Card Stock: White, Pretty In Pink.
Accessories: Mini scallop scissors, sewing machine, white thread, Mini glue dots, SU Dimensionals, Daubers.
Hello my friends and Happy Monday! I have a CAS Valentine card for you today with no Pink/Red on it. I used Green/Brown combo and I think it looks great. I used, again, the "Hearts and Love set" from Inkadinkado. I made this card for Gina K. Challenge over at SCS.
Stamps: Hearts and love (inkadinkado.
Ink: Certainly Celery, Basic Brown.
Hello my friends, I hope you are having a good Sunday. I am relaxing today after a good day at church, DD and DH are napping, so I have my quiet time :) I have a "Thinking of You" card for you today.
For my card I am using the sketch from Heather Scott at "Oz-some stamps blog" and the Monochromatic Challenge from Lucy's Card Blog.
Card Stock: Pure Luxury Red, White.
Embellishments: Pink Satin Ribbon (Offray), Clear Rhinestones (Kaiser Crafts).
Accessories: Sewing machine, Whit thread, Oval Nestabilities, Corner Punch, Mini glue dots, SU Dimensionals.
I love you - Forever.
Hello my friends!! I missed you all. I have been busy as always. Today I wanted to stamp since I woke up, but I had to finish school with DD, even though the lesson was not too long, it took us forever!!, then the window guy came to fix our window and more time to wait, wait and wait. The good thing after all the waiting is I got a roll of nice thick adhesive, LOL, I looked at the adhesive the "window guy" was using, I picked up and gave it another look, I think he noticed I was inspecting the tape so much, he told me, you can keep it, LOL!!
First card: Forever!! : I used a heart image from the $1 dollar bin from Michael's. I stamped the image on Black CS using Red Embossing Powder. I punched the borders in White and Red, then I added a piece of Pink CS and added some tiny pearls. I adhered some Pink Satin Ribbon and a pink flower.
Card Stock: White, Pretty in Pink, Real Red.
Ink: Red Embossing Pad, Red Embossing powder.
Accessories: Fiskar Border Punch, SU Dimensionals, Mini glue dots, Embossing gun.
Second Card: I love You: For this card I used 2S4U Sketch, color from Embellish Blog Challenge. The sentiment and image are from "Hearts and Love set" (Inkadinkado) I, again, used the Fiskar Border Punch and added a very thin piece of Red CS and some Pink Rhinestones. The sentiment was stamped in White CS using Stazon Black Ink, then Cut and embossed using Rectangles Nestabilities. I stamped the heart in Real red Ink and White CS, cut out and adhere on the lower corner. I adhered some Pink Satin Ribbon.
Card Stock: Black, White, Real Red.
Ink: Stazon Black, Real Red, Plum.
Embellishments: Pink Satin Ribbon (Offray), Pink Rhinestones (Kaiser crafts).
Accessories: Fiskars Border Punck, SU Corner Punch, Dimensionals, Mini glue dots, Daubers, Rectangle Nestabilities..
Hello my friends, I hope you all are having a great day! I am in the mood of Valentine cards and I hope you enjoy this card I just made.
Last Saturday I went to my local craft store and I bought few clear stamps like this one I used for this card "Sweet Cheri Collection" from Imaginisce. I stamped the image onto Pure Luxury CS (GinaK) in Stazon Black Ink, using Circle nestabilities I cut it out and embossed it. Then, I stamped the image twice, one in PL White CS and in PL Red CS. The one for the White CS was cut out and the one from the Red CS I cut only the word LOVE. I adhered it onto the White piece of CS.
And also for New Something Challenge over at Stamp Something Blog Challenge" Using something new; stamps, ribbon and rhinestones.
Card Stock: Pure Luxury White, Pure Luxury Red (Gina K), White (GP).
Embellishments: Pink Satin Ribbon (Offray), Black Rhinestones (Kaiser Crafts), Clear Stickles.
Accessories: Sewing machine, white thread, Border punch (Fiskars), SU Dimensionals, Circle Nestabilities.
Hello my friends, I finally stamped!! I am back into my daily routine, homeschooling, babysitting, house chores and stamping, woo hoo!!
I've checked some blogs last few days and I decided I wanted to play their challenges. It is hard to make a card for each of those awesome challenges, so I decided to combine 3 in 1.
First, Melanie is celebrating 2 years of blogging and 25 sets she has illustrated!! So I decided to join her celebration using one of my favorites of her sets: "A year of flowers" I love this set a lot!!!
Second, the sketch comes from Card Positioning System this week sponsored by Gina K. Designs.
And lastly, the wonderful color combo comes from Embellish Blog Challenge: Pink, Red & Black.
Card Stock: Pure Luxury White, Pure Luxury Red, Black.
Stamps: A year of flowers by Gina K. Designs.
Ink: Stazon Black, Prismacolor Pencils.
Accessories: Sewing machine, White thread, Square Nestabilities, Stamp-a-ma-jig, SU Dimensionals.


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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
One feature of my checkered career is the bewildering variety of equipment I've encountered along the way. Here's a short history of the technology that has made me the computing sophisticate I am today.
Find computer stores in the UK
High School & College
IBM 360/44: My first computing experience was with a 360 mainframe at San Diego State College. I was part of a group of high school kids enjoying a summer at San Diego State, courtesy of the National Science Foundation. We spent a few weeks programming in FORTRAN IV using punched cards. After this experience, there was no doubt what I would study in college.
Monroe Monrobot XI: I still had my senior year of high school to get through. Benjamin Cardozo High School in Bayside, NY had a computer for us to play on. Antiquated even when we got it, the Monrobot XI was built into a desk. It had drum memory of 2K 32-bit words, a 10 CPS typewriter for output and a 10 CPS paper tape for storage. It had no divide instruction, instead offering a reduction operation that would repeatedly subtract the divisor from the dividend. So division by 1 took a long time and division by zero never terminated. We used to write hundreds of lines of straight hexadecimal machine code, using the letters S through X for the extra digits.
Xerox Data Systems Sigma 6: At college I got to use a real computer, a Xerox mainframe. The Sigma supported both terminals (10 CPS Teletypes with rolls of coarse yellow paper) and punched cards. We used everything on that system: Basic, FORTRAN, assembly language, COBOL, APL, custom systems languages like XPL and XPLS and a simulation language called GPDS. I wrote games for Tektronix storage tube terminals and chat and email systems for members of our little users' group. RIT gave us Computer Science majors unlimited computer time, and I took full advantage.
HP & DEC minicomputers: At the same time that I was keeping the Sigma busy, I was getting my first taste of minicomputers, courtesy of an HP 2116B in Electrical Engineering and a Digital PDP 11/34 in Computer Science. These were both closer to the metal than the Sigma allowed, as I wrote device drivers and programmed DMA channels and reentered bootstrap programs from the toggle switches. I still have the front panel from a PDP 11/34 in my living room, a gift from a friend who used to work at Digital.
IBM 370/155 & 370/158: RIT was (and is) big on actual job experience. I spent a couple of quarters as an operator, babysitting the county government's mainframes. This mostly consisted of feeding card decks (and occasionally forgetting to remove the rubberband first), mounting tapes and disks, tearing off printouts and checking every fifteen minutes for yet another failure of the transaction processing system. Aside from the fun of placing stuff on the printer cover and waiting for it to run out of paper (the cover would rise like Godzilla from the sea and dump said stuff all over the floor) it was a mighty dull few months. Fortunately, it was also the last time I had anything to do with a mainframe.
Data General Eclipse: After graduation I went to work for Data General and had to learn all about Eclipse minicomputers. I had never used a DG system before working for them, a pattern that I would repeat throughout my career. I started with RDOS, a foreground/background operating system, and graduated to the AOS timesharing system when it first became available.
Atari 800: I bought my own first computer around the time I left DG. Based on the same 6502 microprocessor as the Apple II, the Atari 800 was the original computer that got no respect. I did a little assembly language programming and played a lot of games. I also bought a ludicrous amount of add-on hardware, a pattern that I would repeat many times over the years to come.
Tandem Nonstop II:My next professional platform was a Tandem Nonstop system, which I programmed in two different dialects of COBOL. The less said about this experience, the better.
Symbolics 3600: My next platform was the most unusual: a Lisp Machine. For those of you who missed all the hype, a Lisp Machine was designed from the ground up to run Lisp efficiently. Everything was in Lisp: the operating system, the window system and the applications. In fact, there was no real transition from one to the next. We all believed that we had seen the future and it was us. Three years later reality started to intrude in a big way.
Apple Macintosh SE: It was time to lose the Atari and get a real computer. Thanks to a friend who worked for an official Apple Developer, my girlfriend and I managed to get twin Mac SE's for half of retail. That still made them ridiculously expensive, but love is blind. Over the next few years I surrounded that already-obsolete system with stuff, including an external disk, a portrait monitor and an ink jet printer.
Sun 3 & SPARCstation: In my six and a half years at Sun I went through five systems: a Sun 3/160, a 3/260, a SPARCstation 1+, a SPARCstation 2 and a dual processor SPARCstation 10. Leaving that SS10 behind was my one big regret at leaving Sun.
Apple Macintosh IIvx & Centris 650: After six years of my Mac SE, it was time to upgrade once again. Apple had just announced the IIvx, which would turn out to be their shortest-lived product since the Apple III. I bought one and then watched as its price dropped by 30% almost immediately. When the upgrade to the 68040-based Centris became available, I bought it. Over the next few years I upgraded just about everything but the skins: a Daystar Digital 100 mHz PowerPC processor, 32MB of RAM, a Radius 24 bit color card, a gig and a half of disk, two CD-ROM drives (an internal 2X and an external 4X drive), a 270MB SyQuest removable, a PCMCIA reader (for my digital camera), an HP color DeskWriter, a LaserJet 4ML and a Fujitsu scanner.
Toshiba T4700CS: Before I joined Borland, I had a high degree of contempt for PCs and Microsoft Windows. Once I arrived I discovered it was far worse than I had imagined. My frustrations as I tried to get my Toshiba notebook to talk to our Novell network and my failure to get Windows 95 to talk to much of anything confirmed my belief that if I never saw another Microsoft product it would be okay with me. Sadly, that was not to be.
Silicon Graphics Indy: My primary work platform at SGI was a step up from that PC: a 200mHz Indy with accelerated 24 bit graphics, digital audio and video input and a real (i.e. Unix) operating system. Now this is what a workstation was supposed to be. And the best part was that it wasn't beige!
Apple Macintosh PowerBook 540c: The Borland experience taught me one thing: if you're going to travel, having a computer to take with you is a big win. (It also taught me that having a non-Wintel computer is an even bigger one. I guess I learned two things.) So I used some of my Borland severance to buy a PowerBook. It joined me on a few of my trips, keeping my expenses up to date, storing and letting me view images from my digital cameras and giving me games to play when I got bored. So for a while I was a two Mac household. Does that qualify me for techno-yuppiedom?
Silicon Graphics O2: No, that isn't a breadmaker next to the monitor; it was my demo system. The O2 was a graphics-accelerated workstation. With v ideo input and output and a 175mHz R10000 processor, it made a nice system for showing off OpenGL applications and development tools or manipulating images for my web pages. The O2 (Yakko by name) spent at least some of its time sans disk; it was awfully convenient to carry around a fully configured system on a drive and then pop it into whatever system was handy when I arrived. The O2 was a neat system; it's also awfully cute. I kept wanting someone to produce adhesive Mr. Potato Head parts to give it just a little more personality! (Other people think it already has enough personality; how many computers have haikus written about them?)
Apple Power Macintosh G3: Five years of major surgery had taken its toll on my old desktop Mac. So the time came to consider another upgrade. Would I sell my soul to Microsoft and Intel? It sure looked that way for a while. But then I had a chance to try out a G3 PowerMac. It was just what I wanted: something faster (233mHz G3 PowerPC, 24x CD) with a lot more capacity (4GB disk) and the ability to accept all the software and peripherals I'd accumulated over the years. (Plus a few new bits: a SyQuest SyJet 1.5GB removable drive, an Olympus ES-10 slide scanner and an Epson Stylus Photo 700 color printer.) Installing the new system was effortless; paying for it wasn't too painful either. So I've held the demons at bay at least a little longer. And isn't peace of mind worth something?
Dell OptiPlex GX1: Somewhat against my will, I found myself responsible for SGI's interoperability story, in particular the issues involved in making IRIX boxes play together with Windows NT. So after many months of arm twisting I got permission to order an NT box so I could actually see some of these interop products in action. (Or inaction as the case may be.) When they wouldn't get me a laptop (too logical, I guess), I had to settle for this little tower system. And, true to my record, I managed to destroy Windows NT within a few hours of the system's arrival. Shortly afterward I was concentrating on Linux and ignoring interop. And the Dell? It got used for PowerPoint, the odd Word document people insisted on sending me and reading newsgroups (never mind which ones). The rest of the time it ran PointCast displays of world news. And then it would run out of memory. I thought this NT stuff was supposed to have been debugged...
Mitsubishi Amity CN2: With all the PowerPoint presentations I suddenly found myself doing, I decided it was time to get another laptop. I focused on subnotebooks, wanting something light but with an acceptable keyboard. Comdex in Las Vegas gave me a chance to try out all the different models. I settled on Mitsubishi's incredibly small and light Amity. Not the fastest box by a wide margin, but fast enough and cheap enough for my purposes. And yet again I managed to destroy the Microsoft OS within an hour of opening the box. This time there was no recovery; the PCMCIA CD-ROM drive I bought wasn't supported by Mitsubishi's boot disk. (Lesson: never buy a PC that doesn't come with a CD-ROM.) I ended up shipping the whole thing to the manufacturer for a reinstall. And now I'm very careful about what I do to the system. It worked well enough for my requirements: presentations and email on the road. But I still hate most everything about Windows in all its incarnations. Windows 95 was bad, but running Windows Me on this little box was worse. It's now running Red Hat Linux, which it does badly, although not nearly as badly as Windows Millennium (Bug) Edition.
Compaq Presario 5714: Leaving SGI meant leaving my Indy behind. (I offered to buy it before I left, figuring that a fully depreciated four year old machine couldn't cost much. But Systems Remarketing never bothered to call back with a quote.) In my next job there were lots of Suns. But not for me; when you're the second Marketing person in a tiny company you get what the other Marketing person has. Which meant a PC and Windows, in this case the 98 vintage. The computer was a Compaq Presario, whose name is a small improvement over the condom-inspired era of Performa, Aptiva and Contura. It wasn't an awful machine, I suppose, even if needed more memory to run less than my old Indy. And at least I still had the comfort of a few old friends. Like the Korn shell and Perl and Emacs and Gimp, which worked surprisingly well and made me feel just a little less homesick for my Unix days. And I could finally run all the software the rest of the world has come to know and love. And best of all, I could hook up one of those insanely cheap USB scanners, something you Unix people can't do. Come to think of it, neither can those Windows NT lusers...
Compaq Armada M300 One advantage of working for a PC company like Compaq is that you get pretty good hardware, even if you work for the big system division. My laptop was a beautiful little three pounder with a second unit for all the peripherals. And aside from a slightly scratchy sound when I played DVDs and a trackpad that drove me to distraction, I liked it a lot. Microsoft had even released an acceptable operating system in Win2k, although I still prefer Unix/Linix or the Mac. When I quit Compaq after two and a half short but deeply frustrating months, leaving that computer behind was my biggest regret.
Micron TransPort ZX: After Compaq it was another startup and another laptop. But what a shock to go from the svelte and elegant Armada to the fat, dumb and not exactly happy life of a seven pound Micron. It may not be possible to love a Windows box. But I think tolerating this bulky and balky schleptop was about the best I can do.
Apple Macintosh G4 Cube: I had finally reached the point where my next personal system would be a Windows box. Much as I hated the idea, I knew it was time. Then I made the mistake of visiting the 2001 MacWorld and falling in love with the brand new Titanium Powerbooks. Practicality intervened; I really didn't need a laptop, even one as beautiful as this one. So I settled for Apple's second most beautiful computer, the incredible G4 cube. It's fast, small and, once I picked up some adapters to turn SCSI devices into USB or Firewire, does everything my old G3 could do, only faster. And the DVD drive and my new flat panel are perfect for watching Farscape episodes when I should be working. I even discovered that Adaptec makes a SCSI to USB adapter called the USBXchange that can handle my old Olympus slide scanner, something the Olympus support line assured me couldn't be done. Hah! And my old Mac? It has a new home at UC Berkeley's Lawrence Hall of Science, where it'll get used by little kids as part of a Mac lab.
Apple Titanium PowerBook: As it turns out, there was a TiBook in my future after all. All it took was a few months of begging and pleading. But one of the benefits of a job at Apple was great equipment. The notebook they gave me was fast, light, easy to use, incredibly capable and, best of all, free. But neither it nor the job lasted. So...
Apple Titanium PowerBook: Giving back my TiBook was a lot harder than losing the Micron from my previous job. But before I left Apple (or, to be more accurate, it left me), I got my order in on a new high end TiBook, one with a DVD burning SuperDrive. Before it arrived, Apple announced its new 12" and 17" aluminum PowerBooks. And they even offered to let me change my order and keep that generous employee discount. But I still think the 15" TiBook is just right. It's a fast and convenient tool for my photo and video editing. And it makes a heck of a fine DVD player for those long trips of which I'm so fond.
Dell Latitude D400: A new job means yet another new computer. At this particular firm, the standard platform for road warriors is this small, relatively lightweight Wintel box. It's something of a good news/bad news joke. The good: it's half the weight of that Micron monster of earlier days, a lot faster and not nearly as quirky. (Whadayamean there's no audio for the modem?) The bad: a separate DVD drive, a tinny mono speaker. Oh, and Windows. XP Pro, which is the best version of Windows Microsoft has ever done. Isn't that like being first in your class at Clown College?
Apple PowerBook G4: My Dell adventure lasted a little over six months. Then a combination of engineering people insisting on PowerBooks and an extremely kind IT Director let me trade my little Dell for a 15" PowerBook. Apple calls this model a PowerBook G4. Which is exactly what they call my home computer. But that PowerBook G4 is different than this PowerBook G4. This one is faster. And it has a keyboard that lights up when the room is dark. And it's aluminum, not titanium. And it's just a tiny bit heavier. But I'm not complaining. Although if Microsoft's Mac Business Unit, the guys responsible to the OSX version of Office, would talk to the Windows Office people a little more often, I'd be grateful. The two sets of applications are just different enough to be aggravating. Not enough to make me want to go back to Windows, you understand. No, never that...
Dell Latitude D410: Yet another job and yet another Dell. (Dude!) Not much difference between this one and the last one; same separate DVD drive and useless audio. And a memory maximum of 1 GB. Which seems a lot until you see the software my company does. Which meant that a couple of months after they gave me this one they replaced it with a...
Dell Latitude D610: Bigger. Heavier. With acceptable sound, especially if you've never owned a PowerBook. And 2 GB of memory, a usful thing when you have to run multiple copies of BEA WebLogic on your laptop. Which isn't anything a sane person would do, not that sanity has much to do with the sales process.
Apple Mac Mini: They may force me to use Windows for work, but they can't destroy my spirit! I knew I needed to replace my Macs; the G4 Cube was both underpowered and losing bits of itself (the hard drive gave up the ghost, which isn't Apple's fault), and the TiBook was becoming both slow (1 GB really isn't enough the way I use apps) and unreliable. So I thought about the right thing to do, decided I really didn't need another laptop (two Dells is enough; heck, it's more than enough) and went for the Mac Mini and a 20" flatscreen display. My Mini has dual cores and 2 GB of memory. So far that's sufficient.
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Comments to: Hank Shiffman, Mountain View, California

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


I have always been a firm supporter of Kiva and I introduced their case study to my classes. This is a disappointment. Microfinance, in my opinion, has to stay "micro" and relevant to these under served countries that need it the most. I perfectly understand that many families in the US are navigating in turbulent waters but this is certainly not a good reason to use microfinance – in the case of kiva free credit – to finance 5000-10,000+ $ loans. There are a good deal of peer to peer lending platforms like zopa and many other opportunities for Americans or British lenders. Very little, if any, for people in Samoa, Cambodia etc.
Additionally, some MFI institutions complained that Kiva does restrict their projects: they can only post small loans of less than 500$. This is completely fine but why then open US loans to these "jumbo" loans ? If Kiva wanted to do something in the US it should have focused in entrepreneurial micro projects for the needy and not these type of loans.
Gladly I am doing my with direct microfinance initiatives and trying something out with myc4 too.


text:
class AddTitleToQueries < ActiveRecord::Migration
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end


Discussion in 'Mac Basics and Help' started by mrmarts, May 21, 2012.
I just had my optical drive replaced on my 2 year old iMac as it was struggling to read discs. When it just dawned on me that I have a few region 1 DVDs as i'am in Australia my drive is set to region 4 by playing region 1 discs on VLC can it affect the laser of the drive?
nope, VLC shouldn't damage your hardware.


text:
Where To Get Free Wahlburgers Cheeseburgers Next Week
By Tony Merevick Published On 07/10/2015
@tonymerevick
By Tony Merevick @tonymerevick Published On 07/10/2015
Courtesy of A&E
Cheeseburgers are great. But free cheeseburgers are even better, and that's exactly what you can get -- if you're in the right place at the right time next Wednesday, July 15th, in Manhattan. We've got you covered with all the right places and all the right times to catch the Wahlburgers truck. You're welcome.
From 11am to 6pm, Wahlburgers will be handing out its signature "Our Burger," which comes topped with Paul Wahlberg's wahl sauce, dill pickles, cheese, lettuce, tomato, and onion. However, we've been told not expect any of the Wahlberg brothers or the Funky Bunch to be slinging greasy goods this time around. They're probably busy working on their massive Coney Island burger joint. Although, the Funky Bunch probably aren't up to anything.
Here's when and where you'll find the Wahlburgermobile, or "Wahlburgers on Wheels":
11am - 12:30pm: West 49th St at Sixth Ave
1pm - 2pm: 1697 Broadway (between West 53rd and 54th streets)
2:30pm - 3:30pm: 120 West 45th St (Between Sixth & Seventh avenues)
4pm - 6pm: Grand St (Between Varick St and Sixth Ave)
Big Boi From OutKast Introduces Cliff to Atlanta's Food Scene
Wahlburgers is Opening a Massive Burger Paradise in NYC This Summer
The free cheeseburgers come as A&E promotes the Season 4 premiere of the chain's eponymous reality show, "Wahlburgers," which airs Wednesday night at 9:30 ET. The network is also encouraging New Yorkers to submit photos with the truck using #WahlburgersSweepstakes and will give one lucky Instagramer a Wahlburgers viewing party catering package.
Because who doesn't want a selfie with a burger truck?
Follow us on Facebook for a steady stream of daily NYC stories, and be the first to get all the food/drink/fun/news New York has to offer.
Tony Merevick is Cities News Editor at Thrillist and feels like everything tastes better when it's free. Send news tips to news@thrillist.com and follow him on Twitter @tonymerevick.


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text:
Catabbio, Semproniano, Provincia di Grosseto, Toscana, Italy
Catabbio
Populated place - a city, town, village, or other agglomeration of buildings where people live and work
Mindat.org Region:
Semproniano, Grosseto Province, Tuscany, Italy
Semproniano, Provincia di Grosseto, Toscana, Italy
42° 42' 5" N
11° 34' 2" E
Lat/Long (dec):
42.70144,11.56729
Köppen climate type:
Cfa : Humid subtropical climate
Search for other features
Mindat.org localities near to this feature
Catabbio, Semproniano, Grosseto Province, Tuscany, Italy 42° 42' 2" N 11° 34' 9" E 0.2km (0.1 miles)
Catabbio-Fontanelle cinnabar deposit (Catabbio cinnabar deposit), Catabbio, Semproniano, Grosseto Province, Tuscany, Italy 42° 42' 4" N 11° 34' 15" E 0.3km (0.2 miles)
Cortevecchia Mine, Semproniano, Grosseto Province, Tuscany, Italy 42° 44' 18" N 11° 34' 53" E 4.3km (2.7 miles)
Saturnia, Manciano, Grosseto Province, Tuscany, Italy 42° 40' 18" N 11° 31' 26" E 4.8km (3.0 miles)
Montecchio Cave, Semproniano, Grosseto Province, Tuscany, Italy 42° 42' 16" N 11° 30' 25" E 4.9km (3.1 miles)
Morone Mine (Selvena Mine), Castell'Azzara, Grosseto Province, Tuscany, Italy 42° 45' 19" N 11° 37' 44" E 7.8km (4.9 miles)
Sorano tuff quarries, Sorano, Grosseto Province, Tuscany, Italy 42° 40' 41" N 11° 41' 59" E 11.1km (6.9 miles)
Siele Mine, Piancastagnaio, Siena Province, Tuscany, Italy 42° 47' 20" N 11° 39' 44" E 12.5km (7.7 miles)
Le Solforate Mine (Solforate Rosselli Mine), Piancastagnaio, Siena Province, Tuscany, Italy 42° 47' 51" N 11° 38' 50" E 12.5km (7.8 miles)
Monte Labbro II Mine, Santa Fiora, Grosseto Province, Tuscany, Italy 42° 49' 6" N 11° 32' 4" E 13.3km (8.3 miles)
Monte Labbro I Mine, Roccalbegna, Grosseto Province, Tuscany, Italy 42° 49' 5" N 11° 31' 33" E 13.4km (8.3 miles)
Banditella Mine, Arcidosso, Grosseto Province, Tuscany, Italy 42° 49' 14" N 11° 31' 49" E 13.6km (8.4 miles)
Abetina Mine, Piancastagnaio, Siena Province, Tuscany, Italy 42° 48' 34" N 11° 38' 48" E 13.7km (8.5 miles)
Poggio Bottinello, Pitigliano, Grosseto Province, Tuscany, Italy 42° 35' 54" N 11° 40' 45" E 14.6km (9.1 miles)
Case Collina (Toscopomici quarry), Pitigliano, Grosseto Province, Tuscany, Italy 42° 38' 32" N 11° 43' 49" E 14.8km (9.2 miles)
Bagnore Mine (Le Bagnore Mine), Santa Fiora, Grosseto Province, Tuscany, Italy 42° 50' 55" N 11° 33' 41" E 16.4km (10.2 miles)
Pereta Mine, Pereta, Scansano, Grosseto Province, Tuscany, Italy 42° 38' 35" N 11° 21' 28" E 18.3km (11.4 miles)
Cerreto Piano, Scansano, Grosseto Province, Tuscany, Italy 42° 37' 17" N 11° 21' 45" E 18.9km (11.8 miles)
Macchia Casella Mine, La Campigliola, Manciano, Grosseto Province, Tuscany, Italy 42° 31' 42" N 11° 30' 40" E 19.8km (12.3 miles)
Ponte San Pietro mineralisation, Ischia di Castro, Làtera volcano, Viterbo Province, Lazio, Italy 42° 31' 23" N 11° 36' 23" E 20.1km (12.5 miles)
Prato delle Macinaie (Piano delle Macinaie), Castel del Piano, Grosseto Province, Tuscany, Italy 42° 53' 26" N 11° 36' 15" E 21.2km (13.2 miles)
Abbadia San Salvatore Mine, Abbadia San Salvatore, Siena Province, Tuscany, Italy 42° 52' 57" N 11° 39' 48" E 21.6km (13.4 miles)
Montenero Quarry, Onano, Làtera volcano, Viterbo Province, Lazio, Italy 42° 38' 34" N 11° 49' 27" E 22.0km (13.7 miles)
Làtera solfatara, Làtera volcano, Viterbo Province, Lazio, Italy 42° 37' 5" N 11° 49' 8" E 22.6km (14.0 miles)
Poggio Pinzo, Gradoli, Làtera volcano, Viterbo Province, Lazio, Italy 42° 38' 16" N 11° 49' 58" E 22.8km (14.2 miles)
Mt Saliette, Valentano, Làtera volcano, Viterbo Province, Lazio, Italy 42° 33' 47" N 11° 47' 48" E 24.3km (15.1 miles)
Tafone Mine, Manciano, Grosseto Province, Tuscany, Italy 42° 28' 33" N 11° 33' 16" E 25.1km (15.6 miles)
Casale Rosati, Valentano, Làtera volcano, Viterbo Province, Lazio, Italy 42° 33' 50" N 11° 48' 39" E 25.1km (15.6 miles)
Trachyte quarry, Gradoli, Viterbo Province, Lazio, Italy 42° 38' 42" N 11° 52' 44" E 26.2km (16.3 miles)
Pietrineri Mine (Bagni San Filippo Mine), Castiglione d'Orcia, Siena Province, Tuscany, Italy 42° 55' 41" N 11° 41' 15" E 27.0km (16.8 miles)
Poggio Bagno Santo
Saturnia, Manciano, Grosseto Province, Tuscany, Italy
View of the Saturnia area
View of Monte Amiata mercury mining area, ca. 1950.
Morone Mine, Castell'Azzara, Grosseto Province, Tuscany, Italy
Minerals recorded nearby (within 20 km)
ⓘ Alunite
ⓘ Böhmite
ⓘ Calcite
ⓘ 'Chlorite Group'
ⓘ Cinnabar
ⓘ Dawsonite
ⓘ Dolomite
ⓘ 'Feldspar Group'
ⓘ Fluorite
ⓘ Goethite
ⓘ Gypsum
ⓘ Hematite
ⓘ Jarosite
ⓘ Kaolinite
ⓘ 'Manganese Oxides'
ⓘ Marcasite
ⓘ Metacinnabar
ⓘ Muscovite
ⓘ var: Illite
ⓘ Orpiment
ⓘ Pyrite
ⓘ Quartz
ⓘ Realgar
ⓘ Stibnite
ⓘ Sulphur
Rock types recorded nearby (within 20 km)
ⓘ Limestone
ⓘ Travertine
Entries shown in red are rocks recorded for this region.
Nearby features from geonames.org
Search moreFeature
Verziliani Populated place 42° 42' 14" N 11° 33' 51" E 0.4km (0.2 miles)
Scalabrelli Populated place 42° 42' 23" N 11° 34' 49" E 1.2km (0.8 miles)
Capanne Populated place 42° 41' 4" N 11° 32' 34" E 2.7km (1.7 miles)
Poggio Murella Populated place 42° 40' 28" N 11° 32' 56" E 3.3km (2.1 miles)
Tenuta Cortevecchia Hotel 42° 43' 39" N 11° 32' 49" E 3.3km (2.1 miles)
Semproniano Seat of a third-order administrative division 42° 43' 45" N 11° 32' 28" E 3.7km (2.3 miles)
Saturnia Tuscany Hotel Hotel 42° 40' 20" N 11° 32' 22" E 3.9km (2.4 miles)
San Martino sul Fiora Populated place 42° 40' 21" N 11° 35' 46" E 4.0km (2.5 miles)
Fosso Rigo Stream 42° 43' 0" N 11° 37' 0" E 4.4km (2.7 miles)
Samprugnano Populated place 42° 43' 59" N 11° 31' 59" E 4.5km (2.8 miles)
Regions in mindat.org that contain this locality
Eurasian Plate Tectonic Plate
Italy Country
Tuscany, Italy Region
Grosseto Province, Tuscany, Italy Province
Semproniano, Grosseto Province, Tuscany, Italy Commune
Contains data courtesy of geonames.org - Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
Regions in GADM Database
GADM number
Italy, Toscana, Grosseto, Semproniano 112.16.91.6834.0.0
Quick NavTopMineral ListRock TypesFeaturesMindat RegionsGADM


Farmers' are using agri-environment measures to help fight the decline in meadow bird populations - due to intensive land and water use. Land management practices are being adapted to habitat conditions for meadow birds.
Rural Flanders has a range of environmental issues including the decline of meadow birds. To reverse this trend, the government identified management areas in which farmers are encouraged to take-up specific agri-environment measures (AEM). The nature reserve 'Vallei van de Zwarte Beek' (Valley of the Black Brook) is one of the most valuable natural areas in Flanders and an important habitat for meadow birds, such as black-tailed godwits, curlews, lapwings, etc. It is also an area with intensive agricultural activity and hence one that could benefit from a specific AEM.
The main aim of this agri-environment scheme is to provide better habitats for meadow birds. The biggest challenge identified in the area is the survival of the chicks. To achieve better results, a cluster of measures is necessary to reduce predation and other threats.
Landscape adjustment includes converting fields (maize) to grasslands that are mowed after 15 June to increase breeding success. Grassland borders along watercourses are sown with a grass-herb mixture and also mowed after 15 June. Banning fertilizer on borders reduces nitrates in watercourses. The herbs attract insects that meadow bird chicks feed on. New ponds create gathering and foraging areas. Poplar and poplar bush are replaced by lower-growing native plants to create more open landscapes.
The measures are applied in a cluster of 100 hectares, and 32 new ponds are being established. As a result, the curlew breeding has improved. The snipes are now common to the newly created ponds. As their habitat conditions have improved, this can lead to a higher breeding success. The farmers not only manage the area, but they also count the number of birds and monitor nest sites.
It is possible for farmers to work together, as a group, towards a common goal. The unknown is unloved, so it is essential that each farmer knows and understands what is expected. The group needs to be supported to take action and feel confident they will achieve the common goal.


A graduate in broadcasting from the WA Academy of Performing Arts, Babs McHugh has been with the ABC for over 10 years.
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Her heart as well as her head.


Brittney is a Senior Technologist at Big Spaceship, developing front-end code for brands like BMW and Chobani. She earned a BA in Digital Media from the University of Central Florida while coding .Net for the Department of Defense's websites.
Brittney moved to NYC after graduating, and freelanced a couple years before joining Big Spaceship. She also DJs and occasionally models for non-computer-related fun.


The only two species of alligators in the world live in Southeast of United states and in China.
The most of American alligators live in Florida and Louisiana & the Chinese ones in valley of Yangtze River, these ones being an endangered species.
The habitats of the American alligator are freshwaters and brackish environment.
Alligators are considered very important for keeping the ecological diversity in wetlands.
Due to their large presence, Florida is one of the best places where alligators can be seen in their natural environment.
Travel in Hillsborough River State Park, Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, Ocala National Forest or Myakka River State Park & you can enjoy of untouched Florida landscapes, kayaking, hiking and bird watching opportunities and watch alligators in the wild.


text:
Castro Says He is Gaining Weight During Recovery
Cuban leader Fidel Castro has told an Argentine newspaper he is recovering from his surgery in July and regaining the weight he lost.
In an article published Thursday, in the daily Pagina, Mr. Castro told Argentine journalist and congressman Miguel Bonasso that he lost nearly 19 kilograms after intestinal surgery, but has put back on about half of that. He said he has to take his recovery one step at a time.
Mr. Castro has remained in seclusion so far as the Non-Aligned Movement meets this week in Havana. But the media coverage has raised hopes that he may still make a formal appearance before the meeting ends on Saturday.
Wednesday, Cuban state television broadcast new photographs of a thin Mr. Castro, wearing a dark robe and seated at a table as he met with Bonasso.
Cuban National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon says Mr. Castro has been doing well and has been giving orders over the phone.
The Cuban leader's brother, Raul, told the Communist Party newspaper, Granma, that people should not think Fidel Castro is lying back in bed. Raul Castro says his brother is keeping up on everything that is happening.
Raul Castro is serving as acting president while his brother recovers.
Some information for this report was provided by AP and Reuters.


text:
Crop-circle researchers can loosely be divided into two main camps: those who believe that the circles are produced by extra-terrestrial forces, and those who believe they are produced by paranormal forces. The latter also include those who believe the circles are the result of 'energy points' on the earth's surface. What both camps share, though, is a belief in the spiritual importance of the manifestations. This is reinforced by the fact that all the major crop-circles have been made in Wiltshire, the metaphysical home of English paganism and New Age mythology. Covered in barrows, standing stones, tumili and other earthworks (such as Silbury Hill), and numerous pathways, the area is claimed to be connected by an ancient network of sight lines. Moreover, it is home to a number of famous chalk symbols, such as the Alton Barnes White Horse, etched into the county's hillsides. In these terms Wiltshire is a rich palimpsest of ancient myth and historical record, a place literally pitted with arcane signs and significant remains. Crop-circles and ancient standing stones and tumuli form a 'metaphysical continuum'. This melange of paganism and the occult is largely a product of the 1970s, when Alfred Watkins' discovery of ancient ley lines (Anglo-Saxon for cleared strips of land) in The Old Straight Track (1925), (2) was rediscovered and became mixed in with the counter-cultural revival of Celtic fairy lore (fairy paths) and an interest in the new earth sciences, to create a cult of the landscape as criss-crossed with 'energy centres' ( places of magnetic force). Wiltshire seemed to have more than most making it the favoured place of occult lore, and one of the favoured areas for UFO 'sightings'. As one theory of UFO the phenomenon puts it: spacecraft were attracted to places such as Wiltshire because of the predominance of its magnetic pathways, which they used for navigation!
It is no surprise that Dickinson and his colleagues chose to work here, for the location allows the crop circles to enter a pre-existing mythological value system of 'earth mysteries'. Thus when the enormously complicated 'fractal' or 'Julia Set' design appeared in a field adjacent to Stonehenge, the literature was quick to assume that some extra-terrestrial intelligence was trying to establish a significant connection between the phenomenon and the standing stones, given the occult importance of Stonehenge. This is echoed in the way the literature analyses the crop-circle designs, claiming that ancient site lines and standing stones and crop-circles not only share 'unexplained' energy levels, but a sacred geometry. (3) Morever in some instances where obviously icons of modern science are concerned such as the 'Julia Set', this 'sacred geometry' is stretched to include the non-linear theories of nature of the New physics, as if the earth was producing its own computer print out!
What is remarkably absent in this literature is any awareness that the crop-circle makers are mirroring back to the 'true believers' their own mythologies, knowledges and histories. Dickinson is as well versed in the geography, historical lore and occult of the Cerealogists and Ufologists as the researchers themselves. This makes his interventions extremely context-sensitive, insofar as the crop-circles are made with the desires, fantasies and occult knowledges of the 'true-believers' in mind. They are not ironic. Thus if the complexity of the recent designs is partly a response to Dickinson's own technical and aesthetic ambitions, it is also a way of upping the ante in response to the Cerealogists' theories. This play-off between producer and consumer, mythologizer and believer, is at one level very similar to the practices and rhetorics of art and its theory. In a strange mutation of classic avant-garde practice, Dickinson seeks to outmanoeuvre, or undermine, the claims and expectations of those theories that would seek to explain or predict the crop-circle designs. Concomitantly, there is also a sense in which the anti-materialism of the Cerealogists' theories ventriloquises the idealism and special pleading of much art criticism: a set of practices which are notoriously malleable ideologically in the face of economic pressure and personal flattery. But if this is something to be borne in mind when reading the crop-circle literature this is not what is primarily interesting about the play-off between, or co-presence, of mythologizer and Cerealogist. For Dickinson's crop-circles enact one of the most widespread psychological conditions in contemporary late capitalist culture, iatrogenesis, or co-dependence.
West Stowell, Wiltshire, Wheat, Approx 170ft across, 22 July 1994
In the therapy-situation between doctor and patient it is common to witness a process of narrative suggestiveness on the part of the doctor come to shape and define the patient's illness in concordance with the social expectations of the illness itself. Thus the symptoms of the hysteric or neurotic can easily be produced out of the therapy situation - as in fact Freud recognised balefully towards the end of his life. There is strong evidence of this occuring in the current widespread outbreak of hysterical epidemics and imaginary illnesses (chronic fatigue syndrome, multiple personality disorder, recovered memory of sexual abuse). Multiple personality disorder is particularly significant in this respect. Between 1922 and 1972 there were less than 50 cases documented in the medical literature. (4) Today, in the US alone, there are tens of thousands, due largely to the popularization of a feminist therapy culture in conjunction with a professionally aggressive psychoanalysis. What this new therapy culture has created, it can be argued, is a form of widespread permission-giving allowing women, in particular, to narrativize their own unhappiness and disappointments in unprecedented ways. The issue is not that this unhappiness and disappointment is imaginary - far from it - but that its symptoms are either medicalized or projected onto an external agency, placing more and more women - and men - in positions of victims and accusers. Consequently, as therapy culture widens, iatrogenesis becomes more and more symbiotic with others agendas (such as radical feminism, conspiracy theory and religious beliefs), as patients become more susceptible in therapy to the narrative suggestions of the analyst. In effect the patient learns to tell his or her story from the narratives publically disseminated by the therapists, which is then extended and reinforced in the therapy session itself. This, no more nor less, is the mediatization of illnesses, producing an unprededented closed loop of believers learning to be believers (from real sufferers) which in turn produces more believers. This might also be extended to the huge increase in number of alien abductees in the US, who shape their neuroses and fantasies in the form of narratives learnt from fictional abductions and the abduction stories of others.
The overall result of this is an extraordinary diffusion and dissemination and mongrelization of therapy stories, as patients live out the confusions, paranoias, threats of the moment. In this the exponential rise of these symptoms can be seen less as a dysfunctional epidemic or evidence of a widespread irrationality, but, as in the post-Freudian definition of hysteria, as an oblique form of communication, and therefore, as Elaine Showalter has argued, as a "cultural symptom of anxiety and stress". (5) Hysterical syndromes,are not marginal and prone to appear in the weak and feeble, but a universal part of everyday experience, whose increase gives a indication of levels of internalized fear and crisis. Accordingly, hysteria is a mimetic disorder, in which the individual ventriloquises culturally acceptable expressions of distress. This is why patients increasingly present their symptoms in the way therapists define them, because this allows the patient to give a legitimate voice to their feelings of anxiety. This process of iatrogenesis, though, is rarely seen as a crucible of story-making by the new therapy culture, because the issue of hysteria as a cultural phenomenon is invariably subsumed under the therapeutic dictates of 'self-help' and personal redemption. This leaves these new symptoms of hysteria severed from any examination of the wider social forces that shape and sustain their rise and diversification.
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Operational support for existing on-premises and cloud-hosted deployments including backup/recovery, patching, monitoring, and troubleshooting at the OS, DB and app levels.
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Work with AWS or Azure.
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text:
\section{Introduction}
Forty-five years after its discovery, the \textbf{C}osmic \textbf{M}icrowave \textbf{B}ackground (CMB) radiation is today a very powerful tool of cosmological investigation.

The CMB originates from the decoupling of matter and radiation, occurred when the temperature of the expanding universe fell below 3000\,K. At this temperature the plasma could combine into neutral hydrogen, thus reducing the Thomson scattering cross section and letting the radiation propagate freely.
Because of cosmic expansion the CMB can be observed today as a blackbody radiation at the temperature T=2.725 $\pm$ 0.002 K \cite{Mather} peaked in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum.

The CMB temperature is anisotropic at the level of $\Delta T/T\approx10^{-5}$ on scales from 180 degrees to about $5^{\prime}$. The angular temperature anisotropies depend on the initial conditions of the Universe and on the physical processes that occurred from the Big Bang to the matter-radiation decoupling and later via Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect. Accurate measurements of these anisotropies, therefore, provide a wealth of information on the universe history and composition (baryons, dark matter, dark energy).
CMB temperature anisotropies have been measured by many ground and balloon experiments as well as by the NASA satellites COBE\footnote{\url{http://aether.lbl.gov/www/projects/cobe/}} and WMAP\footnote{\url{http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/}} (see  \cite{Anisotropies} for an extensive review until WMAP). The third generation ESA satellite Planck\footnote{\url{http://planck.esa.int}}, launched in May 2009, will provide in few years foreground-limited CMB temperature anisotropy measurements and open the path to accurate measurements of CMB polarisation anisotropies, the future of CMB experiments.

Polarisation anisotropies, generated by Thomson scattering, can be represented on the celestial sphere by two modes, named E-mode and B-mode, according to their symmetry properties. The detection of B-modes would provide an indirect signature of cosmological gravitational waves, that are predicted by the Hot Big Bang model \cite{Pol_Primer}.

Many experiments are currently planned to accurately measure the CMB polarisation. First detection of E-modes and its correlation with the temperature anisotropy was published in 2003 by the DASI collaboration \cite{DASI_and_others}, while the most up-to-date measurements come from WMAP \cite{WMAP_pol}.
Because only 10\% of the CMB is polarised, polarisation anisotropies are smaller by a factor 10 compared to temperature anisotropies.
E-modes, in particular, are at the $\mu$K level, while for B-modes the signal is expected to be much weaker and not even well theoretically constrained, although it is not exptected to be larger than some fraction of $\mu$K \cite{Pol_Primer}.

Detection of such small signals call for ultra-high sensitivity instruments constituted of large detector arrays of hundreds and even thousands of channels. A key element is represented by the availability of high performance antennas which represent the interface between the sky (or telescope) and the receiver. Precision polarisation measurements require optical components with highly symmetrical optical response and losses not greater than $\sim$1\%. Corrugated feed-horns match these requirements and are commonly used in most CMB experiments [cfr. WMAP and Planck]. Typical manufacturing techniques include direct machining, up $\sim$40 GHz, and electroforming, at higher frequencies. These methods can be limited by time and cost when applied to the production of large detector arrays of hundreds of feed-horns, as requested by future CMB polarisation experiments, so cheaper and quicker techniques are required.

In this work we investigate the validity of a technique, named ``platelet'' \cite{Kangas}, \cite{Haas}, \cite{Wollack}, for the mass production of corrugated feed-horn arrays. In particular we focus on three key factors: (i) mechanical feasibility with reduced costs and time, (ii) reliability in standard and cryogenic conditions and (iii) repeatability of the electromagnetic horn performance. Recently the QUIET\footnote{\url{http://quiet.uchicago.edu}} experiment started CMB polarisation measurememnts using, for the first time, feed-horn array realized with the platelet technique \cite{QUIET2010}.

The platelet technique consists in the overlap of properly machined metal sheets so that the feed-horn is then realized in layers. This method is relatively cheap, with a cost saving of about 90\% with respect to the electroforming and allows quick manufacturing of feed-horn arrays by drilling several holes in each plate.
A complete corrugation, with a tooth and a groove, can be obtained in each plate.
A complex focal surface can be obtained with a series of modules properly tilted to reproduce the required geometry.
Particular care is required in the plate assembly alignment system and for mass/volume control in order to minimize the weight.

The advantages of this technique go beyond its application to CMB measurements and can be exploited in a wide range of mm-wave and sub-mm astronomical instruments. In particular, platelet techniques may prove appropriate for the new generation of large interferometric arrays, such as ALMA, which require high performance antennas (including polarisation properties) over a large number of channels.

\section{The Prototype}
To validate the ``platelet'' technique we have realized a prototype of 2x2 array of corrugated feed-horn in W band (75-110 GHz), named WCAM01.

\subsection{Electromagnetic design}
The antenna electromagnetic design started form an already existing one \cite{Villa97}. The design was scaled to W band and the corrugation step was fixed to 1 mm in order to use standard aluminum plates. The circular waveguide radius at the throat region was adapted by means of three steps from 1.87 mm to 1.49 mm in order to match the circular-rectangular transition. In addition a 4 mm long straight section has been added to guarantee the propagation of the TE11 mode at the throat. Because the main objective of this development was to test the manufacturing technique, we did not perform any further optimizations of the electromagnetic design.

The horn aperture is $D = 11.26$~mm, giving a FWHM ($\sim\lambda/D\,$) of $\sim 18$~degrees at 100~GHz. Its length is 41~mm with a flare angle of 12.6~degrees. Each corrugation tooth and groove is 0.3~mm and 0.7~mm wide, respectively. The corrugation depth is $\sim\lambda/4$ at the aperture and linearly increases to $\sim\lambda/2$ in the last seven corrugations. A section representing the horn profile is shown in Figure \ref{fig:sezione}.

\begin{figure}[!h]
\centering
	\includegraphics[width=0.8\textwidth]{immagini/sezione.eps}
	 \caption{Section of a corrugated feed-horn of the WCAM01 prototype.}
	\label{fig:sezione}
\end{figure}

The beam pattern simulations were obtained with the SRSR-D$^\copyright$ France Telecom software. The software is designed to simulate the electromagnetic performance of structures with cylindrical symmetry and consisting of perfect electrical conductor parts and homogeneous dielectric domains, therefore neglecting the metal resistive losses (i.e. the insertion loss). These restrictions result in some limitations but allow very fast and reliable simulations.
The radiation patterns have been calculated at 90\,GHz, 92.5\,GHz, from 95\,GHz to 105\,GHz with a step of 0.25\,GHz, then at 107.5\,GHz and 110\,GHz. Return loss was simulated with CST Microwave Studio$^\copyright$ software.

\subsection{Mechanical design}

The mechanical design was conceived with the driving idea to obtain scalable modules suitable to realise large feed-horn  arrays. The prototype was manufactured (Figure \ref{fig:realizzazione}) with a CNC machine tool at the Physics Department workshop of the University of Milan.

The array has a square section of 70$\times$70\,mm, it is 44\,mm high and composed by:

\begin{itemize}
\item {one 7-mm thick base plate,}
\item {thirty-three 1-mm thick plates,}
\item {one 4-mm thick head plate.}
\end{itemize}
The plates are aligned by means of 8 rectified pins, alternated in pairs, and assembled together with 9 rods. In this prototype the rod number and displacements have not been optimized for high packing efficiency (horn aperture area/total area $=0.08$) and lightweight. This will be the objective of future studies aiming at designing more compact and light modules.
The base plate is 7 mm thick in order to host the three following elements: (i) the three steps required to reach the optimal exit diameter of 2.98 mm, (ii) the anchorage holes (on the external side) for screws and pins for the standard UG387 flanges, and (iii) the holes for the first alignment pins, that must be deep enough to ensure that they are perpendicular to the plate.
The 4 mm thickness of the head plate is required to hide the rod nuts.

The feed-horn positioning and the interfaces were not designed for a particular type of detector but just compatible with standard WR-10 waveguide flanges. In principle the array could feed both bolometric detectors (with an appropriate thermal brake) and MMIC amplifier based detectors.

\subsection{Materials}
The chosen materials have been two aluminum alloys: Al6082 Al-Mg-Si-Mn (Anticorodal) for the plates, and Al70750 Al-Zn-Mg-Cu (Ergal) for the rods. The pins and the nuts are made of stainless steel.

The main characteristics of these aluminum alloys are their low specific weight (2.69 g/cm$^{3}$ for the Al 6082, 2.81 g/cm$^{3}$ for the Al 7075), their excellent workability and corrosion resistance, their ability to be anodized and their good strength. The main difference between Al6082 and Al7075 is the tensile strength that is respectively 310 N/mm$^{2}$ and 560 N/mm$^{2}$. Moreover their thermal expansion coefficients are quite similar: 23.4 for the Al6082 and 23.5 for the Al7075, thus allowing to apply a great rod traction to properly bind the plates, and to stabilize the prototype with respect to thermal contractions.

\subsection{Manufacturing}
Plates 1 through 33 were cut from 1~mm thick aluminum sheets and worked with the CNC machine tool ``Gualdoni GV-94''. The base-plate and head-plate were milled from a 10 mm thick aluminum slab and worked with the same machine. The rods were obtained by lathing 8~mm diameter Ergal bars, threaded at their ends.

The corrugations were obtained by milling circular hollows concentric to the holes (Figure \ref{fig:realizzazione}), with the difference in diameter corresponding to the corrugation depth, and the cave depth (0.7~mm) corresponding to the the corrugation groove thickness.
This process requested particular care to ensure the orthogonality between the plates and the mechanical tool. This condition was guaranteed by a custom-designed plate support. The maximum error obtained on the teeth corrugations thickness was of $\pm$30~$\mu$m.

Finally, the plates were manually assembled and aligned with the steel pins, and tightened with the Ergal bolts. The assembly by means of rods is very quick, simple and does not require any facilities and/or machinery. Moreover the array can be disassembled and modified in order to possibly change its properties or replace inaccurate and/or damaged parts. Compared to bonding, our technique has the drawback that a smaller number of horns can be packed in a single module. On the other hand its simplicity, the flexibility that comes from the possibility to disassemble the module and the proven performance in cryogenic conditions (see tests discussed in Section \ref{sec_testing}) led us to choose this approach for our prototype.

Total weight is 533 grams, the rods and pins representing the 2.6\% and 1.8\%, respectively.

\begin{figure}[h!]
 \centering
	\includegraphics[angle=0,width=0.45\textwidth,]{immagini/piastra_corr.ps}
	\includegraphics[angle=0,width=0.45\textwidth]{immagini/corrugazione.ps}
	\includegraphics[angle=0,width=0.45\textwidth]{immagini/assemblaggio.ps}
	\includegraphics[angle=0,width=0.45\textwidth]{immagini/Finito_mod.ps}
	 \caption{Top Left: top view of a single plate screwed inside the CNC. There are nine screws: four (black) on the sides and five (gray) located in previously drilled rod-holes. After fixing the plate the four antenna holes were milled. Top Right: corrugation details. Bottom Left: prototype assembling scheme. Bottom Right: The completed prototype.}
	\label{fig:realizzazione}
\end{figure}

\section{Testing}
\label{sec_testing}
Electromagnetic tests were performed to validate the prototype and the manufacturing technique by comparing measurements with electromagnetic simulations. In particular we measured the angular response (beam patterns), insertion loss (IL) and return loss (RL),  which are related to the scattering parameters as follows:
\begin{equation}
	IL=10\cdot \log_{10}\frac{|S_{21}|^{2}}{1-|S_{11}|^{2}}; \hspace{1.5cm}
	RL=-10\cdot \log_{10}|S_{11}|^{2}.
\end{equation}

\subsection{Beam Patterns}
Beam patterns were measured at 100~GHz in the anechoic chamber of the ``Istituto di Fisica del Plasma'' (IFP-CNR) in Milan with an ABmillimetre 8-350-4 VNA. They were obtained by connecting one horn at a time to one VNA port using a tapered rectangular-to-circular transition. The signal, launched by the horn under test, was collected by a standard gain horn connected to the second VNA port.
The E and H orthogonal planes beam patterns were measured for all four horns, while the 45 degrees plane and the relative cross-polarisation were measured for one horn.

The measured E-plane and H-plane patterns for all feed horns, compared with the simulations (black line) described in \cite{sim_Villa}, are shown in Figures \ref{fig:piani_E} and \ref{fig:piani_H}, respectively.

\begin{figure}[h!]
\centering
	\includegraphics[angle=0,width=0.85\textwidth]{immagini/PatternE.eps}
	 \caption{Comparison of measured and simulated E-plane beam patterns}
	\label{fig:piani_E}
\end{figure}

\begin{figure}[h!]
\centering
	\includegraphics[angle=0,width=0.85\textwidth]{immagini/PatternH.eps}
	 \caption{Comparison of measured and simulated H-plane beam patterns}
	\label{fig:piani_H}
\end{figure}

The four patterns are very similar, both in E and H planes, and in good agreement with simulations. At large angles ($|\theta| > 65^\circ$) the horn response is below -40 dB and the signal to noise ratio in the measurements degrades. The $\sim$ 2dB deviation (at -20 dB level) between measurements and simulations, around the first side lobes, could be due to mechanical manufacturing tolerances, that are of the order of $\sim$ 0.03 mm. A comparison of these results with those of an electroformed equivalent horn could clarify the source of these small deviations.

In Figure \ref{fig:piano_45} a comparison between the measured and simulated (black line) patterns of the 45 degrees plane of one horn is shown. The results are similar to the E and H planes cases.

Figure \ref{fig:horn2full} shows the comparison between the measured (red line) and simulated (green line) cross-polarisation patterns relative to the 45 degrees plane of one horn. Also in this case deviations could be due to mechanical manufacturing tolerances.

\begin{figure}[!ht]
\centering
	\includegraphics[angle=0,width=0.85\textwidth]{immagini/Pattern45Co.eps}
	 \caption{Comparison of the measured and simulated (black line) patterns of the 45$^\circ$ plane of one horn.}
	\label{fig:piano_45}
\end{figure}

\begin{figure}[!ht]
\centering
	\includegraphics[angle=0,width=0.85\textwidth]{immagini/horn2full.eps}
	 \caption{The planes E, H, 45$^\circ$ co-polar and 45$^\circ$ cross-polar for one the horn. The green line represents the simulation (from \cite{Villa97}) of the 45$^\circ$ cross-polar plane.}
	\label{fig:horn2full}
\end{figure}

\subsection{Return Loss}
The RL measurements were obtained at the Physics Department of the University of Milano-Bicocca with an Agilent 8510c VNA, connecting one horn at a time to one VNA port by means of a tapered rectangular-to-circular transition. The VNA was calibrated with a one-port calibration at the interface between the horn and the transition. The measured return loss is below -30 dB on a 30\% bandwidth, with a maximum matching of -42 dB at 100 GHz, resulting within the simulated requirement (see Figure \ref{fig:RL_TRL3}). Moreover the measurements shows high repeatability for all horns. We recall that the simulation does not take into account resistive losses (see Sec. 3.3), which is compatible with the deviations at the -40 dB level. Moreover the measurements show high repeatability among all horns.

\begin{figure}[!h]
\centering
	\includegraphics[angle=0,width=0.85\textwidth]{immagini/RL_TRL3.eps}
	 \caption{Return loss measurements compared with the simulation.}
	\label{fig:RL_TRL3}
\end{figure}

Another return loss measurement, performed after removing the central rod, yielded very similar results, (see Figures \ref{fig:8_rods} and \ref{fig:S11_no-tirante}), indicating that it could be possible, in principle, to use this space to build a  module with an increased packing efficiency (horn aperture area/total area) of 0.1.

\begin{figure}[!ht]
\centering
	\includegraphics[angle=0,width=0.85\textwidth]{immagini/8_rods.eps}
	 \caption{Comparison of the RL with (blue curve) and without (pink curve) the central rod, the curves are very similar. This result allows, in principle, to substitute the central rod with another horn.}
	\label{fig:8_rods}
\end{figure}

\begin{figure}[!ht]
\centering
	\includegraphics[angle=0,width=0.85\textwidth]{immagini/RL_Cal3_8V.eps}
	 \caption{Return loss measurements of the 4 horns without the central rod. The curves are very similar to the curves obtained with all the nine rods and they show high repeatability for all the four horns.}
	\label{fig:S11_no-tirante}
\end{figure}

The RL was measured, for one horn, also in cryogenic conditions, after two cooling cycles at about 4 K in a cryogenic chamber. The horn, inside the cryogenic chamber, was connected to the VNA port by means of a waveguides chain (Figure \ref{fig:cryo_setup}) composed by (from the horn to the VNA):  i) a tapered rectangular-to-circular transition, ii) a waveguide bend, iii) a straight steel waveguide (acting as a thermal break), iv) a waveguide vacuum window and v) an external straight waveguide.

\begin{figure}[h!]
 \centering
	\includegraphics[angle=0,width=0.45\textwidth,]{immagini/cryo_des_1.eps}
	\includegraphics[angle=0,width=0.45\textwidth]{immagini/cryo_des_2.eps}
	 \caption{The cryogenic setup used for return loss measurements. Left: the waveguides chain inside the cryogenic chamber connecting the prototype to the waveguide vacuum window. Right: the horn array with thermometers, facing an ECCOSORB$^\copyright$ AN 72 electromagnetic trap to absorb transmitted radiation.}
	\label{fig:cryo_setup}
\end{figure}

The VNA was calibrated with a standard one-port calibration at the interface between the last waveguide and the vacuum window. The prototype was positioned inside the cryogenic chamber and connected to the waveguides chain. The RL was first measured at 300 K and then at 4 K. For this reason the measurements, shown in blue and red in Figure \ref{fig:4KRL}, include the return loss of the chain connecting the horn to the VNA. The waveguides chain RL is responsible for the oscillatory signature. By applying a ``gate'' (i.e. a filter in the time domain) with the VNA, the effect of the waveguide chain is removed from the measurements (green line in Fig.~\ref{fig:4KRL}).

\begin{figure}[!ht]
\centering
	\includegraphics[angle=0,width=0.85\textwidth]{immagini/4K_RL_2.eps}
	 \caption{Comparison of the RL of one horn at 300 K (blue curve) and 4 K (red and green curves). The blue and red curves include also the return loss of the (same) waveguides chain, that connects the horn inside the cryogenic chamber to the external VNA. The waveguides chain RL is responsible for the oscillatory signature. In the green curve, the waveguide chain was filtered with a gate in the VNA time domain. These measurements do not indicate a major change in the return loss that would otherwise occur if there were thermally induced changes in the array.}
	\label{fig:4KRL}
\end{figure}

It is worth noting that the filtered measurements are significantly better than those performed in standard conditions, because the gate removes the effect of the signal reflected by the waveguide chain. Considering the ``gated'' measurements, the return loss is still below -30 dB on a 30\% bandwidth, confirming the initial room temperature performance. In any case, both red and green curves, do not indicate any mismatch due to possible thermally induced plate displacements. This is an important result confirming the platelet technique reliability.

In Figure \ref{fig:4KRL} one can notice a return loss increase in the 105-110\,GHz region between 300\,K and 4\,K. This effect could be due to thermally induced changes in the waveguides chain, in the absorbing trap and/or in the platelet array itself. It is reasonable to assume that the main contribution comes from the waveguides chain, that is composed by two golden copper waveguides and a straight steel waveguide, acting as a thermal break. The steel waveguide, in particular, has a very different thermal expansion coefficient compared to the other waveguide sections and to the platelet array. Moreover the steel waveguide is the longest one and is subject to the largest thermal gradient which causes the largest differential thermal contraction. These effects are likely to be the main cause of the oscillatory signature. Also thermal effects in the absorbing trap and in the platelet array cannot be excluded but they are likely to be much smaller than those in the waveguides chain.

\subsection{Insertion Loss}
The Insertion Loss measurements were performed in transmission, with a TRL calibration, using an Agilent 8510c VNA at the Physics Department of the University of Milano-Bicocca. The signal was injected inside the horn throat and measured at its exit. The difference between the output and injected signals yields the lost signal absorbed by the material because of its non-perfect electrical conductivity and backscattered at the input (the return loss, that is negligible in this case). In order to collect the output signal, we used a second twin horn, coupled by the aperture to the first. Because two horns were used, a factor 2 must be taken into account in order to obtain the single horn IL. Furthermore we simplified the mechanical interface by realizing a dedicated pair of ``twin horns'' as a single two-port device constituted by two faced identical horns with the same design of the array horns and manufactured according to the same technique (Figure \ref{fig:TwinHorn}).

\begin{figure}[!ht]
\centering
	\includegraphics[angle=0,width=0.75\textwidth]{immagini/TwinHorn.ps}
	 \caption{The two halves, individually re-assembled, of the Twin Horn device, constituted by two identical platelet horns with the same WCAM01 design, used to measure the insertion loss. In the IL measurements the two horns were assembled together with four single rods of double length, with nuts present only on the external sides.}
	\label{fig:TwinHorn}
\end{figure}

The insertion loss measurements were obtained by connecting the two horns to the two Agilent 8510c VNA ports and measuring the $S_{2,1}$ (or $S_{1,2}$) parameter with the same rectangular-to-circular transitions used for the RL measurements. The VNA was calibrated with a TRL calibration at the circular interface between the horns and the transitions.

The IL measurement is shown in Figure \ref{fig:IL_P2_L1}, yielding an average value over the band of about -0.06~dB per single horn. It is worth underlining that this figure represent an upper limit, because the wave fronts of the two horns do not match perfectly, being spherical, an not planar, at their mouth. This slight mismatch causes resonances between the horns that were removed by downsampling the measurements (see Fig.~\ref{fig:IL_P2_L1}) but yield, nevertheless, a slightly larger average insertion loss.

\begin{figure}[!ht]
\centering
	\includegraphics[angle=0,width=0.85\textwidth]{immagini/IL2.eps}
	 \caption{Insertion Loss of the Twin Horns measured in transmission (S21). Data were resampled in order to eliminate negative resonance spikes. The insertion loss of a single horn is the half of that shown in the figure.}
	\label{fig:IL_P2_L1}
\end{figure}

\section{Conclusions}
In this paper we have discussed the manufacturing and testing of a non-bonded W-band 2$\times$2 array prototype of corrugated feed-horns realised by ``platelet'' technique. Feed-horns have been realized by layers, allowing reduced times and costs with respect to standard techniques like electroformation, typically adopted for frequencies $\geq$ 100~GHz.

Beam patterns and RL measurements are in good agreement with the corresponding simulations and show high repeatability for all the feed-horns, also in cryogenic conditions. In particular the RL is less than -30\,dB over a 30\% bandwidth with a maximum matching of -42\,dB at 100\,GHz for all four antennas. Also beam pattern measurements indicate very good repeatability and a low level of side lobes and cross-polar polarisation (both lower than -25\,dB). Moreover an estimation of the IL indicates that it is not worse than -0.06 dB over the W band.

These results are very promising for the time and cost-effective mass production of large array of high-performances corrugated feed-horns, as showed by \cite{Wollack}. The non-bonded solution, chosen here and in \cite{Kangas} to assemble the module, allow simple manufacturing with the possibility to disassemble the module if needed and maintain electromagnetic performance at cryogenic conditions. Further developments of this assembling solution are needed (and in progress) for increasing the packing efficiency (horn aperture area/total area) to 0.3 and reducing the mass. These developments will enable the realization of large, lightweight and high density focal planes, as required by the next generation experiments for the precise measurements of the CMB polarisation.

\section{Acknowledgments}
The work described in this paper was carried out in the context of PRIN-MIUR 2006 and ASI contract I/016/07/0 ``COFIS''.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


text:
package com.bls220.cyphersidekick.entities.ai;

import com.bls220.cyphersidekick.entities.Entity;
import com.bls220.cyphersidekick.entities.Player;
import com.bls220.cyphersidekick.screens.MainScreen;

public class Melee extends AI {

	private static final double DETECT_DIST = 7; //entity inactive until player is within this range
	private static final double STOP_CHASE_DIST = 10; //entity will stop chasing player

	enum States { idle, chasing};
	States mState;
	public Melee(Entity e) {
		super(e);
		mState = States.idle;
	}

	@Override
	public void update(float delta) {
		Player p = MainScreen.mPlayer;
		Double dist = Entity.getDist(mEntity, p);
		switch(mState){
		case idle:
			if(dist <= DETECT_DIST){
				mState = States.chasing;
			}
			mEntity.setHeading(0,0);
			break;
		case chasing:
			if(dist >= STOP_CHASE_DIST){
				mState = States.idle;
			}
			else{
				mEntity.setHeading(p.getX() - mEntity.getX(),p.getY() - mEntity.getY());
			}
			break;
		}

	}

}


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text:
Kevin Feige Discusses Bringing X-MEN and FANTASTIC FOUR into the MCU
Posted Fri Dec 28, 2018 at 11:50 AM PST by Steven Cohen
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While 20th Century Fox has held the movie rights to Marvel properties like the X-Men, Fantastic Four, and Deadpool for many years, Disney's recent acquisition of Fox will finally allow the characters to join the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And now we're starting to get a better idea of when such an arrival might actually take place.
The news was shared via a recent Variety Playback podcast with Kevin Feige, President of Marvel Studios. Though the official greenlight has not been given just yet, when asked about starting development for MCU movies with Fox film properties like the X-Men and Fantastic Four, Feige told Variety:
"We've been told it's looking very, very good and could happen in the first six months of next year. The notion of the characters coming back is great. It's nice when a company that created all these characters can have access to all those characters. It's unusual not to. But in terms of actually thinking about it and actually planning things, we haven't started that yet."
Of course, even if development does begin within six months, it will likely still be a couple of years before we actually start to see any finished MCU movies with those characters on the big screen. But the groundwork is definitely being laid for that Wolverine vs. Hulk showdown we've all been waiting for.
Beyond the Fox acquisition, the podcast also features Feige discussing Marvel Studios' 10 year anniversary, the success of Black Panther, working with Stan Lee, and more. Be sure to check out the full Playback Podcast for the entire interview.


P-commerce and E-commerce: The Igbo Involvements.
The P-commerce and E-commerce: The Igbo Involvements.
P-commerce stands for physical commercial businesses. E-commerce means electronic/online commercial transactions.
What is not in doubt is that the Igbos dominate the p-commerce businesses in Nigeria. However, what is in doubt, is that Igbos are not taking over the e-commerce businesses in Nigeria. The future is e-commerce. E-commerce, depends solely on p-commerce (goods would need to be transported from the seller to the buyer).
This is an area of concern and a sector where Igbo business wo/men, investors should pay more attention to. It's estimated that Nigerian e-commerce market is worth about $12 billion dollars.
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Next Referendum(s) In Nigeria: My Predictions.


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Take a trip during the lengthy and intriguing background of North Carolina grapes and vines. The state's local grapes grew with a wild abandon that uniformly inspired early explorers. Wine construction, notwithstanding, is one other story--one with peaks and valleys and switchbacks. Alexia Jones Helsley recounts a story of promise that was once lengthy unfulfilled, of disappointments and good fortune and of competing visions and grapes. those pages converse to these intrigued via the romance of the local muscadines, appreciative of the complicated types of North Carolina wine and interested by the long-lasting drama of humans and their goals. within the outdated North nation, the hugely acclaimed vineyards of this present day have deep roots within the state's past.
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