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Q: Sql Server 2008 - Convert localized DateTime column to UTC I have some columns in a few tables in my database that are all in the localized server DateTime values. I want to convert these all to UTC DateTime values (does not need to be DateTime2 since it will be assumed the new values will be in UTC).
I would like to do this in a single SQL statement. I am not entirely sure how to perform this as I do not spend a lot of time in the database.
Assumptions can be made that my table name is TestTable and my localized DateTime column is called TestDateTime.
I would want the script to do the update to the table as well as the conversion.
Any way to possibly do this?

A: You can substract getutcdate() from getdate() to find the difference:
select  DateAdd(s,DateDiff(s, getdate(),getutcdate()), LocalizedDateColumn)

This assumes you are in the same summertime/wintertime state as the time you're trying to convert.   Not ideal, but the best conversion I know of that you can do in pure SQL.
A C# client has a much stronger conversion:
yourDateTime.ToUniversalTime()

Unlike the SQL version, the .NET version will correctly convert a wintertime date during the summer.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Keep your keys organized with this unique key chain featuring a braided loop for easy gripping and two large, colorful dangling charms.
Our key chain was inspired by a charming tattoo design drawing in The Met collection made between 1900–1945 by Clark & Sellers (American, active 20th century). Western sailors first learned about traditional Polynesian tattoos from voyages to the South Pacific—the word "tattoo" comes from the Tahitian tatau.


I have finally picked up working on the Adelaide Photography 1970-2000 book with Adam Dutkiewicz that is to be published by Moon Arrow Press. There has been more than a year's break from the early stages of planning due to other book and exhibition commitments by Adam and myself. We have just called for submissions for the portfolios in the book, and we are now sitting back and waiting to see what comes in from the call out. Though it is not really clear at this early stage what kind of work will be submitted, the book's explicit regional focus will fill one of the gaps in the art history of Australian photography that has traditionally been written around a cumulative teleology of styles and periods.
The design of the book is simple: each photographer will be given 6-8 pages to present their work from this period, and they will have a text to describe their work and their biography or profile. As there are currently around 20 photographers who expressed an interest in submitting a portfolio and there is some text, the book looks to be around 130 pages. The launch of the book will be at an exhibition of some of the prints in Adelaide early in 2020.
The year 2000 is a useful cutoff point for the book because this is when photography started to go global: the explosion of websites, art fairs, festivals, biennales, travelling museum exhibitions, catalogues, conferences, artist residencies etc associated with the international transmission of objects, ideas and photographers operating across the boundaries of nation states. If this meant that the hold that European and North American artists had over the production of contemporary art has been broken, that the art world has become more event-driven with biennials and art fairs in far-flung locations, then it also means the biennales are institutional sites whose ways of seeing contain an aesthetic regime of experience.
My own portfolio is structured around my shift from street photography to topographics. This would exclude the landscape photographs, and it foreshadows my turn to, and latter embrace of, a topographical approach to still photography. The topographical turn, which was made during this period, with both the Port Adelaide series and the spatial interpretations of Adelaide, was largely shaped by using large format cameras. It was a foreshadowing in the sense of my not consciously relating this to the New Topographics tradition in the US, even though I was consciously photographing a human altered landscape.
Adelaide was then a provincial city without a nationally recognised artist working with photography. In fact, nationally, photography had a relatively low level of recognition in the visual arts. The history of photography in Australia was represented by a single, casually researched, book by Jack Cato…..After the overwhelming breadth, diversity, and intensity of Sydney, Adelaide felt like an overgrown regional town. The general knowledge of photography students consisted of Max Dupain, or possibly David Moore, and the odd international photographer like Diane Arbus.
Despite the 1970s being the Dunstan decade with its emergence of social movements (aboriginal land rights, feminism, environmentalism etc) the lack of the buzz of cultural energy in the visual arts meant that art photography was bootstrap stuff in an isolated provincial city. This meant that as photography seemed to have little artistic baggage or accumulated history of the kind that weighed so heavily on the shoulders of painters or sculptors, so it offered the promise of a new start. Seemed because there was the tension between the photograph as trace and the photograph as picture, that is to say between the photograph as document and the photograph as artwork.
The primary aim of photography curating in the 1970s in Australia was to establish photography as fine art, to include photography as a specific medium within the canon of modernist art practice, and to construct a modernist photographic cannon of master photographers and iconic images. Photography was a young medium knocking on the doors of art. Establish photography as a fine art medium was done without realising that photography's vernacular and reproducibility complicates, and makes problematic, its place in the art gallery that is based on the constant exclusion of the vernacular and of reproducibility itself. As Martin Jolly says photography as a creative art threatened the grounds of the art museum's hierarchies and collection policies.
The assumption is that art photography has value in our culture beyond its market market price and that culture is is a more worthy activity than commerce. What might that value be?
One answer is given by the avant garde in Adelaide associated with the Experimental Art Foundation (EAF). This was formed in 1974 by a small group of Adelaide artists and theorists, in order to both encourage new approaches to the visual arts and to promote the idea of art as 'radical and only incidentally aesthetic'. The emphasis was art practices that were analytical, critical and experimental, and which challenged established thinking and expanded cultural discourse.
The energetic visual activity in the Adelaide periphery was the new, local avant-garde concerned to a sweep away older, diffuse, awkwardly connotative ways of seeing. This included those abstract modernist ways of seeing associated with the refugees from fascist, war-torn Europe who endeavoured to realise the dream of a lively, experimental culture in Adelaide in the 1950s and 1960s, documentary and late modernist formalist photography. The iconoclasm of the avant grade saw photography as a document, index, trace to performative, conceptual, or land art practices and not as a picture or artwork that would critically inform, challenge, or reveal.
During the 1970s to 2000 period the acceptance of photography as art seemed tied to a vision of it as conforming to a Modernism that stressed formalism, beauty, originality, authenticity and subjective expressiveness and as a radical critique of that Modernism. In the 1980s photographic art became entangled with Postmodernism centred around an Anglo-American reading. This sets up a dichotomy between those values associated with Modernism – the aesthetic, its autonomy and medium-specificity – and postmodern anti-aestheticism that used photography to take issue with aesthetic theory in general, and painting as vehicles of allegedly regressive forms of experience and art making.
What emerged in the 1980s was photography as a picture in the form of the 'postmodern' arts of appropriation, quotation and re-photography premised on the assumption that the mass media pictures in a world dominated but advertising were untrustworthy, illusory, distractive, hegemonic, dangerous to 'firsthand experience'. Hence the critique of representation or race, gender, sexuality, consumerism. This is a concept-driven model of photography as art.
The year 200o is also a good cutting off point for the book because things shifted in the late 1990s apart from the internet and globalisation. Contemporary photography as a picture was reinterpreted as a rethinking of, and reinventing, a painterly pictorial tradition i.e., the longstanding tradition of image making to which 19th century paintings (eg., whose of Courbet and Manet) belong. Here the photograph and the camera that makes it, have replaced the brush, paint and canvas as a new painterly medium or art with its focus on the pictorial syntax. This autonomous, free standing image declares its own artfulness through the realisation of a composite, synthetic photographic tableau or picture through the use of digital technology to combine the various elements so that the joins do not show.
Here the photograph as a photo-painting is apprehended as a tableau, if it is given to be seen, by whatever means, as an internally organised image that compels on the basis of that organisation. As exemplified by key international figures such as Jeff Wall, Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky and Hiroshi Sugimoto, the picture is designed to be ambiguous, and it absorbs the viewer in aesthetic appreciation. The pictures–eg., Walls 1993 A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) or the 1999 Morning Cleaning, Mies van der Rohe Foundation, Barcelona– are an event or mode of experience rather than just a picture of everyday life. The formal conventions of this hybrid, composite 'auratic art' – in the Benjaminian sense of the term – are for example large-scale formats, technologically sophisticated color prints and limited editions.
The adherents of this dominant sceptic regime in visual art, such as Jean-François Cheerier or Michael Fried hold that a lack of ambiguity and absorption makes the photograph naive, illustrative and documentary. Yet documentary offers a divergent path for contemporary photography–as it goes against this logic of picture-making of the absorptive model or what Julian Stallabrass calls the 'museum photograph' (and its ties to the art market). This divergent path is one characterised by photography's ability to offer subtle critical comments on the social and economic reality in which we live, and its tradition of actively taking part in transformative social processes.


RadioBanter » rec.radio » Shortwave > Tiny-Tenna ... anybody ? ?
Tiny-Tenna ... anybody ? ?
God Bless President Trump ..
God Bless President Trump's whole family ..
God Bless Our Law Enforcement people ..
God bless the CIA ..
God bless the FBI ..
God bless the Department of Justice ..
God Bless the US House of Representatives ..
God Bless the US Senate ..
God bless the Department of Homeland Security ..
God Bless our military ..
God Bless Us ... EVERYONE ! ! !


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Cleburne County (Arkansas) Rejects Voting Machines and Votes to Move to Hand Counted Paper Ballots
The Cleburne County quorum court passed a binding resolution making them a "paper ballot" county, meaning future elections would be administered with hand marked paper ballots that are hand counted. The vote was in response to Arkansas Voter Integrity Initiative, INC.(AVII) CEO Colonel Conrad Reynolds' push for election computers to be removed from Arkansas elections.
Reynolds stated, "For more than a decade there have been too many unanswered questions with these voting machines, which are essentially computers. The owners of the machine company are intentionally shielded from the public. The machines do not read the names on the ballots, instead they scan barcodes, which humans cannot read. They also utilize proprietary software that we are not allowed to examine. This all means voters cannot verify that their vote is being counted properly as mandated by state law. As a former military intelligence officer, I look at this through a national security perspective and conclude there are big problems with our current voting system."
Arkansas elections are totally controlled by Election Systems and Software (ES&S) out of Omaha, Nebraska. ES&S has been criticized* for their unknown ownership and lack of transparency.
AVII's attorney Clint Lancaster, stated that Arkansas election law 7-5-301 codifies each county's right to choose their voting process, including the use of paper ballots which are hand counted.
Jacque Martin, a Cleburne County Justice of the Peace who voted in favor of moving to paper ballots said, "It's time we take our elections back and return to having elections we can have faith in - with transparency and integrity."
Colonel Reynolds added, "If you're not from Cleburne County and want this, you can do it to. The JPs got a lot of calls from their constituents telling them they supported us moving to paper ballots, so I suggest you do the same in your county."
AVII aims to get the other 74 county quorum courts in Arkansas to vote to return to paper ballots by early 2023.
Print Headline: Cleburne County (Arkansas) Rejects Voting Machines and Votes to Move to Hand Counted Paper Ballots

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Play Day participants pictured left to right: Back row - Kyna Hudman, Makaylee Butler, Brooke Swaffer, Cale Fogerson, Dallyn Fogerson and Justin Self. Front row - Kendall Swaffer, Kohan Hudman, Sterlin Self, Trea Peterson, Sylee Peterson and Joby Fogerson.
Published June 7, 2012 @ 6 a.m.
The 2012 Garza County 4-H Play Day Series prizes were awarded following the final play day on Saturday, June 2.
Paul and Danya Peterson of Southland led the series. The traditional events offered were barrels, poles & flags. There three new events were the keyhole, stakes race and a weekly mystery event. The mystery events were fun and funny but all I'll add is it included western boots, water balloons and apples.
The buckle for the 5 & Under age group was sponsored by Gary McDaniel and went to Sylee Peterson. A leather halter sponsored by Brian Drum Plumbing went to Kendall Swaffer. Citizens Bank, Post sponsored the 6-9 buckle which went to Trea Peterson and the leather halter which went to Joby Fogerson. The 10-14 age group was very close but Brooke Swaffer pulled out the win earning a buckle sponsored by GCJLA with Makaylee Bulter earning the leather halter sponsored by HF&C Feeds. Cale Fogerson received the 16-19 buckle also sponsored by Gary McDaniel. Each participant received a personalized bucket, designed by Danya, full of horse supplies.
Other youth participating included Kohan Hudman, Kyna Hudman, Justin Self, Sterlin Self and Dallyn Fogerson. Open sponsors included Gebos, Buzz Cooper, Dennis & Nancy McDonald and Fogerson Arena. Thanks to the Post Stampede Rodeo Board for the use of the arena. Weekly helpers included Paul and Danya Peterson, Kyle and Jerry Fogerson and Nancy McDonald.


N-Dubz star Fazer has reportedly filed for bankruptcy after struggling to pay his tax bills.
According to The Sun, the 26-year-old is broke after experiencing financial woes over the last few months.
Official records allegedly show that the rapper, who formed N-Dubz alongside Dappy and former X Factor judge Tulisa Contostavlo, was made bankrupt earlier this month.
It is not known how much the producer, whose real name is Richard Rawson, owes the taxman.
However it is thought that Fazer could lose his share of a £796,500 North London flat he bought with Contostavlo.
Fazer became a father for the first time in February when his model partner Ashley Emma gave birth to a girl, Ava Rose Rawson.
The bankruptcy reports come just days after his former bandmate Dappy denied reports he is heading into the Celebrity Big Brother house to avoid bankruptcy.
"WTF is all this bullshhhhhhh in the paper!!!!!! I just got a quarter of a mill!!!! Plus my new record deal is on da table!!!," Dappy furiously tweeted.
"I got doe (dough) now and always will have!!!!!! If your talented you'll always be financially stable!!!
Fazer has not commented on the bankruptcy reports.


text:
(→Conclusion)
If in the Jacob saga, "the good life" for the male is to be the "first born" in the family, for the female "the good life" requires love and fertility. Unfortunately neither sister has both. The beautiful Rachel is loved but barren, and the "ordinary" Leah is fertile but not loved. Both women long for the part of life they have been denied. Leah expresses her longing through the names she gives her sons: Reuben, ''The LORD has seen my misery. Perhaps now my husband will love me'' (29:32); Simeon, ''The LORD heard that I am not loved'' (29:33). Eventually, Leah gives up on love from her husband: Judah, ''This time I will praise the LORD'' (29:35).
The conflict between the sisters is never settled. They can function as sisters, but the agony expressed in the names of their sons remains unsatisfied. Rachel does have another son whom she names Ben-Oni: ''son of my sorrow'' (35:18). As the name indicates, there is no joy in this birth. Rachel dies in childbirth and Jacob renames this son Benjamin. Rachel, the beloved wife, is buried in a tomb near Ephrath. Little more is said about Leah except that the unloved fertile wife is buried in Jacob's family tomb (49:31).
Leaving that conflict unresolved, the saga returns to the conflict between Jacob and Laban. Like their initial conflict, the "visible" issue involves Jacob's wages. Once again this serves as the pretext for their struggle for dominance. In the midst of their escalating battle, Jacob decides to flee (31:2). Jacob's flight with his wives, Laban's daughters, generates a final provocation. The narrator comments that Jacob ''stole Laban's heart by not telling him that he was leaving'' (31:20). Eventually Laban caught up with his fleeing family, and the two men engage in a verbal battle of mutual accusation.
Eventually Laban, not Jacob, proposes that they make a covenant (31:44)—not a covenant of reconciliation, but a mutual nonaggression treaty (31:48-53). They agree not to cross the established stone boundary for the purpose of doing harm to the other (31:52). Laban's concluding words are used in church liturgy (the Mizpah benediction): ''May the Lord watch between you and me while we are absent from one another'' (31:49).
Having resolved the Jacob/Laban conflict with a treaty, the narrative returns to the conflict that initiated the saga: Esau and Jacob. As Jacob begins his journey "home" (31:33), he sends a message to Esau indicating his desire to restore their relationship. Jacob's messengers return reporting that Esau is "coming to meet you with four hundred men" (32:6). Neither Jacob nor the reader knows whether this is a friendly or hostile response from the one who previously said, ''I will kill my brother, Jacob'' (27:41). Jacob prepares a lavish gift and organizes his family for one purpose: ''I may be able to pacify Esau'' (32:20). After spending a night alone struggling with God, Jacob reorganizes his family, placing Rachel and Joseph last, but deciding that he will go first (33:3).
Another even more dramatic encounter occurs at the Jabbok just before Jacob meets Esau (32:22-32). That night, when Jacob was alone, a ''certain one'' confronts him. At the end of the confrontation Jacob realizes that he has encountered God. In the midst of it, however, Jacob knows only that he is locked in a struggle with someone. Seemingly Jacob both wins and loses. He comes blessed, but also crippled. Jacob has won his way in the relationship, but carries scars of the battle.
The favoritism, the cloak, the negative report, the dreams all served to escalate the hatred of his brothers: ''they hated [Joseph] all the more because of his dreams and his words'' (37:8). The brothers found an opportunity for revenge when Jacob sent Joseph to check up on his brothers and the family flocks. Some brothers wanted to kill Joseph, making it look like the work of a wild animal, but the elder brothers Reuben and Judah refused to allow them to shed the blood of their brother. Instead the brothers followed Judah's suggestion and sold him to a passing caravan of traders, a transaction completed in Reuben's absence (37:29-30). The brothers covered their crime by dipping Joseph's "royal" cloak in animal blood and taking it to their father. Jacob broke down into inconsolable grief: ''In grief I will go down to my son in Sheol'' (37:35). Meanwhile, the traders sold Joseph to Potiphar, an Egyptian royal official.
About three months later, Judah learns that Tamar is pregnant, presumably from prostitution. Judah orders her brought out and executed. Tamar presents to the "judge," Judah, his staff, seal, and cord. Realizing what had happened, Judah says, ''she is more righteous than I, since I did not give her to my son Shelah'' (Gen 38:26). In this narrative, righteousness is located in actions that promote the welfare of the community.
Returning in Genesis 39 to the primary story, with God's accompaniment Joseph is appointed steward in charge of Potiphar's household. With responsibility comes danger. Potiphar's wife, attracted to Joseph, orders him to ''lie with me'' (39:7). Joseph refuses. Potiphar's wife, failing to persuade Joseph, seizes Joseph's cloak and uses it as evidence of attempted rape. Potiphar throws Joseph in prison. Joseph's competent composure prompts the prison official to appoint Joseph as prison supervisor. (39:23).
In prison, Joseph gains additional stature as a divinely endowed interpreter of dreams (40:1-23). His interpretive skill eventually brings him to the attention of Pharaoh. Royal dreams that confounded all the sages of Egypt causes the wine steward to remember ''the young Hebrew'' in prison (41:12). Joseph's interpretive gifts in behalf of Pharaoh result in his installation as vice regent and the chief administrator of Egypt (41:43).
Joseph's administrative oversight of food conservation and distribution during a famine put him in a position to reconnect and eventually to reconcile with his family. However, lest we yield to the temptation to idealize Joseph, the narrative relates that during the famine he wielded his power ruthlessly. He confiscated livestock and land in exchange for food, and the narrator tells us: ''Joseph enslaved the people throughout all of Egypt'' (47:20-21).
Like the Egyptian people, the famine reduced Jacob to begging for food. Learning that there was food in Egypt, Jacob sent his sons to obtain grain so ''that we may live and not die'' (42:2). Benjamin, now Jacob's favorite, did not accompany his brothers. What follows is a long, dramatic series of negotiations between Jacob's sons and the vice regent of Egypt. For the Hebrew brothers these negotiations concerned food. But for Joseph this drama was driven by his desire to reunite with his full brother, Benjamin. Facing the choice of starvation or sending Benjamin to Egypt with his brothers, Jacob agrees to let him go. For Jacob, the loss of Benjamin as well as Joseph, would leave him "childless:" ''if I'm left childless, then I'm left childless'' (43:14 CEB).
Joseph's emotions prevent him from continuing the pretense. He reveals himself to his brothers: ''I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt'' (45:4). This prompts an emotional reunion with his brothers and his father. Jacob/Israel relocates his family to Egypt and dies in peace: ''[Israel] drew up his feet into the bed, breathed his last, and was gathered to his people'' (49:33).


text:
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(
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    [String]$branch,

    [Parameter(Mandatory = $true)]
    [String]$build
)

$www = "C:\inetpub\wwwroot\mobile-builds\$branch"
Import-Module "WebAdministration";
New-Item "IIS:\Sites\Saleslogix\mobile-builds\$branch\$build" -type Application -physicalPath $www\$build
Set-ItemProperty "IIS:\Sites\Saleslogix\mobile-builds\$branch\$build" -Name applicationPool -Value "SalesLogix"

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


The ruling on the South China Sea dispute has had critics questioning the authority of the tribunal, its source of legitimacy and the strength of its ruling. East Asia Editor Goh Sui Noi examines the processes that led to the findings and legal standing of the arbitration panel.
On Wednesday, Indonesia celebrated its Independence Day with a bang — blowing up several Chinese boats that had been caught fishing illegally in its waters and impounded.
China does not dispute Indonesia's territorial claims, but Chinese fishermen have more pressing concerns. According to reports in Chinese state media this week, overfishing and pollution have so depleted China's own fishery resources that in some places — including the East China Sea —there are virtually no fish left.
That is a frightening prospect for an increasingly hungry country: China accounted for 35 per cent of the world's seafood consumption in 2015. Seeking catches further afield — including in Indonesian waters — is not really a solution; fish stocks in the disputed South China Sea have themselves fallen by as much as 95 per cent from 1950s levels.
If China does not want the rest of Asia's fisheries to suffer the same fate as its own, it is going to have to think much more ambitiously about how to create a sustainable food supply for the region.
[Three articles. First a bold claim that Organic Farming can feed 10 billion people. Spoiler: Everyone will have to be vegan or vegetarian. Presumably land used for rearing beef and other meat as well as land used to grow animal feed will be converted to farms for human food.
Second a list of myths about organic farming.
Bacillus thuringiensis - Organic farming tool, or GMO food toxin?
The first is a pro-Organic food article from GMWatch which explains why it is ok to use Bacillus thuringiensis or Bt in Organic farming, but it becomes an abomination in GM foods.
One of the favourite arguments of the pro-GM lobby in support of Bt-toxin GM crops is that the Bt toxin has been safely used for decades by organic farmers.
Many thanks to Susan Pusztai for the following information which precisely delineates the very considerable differences between the use of Bt in organic farming and the use of the Bt toxin as a transgene in GM crops.
This should be read in conjunction with Arpad Pusztai's recent comments, posted to the ngin list, on the gut lesions which have been found in several animal feeding studies on GM crops.
This is nonsense. If Britain becomes the only European country apart from Russia to exclude itself from the EU single market, it will not succeed economically, regardless of how people vote. Democracy would not have prevented the ocean tides, driven by gravity, from drowning Canute if he had stayed on his throne, and a referendum will not turn back the economic tides driven by globalization.
SINGAPORE - The Singapore Government will be spending $5 billion more in this year's budget but will still achieve a $3.45 billion surplus - thanks to a run of high COE prices and the inclusion for the first time of investment returns from Temasek Holdings.
Just don't expect this to last, Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat warned in his Budget announcement on Thursday (March 24).
The Government's total spending for fiscal 2016 will go up by $5 billion or 7.3 per cent, to $73.4 billion from $68.4 billion a year ago.
But this will be more than offset by two things - Temasek's contribution and the Government's operating revenue rising by $4.28 billion, or 6.7 per cent, to $68.4 billion.
SINGAPORE — GIC warned that it could see low returns for up to 20 years partly because of an uncertain global economic and earnings environment, as the Republic's sovereign wealth fund manager posted its weakest performance since 2013.
GIC, which manages well over US$100 billion (S$136 billion) in assets, produced a rolling annualised 20-year real rate of return — calculated after taking into account global inflation — of 4 per cent for the fiscal year ended March, down from 4.9 per cent previously.
In nominal US dollar terms, the return was 5.7 per cent over the same period, down from 6.1 per cent previously.
WASHINGTON • Anyone watching the United States' presidential race needs to understand that national opinion polls do not provide an accurate picture of how the election might turn out. Thanks to America's Electoral College, it's not who wins the most votes nationwide that matters in the end, but who wins in which states.
Each state is awarded a certain number of votes in the Electoral College, depending on the size of its population. The candidate who crosses the threshold of 270 electoral votes wins the presidency.
In almost every state, a candidate who wins 50.1 per cent of the popular vote is awarded 100 per cent of its electoral votes. (Only Maine and Nebraska don't follow the winner-takes-all rule; they divide the Electoral College vote by congressional district.) As a result, the votes of millions of people who cast their ballot end up not counting. If you're a Republican in New York or California, which are dominated by the Democrats, or a Democrat in Wyoming or Mississippi, which are reliably Republican, you can forget about your vote for president mattering.
NEW YORK — Amazon is the most obscure large company in the tech industry.
It isn't just secretive, the way Apple is, but in a deeper sense, Jeff Bezos' e-commerce and cloud-storage giant is opaque. Amazon rarely explains either its near-term tactical aims or its long-term strategic vision. It values surprise.
To understand Amazon, then, is necessarily to engage in a kind of Kremlinology. That's especially true of the story behind one of its most important business areas: The logistics by which it ships orders to its customers.
Over the last few years, Amazon has left a trail of clues that suggests it is radically altering how it delivers goods. Among other moves, it has set up its own fleet of trucks; introduced an Uber-like crowdsourced delivery service; built many robot-powered warehouses; and continued to invest in a far-out plan to use drones for delivery. It made another splash last week, when it showed off an Amazon-branded Boeing 767 aeroplane, one of more than 40 in its planned fleet.
These moves have fuelled speculation that Amazon is trying to replace the third-party shipping companies it now relies on — including UPS, FedEx and the US Postal Service — with its homegrown delivery service. Its logistics investments have also fed the general theory that Amazon has become essentially unbeatable in American e-commerce — no doubt one reason Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, felt the need this week to acquire an audacious Amazon rival, Jet.com, for US$3.3 billion (S$4.43 billion).
Singapore and Malaysia signed a Memorandum of Understanding on July 19 to build the High Speed Rail (HSR) linking Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, a long-awaited update on the project that also revealed a more reasonable completion target of 2026.
In my most recent book, Weathering a Property Downturn, I had hazarded a guess that the earliest date for the HSR to begin operations would be the year 2025. Inter-city and international railway projects are never simple and deadlines get postponed all the time. Acquiring land across four Malaysian states, resettling affected families and businesses and, most importantly, the raising of funds for the entire project, will require a few more years, especially if local issues and politics disrupt the timeline.
The project has been repeatedly hailed by both governments as a "game changer" for our economies. Investment advisers are already spouting the economic benefits of the HSR and recommending various types of investments all over Peninsular Malaysia. However, to think that the HSR will change the game for the whole of Peninsular Malaysia, outside of Kuala Lumpur, we have to look deeper.
Between the end of World War II and the late 1960s, leftist politics flourished, particularly among labour unionists, and high school and university students. Inspired by Marx and Mao, the language of class resonated here, especially its association with colonialism and exploitation, and jostled among competing visions of the future in the emerging independent polity of Singapore.
Gradually, as the People's Action Party (PAP) government triumphed over leftist political parties as well as trade union and student organisations, the language of class took a backseat, though it never completely disappeared.
In its place was the language of meritocracy and equal opportunity. This was based on the PAP's "democratic socialist" vision of Singapore, one that carried the promise of freedom from poverty and the prospect of social mobility in a vibrant, but not unbridled, capitalist economy for its people, many of whom were migrants who left China or India in search of a better life.
As is familiar history by now, a strong PAP government has delivered on its promise to provide jobs, healthcare, housing and education over its long, unbroken tenure. Singapore enjoyed sterling economic growth in the 1970s and early 1980s, home ownership grew and education expanded.
Singapore is reportedly holding off a decision to buy the Lockheed Martin F-35 jet, a multi-role stealthy warplane that is touted as the world's most advanced fighter.
A Bloomberg article published on Tuesday said the Republic's Permanent Secretary of Defence Development - who was not named in the story - informed the United States in mid-June that Singapore would be delaying the final steps of the purchasing process.
The report added that Singapore had intended to acquire four F-35s by around 2022, with the option to purchase another eight more, citing information from the Pentagon's programme office.
While several sources had earlier told The Straits Times that a decision on the F-35 could be made as early as next year, the latest news suggests that the multi-billion-dollar deal will be put on hold for now.
HONG KONG: Vietnam has discreetly fortified several of its islands in the disputed South China Sea with new mobile rocket launchers capable of striking China's runways and military installations across the vital trade route, according to Western officials.
Diplomats and military officers told Reuters that intelligence shows Hanoi has shipped the launchers from Vietnam into position on five bases in the Spratly islands in recent months, a move likely to raise tensions with Beijing.
SINGAPORE — The payouts that increase over time under a proposed Central Provident Fund (CPF) Life annuity scheme are aimed at protecting members' savings against inflation to some degree, but if members want to grow their retirement nest egg for an even stronger buffer against such cost of living hikes, they will need to turn to other options, said experts.
An advisory panel looking into enhancements to the CPF system had recommended a new CPF Life option that would see "escalating" payouts at a fixed rate of 2 per cent every year for the rest of a CPF member's life.
This is unlike the two existing plans — the CPF Life Standard and the CPF Life Basic — that give flat payouts. But the starting payouts under this new plan would also be about 20 per cent lower than the Standard plan.
Professor Euston Quah, Nanyang Technological University's economics department head, told TODAY that "nothing really is guaranteed against inflation".
The challenges facing autonomous vehicles lie not with the readiness of technology. As demonstrated in ample trials in Europe and the US, cars are quite capable of getting along fairly well without a driver in many situations. In time, they will be able to do so in every situation.
Rather, the challenges lie with public willingness to embrace this new and alien concept. It is one thing to pronounce something as safe (and superior), and quite another to convince the general population that it is.
Would you board a pilotless plane if Boeing made one, even if experts said there are fewer variables in the sky than on the road? Now, imagine booking a cab, and one appears without a driver. Would your granny, for that matter your mum, get on board - even if it was not the Seventh Month? Would you?
Early lifts had human operators on board who controlled them with a lever. With technology, lift operators became redundant. But not overnight. Many building owners still employed them for years to help or put older users at ease.
A Canadian judge has turned down a Singaporean's bid for refugee protection in Vancouver, finding his claims of alleged potential persecution in Singapore to be unfounded.
Jedidiah Ian Tan, 23, who was exempted from national service on medical grounds after serving two months, had claimed the exemption was revocable and that he had no redress in Singapore except military justice.
"A refugee claimant must adduce clear and convincing evidence that is both relevant and reliable, and sufficient to convince the tribunal that state protection is inadequate," said Justice Cecily Y. Strickland in decision grounds last week.
The Canadian Federal Court judge noted that the Singapore authorities had "acted reasonably and expeditiously" in exempting Mr Tan from national service.
" The documentary evidence indicated that the safety of conscripts is taken seriously and failures to do so often receive considerable public scrutiny," she said.
"Additionally, evidence concerning similarly situated persons demonstrated that Singapore has measures in place to deal with physical and mental incapacity of national service members and their mistreatment by others in the military."
At the Democratic convention last week, I experienced an uncomfortable feeling of deja vu. Emblazoned across the arena was the rallying cry of the Hillary Clinton campaign - "Stronger Together". It was a depressing reminder of "Stronger In", the slogan of the losing Remain campaign in Britain's referendum on European Union (EU) membership.
This similarity is more than an unfortunate coincidence. I would point to three parallels between Brexit and the Donald Trump phenomenon that should worry the Clinton campaign. The first is the potency of immigration as an issue. The second is the way in which the Trump and Brexit campaigns have become vehicles for protest votes about economic insecurity. The third is the chasm between elite opinion and that of the white working class.
Both the Trump and Brexit campaigns have put the promise to control immigration at the centre of their operations. In Britain, the Brexiters' demand to "take back control" was understood to mean, above all, a promise to stop the flow of immigrants from Europe. Mr Trump's most famous campaign pledge is to "build the wall" and stop illegal immigration from Mexico to the United States.


I cannot believe that the Christmas Season has crept up on us again. It is crazy how fast time is going. There are endless options when it comes to gift giving but I am not the most creative person when it comes to picking out items. I am more of a need based giver. I love giving or receiving gifts that I will be able to use and wear.
I have put together a list of items that you can get for loved ones this Christmas.
Adele's New album 25 is incredible. If you haven't listed to it or bought it you are missing out! If you have a friend or family member that is obsessed with Adele, this is the perfect gift. Next on the list is a Nail Polish set. Nail polish is so versatile and you can't go wrong with this classic gift. I think the colors in the Olivia Palermo x Ciate London set are beautiful and great for anyone. If you are willing to take the plunge and purchase a more expensive gift I would suggest this Vince knit sweater. Turtlenecks are a wardrobe staple, especially if you live in a colder environment. I also think turtlenecks add a sophisticated look to an everyday outfit!Another good piece to give is a Polo Ralph Lauren Oxford knit, it is classic and will look good on anyone no matter what their style is. Socks are an easy gift to give and you can never have to many socks! The Fair Isle socks, Burgundy pompom hat, and scarves are perfect stocking stuffers. Lastly, this Monogramed Mug is super cute and personalized!
I hope this list helps you with your Christmas shopping! Merry Christmas!


Mid-20th century pair of 1960s lamps, polished nickel stems featuring abstract spiral lucite panels, raised on cube bases. Excellent vintage condition, with new wiring and sockets.
A 1930's wooden Mickey and Pluto game made in France.
Tall and sculptural pottery lamp in the manner of Mariana von Allesch, with beautiful pigmentation in a celadon and ocres glaze.
A pair of Art Deco horse bookends in metal with ceramic glaze. Excellent condition.
Gump's carved jadeite pendant and necklace with enhancer and clasp in 14k yellow gold.
A pair of 1930's sculptural carved wood table lamps. Each has a series of three female portraits in profile. They are by the American company, Heifetz and are in good vintage condition with age appropriate wear.


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Share this Story: SIMMONS: Leafs captain Tavares not living up to his salary
SIMMONS: Leafs captain Tavares not living up to his salary
Steve Simmons
Mar 21, 2021 • March 21, 2021 • 9 minute read • Join the conversation
Captain John Tavares at Toronto Maple Leaf practice at the Ford Performance Centre in Toronto on Monday November 25, 2019. Craig Robertson/Toronto Sun/Postmedia Network
Just where does John Tavares rank among NHL centremen today?
He's nowhere near Connor McDavid, but then who is? He's not elite the way Auston Matthews, Nathan MacKinnon or Leon Draisaitl happen to be elite or the way Sidney Crosby has always been.
SIMMONS: Leafs captain Tavares not living up to his salary Back to video
He's not a longshot MVP candidate this season, the kind of guy who will get some Hart Trophy votes, the way Anze Kopitar, Sasha Barkov and Mark Scheifele are strutting their stuff. And he's not the offensive sparkplug and energy player that Mathew Barzal, Sebastian Aho and Brayden Point can be. Or the complete centre, team-changer, leader, that Patrice Bergeron, Ryan O'Reilly or Sean Couturier can show most nights.
And there's still Nicklas Backstrom, Jack Eichel, Bo Horvat, Elias Pettersson, Dylan Larkin and Evgeni Malkin, who, among others, could be ranked positionally ahead of the Maple Leafs captain.
So what exactly is Tavares besides overpaid? On the third highest-scoring team in the NHL, Tavares is having the lowest scoring season of his career. After choosing to join the Leafs in one of the most celebrated free-agent signings in franchise history, he went on to score 47 goals and lead the NHL in even-strength goal scoring. Everything was on its way.
This season, his third in Toronto, Tavares has dropped to 181st in goals at even strength. In his debut season with the Leafs, he finished ninth overall in even-strength points. This season, he's 38th.
General manager Kyle Dubas is looking to add a top-six winger to a Leafs team having some difficulty — but he wouldn't necessarily need one if Tavares was driving a line the way he was supposed to when the Leafs made the $77-million investment in him.
If the Leafs had a do-over on Tavares, do you think they'd sign him or spend the $11-million annually on a $6-million defenceman and a $5-million centre? … The red hot McDavid had a 22-point lead over Matthews heading into Saturday night and a 16-point scoring lead over Patrick Kane. In other words, for now, the great Hart Trophy race is over. It's McDavid for Art Ross, for Hart, for Ted Lindsay, and for just about anything else he might want … Tavares might be caught in one of those Harry Neale conundrums: He's 74th among forwards in the NHL in ice time. He has to play better to play more, and he has to play more to play better … My favourite of the many Neale lines: "Last season we couldn't win at home. This season we can't win on the road. My failure as a coach is I can't think of any place else to play." … What the world needs: More Harry Neales … What does anybody ever ask for, a chance? Jack Campbell is getting his on Saturday night. If he plays well, he may be able to extend it. Considering he has spent his entire career backing up Jonathan Quick or Frederik Andersen, with only 26 wins in total over seven seasons, this is big for nice guy Campbell … Don Cherry will not like this: When you search Campbell's name on hockeyreference.com, the first goalie he's compared with statistically is Cherry's old whipping boy, Hardy Astrom … Why are the struggling Nashville Predators so keen on trading defenceman Mattias Ekholm? The guy can play. If the Preds are going to rebuild, why not rebuild with an upper-echelon defenceman? … I can't remember seeing a team that mailed it in more often than the Buffalo Sabres have this season. That's a franchise seemingly devoid of emotion, soul, or both.
HEAR AND THERE
Mark Shapiro got a five-year extension as Blue Jays president. Bill Manning got a five-year extension as president of Toronto FC and the Argos. Last year, Brendan Shanahan got an extension as Leafs president. Everybody gets an extension. But so far, no Masai Ujiri extension. Over to you, Larry Tanenbaum … What was never announced — go figure the Blue Jays — Ross Atkins got an extension as Jays GM through the 2023 season. Manager Charlie Montoyo didn't exactly get a vote of confidence. He was extended through 2022 … Bet you didn't know that Shanahan was third in goal scoring in the 1990s, behind only Brett Hull and Jaromir Jagr. The Leafs president didn't even know that … Other leaders by decade: Phil Esposito, 70s; Wayne Gretzky, 80s; Jagr, 2000s; Alex Ovechkin 2010s … Up next for the red-hot Ovechkin, who passed Esposito in goals this week. He's 11 goals away from catching Marcel Dionne for fifth all-time … If McDavid doesn't score another point the rest of the season, he will still finish with more than a point a game. That is nuts … This will be a weird ending to the NBA season. The league has added two play-in spots, so 10 teams essentially qualify for eight eventual playoff spots. The Raptors only have to be Top 10 to get play-in opportunities. They're currently 11th in the East … Styles makes fights. It's the same with players and certain franchises. Tyson Barrie just didn't fit at all with the Maple Leafs — didn't look right — but is fitting rather nicely with the wide-open Edmonton Oilers … Goaltenders in Canada better than Andersen: Carey Price, Thatcher Demko, Connor Hellebuyck, and Jacob Markstrom, to name four. The way he's playing, Demko could wind up with Hellebuyck on the U.S. Olympic team next year.
Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series with Clayton Kershaw and Walker Buehler at the top of the rotation and with Julio Urias and Dustin May after that. Washington won the World Series in 2019 with Max Scherzer, Stephen Strasburg and Patrick Corbin in its starting rotation. Year before that, the Red Sox won with David Price, Chris Sale and Rick Porcello. And the year before that, the cheaters in Houston won with Justin Verlander, Dallas Keuchel, and Lance McCullers in their rotation along with Charlie Morton. So how, exactly, are the Jays going to win with Hyun-Jin Ryu and only Hyun-Jin Ryu in their starting rotation? … The Blue Jays paid Marcus Semien $18 million to play this season. He's a more than decent major league infielder, but wouldn't that money been better spent on a starting pitcher? … Every time I see or hear somebody going over spring training statistics, I can't get Pat Gillick out of my head. "Believe nothing you see in spring training or September," Gillick used to say and probably still says it … It happened this week when the Yankees and Phillies played in Florida: Luis Garcia pitched to Luis Garcia … In between sentences, Nate Pearson pulled a muscle … The Jays starting pitcher I'm most interested in seeing: Ross Stripling. For a 31-year-old he hasn't thrown a lot of innings in five big-league seasons, but when he has, he has been a big strike-out guy with a decent earned run average in Los Angeles … Everybody doing play-by-play from Florida is raving about the depth of the Blue Jays batting order.
Fred VanVleet is an impressive basketball player, but more than that, an impressive man. He spoke about his bout with COVID-19, his difficulties, with maturity, with intelligence, with honesty, and with a passion for the current state of society … Minor hockey seasons around Toronto would normally be coming to an end right about now. I feel for all involved, players, coaches, volunteers, who have spent their life around the game and lost their season to the pandemic … Because I was personally involved in minor hockey, it's where my heart happens to be. It doesn't mean I don't feel horribly for all those who lost out on so many activities. You don't get that time back. There's only so much Netflix anyone can watch … Some wondered why the Patriots spent all that money signing free-agent tight ends Jonnu Smith and Hunter Henry and I figured the most difficult offences Bill Belichick had in New England came with double tight ends, Rob Gronkowski and Aaron Hernandez. In 2011, Gronkowski and Hernandez combined to catch 169 passes for 24 touchdowns … Every time Doris Burke does a basketball game, I learn something I didn't know before. The best broadcasters do that. I don't have to ever say that's a woman broadcasting. I just say that's a great broadcaster … You probably know this but in case you don't: The interim coach of the Buffalo Sabres, Don Granato, is Ray Ferraro's brother-in-law, and in an earlier coaching life worked with Matthews in the USA Hockey development program … If I'm voting Norris Trophy right now, I'm going Victor Hedman first, Drew Doughty second, Jeff Petry third. Hedman is the best defenceman in the world right now … Hedman, by the way, was the second pick in the 2009 NHL draft. The first pick that year: Tavares … This is Doughty's 13th NHL season. He's playing about as well as has in years in Los Angeles … In honour of St. Patrick's Day, my all-time Pat list: Patrick Roy, Pat Burns, Pat Quinn, Gillick, Patrick Mahomes, Patrick Ewing, Pat Boone, Pat Tabler, Pat Tillman, Pat Hentgen, Pat Ribble, Pat Stapleton, Pat Riggin, Patrick Marleau, Kane, Pat LaFontaine and the Regina Pats … My NBA MVP is LeBron James, followed closely by Joel Embiid. James should win just about every year but doesn't … Happy birthday to Bobby Orr (73), Leo Rautins (61), Pat Riley (76), Charlie Simmer (67), Al Iafrate (55), Anthony Kay (26), Luis Leal (64), Aaron Hill (39), Jim Kyte (57) and Paul Mirabella (71) … And hey, whatever became of Jason Kapono?
DIFFICULT DECISION COMING FOR HYMAN
Zach Hyman grew up in Toronto. He went to school in Toronto. His parents live here. His wife is from here. Their baby was born here. He has businesses here. Most of his friends are in the Toronto area.
All this gets complicated when the season ends and Hyman apparently heads to free agency. Because other teams in the NHL can afford to pay more for Hyman's services than the Maple Leafs will be able to afford post-season. Because every team that watches him play on a regular basis realizes they need what he brings every night and many will be willing to pay significantly for that.
The starting price in free agency for Hyman is expected to be around $5 million a year. With full bidding — and expect a lot of teams involved — that number could be pushed another half-million. The interest in the raucous winger will be significant.
But in the end, what does Hyman want? That's what matters. And what does his family want? And what part will that any of that play in his future with the Leafs?
This isn't about hometown discounts. This is more about quality of life. Hyman can make more money leaving Toronto. But at what price to him or his family?
RAPTORS MUST BE RUTHLESS
Under normal circumstances — and there is absolutely nothing normal about this Raptors season — this would be a time for Masai Ujiri to be at his cutthroat best.
That was how the Raptors won an NBA championship.
Ujiri was ruthless on his championship trail. He fired the coach of the year in the NBA. He traded away the team's most popular player and lost a piece of innocence in doing so.
He brought in Kawhi Leonard, who delivered everything Ujiri thought possible in one sensational season.
And Toronto has an NBA championship — one, maybe the only one — to celebrate.
And now what for Ujiri and his wayward Raptors?
The team plays out of an adopted home, was recently ravaged by COVID-19, has been torn apart by injuries most of the season, and has rarely found its way.
The NBA trade deadline is on Thursday. Kyle Lowry's contract is up. Norm Powell's contract is up. Both might be Raptors next season. Both might not be.
Either way, why not trade them now? Why not stockpile whatever you can get for either of these talented players and then, if interested, sign them back in free agency in the summer?
Ujiri could make those kind of moves for a team in need of so many parts if he is, in fact, going to be part of the Raptors in the future. Mysteriously, he still has no deal to continue as president of the team. Coach Nick Nurse is signed up for the future and GM Bobby Webster is signed up but not Ujiri.
The Raptors could use some creativity from Ujiri right now and a little cutthroat, starting with his own magic — a contract with his name on it.
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A transit-oriented Tech campus in a city on the brink of change.
Beyond Truth is Beauty stands the 135,000-sf Phase 1 building of a 5-building master planned hub of smart building technology. A project by Westlake Urban Developers, in partnership with OSIsoft, the state-of-the-art 100 gigabits per second San Leandro Tech Campus buildings will not only embrace the city's history, but celebrate it's current shift to the promising Bay Area technology place.
Epitomizing the notion of a transit-oriented campus, the six-story OSIsoft Global Headquarters, and private/public parking garage, not only faces the San Leandro BART Station with a pedestrian public paseo crossing the site for access to BART. It also boasts both exterior bike parking and interior bike storage. The campus location prioritizes acoustics as a primary driver of design for the current and future buildings, resulting in innovative solutions to manage decibel levels from Amtrak horns and BART brakes. Other external technologies include the Neolith façade and thicker laminated View Glass to support limiting heat gain and reduce the HVAC system loads.
OSIsoft's interior encourages knowledge sharing and engagement by focusing on collaboration, concentration, flexibility, and technology. The ecosystem of meeting spaces and carefully sized open office neighborhoods feature access to views, highlighted by open ceilings and sound dampening clouds that also bounce light indirectly into the workspaces. At its entry, an exterior-interior wood armature leads through the tailored lobby to numerous first-floor common spaces including a 50 seat café. The multifunctional, expandable 30 person training room opens to the café's picnic tables, booths, indoor-outdoor seating, and coffee bar. In the neighboring Executive Briefing Center, conference rooms, lounge spaces, phone rooms, casual collaboration areas, a break room, and two fully equipped 18-seat computer training centers complete the robust selection of business amenities for employees and guests.
For the building's executive floor, the client favored a uniquely egalitarian approach – the center of the building – to reinforce the understanding of accessibility. OSIsoft also opted for open executive offices to nurture the culture of serendipitous communication among the company's leaders.
Groundbreaking for SLTC Phase 2 took place on May 25, 2017.
Scope included one 6-story warm core-shell office building, one 6-level parking garage, associated site improvements, and master planning for phase 2 and phase 3 (future office buildings).
Energy efficiency measures include electrochromic glass, thermally broken window frames and continuous, uninterrupted 3" rigid insulation on interior side of walls (typical insulation elsewhere) resulting in 18% better energy performance than code minimum.
Other sustainable building measures include high-efficiency toilets (1.28 gpf) and urinals (0.125 gpf), auto-sensor faucets, showers and changing rooms. Also LED lighting throughout interior and exterior areas of the site and garage along with FSC-certified wood, permeable pavers, bioswales on site for water retention and infiltration, drought-tolerant plant material, and EV parking. The site is also adjacent to the San Leandro BART station providing great public transportation access.


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Mohammed Mourhit (arabiska: محمد مُرحيت), född 10 oktober 1970 i Marocko, är en belgisk före detta friidrottare som tävlade i medeldistanslöpning.

Mourhit blev belgisk medborgare 1997. Vid VM 1999 vann Mourhit bronsmedaljen på 5 000 meter på tiden 12,58,80, endast distanserad av marockanen Salah Hissou (12,58,13) och kenyanen Benjamin Limo (12,58,72). Mourhit är för närvarande innehavare av samtliga tre europarekord i långdistanslöpning på bana. På 3 000 meter noterade Mourhit 7,26,62 i Monaco den 18 augusti 2000, på 5000 meter 12,49,71 i Bryssel den 25 augusti 2000 samt på 10 000 meter 26,52,30 i Bryssel den 3 september 1999. Vidare har belgaren blivit världsmästare i terränglöpning såväl 2000 som 2001.

År 2002 svärtades Mourhits rykte ned då han stängdes av för dopning (EPO).

Belgiska medeldistanslöpare
Födda 1970
Män
Personer från Khouribga
Marockanska dopningsfall
Levande personer
Tävlande vid olympiska sommarspelen 2000 från Belgien
Tävlande i friidrott vid olympiska sommarspelen 2000

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


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Oct 29, 2020, 02:19pm EDT
Three Things You'll Need Before Starting A New Business
How Do Employee Needs Vary From Generation To Generation?
Where Is There Still Room For Growth When It Comes To Content Creation?
Here Is Some Good Advice For Leaders Of Remote Teams
How Can Tech Companies Become More Human Focused?
What Impact Is Technology Having On Today's Workforce?
How Is Blackness Represented In Digital Domains?
Oct 3, 2020, 05:15pm EDT
Why Should Leaders Stop Obsessing About Platforms And Ecosystems?
Sep 30, 2020, 12:05pm EDT
Why Is The Future Of Business About Creating A Shared Value For Everyone?
How Can AI Support Small Businesses During The Pandemic?
Party Like It's 1999: Priced At $45, LinkedIn Opens At $83; Soars Past $100 (Updated)
Eric SavitzFormer Staff
CIO Next
Covering the intersection of tech and investing.
Just like the good old days.
The business-oriented social network LinkedIn, which came public this morning at $45 a share, at the high end of the expected range, opened for trading at $83, and has moved up from there, for a market valuation in the vicinity of $8 billion.
This is exactly the kind of first-day pop that became commonplace in the heady days of 1999 and 2000, when stocks would new Internet stocks would come public and investors would blindly buy them. Of course, we all know how that ended.
LNKD right now is up $40.84 from the IPO price, a gain of 90.8%, to $85.84.
Update: In case you were wondering, the record first-day of trading pop is still held by TheGlobe.com, an early social networking company which came public in 1997 at $9 a share, and traded as high as $97 on the first day, before closing at $63.50. By 2001, the stock was under 10 cents. While TheGlobe's operations are long gone, the company actually still exists as a corporate shell - the company's Web site provides some of the history - and the stock even trades occasionally. Last trade: one cent.
Update 2: As of noon Eastern, the stock has soared past the $100 level; as I write this the stock is now up $58.33 from the IPO price, a gain of 129.6%, to $103.33. One thing you have to think about in this situation is whether the bankers for LinkedIn - Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, J.P., Morgan, Allen & Co., UBS - at some level botched the deal. The company itself sold 4.8 million shares in the offering; that effectively means that the company left close to $280 million on the tablet at the stock price in the $103 range.
Eric Savitz
After a long career at Barron's, I joined Forbes as San Francisco bureau chief in December 2010. I've been writing about technology and investing for more than 25 years.…
After a long career at Barron's, I joined Forbes as San Francisco bureau chief in December 2010. I've been writing about technology and investing for more than 25 years. With the Tech Trade, I've picked up where I left off when I was writing the Tech Trader Daily blog at Barrons.com. When I'm not working, you can find me riding my road bike around the Bay Area hills, managing my fantasy baseball team, rooting for my beloved Phillies and Eagles and hanging out in the Valley with my family. You can follow me on Facebook, on Twitter (@savitz), and on Google+.


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In June 2015 something very special happened in Action Sports. Prior to this date portable kicker ramps for bikes and scooters simply didn't exist, but a small start-up company in the UK were about to change this forever. They had created a 'concept prototype' of a kicker ramp that folded into a backpack for transportation by the rider and could be taken literally anywhere.
This technology was ground-breaking and was set to change how, and where people could ride. The UK company was Jumpack and in June 2015 they posted a video on YouTube of the world's first Portable Kicker.
Jumpack Prototype Video: https://youtu.be/V6G7JXUw9oE
The video received over 100k views in just a few weeks, and we knew we were on to something special. It had already taken several years in development to reach this stage, but the extra time spent showed in the innovative design and function. This didn't go unrecognised and the Jumpack ramp concept was successfully announced winner of the INVENT 2016 innovation competition in Ireland as the product 'most likely to succeed'. It was later lead product in a BBC television program on innovation.
BBC Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p048lm8g
The Jumpack portable ramp concept didn't go unnoticed within action sports either as a number of other companies recognised the game changing potential and decided to also produce their own versions of our portable ramp.
The reason that it took several years to develop Jumpack is that we started with a 'Wish List' that would produce the ultimate kicker, with no compromises. After building hundreds of BMX and MTB ramps over 4 decades, we knew exactly what was needed.
The Jumpack Wish List
It must be produced using the latest practices and materials available.
It must be light enough to carry comfortably for long periods – Under 7kg is optimum.
The material selection must be light, incredibly strong and impact resistant.
It will have multiple height settings to accommodate all ages and rider skill sets.
It must be impervious to all weather conditions including temperature variation.
The ramp must not move or slide when in use (weight usually performs this function)
You should be able to connect your GoPro to your ramp to capture content.
The ramp must deploy quickly, easily and effortlessly, no 'jigsaw' pieces that require assembly every time and can be lost or left behind.
It must have the perfect progressive curve for optimum boost and predictable balanced flight. A combination of multiple flat surfaces does not provide this.
Jumpack will be a ramp 'for life'. The ramp will be fully maintainable with every part being replaceable or upgradable.
It will be modular to enable multiple Jumpacks to be connected to form larger ramps without additional hardware being required.
It had to be affordable.
Designing a product to be perfect takes time, and it would be another 2 years before all our 'points for perfection' were finally achieved.
During this period several companies like MTB Hopper, Sender Ramps and Byclex started to produce wooden 'Jigsaw' style ramps that had to be taken apart and rebuilt every time before use, which is time consuming and becomes a genuine pain after just a few builds. They had many parts, a surface made up of multiple flat sections like the profile of a hexagon, and they were heavy, really heavy. All the reasons why we discounted this style of ramp during our initial R&D. This style was certainly quick and easy to produce, but it wouldn't result in the ultimate portable kicker, and the ultimate experience for the end user.
While we had created the ultimate kicker, there was one compromise we had to make to tick all our boxes. We didn't want to make Jumpack a 'luxury' product, reserved only for those that could afford it. We wanted Jumpack to be a kicker ramp for everyone.
For anyone that works in engineering or watches Formula One racing, you will be aware that it is very difficult to combine high levels of ingenuity and design with materials that are both super lightweight and super strong and do it cheaply.
Our ramp was the ultimate kicker for BMX, Mountain Bikes, and scooters, but based on standard manufacturing equations, it should have retail cost of over $500. This was a problem. Do we compromise on quality? materials or margin? When you have designed an award-winning product, a product that does everything you set out to achieve, do you really want to dilute how good it is? The answer is no. We compromised on margin and priced our ramp at the most affordable price possible. We're riders first after all.
The result of our decision is Jumpack customers in over 70 countries, across multiple disciplines including BMX, MTB, Scooters, Skateboarding, Inline Skating, Snowboards and even Mountainboards. We have received 100% positive feedback from all customers worldwide, we have never had a ramp returned broken or damaged and Jumpack has been adopted by some of the worlds leading extreme Sports athletes including multiple world and European Champions.
We did, what we set out to do. To design and launch (quite literally) the best ramp for action sports on earth. We may have had to compromise on margin, so our customers didn't have to compromise on their experience, but we changed the world, the portable ramp industry is now a living breathing thing.
Get Air Anywhere is now a way of life.
Back to Jumpack News


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Q: [Zend]Filtering variables in a huge project I have huge application written in ZendFramework. Earlier everything was fine.
As for now it was redesigned and received a lot of new functionalities and options, but I have to defend this software from xss.
Variables are taken from a couple sources (webform, Webservices, api, etc.), some of them should be escaped, some not.
What do you think, what will be the best method to defend my website, without editing all (2 000 +) files and escaping all echo's ?

A: Zend Framework comes with a class called "Zend_Filter".  This class has a "StripTags" filter option that will strip all tags from a given string.
http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.filter.set.html#zend.filter.set.striptags
If you note, even the strip tags filter isn't recommended for sanitizing input if you exclude something and it shouldn't be used to defend against XSS attacks.  It recommends using Tidy or HTMLPurifier.
http://tidy.sourceforge.net/
http://htmlpurifier.org/
I think HTML Purifier is pretty easy to use.  From their docs website:

require_once '/path/to/HTMLPurifier.auto.php';
$config = HTMLPurifier_Config::createDefault(); $purifier = new
  HTMLPurifier($config); $clean_html = $purifier->purify($dirty_html);

I hope that helps!
Cheers!


It is the best idea to get your child a math tutor when you notice that your child is having problems with math. When you decide that you need an online math tutor for your child, it is important to find the best online tutor. You have the capacity of getting the best online tutor when you consider a number of hints when making your selection.
On important thing you need to keep in mind as you choose the online math tutor is to get one that specializes in math. The fact that your child is struggling with math, it is imperative to ensure that you get an expert that specializes on math. So that you can get an online math tutor that can be able to understand the weakness of your child and offer him a solution, it is imperative to hire an online tutor that specializes in math click here to see page. The upside of hiring an online tutor that specializes in math tutoring is that he has the capacity of identifying the concepts holding your child back and offer proper assistance.
The other vital thing you need to consider as you choose the online tutor is his schedule. You must choose an online tutor that has a schedule that can match your child discover more here. It is important to search for an online math tutor that is available when he is working on his math. It is imperative to ensure that you hire a math tutor that has a schedule that can match that of the online tutor because you will be certain that your child will get all the help that they need.
The other essential thing that you have to keep in mind as you choose the math tutor is whether he is able to work interactively with your child. For your child to understand math concepts, it is imperative for the math tutor to create a relationship with your child. When your child is comfortable with the math tutor, he can be able to ask his questions and open up more about the areas he is having difficulty understanding. When the tutor understands the problems of your child, he can come up with ways in which he can address them effectively.
You have to ensure that you search for an online math tutor that uses visual aids when offering tutoring services. On the off chance that visual aids are used, your child has the capacity of understanding math better. When the online tutor uses visual aids to explain math concepts, there will be likelihood that your child will be able to understand the concepts easily.
Lastly, it is imperative to search for an online tutor that is open to feedback, visit this site. There are important things that the tutor can get feedback on such as what is working for your child and what is not working.
Nowadays you have no excuse on how you look because there are many ways of enhancing your beauty. Things have changed and they are much better now because you don't have to look for someone to enhance your beauty especially if you purchase the beauty products that are being supplied by many companies today. Things are even much better if you need something complex and you cannot achieve it all by yourself because you can go to the best spa for treatment or even salon for different other services. When choosing a salon or spa, never be a rush to choose one so that you can always engage the best. It is possible that you want to engage the best salon and spa and if you are looking for info to handle your decision-making, see page below.
You need to discover more about the different businesses that can engage for the services spa and salon though research. The best thing is that most of these companies nowadays have an online homepage and visit is a great opportunity for you to know more about them especially from customer reviews. If you have friends and relatives that you can trust for referrals, always ask them. Self-analysis is very important and that is where you can spare some time and visit different spa and salon.
Location is very key when it comes to choosing a spa and salon. You need a place that you can conveniently go to especially after work because that will sometimes you may have free time for such services. One of the reasons why it is important to consider a place that is near is because you can manage time and also save on transportation cost.
A salon or a spa is defined by the things that they have invested in especially the equipment. Nowadays, it is very possible appointment to a spa or is followed because there are those that have invested in the current technology that is very up when it comes to making such appointment, but also the can clearly know your appointment because they have the appropriate software. However, the most important thing is that they have the equipment that will enable you to receive the services you want and they are many such as Victoria Spa.
Prices will vary from one salon or spa to another and that is raining to know how much it will cost you to work with a specific one. You can always find an affordable service provider such is Victoria Spa but you need to compare the information on changes so that you can make the decision.
Computed Tomography is an X-ray examination that captures several digital images of your body through the help of very thin X -ray beams. Computed tomography is very effective in the diagnosis of abnormalities with the soft tissue and the bone of the targeted limbs. The specialist that conduct these examinations commonly referred to as HSS radiologists are uniquely qualified for this work. The professional has the skills to work with the equipment to have the images and with your images they will interpret them and tell you what they mean as you might not see a problem unless the expert points it out for you.
The medical tech allows you to have very accurate views of the human anatomy and pinpoint even the finest details of what you are looking for. Capturing of the images also takes place at very high speeds making them better than the way diagnosis was done in the past. CT exams have a lot of benefits as a way of doing diagnosis to bone and soft tissue abnormalities. It is a very cost effective to have CT exams which applies for many clinical problems. Another benefit of computed tomography is that it does not involve any pain hence no discomfort , add that to the accuracy levels it registers and you have a near perfect diagnosis method which you should opt for.
The new state of the art CT scanners will do the diagnosis within a fraction of the time and on top of that the radiation that you are exposed to is very minimal. If your child needs a diagnosis you might have a challenge making them hold still for long to have a successful scan done, the newer technologies in CT exams have improved on the time. The elderly and young children can have a problem holding a breath for too long, the shorter times thanks to the new technology work to elevate that. It would have been necessary to sedate children in the past to take good scans but that is not necessary anymore as your child will not be in the scan that long.
The images of a computed tomography show blood vessels and bone and soft tissues all together which is very ideal when it comes to identifying a problem that could affect more than one part of the anatomy under capture. When you compare an MRI and computed tomography patient movement and implants on a patient's body might be a problem in the latter but with CTs not so much and learn more. Some of the problems that would have required you to have biopsy or exploratory surgery can easily be taken care of with a simple computed exam which is a prime benefit of the diagnosis. You need not be concerned when your doctor requests you for a CT examination as most of the times it will be to find out, more information.
Wedding day is one of the most important days in everybody's life. This is because you are now officially someone's husband or wife. That is why no one wants to mess up on such a day. One of the ways is usually having a photographer to capture the best moments. There is a time that will come when you will need to go through these photos. There are quite a number of North east photographers in the market. As a result, it will not be that easy making the right decision. This article outlines aspects to look for about the selection of a wedding photographers North East.
You should ensure that you look at the photos posted on the homepage of the photographer Simon Hogben Photography. This is because it is on this website where photographers get to showcase their great work. As a result, you will be in a position to carry out your own assessment. If you get pleased by their posted work, then there is a high likelihood that you will be pleased by this service by the photographer. For a photographer whose work is not amazing, you should get to avoid them.
You should look at the photographer charges. The photography costs differ from one photographer to another. You will come across photographers that are very expensive. You do not want your wedding day to end out without having photos taken. You should ensure that you settle for a photographer that you can afford. There are some photography charges that are below average. Such a photographer is likely going to disappoint you.
You should also consider going through online reviews. This is because you will get to read testimonials posted by individuals that have hired such services before. This will enable you get to read the positive and negative side of the story. A wedding photographer that has a lot of positive online reviews is likely going to carry out a great work. That is why you should make sure that you go through various online reviews.
Also, you should ensure that you settle for a skilled and experienced photographer. You are likely going to come across new photographers in the industry. A new photographer is likely going to disappoint you. If you hire a wedding photographer that has been in the industry for a while, you will be pleased with their work. This is because they have covered such occasions in the past.
Lastly, you should make sure that you get to ask from the people you engage with on a daily basis. This is because you have someone close to you that has had a wedding ceremony. In the process, you will be advised accordingly. This will ensure you do not hire an incompetent wedding photographer.
The society has the disabled who hold an important part in it. Wheelchairs are used by the crippled so that they can easily move about in their day to day lives. The movement up and down for the wheelchair require the ramp even though they can move about. The steps of the vehicle and the stairs is where the ramps are installed and that helps the person on the wheel chair to board or alight the ramp safely.
In the healing process after one is injured and admitted to the wheelchair one will use the ramp to be able to move around the work or at home so as to perform basic duties. There are however a lot of ramps in the market and the client should make use of a number of factors in the making of a decision.
The first factor is the cost of the ramp. The budget of a person should be able to accommodate the cost of the ramp so that it can be considered. What the client can afford to buy is what should be purchased because they shouldn't spend more than they have. The second factor to consider is the type of wheelchair ramps.
The different wheelchair ramps are each specialized for a certain reasons and one should ensure that they buy just what they need. The material, the design and the purpose the ramps are made for cause the differences between them. The client should hence ensure that they do some research before they head out to buy a ramp. The client is able to know what fits their needs because these knowledge they acquire goes a long way.
The size of the ramp is the other factor to consider. The area that a ramp is to be used makes the ramps come in different sizes. Large ramps are used on large slopes and vice versa because there is need to create a slope so as to ease the movement of the wheelchair on it. The other factor to consider is the safety precautions. The ramp also presents some dangers and that is so because the wheelchair cannot slow down once it is on speed and the user might end up crashing. The landing should be slow and soft and one should make sure they employ mechanism such as the use of railings to ensure the user does not speed off.
The process of detoxifying your body is very important because it helps you to remove harmful toxins from your body. When you are able to detox, it's possible that you will be able to get a lot of health benefits. One of the things that you need to know is that the process of detoxification depends on the types of toxins that might be within your body. Some of the most famous types of detox are usually full-bodied detox and also drug detox systems. To ensure that you do not cause any harm to your body, it's important for you to always do detox under the supervision of a person who understands. Another thing you need to know about detox is that, you have to be very careful because the process can be quite difficult. If this is something that you have never done before, it is important to be very careful and to listen and watch your body. Buying detox kits is going to be of great importance because then, you'll be able to go through the process in an easier way. There are many companies today that provide detox kits for different amounts of money and for different purposes.
The probabilities of getting the best results are always hire when you take your time to choose the detox kits very carefully. Some of these detox kits are never good for you and that's why you have to be very careful with how you choose them, some of the companies do not have a good reputation. There are a number of detox kits in the market today and because of that, you always have to look for the one that is going to be most affordable for you. You will be able to use the detox kits for the detox process and detoxification is going to be of major benefit to you as explained below. Your body becomes much stronger when you are able to remove the toxins from your body especially because, toxins are like poisons,click for more. Your immune system is also going to be much stronger and the stress on the body is going to be much less. When there are less toxins in your body, the muscle tension is going to be much less.
Apart from that, the process of detoxification for example from drugs is going to help you to prevent damage to your nervous system. After the detox process, you will be able to live a normal life and you'll be able to achieve your responsibilities. Using these detox kits is going to be great for you and it is something that you may be able to prioritize.
The reproductive part of a plant is known as a flower. Many flowers are colorful especially in those plants which are pollinated by insects. The main parts of the flower are; sepals, stigma, style, ovary, anther, style and filament. The ovary is the part which forms a fruit after fertilization. Flowers on the same plant have the same color but flowers on different plants have different colors. Flowers have many uses such as beautification of office, homes, and ceremonies, used in clothing and jewelry and applied in aromatherapy. There are many shops which sell flowers today. The following are the factors you need to consider when searching for a good flower shop.
Before you visit a flower shop, you need to make sure it is authorized. The law requires that every entity which provides goods and services is supposed to have a license. An incompetent flower shop should not get a license. Since a license has an expiry date, it should be renewed from time to time as this article by Scotts Flowers. Buying flowers from a shop such as Scotts Flowers is recommendable since the shop is licensed.
A good flower shop should have affordable prices like Scotts Flowers NYC. The best flower shops offer quality flowers at reasonable prices. On the other hand, there are many flower shops hence one needs to compare their prices before settling on one. It is also good to come up with a financial plan on the purchase of flowers in order to eliminate overspending.
The best flower shops have e-commerce stores. Today, it is easier to do research on goods and services on the internet and even place an order virtually and this is the reason why a flower shop needs to have an online store. A client should find the important information about the flower shop such as telephone numbers, email addresses, location, terms and conditions and pricing details on the e-commerce site. For instance, a good flower shop nyc needs to have an online presence.
Free flower delivery nyc is another service offered by competent flower shops. After making an order of some bunches of flowers online, a good flower shop will deliver the flowers to your doorsteps without asking for an extra fee. Since the delivery of flowers requires special transportation and storage facilities, free delivery will pull in more clients.
The best flower shops have no bad reputation. A reputable flower shop is highly esteemed and honored by a lot of people. The reputable flower shops offer quality flowers and services. A reputable flower shop is associated with quality flowers and services. In order to identify a reputable flower shop, you need to read the reviews.
What you are as a parent may be different from how your other peers are as parents, read more now about different parenting styles.
Like any other forms of relationship, you need a bond built on connection and communication. Whatever happens, words matter that is why you need your child to understand that feelings and tears are okay.
Set limits with your kid but never use violence or spanking to make sure they follow your orders. This is a way for you to keep your sons and daughters on track- a method of disciplining them without the use of extreme physical violence.
In the process you have to take note that you must be gentle with yourself mainly because of the fact that all of these changes do not happen overnight.
Share what you have learned in this article to your spouse or friends with children of their own so that they will learn techniques about better parenting.
Are you looking for the best radar detector for your car? There are numerous ways you can buy the best radar detector that will suit your needs. Read the steps below to help you decide how to buy the best radar detector for your car.
Before researching about radar detector, see to it if a detector in your state. It is very important to know your state and local laws about radar detector before you purchase. You could face fines for buying illegal detectors or get your detector confiscated by authorities. In District of Columbia and Virginia for instance, radar detectors are illegal. Furthermore, radar detectors are illegal in the U.S. military bases and in most provinces in Canada. Radar detectors are not legal in commercial vehicles in many areas. The best way to know whether radar detectors are legal or not in you area is to call your local law enforcement or go to the website of your state's department of motor vehicle.
Nowadays, there are a lot of radar detectors with different features that you can purchase. $50 to more than $400 are the usual price range of these radar detectors. Always remember that just because it is the most expensive radar detector does not mean it is the best one.
There are three types of radar detectors: remote-mount radar detectors, that are permanently set up to your vehicle; cordless radar detectors, that are easily transportable and easily installed; and corded radar detectors, commonly mounted on the windshield of your rearview mirror.
There are many radar detector models available but it is best to stick with the major brand name manufacturers like Cobra, PNI, Valentine, and Beltronics. When purchasing a radar detector, look for these basic features: a mute feature and an adjustable volume control, have at least 110 dB, a wideband that can pick up the entire X, K, and Ka band.
You have to determine your budget, what bands you need to detect, the brand names of the model and also its basic features. There are a lot of websites that will help you compare various features, models, prices, and reviews. The trick here is to look for a radar detector with the best features and can meet your budget.
After you purchase your radar detector, you have to plan if you are going to install it yourself or have someone install it for you. There are some radar detector installations that are easy to install but there are also those that are complex that you need to have it professionally installed. An excellent place to have your radar detector installed is in a car audio store.
If you want to know more info about radar detector, click for more.
Recently, an increasing number of people have been reading books online and they really receive huge advantages. Some people have discovered platforms like Kindle Books which enables them to read various books and do more things. Take a look at the list below for some suggestion on the things you can do with Just Kindle Books and shop here for more reading materials of your favorite genre.
As a start, it is an amazing fact that having your own set of qualifications when choosing the genre of the book to read will provide you a guarantee that this will serve as your indicator until you could come up with the most suitable title of books to read as well as the right platform where you can read it for you to choose from. Through various platforms, just a few typing of keywords will display a list of materials which belongs in that category.
Upon looking at the site, you will immediately be guided to the categories like personal resources, premium book promotions, and budget book promotion which has the list of books to read. Aside from that, platforms such as this one always have discounted and free Kindle books so all you need is to stay tuned for daily deals on romance, mystery, fantasy, Sci-Fi, women's fiction, and a lot more.
Also, you can inquire for help from your family members or your friends about their experience when it comes to reading books online and they might be able to offer you some fascinating tips and suggestions on how to avoid making mistakes when opting for the right platform to register when planning to read books online.


Should "The End" Be Feared?
The End. Apocalypse. Revelation. I was 12 years old when the new millennium broke out. Year 2000 was welcomed with full of Y2K bug crap and end of the world paranoia. Computers, according to that Y2k bug are not programmed to accommodate that 000 reset and this was supposed to make banks, healthcare, power grids, and basically anything that's electronic or programmed to malfunction or shut down completely.
In the meanwhile, the Philippines during that time when the world was busy worrying about finance and commerce, was busy worrying about "the end of the world".There were groups of people who were literally caving in! Some sects (or cults) left their houses and hid inside some caves which according to their beliefs a.k.a. interpretation of the bible, could be their safe haven when the deluge happen. One crazy question then was: if the end was coming on January 1 2000, what country would be obliterated first? This world uses different timezones anyway.
New Year in the year 2000 was celebrated with a louder than loud bang. Fireworks display were all the rage. Each country had their own flamboyant display, not to be outdone by another. Same goes in our neighborhood where the New Year was welcomed with the loudest firecrackers Bocaue could ever invent. That was no ordinary New Year. It was the New Year and the New Millennium. Dogs were crouching in fear. I woke up by midnight in fear.
The crazy, coward, 12 year old me believed that there might be a tinge of truth in the end of the world paranoia. That was lame and a shame, I know! That tinge became more vivid and vivid that by 10 minutes that firecrackers were resounding in all corners of the forest where I lived, I wanted to throw up – like how I would weirdly acted as a child whenever I'm nervous or stressed (e.g. first day of school, when my grandfather died, etc.).
The sounds were diminishing slowly after half an hour. By 1am, bangs were dying down. I was able to go back to sleep then woke up again in the morning. Everything was the same except that it wasn't. A new millennium has broken.
The end has always scared me. Revelation, I thought, is the last book in the Bible that states all the frightful things of the pending apocalypse. Good thing this view slowly changed when I started to learn more about God – our merciful God.
One "Christian" book I read as a child said that, the end of the world should not be feared. We should not wish it not to happen. It would be like saying, "Jesus, don't come back again to save us." I was about 10 years old then. Time passed and I went on living my life, this idea slipped, or was pushed out, or tucked into oblivion for when you are young, the end seemed nowhere in sight.
One and a half decades later, a priest gave a talk during one retreat. He was reading all these passages from Revelation reminding me again that the end will come, it's inevitable and wait, I will see it in my lifetime? If not,I'll probably rise from the dead to witness it still. Nobody knows when it could be – a few minutes from now, next day, in a span of 10 years. Nobody knows but it will surely come. Frightening but it turned out, as explained, Revelation is a book explaining the liturgy. More liturgical than a book of doom. My cowardly 12 year old heart which was about to throw up upon hearing apocalyptic phrases was put to rest. Thank God, it is not literal!
The homily this Sunday shines a different light to the end. The words have got to be the most comforting, reassuring words I've heard in a long while. Like everyone else, I would have my ups and downs spiritually. For weeks now, I've been praying to be granted an increase in faith. I would tell God to take care of His cowardly child. This Sunday he answered.
Ang paghihirap ay prelude sa pagliligtas ng Panginoon.
This cowardly inner child is afraid of the unknown. Today I found out, heard for the first time despite how many times she had been told, that the future is certain! And that it is up to us whether we spend eternity in heaven or in hell.


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PMC SLEAZE: Kim & Kanye Finally Set Wedding Date x What We Learned From Prince's Arsenio Interview
Written By: ronenewpmc
Get ready to head to France for the wedding of the year! Kim Kardashian and Kanye West's wedding plans are well underway, in fact, everything is pretty much done, according to Us Weekly. This includes having set a date of May 24 and it is confirmed that this really is the date! Plus, you better believe, E! cameras will be there every step of the way.
For the complete story go to: http://hollywoodlife.com/2014/03/05/kim-kardashian-kanye-wests-wedding-date-revealed-new-report/
Here's five things we learned about His Royal Badness.
1. He doesn't own a cell phone
Hall told the audience that Prince was one of the first people who called him when the news broke that he was returning to late night, but he wasn't sure how the call was even made because the pop star doesn't have a cell phone. Prince quickly clarified, saying, "Everybody I know has one."
2. If he wasn't singing he would be a teacher
Prince revealed that when he was 16 he was broke and went on a mission to find an alternate career. "I got the Yellow Pages out and I didn't find anything I wanted to do, so I decided I was going to become a musician and win at it," he said. But if he absolutely had to choose a different calling, he'd "want to teach in some capacity."
3. He may be coming to a city near you
When he's not on tour or recording, Prince is indulging in his love of history and travel. "For the past couple of years I've been studying on my own and learning about history and trying to plan to go to the places I've been reading about," the 55-year-old said.
4. Don't get too close to the 'fro
In response to a fan who asked what his pet peeve was, Prince responded, "Strangers touching my hair." Respect.
5. He's a chef
When quizzed about his favorite household chose, Prince replied, "I can cook." But he only whips up one thing. Omelets. "All my friends have high cholesterol," he joked.
For the complete Prince story go to: http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20794086,00.html
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Richard Dawkins wrote The Blind Watchmaker to provide a "non-miraculous account of the existence of complex adaptations."1 The Economist magazine says it is "as readable and vigorous a defense of Darwinism as has been published since 1859." Logic & Light has addressed the theory of evolution before, but it makes sense for us to review and critique this book to ensure both sides of the debate are adequately considered.
Logic & Light has touched on the issue of evolution in several posts. But since this topic is of such importance, a more in-depth, multi-part analysis is warranted.