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A surprisingly large part of a software engineer's life is spent dealing with the little things. Much as I like to write about grand designs and architectural issues or people, processes and communities, all too often, the devil is in the details and I get lost chasing technological quirks. Herewith a sample of just the past week's minutiae, perhaps fodder for historians of science or anthropologists.
Boolean Identity Crisis
Structured Data Footnotes
Highlights, Lowlights
The Null Hypothesis
Camel Humps
The East Australian Singularity
I was going over some code in my pet XForms processor implementation and wondering what was going wrong - incidentally IBM has written (at least) 6 forms processors in the past 4 years along with contributing to the Mozilla XForms effort but we won't get into that - I'll save that for a business school case study or something.
After an hour or so of head-scratching this was what I found. In XML Schema Datatypes, the lexical space of boolean values includes not only "true" and "false" but also "0" and "1". I assume the inclusion of 0 and 1 in the specification comes from the legacy of the C language and presumably that makes sense. But I ask, was that a wise decision? The designers of the specification chose a binary representation in a textual format.
The forms processor is written in Java. It turns out that in the Java language, the lexical space of boolean values is case-insensitive "true" and "false". So if you have a mapping layer that goes from schema datatype to Java you have to add special case code to deal with 0 and 1. Presumably also in the other direction, you have to make sure that you don't output "True" instead of "true". I had been linking to a library that hadn't bothered to implement this more robust logic and ran into this boundary condition. Oh well, I thought, I'll have to add an adapter around this library or rip it out and roll my own - an assignment for the weekend.
I vaguely remember Sam Ruby mentionning that this was one cause of interoperability issues between SOAP implementations and it stands to reason: we've codified an identity crisis.
Jon Udell is a careful man whose
blog works differently from the rest of the InfoWorld blogs. The content is well-formed XML, and it follows certain self-imposed rules.
This discipline enables him to work miracles and regularly come up with lots of cool applications. But in the wider world, getting people to author structured data is an often intractable problem. XML is often structurally invalid; as an example the Google Reader team have reported that 15% of feeds on the web are not well formed and that is before considering the feeds' semantic validity.
Thus I was tickled by this footnote he wrote when playing with microformats.
The difference? I ran the page through HTML Tidy to get well-formed XML 2...
2 It wasn't entirely automatic, unfortunately, I had to wrestle with character encoding issues too.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you The Gruesome Twosome of Computer Science: Structured Data and Character Encoding. We call them footnotes.
It started with an offhand comment, a report that one couldn't set the background color on text in the rich text editor in Mozilla Firefox. Every other command on the editing palette worked. You thought, "15 minutes tops, I'll take it".
So you look up the list of command identifiers in Internet Explorer and notice that the execCommand method has an attribute named BackColor which
Sets or retrieves the background color of the current selection.
You head back to the Midas spec for Mozilla and see that for the backcolor entry
This command will set the background color of the document.
Hmm... Your first thought had been that it was a case-sensitivity problem, "backcolor" rather than "BackColor", but the documentation notes that case doesn't matter. So the problem is rather what you highlighted, in Mozilla, backcolor applies to the document and not to the current selection. This means that you have to use a different identifier to achieve the same effect in Mozilla. You promptly notice one called hilitecolor
This command will set the hilite color of the selection or at the insertion point. It only works with useCSS enabled.
Okay, someone decided to not use the same command as Internet Explorer, fair enough, you've seen worse. As you change the code, you say, it's Mozilla and CSS is enabled by default so all I have to do is switch to using hilitecolor.
Of course that doesn't work. You then tell yourself that you'll just enable CSS with the useCSS attribute (you had looked more closely at the code and noticed that CSS styling had been deliberately turned off for some obscure reason).
Hmm, that didn't work...
So you go back to the spec and you notice a styleWithCSS attribute. Interesting... You try that instead of useCSS. Of course, you happen to be testing using a version of Firefox (1.04) that doesn't support that attribute so there's an exception. Presumably this attribute was introduced in Firefox 1.5 or something. Still it's a good thing that you are using an older version for testing otherwise this would have been another bug (feature doesn't work in Firefox 1.0 etc).
You bang around for a while and go back to the original Midas demo which seems to work correctly if you have the "use CSS" checkbox checked.
You view the source of the demo to figure out what could possibly be making it work and you notice that they are setting the useCSS property to false when the checkbox is checked. Huh? They set useCSS to false in order to enable CSS!
So you go back and look more closely at the documentation. First you notice that the useCSS property is deprecated. Hmm... the plot thickens. Then you read this
useCSS - value: true/false
Note: This command has been replaced with styleWithCSS. It takes the same values as styleWithCSS, but the meaning of true and false are inversed.
Up is down in other words. It's like Alice in Wonderland or something. Do note that there is no word on what version the replacement occurred. Nor indeed is there any footnote on why true and false are "inversed".
Anyway you've finally figured it out, you make the change to enable CSS styling only when applying the hilitecolor attribute, add some future-proofing to use the styleWithCSS attribute in case the deprecated useCSS attribute is removed in later browsers, submit the patches and 3 hours of your life have passed. It was frustrating but there's an object lesson somewhere. If you are building a robust cross-browser rich text editing application, you have some code that has to go through this rigmarole.
I have a confession. I recounted the above tale because I feel guilty: I could have prevented all this four years ago.
Internet Explorer was the first browser to introduce rich text editing. It was not pretty since they didn't want it to be as good as Microsoft Word, but it worked reasonably. IBM later contributed resources to Mozilla to beef up its rich text editing. Indeed four years ago, I was asked to review the resulting Midas spec by my colleagues who had been working on that functionality. The spec looked serviceable, pointing mostly to the Microsoft documentation since they wisely chose to follow the de-facto standard. I reported a few bugs with the intial implementation and we built a rich text editor around it. It's widely used on the web these days.
I obviously was a bad reviewer because I certainly didn't notice that there was a change in the semantics of the backcolor attribute from "current selection" to "document" nor indeed that a new attribute, hilitecolor, had been introduced in Mozilla. There is absolutely no reason for these discrepancies. Nor do I want to go down the forensic trail that explains why you can't have a background color on text if you don't style with CSS. That's a rathole of its own.
So what do we have here? A de-facto standard was implemented but someone took the liberty to change one aspect of it for whatever reason - semantic purity or something. I suspect I won't be the last developer to waste an afternoon on this or indeed the last user to be cursing about why I can't add a background colour to a piece of text. I hope that Opera and Safari, if and when they have their rich text editing implementation in place, will do a wholesale copying of Internet Explorer's behaviour. I don't want to be chasing these lowlights again. I often see criticism of Microsoft's inconsistent approach to standards but everyone can be as guilty as them on occasion.
Stefan Tilkov recently asked what's wrong with Javascript? The answer of course is nothing really, it's a fine language as evidenced by looking around current thinking on the language. Indeed Brendan Eich's biggest admitted gotcha about the language is automatic semi-colon insertion. Thus there is no reason it can't be used in environments outside the browers in which it is most widely deployed as glue - I've played with Rhino on the server-side without any problem.
From what I understand, Jotspot, which incidentally I consider a cunning plan to showcase the Dojo toolkit, uses Javascript as the scripting language on both the server and client. All power to them. Of course with Javascript from the same document executing in both environments, you can get very confused. The answer to one of Jotspot's most frequently asked questions, "Why isn't my Javascript function being called?" is that "your code is not running where you think it is" ergo, you're expecting that the current code you're looking at is server-side rather than client-side, or vice-versa. This is especially true since the object model is likely to be different, the browser DOM is a deliberately constrained environment whereas on the server side you'd want to allow your plugins to do more.
Thus there is a little impedance with using Javascript everywhere. Perhaps it's less confusing to use a different language and syntax for server side code - a tag library in jsp, or embedded java, php, asp or whatever. Or maybe clever syntax coloring in your editor or IDE would do the trick to remind you of the context. Needless to say, you have to decide what side you're on...
I've been working on a project in which the others on my team are seasoned PHP gurus and are occasionally petrified of Javascript - the reason of course being the continued brittleness of the browser platform. When I started work, this bias showed and their initial recommendation was to do as much as possible in PHP on the server-side. They recognize however that that we are living in an age of interactivity so we need that shine that comes with moving intelligence to the client. Still when you start doing data-binding and automatic JSON serialization of PHP objects, you get constructs on the browser client that you wouldn't normally use if you were a client-side person. As someone who's very comfortable with both client and server side code (perhaps more comfortable with Java than PHP), I keep running into such peculiarities all the time. Of late I find myself prototyping code in client side Javascript even if it will eventually morph into server side code. Perhaps I need to get more into Python or that Ruby bandwagon. Still you tend to develop a split personality when you develop for the web.
I got the note: "you can't append a column if you click on a cell in the last column of a table in Internet Explorer".
Huh? I attempted to reproduce the bug and, sure enough, that was the case. Vaguely at the back of my mind I recalled from painful experience in K-station that there were special APIs in the HTML DOM for dealing with tables. Thus I searched the codebase for insertRow and insertCell. Hmmm those functions were nowhere to be found. How were they doing the column insertion, I wondered? My guess was that this was either some innerHTML tricks or simple standard DOM manipulation. Thus I had to dig through the code and eventually encountered the Node.insertBefore conundrum.
Now insertBefore is a method on the Node interface that is part of DOM level 1 specification. Every browser claims at least DOM level 1 support.
It turns out that in certain versions of Internet Explorer the second parameter to the insertBefore call can't be null, you get an Invalid Argument exception. Mozilla handles this condition as one would expect in their Javascript binding; Internet Explorer chokes. [Obscenity]. There was too much code to change to use the HTML-specific methods so I just hacked special case code that ensures that I don't pass a null to Internet Explorer - 3 hours of my life perhaps.
Now this doesn't amaze me really, thinking back on it, this is probably the reason that somewhere in the bowels of every Javascript library that deals with dynamically adding a new option to a select control, you'll find code like the following:
function appendOptionElement(select, newoption){
if(is_ie) // test for internet explorer somehow
select.add(newoption);
select.add(newoption, null);
The browser is a fragile place and hopefully the frameworks that are being developed will shield you somewhat from such issues, but it is telling that you can't rely on core DOM functionality. Even if these quirks are fixed in Internet Explorer 7, this patched-up code will have to hang around for another 5 years before users will no longer use older versions of the browser. We're in a world of pain in the browser world.
Nulls however are problematic throughout computer science. The arguments around them may sound like angel and pinhead discussions but they are fair questions. What indeed is null? What is zero for that matter? For centuries and throughout the Dark Ages of the West, there was no concept of zero, it took Arabic Algebra to spread that notion. Why should one expect that programmers would have internalized the null concept? Reasonable people can and do differ on how to treat null.
Just now, reading through the latest Dr Dobbs journal, I noticed the following in an article about Consuming .NET Web Services in Oracle JDeveloper
The ATL Server SOAP handler generates an xsi:nil="1" attribute when the element's value is null, or when the array is null or zero-size. Unfortunately, Apache SOAP fails to deserialize UDTs whose fields contain the xsi:nil="1" attribute and expects zero-size arrays to be represented as XSD arrays with the dimension parameter set to zero.
The author then proceeds to outline a variety of workarounds. Now I happen to not be a fan of the SOAP style of programming (in the past I've called it Crusty Old Architecture pronounced SOA with a silent P) but as a developer, I feel the pain. The article is a catalog of kludges and likely mapping errors that have to be worked around - the word "unfortunately" is used entirely too often.
I started my career doing graphical programming thus I perked up when Raymond Chen recently outlined the consequences of invalidating the null window and his anecdote is worth quoting at length.
If however you end up passing NULL as the window handle to the InvalidateRect function, this is treated as a special case for compatibility with early versions of Windows: It invalidates all the windows on the desktop and repaints them.
Even more strangely, passing NULL as the first parameter to ValidateRect has the same behavior of invalidating all the windows. (Yes, it's the "Validate" function, yet it invalidates.) This wacko behavior exists for the same compatibility reason. Yet another example of how programs rely on bugs or undocumented behavior, in this case, the peculiar way a NULL parameter was treated by very early versions of Windows due to lax parameter validation. Changing nearly anything in the window manager raises a strong probability that there will be many programs that were relying on the old behavior, perhaps entirely by accident, and breaking those programs means an angry phone call from a major corporation because their factory control software stopped working.
The null hypothesis strikes again.
Even when you get past these details, you get into matters of syntax - a longstanding pet topic of mine. Consider the separators that people use for readability. Some people like to use Hungarian notation, others prefer hyphens... well I've already written a hyphenated parable so I'll skip that aspect. Anyway, assume for some insane reason that it makes sense for your spec to have an attribute named "windowTop". There'll undoubtedly be people who will write it "window-top", "window.top" or with some other variant of case, "WindowTop"? If you're dealing with XML where case matters, things will fail. You say potato, I say pubDate anyone?
I've been playing with a product that is essentially a wiki and it turns out that by convention, camel case (or should I write it as CamelCase) is significant in the wiki world as denoting a "WikiWord". I even had to spend half an hour writing glossary entries for these concepts since in our system, user names and page names had to be in that format.
You can imagine however the kinds of issues that arise when you have an html editor that allows you to enter HTML and Javascript along with php code and a specialized wiki syntax - since for some reason, it was decided not to use angle brackets in this product. The most complicated piece of code is going to be the parser. As currently implemented, the parser is a mass (or should I say, a morass) of regular expressions and all kinds of things I'll never understand. There's even special case code in there to handle nested comments in Javascript. What was never forseen however was that you'd have to deal with user-entered script code. What would happen if camel case is used for variables inside of said script? Well it wasn't pretty when the wiki engine jumped in and treated script as wiki words, let's just say that someone had to come up with a solution.
There's this concept known as McCabe Cyclomatic Complexity which is basically an application of graph theory to software and is often used to pinpoint potential problems. The basic insight is that if there are too many decisions or paths through your code, it will be buggier, harder to maintain and test. A good guideline is that anything with complexity greater than 15 in this scheme is ripe for refactoring. Luckily I have access to some tools that can generate reports and provide some numbers to validate that nagging sense that a piece of code is getting harder to understand. What worries me is that I keep running into code that laughs at such guidelines - after the latest change the parser code just hit 41 (to give some context, values between 21 and 50 indicate "a complex, high risk program" and with the 50 barrier looming, we are verging towards that notable status of the "untestable program - very high risk"). I'm sure it didn't start out this way and that the steady accretions have been solutions to real problems. Still, technical arteriosclerosis continues its inexorable spread...
Ruby on Rails and the Zend framework for PHP are founded on favouring convention. We had this code that automatically created the schema for what amounted to a database table. We never actually told users that this was what was going on. Of course once a wider audience started to play with the product, we had to fix the bugs that arose to enforce the convention so that databases would be named as the code expected. A classic case of leaky abstractions I suppose. You can guess the complexity the additional error checking added.
Moving up a level, you get politics - the most aberrant of which have been the feed wars of the past few years perhaps best summarized hilariously by Shelley Powers. Truly, Jesus wept.
Bill de Hóra in an aside wisely noted that
Programmers would rather squabble about minutiae - it seems this transcends community or language choice.
But even when you move beyond whiplash and abrasive personalities, who would have thought that the Atom working group would have spent so much time on the concept of dates. When I saw dissertation-length essays on the various types of dates that might be used in publishing systems, I was content to continue lurking in that community. The thing however is that these details do matter and they are best dealt with up front. The aggregate waste of programmer effort in pursuit of minutiae might keep the profession in business but it surely isn't sustainable.
I'll conclude by noting that acts of God (or in this case, his flawed proxies: politicians) can come into the picture. Thus I read the following this week: Eastern Australia: Java applications impacted by the change to daylight savings time dates
The running of the Commonwealth Games in Australia in March and April 2006 has resulted in an extension to daylight savings time in the eastern states of Australia, which includes New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Australian Capital Territory and Tasmania.
Rather than the clocks being put back an hour at 03:00 on Sunday 26 March 2006, they will now be adjusted at 03:00 on Sunday 2 April 2006. The IBM Software Development Kit (SDK) or Java Runtime Environment (JRE) is not currently aware of the one-time change to the daylight savings time extension. An interim fix is required for your application to have the same time as your operating system.
This change applies to all of the Java environments, irrespective of their setup, whether they are set up to use the operating system time zone information, or the user.timezone custom property that can be set for the SDK or JRE.
I assume television schedules were behind this change to the time/space continuum since the Commonwealth games have just begun. Or perhaps the politicians were concerned about athletes missing their events or something. Still imagine if you're the Java programmer who has suffered through the badly defined date apis in Java 1.0 a decade ago, adapted to the improvements in succeeding versions and finally, finally gotten a robust application deployed. Then your manager walks in and tells you about the East Australian Singularity. You're going to have to rework everything since bank transactions might be messed up and there are likely to be blinking clocks etc. We live in a global village so you have to worry about what happens if some mission-critical application that you rely on is being run in Eastern Australia. You can't even have the special case restricted to that country, it's only a sub-region that is affected. At such times I'd prefer being the poor Eastern Australian sheep or lamb, their lot is much easier.
What a way to make a living, if it isn't one thing it's the other. And then there's version hell. Lord help me.
File under: technology, software, abstraction, details, minutiae, glitches, programming, standards, language, absurd, toli
Labels: abstraction, absurd, complexity, data, details, glitches, html, javascript, language, minutiae, programming, Small Things, software, standards, syntax, technology, toli, web, xml
Little Mr Square Eyes said...
"Then your manager walks in and tells you about the East Australian Singularity."
Koranteng, down this way many of us just refer to the extended daylight saving thing as a 'pain in the arse' (granted East Australian Singularity does sound a bit more technically genteel).
If it's any consolation Betty and Phil (aka her maj) popped down under to open the games and she definitely looked like she wanted to be somewhere else as well.
To add insult to injury, the Commonwealth Games are not being broadcast in the US. I can't even follow the athletics competition and see how Ghana's athletes are doing - whether Aziz Zakari will wake up on the right side of bed, whether Leo Myles-Mills will fumble the baton in the 4x100 relay. It will have to be a case of monitoring minutiae in the US newspapers if indeed they do cover the games.
5:35 PM, March 18, 2006
Alessandro Vernet said...
Koranteng,
Thank you for sharing all this with us. Definitely very useful! I posted an entry in our blog about what what you are saying here regarding 0 and 1 being valid Boolean values in XML schema. And I am just mentioning this here because you might be interested by that blog as you seem to be watching the XForms space.
Thanks for the hilitecolor remark. I found it extremely useful especially that i had no clue where to look for it.
7:23 AM, January 27, 2009
Frisson de Folksonomie
The REST Elevator Pitch
Voices Inside
Africa, 1966


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Review & Betting Guide for the Nelson Mandela Championship
Branden Grace 14/1 © Kevin Murray
It's going to be a very emotional Nelson Mandela Championship this week as South Africa and the world say their goodbyes to Madiba and how fitting it would be if a South African player won here this week.
I am sure all the players will want to pay their respects and I must say yet again I am disappointed that such a great man's tournament is being bypassed by some of the worlds top players. I am sure the tournament organisers would have bent over backwards if Tiger Woods had asked to play so he could honor Mandela and what he stood for. But it seems professional golfers are only interested in money and the pursuit of it.
This weeks guide is obviously dominated by South African players mainly because I am sure all of them would want to be the one holding the trophy so they can honor the man and his legacy. This could go two ways this week, it will either inspire the home players to do well or the weight of the nation will be too much for them – I am hoping it inspires them.
Jaco Van Zyl 22/1 © Sunshine Tour
My tips to win:
First up is Branden Grace 14/1 who comes into this week "striking the ball really well", according to one of his pre tournament interviews. He also stated he "just couldn't get it in the right positions to score" at last week's Nedbank Golf Challenge. Grace hasn't won on the European Tour this year after winning four events in 2012 and with only five Top 10 finishes in 2013 I am sure he will be looking to do well here this week.
Although this years event is being staged at Mount Edgecombe Jaco Van Zyl 22/1 did fire a final round 57 in this event last year at Royal Durban, it maybe a different track but I am sure those good memories will come flooding back when he tees it up this week. Jaco has started the 2014 season well with a Top 15 finish at the SA Open Championship, which followed on from his Top 25 at the WGC HSBC Champions tournament and he currently sits third on the Sunshine Tours Order of merit. We have done well with Jaco in the past and hopefully that will continue here this week.
Someone we have backed a few times recently who currently lies one place better off than Van Zly on the Sunshine tour's Order of Merit, is Darren Fichardt 22/1. Darren slid back down the leaderboard at last week's Nedbank Golf Challenge with his final round of 74, but I think his early work at that event shows he is not far from getting back to that early season form that bagged him a win at the African Open, which he followed up a week later with a runners-up finish at the Tshwane Open.
My each-way tips:
Richard Finch 33/1 is one of the two none South Africans on this week's betting guide. Finch over the last couple of weeks has been in great form with a runners-up finish at the Alfred Dunhill Championship and then followed that up with a Top 10 finish at last week's Hong Kong Open where he played some solid golf for his last three rounds which were all in the 60s. The 2012 season wasn't that great for the lad from Cheshire, but he looks like he has the bit between his teeth this season.
Another tip from last week's guide and the other none South African this week is Oliver Fisher 40/1. As I stated last week I have been watching the lad from Essex over the last couple of weeks and he looks like his game is coming together nicely, his Top 15 finish at last week's Hong Kong Open shows he's found a new swing key after his eleventh place finish at the KLM Open. His steady progress I think will start to see him challenge here this week.
My outside tip:
This week's outside bet is going to be Oliver Bekker 150/1.Bekker finished the 2012 season on the Sunshine Tour in the Top 10 and I was surprised that he didn't kick on this year. The lad from Pretoria – who has three wins on the Sunshine Tour, one of those at this year's Telkom PGA Pro-Am – will want to get this season off to a good start.
For updated betting odds during the tournament go to planetgolfreview.com
TOPICS: Golf, Golf on the Web, Lifestyle, Off course, Tournament reviews and betting guides
ABOUT: James Mason
James Mason is a contributing writer for Golf Monthly magazine, producing destination reviews, technical and equipment reviews and blogs. He was also part of the judging panel for the 2010 Top 100 courses in Great Britain and Ireland. James has written equipment reviews and technical features for Greenside magazine, destination features for Golf World and Going for Golf magazines and interviews for Middle East Golfer.
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


First, I'll be doing the 2012 Walk for Autism Delaware again this year! Last year I raised $463 for this cause, with the help of many of my readers! This year, I'm teaming up with my friends at Juniper Hill Farms. Help us reach our goal when you support us through the Dude, I'm an Aspie fundraising page! The April 21 walk will benefit adult vocational services, teen game night, parent information, and autism awareness and education. Thanks!
And lastly, don't forget I have T-shirts! There are five designs now, including "I Need a 1-Up!" and "Neurotypical Is My Second Language." Is there a cartoon you'd like to see on a shirt? Tell me, and I can probably make it happen.
oh man, I forgot how much I found myself nodding to the "wide eyed" cartoon... I had just gotten a new monitor and yeeeeeeeargh!
I know, I forgot myself, since I've now gotten so used to it!
*Squee!* It's a shirt now!! Yays! I know it's not much costwise, but I still have to wait till I get the money... oh, but it'll be worth the wait! Another smile in my odd days of late.
I hope you don't get tired of me "sounding" like a broken record (no vocal involved, so no sound, right?)... but I feel so blessed to be able to come here and find something to make me smile, even if it's something I've found a hundred times before!
Best of luck on the walk! Hope you break your fundraising record!
Hey Chris - nope, never gets old to hear I make others smile - thanks!


Everyone knows that when we want something so bad, the waiting part is the hardest. We wait for a lot of things in this life; a breakthrough in career, a specific amount in our bank accounts, that house and lot we've been eyeing out, the right person we're going to marry and even our dreams to be a reality.
This was the one dream that I was willing to wait for. I was going to do it step by step. I was going to prepare myself. Little did I know that God was already working backstage. And this is the very reason why this journey was so much special.
My journey in dreaming and waiting started in 2013. Year after year, I committed this specific prayer to God and listed it down to my faith goals. The desire was too strong that there were days when I found myself crying on bended knees asking God that if He had no plans of granting my prayer, He might as well remove the desire and give me a new one – one that's aligned with His. He saw how my heart broke and rejoiced in the news of friends being given the opportunity to live my dream. He knew about how scared and happy I was to have received the news, three years later – just the thought of stepping foot on the country and at the same time, having the possibility of a denied visa was both overwhelming and heartbreaking.
I left the first company I worked for in 2014 with uncertainties in the new path I was going to take. I've always told everyone that leaving one of the best companies in the world and changing industries from IT retail to financials were for the bigger goals in my life. I had it all planned out; I was going to enter the financial industry and add some skills in my resume to qualify me for work in Singapore, thinking it would be so much easier if I enter UK from there. After, I was going to try out applying for the UK visa or doing whatever way I could, to fly to London. I had no specific end date, I just knew I'll be in London sooner or later. I wasn't the hurrying type, but I got so frustrated that I almost gave up. Well, that was MY plan.
Just more than a year in the new company and in the first project I was assigned to, the team was suddenly dissolved. We found ourselves floating – exploring opportunities outside the company. I attended three interviews and promised three more to other companies. My last option was to go back to my hometown and rest for awhile and maybe keep my options open or try to chase other things I am passionate about.
I had sleepless nights and continued to pray to the Lord. And though I was a little depressed and scared about the future, I had this feeling of excitement – as if something big was coming, I didn't know what or when, but there was an assurance that everything will work out fine.
There are a lot of people who never fully trusted God nor His capacity to do wonders, it's as if we always need to push and do our best to achieve something. But this one, I tell you, is something I never had to work hard for. Looking back, everything had fallen exactly into place. Project got dissolved. I was given a slot to the newly-acquired project of the company even though my manager had told me there wasn't any slot left, that actually led me to prepare myself to pursue my other passions. The unfortunate event of almost losing a job, with the project getting dissolved turned out to be a beautiful blessing in disguise because it redirected me to new doors that skyrocketed me straight to my dream.
When I was asked if I wanted to join the team to fly to United Kingdom for training, I got so excited, like a kid finally getting what she wished for birthdays, Christmas, and all the good days. Then fear set in – this was too good to be true. This was too easy. What if my visa application got denied? What if I got into an accident and couldn't fly to UK? What and ifs. It clouded my mind for so many days but God always reminded me that He's got this and that I shouldn't limit His infinity to my finite mind, that nothing is too hard for Him!
"God, You've opened the doors when I was willing to wait. You're handing out my dream when I was willing to work hard for it. You initiated this opportunity when I was willing to look for it. This isn't me now, this is You. And I will trust in You. I will trust in Your promise that You will withhold nothing amazing from your children. May all the glory and honor be Yours, and Yours alone. And even if this doesn't turn out good, I will still trust in Your Will because it's always good and perfect," this was the last entry I wrote before my visa got approved.
While I was looking out the window just before our touchdown, my tears swelled as I saw the London Eye and the Shards. I couldn't believe that I was finally seeing it in the flesh. My insides turned in a good way. My heart skipped beats and I couldn't help but shed a few tears while taking photos from the window seat. I heard myself whispered a hundred times, "thank you Lord".
As I exited from the plane, the cool air struck my face and I stopped at the door and gave London my warmest smile. London air all over me! London air! Yes, I was that happy that even the thought of me gasping the London air made me so excited and teary.
I remembered a friend of mine told me a story about a friend of hers that went to London through a scholarship that was granted to her because of the connections she worked for by attending different UK seminars. Why didn't I go and find opportunities myself?
Truth is, I could've done that if I wanted to. I was actually looking through opportunities and saving for some. But this wasn't just a goal, this was a prayer and I wanted God to personally show me that He could answer prayers for me as big as this one. This wasn't just a dream, this was a fusion of worldly and spiritual goals. I was giving it up to God and letting Him do what He does and thinks best.
Even when I'm back in Manila, I still couldn't process everything that has happened for the last few months. It was as if everything in my life built up to prepare me to receive this and I couldn't be anymore grateful.
Just before I went home from United Kingdom, my best friend and I were talking about dreams being answered through prayers. She spoke about the term, "from glory to glory", what it means and what we should be doing to understand what the phrase means. We should always have an open palm, always ready to accept blessings and have it replaced or removed. We shouldn't clench our fists when God gives us something, because when He decides to remove it, we will hurt and we will grow bitter towards God. We should trust that our God knows what's best for us and He wouldn't give us anything less than what we have now.
"Glory to glory" – I feel like I can dream bigger now, like I have this hope and faith that if God could give my biggest dream in a snap, what else can He not give?
God wrapped this year with a ribbon. He was true to His Words, "Call to me and I will answer you, and show you great and unsearchable things you do not know", Jeremiah 33:3 and indeed, He showed me great and mighty things which I wouldn't know if I didn't offer this one to Him.
To the author of this story, thank you for sharing this dream turned into reality story! Indeed, nothing is impossible with the Lord! More stories of her at her blog site – Half of My Heart .


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Candelaria Will Chair Black and Latino Caucus
State Rep. Juan Candelaria (D-New Haven) has been tapped to the new leader of the Black and Latino Caucus, a group of 20 members of the state House of Representatives and four members of the state Senate. Latinos now have three of the leadership positions.
Candelaria is in his sixth term as a state representative from New Haven and is one of the House deputy majority leaders. He sits on the Appropriations, Children, Higher Education & Employment Advancement committees, and the Joint Committee on Legislative Management.
Rep. Bruce Morris (D-Norwalk) will serve as vice chair. Rep. Jason Rojas (D-East Hartford/Manchester) was reelected treasurer and state Rep, Christina Ayala (D-Bridgeport), in her first term in the House, was elected secretary.
Candelaria stated, "It is a great honor to have been elected chair of the Black and Latino Caucus. The minority growth, attention and momentum we are witnessing across the state and nationwide is contagious and extremely important to us. We will use it to advance our priorities and strengthen our position as one unified and strong voice. I look forward to working with all my colleagues to help our communities move forward."
"I'm honored that my colleagues have re-elected me, and I'm looking forward to continuing my service as treasurer and managing the finances of the caucus," said Rep. Rojas in a press release.
"I am honored to be considered for this position as I begin the job of representing my constituents in Bridgeport," Rep. Ayala added. "I am looking forward to working with Caucus members in the capacity of Secretary to address issues important to our communities. I believe that this caucus is instrumental in addressing issues in urban cities like Bridgeport and am confident that we will all work diligently with one voice to move our agenda forward."
A number of members of the Black and Latino Caucus serve in leadership positions in the House and Senate.
Latino House members in leadership positions are:
Juan Candelaria (D-New Haven) Deputy Majority Leader
Minnie Gonzalez (D-Hartford) Majority Whip at Large
Ezequiel Santiago (D-Bridgeport) Vice Chair, Labor and Public Employees Committee and Deputy Majority Whip
Robert Sanchez (D-New Britain) Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee Vice Chair and Assistant Majority Leader
Jason Rojas (D-East Hartford) Chair, Planning and Development Committee
Senate Latino members in leadership positions are:
Andres Ayala, Jr. (D-Bridgeport/Stratford) Assistant Majority Leader, chair: Committee on Aging and Regulations Review committee. Vice-Chair: Public Safety & Security.


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Let Me Tell You a Story – part 1
Programs by Composers
December 29, 2014 - January 2, 2015
Tchaikovsky, Part I – Bill launches into the first part of a two part series on the Russian Romantic composer Peter Tchaikovsky. Though shunned by some other Russian composers as sounding "too Western", Tchaikovsky was loved throughout the world as a great Russian composer. Caught between East and West, he created his own sound— a sound that to this day is still treasured and that Russians are proud to call their own. Bill starts with Mikhail Glinka, who broke from the Italian school to create the Russian school of music, and ends with excerpts of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. Don't miss this week and next, where we continue with the music of Peter Tchaikovsky.
December 22 - 26, 2014
Holiday Celebration – All around the world, winter holidays are celebrated, and their music is wonderful to hear, regardless of which tradition you observe. Bill gets us started with Nova Stella, medieval Italian Christmas music with a very early staging of the nativity. We will enjoy Christmas in Paris with music from Debussy, Charpentier and Poulenc and a Polynesian traditional hymn, Anau Oia Ea, plus an excerpt from Amahl and the Night Visitors from the original television production. Bill plays us one of his favorites from Ernest Bloch, Sacred Service. On our final day we will listen to Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on Christmas Carols, and this week's celebration will end with more holiday cheer from David Bowie and Bing Crosby.
Beethoven Quartets – An exploration of these rare bodies of work. We'll take a tour through all 16 quartets, plus the Grosse Fuga.
Viola – This week we'll celebrate some of the exquisite music written for this "inner voice". The viola is the middle sister of the stringed instruments, sitting between the violins and the cellos, and playing in a clef written devised just for her. The viola is often misunderstood and mistaken for a "larger violin" or sometimes either forgotten about or made the butt of jokes. But, the viola sings with a dark richness that composers loved! Mozart, Brahms, and Dvorak, to name just a few composers, played the viola, and oh, Hindemith did too. And these composers, plus many more figured out how to let this instrument have her day in the sun with concertos, tone poems, and orchestral solos. Listen and you too will fall in love with this instrument.
December 1 - 5, 2014
Incidentally Speaking – For as long as art forms such as theatre, ballet, and other entertainments have graced the stage, composers have been there to enhance the dramatic action through music. This week Bill explores some of the not-so-incidental music that has resulted.
Francis Poulenc – A master of wit and elegance, equal parts boulevardier and enfant terrible, Francis Poulenc's melodic gifts and prolific output made him one of the 20th century's most enduring composers.
Nobody Ever Builds a Statue to a Critic – An exploration of composers' critiques, evaluations, and responses to their contemporaries.
Poland – A five-part history of music in Poland.
November 3 - 7, 2014
Don't Shoot the Piano Player —He is doing the best he can. -Oscar Wilde
Starting with the earliest piano trios from Joseph Haydn, Bill will present the best of chamber music that includes the piano— piano trios, quartets, quintets, and more. The piano is a versatile instrument in the chamber music world. Pianists can be members of an established group or featured guests, and composers add them to compositions as the "glue" that joins instruments together. Mozart, Dvôrák, and Brahms all wrote chamber music and then played "musical chairs" to fill the empty seat to join in on the fun. Chamber music written to include the piano continues through the 20th century with Bartok and Messiaen, and on to today with Joan Tower and her colleagues. Bill just touches the surface of this world, and will return to it in the future, so please, take care of our piano players!
The New York Philharmonic: The Big Five, Part II – We continue to look at the unique history of the New York Philharmonic. Just think about the audiences who were there before you: from Walt Whitman's "silent sea of faces and the unbared heads" listening to the funeral march from Beethoven's 3rd Symphony as Abraham Lincoln laid in state at City Hall, to the orchestra's televised tribute to JKF led by Leonard Bernstein, and later still, the premiere of the John Adams On the Transmigration of Souls, commissioned by the Philharmonic to remember the victims of September 11, 2001. In celebration and in mourning, the New York Philharmonic has been there.
The New York Philharmonic: The Big Five, Part I – Bill begins a two-week series on our oldest orchestra, the New York Philharmonic. Their doors opened December 7, 1842 and Bill plays several pieces the Philharmonic included in its opening season— the overture to Weber's Oberon and Beethoven's Symphony No. 5. This orchestra was conducted and cultivated by Franz Liszt, Richard Strauss, and Gustav Mahler, and their influence along with many other musicians is still heard in every note the orchestra plays. Many of the works they premiered have become standard orchestral literature. Bill interviews musicians, explores the orchestra's archives, and features some of its most memorable performances.
From This Mighty River: The Music of the Children of J.S. Bach – Music flowed from the Bach family in a seemingly unending torrent for generations, and the three sons of Johann Sebastian were no exception. This week we'll listen to the music of Wilhelm Friedemann, Carl Phillip Emanuel and Johann Christian Bach as they continued their father's legacy into the Classical era.
España – Bill takes on the confluence of cultures, languages, and terrains in the country of Spain. Monday's program starts with the religious music of early Spain during a time in which Islam, Judaism, and Christianity existed side by side, to 1492, when the Jews and Moors of Spain were banished from the country. We continue through the next 400 years, and this week concludes with music from present day Spain.
September 29 - October 3, 2014
Life Among the Dead – This week we'll venture into hallowed territory with some of the most profound music in the literature, including requiems by Mozart, Verdi, Berlioz, Fauré, Dvorak and Duruflé.
String Quartet Composers From Fibich to Sibelius – Bill continues his in-depth look at the string quartet's history and development this week, with a focus on late 20thcentury composers Zdeněk Fibich, Jean Sibelius, and their contemporaries, all born in the 1850s and 1860s. After quartets of Hugo Wolf and Claude Debussy, we will venture across the pond to another form of chamber music, a piano trio by American composer Amy Beach.
Autumn Leaves – Works inspired by sights, sounds and smells of the world at summer's end, including selections by Vivaldi, Piazzola, Delius and Schubert.
September 8 - 12, 2014
Schubert String Quartets – Bill continues his in-depth look at the string quartet's history with the music of Franz Schubert. His quartets are unique and remarkable. From his early teens, Schubert loved composing quartets with surprising key relationships and complicated rhythms. These "tone puzzles" can be heard within quartet movements and throughout the complete piece. On Friday's program Bill adds an extra cello to feature Schubert's final chamber work, the String Quintet in C Major. This "Cello Quintet" was composed just a few months before Schubert's death.
September 1 - 5, 2014
William Walton –Inspired by a composer that was in the vanguard of British music in the 20th century, Benjamin Britten once wrote that hearing William Walton's music was a "great turning point in his musical life". We'll trace the arc of Walton's life and his associations with the greatest artists of his time, including Heifetz, Hindemith, Olivier, and Beecham.
Venic: The Glories of – Exploring Music focuses on sounds of the city, water, and love in Venice. Bill explores the magical city that inspired music of the late Renaissance, Baroque, and the beginning of Italian opera. From Monteverdi and Orlando di Lasso, Bill includes religious and secular music and continues with two major Venetian influences: Adrian Willaert of Dutch descent and the Roman composer Palestrina. Other composers featured in the week are Gabrieli, Vivaldi, Verdi, and more.
Homage – How would you like to be the subject of a composition by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky or Mozart? In many cases, the fame of the music has outlasted that of its honoree, but we'll explore some of these heartfelt gestures and the composers who made them. Works include Handel's Water Music and Pictures at an Exhibition.
A Green and Pleasant Land – With William Blake's famous words as a stepping-off point, we're traversing the pastoral musical landscapes of the British Isles.
Frédéric Chopin – A five-part biography to celebrate the 200th birthday of Chopin, whose invention and innovation had an indelible effect on the world of Romantic music and the piano.
July 28 - August 1, 2014
Emotion and Meaning in Music – Is music merely a collection of ordered pitches and vibrations in the air, or is there inherent and universal meaning contained within? Does music convey anger, longing, desire or humor? This week Bill delves into one of the most mysterious and fundamental qualities of music: its ability to convey emotion to the listener. Starting with Gil Shaham with the New York Philharmonic's performance of Samuel
Barber's violin concerto, we will listen to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and end the week with JS Bach's E minor Toccata. Bill asks us to listen carefully and ask ourselves, "what do we feel when we listen to this music and why?"
Maiden Voyages – A composer's first symphony can bring on the hardest challenges and greatest rewards. This week, we take a look at three composers' maiden voyages out into deep, musical oceans. Bill explores the trials and tribulations that Haydn, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn experienced while composing their first symphonic works.
Nadia Boulanger – Virgil Thomson once said, "In every town in the United States you find a five-and-dime and a Boulanger student," and he wasn't far off. Nadia Boulanger taught and influenced an entire generation of musicians, from Aaron Copland and Astor Piazzolla to Philip Glass and Quincy Jones. This week we'll hear some of her own compositions, works by her talented sister, Lily, and performances of works by prolific students. Bill features Nadia conducting her close friend Igor Stravinsky's composition Dumbarton Oaks and ends this retrospective listening to Piazzolla's Oblivion.
July 7 - 11, 2014
Four Seasons – From the boundless majesty of the summer sun in Haydn's Die Jahreszeiten to the frosty snow and shivering winds of Vivaldi's Winter, this week is dedicated to music inspired by the changing seasons.
June 30 - July 4, 2014
American Masters, Part IV – From the east coast to the west, American composers developed a singular identity in the 20th century that continues to energize and influence classical music. In this latest in a multi-part series, we'll take a listen to more of these musical trailblazers in the United States.
Artists in Exile, Part II – Bill continues to reflect on artists in exile, beginning with music from Paul Hindemith. In his escape from Nazi Germany, Hindemith traveled to Turkey, England, and Switzerland before coming to America. We will listen to his Symphony for Concert Band and When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd. Bill then considers the plight of composers who faced deportation from America because of their political views. We finish this two-week series with composers from Asia and Latin America. Glorious music from Chen Yi and Gabriela Lena Frank, as well as Tan Dun's title song for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Artists in Exile, Part I – Our two-week series titled Artists in Exile pays homage to Joseph Horowitz's book that focuses on "how refugees from 20th-century war and revolution transformed the American arts." In this program, you will hear stories of appreciation for a new country, but also of terrible loneliness that comes from being forced from one's home by political strife. Bill begins this week with a vacationing artist, Antonín Dvořák, before playing music from Serge Prokofiev, who fled the Soviet Union. This week will end with Hungarian Béla Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra, written in America.
Richard Strauss – Strauss - whose musical life spanned nine decades, two world wars and the Third Reich – was one of Germany's most gifted and controversial figures. We'll explore his tone poems, operas, and life both public and private in this five-part biography.
June 2 - 6, 2014
What Else Ya Got? – Have you ever wondered about composers who succeeded in writing one smashing piece, but were otherwise forgotten? This week, we'll get to know some of these immortals for their other compositions, including Dukas, Ponchielli and Glière.
Symphonies, Part X – Even after being stretched to its limits, the symphony remained the pinnacle of achievement for many 20th century composers. This week, Bill McGlaughlin continues his multi-part exploration of this vibrant, exciting musical form
Italian Souvenirs – We all would like to have a holiday in Italy, and your desire will just grow and grow as you listen to this week of EM. The composers inspired by the great beauty of Italy include Berlioz, Liszt, Mendelssohn and Elgar. And let us not forget Mozart's visit as a teenager that changed the course of opera forever.
Proud Tower, Part II – More music from the Gilded Age to the Great War. Bill picks up his exploration of music from the "banquet years" in the early 1900's in Russia with music from Rimsky-Korsakov and Rachmaninov. We then travel to Paris to hear Cécile Chaminade and conclude in Austria with Mahler and Lehár. Our journey ends with The Rite of Spring, and as we approach the precipice of war, we hear a piece from George Butterworth, who died in the Battle of the Somme.
Proud Tower, Part I – Bill gains his inspiration for these two weeks of Exploring Music from Barbara Tuchman's book The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914. This was a gilded age for music that brought us boldly into the 20th century. We will listen to music from many composers and their countries—Elgar from Britain, Schoenberg from Austria, and Bill closes this first week with French composer Claude Debussy's La Mer.
Musical Cryptograms – This week we'll discover and decipher codes, messages and meanings that have been hidden within pieces of classical music over the centuries.
Shakespeare – We'll sample from the wealth of music inspired by the Bard's verse, including a suite from Mendelssohn's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and excerpts from William Walton's film score to the film "Henry the V". Bill also finds time to fit in a few different musical interpretations from the timeless legend of Romeo and Juliet.
St. Matthew Passion – Composed in 1727, it's one of two surviving J.S. Bach accounts of the last days of Jesus. Bill begins by examining the history of the Lutheran church in Germany and the early musical representations of Christ's last days, including Bach's earlier St. John Passion. Before the week is over we will also sample Haydn's Seven Last Words of Christ and Osvaldo Golijov's La Pasión Según San Marcos.
April 7 - 11, 2014
Portraits in Black, Brown and Beige, Part II – Bill's exploration of the music of African-American composers continues this week. We will hear Bill conduct a work by Anthony Davis, plus music composed by Bill's friend Jeffrey Mumford. Our two-week celebration ends with a poem from Langston Hughes as well as music from Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, and Michael Jackson.
Portraits in Black, Brown and Beige, Part I – This two-week celebration, named in honor of Duke Ellington's jazz symphony, will explore 400 years of African-American composers and performers. Starting with Call and Response, and Shouts, from the first Africans to arrive on this continent, Bill will introduce us to art songs, symphonies, and traditional spirituals that have become a large part our American musical identity.
A Call for Scores – Music suggested by our colleagues at radio stations around the world.
Bach Sleeps in on Sundays – Bach spent most of his life in serve to the Lutheran Church and his God, but he did write secular music too. Here we focus on a five year period of Bach's life, the time in which he worked for Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Kothen. The cello suites, the violin sonatas and partitas, and the Brandenberg concerti were all composed by Bach, in this five year period.
Latin Carnival – From Padilla and Ponce to Ginastera, Villa-Lobos and Piazzolla, we're exploring music by Latin-American composers.
You and the Night and the Music – Novelists who have built their plots around great music. Join us as we step inside the minds of authors groping for the words to describe the feelings and emotions of the music. We begin with an inspiring mandolin, and the letters of T.S. Eliot. In Thursday's program Bill tells the story of a violin maker and part-time sleuth with a nostalgic longing for Bach. Dvorák falls in love and an author reminisces about his father's final journey with Beethoven. We end our travels through literature and music with a dream of the devil and E.M. Forster's vision of Beethoven from Howard's End.
February 24 - 28, 2014
Exploring Two Very Different Worlds – Beginning in 1786 at the first hearing of Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro, we'll explore the stream of masterpieces, including operas, symphonies, piano concertos, and chamber works that Mozart wrote in the last five years of his life. He was in his early thirties and navigating the political life of a court composer in Vienna while partying with the passion of the young man that he was, and all the while producing one masterpiece after another. On November 20, 1791, Mozart took to his bed, and still he brought in one of his protégés to write notes and phrases down. On December 5 Mozart died, with his requiem mass unfinished. From these years alone, Mozart left a body of work that expresses a universe of imagination and emotions.
Shostakovich, Part II – This week we conclude our two-part series on the life and times of Dmitri Shostakovich. From his later symphonies to the Jazz Suite No. 2, Bill explores all forms of Shostakovich's writing. Starting with Shostakovich's Four Romances after Pushkin, Op. 46, and his Symphony No. 5, The Market Place from The Gadfly, Op. 97, Bill ends the week with Kim Kashkashian playing a beautiful performance of the Viola Sonata with Robert Levin.
Shostakovich, Part I – "He forged a musical language of colossal emotional power" says Grove's Dictionary. This week will be the first of a two-part series exploring the life and times of Dmitri Shostakovich. From his four-note "D-Es-C-H" signature to the musical sounds of the KGB knocking on his door, Bill will help us understand these hidden meanings in his music. Born in Tsarist Russia and living through the establishment of the USSR, his music reflects all of these political changes with emotional depth for the world to hear. Also, having his ear to the ground for music from other places, we will hear his Tahiti Trot and waltzes.
Magnificent Magyars – Surveying 500 years of music in Hungary. This week we'll delve into the rich musical history of Hungary, starting with ancient sacred music and working our way through Liszt, Kodaly, Bartók and Hungarian gypsy music.
Beethoven at Parnassus, Part II – In the second part of a two-week series, we'll take an in-depth look at this music of a master reaching the pinnacle of his abilities. Bill starts with Missa Solemnis and Consecration of the House and ends in the rarified atmosphere of Mt. Parnassus as we take in Opus 135 performed by the Guarneri Quartet. Robert Schumann said, "[Beethoven's quartets] stand...on the extreme boundary of all that has hitherto been attained by human art and imagination." In 1977 his quartets were added to the Time Capsule of Humanity and sent into space in Voyager 1.
Beethoven at Parnassus, Part I – This is a festival of the late music of Beethoven, music from the last ten years of his life. Parnassus refers to the great mountain in Greece that towers over Delphi and is the home of the Muses. In these years from 1816 to 1826, Beethoven soared to almost mythological heights with some of his greatest works—the Ninth Symphony, last four piano sonatas, Missa Solemnis, and his final string quartets. All of these compositions still sit at the top of Mt. Parnassus.
Merrie England – Ready your passport! We're travelling to Merrie Old England. Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Dowland, all wrote music based on the folk tunes in the country pubs, the pageantry of Royal Albert Hall and Covent Garden, and the images of their beautiful countryside. Come open your ears and walk with us through the pathways of England. Greensleeves, Turtle Doves, and Janet Baker. Rule Britannia! Britannia rules the waves!
January 6 - 10, 2014
Johannes Brahms, Part II – This is the second of two weeks exploring the music and life of the great German master. Brahms's love of Hungarian Gypsy music and folksongs allowed him to create music that speaks to our inner souls. Scholars think Brahms threw away more works than he published, so let us treasure the music we have from him.


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La infidelidad, es una obra del pintor italiano Paolo Veronese. Es un óleo sobre lienzo, pintado hacia 1575-1580. Mide 1,89 metros de alto y 1,89 m de ancho. Se exhibe actualmente en la National Gallery de Londres, Reino Unido.

Este cuadro es uno de los cuatro que forman la serie «Alegorías del amor», realizadas por Veronés por encargo, según se cree, del emperador Rodolfo II.

Se representa a una mujer infiel, de espaldas, sujetando a su marido con la mano derecha mientras que con la izquierda parece entregar un papel a su amante, hacia quien vuelve la cabeza y la mirada.

Referencias

Alegorías en el arte
Colecciones de la National Gallery de Londres
Cuadros de los años 1570
Desnudo (género artístico)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


The best selection of telescopes and astronomy equipment available anywhere! OPT provides professional services and advice at the highest levels in the industry.
This article will help you gain a deeper understanding of the astronomical eyepiece - its performance parameters, possible optical aberrations and design characteristics.
Visualization of the larynx by direct or indirect means is referred to as laryngoscopy and is the principal aim during airway management for passage of a tracheal tube.
Expert advice on how to buy binoculars that will fit your particular needs and give years of enjoyment and satisfaction.
This section contains over 70 still cameras from A to Z (Agfa to Zeiss Ikon) using 35mm film but not having single lens reflex viewing and focusing.
14522: Agfa Movexoom 6 Sound Super 8 movie camera. With 7-42mm f1.8 Variostar zoom lens. A sophisticated Super 8 camera in VGC and god working order.
There are a few different types of refracting telescopes in the world of astronomy. Find your Apochromatic. Achromatic, Doublet, Triplet, or Petzval today at OPT!
Sony A7 III (22.9 oz./650g with battery and card, about $1,998) and 24-105mm f/4 G OSS. I'd get mine at Adorama, at Amazon, at B&H or at Crutchfield.


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the breweries
eats & shops
Blue Light Bandits, the independent groove rock band from Worcester, MA, is coming back to the Brew Stage on the 10th anniversary of Worcester's original craft beer festival. The award winning rock band took home Worcester's "Best Live Act" at the 2018 Worcester Music Awards and has hit the NACC 200 national college radio charts. Their debut self-titled LP released in October of 2017, and they continue to tour the northeast as a piano based funk rock outfit defining a new genre of pop and neo-soul, with rock and jazz inspired elaborations.
Check them out at: bluelightbandits.com
DCU Center
50 Foster Street


Officials are looking into whether the popular tourist attraction was involved in the wildlife trafficking after the discovery of 40 dead cubs.
Thai wildlife authorities investigating the famed Tiger Temple have found the remains of 40 tiger cubs inside a freezer and are now looking into whether the tourist attraction engaged in wildlife trafficking.
As we reported Monday, wildlife officials seized some of the more than 100 tigers held at the Wat Pa Luangta Maha Bua Yannasampanno, the official name of the Buddhist temple in western Thailand, in response to allegations of mistreatment of the animals.
The temple is a popular tourist spot in Kanchanaburi province, where visitors are allowed to play with tigers and cubs and even take selfies with them. Government officials plan to clear the temple of all tigers, and will spend the next week removing the remaining 131 animals. The tigers will be transported to government sanctuaries elsewhere in the country.


Located in the gorgeous Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, the Residence Inn by Marriott Harrisonburg is the ideal choice for a quick trip or a long stay. Recently renovated guestrooms and lobby completed in the Spring of 2017. Let us show you our updated look. We are conveniently located just minutes from James Madison University, Massanutten recreation area, Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Parkway. The Residence inn by Marriott Harrisonburg is the Shenandoah Valley's best choice for the marathon business traveler or the relocating family. We feature fully equipped kitchens including full-size Energy Star appliances, a luxurious fitness center, a full size indoor pool and whirlpool, complimentary hot breakfast buffet daily, complimentary high-speed internet, 40″ LCD flat panel televisions with HD programming and evening socials for guest. Bring your dog because our hotel is pet friendly. When business travel or a recent move brings you to Harrisonburg, the Residence Inn by Marriott Harrisonburg makes you feel at home! Book your stay.


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Readers ask: India vs newzeland?
India cricket team comfortably won the ODI series 4-1 but had to face loss a 2-1 loss in the T20 series to New Zealand. The last New Zealand vs India encounter was at the 2019 ICC ODI World Cup semi-finals. And that was one of the most crucial matches ever played between the two countries.
1 Why did India lost to New Zealand?
2 Has India won any series in New Zealand?
3 Who won the match today New Zealand vs India?
4 How many matches are between India and New Zealand?
5 Why did India lose against Australia?
6 Why did India lose the World Cup?
7 Who is better Smith or Kohli?
8 Which country has not won Test series in India?
9 Has India won T20 against New Zealand?
10 Who won the 3rd ODI?
11 Who won 3rd ODI?
12 Who won the 3rd ODI match?
13 Has India ever won a Test series in England?
14 Which city is hosting NZ XI India tour game?
15 Who is the Indian born New Zealand cricket player?
Why did India lost to New Zealand?
India's batsmen have had success on some difficult pitches, very recently. Equally, it wasn't decisive for New Zealand. So, ultimately, India lost this series because they batted poorly, in very difficult conditions, with a plan that wasn't suited to the challenge at hand.
Has India won any series in New Zealand?
The Indian cricket team toured New Zealand from 25 February to 7 April 2009, playing a Test match series with New Zealand for the first time in five years. India won both the ODI series 3–1 and Test series 1–0.
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Who won the match today New Zealand vs India?
New Zealand beat India by five wickets to clinch the three- match ODI series 3-0.
How many matches are between India and New Zealand?
The India cricket team toured New Zealand from January to March 2020 to play two Tests, three One Day Internationals (ODIs) and five Twenty20 International (T20I) matches.
Indian cricket team in New Zealand in 2019–20
Results New Zealand won the 3- match series 3–0
Most runs Henry Nicholls (199) Shreyas Iyer (217)
Why did India lose against Australia?
Here is an explainer on the key factors behind India's loss. In the first innings, the Australian bowlers had made scoring very difficult for the Indian batsmen. A mix-up between Rahane and Kohli saw the Indian skipper run-out for 74.
Why did India lose the World Cup?
Some experts saw a pattern in losing these two semi-finals and one Champions Trophy 2017 final – that Team India did not perform well in pressure situations. Some thought it was rain that spoiled India's momentum when they had New Zealand on the mat on the first day.
Who is better Smith or Kohli?
And no surprise, he fares much better than Smith as a captain. Of the 55 Tests Kohli has captained India, he has won 33 and lost 12. Whereas Smith, who has played 34 Tests as a skipper, has won 18 and lost 10. Kohli has a mighty impressive win-loss ratio of 2.75 to Smith's 1.80.
Which country has not won Test series in India?
Out of all the Test-playing nations where Test cricket has been hosted, South Africa and Australia are the two nations where India have never won a Test series. India have played six Test series in South Africa, losing five and drawing one.
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Has India won T20 against New Zealand?
The New Zealand cricket team toured India in October and November 2017 to play three One Day Internationals (ODIs) and three Twenty20 International (T20I) matches. India won the ODI series 2–1 and the T20I series 2–1.
Who won the 3rd ODI?
IND vs AUS 3rd ODI highlights: India wins by 13 runs; AUS clinch series 2-1
Josh Hazlewood not out
Total: 289-10 in 49.3 Overs
Bowlers Overs Wickets
Jasprit Bumrah 9.3 2
Who won 3rd ODI?
India vs Australia 2020 Highlights, 3rd ODI Match at Canberra, Full Cricket Score: Virat Kohli and Co register 13-run win, hosts take series 2-1.
Who won the 3rd ODI match?
Manuka Oval, Canberra
India, elected to bat first
Player Of The Series Steven Smith
Series result Australia won the 3 – match series 2-1
Match number ODI no. 4267
Has India ever won a Test series in England?
India have won four series while England has won 19 series and four series were drawn. Of the 18 series played in England, India have won three, England have won 14 and one was drawn. VICTORIES BY RUNS MARGIN.
279 runs
Ещё 20 столбцов
Which city is hosting NZ XI India tour game?
India will play the only practice game ahead of the Test series with New Zealand XI at the Seddon Park in Hamilton. Friday's practice match between the two sides will start at 3:30 AM IST.
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Who is the Indian born New Zealand cricket player?
Jeet Raval
Role Batting all-rounder
National side New Zealand (2016–present)
Test debut (cap 271) 17 November 2016 v Pakistan
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FAQ: Bed bugs in india?
Top medical colleges in india?


Calendula flowers were historically considered beneficial for reducing inflammation, wound healing, and as an antiseptic. Calendula was used to treat various skin diseases, ranging from skin ulcerations to eczema. Internally, the soothing effects of calendula have been used for stomach ulcers and inflammation. Traditionally, a sterile tea was topically applied in cases of conjunctivitis.


Mothers Against Drunk Driving of Southwest Florida hosted its inaugural Day of Remembrance Event on Thursday, Dec. 3 to honor those affected by drunk and drugged driving.
The theme of the event was, "You Always Have A Place," in order to remind those who have lost anyone to drunk or drugged driving that although their loved ones may not be physically present, they will always have a place in their lives. The Day of Remembrance was a national event that took place at MADD organizations across the country to culminate the organization's 35th anniversary and was the first of its kind in the southwest Florida community.
The Day of Remembrance event included a poetry reading as well as a candle lighting ceremony and an emotional musical tribute. Those present at the event had the opportunity to share their stories and to spread awareness about the issue of drunk driving.
Tying in with the theme of the event, attendees had the opportunity to decorate plates in memory of their loved ones. It was also encouraged for victims and survivors to bring a recipe that would be submitted into the "You Always Have A Place" Victim Tribute Recipe Book. Attendees were able to provide a recipe, photo and description of their loved one or a memory with their loved one in honor of them.
MADD will continue to accept recipes and photos for the Victim Tribute Recipe Book until Dec. 20. Anyone who wishes to submit a recipe and photo to commemorate a loved one can do so by emailing it to southwest.fl@madd.org or by stopping by the MADD office located at 13130 Westlinks Terrace, Suite 8 in Fort Myers. For more information about MADD or to get involved with the organization, visit www.MADD.org/southwestfl.


"At Battle Abbey School we are proud of the academic rigour and breadth of the curriculum offered at Key Stage 3. Small class sizes and the opportunity for our highly skilled teachers to develop programmes of study that can allow each student to make superb progress in a tailored curriculum whilst retaining the best aspects of the National Curriculum.
The overall balance of the curriculum allows each student to experience a wide range of subjects, developing many skills and a knowledge base suitable to tackle GCSEs and beyond. The subject areas which will be studied throughout the whole of Key Stage 3 are English, Mathematics, Science, Music, Art, Drama, History, Geography, Religious Studies and ICT Computing. In addition all students will study Modern Foreign Languages. Initially this is French in Year 7, but by the time students are in Year 9 they will have studied Spanish as well. PE and Games are also important curriculum offerings with many opportunities to join in with school sports.
Educating the 'whole child' is also embedded within both the core curriculum and extra-curricular clubs and societies. There is a PSHE programme and an awareness of issues surrounding careers is provided even at this early stage. There is a flourishing range of clubs and societies available to Key Stage 3 students and all Year 7 and 9 pupils have a bonding experience.


Last night, Nvidia finally announced the GTX 1080Ti, delivering up to 35 percent higher performance than a GTX 1080 with a $699 MSRP in the US. However, this new addition to the Pascal lineup has also prompted some reshuffling of other GPUs, which is why Nvidia is lowering the base MSRP of the GTX 1080 from $599 to $499. However, that isn't the only change coming our way.
While the $100 price cut is nice, it isn't the only change coming to the GTX 1080. Last night during its 1080Ti unveiling Nvidia also announced that its new GPU would be using faster GDDR5X RAM from Micron, running at a faster speed of 11Gbps. This is faster than the GDDR5X used on the Titan X and original GTX 1080, so in order to bring later 1080 adopters up to speed, the GTX 1080 will now start shipping with 8GB of faster 11Gbps GDDR5X VRAM.
If a GTX 1080 or 1080Ti is still out of your price range, then Nvidia is going to be upgrading the VRAM on the GTX 1060 too, though not to the same extent, These new GTX 1060s will ship with 9Gbps VRAM, which is an increase over the 8Gbps found on launch models. Unlike the GTX 1080 though, the 1060 won't be receiving an official price cut.
KitGuru Says: While price cuts are generally expected when a new high-end card is released, upgrades to older GPUs don't tend to happen. How do you guys feel about Nvidia's announcements today?


The Original New York Deli Restaurant Inc was founded in 1980.
The Original New York Deli Restaurant Inc specializes in Retail - Delicatessen (eating Places.
New York City is the land of delicatessens aka delis and salumerias stacked with nostalgic foods that followed immigrants from the old country wherever that may have been.
Served on thick sliced rye bread, with corned beef, pastrami, slow-cooked roast beef, fresh carved roast turkey, salami, sliced beefsteak tomato, lettuce, homemade coleslaw and Russian dressing.THE ORIGINAL NEW YORK DELI MANAGEMENT CORPORATION is a Florida Profit Corporation from ORLANDO in Florida, United States.Huntersville customers get a genuine New York Deli experience, and have all the same foods that have made New York Delis famous for decades.
Stream CBSN live or on demand for FREE on your TV, computer, tablet, or smartphone.Owner Marian Harper took down its red awning and locked its doors for the last time almost 80 years later, on December 30, 2016.For the pastry, place the sugar and lemon zest in a food processor for 5 seconds.
Fresh Ground New York Burgers Half pound 100% Certified Angus Beef Burgers all served with Seashore Fries (Sea Salt and Black Pepper), Coleslaw, and Pickle.
Black and white cookies are in fact, not a cookie but a flat, thinly frosted cake.
Carnegie Deli Classic New York Cheesecake - Best Hacks!
The Original New York Bagels is taking over the former TCBY spot near Harris Teeter by exit 30. Way to go.Original New York Deli, Inc. is a Michigan Domestic Profit Corporation filed on June 1, 1993.
The Carnegie Deli has been open since 1937 on 55th St. in New York City and quite possibly lays claim to the true, original New York Style Cheesecake.


Iron Mountain introduces dedicated transportation!
Developed while working with some of our largest financial services clients, Iron Mountain Dedicated Transportation offers additional layers of security specifically designed to meet the growing protection needs for your most critical data. Read this brief data sheet to learn more.


text:
Business News›Industry›Ind'l Goods/Svs›Metals & Mining›Centre tells states to apply for forest clearances on behalf of companies
Centre tells states to apply for forest clearances on behalf of companies
Meera Mohanty
, ET Bureau Last Updated: Aug 11, 2019, 10:45 PM IST
This major step in environment regulatory practice is being undertaken to avoid a disruption in mineral production and its impact on the economy.
BHUBANESWAR: In a significant deviation from current practices the Centre has asked states to apply for forest clearances, on behalf of unidentified, prospective mining companies.
This major step in environment regulatory practice is being undertaken to avoid a disruption in mineral production and its impact on the economy. This occurs as the Narendra Modi government rushes ahead with auctions of mineral deposits.
The existing norm, upheld by several Supreme Court orders, has been for the user agency - the miner in this case - to apply for forest clearances, and for these clearances to be strictly co-terminus with the lease period.
In 2015, while its national mineral policy was still being drafted, the Government decided to auction all future mineral rights; hundreds of leases older than fifty years would have to come to an end on 31 March 2020, or on 31 March 2030 if captive.
Odisha, India's largest producer of iron ore and steel, stands to be the most affected by this transition next year. Working mines among those that will lapse in March made up for half the state's iron ore production of 120mt last in the last fiscal, or 28 per cent of the county's production.
Naveen Patnaik's government has decided to establish a forest cell within the mines department to facilitate these clearances - to be later transferred to private player. Karnataka has similar plans.
In a meeting chaired by the Odisha Chief Secretary on 10 July last month it was decided to take certain "expeditious" steps. "In order to have a smooth transition of expiring leases post 31 March 2020, Central Government has decided that the proposal for FC may be initiated by the State Government. ...One Divisional Forest Officer (DFO) and three Assistant Conservator of Forest (ACF) range officers will be deputed at least till March 2020 to work in the Directorate of Mines for filing of applications for Forest Clearances for the expiring leases and for prospecting operations. These officers must have experience of dealing with forest diversion proposals," note the minutes of the meeting.
The government is a respondent to the writ on illegal mining in Odisha, being heard by the Supreme Court since 2014. Officials of the steel and mines department who have spent considerable time in court were earlier opposed to this idea. Forest conservation rules are explicit that the user agency needs to submit, among other details, a cost benefit analysis, a mining plan, an area wise and item wise breakup of proposed land use. Speaking to ET on condition of anonymity, one of them said, "How can the state submit a mining plan for a future lessee? But what can we do if every other state agrees?"
In Karnataka, the March 2020 deadline will bring to a halt an annual production of only 3.6mt of iron. The state isn't too perturbed; recently auctioned mines make up for some of this and it has enough stocks for any exigency. "The land belongs to the state, as do the minerals, and forest land to the forest department so why can't the state act as the agency seeking clearance. After all the act only requires the Ministry of Environment and Forest, Climate Change approval for diversion of forest land for other use. Why should it matter who applies for it when the end purpose is the same," said a senior official in the state. These are were being mined and are already deforested, he added. The state will pay for the prerequisite compensatory afforestation, the net present value and other dues that it can be compensated for when clearances are transferred.
"One of the biggest problems with this process is addressing previous non-compliances and liabilities. There are several instance where there are pending environmental violations and unresolved forest right conflicts. The government's job is to play a regulatory role and ensure accountability and justice. Instead this process is creating a new administrative practice in favour of mining companies," said Kanchi Kohli, who heads an environmental justice programme at the Centre for Policy Research.
It was unclear whether this change would require an amendment to the act, the rules, or merely, as suggested a senior official, a change in the online form that are to be filled.
Ironically Odisha has often complained that applications made by the state's own Orissa Mining Corporation are met with a zillion, knit-picking queries by the Centre. The July meeting acknowledges that state entities Mineral Exploration Corporation Limited, Odisha Mineral Exploration Corporation Ltd, Director of Geology and Geological Survey of India, assigned to explore a large number of virgin areas for future auction were finding it difficult to get clearances. The forest and environment department was advised to intervene and expedite these approvals too.
forest clearancesNarendra ModiodishaKarnatakaNaveen PatnaikBhubaneswarenvironment regulatory practiceIndia
Lionel Rodrigues522 days ago
this is an obvious good move by a non corrupt government.... while we are busy fighting each other the country is being sold for peanuts... all in the name of development..... though we can see that there is no real development.....
Government to expedite grant of forest clearance
MoEF grants forest clearance for Kodingamali bauxite mine
15 rail projects facing hurdles over forest clearances
NGT notice to Centre on plea challenging forest clearance to Yettinahole
Odisha Mining Corp gets forest clearance to develop new bauxite mine in Kodingamali


text:
About Jazz Club
Seats scheme of the jazz club
Interiors of the jazz club
Photo reports of the jazz club
Rules of the Jazz Club
About jazz
Jazz musicians, jazz bands, jazz performers
Jazz Club address
Saturday, 29 january 2022, 20:30
Internationally renowned Ukrainian pianist and jazzman Daniil Kramer, known for his on-the-spot improvisations, is a unique musician. Kramer, 41, who will perform April 7 at 7 p.m. at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts as part of the Jazz Wednesdays series of concerts, does not follow the usual path of simple improvisation based on classical themes. Instead, he strives to invent a unique language for each piece, harmoniously blending jazz and classical elements. Kramer's style embraces practically all varieties of jazz – from the classical and traditional to the avant-garde. In his solo concerts, he always offers a variety of styles, both traditional and modern. Born in the town of Kharkov, Kramer had already won several music contests by the age of 15. After finishing school in 1978, he enrolled in Moscow's Russian Academy of Music and, during his second year there, he applied to participate in the Tchaikovsky International Contest. At the same time he became captivated with jazz after hearing performances by Oscar Peterson, Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett, a fascination that would change his life immensely. Upon hearing a concert by Leonid Chizhik, later his mentor, he was won over to improvisation. In 1982, he won first prize at a contest of jazz-piano improvisers in Vilnius, Lithuania. Since 1984, Kramer has taken part in a great number of international jazz festivals across the world, and become an Honorary Member of the Sydney Professional Jazz Club and a member of the Swedish Happaranda jazz club. Besides performing, Daniil Kramer has distinguished himself as a composer and teacher. In 1994, he established the Moscow Conservatory's first class of jazz improvisation.
tomorrow, 20:30
Sofi Okran
SUN, 23 january, 20:30
Julia Bulavko
MON, 24 january, 20:30
Tablao Flamenco
TUE, 25 january, 20:30
Chicago Groove
Union of Composers jazz club
Address: 125009, Moscow, Bryusov lane 8/10 build. 2
© Union of Composers jazz club
Web site development - ICO


We understand that not everyone wants to eat amongst the jolly sounds of a working bar, so we have two private dining areas for you to choose from.
The rooms are perfect for private parties and get togethers, or as business meeting rooms in the day or evening.
We are happy to create a menu to meet your needs.
The Little Wychwood occupies the old archway of our old coach house building - where horse drawn carriages would have taken shelter.
We have kept the curvature of the archway and fitted a beautiful, eight paned window at the end of the room, which highlights the shape and makes a light and airy space.
The room is elegantly decorated with dark dramatic colours - continuing the look and feel of the bar and restaurant. An ornate chandelier designed by Christopher Townsend of 'Love the Tree' to look like the roots of a treesets of hand painted stormy ceiling.
The Summer Restaurant was the games room used for playing pool in the days of the old pub, The Red Horse.
It is now a radiant dining room, illuminated in the day time by the light from the large, original windows. And in the evening our chandeliers and wall lighting offer a amiable dining experience.
The room can seat up to 30 people for a dinner party or conference, still with plenty of breathing space.
We do not charge for private room hire when the party is dining with us. We are very happy to welcome you as our guests.
However, tables of 6 or more will be charged a discretionary 10% service charge.


Now in its eighth year, the Global Effie Index identifies and ranks the most effective agencies, marketers and brands by analyzing finalist and winner data from more than forty national & regional Effie Award competitions. The 2018 rankings reflect a compilation of over 3,400 worldwide Effie winners and finalists announced between January 1, 2017 and December 31, 2017.
The Effie Index can be accessed here.


Experience one of Spain's favorite activities—evening tapas at these 10 popular spots in Barcelona. Join the locals for an afternoon or early evening feast of small plates ranging from blood sausages and Spanish omelets to more inventive small plates like tuna topped with caviar and platters of garlic prawns. When it comes to local flavor, you won't find any chain restaurants on this list but trendy, old-fashioned hideaways serving up classic Spanish dishes.
In the heart of the Poble Sec neighborhood of Barcelona, get ready to feast on pre-dinner tapas like prawns, mussels, chorizo, and all the classic dishes at El Rincon del Cava, a popular local taperia. While unknowing out of town travelers get gauged at nearby tourist traps, you can rest easy since most tapas are around 3 Euro and pints of beer only 2.50. Not bad for the budget traveler feeling peckish in between meals. You'll find it situated on Carrer de Blasco de Garay, which lies in the middle of a cultural mecca of chic restaurants, lively bars, and historic landmarks like the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC), a treasure trove of art history relics.


text:
<?php

/**
 *
 * This file is part of the Apix Project.
 *
 * (c) Franck Cassedanne <franck at ouarz.net>
 *
 * @license     http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause  New BSD License
 *
 */

namespace Apix;

class XmlTest extends \PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase
{

    protected $xml;

    public function setUp()
    {
        $this->xml = new Output\Xml();
    }

    protected function tearDown()
    {
        unset($this->xml);
    }

    public function assertXml($str, $xml)
    {
        $this->assertEquals(
            "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>"
            . PHP_EOL . $str . PHP_EOL,
            $xml
        );
    }

    public function testContentIsSet()
    {
        $this->assertEquals(
            'text/xml',
            $this->xml->getContentType()
        );
    }

    /**
     * @expectedException   \RuntimeException
     */
    public function testContentTypeIsNull()
    {
        $ref = new \ReflectionClass($this->xml);
        $prop = $ref->getProperty('content_type');
        $prop->setAccessible(true);
        $prop->setValue($this->xml, null);
        $this->xml->getContentType();
    }

    public function testBooleanString()
    {
        $this->assertEquals(
            'True', $this->xml->booleanString(true)
        );
        $this->assertEquals(
            'False', $this->xml->booleanString(false)
        );
        $this->assertEquals(
            0, $this->xml->booleanString(0)
        );
        $this->assertEquals(
            1, $this->xml->booleanString(1)
        );
        $this->assertEquals(
            -1, $this->xml->booleanString(-1)
        );
    }

}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Established in 2009 by Andrew Howe and Simon Williams, Bridge Leisure Parks are a caravan holiday park operator, offering holiday home ownership, lodges, caravans, touring and glamping holidays, leisure facilities and associated retail services.
With over 14 sites across the UK, the company's aim is to delight every visitor so they wish to return.
Bridge Leisure Parks core principles are set out by their Hearts programme, which consists of six core values: honesty, enthusiasm, astounding, rapport, teamwork and smiles.
The senior management team all work as per the Hearts programme's values and are available to all team members via workplace and regularly make park visits to speak with the various team members.
The company gives back to their local communities by allowing community groups and schools to use the park's swimming pools when there are no public pools nearby.
The wellbeing of the staff is important to Bridge Leisure Parks, which is why team members are offered significant holiday entitlements. In addition, staff are monitored by managers on each site and if any signs of stress are visible, they will be supported.
The Workplace social platform has been implemented across the business, and is used to share many good stories regarding the business, as well as stories of employees performing above and beyond their duty and happy photos from across the company.
The organisation's HEARTS (Honesty, Enthusiasm, Astounding, Rapport, Team, Smile) culture runs throughout the business, and is supported by annual HEARTS award. In addition, each park manager and area manager has HEARTS scratch cards that they can issue to team members when they demonstrate any of the HEARTS values.


Specializing in providing professional food services for the film industry in Vancouver, BC since 1996.
Committed to providing diverse, fresh and healthy menus created from quality ingredients. This simple basic commitment to food has earned Tivoli a reputation as one of the city's best film caterers.
Tivoli has three modern complete catering trucks and attracts talented professional chefs. The years of experience and high energy of the owner, Michael, ensures the catering crews are well supported in meeting all of Production's needs.


text:
require 'vagrant/smartos/zones/util/datasets'

module Vagrant
  module Smartos
    module Zones
      module Cap
        module Dataset
          class List
            def self.dataset_list(env)
              Zones::Util::Datasets.new(env).list
            end
          end
        end
      end
    end
  end
end


So cute. I love that striped skirt so much I ordered it! Just curious if you've tried washing it at all or if you're dry cleaning it?
I love that dress with the jacket! Adorable!
Wash. It's an extra large so if it shrinks a bit – it'll actually be a good thing.
Although I would totally buy that striped maxi if it was available!
I totally went on a hunt at several Targets for this dress after seeing this and only found the Purple and Grey one. Luckily though, my awesome sister found the black and white one at her store in a different state and snagged it for me. Love it but it's SUPER long.
Luv the out fit were did u purchase the dress?


Today I am sharing a synopsis of an inspirational podcast given by Katie O'Selvidge from Cottage Hill Magazine about finding your WHY in business. She calls it Assured & Well. It's been a huge help to me and I'm hoping it will be for you too!


Without light, photography would be impossible. So it's no surprise that photographers are obsessed with using light effectively.
Learn about different types of lighting and how to various lighting set-ups can produce different effects for your photography.
Quality of light refers to the color, and hardness or softness, of light. In this tutorial you will learn the difference between hard light and soft light.