text:
Q: Table cells with overflow: hidden and absolutely positioned elements I have this classic  which has the style attribute overflow: hidden set. Inside the cell, I've put a
 with position: relative, and inside the block there are absolutely positioned large images that I want to be clipped to the boundaries of the cell. Meaningful example:
...

...

It seems to work fine in IE8, IE9, Firefox and Opera, but it fails on Chrome: the image spans over the boundaries of the cell.
I have the same behaviour when I print the page in IE.
I'm aware that the overflow attribute on table cells isn't well defined. Is there any way to obtain the desired effect without using background images? The result must be printable.
UPDATE I don't want to use Javascript either. I want it to be my last resort.

A: overflow : hidden has a meaning - which is hide everything which is going out of "defined" area. which means you will need to define what will be your width / height or both will be and it will hide anything which des not fit there.

A: Try using table-layout:fixed on the table element and defined width/height on the td. It stops the layout engine from trying to adjust the table cells based on their contents. It's still not gaurenteed to work but it's your best shot. Frankly though I don't think it can really be done.
I should point out that overflow on table cells is actually well-defined - the standard specifically doesn't support it. What you're doing is a hack.

A: You may want to make use of the CSS Clip property and it is not even CSS3. Looks like it fits in your kind of situation.
The clip property is like a mask. It allows you to mask the content of an element in a rectangle shape.
Check this link below and read the CSS Clip part.
http://webdesignerwall.com/tutorials/5-simple-but-useful-css-properties


text:
Tony Blewitt
Tony Blewitt started his radio career in England where he worked for several commercial stations, including a "great spell" in Luxembourg from where he broadcast to the U.K. on Radio Luxembourg 208.
He was head-hunted (along with the rest of his body) in 1988 by Capital Radio, Transkei, and having transferred to South Africa, he became that station's prime-time presenter, which stints included 2½ years as music manager and Breakfast Show host.
5fm lured him away to front the nationwide PM drive, increasing the audience by 47% in his first survey there. He then took over the Breakfast Show and the morning 09h00–12h00 show, representing, all-in-all, 7 years on the country's biggest National.
For over four years, Tony Blewitt hosted the highly popular PM drive show on 94.7 Highveld Stereo, after which he joined Classic fm to anchor the audience-catching Afternoon Drive and in August 2004, Tony assumed the mantle of the station's biggest daily programme, "Classic Breakfast".
Now presenting "Breakfast with Blewitt" on Mix 93.8 FM. Which has won 3 MTN Radio Awards.
Tony was also inducted into The MTN "Radio Hall of Fame".
Best Breakfast Presenter and Best Breakfast Show, for 2012 and Best Breakfast Show 2014.
Tony also has a Show on OFM every Sunday morning from 9am, broadcasting to Central South Africa.
Tony's foray onto "the box" has included presentation for Revue Plus, Blewitt's Music Biz Quiz and Blewitt's Movie Biz Quiz on SABC TV; 2 Grammies specials on M-Net; "Where In The World Is Tony?" on SABC and "What a Lovely Pair on M-Net".
Tony Blewitt presented "Tech Talk" on Summit TV and CNBC Africa presenting "The Gadget Man", which featured all aspects of technology, new developments and product launches in the world of IT.
Cutmaster Swift (CMS) is one of UK's original architect's of Turntablism, and was encouraged by his father to explore music to the full by providing him with a record player and selection of reggae singles at the age of 6, but it was the introduction of Hip Hop originally from the US and 'Scratch Mixing' […]
Peter Antony
If you want to meet a radio man, let us introduce you to Peter Antony who's career was a radio DJ's dream. His highlight, before joining United DJs Radio was undoubtedly living and working in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg where he earned his international radio spurs. It all began for Peter in the early […]

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


The International Meuse Cycle Route is a great route for cyclists of all proficiency levels as it follows the banks of the River Meuse. It starts at the river's source on the plateau of Langres region and passes through Belgium into the Netherlands. From source to mouth, the entire Meuse Cycle Route is exactly 1,166 km long. This attractive and varied route offers ever-changing scenery, with charming towns and villages on both banks of the river, plus there are plenty of cultural heritage sites and culinary treasures from beginning to end.
The source of the Meuse lies in Pouilly-en-Bassigny, a village close to the fortified town of Langres in the French département of Haute-Marne. It is here that the International Meuse Cycle Route starts. Further along the route you will pass the foothills of the green and mountainous Vosges region. After Neufchâteau, you arrive in the birthplace of Joan of Arc, the 'Maid of Orléans' and a French national heroine. Further downstream are Verdun and the Argonne region, famous for the Battle of Verdun during the First World War in which hundreds of thousands of soldiers lost their lives. Moving further north, the Meuse flows into the French Ardennes. Here, you pass through Sedan which has the largest mediaeval castle in Europe (35,000 m²), Charleville-Mézières with its 17th-century Place Ducale square and, on the border with Belgium, Givet with the Fort of Charlemont.
You then enter Belgium or-more precisely- Wallonia, its French-speaking region. In a magnificent setting characterised by rock faces, you follow the Meuse along various citadels. In Dinant, the citadel towers above the onion dome of its collegiate Church. The next citadel is in Namur, the capital of Wallonia, at the confluence of the rivers Meuse and Sambre. Slightly further afield, you see the fort of Huy that towers above a 14th century collegiate church, famous for its rose window and its internationally renowned treasure chamber, You finally arrive at the citadel of Liège, the 'ville ardente', with its impressive train station, designed by the famous architect Calatrava, its rich historic past you may discover in the old historic heart, where numerous musea make you discover a city where celebrating is a key word. After passing Visé, you have the choice to continue either on the east bank or discover Belgian Limburg along the charming west bank of the Meuse.
From the rolling hills around Maastricht to the Dutch town of Maasbracht, the Meuse winds over shallow gravel banks, fast-flowing and virtually unnavigable. As a result, you won't see any barges on this section; they all sail on the Juliana Canal that has been constructed parallel to the river instead. The area of the Maasplassen lakes in Central Limburg is openly connected with the Meuse. The flat terrain here makes it ideal for cycling. You then pass through the attractive dune landscape in northern Limburg to reach one of the Netherlands' most glorious cities: Den Bosch. No visit to this city is complete without sampling the sweet, sticky treat that is a Bossche Bol. Leaving the province of Brabant, where life is always good, you arrive in South Holland – home to Dordrecht, a charming town with a rich history. As the Dutch saying goes: 'Hoe dichter bij Dordt, hoe mooier het wordt' (The closer you are to Dord(rech)t, the nicer it gets). Another 'must see' in this typically Dutch landscape of rivers and dikes is Kinderdijk, a UNESCO World Heritage site in the Alblasserwaard. This unique collection of 19 authentic windmills dating from the 18th century played a crucial role in water management. Finally, via the cosmopolitan city of Rotterdam, you reach the mouth of the Meuse at Hook of Holland.


text:
Q: Problems with Weather API from APIXU I am just starting to learn API requests and I am trying to display current weather in Toronto using APIXU api calls (here is the documentation: https://www.apixu.com/doc/current.aspx) and I am not sure what I am doing wrong.
Here is html:

Toronto Weather Forecast

Here is js:
        // Weather API
    function loadData() {
        var weatherAPIXU = "http://api.apixu.com/v1/current.json?key=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX&q=Toronto";
    $.getJSON(weatherAPIXU, function(data) {
        var list = $(".place ul");
        forecast = data.current;
        list.append('
Temp: ' + forecast.temp_c + '°C
');
    }).error(function(e) {
        $(".place").append('
Sorry!

Could Not Be Loaded
');
    });
};

$('.place').submit(loadData);

Once I know how to implement it via JSON, I want to bind it with knockout.js as well
So, if you can give me recommendations on that as well, it would be greatly appreciated.

A: I looked closer into it and I have found that I didn't load my API at all. So, here is a working solutions for those who might have similar problems.
$(document).ready(function loadData() {
    var weatherAPIXU = "http://api.apixu.com/v1/current.json?key=XXXXXXXXXXXX&q=Toronto";
    $.getJSON(weatherAPIXU, function(data) {
        var forecast = data.current.temp_c;
        var weather = $(".weather");
        weather.append(forecast + '° C');
    }).error(function(e) {
        $(".weather").append('Sorry! Not Loaded');
    });
    $('.weather').submit(loadData);
});

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Thai Lottery Result – How to Find Your Lucky Number in the Thai Lottery
Thailand has a history of lottery games that started in 1868. The lottery was first introduced on the birthday of King Chulalongkorn. He then authorized the Royal Bodyguard Department to operate a lottery and an Englishman named Mr. Alabaster was appointed Director of the Lottery Office. In the following years, the lottery's popularity grew and in 2014, more than 67 million Thais played it and spent 76 million baths. However, Thai lottery players are more likely to be women.
In Thailand, lottery players have a different attitude than their western counterparts. The lottery is considered extremely superstitious, with some Thais consulting spirits to get lucky numbers. เลขอาจารย์หนู gather numbers from their daily life and place them in their lotto tickets. Thais tend to rush out to purchase lottery tickets after childbirth and after having a baby in a car. If you're a foreigner in Thailand, there are some things you should know before buying tickets.
The Government Lottery Office has dismissed rumors of a corruption scandal involving Gen. Prayuth and lottery vendors. Nonetheless, lottery veterans are more confident in Gen. Prayuth's ability to manage the lottery. The military regime is likely to rig the lottery and choose numbers that confirm the charisma of the dictator. The National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO), which has ruled Thailand since 22 May, has prohibited all criticism of the government and banned all forms of protest. It has also censored the media and issued legal orders at will.
Thai lottery results are announced on the first and sixteenth days of each month. The winners' list will be published on the official website of the Government Lottery Office Thailand. You can check out the results live by clicking on the date below. The winning numbers chart is updated regularly so you'll always know if you've won. So, keep an eye on the Thai Lottery Result as soon as it's announced!
The odds of winning the top prize are 1 in 1,000,000. The chances of winning depend on the number of tickets sold. For TCL tickets, the top prize is two million baht while for TGL tickets, the top prize is three million baht. The nine other prize tiers are the same for both tickets. And if หวยอาจารย์หนู enough to win the top prize, it will be a lot more than the odds of you winning the lottery.
The Thai lottery is more lucrative than other lotteries and is available for low prices. However, beware of scammers who may target you and swindle you. It's also worth remembering that 52% of Thai women play the lottery regularly. Thai lottery prizes can be huge – a single ticket can win you six million baht, while two tickets can get you only 2,000 baht. The prize money in the Thai lottery can be very substantial, especially when you consider that the jackpot prizes are often much higher than what you expected.
Previous PostWin a Settee by Playing the Settee Lotto Online
Next PostThe Benefits of Playing Slot Online


text:
John Salmon
Hogan Lovells International LLP
Jeffrey Dant
BMO Financial Group
Cyber Intelligence: What Exactly Is It?
Eric Chabrow • September 12, 2011
The nascent field of cyber intelligence addresses threats that originate anonymously within cyberspace with potentially enormous consequences: physical destruction and economic chaos.
ATM Skimming: Insights on New Attacks
Tracy Kitten • September 9, 2011
The arrests of three Seattle-area men for their involvement in two separate ATM-skimming schemes highlight technological and social vulnerabilities that international fraudsters have learned to exploit with ease.
Business Continuity Management / Disaster Recovery
9/11: A Look Back
The 9/11 attacks did not just affect America; they impacted the world. The events of that day stir frightening memories in everyone. In the end, every nation is vulnerable to terrorism.
Mortgage Mess: Feds Blame Banks
"Everyone from the Fed down knew about this and chose to let it go," says mortgage fraud expert L.T. Lafferty. "As a result of that regulatory complacency, the market continues to be plagued with fraudulent activity."
New ATM Skimming Arrests
Three Seattle area men have been arrested for their alleged involvement in separate ATM skimming schemes that drained more than half a million dollars from retail customer accounts in at least six states.
Information Security Media Group • September 8, 2011
The Treasury Department's Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence has worked to prevent anti-money laundering and illegal cash flow from reaching the hands of terrorist groups, but more needs to be done to further mitigate risks, says Treasury Assistant Secretary Daniel L. Glaser.
Account Takeover: Secret Scams
"What banks need to be aware of is that much of this fraud is occurring on the consumer and business-customer side, and not all of them will invest in technology that catches these attacks," says Phil Blank of Javelin Strategy & Research.
Ex-DHS Official Becomes Sony's CISO
Eric Chabrow • September 6, 2011
Philip Reitinger's appointment as Sony's first chief information security officer comes more than four months after a massive breach of Sony's PlayStation gaming system that exposed the personal identifiable information of some 77 million customers.
State of Privacy in Financial Services
Trevor Hughes • September 6, 2011
Although those in the field understand very well that the CFPB will have an enormous impact on privacy policy-making responsibilities, questions remain about what the agency will actually do.
Calif. Law Beefs Up Breach Notices
Jeffrey Roman • September 2, 2011
A new California law requires that organizations experiencing a data breach provide more detailed information to the individuals affected. The law, which covers breaches involving financial, healthcare and other personal information, goes into effect Jan. 1.
Execs Say Hackers Are Primary Concern
Are executives spending too much time and energy focused on external hacks, sacrificing attention they should be paying to internal threats? It's good that business leaders understand insiders pose risks, but are they taking those risks as seriously as they should?
Anon Defector: 14 Ways to Secure IT
Eric Chabrow • August 31, 2011
A repentant SparkyBlaze wants to go legit, leaving behind the hacktivism he helped foster as a member of Anonymous and start a career in the U.S. as a ethical hacker. As proof, he's offering advice to protect IT from hackers.
U.S. Move to Chips: Improved Security
Jeffrey Roman • August 30, 2011
Visa's introduction of chip-based payments incentives for U.S. merchants is enhancing dynamic authentication and expects to accelerate adoption of the EMV standard.
Phishing Schemes: The New Wave
Tracy Kitten • August 30, 2011
As summer draws to a close, banking institutions and their customers face a new wave of targeted phishing attacks - and industry experts predict these incidents will only increase in the months ahead.
RSA Breach Evidence Uncovered
The Finnish security provider F-Secure concludes the attack e-mail doesn't look too complicated. In fact, it's very simple. But the exploit inside Excel was a zero-day attack at the time and RSA couldn't have protected against it by patching its systems.
The Growing Threat Landscape in 2018


text:
fast Forkast logo
The latest industry news
CBDC - Central Bank Digital Currencies
DCEP - Digital Currency Electronic Payment
e-CNY
Published July 23, 2021 | 3:57 pm HKT Last updated 6 months ago
By Kelly Le
Chinese electricity bills to become payable using digital yuan
An e-CNY sign at a convenience store in Shanghai.
A digital yuan wallet app launched by China's central bank will include an electricity bill payment feature designed by the country's State Grid, according to Economic Information Daily, a local financial media outlet.
Users will be able to pay their electricity bills through the digital yuan app directly and do not need to link payment to a bank card, unlike other third-party mobile payment apps.
The new function will be tested in nine cities and regions, including Xiong'an New Area, Suzhou, Chengdu, Shanghai, Xi'an, Dalian, Changsha and Qingdao, and at the Winter Olympics in Beijing in 2022.
The electricity bill payment function marks another expansion of the e-CNY ecosystem and boost to the new currency's circulation in China.
Digital cash has been given away in nine major cities to stimulate consumption, and public transportation systems in Beijing, Chengdu and Suzhou recently started to accept digital yuan payments.
In July 2021, the Peoples's Bank of China published its first white paper on the digital yuan. The white paper said e-CNY trials had seen nearly 21 million personal wallets opened and transactions worth a total of around 34.5 billion yuan (US$5.3 billion).
Kelly Le
As a journalist, Kelly has covered stories at South China Morning Post, People's Daily, and Beijing News. She received a Master of Journalism from the University of Hong Kong, and a B.A. in TV Editing / Directing from the Communication University of China in Beijing.
More articles on CBDC - Central Bank Digital Currencies
Hong Kong outlines stablecoin regulation plan to check financial stability risks
Kazakhstan crypto mining fortunes falter as regime unplugs internet
CBDCs and the year that may reshape crypto markets
CBDC tracker shows U.S. falling further behind
Japan's central bank is urged to speed up its digital yen project


He's a doxicorghund. I meant to say a corgi-dachshund.
Loves: Long walks on the beach, candlelight dinners, and running everyone out of the room with atomic farts. . .
oh, and love. He also does love.
hi – what size tag is mojo wearing? my pup looks very similiar in size and build. thanks!
mojo is sporting a small roundish fetching tag.


text:
7 (Foaled 2nd April 2014)
N P Mulholland
Dream Ahead
Last Cry
Mr Donald Bell
23/11/20 F 107 HURDLE Musselburgh, 1m 7f 124y, Good (Good to Soft in places), C4 14/1
28/10/20 4/10 110 HURDLE Fakenham, 2m 3y, Good, C4 5/1
13/10/20 5/17 112 HURDLE Huntingdon, 1m 7f 171y, Good, C4 12/1
24/08/20 3/7 113 HURDLE Southwell, 1m 7f 182y, Good, C4 13/2
08/06/20 11/12 80 FLAT Lingfield, 1m 4f, Standard / Slow, C4 80/1
11/11/19 3/10 115 HURDLE Kempton, 2m, Good (Good to Soft in places), C4 11/2
04/10/19 4/9 116 HURDLE Fontwell, 2m 1f 162y, Good (Good to soft in places), C3 6/1
30/08/19 3/6 118 HURDLE Bangor-on-Dee, 2m 145y, Good, C4 11/4
04/06/19 1/9 - HURDLE Bangor-on-Dee, 2m 145y, Good (Good to Soft in places), C4 6/1
14/05/19 2/7 - HURDLE Ffos Las, 1m 7f 182y, Good, C4 5/2
13/04/19 13/18 82 FLAT Newbury, 1m 2f, Good to Soft (Soft in places), C3 8/1
22/10/18 2/12 82 FLAT Windsor, 1m 2f, Good to Soft (Soft in places), C4 4/1
21/09/18 5/14 83 FLAT Newbury, 1m 2f, Good to Soft (Good in places), C4 14/1
01/09/18 4/9 84 FLAT Sandown, 1m 1f 209y, Good (Good to soft in places), C4 8/1
11/06/18 5/7 84 FLAT Windsor, 1m 2f, Good to Firm (Good in places, Watered), C4 9/2
14/05/18 1/10 80 FLAT Windsor, 1m 2f, Good (Good to Firm in places in the last 3f), C4 9/2
07/10/17 3/14 80 FLAT Redcar, 1m 2f 1y, Good to Soft, C4 15/8
14/09/17 1/7 75 FLAT Epsom Downs, 1m 2f 17y, Good, C5 5/4
28/08/17 3/10 75 FLAT Ripon, 1m 1f 170y, Good, C5 4/1
10/08/17 2/7 75 FLAT Sandown, 1m 1f 209y, Soft (Heavy in places), C4 3/1
13/07/17 2/5 72 FLAT Epsom Downs, 1m 2f 17y, Good (Good to Soft in places), C5 3/1
16/06/17 3/8 72 FLAT Sandown, 1m 1f 209y, Good to Firm (Good in places), C4 3/1
26/05/17 1/9 67 FLAT Haydock, 1m 2f 42y, Good to Firm, C5 8/1
16/11/16 8/13 - FLAT Kempton, 0m 7f 0y, Standard, C5 50/1
02/11/16 8/13 - FLAT Nottingham, 1m 0f 75y, Good (Good to Soft in places), C5 100/1
24/09/16 10/10 - FLAT Haydock Park, 1m 0f 0y, Good, C4 33/1


I wrote this for a local writing group's newsletter and I thought it might be nice to post it to my blog, too. Enjoy!
As I write this, 19 of the top 50 USA Today bestseller list titles are selling better in digital format than in hardcopy for the third week in a row.
Figures cited in January 2011 peg digital books as 9 percent of the trade book market. At the end of July 2010 they were five percent of the market. That's now fast this "new" book format is growing.
So what is a digital book? Well, it's pretty much the electronic file a publisher would send to its printing plant to produce a physical book. This means it has been written, revised, edited, copy edited, formatted proofread and galley-proofed. A cover has been designed. Jacket or back-cover copy has been written and an author photo has been taken.
Quotes have been obtained from other authors and an author bio has been written or edited. Catalog copy has been written, a website listing has been created. All of the things that have to happen for a hardcopy book to get to the ink-and-paper stage have been done.
It's ready for printing—or for conversion to E-pub, PDF, Mobi or some other electronic format suitable for reading on a computer screen, a cell phone, an I-Pad or a dedicated e-reader.
What's in it for you as a reader? Less expensive books. Yes, you have to invest in a reading device (unless you already have a smart phone or can read on a computer), but you can buy books pretty much anywhere, anytime.
Many publishers set digital book prices slightly lower than physical book prices, and if you're an online bookstore patron, you don't have shipping charges added to the total.
And that's the digital publishing revolution from the reading point of view.
From the writing point of view, there's a lot more involved. For example, digital-first publishers like Carina (the digital-first division of Harlequin) don't pay advances. They pay higher royalty rates than regular publishers and get the books to stores considerably faster.
My book came out from a digital-first publisher, Samhain Publishing; I signed the contract on Saint Patrick's day 2009 and received my first royalty payment in mid-October of that year.
New York publishers generally get books into print 12-18 months after the contract is signed. And they break advance payments into several portions: part on signing the contract, part on manuscript acceptance after editorial revisions, and the final portion when the book hits bookstores.
The royalty rate for my publisher is 40% of cover price on digital books purchased from their website and 30% on digital books purchased from a third party website, such as amazon.com.
Standard royalty rates for digital books from New York publishing houses are, well, lower than that. Most houses are trying to make 25 percent on net the standard, with net being the amount the publishing house gets for the book. However, the payments are comparable to hardcopy versions.
Of course, to them it's still only a small percentage of the market. Or it was until a few weeks ago, when the bestsellers started selling more digital copies than paper copies.
The market is in flux, the method of payment is in flux and the role of big publishers is in flux. Writers still create stories and readers still consume them. At least some things don't change, even in the midst of revolution.
« Pseudo-MFA in Genre Fiction writing?


text:
Q: The size parameter for gzip.open().read() When working with the gzip library in Python, very often I'd come across code that use the .read() function in a pattern that look like this:
with gzip.open(filename) as bytestream:
    bytestream.read(16)
    buf = bytestream.read(
        IMAGE_SIZE * IMAGE_SIZE * num_images * NUM_CHANNELS
    )
    data = np.frombuffer(buf, dtype=np.uint8).astype(np.float32)

While I'm familiar with the context manager pattern, I struggle to really grasp what is it that the first line of code within the with context manager is doing at all.
This is the documentation for the read() function:

Read at most n characters from stream.
Read from underlying buffer until we have n characters or we hit EOF.
  If n is negative or omitted, read until EOF.

If that is the case, the functional role of the first line bytestream.read(16) would have to be reading and thus skipping the first 16 characters, presumably because they act as meta-data or header. However, when I have some images, how would I know to use 16 as the argument for the read call, instead of say, 32 or, 8, or 64?
I recalled plenty a time coming across completely identical code as above except having the author use bytestream.read(8) instead of bytestream.read(16) or just as likely, any other value. Digging into the file character-by-character show no discernible pattern to determine the length of the header character.
In other words, how do one determine the parameter to be used in the read function call? or how do one know the length of the header characters in a gzip-compressed file?
My guess was that it has something to do with the bytes, but after searching through the documentation and online references I can't confirm that.
Reproducible details
My hypothesis, after countless hours of troubleshooting is that the first 16 characters represent some sort of header or meta-data. So the first line in that code is to skip the 16 characters and store the remaining in a variable named buf. However, digging into the data I found no way to determine why or how the value 16 was chosen. I have read the bytes in character by character, and also tried reading + casting them as np.float, but there is no discernible patterns that suggest the meta-data ends at the 16th character and the actual data begins on the 17th.
The following code reads the data from this website and extracts the first 30 characters. Notice that it is indiscernible where the header row "ends" (16th apparently, after the second appearance of \x1c`) and the data begins:
import gzip
import numpy as np

train_data_filename = 'data_input/train-images-idx3-ubyte.gz'
IMAGE_SIZE = 28
NUM_CHANNELS = 1

def extract_data(filename, num_images):
    with gzip.open(filename) as bytestream:
        first30 = bytestream.read(30)
        return first30

first30= extract_data(train_data_filename, 10)
print(first30)
# returns: b'\x00\x00\x08\x03\x00\x00\xea`\x00\x00\x00\x1c\x00\x00\x00\x1c\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00'

If we modify the code to cast them as np.float32, such that all characters were now in numeric (float), again there was no apparent pattern to distinguish where the header / meta-data ends and where the data begins.
Any reference or advice would be very appreciated!

A: From gzip's perspective, everything it's returning to you is data. There is no metadata or gzip-specific header contents prepended to that data stream, so there's no need for any kind of algorithm to figure out how much content gzip is prepending to that stream: The number of bytes it prepends is zero.

Scroll down to the bottom of the page you linked; there's a header titled FILE FORMATS FOR THE MNIST DATABASE.
That format specification tells you exactly what the format is, and thus how many bytes are used for each header. Specifically, the first four items in each file are described as follows:
0000     32 bit integer  0x00000803(2051) magic number
0004     32 bit integer  60000            number of images
0008     32 bit integer  28               number of rows
0012     32 bit integer  28               number of columns

Thus, if you want to skip all four of those items, you would take 16 bytes off the top.

A: From the code snippet, bytestream.read(16) reads or skips the first 16 bytes of bytestream. When you quoted that read() reads at most n characters from the stream, it does so, but also it appears that python stores a single character in 1 byte, making 16 characters occupy 16 bytes.
See more on chars and bytes https://pymotw.com/3/gzip/#reading-compressed-data
The code snippet is primarily interested in the contents of buf, skipping the first 16 bytes of the stream. To understand how to determine the parameter that goes into first bytestream.read() AKA determine how many bytes of the compressed image file to skip, we must understand what the rest of the code does. Particularly, what file are we reading and what are we trying to accomplish with numpy(?) library (saving rgb images in a 1D numpy array?).
I am definitely not an expert on image processing, but it seems that bytestream.read(16) is a unique solution for a unique problem of processing some unique compressed image file. Thus, it is hard to tell how to determine how many bytes to skip without seeing more code and understanding more logic behind the snippet.


When I contacted the neighboring ward's YW President to see if we could schedule a joint (all-girls) activity with both ward's YW, I suggested the speed-friending concept and she came up with the idea for the clothes swap.
This time, since we had a larger group of girls, we didn't include the leaders in the speed-friending (except for one who filled in when there was an uneven number – we had some girls trickle in throughout the evening, so we were constantly adjusting the number of chairs, etc). This part of the activity took about 45 minutes. It could be shorter or longer, depending on how many questions you have prepared and how many girls you have (we had about 26 girls).
During the speed-friending, the other leaders were setting up a clothes-swap in the RS room. We had asked the yw (from both wards) to bring any unwanted (but CLEAN) clothes, shoes, or accessories to donate for the swap (and to get their parent's permission first before donating anything!). We had about 26 girls attend, and I'd estimate we had about 300 swap items donated. We quickly arranged the clothes into areas (pants, skirts/dresses, shoes, shirts, etc) while they speed-friended. After the girls finished up the speed-friending, they went into the RS room, where they were welcome to take anything that they wanted from the donated items. We did not place any restrictions on who could take what (ie, you didn't have to bring something to take something). Most girls took away at least a few things. Some girls had to haul their 'new' clothes away in garbage bags. Any leftover items were donated to a thrift store.
Afterward, we had doughnuts and milk for refreshments. This was one of our most popular activities EVER – the girls have been asking when we can do it again!
This could also be done on a Stake level.
COST: Only the cost of refreshments!


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Rugby: Japan as host makes World Cup "very special" for Eddie Jones
By Sean Miyaguchi, KYODO NEWS - Sep 23, 2019 - 00:02 | Sports, Rugby2019, All, Sapporo
For England coach Eddie Jones, leading a team at a World Cup in Japan is "very special."
Buoyed by his side's 35-3 win against Pool C opponents Tonga at Sapporo Dome on Sunday, an ecstatic Jones showered praise upon his players, his opponents and the tournament hosts.
"I love rugby and I love this team. So (I'm) pretty lucky. And then coming to Japan, we're part of this historic World Cup, there's never going to be anything like this again, and to be part of it you feel pretty special," the 59-year-old Australian said.
"Our team is really enjoying it. Guys are learning new things every day, so yeah, it's very special."
(England coach Eddie Jones watches his squad from the stands during the first half of a Rugby World Cup Pool C match against Tonga on Sept. 22, 2019.)
"I thought it was a great day for rugby. We're so appreciative of the Sapporo people and the way they've come to the game and engaged with rugby."
Revered by Japanese rugby fans for coaching the Brave Blossoms to their historic 34-32 win over South Africa at the 2015 tournament hosted by England, Jones is firmly focused on raising the Webb Ellis Trophy for the first time with his new side.
Though England were slow to assert control over Tonga, the lowest-ranked side in Pool C, Jones has proven he knows how to guide a team to the business end of the tournament.
Before he orchestrated the "Brighton Miracle," Jones coached Australia to the 2003 World Cup final on home soil, with their last-gasp loss to England coming on the heels of a semifinal dismantling of tournament favorites the All Blacks.
Jones was also instrumental in South Africa's 2007 victory, serving as a technical advisor to Springboks coach Jake White.
Renowned for his grasp on the psychological side of the sport, Jones said a recent pep talk from another master motivator -- former Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson -- may have helped his team maintain composure and grab a bonus-point try at the death against Tonga.
Ferguson spoke of his teams' ability to score late in games, during the so-called "Fergie Time" that critics said his Manchester United squads would be allowed by referees when he was at the helm.
"The message (from Ferguson) was to be patient. That's what I enjoyed about our team today, there was no sign of panic, we just kept on playing good rugby," Jones said.
Sep 23, 2019 | KYODO NEWS
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KYODO NEWS - 7 hours ago - 22:17 | Sports, All


As a rule, I don't think anyone automatically expects for their life to be a disaster. In general, I think most people try to have a hopeful outlook on life. Their high expectations should never be mistaken for delusions of grandeur. The Bible says "without a vision the people perish." A Civil Rights Activist, Martin Luther King Jr.'s most famous speech was his "I Have a Dream" speech. So people are justified in dreaming their dreams.
When I was very young, I once heard someone say, "If you reach for the stars, you may never actually hold a star, but you can be sure you won't wind up with a handful of mud for your efforts." Not very spiritual, I'll admit... but it made a very great, visual impression on me.
Somehow, nothing turned out quite the way I had expected, but I always had that sincere response... "there's a reason for everything." I pressed on with "Plan B"... "Plan C"..."Plan D"...etc. All the while, I have held tenaciously to the expectation that, in the end, everything would work out the way it is supposed to.
Paradigm shift... or is it?
Not a hiccough... not a speed-bump... not a detour or a deviation. Part of the plan all along.
I have no more bullet-points.
I expect that I will wake up each day, grateful for the gift of one more day.
I expect that I will walk... not blindly or fearfully, as one feeling their way through a labyrinth... but boldly... as one who is holding tightly to the hand of Someone who knows the way.
I do not know what tomorrow holds... or next week... or next year. I don't have to worry about what the future holds... I know Who holds my future.
I expect it will be great.
Oh wow, what a well written, well presented moving piece - the message and voice of faith so beautiful and powerful! This just really touched my heart and I feel blessed to have read it! God Bless!
Wow - this is so powerful, really touches the heart. Wonderfully written and very thought-provoking. Congratulations on your win. It is very well deserved.
Whoaaaaaaaaaa! I never expected the last part but God sure brings blessings and hope out of big bumps in the road, that often have caused many to get out of focus and instead take fear and depression as their bosom buddies. It would be understandable too but God can take the bad and make good out of of it, praise the Lord-for His ways are above our ways, and we can "EXPECT GREAT THINGS" in HIM. Congratulations on your placing first-this is such a touching piece-reality with a message, shifting between humor and drama and HOPE!! Praise God!!
Congratulations! Thank you for sharing such a well written, transparent piece.
Wow! Super congratulations on this outstanding piece and your first place EC!
If this is a true story, my prayers go out to you.
It is a true story for my sister-in-law, who has lived this just about to the letter, including the last part where she knows that every day is a gift and lives it just exactly that way.
Reading this, one cannot but stop and put things into perspective. Life is so fragile - we plan, but God directs our steps. How good it is to know that He is ever faithful in His plan for our lives. Congratulations on your EC.
Wonderful piece and very well written. The testimony found in this story shines brightly and is an encouragement to all who read it! Thank you for sharing honestly and from the heart!
And as Paul Harvey said... now for the rest of the story... I wrote this at 1 AM Thursday morning. I went to see my surgeon and my endocrinologist later that day, expecting to find out the treatment plan... got miraculous news... the cancer was a mixed cell type which would be harder to treat, but it was found tucked inside a benign tumor, so it had not one but two capsules around it. It had not spread, they think they got it all, and no treatment necessary right now... just frequent monitoring for the next year, then yearly after that. I feel like a walking miracle, and my life plan remains to live each day like it is my last, and to tell every one how God has blessed me. Thank you all for your kind comments, and PRAISE THE LORD!
A well deserved win. It is moving and written extremely well. You deserve publication for your work. I have read several others that you wrote and I like your writing style. God is with you and is using you for His glory. Thank you for the touching article.
Congratulations on your 1st place EC award. Very poignant piece and title. It is a great reminder of who holds the key to our future.
Plan B, C, D, E, F, GOD ! Give us this day our daily bread. Lisa, you are a genuine master storyteller and I hope so much that all of your fans one day soon sees from you Plan PUBLISHED AUTHOR; I know I would have Plan BUY IT NOW.
Congratulations, Lisa, on all facets of the winner you are.


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George Macias
Co-CEO, MatchTune
George Macias is a senior leader, and intrapreneur turned entrepreneur with over two decades of experience in sales, marketing, operations, and strategy across multiple industries. Throughout his career, George has driven rapid growth and financial success in numerous companies across the music and entertainment industry.
George is the Co-CEO of MatchTune, a music tech company whose products utilize AI to allow content creators to find, use music, and post videos to digital and social platforms. He is a staunch advocate of music creators' rights and seeks to craft a more equitable digital landscape while making it easier to create beautiful content.
Before his current role, George was SVP/GM of Universal Music Group's Production Music Division globally, managing global strategy, technology initiatives, and business development. Additionally, George was the COO at Vanacore Music, COO for Entertain Impact, and has held many senior leadership roles at other prominent music companies, including EMI Music Publishing and APM Music.
As a proponent of innovative technologies, George served as COO of MediaRebel, a SaaS-based technology company that utilized AI and machine learning to provide intelligent insights into the legal industry. Additionally, George was the founder of Chessbox Media, a mobile-based streaming music service serving the Far East.
In his free time, George dedicates time to non-profit and social enterprises and mentorship programs at his alma mater, Pepperdine University, and through the Latino Entrepreneur Leaders Program at Stanford University. George and his wife have two children and live in Los Angeles, CA.
LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgemacias
Future of Music Creation & Production: Adaptive Music: Reimagining Our Role As Listeners
Is music in a fixed form a thing of the past? Imagine music that adapts dynamically to our mood and surroundings, whether in real world or digital environments. With their recent acquisitions, companies like Apple see a future here. Join this panel of experts as they discuss the state of adaptive music.


This "proverb" from the writings of George Elliot, a famous 19th century author definitely holds true. As a woman living in that era, Mary Ann Evans took on the pen name of George Elliot so she could write strong dramatic fiction. She knew from firsthand experience what first impressions could do. For her and her contemporaries, a friendly smile made all the difference in life. The same holds true today. People do tend to steer away from unfriendly scowls. Scowls also cause disfigured faces with lines and wrinkles.
It is a known fact that beautiful, healthy smiles can attract people to you. When you wear a smile, it signals to the other person that you are open. You can wear a smile and have friends because they don't feel intimated by you. You project confidence and assurance with your smile.
So what if you are embarrassed by your smile? Your teeth say a lot about you. Crooked or broken teeth, gaps and other deformities often deter people from smiling.
The orthodontists at Beecroft Orthodontists are highly trained in all areas of orthodontia from the popular Invisalign® braces to the fixed Incognito™ braces. You can have confidence that your teeth problems will be addressed and corrected. Common treatments include the under bite treatment that corrects what is commonly known as a reverse smile effect and the Teeth Crowding treatment that corrects the overlapping effect.
You have many options. We have advanced orthodontics in Stafford that you can take advantage of and utilize. The dedicated staff at Beecroft Orthodontists can make you smile in Stafford. So why not give them a call at (540)659-6300. You'll be glad you did.


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Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford - Antiques And The Arts Weekly
23 Mar 2004 / 0 Comment
Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford
"A Gorge in the Mountains," 1862. Oil on canvas courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
"A Lake Twilight," Sanford Gifford, 1861. Oil on canvas from a private collection.
Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823-1880), a masterful Nineteenth Century landscape painter and member of the Hudson River School of painting, is the subject of this splendid, overdue retrospective. Gifford is not as well known as many of his Hudson River contemporaries, due in part to the smaller size of his luminous pictures and the fact that he died at the height of his powers at age 57.
In fact, as this exhibition documents, Gifford was an innovative, original landscapist, whose use of color and atmosphere set him apart from his colleagues. Utilizing fluid brushstrokes and a disciplined palette of pale blues, greens, roses and yellows, he captured the effects of light on a variety of settings. As critic-historian Henry T. Tuckerman observed in 1866 of Gifford's works, "they do not dazzle, they win; they appeal to our calm and thoughtful appreciation; they minister to our most gentle and gracious sympathies, to our most tranquil and congenial observation."
Often paying homage to the sanctity of the American wilderness, Gifford painted not only the natural world, but also how a viewer perceives it through layers of atmosphere and light. As his friend and fellow artist John F. Weir put it, in Gifford's art "a veil is made between the canvas and the spectator's eye – a veil that corresponds to the natural veil of the atmosphere…the object itself is of secondary importance."
In these contexts, Gifford made special contributions to American art of his century and deserves the recognition this retrospective is bound to engender.
American attitudes toward nature fairly early in the Nineteenth Century were significantly influenced by the writings of such luminaries as Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper and William Cullen Bryant, who extolled in the wonders and beauty of the domestic landscape. They were abetted by Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Frederic E. Church, Jasper F. Cropsey, Gifford and other painters of what became known as the Hudson River School. Today, Gifford remains one of the most talented, but least known, of these titans of our art.
Beginning with Cole in 1825 and continuing to the end of the 1870s, Hudson River School painters created dramatic, often sweeping depictions of nature and subjects ranging from sublime views of the wilderness and towering mountains to pastoral scenes and allegorical pictures carrying moral messages. At the height of the movement in the 1840s, their canvases were seen as celebrating the presence of God in nature. Consistent with concepts of Romanticism, they made the American landscape a source of pride and an economic resource, growing out of divine inspiration.
One of the Hudson River School's most interesting figures, Gifford was born at Greenfield, in Saratoga County, N.Y., one of 11 children of Elihu and Eliza Starbuck Clifford. In 1824, the family moved to Hudson, N.Y., where the father owned a successful iron foundry and became a bank president.
While Gifford was growing up in prosperous circumstances in Hudson, just across the Hudson River in Catskill, Cole was creating art that inspired Gifford's artistic ambitions. Young Gifford was the only Hudson River School painter who was actually born in the area that gave the movement its name, and the only one who went to college.
Gifford entered Brown University in 1842, but remained there for only three semesters because he had decided to become a painter. Over the next few years he studied in New York and Hudson, honing basic skills and being exposed to Cole's work. In the middle and late 1840s, inspired by Cole's example, Gifford traveled extensively in the Catskills and the Berkshires, sketching and experimenting with painting techniques.
Moving to New York in 1847, the 24-year-old showed his first canvas, "Lake Scene, on the Catskills," in the National Academy of Design's annual exhibition. Gifford's growing reputation as a skilled landscapist was reflected in his election as an associate of the National Academy in 1851 and as an academician in 1854.
Gifford evolved his mature style during his first visit to Europe in 1855-1857, where he visited museums and major cities, communed with other artists and prepared paintings in England and on the continent. It was, writes Heidi Applegate in her informative catalog chapter, "the standard Grand Tour."
Gifford was particularly influenced by the color and light in the paintings of British titan J.M.W. Turner that he studied in London, and discussed with John Ruskin, the influential critic and Turner champion. When Gifford expressed concern about the manner in which Turner took "liberties" with reality, Ruskin responded that Turner "treated his subject as a poet, and not as a topographer; that he painted the impression the scene made upon his mind, rather than literal scenes." Observes Kelly, "As he matured as a landscape painter, that was precisely what Gifford himself would strive to do."
Later, in Italy, where he spent time in the company of fellow painters Albert Bierstadt and Worthington Whittredge, Gifford created the first of what he called his "chief pictures." The largest canvas of his career and his most significant to date, "Lake Nemi" (1856-57), measures 395/8 by 60 inches and demonstrates characteristics of his best work. It offers a panoramic view of terrain around a lake, with a large villa and a few people to the right, all filtered through color-saturated light and atmosphere. The Turneresque use of the radiant light of a setting sun to suffuse the composition became a frequent Gifford device.
Writes curator Avery in the exhibition catalog, "Lake Nemi" is "one of his strongest compositions and perhaps the richest tonally of all the sun paintings that would come to represent his accomplishment." The picture was warmly received when displayed at the National Academy of Design. The New York Times critic pronounced it "a decidedly vigorous and noble painting." This work is now in the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art.
Returning to the United States in 1857, Gifford took a studio in the famous Tenth Street Studio Building, which he retained to the end of his life. Extensive travels in the northeast soon led to major landscapes.
A high point of the exhibition, "Mansfield Mountain" (1859), is a wonderfully atmospheric view of prominent mountain peaks in Vermont's Green Mountains, with two men in the foreground starting a campfire. Critics labeled it "poetical" and praised its atmospheric effect when it was exhibited at the National Academy. It is in the Manoogian Collection.
In "The Wilderness" (1860) from the Toledo Museum's holdings, Gifford focused on a single mountain in the distance, with a tranquil lake in the foreground, all enveloped in a warm, glowing atmosphere. A Native American woman holding her papoose to the left watches her husband paddling across the placid water to their tepee. Bathed in soft golds and pinks, this dream-like composition conveys the palpable hush of evening in New England.
Although the painting probably does not depict a specific mountain, Avery speculates that it might have been based on sketches of Maine's Mount Katahdin that Gifford could have seen in Church's studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building.
It appears that Gifford's "A Lake Twilight" (1861) was inspired by Church's celebrated "Twilight in the Wilderness" (1860). The latter, a spectacular sunset view of unspoiled American terrain, is widely regarded as a foreboding reflection on the looming Civil War.
In his canvas, probably set in the Green Mountains, Gifford employed a rich, sharp palette to capture a panoramic scene at twilight. The hunter in the lower right arranging in the bottom of his canoe the deer he has shot gives this picture a touch of harshness and foreboding.
As war approached, Gifford returned to the landscape of his native state, especially the Catskill region and the less familiar Adirondack Mountains. By this time, the Catskills had become an important tourist destination, spurred by improved roads and accommodations and the area's proximity to New York City.
Adapting the light and atmospheric style he had developed in Italy, Gifford executed some of his most captivating canvases of the region in memorable pictures such as "A Mist Rising at Sunset in the Catskills," circa 1861, (a small but particularly beautiful sketch), "A Gorge in the Mountains (Kauterskill Clove)," 1862, and "The Catskill Mountain House," 1862.
Somber, dark and brooding images like "A Coming Storm" (1863/1880) and "Hunter Mountain, Twilight" (1866) may well reflect the national mood of turmoil and angst growing out of the bloody Civil War.
At the outbreak of hostilities, Gifford joined the Seventh Regiment of New York's National Guard and sailed to Washington, where he was quartered among troops assigned to defend the nation's capital. He later served in Virginia and Maryland during his three tours of duty, 1861-1863.
Gifford's four wartime paintings were based on his personal observations as a soldier. Painted a few days after the Battle of Gettysburg, the turning point of the war, "Camp of the Seventh Regiment, near Frederick, Md., in July 1863" (1864) records myriad activities in a large Union encampment. In the sunlit foreground, guardsmen go about such daily routines as writing letters, talking, sleeping, cooking, eating and hanging wash, under the watchful eyes of sentries on the peripheries. In the middle distance, soldiers wash laundry in a steam, and in the far distance, under glowering mountains, a line of Union forces moves along a road.
Ever the landscape painter, Gifford's composition, says Avery, "as much describes the panorama of the military campaign as it details the world of the soldier…The viewer witnesses the spreading of he sun's providential light over the landscape and its Union occupants, and, in the background, the registering of its glinting reflections on the host of Union infantry and wagon trains winding their way southward into the mountains."
This grand picture and the equally evocative Civil War image of a sentry on duty, "Baltimore, 1862 – Twilight" (1862, not in the exhibition) are housed in Manhattan's historic Seventh Regiment Armory.
At the conclusion of his last tour of duty with the National Guard, Gifford and his regiment were dispatched to New York City to put down draft riots that raged in July 1863. It was the only time he fired his gun in action.
About the time he left the military, the artist learned that his brother, Edward, a major in the 128th New York Regiment, had died in Louisiana after escaping from a Confederate prison camp and swimming across the Mississippi River. "[T]he events of the summer," writes Kelly in the catalog, "were devastating enough for Gifford…to end his soldiering for good."
Added to the exhibition in Fort Worth is an important and interesting painting just acquired by the Amon Carter Museum from Berry-Hill Galleries in New York. "The View from Eagle Rock, New Jersey" (1862), a 10 by 20 inch canvas, has been out of public view for many years. It was likely done for Llewellyn Solomon Haskell, a pharmaceutical magnate who built a rustic home atop Eagle Rock, a mountain offering a panoramic of the land that became Llewellyn Park in West Orange.
This residential park, the first suburban housing development in America, was planned by Haskell in collaboration with renowned architect Alexander Jackson Davis. The view from Haskell's property, as immortalized in Gifford's dramatically hued picture, was regarded in the artist's day, as it is now, as among the most scenic in the country. "The scene," says Amon Carter curator of paintings and drawings Patricia Junker, "represents Gifford's ideal of humans living in harmony with nature."
During a summer sketching tour of New England in 1864, Gifford followed in the footsteps of Cole and Church in visiting Mount Desert Island in Maine. While there he made sketches that culminated in the standout canvas, "The Artist Sketching at Mount Desert, Maine" (1864-65). Painter Jervis McEntee, who accompanied Gifford to Maine, was formerly thought to be the artist depicted, but Avery argues that it is Gifford himself.
At any rate, in spite of the drama of the setting and the grand panorama of nature it presents, the focus of the painting is on the painter at work, surrounded by the tools of his trade. "By locating himself in the field of vision, and by showing himself painting the scene that lies before him," says Avery, "Gifford acknowledged both the primacy of the natural world as inspiration, and the centrality of the artist as its interpreter." This outstanding painting is from the collection of Jo Ann and Julian Ganz Jr.
The artist returned to Maine in 1879 at the invitation of Church, who had bought property on Lake Millinocket with a view of Mount Katahdin, the state's highest peak. In Gifford's tiny, evocative canvas, "Mount Katahdin from Lake Millinocket" (1879), two canoes glide across the blue water of the lake with the lofty, snow-capped mountain towering in the distance.
In the wake of the Civil War, rising national affluence, increased foreign travel and growing interest in paintings of overseas landscapes encouraged Gifford to take his second and final trip abroad. In 1868-1869, in addition to revisiting Italy, he traveled to Greece, Syria, Egypt and Turkey, painting as he went.
In these works he gave full expression to his predilection for light and color, incorporating facets of Turner's scenic and visionary manner. Among the highlights on view in the current show are views of Lake Como, Lake Maggiore and Venice in Italy and of the Bosphorus and Constantinople (Istanbul) in Turkey.
Gifford's style, observes Applegate, was "brilliantly suited to portraying the East." A good example is his most ambitious Egyptian painting, "Siout, Egypt" (1874), from the National Gallery collection. It offers a sun-filled view of the approach to the historic town known today as Aysut, located on an extensive plain below the Libyan hills.
In a remarkably precise yet atmospheric composition, Gifford delineated such features as the domes and minarets of the town, fields of grain, a tent with horses and sheep, a fountain, figures walking and riding on camels on a winding road and yellow cliffs in the background. "The whole," as the artist described it, "glowing and gleaming under the low sun."
In 1870, Gifford made a trip to Colorado and the Rocky Mountains with painters John F. Kensett and Whittredge, and then explored Wyoming with Ferdinand V. Hayden's government survey party. Particularly memorable from this tour is "Valley of the Chug Water, Wyoming Territory" (1870), a small painting that immortalizes the vast landscape around an outcropping of crenellated rock, whose enormous size is documented by the tiny figure of a man standing next to it. This grand work is owned by the Amon Carter.
In 1874, Gifford again headed west, visiting the Pacific Coast from California to Alaska. On view are two fine paintings of Mount Rainier in what was then the Washington Territory; they convey the artist's admiration for this dramatic, snow-clad, volcanic peak towering over a serene lake.
In the last two decades of his life, when not serving in the Civil War or traveling abroad or in the West, Gifford roamed the northeast and middle Atlantic states. Included in the exhibition are lovely evocations of Lake George, views of the mighty Hudson and its marshy banks, dramatic Adirondack and Catskill mountainscapes, a warm rendering of Kauterskill Falls, seascapes off the Massachusetts coast and beach scenes ranging from Fire Island, N.Y., to Long Branch, N.J.
Over the years Gifford frequently depicted the Palisades, the dark, almost perpendicular cliffs of bare rock that define much of the Hudson River's New Jersey side. In his culminating portrayal, "Sunset over the Palisades on the Hudson River" (1879), the rugged river bank and placid river dotted with sailboats are bathed in the radiance of a mellow sunset.
Gifford's last important painting and one he considered the crowning achievement of his truncated career was "Ruins of the Parthenon" (1880). Based on detailed drawings made on site in 1869, the painting was, according to the artist, "not a picture of a building but a picture of a day."
Gifford hoped "Ruins of the Parthenon" would find a home in an American public museum. His wish was fulfilled, posthumously, when it was purchased by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1881 for $5,100 – at the time the highest price ever paid for a Gifford work.
By most accounts, Gifford was a simple, unselfish, reticent and generous character. "Though he was well-to-do, he shunned luxury or display and lived in an almost ascetic manner," according to contemporary art critic William Howe Downes. His chief recreation, said Downes, was fishing, seeking out remote waters from the Adirondacks, Catskills and Maine coast to the Midwest and Alaska.
Gifford did not marry until 1877, when he was 54. Three years later, his health began to fail and on the advice of his physician he went to the Lake Superior region to recuperate. When his condition worsened, he returned to New York, where he died of pneumonia. He was only 57 years old and at the top of his game.
In 1870, Gifford had joined with other artists and civic leaders in founding New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Upon his death, he was honored with the Met's first monographic retrospective and a memorial catalog of his paintings.
The 274-page exhibition catalog includes 237 illustrations, 81 in full color. The book features essays by Avery, Kelly, Applegate (a doctoral candidate at Columbia University) and Harvey (Luce Center curator at Smithsonian American Art Museum). There is a detailed chronology and a selected bibliography. Published by the Metropolitan Museum and distributed by Yale University Press, the volume sells for $60 (hardbound) and $40 (softcover).
The Amon Carter Museum is at 3501 Camp Bowie Boulevard. For information, 817-738-1933 or www.carter-museum.org. The National Gallery of Art is on the National Mall between Third and Ninth Streets at Constitution Avenue NW in Washington. For information, 202-737-4215 or www.nga.gov.


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Nový Dvůr je osada a základní sídelní jednotka, součást města Veverská Bítýška v okrese Brno-venkov. Nachází se v Boskovické brázdě, jižně a západně od křižovatky silnic II/386 z Ostrovačic do Veverské Bítýšky a II/384, která zde začíná a pokračuje směrem do Brna-Bystrce. Osada těsně přiléhá ke katastru Bystrce, ve směru od Brna je přístupná ulicí Rakoveckou, která se jí dotýká a leží v podhradí hradu Veveří. Zástavba čítá 29 staveb. Sídlí zde zemědělské středisko Veterinární univerzity Brno.

Reference

Externí odkazy

Veverská Bítýška
Sídla v Boskovické brázdě
Osady v okrese Brno-venkov

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


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text:
Audi A4 Review
As a rival for the venerable BMW 3 series the Audi A4 has been a mainstay, matching the Munich maker's models with performance, efficiency and looks all the way. Revised late in 2011 it's now better than ever, and offers something of a sensible choice in the compact executive segment. There's no doubt the A4's USP and key to its appeal is its sleek looks, backed up the firm's now trademark LED running lights, and quality cabin. Available as both an Avant (estate) and saloon, we tested a £26,555 SE 2.0 TDI version of the latter.
The A4 has an understated but attractive design.
The A4 is the automotive equivalent of a tailored suit — subtle but reassuringly good looking. Audi was one of the first to do the full length grille, and continues the theme with the A4, the face flanked by the sharp headlights with redesigned LED running lamps. Both the saloon and avant look good, though the latter somehow appears to be more of a premium product, especially in sporty S-Line trim. Inside the layout may be familiar, but it's incredibly well put together and feels more special than any rival's cabin.
There's plenty of space up front, and storage space is good, however those relegated to the rear will note that it can be rather cramped, especially behind taller front seat occupants. Regardless Audi offers some excellent sports seats, and the driving position has plenty of adjustment. Boot space is reasonable too, with 480-litres available in the saloon and a further 10-litres in the practical avant — dropping the seats extends the former's capacity to 962-litres and the latter to a whopping 1,430-litres. It's incredibly well trimmed back there too, with a quality carpet that rivals the material used in the main cabin of some competitors.
Both the saloon and Avant versions have cavernous boots.
Performance & handling
In terms of finesse and feedback the A4 is something of an also ran in the compact executive sector; that's not to say it's a bad drive, it's just not as dynamically appealing as the BMW 3 Series. But, it is safe and secure — especially when specified with the firm's excellent quattro four wheel drive system.
There's an engine to suit everyone from the frugal 1.8 TFSi with 118bhp to the storming 328bhp supercharged S which sprints from 0-60mph in a little over five seconds.
The 2.0-litre TDI tested here is slightly slower at 8.2 seconds, though it delivers its 175bhp in an incredibly linear and smooth matter. Those looking for extra flexibility should turn their attention to the allroad model, a quasi off roader with chunky bumpers and raised ride height, though like all others in the range it too suffers from numb steering and a notchy manual gear change.
Economy & environment
There's been a raft of recent improvements to the A4 to make it even more economical and efficient — from the rather techy sounding Thermal Management System to the electromechanical steering system. Opt for the most economical engine — the 2.0-litre TDI e with 134bhp and you can expect a combined economy of 65.7mpg and thanks to stop/start CO2 emissions of only 112g/km. Even the more powerful 2.0-litre TDI tested here manages 61.4mpg and 120g/km CO2. It's also worth bearing in mind that useful though the quattro four-wheel drive system may be, it does rather eat into the efficiency and economy on offer.
Equipment & value
Prices start at £23,630 for the 1.8 TFSi SE saloon and rise all the way up to £41,130 for the S4 Avant Black Edition — and allroad models start at £31,485. Regardless of specification chosen though the A4 comes equipped with three zone climate control, split folding rear seats, rear parking sensors, cruise control, automatic Start-Stop, Bluetooth connection and a 10 speaker audio system with AUX-in. There's a host of options as well, allowing you to really tailor the A4 to your needs though prices are often expensive; sat-nav is £1,620 while leather seats start at £1,680.
Like rivals the A4 gets the full five star approval from Euro NCAP, but the latest A4 will also ensure the driver is paying attention. If it thinks they you haven't reacted to the car in front slowing or stopping, it will momentarily apply the brakes to jolt your attention.
The Audi A4 may not be the sharpest compact executive on the market (that award goes to the BMW 3 Series) but it's left languishing as second best. For many this car's subtlety will appeal most — both in terms of the way it looks and how it goes about its job. There's a range of smooth, and in the most part efficient, diesel and petrol engines along with a choice of transmissions as well as saloon, avant and allroad bodystyles. And where many rivals like the Volvo S60 only offer four-wheel drive on the flagship, the A4 is available with quattro on lesser models too.
Model tested: Audi A4 Saloon 2.0 TDIe SE
Engine: 2.0-litre diesel
Power: 136bhp
Torque: 320Nm
Acceleration: 0-62 in 9.3 seconds
Top speed: 134mph
Economy: 65.7mpg
Emissions: 112g/km CO2
Price: £26,555


>few questions concerning some formations in the mid Jurassic of China.
>Bathonian-Callovian.  Which one is correct?
Jurassic) based on the conchostracan work of Chen et al.
>Secondly, is the Lower Shaximiao Formation the same as the Xiashaximiao?
>Dinosauria," but there are two formations that have the suffex "-shaximiao"
>assumption that Xiashaximiao = Lower Shaximiao?
Shaximiao Formation and the Shangshaximiao is the Upper Shaximiao Formation.
Next by thread: Help Save The Lost World Now!


For some years now Debby and Mick Hayward have come down to Sydney to run / walked the City to Surf.
Hailing from northern NSW, this is a great opportunity to catch up with family and friends, have some fun and support a worthy cause.
Mick and Debby take this opportunity to raise funds for Motor Neurone Disease research.
Debby and Mick have raised substantial sums for MND research both from their own personal donations as well as from family and friends.
The photos show a very happy team at the Bondi finish plus Debby and Mick's visit to The Deb Bailey Laboratory for MND Research.
The Deb Bailey Research Laboratory received 100% of all monies raised by the Haywards.
Our thanks to these two wonderful people, and their great team.


James Cameron"s The Terminator (1984) movie trailer looks just as great as you would imagine for this timeless movie. Combine action and sci-fi into a film that is always entertaining no matter how many times you watch it. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, and Michael Biehn star in The Terminator.
The Terminator is a 1984 American science fiction action film directed by James Cameron, co-written by Cameron, Gale Anne Hurd and William Wisher Jr. and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn, and Linda Hamilton. The film was produced by Hemdale Film Corporation and distributed by Orion Pictures, and filmed in Los Angeles. Schwarzenegger plays the Terminator, a cyborg assassin sent back in time from the year 2029 to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor, played by Hamilton. Biehn plays Kyle Reese, a soldier from the future sent back in time to protect Sarah.
Though not expected to be either a commercial or critical success, The Terminator topped the American box office for two weeks and helped launch the film career of Cameron and solidify that of Schwarzenegger. Three sequels have been produced: Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), and Terminator Salvation (2009), as well as a television series, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008--2009). In 2008, The Terminator was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry, being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."


Looking to Finance a Missouri Property?
Search through Missouri Mortgage Rates and apply with a preferred Missouri Mortgage Lender.
If you're buying a new home, choose the Purchase option below to find Missouri Mortgage rates and lenders for your new home purchase.
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text:
Essam El-Haddad (, 'Isām al-Haddād; born 1953) is an Egyptian politician. He was a senior advisor for foreign relations for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Freedom and Justice Party. In August 2012, he was appointed as one of four Egyptian Presidential assistants with responsibility for foreign relations and international cooperation until the overthrow of Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi in the third of July 2013. He is now in custody in solitary confinement in Al-Aqrab Prison in Cairo.

Early life and career

Essam spent his early life in Alexandria in Egypt. He attended the faculty of medicine in Alexandria University where he earned BA degree. His political involvement began while he was a student when he was elected a president of the student union.

He had his M.B.A. from Aston University, England. He studied for PhD degree in University of Birmingham Medical School where he also worked as a research fellow, in addition to being Head of Egyptian Students' Society in Birmingham and Head of Islamic Students' Society in Birmingham University.

In 1984, El-Haddad co-founded Islamic Relief, an international humanitarian organisation working in more than 40 countries providing emergency aid, carrying out long-term development, and campaigning for change. The Islamic Relief international headquarters are in Digbeth, in Birmingham, UK.

In Egypt, he chaired the Arabian Group For Development (AGD), the company was a member of the Union of Arab Exhibitions, the International Business Forum, the German-Arab Chamber of Industry and Commerce, the British Egyptian Business Association, and the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. He also founded "Inter-Build Egypt," the country's largest exhibition for the construction sector.

He worked also as a management consultant in SKOPOS Company, one of the leading Management Consulting and Organization Development companies in Middle East based in Dubai, UAE. He is also a member of the board of governors (BOG) of the International Business forum (IBF) in Istanbul, and a frequent discussant and participant in Friends of Europe Think Tank (Development Forum) in Brussels.

Family members

One of his sons is Gehad El-Haddad Senior Adviser and Media Spokesperson for the Muslim Brotherhood. Gehad had become the most recognized face of the Muslim Brotherhood in foreign media during the period following former President Mohamed Morsi's ouster. He held several interviews with international media from inside Rabaa Square where protesters made a sit-in for more than a month. He is now also in Al-Akrab prison in solitary confinement.

Morsi Administration

El-Haddad was appointed as Assistant to President Mohamed Morsi for Foreign Relations and International Cooperation in August 2012.  He was leading the country's efforts to join the BRICS, and engineered the Egyptian Initiative to end the Syrian Crisis. He also contributed to the cease-fire between Gaza and Israel in 2012.

In the 30th of June 2013, after a year of Morsi presidency, millions of protesters across Egypt took to the streets and demanded the resignation of Mohamed Morsi. After 3 days, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi the chief of the Egyptian Armed Forces launched the 2013 Egyptian coup d'état overthrowing president Mohamed Morsi.

Before General Sisi made his statement. El-Haddad took to the official Facebook account to post a frightening statement as described by media at that time. The following are parts of it.

As I write these lines I am fully aware that these may be the last lines I get to post on this page.
For the sake of Egypt and for historical accuracy, let's call what is happening by its real name: Military coup.

...

On January 25 I stood in Tahrir square. My children stood in protest in Cairo and Alexandria. We stood ready to sacrifice for this revolution. When we did that, we did not support a revolution of elites. And we did not support a conditional democracy. We stood, and we still stand, for a very simple idea: given freedom, we Egyptians can build institutions that allow us to promote and choose among all the different visions for the country. We quickly discovered that almost none of the other actors were willing to extend that idea to include us.

...

There are still people in Egypt who believe in their right to make a democratic choice. Hundreds of thousands of them have gathered in support of democracy and the Presidency. And they will not leave in the face of this attack. To move them, there will have to be violence. It will either come from the army, the police, or the hired mercenaries. Either way there will be considerable bloodshed. And the message will resonate throughout the Muslim World loud and clear: democracy is not for Muslims.

...

I do not need to explain in detail the worldwide catastrophic ramifications of this message. In the last week there has been every attempt to issue a counter narrative that this is just scaremongering and that the crushing of Egypt's nascent democracy can be managed. We no longer have the time to engage in frivolous academic back and forth. The audience that reads this page understands the price that the world continues to pay for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Egypt is neither Afghanistan nor Iraq. Its symbolic weight and resulting impact is far more significant.

...

Many have seen fit in these last months to lecture us on how democracy is more than just the ballot box. That may indeed be true. But what is definitely true is that there is no democracy without the ballot box.
Two months later, troops loyal to Sisi began a bloody crackdown against protestors and dissidents–later to be dubbed the August 2013 Rabaa massacre–that left 1,400 dead and 16,000 detained.

Under arrest

After Morsi and a number of his aides were taken to an unknown location by the country's armed forces. El-Haddad remained for months in this location without official charges until he was moved in 21 Dec 2013 to Al-Akrab prison.

In September 2013 Gehad El-Haddad was arrested in a Nasr City apartment. He is now in the same prison with his father but in different wings where they can't see or contact each other as said by his family.

Al-Aqrab (Scorpion) Prison in Tora is a notorious maximum-security facility used for political prisoners, who include Muslim Brotherhood and  April 6 Youth Movement leaders, as well as political activists. The inmates in this prison suffer from ill-treated, shortage of food and extremely bad conditions for family visits. Essam and his son Gehad are in solitary confinement where they are allowed only one hour of exercise each day inside a closed yard.

Colonel Omar Afifi talking about Al-Aqrab stated:
Al-Aqrab prison was designed so that the sunlight never enters any of its cells during the day. As a result inmates develop other diseases due to the lack of vitamin D whose scarcity leads to weakness in the mind and in the body. The prison also suffers from lack of ventilation. During summer temperature within it rises to unbearable levels while in winter it turns into a freezer.

Essam is still on trial for more than 3 years without conviction till now. Human rights organization consider the political trials in Egypt to lack justice. The director of Amnesty International in Germany, Selmin Çalışkan, has said "Mass trial of opposition figures are grossly unfair and make justice more selective" She added "The Egyptian judiciary has become an instrument for the suppression of the opposition and the free press. At least 20 journalists are currently in prison because they have criticized the government in their coverage or uncovered human rights violations."

Hunger strike

In February 2016, Essam El-Haddad objected when prison officials broke into his cell and insulted him. In response to his protests, officials deprived him from his right to get outside his solitary cell to the prison yard for a week. El-Haddad declared, "I am 63 and close to death but I will die with dignity." He was threatened by prison officials that his health won't bear such strike but he insisted and a day later prison officials retreated.

In the meanwhile, Al-Akrab banned family visits to prisoners from January 24 to February 10, 2016. When visits were resumed, only 30 families were allowed to visit a day in a prison that hosts more than 1,000 detainees. As a result, families had to sleep in the street outside the prison gate the night before their visits to make sure they will be allowed to visit their detainees next day. On February 14, prison guards assaulted the families who refused to leave after being denied the right to see their relatives. Four women were beaten and briefly arrested, and many fell to the ground after being violently pushed by the guards.

Several inmates including Gehad El-Haddad, went on strike against ill-treatment and the humiliating conditions of family visits. Under the slogan "I am human," the prisoners have set forth four main demands:
 Weekly hour-long family visits with no glass barrier
 Improving the quality and quantity of food and water to "fit human consumption"
 Allowing packages into the prison
 Allowing inmates outside on a daily basis
All of the above rights were in fact already supposed to be guaranteed by the prison.

Meanwhile, Families of Aqrab Detainees Association made a statement: "Major General Hassan Al-Sohagi, Assistant Minister of Interior for the prison sector, met with Aqrab Prison hunger-strikers and gave them a short message: he has "a Carte Blanche to deal with this strike" in whatever way he liked, from harassing detainees' families, through the prevention of visits, to state-sponsored executions, if this strike is not ended. Detainees rejected the junta regime's threat.

It is not clear what was the result of this hunger strike, but inmates of Al-Aqrab still suffer from ill-conditions while their trials are closing to its end.

References

Living people
1953 births
Egyptian prisoners and detainees
Alexandria University alumni
Alumni of Aston University
Alumni of the University of Birmingham
Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood members
Freedom and Justice Party (Egypt) politicians
Politicians from Alexandria
El-Haddad family
21st-century Egyptian politicians


By default , when we setup enterprise Manager database console(dbconsole), 1158 port will be configured.
But we can change this port easily using emca utility.
INFO: This operation is being logged at /oracle/app/oracle/cfgtoollogs/emca/prddb/emca_2017_10_01_19_00_51.log.
We have successfully changed the http port of the database console.


text:
Sustainable Development Goals—Initiatives for Green & Carbon Neutrality
Mr. Wong Heang Fine, Group Chief Executive Officer, Surbana Jurong Pte Ltd, Ms. Jessica Cheam, Founder and Managing Editor, Eco-Business, Mr. Micheal Edward Long, Head of Sustainbility, Asia, Lendlease and Mr. Lim Teck Leong, Director (Physical Planning West), Physical Planning Group, Urban Redevelopment Authority
The future is ours to create now, says Surbana Jurong Group CEO Wong Heang Fine. Out of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the UN, 9 relate directly to the building sector, says the World Green Building Council. These cover affordable & clean energy, sustainable cities & communities etc. As a global team of architects, designers, planners, engineers and other building specialists, Surbana Jurong is passionate about optimal city planning – starting from inside out rather than outside in. We want to create smarter and a more sustainable ecosystem at 3 levels.
At the building level, we are aiming for zero energy building design and Super Low Energy Buildings, with the seamless integration of sustainability enablers such as renewable energy and greenery. At the precinct level, we want to enhance liveability and adopt resource efficiency in terms of energy, water and waste management. Only when we have such sustainable precincts can we achieve lower carbon foot print per capita, mitigate concerns on rising temperature in the urban context and integrate smart mobility using autonomous vehicles.
Speaking at the International Built Environment Week 2019 in Singapore, Mr Wong shared Surbana Jurong's trail-blazing efforts to support green building initiatives in Jurong Innovation District, where Surbana Jurong Campus will be located from 2021; Punggol Digital District and Jurong Lake District.


This may their recorded a full session in the Paste Studios, New York, NY, where they recorded several songs, including my favorite "Resist", which is a heavy Rhythm and Soul song with a direct message. I'm really impressed how good their sound is. The vocals are soul filled and really, really convincing. The backing band is tight like you expect from James Brown' songs. The backing vocals add an enormous Gospel vibe to the scenery.
The Rev. Sekou and The Holy Ghost band met in 2015 at a Movement for Black Lives gathering, when Rev. Sekou washed pepper spray off Jay-Marie's face after police arbitrarily sprayed a crowd demanding they released an illegally detained 14-year-old Unexpectedly reuniting weeks later in Oakland, California they penned "The Revolution Has Come" in less than a week.
Previous PostSEE: INVSN' new Song "This Constant War" from their forthcoming LP, The Beautiful StoriesNext PostSEE: Jesse Redwing Mixing best of sixties blues into a enjoyable long drink!


text:
Three astronauts land on Earth from ISS in Russian capsule
MOSCOW - Agence France- Presse
his image provided by NASA shows Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko (center), Expedition 31 commander; along with NASA astronaut Don Pettit (left) and European Space Agency astronaut Andre Kuipers, both flight engineers, attired in Russian Sokol launch and entry suits, pose for a photo in the Destiny laboratory of the International Space Station Wednesday June 20, 2012. AP Photo
A Russian Soyuz capsule carrying three astronauts on Sunday landed on schedule in the Kazakh steppe, the Russian mission control said.
"At 12:14 Moscow time (0814 GMT) the Soyuz TMA-03M capsule landed with an international crew," Russian flight control centre said after Russian Oleg Kononenko, NASA astronaut Don Pettit and Dutch astronaut Andre Kuipers were parachuted to Earth.
"All the operations on descending from orbit and landing went by without any concerns," Russian flight control said in a statement posted on its website.
"The crew members who have returned to Earth are feeling well," it added. The capsule descended through an overcast sky to land in a grassy field with the three men who had spent more than six months on the International Space Station. The astronauts, weakened by their landing, were extracted from the capsule and lowered into armchairs in the steppe, chatting to rescue workers and speaking on a telephone to family members, in footage shown live on NASA TV.
The expedition commander Oleg Kononenko, who was first to be pulled from the descent module, looked pale and blinked in the daylight as the men adjusted to gravity after spending a total of 192 days in space.
The men blasted off on December 21 from Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, docking with the ISS two days later. While on the ISS, Kononenko took part in a two-man spacewalk lasting more than six hours.
The men leave three astronauts on the ISS: Joe Acaba, Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin, who will be reinforced later this month with three more crew members expected to blast off from Kazakhstan on July 14.
The next Soyuz flight will take up NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, Russian Yuri Malenchenko and Akihiko Hoshide of Japan, who are due to stay on the ISS until November.
Russia, astronauts
Surf's up for Turkey's "calm city"
Italian author Camilleri, creator of 'Inspector Montalbano', dies
Sultans of Jazz: Documentary to highlight Turks' battle with racism
Painter's life to be featured in film
Netflix deletes suicide scene from popular youth show, '13 Reasons Why'


Have you ever thought about investing in one of the new homes being built in or around your town? It doesn't matter if the housing developer in question is building a dozen residences or a hundred. These communities usually entice businesses to enter the area and set up shop. This perpetuates economic growth on many levels.
Perhaps you are interested in opening a small, independent business of your own. If you buy yourself one of the new homes close to a growing shopping district, you can keep an eye on development nearby. Then, if a commercial space becomes available, you can decide if the traffic in the area is heavy enough to warrant signing a lease. When there is an affluent neighborhood within walking or driving distance of the commercial space, you can anticipate that a lot of people with disposable income will drive by and see the shops. Just make sure that the businesses housed near yours will draw crowds. You will be sure to benefit if you are located near a grocery store or some other big-box retailer.
Maybe you are interested in working out of your home. New homes are perfect places to host sales parties and gatherings where ladies and gentlemen can sample various products and make purchases. In fact, a lot of newly constructed houses are in gated communities where it is popular for people to host events in an effort to get to know their neighbors. If you have folks over in order to promote your business, the inviting atmosphere might prompt them to take a closer look at your products and spend some money. You might even make some new friends in the long run.
Imagine the many networking opportunities that are possible when you are in constant contact with the residents in new homes around you. You will be able to promote your business, pass out samples, invite people to events, and seek advice from other professionals. These are all things that can make a significant difference in the growth of your business. Just be sure that you do not pressure anyone into promoting your services or buying your products. Products sell themselves if they are truly innovative and worth buying.
Keep an eye on new developments being constructed in your area and tour some of the houses in these developments. Try to learn more about nearby neighborhoods that seem to be experiencing rapid growth. You might want to think about moving if an area seems to have a lot of potential.


Hi, my name is Clint.
I'm currently working as the Director of Innovation & Technology for New London Public Schools in New London, CT USA. I am also working as an Educational Technology consultant for Whittle School & Studios.
I have been married to Lea Graner Kennedy for 15 years. I met here when I was 16 and told my mother that night I was going to marry Lea some day....and I did! My three children are Noah (12), Fiona (10), and Ava (6).
I have been a Scholar-in-Residence at STMHS which is part of the New London Public School system since January 2014. Prior to New London, I was the CTO for Branford Public Schools for six years and the Director of Technology for Stonington Public Schools for nine years.
This is my current research.
I am a doctoral student and fellow in the New Literacies Research Lab in the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut. I am working with some wonderful researchers and people including my advisor Dr. Donald J. Leu. My research interests include thinking skills specifically critical thinking and collaboration and how they are leveraged to solve real world ill-defined problems.
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Fast and precise. Now I can use all the sim cards in my phone!
Great! It Works Perfectly! Thank´s a lot!
Thanks, its wasn't working directly but their efficiency of answer was great, now I can use my BB unlock!
Worked a treat - BT Phone HTC S620 from eBay unlocked to Vodaphone. Placed the order 12:02 got the code 12:30.
Fast delivery, excellent help, works perfectly.


Made from genuine natural wood, crafted onto polycarbonate (PC) case, the stylish, elegant appearance and the unique wood grain of Vena NEU makes it classy, minimal, yet trendy.
The slim and minimalist build of Vena NEU is refined and thoughtful and complements the slim profile of your iPhone 8.
The sturdy polycarbonate (PC) hard shell protects your iPhone 8 from unwanted scratches and blemishes from everyday use. Raised bezel keeps the screen and camera above the surface when placed face down, keeping the screen and camera clean and scratch-free.
Vena NEU is designed with precision cut-outs to suit the iPhone 8 and provides effort access to all ports, buttons, and features. The beveled power and volume buttons are crafted to maintain the same great tactile feedback from your phone's buttons.


After coming to singing with me this morning, I let LiveWire No 3 loose with my camera in the garden and she took some beauties. This is my favourite.
Both youngsters finished off their glass shooting stars this afternoon.
And, of course, we went to the beach later in the afternoon for another session of dam building and stream diverting.


ÀPÓTÍ – which means Ethnic Pouffe in the Nigerian Yoruba Language. They are padded for comfort, having our Rich African Fabric Colors.
Centuries ago and till date, You'll always find a stool in every home, used as a kitchen sitting support when making some particular local meals, it is used as a low seat when friends gather under trees or in play areas to tell folktales, and also presently used to give comfort as a feet rest while seated to allow blood circulation.
Apoti can be used as Footstool, Low Seat and also to add Ethnic Aesthetics to any space. They are available in various designs and models.
However our Apoti Collection is not limited to stools only, we have a wide range Collection of African Furniture & Lifestyle Pieces made with a touch of our rich culture and heritage.


text:
package io.dropwizard.jdbi.args;

import org.junit.Test;
import org.mockito.Mockito;
import org.skife.jdbi.v2.StatementContext;

import java.sql.PreparedStatement;
import java.sql.Timestamp;
import java.sql.Types;
import java.time.ZoneId;
import java.time.ZonedDateTime;
import java.util.Optional;

public class ZonedDateTimeArgumentTest {

    private final PreparedStatement statement = Mockito.mock(PreparedStatement.class);
    private final StatementContext context = Mockito.mock(StatementContext.class);

    @Test
    public void apply() throws Exception {
        ZonedDateTime dateTime = ZonedDateTime.of(2007, 12, 3, 10, 15, 30, 375_000_000, ZoneId.systemDefault());

        new ZonedDateTimeArgument(dateTime, Optional.empty()).apply(1, statement, context);

        Mockito.verify(statement).setTimestamp(1, Timestamp.valueOf("2007-12-03 10:15:30.375"));
    }

    @Test
    public void apply_ValueIsNull() throws Exception {
        new ZonedDateTimeArgument(null, Optional.empty()).apply(1, statement, context);

        Mockito.verify(statement).setNull(1, Types.TIMESTAMP);
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub