text:
Q: Change value based on 3 columns I have the following subset of my dataframe
Initial Date        Type    Sub_type
AML 2018-01-02  DV  MR
AML 2018-01-02  DV  MR_abdo
DJ  2018-01-02  DV  MR
DJ  2018-01-02  DV  MR_abdo
MS  2018-01-02  V2  V2
MS  2018-01-02  DV  UL
NK  2018-01-02  DV  Pet_ct
NK  2018-01-02  DV  CT_dr
NK  2018-01-03  DV  CT_dr
NK  2018-01-03  DV  Pet_ct
PV  2018-01-03  V2  V2
PV  2018-01-03  DV  UL
MD  2018-01-04  V2  V2
MD  2018-01-04  DV  MR
NQ  2018-01-04  AN_BV   V1
NQ  2018-01-04  DV  CT_dr
PS  2018-01-04  DV  Møder
PS  2018-01-04  DV  Ferie

where I am trying to change the value of Type, if it is the same Initial, Date and if the Sub_type for that person on the same date is V2.
So for example lets take MS, on the 2018-01-02, this person has a Type that is V2 and DV and in the Sub_type this person is have V2 and UL respectively. However, since this person is have a Sub_type V2, for the same date, then I wish to change the Type value of DV to V2
Wished output
Initial Date        Type    Sub_type
AML 2018-01-02  DV  MR
AML 2018-01-02  DV  MR_abdo
DJ  2018-01-02  DV  MR
DJ  2018-01-02  DV  MR_abdo
MS  2018-01-02  V2  V2
MS  2018-01-02  V2  UL
NK  2018-01-02  DV  Pet_ct
NK  2018-01-02  DV  CT_dr
NK  2018-01-03  DV  CT_dr
NK  2018-01-03  DV  Pet_ct
PV  2018-01-03  V2  V2
PV  2018-01-03  V2  UL
MD  2018-01-04  V2  V2
MD  2018-01-04  V2  MR
NQ  2018-01-04  AN_BV   V1
NQ  2018-01-04  DV  CT_dr
PS  2018-01-04  DV  Møder
PS  2018-01-04  DV  Ferie

and the dput
structure(list(Initial= c("AML", "AML", "DJ", "DJ", "MS",
"MS", "NK", "NK", "NK", "NK", "PV", "PV", "MD", "MD", "NQ", "NQ",
"PS", "PS"), Date = c("2018-01-02", "2018-01-02", "2018-01-02",
"2018-01-02", "2018-01-02", "2018-01-02", "2018-01-02", "2018-01-02",
"2018-01-03", "2018-01-03", "2018-01-03", "2018-01-03", "2018-01-04",
"2018-01-04", "2018-01-04", "2018-01-04", "2018-01-04", "2018-01-04"
), Type= c("DV", "DV", "DV", "DV", "V2", "DV", "DV", "DV",
"DV", "DV", "V2", "DV", "V2", "DV", "AN_BV", "DV", "DV", "DV"
), Sub_type= c("MR", "MR_abdo", "MR", "MR_abdo", "V2",
"UL", "Pet_ct", "CT_dr", "CT_dr", "Pet_ct", "V2", "UL", "V2",
"MR", "V1", "CT_dr", "Møder", "Ferie")), row.names = c(470L,
585L, 1605L, 1796L, 6081L, 6230L, 6673L, 6710L, 6514L, 6586L,
7490L, 7658L, 5512L, 5657L, 6968L, 7142L, 7182L, 7296L), class = "data.frame")

A: For each group in Initial and Date we check if Type == Sub_type and return the Type where they are similar.
library(dplyr)

df %>%
  group_by(Initial, Date) %>%
  mutate(Type = if(any(Type == Sub_type)) Type[which.max(Type == Sub_type)]
                else Type)

#   Initial Date       Type  Sub_type
#   <chr>   <chr>      <chr> <chr>
# 1 AML     2018-01-02 DV    MR
# 2 AML     2018-01-02 DV    MR_abdo
# 3 DJ      2018-01-02 DV    MR
# 4 DJ      2018-01-02 DV    MR_abdo
# 5 MS      2018-01-02 V2    V2
# 6 MS      2018-01-02 V2    UL
# 7 NK      2018-01-02 DV    Pet_ct
# 8 NK      2018-01-02 DV    CT_dr
# 9 NK      2018-01-03 DV    CT_dr
#10 NK      2018-01-03 DV    Pet_ct
#11 PV      2018-01-03 V2    V2
#12 PV      2018-01-03 V2    UL
#13 MD      2018-01-04 V2    V2
#14 MD      2018-01-04 V2    MR
#15 NQ      2018-01-04 AN_BV V1
#16 NQ      2018-01-04 DV    CT_dr
#17 PS      2018-01-04 DV    Møder
#18 PS      2018-01-04 DV    Ferie

data
df <- structure(list(Initial = c("AML", "AML", "DJ", "DJ", "MS", "MS",
"NK", "NK", "NK", "NK", "PV", "PV", "MD", "MD", "NQ", "NQ", "PS",
"PS"), Date = c("2018-01-02", "2018-01-02", "2018-01-02", "2018-01-02",
"2018-01-02", "2018-01-02", "2018-01-02", "2018-01-02", "2018-01-03",
"2018-01-03", "2018-01-03", "2018-01-03", "2018-01-04", "2018-01-04",
"2018-01-04", "2018-01-04", "2018-01-04", "2018-01-04"), Type = c("DV",
"DV", "DV", "DV", "V2", "DV", "DV", "DV", "DV", "DV", "V2", "DV",
"V2", "DV", "AN_BV", "DV", "DV", "DV"), Sub_type = c("MR", "MR_abdo",
"MR", "MR_abdo", "V2", "UL", "Pet_ct", "CT_dr", "CT_dr", "Pet_ct",
"V2", "UL", "V2", "MR", "V1", "CT_dr", "Møder", "Ferie")), class =
"data.frame", row.names = c(NA, -18L))

A: A base solution. Simply overwrite the Type with V2 where Sub_type=="V2" and you have a match in Initial and Date.
x$Type[interaction(x[, c("Initial", "Date")]) %in%
   interaction(x[x$Sub_type=="V2", c("Initial", "Date")])]  <- "V2"
x
#   Initial       Date  Type Sub_type
#1      AML 2018-01-02    DV       MR
#2      AML 2018-01-02    DV  MR_abdo
#3       DJ 2018-01-02    DV       MR
#4       DJ 2018-01-02    DV  MR_abdo
#5       MS 2018-01-02    V2       V2
#6       MS 2018-01-02    V2       UL
#7       NK 2018-01-02    DV   Pet_ct
#8       NK 2018-01-02    DV    CT_dr
#9       NK 2018-01-03    DV    CT_dr
#10      NK 2018-01-03    DV   Pet_ct
#11      PV 2018-01-03    V2       V2
#12      PV 2018-01-03    V2       UL
#13      MD 2018-01-04    V2       V2
#14      MD 2018-01-04    V2       MR
#15      NQ 2018-01-04 AN_BV       V1
#16      NQ 2018-01-04    DV    CT_dr
#17      PS 2018-01-04    DV    Møder
#18      PS 2018-01-04    DV    Ferie

Data:
x <- structure(list(Initial = structure(c(1L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 4L, 4L,
5L, 5L, 5L, 5L, 8L, 8L, 3L, 3L, 6L, 6L, 7L, 7L), .Label = c("AML",
"DJ", "MD", "MS", "NK", "NQ", "PS", "PV"), class = "factor"),
    Date = structure(c(1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 2L, 2L,
    2L, 2L, 3L, 3L, 3L, 3L, 3L, 3L), .Label = c("2018-01-02",
    "2018-01-03", "2018-01-04"), class = "factor"), Type = structure(c(2L,
    2L, 2L, 2L, 3L, 2L, 2L, 2L, 2L, 2L, 3L, 2L, 3L, 2L, 1L, 2L,
    2L, 2L), .Label = c("AN_BV", "DV", "V2"), class = "factor"),
    Sub_type = structure(c(4L, 5L, 4L, 5L, 9L, 7L, 6L, 1L, 1L,
    6L, 9L, 7L, 9L, 4L, 8L, 1L, 3L, 2L), .Label = c("CT_dr",
    "Ferie", "Møder", "MR", "MR_abdo", "Pet_ct", "UL", "V1",
    "V2"), class = "factor")), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA,
-18L))

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Why must it be so difficult to get access to mental health support?
"In this short film Jane talks about her mental health issues at school and the difficulties of getting help from adults around her. Dr Raph Kelvin talks about how letting mental health problems in youth go unnoticed can lead to a multitude of issues in adult life and how MindEd can help adults to intervene early, getting children and young people the support they need."
"MindEd provides practical e-learning sessions when and wherever they're needed, quickly building knowledge and confidence to identify an issue, act swiftly and improve outcomes for children and young people."


On the coast of Spitsbergen, slightly further north than 78°, a wide fjord opens out to the sea. Alkehornet to the north of the fjord is a distinct landmark. To the south, Radio Isfjord's buildings at Kapp Linné emerge. Cultural remains from all of Svalbard's historic eras, glaciers, characteristic flat-topped and layered mountains can all be found within this giant fjord complex. The largest communities of permanent residents are also located in the Isfjorden area: Barentsburg and Longyearbyen.


text:
Q: understanding go channel handling / buffer overflow I have inherited some code I am still trying to make sense of.  The core of it is this:
for msg := range this.out {
    for i, handler := range this.handlers {
        select {
        case handler <- msg:
        default:
            this.logger.Printf("Buffer overflow occurred for handler %s", this.names[i])
        }
    }
}

out is a chan byte
handlers is []chan []byte
It looks like this is reading from out and writing to a handler from the array, and the default is to complain about a buffer overflow.  I think.
But I need details.  I am new to go and this is my first time dealing with chan.   So first question, is that actually what is happening here?   And if so ... how do I prevent the buffer overflow?

A: In Go, channels can be created in two ways:
c := make(chan []byte)

which creates a channel that will synchronize the sender and receiver. This means that the receiver will have to wait until data is sent by the sender, and the sender will have to wait until the receiver gets that data. However, by adding a buffer to the channel:
c := make(chan []byte, 100)

you're effectively desynchronizing the sender and receiver. In this case, the sender will block when the buffer is full and the receiver will block when the buffer is empty.
Now, I don't know what the capacity on handler is, but this is the general workflow you should expect:

*

*Go will check if there is space in handler and if there is, msg will be written to the channel.

*If there is not space then the error message will be logged.

What you actually do about buffer overflow is a little more tricky.
First, as a stopgap, you could increase the capacity on handler so that it can hold more messages. This may represent an actual fix if the problem is intermittent (i.e. large spikes in traffic). Otherwise, all you're doing is pushing the issue off for a time.
Second, you could horizontally scale the handlers on the other end of handler to process more messages, thereby ensuring that the channel doesn't overflow. The problem with this, however, is that you then have to worry about managing handlers at various capacity levels so then you get into auto-scaling and things like that.
Third, you could look at the code handling messages from handler and see if this could be redesigned to handle messages more efficiently. Such redesigns are pretty common when the original design assumptions for your code no longer hold.
Finally, you could move away from using channels as infrastructure altogether and replace that component with a cloud-based pub/sub that includes memory. The advantage here is that this would allow you to scale your application as necessary without worrying about overflow but it would incur additional costs and require infrastructure changes.


DOES JESUS DO DRIVE THRU?
Maybe in protest the author meant to say – "God is nowhere". But for many thousands the testimony was – "God is now here".
The arrival of God amongst us, coming with the intention of saving us, is not only the story of the Welsh revival, and many others, it is the Christmas story a story we are soon to celebrate.
But it is only part of a greater story and that story can include you, the reader of this article, for Christmas forms part of a larger story, a meta-narrative of God's determination to rescue humanity from destruction.
His sovereign will, enacted over centuries, resulted in the Christmas event. God took on flesh and entered our world in the vulnerability of an embryo within a primitive culture enduring a period of military occupation and religious ferment.
Mary welcomed him, Herod hounded him, some followed him, others crucified him, but none could rid themselves of him.
Truly Jesus was and is "God with us" for the tomb could not hold him, heaven applauded him and today the spirit testifies about him – he is risen and will return in judgement fully to usher in the new age when once again the dwelling of God is with man.
May you experience the reality of Immanuel and know heaven's peace and joy as you welcome Jesus this Christmas.


Dados and grooves are everyday needs for most woodworkers and making them entirely by hand has never been easier or more accurate. Plow cutting a dado or groove with the grain is not a difficult task but cutting grooves in end grain and across the grain is difficult with traditional plow planes because they lack a scoring cutter.
Sharpening the iron and scoring cutter is easy, too. The irons are sharpened using any technique that works for you on a flat stone (we do recommend a guide for the smaller width irons). The scoring cutter is reversible and can be easily honed with the Scoring Cutter Hone included int he kit or on a sixty-degree knife edge stone. Imagine making cuts—entirely by hand—in any grain direction, that rival any technique for quality and accuracy.
Here's another little cool detail: Each of these sole kits, regardless of the dado width, are exactly 1″ wide which means they are a tad wider than the plane body. Why? Because you can find the center line of your groove really easy if you know it is exactly 1/2″ from either of the sole edges. This is important when you need to use a shop made guide fence (strip of wood) to place your cut at odd angles or when the HP-10 Guide Fence runs out of travel.
With the grain, across the grain, end grain, or diagonal, you will get razor crisp results that are smoother than what can be made with a saw or router. Oh, and a whole lot quieter too.


We won't know if victory over a beleaguered, demoralised West Bromwich Albion at the Hawthorns was a pivotal moment until the whole season's story unfolds, but it sure felt like it.
In all likelihood, the defeat consigns the Baggies to relegation. While hope will flicker in the Midlands for a little while yet, there is now a gap of 7 points to safety with games running out and with their dreadful record over a much longer period to consider, pessimism will devour them.
It is even more outlandish to imagine them being able to make up 10 points on Town, leaving the small dogs of the top league to worry about just two remaining relegation spots – even not finishing at the bottom of the pile will represent a minor victory over the majority expectation that they would sink without a great deal of trace in elevated company.
What may be viewed as pivotal is the shrewd transfer business early in the last window. Not only did Town strengthen two crucial areas – offensively and defensively – Wagner delayed the introduction of both Pritchard and Kongolo until he was sure they could make the type of crucial difference both made in yesterday's vital win.
Kongolo shone throughout. Strong, composed and aware, the left back made a vital tackle to prevent wunderkind Burke making an immediate impact following his introduction and contributed to a fine defensive performance which, corners aside, subdued the home side's attacking threat.
The excellent Pritchard filled the troubled number 10 role with energy and imagination, simultaneously bringing out Mounié's qualities as he had done in the Bournemouth game and the much maligned Frenchman has hit form at exactly the right time now that his strengths are illuminated by his integration in to a team plan and shape which suits him.
The tension around the Hawthorns was palpable and no doubt contributed to a quite dreadful first half almost entirely devoid of quality or semblance of calm. A fierce midfield battle produced a multitude of errors from both sides and a contest as dour as the struggles of both clubs, but it suited the visitors more as they built a foundation on the back of the Baggies' increasing frustrations both on and off the field.
Williams and Hogg dominated the midfield slog without being able to inspire threat, but rarely relinquished their superiority over Barry and Krychowiak while providing a largely impenetrable defensive shield. This allowed Schindler and Zanka to cope comfortably with Rondon – who was semi permanently offside – and the dangerous Rodriguez.
Having established decent control, Town should have gone ahead just after the half hour when Hadergjonaj and Quaner opened up West Brom's left side to set up Pritchard for a shot which was goalbound until hitting Mounié near the line. Van La Parra's follow up was saved by Foster and scrambled away before Pritchard could head in the rebound.
It was a rare moment of excitement in a frantically unsatisfying first half and, soon after, the home side created a chance following good work from Rondon who, for once, got behind the visitors' defence to set up McClean who may have done better than volley over when unmarked.
The breakthrough for Town came early in an improved, but hardly sparkling, second half. Quaner, who was quietly effective throughout, capitalised on good front running by Mounié and movement by Hadergjonaj to set up Van La Parra. The Dutchman swung a leg at the ball first time and somehow shinned the opener past a bemused and utterly stranded Foster to score for the second time in the season against the troubled hosts, if rather less spectacularly than his previous effort.
Taking the lead has always been vital to Town successes. It is rare for them to lose once in front – just as it is rare for them to recover from conceding the first goal – and the cushion of a second followed not long after.
A dreadful ball out of defence was shifted quickly forward to Pritchard who cleverly played in Mounié with a lovely reverse pass. With his new found confidence and in the knowledge that he now has a song dedicated to him, the striker curled a great finish past Foster to put Town in firm control.
In between the goals, Wagner sacrificed the booked Hadergjonaj (he had picked up the yellow card following a typical piece of Van La Parra madness who had stayed down following a tackle he felt should've been a foul in the first half) for Smith. The captain played his part in a generally good second half performance by the visitors.
The blot on the landscape was Town's defending of corners. With 25 minutes to go and a comfortable victory in sight, defenders allowed Dawson to head home an excellent Brunt corner with Lössl nowhere, though possibly illegally blocked.
The same defender was to head over from a similar but less promising position later in the game and Lössl made a good save from a Brunt free kick to make amends for his less than commanding effort for the Baggies' goal.
Other than those two scares, Town's experience of seeing out slim victories came to the fore, and, if anything, they looked far more dangerous going forward than their desperate hosts. Williams had a fine volley well saved by Foster while a jinking Van La Parra run in to the area past 3 defenders was let down by a very weak finish.
At the heart of it all was Hogg. Tackling, blocking, cajoling, the highly energetic midfielder combined excellently with the more progressive Williams to snuff out threats at source and reduce West Brom to an aerial bombardment capably dealt with by all of the back four.
While the last 25 minutes and injury time were occasionally stressful, Town's resilience was not to be broken and the vital 3 points were rightfully earned.
West Brom look hopeless. In direct contrast to the spirit and togetherness of their conquerors, the stench of decay and disharmony – particularly between the club and fans – was overwhelming. Relegation looms and it is not easy to see how the caustic atmosphere around The Hawthorns can be dispelled.
For Town, salvation is within grasp though it remains exceptionally challenging. The last few games have restored the early season confidence; if relegation is the final fate, it will not arrive because of lack of effort and that same effort gives them a fighting chance of survival.
Turning the corner from a dreadful period from mid December, the recent performances – including in defeat – has given supporters renewed hope and revitalised enthusiasm. Even if yesterday's win was a little on the ugly side, it was massively encouraging to witness the commitment to the cause.
Town fans, rightly or wrongly, will forgive a lot if they see blood, sweat and tears and their response to the victory celebrations at the end reaffirmed the bond so indispensable in this struggle against the odds.


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calls The SPD that older people can refer to in case of unemployment in the future significantly longer unemployment benefits. This is part of the concept of party leader Andrea Nahles for a "welfare state reform in 2025", in which she also wants to replace the controversial basic backup Hartz IV by a "citizens ' money". The concept is to. in the case of a closed meeting of the SPD party Executive on 10 and 11. February will be decided in Berlin.
"from the age of 50 years, we want to acknowledge the contribution of number of years, even more than today," said Nahles, the editors ' network of Germany. "Who is 58 years old, can now apply for 24 months of unemployment benefit. We want to extend the reference period to up to 33 months." Currently, Affected to fall after the end of the duration of the unemployment benefit I in the. According to Nahles, the reference period should in individual cases in the future, even on three years.
The SPD Chairman had demanded in the past year, a social reform of the state and announced: "We will not let Hartz IV behind us." In the Interview, Nahles IV. confirmed again their demands for the abolition of Hartz Instead your party wants to introduce a new basic social security as a "citizens ' money". This is the core of the concept "social state 2025".
one of the plans, sanctions against non-cooperating, benefit recipients will be abolished. "If sanctions are useless, but just create new problems, they are nonsensical," said Nahles. Such measures should never lead to 100 percent cancellation of financial resources. "Sanctions have homelessness, we will abolish it", said Nahles.
said cost more for the reforms can be met, according to the SPD Director of unemployment insurance: "The qualification measures and the longer period of receipt of unemployment benefit I cause, of course, cost, but which are financed from unemployment insurance", Nahles. Their coffers are full, and the money was there.
to be expressed, meanwhile the CDU has been criticism of the proposals for a longer payment of unemployment benefits to Older. "I think it sends completely the wrong signal, if you want to extend this labour market situation, with a record of employment to take the Reference for the unemployment benefit", – said the labour market policy spokesman of the Union group, Peter White, the Reuters news Agency. "I see a need for the unemployment benefit I, no action," said White.
"The SPD proposals, which do not fit to the situation on the labour market", said White. Priority must have the mediation in a work and not a longer payment of unemployment benefits. Willingness to talk White signaled the limits to which assets and own apartment in Hartz-IV-Recipients for the purposes of attributing state support from tax funds spared. "We can certainly talk," said White.
colloquially often Hartz IV-called unemployment benefit II was introduced in 2005 under the SPD-led government of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.


The first round of interviews for candidates interested in becoming the next superintendent of the Sevastopol School District is set for Saturday at 9:30AM in the multi-purpose room at the school in Institute. Five individuals have been invited to the closed door meeting involving a 19-person committee representing the school board, community members, parents, teachers, and support staff. The school district has been working with Jeff Dickert of Cesa-7 to develop a list of applicants interested in the job. A total of 26 individuals have expressed interest and, based on community/staff surveys, the number was whittled down to the five who will participate Saturday. Each candidate will be evaluated based on a scoring system and the top applicants will be asked back for the second round of interviews the first week in March. Current Superintendent Steve Cromell has announced that he will retire at the end of the current school year.


Amazing new platform for development, eZ430-Chronos Wireless Watch Development Tool. Introductory video here and assembly/disassembly video here. Not available at the time of writing but will be available for purchase for $49 at TI eStore.
The New $49 BeMicro FPGA Evaluation Kit available from arrowdevtools.com looks very impressive with the availability of free tools and a Nios II processor. With the on-board USB-Blaster for Quartus II Web edition you should have all you need to design and debug with a custom FPGA microcontroller. For I/O you have an 80-pin edge connector, eight LEDs, a UART and JTAG. See this getting started page for more details.
UPDATE: There are a number of low cost BeMicro boards available from Arrow at http://www.arrow.com/bemicro/ including the new BeMicro Max 10 for $30 US.
Freescale's tower development system is unique in physical design and also because it will support multiple processor families according to the tower system website, TowerGeeks.org. Currently only Coldfire processor boards are available along with a few peripheral boards. You can purchase either a complete kit or inidividual boards from Digi-Key. The kit shown above (TWR-MCF51CN-KIT) costs $100 and includes a microcontroller board, a serial module board, and two elevator boards.
Barnes and Noble has released details and some specifications of its new electronic reader, Nook.
Gizmondo and the Wall Street Journal are reporting that Barnes and Noble will release the Nook, an electronic reader to compete with Amazon's Kindle. It's reported to sell for $259, and run Google's Android OS. Gizmondo has pictures but no specifications yet.
Today's google logo is a bar code that scans as 'google' and displays 'invention of the bar code' as the roll-over. Today is the anniversary of the bar code invention and yesterday the Nobel Prize in Physics 2009 was given to inventions that enabled technology such as bar codes, fiber optic communication and digital cameras. The Nobel press release is titled 'The masters of light' and describes "two scientific achievements that have helped to shape the foundations of today's networked societies."
Attending the TI Tech Days Toronto 2009, I was impressed with the capabilities of the BeagleBoard, an OMAP3530 single board computer that sells for only $149. It was on display serving video to a tiny DLP projector that is also available as a development kit from TI.
The BeagleBoard is a reference platform as well, with all schematics, gerbers and even design files available online. This allows third-parties like TinCanTools to develop a peripheral add-on board an an adaptor for their USB-JTAG board to support the BeagleBoard.
The OMAP is a great platform for Embedded Linux development. The OpenEmbedded project, the Angstrom distribution, and Android all have been ported to the OMAP, and there is a great community of BeagleBoard Linux users and a wealth of information online at BeagleBoard.org. In addition to the BeagleBoard, there are OMAP development boards from gumstix and Logic. Each of these boards also have embedded Linux distributions and online resources for developers.
At the Conference, the room was full for the OMAP embedded Linux presentation by Nuvation, and it could have lasted much longer if time permitted. Developers had many questions on each slide and the presenter had to rush to finish. You can tell that there are a lot of products in development with the technology or at least considering OMAP and Embedded Linux as a solution.
There were a number of development companies at the conference (including Aaron Clarke Consulting) offering support for OMAP development. bSQUARE was giving away copies of Microsoft's Windows Embedded CE Evaluation Kit that also runs on the BeagleBoard. They support both WinCE and Embedded Linux development. They are headquartered in Bellevue, Washington with offices around the world including one near me in Rochester, NY. bSQUARE, who aquired Vibren Technologies in 2005, also offers an embedded flash for Linux and porting services for Adobe Flash Lite.
You can see the BeagleBoard in action either at one of the remaining TI Tech Days or at the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston. TI will have a number of workshops featuring the BeagleBoard including Android development.
Google's latest logo art honors Hans Christian Ørsted via a direct link to a google search of his name. He discovered that electric currents can induce magnetic fields in 1820. This inspired electromagnetic theory, one of the most important (and hardest to master) electronics design concepts. Consumer electronics like the radio, television and cell phone (and Google Android) are all possible because of Ørsted's discovery, and the work of others like James Clerk Maxwell. He allowed us to understand (and therefore eventually create) these waves traveling through space with what are known simply as Maxwell's equations.
Mentor's acquisition of Embedded Alley will allow it to offer a three-OS solution to device manufacturers. Mentor's Nucleus real time operating system (RTOS) is installed on about one third of mobile phones. Before the acquisition, Mentor's Ben Hookway blogged about Nucleus and Android.
Mentor has already updated its website to support developers implementing the multi-OS solution: Android and Linux Development Systems for Multi-OS and Multicore Development.
Researchers at the Black Hat USA 2009 Technical Security Conference have shown how to use an SMS message to attack the iPhone. Charlie Miller and Collin Mulliner gave the talk 'Fuzzing the Phone in your Phone' (full text link here). They presented techniques that can be used for the iPhone as well as Android and Windows Mobile phones. The Authors demonstrated the iPhone attack for Elinor Mills of CNET before the talk. She reports there is no patch at this time but Apple was notified of the problem 6 weeks ago.
Need to estimate battery life for your next embedded design? With SDRAM systems that can be difficult but Micron has a few system power calculator excel spreadsheets you can download to help. They have separate spreadsheets for SDRAM, DDR, DDR2, DDR3 and RLDRAM II. They also have some useful tech note pdfs on calculating system power.
The first teardown of the iPhone 3G by Rapid Repair gives more details than the previously published specs. The Rapid Repair comparison chart shows the 3G has a 412MHz Samsung S3C6400 ARM11 and the 3G S has a Samsung S5PC100 ARM Cortex A8 at 600MHz.
Google Wave is the second Google project for the developers of Google Maps. It attempts to combine e-mail and instant messaging into a single system, but doesn't stop there. They also aim to combine documents with conversations and allow networked collaboration to create a new electronic object called a wave. A wave doesn't have a true physical representation but that is part of the design according to the Google Wave post on the Official Google Blog. With an electronic form the wave allows dynamic features like playback and rewind that are hard to navigate with paper documents.
Another interesting part of Wave is that it has an underlying open protocol called the Google Wave Federation Protocol. By opening up the protocol, Google is enabling companies to develop interoperable systems that use waves. That could allow consumer electronic start-ups to invent new web enabled devices. This can also allow some apps to be developed and delivered across mobile platforms. In the video you can also see Wave running on Android and iPhone at the 25:26 mark.
"The new product design you are working on will end up in a dumpster in 10 years." I read that years ago in an engineering magazine. The point was to think about the environment, but I was more shocked to realize my hard work would soon be worthless. It made me strive to design products that will have value well beyond the warranty period.
An unlikely area for product longevity is computer games because of the continuous advance of graphics technology. It may be partly nostalgia, but classic games live on. Surprisingly, its not in remakes with modern graphics, but in ports of the originals to new platforms like flash or mobile. Here is a flash Super Mario (also see Game Developers Compete to Give Mario Intelligence) or this Pac-Man for your cell.
The use of emulators like MAME with the original code means even the flaws are ported. Usually cheats are added to give unlimited lives or invincibility but now the bugs are being fixed as well. That code review and test cycle that was skipped 26 years ago is being done by volunteers. Don Hodges found and fixed a huge bug in Donkey Kong shown in the video and another in Pac-Man.
Thanks to Paras for sending me the link.
Before open hardware came along, the only schematics and layouts that were free to download were from reference designs like this capsense multimedia board from cypress or this potential handheld gaming board from Luminary Micro.
The Curious Inventor website has a great surface mount soldering video guide showing a number of techniques you can use to solder fine pitch surface mount components to printed circuit boards (PCBs).
A novel method of prototyping electronics that allows easy soldering is the Schmartboard. An example of this is shown 7:59 into the video. I just read an article about electronic prototyping in the latest issue of Electronic Design that mentioned Schmartboard was awarded patent 7,511,228 for this technology. I found the JTAG I/O SchmartBoard useful when I needed to create an adaptor to connect my prototype to a standard 0.1 inch JTAG cable. The RJ11/45 and USB connector board looks useful as well.
DataSlide is publishing 160,000 IOPS and 500MB/s transfer rates for its new Hard Rectangular Drive technology. The technology has been proven in prototypes according to an article in the Register. ZDNet gives a few more details and mentions a similarity to IBM's Millipede project.
DataSlide is also promoting this as green tech when comparing IOPS/Watt to other drive technologies.
I have developed on a few different NXP (formerly Phillips) ARM7 processors in consumer electronics products. NXP has a great selection of processor families with a variety of feature sets in each family. This makes it possible to reuse code on different products or to design-in a new processor without changing vendors. For example, on a product using the LPC21xx we were able to change to a processor with more memory during software development without any problems and with a very minor schedule impact.
I just returned my LPC21xx development board to a client last week now that their product is in production. I was thinking about purchasing a replacement when out of the blue, I received a skype from NGX Technologies about a new low-cost LPC214x evaluation board they have developed. I haven't had a chance to evaluate it, but at under $50 (depending on exchange), it is much cheaper than any of the LPC214x boards I find online at the very useful LPC Tools website.
The concept of open hardware is not as mature or well-defined as open software, but that hasn't stopped the development of some very interesting embedded systems. Some are inexpensive designs for the hobbyist that resemble electronic kits like the Arduino. Other are very polished and expensive consumer electronics like Chumby, with a 1GHz Marvell PXA168 processor and 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi. Another is Bug Labs ARM11 based BUGbase with swappable BUGmodules available for a variety of applications. Of course, with open hardware you can build your own module too. Make magazine has a huge list of open hardware projects. The one thing they have in common is free access to the schematics and layout and should use only open source software, so you are free to build the entire design yourself.
In 2006 Intel sold the mobile XScale processor business to Marvell "to focus its investments on its core businesses." Now they are re-entering the embedded market by acquiring embedded software company Wind River as "part of Intel's strategy to grow its processor and software presence outside the traditional PC and server market segments into embedded systems and mobile handheld devices." Links are to Intel press releases.
There is a lot of speculation about this acquisition and Intel's next embedded move, such as Intel looking to buy Marvell to re-aquire the mobile XScale, or an Android Linux smartphone that outperforms Google's.
One area that may be affected by the acquisition is the newly available embedded OS virtualization technology, Wind River Hypervisor. It is currently only available on Intel and Power-PC processors, but support for other non-Intel processors is planned. This article at LinuxDevices.com claims that might change and gives an overview of the technology. Hypervisor currently only supports Linux and VxWorks, both Wind River supported OSes.
CoreMark is a new free benchmark for embedded processors from EEMBC. EEMBC is using this to promote its other benchmarks and to compete with free benchmarks like Dhrystone.
ARM TechCon3 is still being held in October in the Santa Clara Convention center. The deadline for paper submissions is July 14, with the conference on October 21-23, 2009.
This reminds me of the Terminator TV series where a computer designed to compete in chess acquires an artificial intelligence that eventually threatens humanity. If you enter watch out for cyborgs and time travelers.
The makers of Mathematica have created a website to "make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything." They need some help at the moment and will give you a link to participate if you find something the site is missing like digital filter, frequency spectrum, Hamming window, or impulse function.
Wolfram Alpha is currently more powerful than using Google's built in calculator but I find the interface to be cumbersome. If you perform more than one calculation the history function can interfere with your text input and you lose the focus from the text entry box after each result.
It does look useful for learning about mathematical functions, try epi*x for example, you can see a quick graph and they give a lot of useful formulae like series representations and integrals.
Here are the full iPhone 3GS specifications and iPhone 3G specs. The 3GS release date is June 19. Prices are $199 for the 16GB 3GS and $299 for the 32GB model with new $99 price for the 3G. The 3GS specs are close to those leaked a month ago on a Chinese website according to this article on Brighthand. A few more specs that were leaked are a 600MHz processor and 256MB of RAM, these were both on the Chinese site and an accidental post to a T-Mobile spec page in the Netherlands.
I have had great success bringing up new hardware with this small bench-top power supply from Lascar Electronics. The PSU 130 is inexpensive at under $90 US on Amazon.com or direct from the manufacturer (which gives quantity discounts). It is powerful enough to handle most electronic devices that I work on, and is small enough to fit underneath my computer monitor. The backlight is great for working in dim lighting and the large display is easy to read. I have unintentionally tested the short-circuit protection when I powered up a new prototype with a wiring mistake, and the supply suffered no damage. The only problem I have had is that one of the plastic tabs underneath the unit has broken, these are similar to what you find underneath most keyboards. This prevents me from easily raising it slightly for a better viewing angle (as shown in the picture). On the electrical side I have never had a problem. The current display is very useful working on prototypes, I can see when the SDRAM is initialized by the increase in current, I can see a short circuit condition and can easily measure power usage in different operating modes.
With a 500+ MHz Freescale ARM11 the newly released Kindle 2 is faster than many smartphones including the iPhone according to a teardown at ifixit. It also uses a 32MB mobile DDR SDRAM and 2GB moviNAND both made by Samsung. Also improved are the display, battery life, ergonomics and wireless (3G) to allow book title browsing and download without a computer. Free internet access is limited to Wikipedia, magazines and blogs are available in the kindle store.
Nokia owned Qt Software (formerly Trolltech), is offering a royalty-free license for the latest release of its windowing system Qt 4.5. The Linux port of Qt was formerly called Qtopia, now called Qt for Embedded Linux. It is advertised to be optimized for embedded and includes features to aid embedded developers. These include C++ class libraries, built-in support for hardware-acceleration, a free cross-platform IDE and the ability to simulate the device display on your development workstation. Also available for consumer electronics development are Qt for Windows CE and Qt for S60 on Symbian OS.
On most embedded projects, I find the need to write utility applications that run on a PC. I have written programs to emulate TCP/IP clients and servers, test USB communications, test protocol implementation in firmware, and automate GPIB testing. Since most Linux (Unix, FreeBSD, etc.) utilities use getopt() for command line processing, I find it very useful when creating these utilities on Linux. I just found that I can do the same for Windows with this getopt port for Win32 and MFC development by Hans Dietrich.
An electric guitar is being developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that simulates a full sized acoustic guitar using a wooden insert and digital signal processing (DSP). The wooden insert is interchangeable to simulate different Acoustics. The newest version is going to use the Freescale DSP56371 with the Symphony SoudBite Development Kit.


A performance version of our Straight Fit Jeans in a midweight organic cotton/polyester blend denim. Built for a more active lifestyle, they feature mechanical stretch, COOLMAX® fiber-based moisture management and a weather-resistant DWR (durable water repellent) finish.
Wow, I'm impressed in the overall process of making these jeans. How i wished you could also distribute this in our country. (Philippines) Great Job Patagonia.


text:
Samudradevi Balika Vidyalaya () is a public girls' school located in Nugegoda, Sri Lanka. It was founded on 5 May 1915 and is considered as the oldest girls' school in Nugegoda.

History

Samudradevi Balika Vidyalaya was started as St John's Mixes school with 14 pupils on May 5, 1915. Initially it was a Christian Mission school and the first principal of the school was Rev. Fr. James Henry Wickramanayake. In 1934, the mixes school was separated into Girls' and Boys' schools. The girls' school was known as st John's Girls' School and boys' school was known as St John's boys' college. The schools were under the church of SS Mary and John, Nugegoda.

The girls' school had both English and Sinhala medium classes. There was a Tamil stream as well but the classes were initially at the boys' school and then transferred to a building adjacent to the Church. It became a separate school and was called Tamil Maha Vidyalaya. In 1963 under the government re-organisation of schools, all English medium classes were transferred to st Joseph's Convent. On 1 January 1965 the school was renamed as Samudradevi Ballika Vidyalaya.

Past Principals

Notable alumni
Damitha Abeyratne
Soma Edirisinghe
Uresha Ravihari

References

Girls' schools in Sri Lanka
Educational institutions established in 1915
Schools in Colombo District
1915 establishments in Ceylon

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Callidemum monteithi es un coleóptero de la familia Chrysomelidae.

Fue descrita científicamente por primera vez en 2003 por Daccordi.

Véase también

 Callidemum hasenpuschi

Referencias

Callidemum


text:
Finance Minister: India can breach top 50 in business ease index
Published: Nov 01,201801:54 AM
India has jumped 23 places to the 77th position in the World Bank's 'ease of doing business' ranking released Wednesday, a development that could help the country attract more foreign investments.
The parameters include ease of starting a business, construction permits, getting electricity, getting credit, paying taxes, trade across borders, enforcing contracts and resolving insolvency. India was ranked at the 142nd position among 190 nations when the Modi government came to power in 2014. It rose to 100th spot in the last ranking from the 131st rank in the previous year.
New Zealand topped the list of 190 countries in ease of doing business, followed by Singapore, Denmark, and Hong Kong. The United States is placed eight and China has been ranked 46th.
Neighbouring Pakistan is placed at 136. World Bank put India among the top 10 economies to make the most improvements.
Buoyed by a 23-place jump on World Bank's ease of doing business ranking, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley Wednesday said India can crack into top 50 if it improves on time taken for registering real estate, starting business and enforcement of contracts.
Addressing a news conference soon after the World Bank released its 2019 ranking, Jaitley said areas that require improvement include time taken for registering property, starting business, insolvency and taxation, and enforcement of contract areas. This government, since coming to the power, has reduced red-tape and corruption, and its reforms have ensured India jumps ranks from 142 to 77, he said.
Improvements have already been made on enforcement of contracts, taxation and insolvency laws and would be reflected in future rankings, he said. Jaitley said Prime Minister Narendra Modi had soon after coming to power in 2014 set a target of breaking into top 50 and it seems probable if improvements are done on time taken to start business, registering property, enforcement of contracts, paying taxes and insolvency laws. Commerce and Industry Minister Suresh Prabhu said the improvement in rank was due to a combination of several factors, including administrative changes and legislative reforms like GST and the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC).
"As we go on, we will continue to improve more. The structural reforms which have not yet captured fully will be reflected," he said.
More News - Business
Gold slides Rs 70 on muted demand, silver jumps Rs 660
'Budget ensures vigilance, short-term liquidity for NBFCs'
Air India suffered loss of Rs 430 crore due to Pak air space closure
Unique scheme feeds poor, manages waste, builds infra
Jalan panel finalises report on RBI capital, recommends surplus transfer to govt in 3-5 years
LTI to buy advanced analytics firm Lymbyc for Rs 38 crore

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


1. While shopping be on guard. Thieves target the clueless.
your purse or wallet is secure to you and don't flash cash.
surrounding when they were attacked.
see. Remember to lock your car, roll up your windows.
screen TV boxes out at the curb days before trash pick up.
pictures of your new 60 inch screen TV on Facebook.
You're just welcoming others to break into your home.
break this window and steal me.
can purchase a light timer and set it for peak times.
by your place while you are away.
to help reduce false alarms.
shop from trusted sites with the secure shopping seals.
broken or is not what you ordered.
Remember you are in control of what happens in your life.


text:
The Miss Pride Of Africa UK™ Pageant Is A Beauty Pageant Fostered To Promote African Beauty, Unity, Talent and Heritage in the United Kingdom. Miss Pride of Africa UK is set to groom the African youths into women leaders to impact their communities in Africa, United Kingdom and the world at large.
The Pageant enables young African ladies in the United Kingdom to have a chance to shine a spotlight on Africa as a Whole. The girls are given the opportunity to inspire each other, look and feel beautiful inside out, tell their own stories to the different communities and the world at large and most importantly build their self-esteem.
This is a highly competitive beauty pageant aimed to promote Beauty, African Unity (united we stand), talent plus heritage and culture. The pageant is not only about Beauty, it's "Beauty with a purpose". This theme clearly spells out the ultimate goal of the pageant. The goal is not to pick the most beautiful girl as a winner just for the sake of it but to use her beauty to further meaningful courses.
The Miss Pride of Africa UK ™ Beauty pageant aspires to select girls who are not only beautiful but also educated. By placing emphasis on education, we create role models who inspire others to place value on education through educational workshops. As Miss Pride Of Africa UK™ Queen/Ambassador, we are looking for a lady who is humble, confident, relatable with a good personality, and most importantly a role model, someone everyone will look up to.
When Miss Pride Of Africa UK™ is crowned, she becomes an ambassador on behalf of all African countries and various organizations. The crowned Queen will travel to Africa to take part in human capital development projects, Experience the culture and heritage of Africa and she will also be involved in making donations and contributions to various charitable institutes as well as 100% involvement within the United Kingdom as an African Ambassador.
Promoting African beauty | Unity | Talent | Heritage
@Missprideofafricauk
Sletch Plugin
© All rights reserved Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Aenean malesuada molestie neque non lobortis.


If you're considering a career in one of the many branches of computer science, it's likely that you'll deal with information technology on a daily basis. Understanding what it is and how it's applied in a diverse number of ways can help to both enhance your success and diversify your quest within the field. In the subsequent sections, we'll explore what precisely this term means, and how it's put to use in a variety of ways within the realm of computer science—indeed, daily life.
Charles Babbage, a famed scientist and creator of an early, complex computer, noted, "At each increase of knowledge, as well as on the contrivance of every new tool, human labour becomes abridged." While he lived long before computers assumed such an important role in our lives, the seed of his observation is accurate nonetheless. Computers have decreased the effective workload and time cost in many areas of endeavor through the increasing eloquence of their software. But it has not done so spontaneously or without a great deal of personal investment from scientists whose focus lay in enriching the field of computing.
Loosely speaking, Information Technology is defined as the use of computers, networking and storage devices, as well as infrastructure and processing devices to exchange and secure information in its various electronic forms. But we should make a distinction between devices programmed for entertainment or personally-oriented computing processes and networks and those computers that may be programmed to perform a number of complex tasks required for business, research, scientific endeavor, or the pursuit of social inquiry via statistical collation.
Another application includes managing the influx of data into and through servers and communication hubs, each of which employs its own programs written in the dominant computer languages of today or yesterday. The direction in which such massive, multiple company or client operations are increasingly trending is into the virtual realm. With ever more individuals working remotely, and communicating with partners and clients in distant locations, the need for competent IT professionals to help facilitate and maintain the servers through which this vast river of data flows daily is more vital than ever. IT management and formation now takes us into the realm of the Cloud Servers, which are quite well-grounded, in fact. These hubs direct and manage enormous quantities of data—storing and redistributing information upon user request, largely removing the burden of a data cache from the personal computer.
IT is an immense field, and a succinct definition will always be an oversimplification of its complex nature. However, that isn't a negative quality. Because we are, as a culture, moving increasingly to virtual and server based remote-access of our data storage, we have a defined need for professionals who can navigate the complexities and subtleties of the dominant computer languages, understand the functions and features of servers, and can either build or maintain these essential aspects of our computing culture, making the most efficient uses of information technology application and theory.


text:
US cyber officials issue sweeping directive requiring federal agencies to update systems vulnerable to hacking | #government | #hacking | #cyberattack
November 12, 2021 Category: All News
By Sean Lyngaas, CNN
US officials issued a sweeping directive on Wednesday requiring federal civilian agencies to promptly update hardware and software that is vulnerable to hacking following multiple breaches of government networks in recent years.
The directive gives agencies just two weeks to remediate newly discovered software vulnerabilities, and requires agencies to have a process in place for mitigating the impact of those security issues. The directive does not apply to the Pentagon, which is in charge of its own networks.
The new policy comes after multiple warnings from US cybersecurity officials and outside experts that federal defenses have not kept pace with attempts by cybercriminals and state-sponsored hackers to access sensitive federal information. Alleged Russian hackers were able to go undetected for months last year in the unclassified networks of agencies such as the Justice Department before a private firm discovered the intrusions.
The directive sends a "clear message to all organizations across the country" to address vulnerabilities that hackers are actively exploiting to access networks, said the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which issued the directive.
The new CISA directive is an attempt to break the US government from a cycle of having to clean up from one big hack after another and instead keep key systems that hackers are trying to breach updated. Left unaddressed, software bugs can linger in systems for years and offer a path for spies and criminal groups to siphon off data.
The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the new CISA directive.
While timely updates of software vulnerabilities alone are not enough to blunt the impact of advanced hacking operations, the Biden administration is hoping a multi-pronged approach will. CISA, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, is investing millions of dollars in better security technologies and methods to more quickly detect hacks, officials say.
"Every day, our adversaries are using known vulnerabilities to target federal agencies," CISA Director Jen Easterly said in a statement on Wednesday. "As the operational lead for federal cybersecurity, we are using our directive authority to drive cybersecurity efforts toward mitigation of those specific vulnerabilities that we know to be actively used by malicious cyber actors."
The White House has made cybersecurity a top national and economic security issue, particularly after the May ransomware attack on computers at Colonial Pipeline, the main artery for delivering fuel to the East Coast. Colonial Pipeline was forced to shut down for days, causing long lines at gas stations in multiple states.
President Joe Biden in June called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to rein in the criminal hackers operating from Russian soil that experts believe are responsible for the damaging ransomware incidents at Colonial Pipeline and elsewhere.
Some Russian-speaking criminal groups have gone quiet since the Biden-Putin meeting, while others have continued to hold US companies for ransom.
Chris Inglis, the US National Cyber Director, told lawmakers on Wednesday that the US government had seen a "discernible decrease" in Russia-based hacks against US organizations since the Biden-Putin summit, but that it was "too soon to tell" if that lull in activity was "because of the material efforts undertaken by the Russians or the Russian leadership."
"It may well be that the transgressors in this space have simply … lain low, understanding that this is, for the moment, a very hot time for them," Inglis said at a House Homeland Security Committee hearing. "And we need to make sure that that continues to be the case."
The White House has also sought to rally allies to crack down on the sources of funding for ransomware gangs. The National Security Council last month hosted an initial 30-country meeting where governments said they would do more to strengthen network defenses against the threat. A follow-up meeting with 35 countries was held Tuesday and covered efforts to "accelerate cooperation to counter ransomware," according to a White House statement.
Meanwhile, US officials say they are doing more to map out the most important US critical infrastructure that needs to be protected.
Easterly told the House Homeland Security Committee hearing Wednesday that her agency expects to identify "150 to 200 entities" in the US that are top priorities to defend against hacking threats.
Posted in All News, Government Hacked
+ twenty five = thirty one


text:
The Grand Schemes of the Petty Grifter
That old adage that you can be anything you want? Well, Jeremy Wilson has lived it for years, crisscrossing the country and inventing new identities. A war hero, an MIT grad, a Hollywood journalist, an IRA operative—Jeremy has claimed to be all those things and more. And oh, what a mess he's made.
By Guy Lawson
ILLUSTRATIONS BY KELSEY NIZIOLEK
The third Chimpanzee was intrigued. Late one night in June of 2009, 19-year-old Angela Stamm was at home in the quiet middle-American suburbs outside Indianapolis, scrolling through OkCupid. Her online identity, Third Chimpanzee, was a geeky reference to Jared Diamond's book on the evolution of Homo sapiens, and it didn't take her long to find someone else online that night who employed a nerdy moniker of his own. Arthur Dent, named for the protagonist in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, noticed Angela, and the two began to chat.
The online flirtation between the two rapidly grew intense. Before long, Angela learned that the man's actual name was Finn Keenan. He was 24, Irish, a former soldier, and a graduate of MIT. Angela found him quirky and exotic, with knowledge about anarchist politics and punk music—subjects that interested her. Finn was similarly taken. Angela was witty, and she appeared beautiful in her profile, professing to desire exactly what he was after: good conversation followed by emotionally uninvolved sex.
Angela agreed to meet Finn the next day, outside a Starbucks. She dressed simply, in a skirt and a tank top; the tattoo of a stag, visible on her shoulder, caught Finn's attention. He was goofy-looking, she thought, tall and thin with closely cropped red hair. She could tell he wasn't anything like the boring boys she'd known in Indiana.
"He had an Irish accent," Angela recalled. "Not like a leprechaun—more lilting, musical. Just the fact that he was from Europe made him interesting to me. Our first date lasted 16 hours. We went to Steak 'n Shake and talked and talked. I enjoyed the way he viewed the world: skeptically."
But she could also sense danger lurking beneath the surface, which intrigued her. Finn said he was hiding from law enforcement and he'd need to leave town soon because of immigration troubles. Finn confessed he was also broke, homeless, and unable to get work. That night, the pair wound up sleeping coiled together in Angela's tiny beater Mazda Miata. In the middle of the night, Finn began to whisper to her sweetly in Gaelic. Angela didn't understand what he was saying, but she held him tighter.
Angela, who at the time lived at home with her disciplinarian father, was working part-time at a Thai restaurant and preparing to go back to school in the fall. In the days after meeting Finn, she lent him $100 and took him to the DMV to get a new license, as he claimed to have lost his ID. She began to house-sit for her aunt, so Finn joined her there. He cooked pasta Alfredo while reciting the poetry of William Blake and Charles Bukowski.
"We had sex, and it was my first time doing BDSM," Angela said. "The sex was amazing—too good to be true. He was dominant, and I was submissive. I was able to explore with him. It was a big part of the initial attachment. The bedroom bled into the rest of our relationship as he subtly manipulated me. I was head over heels."
At the time, Finn was couch surfing, staying with a friend of a friend who had offered him more than just a place to sleep. When Finn applied for a new driver's license, he used his host's Social Security number and birth certificate. In return, Finn had agreed to supply the man with a Walther handgun, but the deal fell apart. Seeking revenge, Finn's acquaintance called Angela's family to warn them about her new boyfriend's true identity and criminal history: Finn's real name was Jeremy, and he was a convicted fraudster, the man said.
The acquaintance explained over the phone that Jeremy had spent most of his adult life in prison and that he was now a fugitive. Angela's family was outraged. The police were called, and a manhunt quickly ensued, with the penniless outlaw hiding out in a hospital, posing as a doctor, using a stolen white coat and a stethoscope to scam cafeteria food and a place to sleep.
GQ's Doing Something Special This Month
Editor-in-Chief Will Welch on GQ's first-ever Summer Beach Reads issue.
By Will Welch
Angela initially cooperated with law enforcement, and after Jeremy texted her, he narrowly escaped arrest. Finally he asked her for a clandestine rendezvous, so he could explain the truth. The young woman agreed—both reluctantly and excitedly. They met in a park, Jeremy watching her arrival to make sure it wasn't a trap. When she spotted him, Angela saw that Jeremy was wearing hospital scrubs. She knew he wasn't a doctor, she said with a laugh. She could feel herself being drawn into his world. When he spoke, his Irish accent was gone—he sounded like a midwesterner.
He unloaded the burden of his past, or at least the version that he claimed to be his life story. His real name, he said, was Jeremy Keenan, and he was 35 not 24. He hadn't gone to MIT. He'd been in prison, but he'd walked away from a work-release program. He told her about an ex-wife and the young daughter who'd died of cancer; he hinted about surreptitious military missions overseas, a complicated weave of intrigue and tragedy and adventure. It was the tale of a broken and neurotic outlaw on the run—and it was irresistible to the lonely and directionless 19-year-old.
"I knew I was in trouble, because I still had feelings for him," Angela said. "My body was saying, 'Danger, danger.' Alarm bells were going off. But I was still so interested. I wanted to know what the secret was. It was very dramatic and dangerous and attractive."
But Angela couldn't make the leap—not yet. Concerned for her safety, her father confiscated her car keys, but she set up a secret e-mail address to communicate with Jeremy, who was now staying at a five-star hotel in Indianapolis. Angela said that when she asked how he could afford such accommodations, Jeremy explained that of course he wasn't paying for the room, but he wasn't actually stealing from anyone; the only victims were credit card companies and large corporations. "It was kind of a turn-on," Angela said. "I'm not a huge fan of capitalism, anyway. Jeremy was using the system, instead of the system using him."
Jeremy told Angela that he was going to leave Indiana and live on the lam and he wanted her to come along—to be Bonnie to his Clyde. He told her he would wait for her in the nearby town of West Lafayette if she chose to run away—if she dared to run away—with him. He was offering the excitement of a new life, a chance to see the world. She packed a duffel bag with clothes, a Tibetan singing bowl, and a belly-dancing scarf. She scribbled out a note to her father: I'm sorry I have to do this. I can't handle this level of control and I feel misunderstood.
Now imagining herself a fellow fugitive, Angela called Jeremy.
"It's done," she said.
"Turn off your phone and stay off the interstate," Jeremy instructed her, saying that the law would be looking for her.
When she got to West Lafayette, meeting Jeremy at another scammed hotel room, she discovered more about him.
"You should know I've got a gun," Jeremy said, opening the bedside drawer to reveal a Walther pistol.
"What the fuck!" Angela screamed. "Why? Where did you get that?"
"Trust me," Jeremy said. "I feel safer with it."
Angela felt panicked by her simultaneous attraction to Jeremy and her fear of learning too much about him. As she lay in bed that night, a scary sense of intimacy wound itself around her thoughts. "We had sex," Angela said. "It was tender, not BDSM. I knew that something here was big. It was the first night of this chapter of my life."
Jeremy Wilson wanted Angela Stamm to be Bonnie to his Clyde, so they ran away for six wild months together.
Courtesy of Angela Stamm
I first encountered Jeremy seven years later, in the winter of 2016. He'd been arrested and was sitting in a jail cell in New York City when we began what became a three-year correspondence—an intriguing and in-depth snail-mail relationship that coincided with Jeremy's ongoing gauntlet through the justice system.
What he wanted me to know, first and foremost, was that he wasn't just another scammer and criminal. He was remarkable, he said, and his adventures and exploits—however legally murky or factually dubious—had been fittingly grand.
When he was arrested in New York, Jeremy had been calling himself Jeremiah Asimov-Beckingham—and claiming that he was from the United Kingdom and possessed two Ph.D.'s and a litany of military decorations, earned as a Special Forces soldier in Afghanistan. Under this identity, Jeremy had stolen a BMW in Massachusetts and racked up charges on a fraudulent credit card. Cops located the car using its GPS system and lured the unsuspecting "Beckingham" into a precinct house in Chelsea by telling him that the vehicle had been impounded after being damaged in a police shoot-out. The ruse worked, and Jeremy turned up to collect the car at the police station—wearing a Wounded Warrior cap—where he was charged with fraud.
When the authorities ran his fingerprints, they discovered his name was Jeremy Wilson and he had a decades-long criminal history. Jeremy disputed none of his crimes. In fact, he offered a voluminous confession of his recent adventures, kiting checks worth $70,000 and purloining the BMW. There was only one thing Jeremy contested. He said his last name wasn't Wilson; rather, it was Keenan—and he claimed he was guilty of far more than the cops could imagine.
"Who the hell are you?" the cop asked, staring at Jeremy's rap sheet. "That, sir, is an excellent question," he replied.
Jeremy told me the same story. He said his father was Brian Keenan, a notorious prisoner and a leader of the Provisional Irish Republican Army during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. He confessed to me that he'd been involved in multiple murders and had roamed the earth for years as a trained assassin—"hound" was the term he used—participating in terror attacks and facing combat in war zones in the Balkans and Africa as a kind of real-life Jason Bourne.
In our letters, he detailed his participation in heinous crimes, but he could offer no proof, only hundreds of pages of meandering narration in tidy, small handwriting, mostly in all capital letters, with asterisked asides, thought bubbles, and ornate illustrations of birds of prey or dragons.
It was evident that Jeremy was smart and articulate, an autodidact who, in our letters, digressed into long dissertations on scientific and existential questions. On countless phone calls and during a jailhouse meeting we shared, he was much the same. In person, he was tall and thin, with a shaved head, his body covered in prison-house tattoos. He possessed a quiet, thoughtful manner that seemed out of place in the cacophony of the Brooklyn Detention Complex; in another life, he might have been the MIT graduate student he so wished he had become. He described himself as possessing a genius-level IQ, and he displayed an amazing command of arcane U.K. terror events from the '90s, bombings and killings that had absolutely no verifiable connection to Jeremy other than his tales—but that were so obscure that his detailed knowledge seemed inexplicable.
According to the official records, Jeremy Wilson was a kid from Speedway, Indiana, the son of a teenager named Patricia Clark and her husband, Lonnie Wilson. Jeremy described the dysfunction of his childhood in Indiana, with his bohemian mother divorcing his father and remarrying a man Jeremy loathed, estrangement from this stepfather leading him to become a teenage runaway. It was the tale of a middle-class kid stealing his grandfather's car and disappearing into the maw of straight-edge street punks and low-level cons.
But Jeremy said there was a crucial aspect of his life never captured in official records: his secret origin. He told me he'd actually been born in the United Kingdom in 1973 and smuggled into America, where a fake Cesarean birth was staged to hide the truth of his provenance. He said his mother had traveled to Northern Ireland in the early '70s, had a one-night stand with the charismatic Irish rebel Brian Keenan, and he was the product of that tryst. This paternity claim explained his whole improbable life, he insisted: He was the son of a violent Irish rebel, not just another American con man, even if he had no way to prove it.
There were constant reminders of Jeremy's impulse to commit fraud, like the letter of recommendation from the fake professor, or the army uniform he'd started to wear.
When his fraud case went to trial in New York, in March of 2017, the issue of Jeremy's supposed true identity was deemed immaterial and he was essentially forbidden from delving into it or his criminal past. I was the sole spectator in the courtroom. The evidence against him, including a videotaped confession he'd given to police, was overwhelming.
Jeremy fidgeted as the jury watched the video, grainy footage of him in an interrogation room wearing a Harvard hoodie and describing how he'd adopted the identity of an invented Englishman named Beckingham. This was his most recent "legend," he told the police, referring to the many alter egos he had created. "People don't assume you're fucking with them," Jeremy said on the video, as jurors stole glances in his direction.
Jeremy was promptly found guilty of multiple counts of fraud. Prior to his sentencing, his defense attorney commissioned a psychiatric report that noted that Jeremy didn't exhibit the symptoms of psychosis or delusional thinking, even if his accounts of his "dual life" were improbable. "As evidenced by his myriad identities, Mr. Wilson does not have a consistent sense of self," the psychiatric report concluded. "He becomes whoever people want him to be."
Jeremy told me the stories he'd told the psychiatrist, sprawling tales that swirled like Walter Mitty fantasies. He knew how crazy it all sounded. In the '90s alone, Jeremy claimed to have been involved in terror bombings in London, protested against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, led counter-sniper operations in the Balkans, and traded arms and blood diamonds in Africa. While Jeremy's circuitous tales of international derring-do proved impossible to verify, evidence of his more quotidian, more personal—and in many ways more intriguing—adventures could be reported and fact-checked.
Angela Stamm, his runaway partner for six months in 2009, had been Jeremy's one great love, he told me, even though they were now estranged. When I tracked her down, she was working as a manicurist in Indiana, a witty and charming young woman who was able to laugh at her experiences with Jeremy, even as she spoke of that time with a mixture of disbelief and amazement.
Angela told me that the day after she ran away from home to meet Jeremy, the pair took a bus to Chicago. Jeremy talked about his feats as a soldier and a global adventurer. He didn't tell her his elaborate backstory all at once, or in any coherent way. Angela said she wanted to trust him, and believe him, but it was a struggle. Her father had been in the military, and she knew that soldiers who'd really been in combat rarely talked about their experiences, and certainly not in the grandiose manner affected by Jeremy. She'd had her doubts, but she was undeterred.
"I didn't believe him from the start," Angela told me. "I didn't want to deny him his story, but I was personally skeptical. I asked leading questions and he would dodge them. He contradicted himself. The timing didn't work. I thought he was trying to impress me, and make me feel sorry for him—to feel sympathy."
After they'd arrived in Chicago in 2009, Jeremy's Irish brogue returned, to Angela's surprise. He set about inventing another new identity, as Finn Jeremiah O'Neill. At a Kinko's, he created an official-looking document with a corporate letterhead copied from the Internet. Jeremy printed the letter, faxed it, and then walked with Angela to a nearby luxury hotel. He instructed her to wait outside. Minutes later he emerged with a room key, to her amazement.
"For a stay of less than 24 hours and with no room-service charges, you fax a corporate authorization to the hotel to bill the room to the company," Jeremy told me, explaining his technique for scamming hotel rooms for free. "Make a reservation and show up late, after 5 p.m. When it comes to turning over your credit card, you say they should already have a credit card authorization faxed to them. They find it and generally check you in. About two hours later, you'll get a call in the room saying that the card number won't let us make charges—can you give us another card? To which you reply, 'Actually, no, hence the fax. I'm sure it's easily fixed, but my office is closed. Can this wait until morning?' They say, 'Oh, of course, we have you staying with us for three nights.' Then you leave at 7 a.m. the next morning, after raiding the continental breakfast. You get a full belly, hot shower, and comfy bed, and all you 'stole' was a room that was likely empty, anyway."
To find a more sustainable form of shelter, Angela and Jeremy searched the website Couchsurfing.com for someone willing to take them in for free. While riding the train to meet a potential host, Jeremy gave Angela the story he wanted her to follow—now always speaking in his fake Irish accent.
Jeremy said his name would be Finn. He was born in Belfast, and he was an Army Ranger with immigration troubles, trying to get a passport. "We're a young couple who need help because of a bad situation," Jeremy said.
The hosts were a couple in their 20s living in a loft in Wicker Park, and they seemed tickled by Jeremy's Irish accent and sweet disposition. Jeremy insisted on cooking portobello-mushroom burgers for everyone, generosity to their hosts he would always insist on when they couch surfed. To maintain their ruse, Angela said, she referred to him always as Finn, never Jeremy, even when they were alone, lest she slip up or be overheard.
Insinuating himself with the Irish expat community in Chicago, offering hints of his involvement in the Troubles and risking his phony accent with real Irish people, Jeremy got a job as a bouncer at a pub. He and Angela shared an interest in anarchy; they both believed in polyamory and wanted an open relationship, but finding boundaries wasn't easy. At a Couchsurfing.com party they attended, with young people from all over the world, Angela met a pretty blonde from Germany and she started flirting with her, to Jeremy's delight. Tipsy, the German woman came home with them, and the threesome disappeared into the bedroom together. Angela worried that she was crossing all kinds of lines, but she was unable to stop herself.
"It was like living in a dream," Angela recalled. "I felt disconnected from the reality of the situation. It was a weird feeling. I could call 911 any time, or just talk to a cop, and I often wanted to, but I felt guilty. I was trapped in the lie. I was under his spell."
Sitting on the couch one afternoon, the two began talking about their future, imagining living above a pub in Ireland someday. Jeremy asked Angela to marry him; he was speaking in his concocted Irish accent. She didn't say yes—but she didn't say no.
Jeremy's constant paranoia as a fugitive seemed to be confirmed when, on the street one day, a fellow former inmate from Indiana recognized him and called out his name—"Jeremy, Jeremy." He recoiled in horror, afraid the ex-con could report him to the authorities and now certain that Chicago was too close to Indiana. Then a former boyfriend of Angela's was able to track Jeremy's identity as Finn online, and the ex messaged her on Facebook. When Angela spoke to Jeremy about this, she witnessed a new side of him as he announced in a blind panic that they had to leave town. Jeremy suggested Colorado or Montana. "We'll find a place that sings to us," he said.
Jeremy left the apartment in the morning, returning within a couple of hours driving a blue Kia hatchback rental he'd obtained under false pretenses.
"Is this stealing a car?" Angela asked as they drove away from Chicago.
"We'll drop it off when we get where we're going," Jeremy replied.
"I don't want to know specifics," she said.
This was the bargain they were making with each other: Each believed they were protecting the other, as they raced west in a stolen vehicle, caught up in a folie à deux. After getting pulled over in Wisconsin, they were convinced they were going to be caught, but Jeremy's fraudulent license fooled the cop. Crossing through the Badlands of the Dakotas, Jeremy introduced yet another identity he was now going to inhabit.
"So I'm going to go by Angus now," he said, switching from his Irish accent to a Scottish brogue. The new accent was subtler than his singsong Irish, but the transformation caught Angela by surprise and she burst out laughing.
"Don't you want to go by Sean Connery?" she asked, comically imitating the accent of the famous Scotsman.
There seemed to be a glimmer of humorous self-awareness in his eye—like he knew that they were playing an elaborate game. But he persisted with his fresh alter ego, building a new biography. Instead of being an Irish soldier, he told Angela, he was now a Scotsman who'd served in the American Special Forces. His full name was Angus "Jocko" Ferguson.
Angus had the same personality and interests and tastes as Finn (and Jeremy), but he narrated an ornate tale of the Scotsman's picaresque adventures to Angela—like the wars he'd fought in, always casting himself as both a decorated hero and a wounded and vulnerable warrior. Now in the Rockies, Angela developed a severe case of vertigo, as if dizzied by the mounting frauds and lies.
In early August they pulled into Missoula, Montana, a quiet college town nestled on the banks of the Clark Fork River and comfortingly surrounded by mountains—the kind of remote settlement where they might be able to hide out for the long term.
Couchsurfing.com yielded a place to stay, so Jeremy and Angela introduced themselves to a man named Reid Reimers and his roommate, both active members of the local amateur-theater scene. Jeremy told them that he'd studied theater in Scotland, with an emphasis on Shakespeare, and he was keen to participate in their forthcoming cabaret night. Charmed by Jeremy's tales of the stage, which blended, improbably, with whispers about secret military operations he'd been involved in, the hosts seemed to enjoy their guests, upgrading them from the couch to a bedroom in the house.
As they settled in, Jeremy decided that Angela needed a new identity as well: She could be located online by her surname, and she needed to hide to protect him. He suggested one of the Spanish words for "deer," to match her shoulder tattoo—venado. She liked the sound of it, so he set about obtaining fake IDs for Angela Venado, copying and pasting letterhead from Indiana court records to provide a Social Security number—just as he'd done for his Finn identity.
With Angela now bedridden with dizziness, Jeremy took to disappearing for hours at a time, returning with a duffel bag filled with military uniforms, boots, and armored vests, claiming he was issued them by the U.S. military when he said he enlisted in the Reserves. He talked about going on military exercises and fast-roping from helicopters as part of the training he was undertaking. When he showed up with a slew of household goods—including a computer, a bed, and a flat-screen TV—he told Angela that he'd "hacked" into Walmart's computers to steal the items.
"Funny things happen," he told Angela. "Just trust me."
To check her e-mail, Angela would secretly log on to a laptop. She told me she received an e-mail from her father, explaining that he was going to cancel the credit card he'd given her because of large charges made at a Walmart in Montana. Angela wrote back, asking for proof of the bogus charges, and her father sent an image of a statement showing Jeremy's purchases.
"Jeremy didn't hack anything," Angela told me. "He had no computer know-how. He wasn't good with computers or the Internet. He'd been in prison most of his life."
Angela confronted Jeremy, but he said someone else must have stolen the card. It was his pattern as he continued gaslighting her. "Your lack of trust is going to ruin us," he said. Oddly, Jeremy's accent disappeared during the argument.
Over time, Jeremy hosted the amateur cabaret show, and he participated in a local production of The Rocky Horror Show. It seemed to Angela that Jeremy loved acting—indeed, he was acting all the time. Life in Missoula was pleasant in many ways, but there didn't seem to be any endgame in mind, and there were constant reminders of Jeremy's impulse to commit fraud, like the letter of recommendation he forged from a fake professor, or the veteran's health-benefit card he finagled, or the army uniform he started to wear, a costume that changed his affect to crisp militarism—at odds with his anarchist politics.
"You can turn me in anytime," Jeremy frequently told Angela, a dare that she felt was a way of lording his vulnerability over her.
Finally, needing money because Jeremy hadn't found work, Angela took a job with an environmental group. Part of her duties required collecting petition signatures. When she had to travel to a nearby town for a Shakespeare festival one weekend, Jeremy came along, dressed in his army garb. Once there, he grew upset when he sensed Angela's interest drifting toward a young and handsome motorcycle-riding photographer. Jeremy angrily confronted her, the military uniform he was wearing adding menace to the scene. He sat close to her on a bench and spoke in a loud voice, in a way that seemed to threaten violence.
"Get away from me," Angela said.
"You're scaring me."
"You belong to me," he hissed, attempting to assert himself.
Driving back to Missoula the next day, they passed a sign for Malmstrom Air Force Base. Still wearing his uniform, Jeremy took the moment as a chance to impress Angela by using his fake veteran ID. Angela had grown up on military bases and knew they could get exotic foods that weren't available in town at the commissary; she had ID showing that she was the daughter of a former member of the military, so she qualified for entrance. As fate would have it, the base was on a high-alert exercise, so the guard at the gate turned them away. They could have driven off, but Jeremy was in character and he was self-righteously outraged as well as deluded that his Special Forces uniform was more than a mere costume.
"Arrogance being what it is, I instead drove over to the visitors' center and laid some command presence down," Jeremy recalled.
A guard ran the Illinois license plate of their car and discovered it was stolen. They were ordered to pull into a parking lot, and a sense of doom descended on the pair of runaways. Moments later, the car was surrounded by armed men ordering them to lie facedown on the ground. The two were taken to separate interrogation rooms. Jeremy maintained his indignant-officer routine and Scottish identity as Angus Ferguson while Angela sobbed uncontrollably as she sat handcuffed to a chair.
"How well do you know Angus?" a female officer asked Angela.
She didn't tell them that Angus wasn't his real name, nor did they ask.
"It's not my car," Angela said. "I've only known him for a few months."
Having been released by the police and dropped in a Walmart parking lot hours from Missoula later that night, Angela called her hosts, who came to pick her up, a kindness she told me she regretted taking advantage of. She avoided questions about what had happened at the base, and together they managed to raise bail for Jeremy. As they left the sheriff's office, a guard nodded at Jeremy's military uniform and indicated that one of the adornments was upside down.
In the car, Jeremy told Reid that he was part of a covert military operation and he'd been flagged by a rogue branch of the army. "They're turning against me," he said, his bizarre tale leading to an uneasy silence in the vehicle.
Jeremy seemed to realize that he had to leave immediately, before the authorities ran his prints and discovered that he was a fugitive. He asked Angela to come along, but she refused. In the middle of the night, Jeremy left in a taxi.
"Don't tell me where you're going," Angela said.
Hours later the police descended on the house.
Fleeing, Jeremy told me he drove farther west in another stolen rental car, this time a blue Mustang, first to Spokane and then Portland before arriving in San Francisco, crossing the Golden Gate Bridge into the city at two in the morning. He checked into another fancy hotel, employing his usual scam to take an executive suite. Untethered from the fear of implicating Angela in major financial fraud, he'd decided he was now going to live large on the lam.
"I didn't really have a plan at the time or know how long I'd need the hotel room," Jeremy told me.
Jeremy and Angela spoke by Skype often, discussing whether he should turn himself in. At one point, he admitted to using her father's credit card at the Walmart in Missoula—and she stopped communicating with him, at least for a while. Unabashed in his fraud, he was no longer concerned about housing or food. He rented a small apartment and began DJ'ing anarchist events and attending fetish nights.
Angela had moved to Atlanta, to live with her mother, but she and Jeremy inevitably were back in touch. In November, he flew her to San Francisco. When he picked her up at the airport in the Mustang, she assumed it was stolen. After they got to his apartment that night, she said they needed to break things off.
"I don't love you anymore," she said.
"I don't believe you," he replied in his midwestern accent.
Jeremy was desperate to convince her that he was going to build a new life, but it was no use. "A fantasy was shattered," Angela recalled, saying she flew home the next day.
Then Jeremy had an idea. A serious problem he faced was that he had no practical vocational skills with which to get a decent job, a reality that—to his mind, anyway—continually forced him into a life of crime. What if he could get legitimate work, maybe even a career? Would that win Angela back? One day he was reading a music magazine when he came across an article that mentioned that the British Broadcasting Corporation had begun using more freelance journalists.
"That got me thinking," Jeremy told me. "Could I do that?"
Before he approached the BBC, he decided to see if he'd enjoy the work and if he was any good at it. The band the Melvins was playing a show in town, so Jeremy bought a video camera and persuaded a couple of acquaintances to pose as his crew. At the venue, Jeremy introduced himself as Angus Ferguson, a correspondent from MuchMusic, then Canada's version of MTV, and he wound up hitting it off with the band, he told me. The prank was a blast, Jeremy decided, and he figured that journalism could be a way to make some legitimate money and perhaps even create a new and durable identity.
Days later, he drove down to L.A. in search of the BBC's office in Santa Monica. In his Scottish brogue, he introduced himself to a reporter and claimed he'd been hired as a freelancer by the New York office. The man reluctantly let Jeremy use a desk, where he quickly generated a memo from New York vouching for one Angus Ferguson. Now Jeremy-as-Angus was able to pick his own assignments, interviewing music groups like the Flaming Lips and politicians like then San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom; he claimed that he edited and submitted his filmed interviews of Taylor Swift and the Black Eyed Peas and was twice paid, though he had no idea if the pieces ever aired or if there was any real proof of these deeds. He told me the BBC liked his irreverent and light-handed style of reportage; no evidence of these pieces can be found.
One encounter that can be confirmed was his brush with one of Angela's favorite bands, the Decemberists, whom Jeremy arranged to interview—hoping that it might help him persuade her to come to California again. While mingling with the group before a concert, Jeremy got two members of the band to pose with him for a photo while holding a piece of paper that read: "We Wub Woo Angela!"
Achieving some measure of success as a fake journalist, Jeremy claimed that he started submitting work to other outlets—ITV, Sky, CBC, MTV, MuchMusic—always unaware if any of the pieces were broadcast and, in truth, indifferent to the outcome. Six months earlier, he'd been a homeless American fugitive in Indiana, and now he was a Scottish entertainment correspondent in Hollywood and having a great time.
Using his fake identity, Jeremy rented an apartment in Marina del Rey, near the beach, in L.A., taking on an aspiring actress as a roommate. He set about building a new life. Connecting with the fetish scene, he was once again cast, this time as Rocky, in a production of the The Rocky Horror Show that played to a packed house. He was trying to amass money to move overseas, to New Zealand perhaps, using a fake passport, where he could disappear into the ether forever—and persuade Angela to join him. He had a string of sexual encounters, many through swinger websites. He took a woman with him to Vegas to gamble, telling her on the way that he might be suddenly called away on duty because he was with the Special Forces, as the tattoo on his arm indicated; in the middle of the trip, the woman told me, he vanished in his uniform.
"So what was the plan, other than to make Angela return in a fit of jealousy?" Jeremy asked me rhetorically. "I was going to network my way into a real job in the industry, and so cement my identity as Angus the Scotsman into the public eye that no one could possibly believe I was anyone else. I wanted public perception to subsume reality. Insanity? Well, are the Kardashians actually the new American royalty? L.A. is a crazy town. Reality isn't the same in that 20-mile zone. I just needed one more bet to come through. I needed a new pair of identities for Angela and I.
"Somehow, through some flux distortion in the time-space continuum, I had become cool," he continued. "But the universe was about to slap me in the face."
The day after Christmas 2009, Angela arrived in L.A. for a weeklong visit, teasing Jeremy for still not getting rid of the stolen blue Mustang. People ask fewer questions if you drive a nice car, he explained to her. She discovered that he'd been dating a series of women, and it seemed to her that none of them were aware they were having sex with an ex-con fugitive—they all thought he was a Scottish journalist. Preying on lonely and vulnerable women was one skill Jeremy had perfected. The deception upset Angela, particularly as it related to him injecting the "poison" of his lies into his emotional and sexual connections—but she still engaged in threesomes with him, and they went to Burner parties together. "It was dangerous and exciting," she recalled, "a sexy nightmare."
Flogging Molly was an Irish-American rebel-punk outfit that Jeremy particularly liked, and so he arranged to cover their gig in Vegas early in the New Year, taking a cameraman along with Angela. Jeremy drank Guinness and conducted phony interviews, with the lead singer drunkenly declaring that Jocko Ferguson and Angela had been brought together by fate.
The con man was on top of the world—until his phone buzzed. It was a text from the aspiring actress who'd been staying at his apartment in L.A. Apparently, Angela had lost her purse at a party and a friend had dropped it off with the concierge at Jeremy's building. Collecting the bag, the roommate looked inside, only to discover Angela's fake driver's license in the name Venado, along with her real license from Indiana with the surname Stamm. The roommate then searched Jeremy's room, finding his Walther and what he called his "Jason Bourne" stash of false IDs.
"Who are you?" the text asked.
Jeremy called and tried to talk her out of alerting the authorities. He told Angela not to panic. Trying to avoid arrest, Jeremy phoned the police in L.A. and told them his roommate was stalking him because of his BBC credentials and connections with celebrities. Returning to L.A., the noose tightening, he took Angela to the airport and put her on a plane back to Atlanta. "Sorry this has to end this way," he said to her as they parted. "I hope to see you again." He said this all in his Scottish accent.
Planning for flight himself, he set about preparing to sell the multiple computers and extensive comic-book collection he'd accumulated. Then he went down to his car—only to find it missing. (Unbeknownst to Jeremy at the time, the ruse that followed would be repeated five years later, by cops in New York City.)
Jeremy went to the towing company to retrieve the vehicle and was startled, he said, by the click of two guns being put against the back of his head. Jeremy was accused of stealing the identity and car of the BBC journalist Angus "Jocko" Ferguson, as if there really were such a person. He was then fingerprinted and the miasma of his many criminal pasts began to take shape.
"Who the hell are you?" a sergeant asked, staring at Jeremy's rap sheet.
"That, sir, is an excellent question," he replied.
Jeremy's younger half sister, Mary Rybak, keeps a small repository she calls Jeremy's Box. It represents the last physical vestiges of her brother's life in Indiana. The contents included poetry their mother had written, as well as samples of her writing from college. There were also redacted reports from the time of Jeremy's arrest in 2010, after his six-month spree with Angela. "He is by all accounts just a very peculiar and thorough impostor," a forensic report concluded. "Your case but I'd run him through Foggy Bottom [State] or Langley [CIA] to be sure."
Jeremy ultimately pleaded guilty to four counts and was given an 81-month federal sentence for the frauds he perpetrated in 2009, during his six months running with Angela (she was never indicted for a crime). Over the subsequent years spent in prison, Jeremy fell out of touch with Angela and with his half sister, due in large part to his insistence that he's the son of an Irish Republican, not a lost soul from a broken family in Indiana.
Jeremy told me he was trapped, with little formal education, a long criminal history, unable to get any work on the outside save for the most menial jobs. He was smart, funny, charming, in the way of a confidence man, and he was aware of how crazy his stories sounded—but he couldn't let them go.
"I have no family," he wrote. "No friends. No support. No resources. I am homeless. I have no ID. I can't access social services, without committing perjury or fraud. No one believes me."
After he was convicted at his trial in 2017, Jeremy was sentenced to 7 to 14 years in New York. He was then extradited to Massachusetts to face charges for the crimes he'd allegedly committed in that state. In Massachusetts, he was charged as a habitual offender, which would mean a mandatory minimum of ten years, to be served after his term in New York. Even when those terms were done, Jeremy would potentially also have to serve out his remaining federal time for violating his supervised release.
Angela and Mary told me that they're convinced that Jeremy no longer knows the truth about himself, a view he described as "prescient"; he's too caught up in the intricate web of deception that he'd woven. Ensnared in an Alice in Wonderland conundrum—"Who in the world am I?"—Jeremy wrote to me from prison most recently to say he was now certain that this article could be decisive in determining his fate. His reasoning was paradoxical: If I portrayed him as an incorrigible impostor, he felt sure he would be treated ever more harshly by prosecutors, but if I believed him to be a killer and terrorist operative for the IRA, well, then perhaps he could, in turn, prompt a law-enforcement investigation and atone for his many sins.
Jeremy's knuckles bear the tattooed Gaelic words mair fior, which translates to "stay true"—but to whom, or to what? After all our letters and conversations over three years, I hope he finds a way to solve the mystery of his identity, but it occurred to me that the ultimate victim of his decades of lies might well be the con man himself; Jeremy's final mark was Jeremy. As of the time of this writing, no one knows who Jeremy truly is—not even Jeremy.
"I want to be who I am," he wrote to me. "The son of Brian and Patricia. Anything else is a dream."
Guy Lawson is the author of 'War Dogs,' the book upon which the film of the same name was based.
A version of this story originally appeared in the June/July 2019 issue with the title "The Grand Schemes of the Petty Grifter."
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