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Fighting Rhythms and other rants
I've recently finished The New Magic by Joseph Malik (review to come soon — but his first book, Dragon's Trail, was half of what prompted me to start writing advice on writing action scenes, as an example of how to do them right).
Anyway. You often hear the advice about writing fight scenes to "use short sentences." It's ok — to a point.
Take a look at the following excerpt from Murder In Absentia. As you read it, pay attention to the rhythm of sentences, to the variation in sentence & sentence fragment lengths.
Thirty paces to go, and another volley of arrows. This time one man fell down when an arrow that ricocheted from a shield lodged itself in his neck. The deck became slick with the blood spurting from his wound. Margaritus was shaking Didius Rufus by his shoulders, yelling in his face to get the wind up.
Ten paces, and the pirates cast ropes with hooks onto our rails, dragging us closer. We dislodged the hooks and struck at the ropes, but within the space of a deep breath the pirate ship bumped into ours, shaking the deck under our feet. The two ships screeched like racing chariots colliding.
The pirates were upon us. With wild cries they jumped from their ship onto our deck, swinging swords, axes, hooks and clubs. I braced my shield, and as the pirate who targeted me tried to land his curved sword in a neat arc from above straight on my head I took a step back, causing him to miss his mark and forcing him to stumble as he landed, and immediately with my full weight behind the shield I jumped and slammed into him, forcing him backwards and the boss of the shield knocking the wind from his lungs, yet still with his back against the ship's rail he tried to raise his sword to protect himself, but I knocked it aside with my shield and plunged my knife deep into his chest. His eyes widened and a gurgling, rattling sound came from his throat as he lost balance and fell overboard, splashing into the waters in the space between our ships.
What followed was a mad free-for-all battle. The pirates were ferocious, the deck was slick with blood and the air was heavy with the din of fighting, the shouts of enemies colliding and the cries of the wounded and the dying.
So, err, yes, that was from the very first book I ever published. But while I can see things I might improve now, I'm fairly happy with the rhythm of the fight.
For a novel & series that isn't heavy on the "action" (because violence has consequences) I still enjoy writing this bouts of fighting, and I try to make them — and the surrounding text — support the feeling of combat.
By using short sentences in the lead up, I tried to build up the nervous expectations. But as soon as violence erupts I used an extra long sentence to leave the reader mentally breathless, to instill that feeling of dense, no-breaks action.
Varying sentence length is always important. These is no one size fits all. This is true for all moods. It's boring to use always short sentences. (See what I've done here?)
Playing with sentence length goes further. You can play with complex sentences that have multiple short clauses so as keep the 'quick' pace but without falling into repetitive drudgery. Always try to consider the feeling
Tools for Fight Scenes
I've written before about action scenes and about making historical combat realistic. Here are a few more tools and ideas you can consider when writing such, to help you both keep track of the physical aspect and to control the tone and pace of the writing.
These are in no particular order, just various tools to keep in the back of your mind when writing, and in the front of your mind when editing.
The environment, the space available for fighting, will have a significant impact of what's possible, on how people move and where they can move to. A bar brawl is different to the street outside, a muddy field is different than a forest, etc.
This should all be established ahead of the actual fight. When violence erupts, the POV character's is just like any other person's in a similar situation — afflicted with tunnel vision of the immediate threat in front of them.
The good thing is that just like any scenery piece, you don't need to be overly explicit. You can describe a bar with "long tables and benches" or "tall, round tables to place your drinks and a few stools around". No need for exact placement, your reader will build up the mental image.
Combat is chaotic, and keeping track of who's where can be hard. And if it's hard for the author, it's going to be impossible for the reader. A simple chart with a few tokens (like miniatures in table-top gaming, but, y'know, without the capital outlay) might help you keep track of positions and movements. This works on any scale.
Don't fall into describing a chess game with each individual movement (see POV below), but keeping a track of movement across time will help avoid the faux-pas of people in two places at once.
Unless you're familiar with martial arts, get a painter's model or a friend to help you position fighters and their moves. I've seen instances where a character had to have three hands or Mr Fantastic's stretchy limbs to achieve what they were doing. Don't think of just what they're trying to achieve / needs to happen, but afford some consideration to how: what's humanly, physically possible in a sequence of actions.
You don't need blow-by-blow description, certainly not for any length of fight. See my above excerpt — there's just the short burst in the initial clash to establish the feel, and then a generalised observation.
If you focus on the important bits (usually the start and end of the fight), you can whitewash a lot of details in between (which might also neatly solve some of the positioning problems above).
I'd advise to vary sentence length to control pacing. Read things aloud if you need to, and pay attention to the rhythm. I hope I demonstrated above why not to use just a short staccato, but long sentences too. Very length to control scene tempo and mental 'breathing' in the reader's mind.
My approach is to focus on one character, and what they can see. Remember that they have tunnel vision during a fight, so will need to occasionally look around to see what else is going on (thankfully, this simplifies things when you to write).
It's entirely possible to write sweeping battle scenes with hundreds of combatants, but it's a lot easier to draw the reader, to place them in the thick of it, when describing everything from a narrow, personal point of view.
Goals and Outcomes
Those characters are fighting for a reason. Everyone wants something, and the other side is standing in their way. When describing the fight it's important not to lose sight of the motivations and the consequences of winning and losing for all participants. This isn't just for the author to keep in the back of their minds as they write the lead-up to the fight, but something that should be on the page to heighten the drama for the readers.
Writing excellent action scenes, the kind that draws your readers in and makes them feel like they're in the thick of it — not leaving them scratching their heads and wondering how the heck did that just happen, is a skill you can cultivate.
It's not (just) about describing the maneuvers (although that has it's place), but about the sum totality of the conflict, about the forces that shape it as much as it is about the specific action sequence. By examining both the participants and the environment, you can describe rich, immersive clashes.
Bonus Rant: Never / Always type of advice
Having dealt with the Offending Advice of the Day regarding the blanket "use short sentences for fight scenes" above, there are a couple of other pieces that I came across recently and though to address.
In general, I'd say that every advice that starts with an "always" or a "never" is suspect. Like all art, writing rules are meant to be broken. By all means, try to understand what prompted that advice in the first place (it might have a grain of truth), but go beyond just accepting it and figure out if it's right for you in this particular instance.
This is a bit like stereotypes. It's a useful shorthand, that allows me to say something like "A redneck and a rabbi walk into a brothel…" without having to detail what that means are and what do those people look like. If I told you "never use stereotypes", you'd end up the world's most descriptively boring book. We as authors rely on tropes, on stereotypes, on cliches even. As long as you understand their origin and the extent of their usefulness, they can be tools to get into the meat of your story. Even the most rabid "show vs tell" proponents can be brought down to tears with a bit of sophistry, when you pick on each individual detail requesting to be "shown" it until they cry mercy. (Oh, it's a bar? Describe the lighting. And the tables. And the bar. And the bar stools. And that patron in the corner. And the bartender. No, I don't care your protagonist saw the blonde first and is making his way towards her — show me each cigarette butt in the saw dust on the floor!)
We use words to evoke a feeling, and sometimes less words are better. Besides, so much of the reading experience of a work happens in the reader's head (something I've learnt working with beta readers and reading reviews), that it's not even funny. You can't control the complete mental picture, and you shouldn't even try. Balance evocative descriptions with progressing the plot.
Getting back on the topic of never / always advice about writing, I've mentioned before what I believe to be the only eternal pieces of writerly advice. If you've paid attention you probably noted that they have nothing to do with technique. They're simply Read, Write, Edit as the most general things, constant things you need to do. Not what to read, or how to write, or rules of editing — just the activities in themselves, together with a judicious application of reason, lead to improvement.
Anyway, moving back to ranting…
Dreams, Waking up, and the Weather
Something random that came up, and sparked this part of the rant:
Waking up from a dream or a coma is cliche and boring
Dreams are just cheating the reader of emotional investment, and you end up waking which is boring as above.
Don't start with the weather
And my response is…. Meh.
You can make everything work well (and you can make everything crap, too). Sometimes waking up is important: if you're about to disrupt someone's idyllic life, you need to show that life first. As for comas, tell that to Zelazny and Nine Princes of Amber (one of my all time favourite authors, and whose books so far withstood the test of time).
Dreams go for motive, your honour. Even whomever wrote that original meme acknowledged that done in the right way they can be an important part of the narrative.
As for the weather — tell that to Danielle Steel. 92 of her 179 books start with the weather — and you can't argue with her best-selling status. In fact, whenever you look at the statistics of literature, the only thing you can safely say is that author's styles and sales figures have nothing to do with literary criticism. And that includes any such always/never type of advice.
Oh, and I'm totally not writing it because I started my first book with a dream (a nightmare, really, about an old love) followed by Felix going to wash his face and do some light reading until dawn… at which point he has a visitor that hires him to deal with a cult death, and he's doing a squishy autopsy before the sun is much up and it's still chapter one.
One beta reader said everyone stops reading at "it was all a dream". Err, there's a difference between prologue and epilogue, dude. That dream, which repeats in important variations throughout the novel, is actually serving both to establish character (showing his scars, without telling about them), and comprises the emotional arc (which is always secondary in hard-boiled detectives) as the perfect mirror image between the opening and closing images of the novel.
My second book opens with the weather, as Felix is lying naked in a fountain because summer is too hot… until someone comes to hand him a haunted building and asks him to evict the ghosts. As for the third novel, ah my third novel opens up with… a politician exposing himself (literally) on a public platform. And then Felix gets called to handle a case of bizarre misfortunes and curses.
My point in all this is that, yes — it's good to start as close to the action as possible. But be wary of starting too close. Sometimes there's a good reason to show the character's daily routine, to establish their life before events overtake them.
In conclusion, all I can say is you should find your voice, make your works distinctly your own, and don't look back.
So what bad advice have you gotten? What imperative, imperious tones have raised your hackles? Have you considered why such blanket statements came to be, and why and when should they be broken? How do you approach controlling rhythms — ion and out of fights — in tense scenes?
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Mark Schultz says:
Nice post, you make some good points.
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Key Point: It is amazing what we can accomplish when we put commitment in front of fear and slowly, methodically, bit by bit, walk from one side of the road to the other, more desirable side. I heard someone explain that if one wanted to cross a street through crazy, chaotic Hanoi traffic they had to step confidently into the flow, walk slowly, persistently forward, NOT stop or run and somehow, unbelievably, they would get to the other side safely (Watch this video if you want to get a more visual feel for this).
The thought provoking,(The 4-Hour-Work Week) irrepressible, Tim Ferriss, takes this idea even further. In his upcoming book, he writes from the premise of believing wholeheartedly that people can become world class; i.e. top five percent in the world at one or two things per year, not one or two things per lifetime.
If you are really clear what you want (many people are better at identifying what they don't want), put your fear behind commitment, "step into the traffic," and slowly keep moving forward, keeping your eyes on where you want to end up.


text:
Sea Trial
Sailing After My Father
by Brian Harvey
tagged : personal memoirs, western provinces, medical, sailing
My father's effects were like flotsam on a beach, each wave leaving something behind as he weakened and died, until the beach was littered with his life.
And there were so many John Harveys. The prairie kid who was happiest snaring gophers with his friends and crawling underneath the boardwalk on Main Street, who left home at sixteen and never came back, not even for his father's death. The disillusioned high school teacher who borrowed money, went back to school and became a doctor. The photographer who filled our house with the smell of developers and fixers, and our family albums with images that were much more than snapshots. And the trophy-winning violinist and peripatetic physician who kept searching for the place where medicine was practised the way he thought it should be.
Getting a handle on a life like this one seemed impossible; there was always going to be something you couldn't quite grasp. After he died, I took a lot of that flotsam into my own home and went gamely through it, sometimes laughing, occasionally crying. I spent a month classifying, labeling, judging, before distributing and disposing. Worst of all were the drop-offs at the Sally Ann, roaring away from the beaten chair and the obsolete stereo abandoned on a wet sidewalk.
For sheer tonnage, the photographs dominated, and that seemed fitting. Photography and music had been the passions that never faded, and he had left many pounds of meticulously labelled negatives and prints. Among the best were the black and white portraits of his fellow physicians, hand-made sixteen-by-twenties he had shot in a hallway, or an operating room, or the smoke-laden Doctors' Lounge. My favourite bore a caption that typified the mordant sense of humour that my father tried to suppress, but never really could: in this portrait, the doctor is grinning, a cigarette in one hand and the other hand aloft, the thumb and first finger measuring off an inch or so of air.
"Just a small one," the caption reads. "I have to operate."
He also left bits and pieces from most of our boats. I went through mountains of nautical detritus in the freezing-cold shed behind his house, high-stepping over rusting garden tools and reaching around scary bottles of thirty-year old pesticide to get at the treasures. Rotting cardboard boxes rained hundreds of dollars worth of bronze nuts and bolts on my shoes. I unearthed a priceless collection of teak scraps left over from the costly rebuilding of a doomed deck; cans of questionable kerosene and long-solidified spar varnish; the rope and wood boarding ladder he'd made during his fear-of-falling overboard phase (this coincided with his fear-of-head-injury phase, when he wore a red motorcycle helmet while driving his convertible). One boat in particular was responsible for much head-scratching and even the need for a German-English dictionary: from Stortebeker III I discovered old Admiralty charts of Raoul Island, where HMS Bounty's Captain Bligh and his men first made land after being cast adrift by the doomed Fletcher Christian, ceramic jars with cork-lined lids marked "Kaffee" and "Kakao" and even, stuffed into a black plastic back that showered me with rat droppings when I tugged it out of a high-up cranny, a threadbare Nazi flag. Stortebeker III had been built in 1937, in Bremen; there was no lead in her keel.
But the boat stuff was not so difficult to deal with. A lot of it, like the screws and the teak, went directly into my own boat stores, with silent thanks that I would never have to buy it. The coffee and cocoa containers were washed out and refilled. The rest of the household goods found their way to new homes, or to family shelves where they could bide their time for as long as it took for their new owners to die. I donated the doctors' portraits to the Victoria Medical Society.
That left the papers.
My father's papers (and there were a lot of them) were sealed in already-labeled cardboard boxes. I left those for last, finally working through them with a growing sense of dread. Most of them were no problem: letters, newspaper clippings about his early triumphs as a violinist, pristine instruction manuals for his many cameras, his own short stories and essays and even a few tentative poems. But there was one box I didn't want to find. For a while I even thought it might not be there at all, that he might, in the final months before he was exiled to the nursing home and lost control over his own possessions, have managed to get down on his knees and enter the vile crawlspace beneath the kitchen, where I knew it was stored. I imagined him navigating shakily past the trap with the liquefying rat and the jumble of mouldy boat cushions, making it finally to the leaning pile of cardboard boxes to delete the one I feared.
I found it, of course. He could never have disposed of it even if he'd wanted to: it was too heavy. I shoved the box to one side, ignoring it until that's all there was on the workbench: labeled like all the rest (he was a labeler), but more carefully than the others, the single word LEGAL written on one of those white adhesive rectangles with a red border, then licked and smoothed hard onto the cardboard so there would be no mistake about what was inside. The pain its contents represented had been impossible to contain, but at least the evidence was secure. Until now.
The tape yielded after a short struggle, and took some of the cardboard with it; he had sealed the box well. Inside were files, packed tightly, a solid cube of paper. I pulled them out in slippery handfuls, stacked them on the workbench, stomped the torn cardboard box flat; it was as frail, it turned out, as he was at the end. Then I began to go through the piles.
Work quickly, I told myself; be ruthless. You owe it to him to see what's in here, but you don't have to read anything. If he would never explain it all to you before, why start now?
The papers smelled of mould and neglect and, because I knew something of their story, of defeat. I began to go through them, a quick scan and then into the recycling box. Files of patients long dead, each in its own named folder. Photocopies of scientific papers from medical journals, none of them more recent than the mid-1980s. Long and ominous-looking transcripts in vinyl three-ring binders warped with age, and a thick bundle of yellowed newspaper clippings that I tossed without even looking. Printouts of some kind of manuscript, the lettering faded, on side-punched computer paper. I glanced and tossed, as though washing my hands of a corpse. It looked like the whole story was here.
And then, after about twelve inches, I gave up and began to go in reverse. The discard pile got smaller again. I couldn't recycle or even shred this stuff, it was too sensitive. There were names. It must have taken him years to compile this dossier, with trips to the medical library, the archives, the stationery store for the recipe cards where every reference was recorded on its own little rectangle. Hydrocephalus in Children. Complications of Ventriculo-Atrial Shunts. The Practice of Law and the Search for Truth. Most of the reprints were heavily annotated, in orange highlighter or in his own neat hand; some of them were askew on the page. I imagined him, an unwilling student in his late seventies, cramming a heavy textbook over the photocopy machine, leaning on the cover, turning the page and doing it all again. I couldn't throw this stuff away.
Pretty soon it was all back together again, a toxic little archive reconstructed. I grabbed one of the brand new U-Haul boxes, erected it and shoe-horned the lot back in. Then some packing tape, rather a lot of it, because I never intended to open the box again, and all it lacked was an unambiguous name. I took a felt pen and wrote the one he had already chosen for his own manuscript, on the top and on each side for good measure, so there'd be no mistaking it: THE TRIAL. Then I pushed it out of sight.
tagged : personal memoirs, western provinces, sailing, medical
The Nahwitti Bar
Vera was a glowing little island surrounded by drizzle and fog. I could just make out the sickly yellow arc lights on the loading dock where the fishing boats had delivered their catch the night before. It was 4:45 in the morning, and I hadn't slept much. Hatsumi made coffee and poured it into a thermos; neither of us ate. We put on our rain gear. Then I started the engine; turned on the radar, the GPS, and the depth sounder; and crept over the slippery deck to get the anchor up.
"Can we do this?" said Hatsumi when I rejoined her in the cockpit. Her voice sounded small. She put the engine in gear and Vera began to slide forward.
"I'm not waiting here another day," I said. "I can't stand it."
We felt our way out of the anchorage. It was still pitch dark, and the fog erased the meeting of boat and water. By the time we reached the mouth of Bull Harbour, the sky had begun to lighten, but our surroundings were still a uniform grey. We were almost at the northern tip of Vancouver Island. Somewhere in front of us was the Nahwitti Bar, the obstacle I'd been obsessing about for months. According to the chart, we were only a half mile away. Soon we would turn toward the shore, find the opening in the rocks that the locals swore by, and follow the edge of the kelp through this inside channel. This was the plan: we would bypass the bar and its multiple hazards altogether, then zip around photogenic Cape Scott, admire the surf exploding on the headlands, and congratulate ourselves for reaching the west coast at last. The home stretch. Nothing to it.
But following the inside route meant you had to see where you were going. I hadn't thought of that. GPS and radar couldn't see kelp, and kelp told you where the shallow spots were. I grabbed the binoculars and did a quick, frantic sweep where I thought the horizon should be. Nothing.
"We have to turn!" Hatsumi was inside, glued to the GPS screen. "We're running out of room."
"Keep going." I felt the Pacific swell lift us. "Don't turn."
"I can't see the channel. I can't see anything." I grabbed the binoculars again, and for a moment, maybe five seconds at most, a hole in the fog revealed something. But it wasn't the inviting, kelp-fringed escape hatch I expected to see. It was a grey wall of water, smooth and undulating and evil-looking. The Nahwitti Bar, the thing we thought we were avoiding, was straight ahead.
This was the choice: go blind into confined waters or go blind into that wall. The third and most sensible choice, to turn around and go back, existed for about as long as it took me to hand the binoculars back to my wife. The wall was a lot closer than I thought.
"We'll just go through it," I said. "How bad can it be?"
In an instant, I'd done the equivalent of taking off my clothes in a snowstorm. Would Hatsumi have done it differently? For all my railing at Japanese inflexibility, this was one situation where Western-style improvisation was a mistake. We were entering the Nahwitti Bar at peak ebb tide, the worst possible time; behind that grey wall would be a field of standing waves that would take us, how long to get through? Ten minutes? An hour? I had no idea. And as Vera lifted into the first of them and I felt the weight and size of it, I knew that, once we were into that field, there was no way we could turn and run. If the engine stopped, if the blue goop I'd bunged into the leaking driveshaft two days earlier suddenly let go, if Vera reared so high the sludge at the bottom of the fuel tank got sucked into the fuel line, we would be driven, wallowing and helpless, onto invisible rocks.
These weren't ordinary waves. They weren't wind-driven and marching predictably at us; instead, they were gunmetal-glassy and weirdly stationary. Vera had to climb each one, and as we got deeper into the bar, I had to hold hard to the wheel to keep from slipping backward. Charley, clipped to a line that kept him on the cockpit seat and out from under Hatsumi's feet, cowered and scrabbled with me. Charley was a miniature schnauzer. He couldn't swim. Vera reared, climbed, and fell sickeningly into the next trough.
After a half-dozen waves, I gave up steering the course Hatsumi kept shouting to me and concentrated on keeping our bow more or less perpendicular to the crests. We were on a road, even if it led straight into the rocks, but I felt an overpowering need to just get through it. The worst part was the lack of a frame of reference. There was just enough visibility to see two or three waves ahead; everything else — land and sky — was greyed out. It was like being blindfolded and beaten in a locked room. All our planning, three years of progressively longer cruises, the courses, the reading, the conviction that circumnavigating Vancouver Island was the logical shakedown before a true offshore voyage — how did we end up in this mess?
"Are we okay?" Hatsumi kept asking. Where she was stationed, braced in the companionway, the view astern must have been just as bad. She wouldn't see the bow climbing to the sky and shedding sheets of water down the decks, but she would see me trying not to tumble backward off the stern. Every few minutes, she blew violently into the ancient brass foghorn I'd found in my father's effects and brought along as a memento. That was what you were supposed to do in fog, wasn't it?
"We're fine," I said. But I was seriously scared. When I suddenly found myself clutching a stanchion and vomiting violently over the side, I didn't know if it was seasickness or fear. I'd never been seasick before. I'd never been this frightened either. Except once — and that was a long time ago.
I first saw Zero Rock on a summer weekend when I was eight years old. A number of things came together then, and because of those things, I was sure I was going to die. The things were: my father's impatience with the limitations on his time, his determination to learn new skills, a southwest gale, and a fishing fleet.
We had no business being anywhere near Zero Rock in Frou-Frou. She was a Lightning Class racing boat, nineteen feet long, open except for a few feet of foredeck under which you shoved spare life jackets, a paddle, lunch. The cockpit took up most of the boat: slat seats bracketed the centreboard box, a raised slot that penetrated the hull and through which the retractable keel protruded. With a good wind behind you and the centreboard pulled up, a Lightning planed like a surfboard. You raised and lowered the board by hauling on a block and tackle, an arrangement that allowed the racer to fine-tune lateral resistance and unfortunately allowed my father to conclude that a Lightning could be beached for a weekend's camping.
Our Lightning was painted a cheerful yellow. Her ridiculous name, which we never changed, was picked out in black plastic letters screwed to the transom, one "Frou" on either side of the rudder. That rudder is important to my story. It hung by two oddly named bits of hardware whose names I have never forgotten: the pintles, vertical pins attached to the rudder, and the gudgeons, two brackets like crooked fingers screwed into the transom. You lowered the pintles into the gudgeons, male meeting female with a solid bronze thunk, and there the rudder dangled and swung. What happened to this handy system was the first unravelling of my father's plan.
Zero Rock is in the middle of Haro Strait, a sizeable chunk of open water between the southern tip of Vancouver Island and the American Gulf Islands. Haro was Gonzalo López de Haro, a pilot on Manuel Quimper's Princesa Real, which passed through in 1790; his is one of the "Spanish names" on the coast of British Columbia, as opposed to the "British names." Two seafaring countries, two legacies. The actual mapping was done a few years later by the other team, led by the dour and dyspeptic George Vancouver, for whom the island and its largest city were named.
Haro Strait is a busy corridor. Freighters and bulk carriers trail mile-long smudges of diesel exhaust down its shipping lanes. Haro connects the Strait of Georgia with the larger Juan de Fuca Strait, which cups the southernmost end of Vancouver Island and connects to the open Pacific, where the really ugly weather comes from. But Haro Strait can be ugly enough; it's eight nautical miles at its widest point and wide open, north-south, for twenty — plenty of what sailors call "fetch," the open area required for a wind to really cock its fist and hammer you. Haro Strait is a complicated place for wind, fielding whatever comes from the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the Strait of Georgia, and Puget Sound and turning it into a baffling brew that can make for great sailing or chewed fingernails. The southwest is where the prevailing winds come from in summer, which means they're behind you going north and in your face heading south. A fine day in Victoria is a blue sky etched with mares' tails and a southwester steered in from Juan de Fuca doing its best to take the top off Haro Strait. On the day I thought I would die, this was how it looked.
My father was a neurosurgeon, and he didn't take holidays, not when I was eight. He was always on call. Evenings and weekends, the phone at home rang constantly because the hospital knew where he was. Most of the time, whatever he was doing when the phone rang — rewiring a light socket, knocking out a wall, developing a roll of photographic film, or varnishing a boat rail — simply stopped or went on without him while he went off to change out of his old clothes. But somehow, this weekend, he'd gotten free. Maybe he had an unprecedented opening in his schedule, maybe he just decided on the spur of the moment to make a run for it and hope nobody drove their motorcycle into a wall or had a massive aneurysm in the twenty-four hours our jaunt was supposed to take.
Our plan (his plan) was to spend Saturday night camped on Sidney Island, about fifteen miles north of Victoria. There were a number of problems with this plan — the wrong boat, no idea of the weather forecast, we knew almost nothing about sailing — none of them too surprising from a man whose previous experience with water was confined to the swimming hole by the railroad tracks in rural Alberta and a few lakes in Ontario. The really remarkable thing was that we were going at all. It wasn't even the entire family; my older brother and I got to go, but my mother and sister were stuck waiting at home. They ended up waiting for a lot longer than they'd expected.
The first thing I remember about the trip is the moment things started to go wrong. The north end of Sidney Island, where we intended to camp, is a long, curving spit of sand, an unmissable target. But it shallows abruptly, and we hit the bottom going fast, the southwester behind us, and the sails dropped too late. The centreboard swung up into its case, as it was designed to do, but the rudder, overlooked, caught the bottom and tore loose. The tiller must have leapt suddenly in my father's hand, and I can imagine his shock and the metaphoric slap to the forehead as he found himself suddenly dragging a floating rudder behind us. The gudgeons, of course, ripped out of the transom and slid silently into the sea.
The part of the story my father preferred to remember was how he actually found those two brass gudgeons at low tide the next morning; how he pounded bits of driftwood into the screw holes in the transom and reattached them; how we pushed off when the tide came back in and headed home. And it is a good story, especially the bit where he strode ashore after we'd crash-landed, emptied my army surplus knapsack, stuffed it with sand and pitched it out to where we'd hit the bottom. The bag was there when the tide went out, marking the spot where those gudgeons had to be.
But my own memory is uninterested in his quick thinking, preferring to jump forward to the point where I knew I would die. Here, in the southerly transit of Haro Strait, is where my details are.
I remember the sun. It was a beautiful day, cloudless from start to finish. But the wind that had sent us scooting up onto Sidney Spit was in our faces now. Poor Frou-Frou's flat bottom slammed into the rapidly building seas with a sound you felt as much as heard. Voices were snatched away and blown astern. I heard my older brother, who was sailing the boat, yelling about the engine, but my father was bent over the lurching transom, fumbling with the thing, a surgeon trying to slap the machinery into life. Maybe he was checking those reattached gudgeons too, wondering when they would pop out of their new holes and the rudder would fly away astern and Frou-Frou would flounder and flip. When he turned and shouted at us, we heard nothing. "What?" he seemed to be saying. "What?" His mouth opened and closed silently, like a fish's.
My brother clutched the mainsheet in one hand and the tiller in the other and fought to spill the wind each time a gust threatened to slam us flat. The engine was useless. Our doughty British Seagull, all three horsepower of it, looked to have been the first of us to drown. Water spun off the drum when my father tried to start it, wrapping the cord again and again around the flywheel and yanking furiously with hands that would probably be navigating a hemostat through a tangle of cerebral blood vessels the next day. Finally, he decided to operate. We soldiered on while my father knelt on the pitching stern deck with pliers and wrench, one arm crooked around the wire backstay to keep him from falling off. I think he was trying to extract the spark plug.
By now Haro Strait was a field of beaten silver and white, a beautiful sight for anyone standing on the cliffs and taking in the view of the strait and the hills of San Juan Island and the distant peaks of the Olympic Mountains. We would have been a merry yellow dot. "Hell of a sail," they might have said, nodding in appreciation before ambling back to their cars. But for me, out there in the howling centre of things, it wasn't beautiful at all, just heaving green water that kept coming at our little boat, at my father, my brother, the British Seagull, me.
And so I concluded I was going to die. What was worse, I was going to die in a boat called Frou-Frou. I crawled forward, under the small shelter of the coaming, curled up and waited for the water to punch through the plywood next my ear and keep on coming. I prayed, for the first and (so far) the only time in my life.
Then I spotted the trollers. Back then, commercial salmon fishing was still thriving, there was good money in owning a boat and steaming out to meet the sockeye and the chinook as they zeroed in on their coastal rivers after four years getting fat in the North Pacific. There would be another two decades of good times before the only salmon fishermen in Haro Strait were weekend warriors in plastic speedboats. In the '60s, the fleet was still made from B.C. timber and the boats would move from one hot spot to another, racing for the next place where the Department of Fisheries had announced an opening.
And there they were! I could just see them between the boom and the heaving deck. They were big, thirty-five feet or longer, most of them a blinding white, forging unconcernedly through the whipped-up mess of Haro Strait. They were close enough that I could see the long trolling poles waving like insect antennae, and the occasional brilliant orange teardrop of a topside fender. I lifted my head just enough to keep them in view as they crawled past us, one every minute or so, each one, I felt certain, about to go hard to starboard and head for us.
"Good God," I imagined a skipper saying, peering through a spattered wheelhouse window. "Over by Zero Rock, it's a . . ." He reaches for binoculars, claps them to his eyes, whistles. His eyebrows go up under the hairy woollen watch cap. "It's a kid out there, hangin' on for dear life. Poor little guy. Hold on, we're goin' in!" Over the wheel would go and on she would come, the Lucky Lady or the Pacific Marauder, rolling wildly in the broadside swell with a white bone in her teeth, closing the gap, saving us.
But none of them broke ranks, and after an eternity, the procession was past, the transom of the last one vanishing but its long poles still visible, swaying mockingly above the tops of the whitecaps for at least another minute. Then we were alone again. I couldn't believe it. I went back into my hole and stared miserably at Zero Rock. It lurched past in slow motion, draped in shiny seals. How long had we been out there? To me, it felt like days; given the conditions, it was probably more like three hours. We were only halfway home.
My father went on with his futile dissection of the outboard, and my brother sailed the boat until the hand holding the sheet was a claw. The foresail exploded in Baynes Channel, the final gauntlet before Victoria. We coasted into a tiny cove near Ten Mile Point, a place of waterfront houses with kelp beds, not petunias, out front. I was sent ashore. It was almost dark. I remember slipping on seaweed-slick rocks and realizing I couldn't get any wetter, making my way, still wearing my life jacket, up a pocket beach toward the lights of a house. A woman opened the door.
"Oh dear," she said. "You look like a drowned rat." I dripped onto her welcome mat.
"Can I please use the phone?" I said. "I'm supposed to call my mother."
After my father died, I spent an afternoon driving up the western shoreline of Haro Strait, nipping seaward whenever I saw the triangular "Beach Access" sign. Somewhere, I felt certain, there was a rock ledge or crescent of shingle where relatives could gather and release his ashes into the ocean. The cliffs near Cordova Bay (another of those Spanish names) would have been ideal. But the logistics of tide and wind were wrong, and although older relatives might have been able to scramble down to the water's edge, we would have had to winch them back up.
So I kept looking. Closer to Victoria, I took a turnoff I'd never noticed before and found myself in a pocket cove you could barely squeeze a boat into. There was a house on the rocks, looking out over Baynes Channel, and in the moment of realizing the place was too public for scattering a person's remains, I also realized I had been here before. As a drowned rat.
I really wished those fishing boats had stopped. One of them should have; even in the absence of a radio Mayday, maritime law dictates that a vessel in obvious distress be assisted. Somewhere on this coast there's at least one ninety-year-old ex-skipper mumbling and farting in front of his TV who remembers too. And don't tell me you couldn't see us; we were bright yellow.
I don't know what happened to Frou-Frou, except that she was replaced by a succession of larger boats as my parents struggled to figure out how to sail. I learned to sail too, but I stayed scared. Four hours hiding under the foredeck in Haro Strait, tossed around like a marble in a tin can and waiting for the end, left me with the kind of knee-jerk fear that a place like the Nahwitti Bar brought back with a vengeance.
My fear didn't keep me from sailing; as a teenager, when I was old enough to take the family boat out alone, I would push it to the limit, carrying too much sail and driving the rail down into green water. Rough sailing didn't bother me. But deciding to go out, watching those trees lash and sway and then stepping into the boat, that took me back under Frou-Frou's foredeck every time. It still does.
Sea Over Bow
A North Atlantic Crossing
by Linda Kenyon
tagged : personal memoirs, sailing, adventurers & explorers
The wind was from the southwest—we knew it would be, right on the nose, but it was supposed to clock around to the north so we put out just a slip of genoa, reefed the main, and settled in for a lively sail. It was rough, but we soon got used to the pounding. You can handle almost anything on a nice sunny day.
But as the day wore on, the wind showed no sign of clocking and the seas continued to build. There was no way we could hold our course. By nightfall, we were sixty miles off shore, well off Cape Fear, but farther off shore than we'd ever been. And the wind was picking up.
We had crackers and cheese for supper—neither of us wanted to spend much time below deck, and in truth, we were both feeling a little queasy. Then I went down to try to sleep while Chris took the first watch. I lay there in the dark, trying not to think about the ghost pirate ships locals claimed to have seen in these waters. The boat was galloping along, the oil lamp above my head swinging wildly. The rigging creaked and groaned, water rushed along the steel hull. There's no way I'm going to sleep, I thought, but I must have, because suddenly it was 2 am, time for my watch.
The wind had definitely picked up, and waves were breaking over the bow, I discovered, when I staggered to the head. We'd left the hatch open, and I was treated to a salt-water shower. I grabbed a towel and dried myself off as best I could then, grumpy and wet, took a little too long to pull on my warm fleecy and boots.
By the time I got above deck, I knew I was in trouble. There's no mistaking that feeling in your stomach. But it was no wonder. While I was sleeping, Chris had been "letting it run," as he calls it. This means carrying way too much sail, going way too fast, and heeling way over as we pound into the waves. He saw the look on my face.
"Let's reduce sail," he said, furling in about half the genoa.
We tied a second reef in the main and the boat slowed down, straightened up a little.
"That's Frying Pan Shoal, off Cape Fear," Chris said, pointing to a light up ahead. "Keep it well to starboard. Oh, and I think there are warships on manoeuvre out here—haven't seen anything, but there's been lots of chatter on the radio. Better keep an eye out."
With that, he gave me a quick kiss and headed below to sleep.I stood bravely at the helm, watching the approaching light, scanning for ships. No, I told myself firmly, taking big breaths of fresh air and searching for the horizon. But it was pitch black—no moon. And the shore was out of sight. There was no way to orient myself, to straighten out the confused little compass in my head. I could feel my stomach churning as the boat heaved up and down. I checked to make sure the pail was at hand, and, oh my god, okay, here it came—I heaved what was left of my cheese and crackers into the pail.
I was still retching when an officious voice filled the cockpit.
"To the vessel at…"
I pulled my head out of the pail long enough to check our co-ordinates on the GPS. Of course he was talking to me. I took a couple brave swallows, reached for the VHF microphone.
"To the vessel hailing, this is the sailboat MonArk."
Back to the pail.
"We are an aircraft carrier with limited manoeuvrability. Please maintain a five-mile distance from our position."
I lifted my head from the pail, wiped my chin on my sleeve.
I had no idea where he was, but I set the radar alarm to six miles and went back to my pail. If anything shows up, I thought, I'll get out of its way.
Thankfully, the radar remained clear, and in time, there was nothing left for me to throw up. I drank some water, threw it up, drank some more, threw it up. It was miserable, but much better than the dry heaves. I looked at my watch—five more hours to go—checked the position of the light, scanned for ships.
It seemed to take forever to come abreast of the light. It was the middle of my watch before it was safely behind us and we were sailing into the dark. No moon. No shoreline. I turned on the radar, scanned for ships. Nothing out there. I checked our position and heading, switched off the instruments. So dark.
I looked down through the companionway. I could just make out Chris wedged into the sea berth with pillows so he didn't fall out as the boat pounded and rocked. He felt me looking at him, opened his eyes, smiled.
"Everything okay?"
"Yep, just fine."
He was asleep again. How did he do that?
I looked back. I could still make out the flashing light marking Frying Pan Shoal, tiny now but still visible.
What are you doing out here? You don't know what you're doing.
It's surprising, I thought grimly, how long things take to disappear behind you.
Sailing in Circles, Goin' Somewhere
Not Your Typical Boat Story
by Finley Martin
tagged : sports, personal memoirs, sailing
All The Oceans
Designing By The Seat of My Pants
by Ron Holland
tagged : personal memoirs, sailing
tagged : sports, sailing, personal memoirs
Dreamspeaker Cruising Guide, Volume 1
The Gulf Islands & Vancouver Island (fourth edition)
by Anne Yeadon-Jones & Laurence Yeadon-Jones
also available: Paperback Paperback
tagged : boating, sailing, western provinces
The West Coast of Vancouver Island (second edition)
tagged : sailing, boating, western provinces
Air Sports (1)
Bodybuilding & Weight Training (4)
Business Aspects (11)
Canoeing (126)
Children's & Youth Sports (9)
Disability Sports (1)
Equestrian (14)
Equipment & Supplies (1)
Essays (62)
Extreme Sports (26)
Ice & Figure Skating (14)
Martial Arts & Self-Defense (22)
Mountaineering (115)
Outdoor Skills (76)
Rodeos (11)
Roller & In-Line Skating (5)
Running & Jogging (32)
Scuba & Snorkeling (3)
Sociology of Sports (32)
Swimming & Diving (2)
Track & Field (1)
Winter Sports (52)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


This article focuses on the development of miRNA nanoformulations to achieve enhanced cellular uptake, bioavailability, and accumulation at the tumor site.
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are noncoding RNA molecules that regulate gene expression through diverse mechanisms. Increasing evidence suggests that miRNA-based therapies, either restoring or repressing miRNA expression and activity, hold great promise. However, the efficient delivery of miRNAs to target tissues is a major challenge in the transition of miRNA therapy to the clinic. Cationic polymers or viral vectors are efficient delivery agents but their systemic toxicity and immunogenicity limit their clinical usage. Efficient targeting and sustained release of miRNAs/anti-miRNAs using nanoparticles (NPs) conjugated with antibodies and/or peptides could reduce the required therapeutic dosage while minimizing systemic and cellular toxicity. Given their importance in clinical oncology, here we focus on the development of miRNA nanoformulations to achieve enhanced cellular uptake, bioavailability, and accumulation at the tumor site.


a few more. I'm thinking about trying the Gingerbread or Irish Cream one's next. They even have a range of roast coffee's with even more flavours to pick from! I think I'm on my way to becoming a coffee convert.


Join the Transform21 Focus Group Now!
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This page outlines what happens at a typical Toastmasters club meeting, and the roles of the participants.
Most Toastmasters meetings last between one and two hours.
giving feedback on the speeches and other aspects of the meeting.
The atmosphere is always supportive, and usually light-hearted.
What is table topics all about?
In this portion of the meeting, club members (and willing guests) practice impromptu speaking by responding to questions or topics prepared by the Table Topics Master.
Sometimes the topics are simple, such as "My Favourite Holiday", and sometimes they are more challenging, focusing on issues of the day, such as Elections, the Olympics, Health, Education or Crime, where you may be required to give an opinion, or argue a point of view. Whatever the format, a good impromptu session should include topics that any member, irrespective of experience, can speak to. It not quite usual for first-time guests to be asked to introduce themselves with a little background and an idea of how they believe Toastmasters can help them.
In this section of the meeting, Toastmasters practice their public speaking skills by giving a prepared presentation from the Communication and Leadership Programmes.
Each project has specific objectives in an area that helps you practice different speaking techniques.
These objectives are designed as guidelines to help you think about the various qualities that comprise a good speech.
Some speakers may be giving an icebreaker, while others may be trying to persuade you to their point of view, or inform you about technical issues relating to their hobby or occupation.
You'll learn something new with every speech you listen to!
During this portion of the meeting, you'll practice your listening and thinking skills.
Speech evaluators will give feedback on the prepared speeches. Their objective is to provide this in a positive, specific and helpful way, so the speaker can see ways to become more effective.
The General Evaluator comments on the running of the meeting as a whole, and evaluates those who have not already received feedback.
All evaluations provide valuable insights on how the evaluators saw the speakers and will point out the positive aspects of the speech and some possible areas for improvement in a helpful manner.
Other members fill a number of roles in order to help the meeting flow smoothly. Different clubs may have additional roles or perform them in a different way; that is up to the club.
The Toastmaster prepares and leads the meeting as "host" or chairperson.
The Assistant Sergeant at Arms sets up the meeting venue and serves refreshments.
The Timer supports everyone by reminding them of their use of time using lights and a stopwatch.
The Um-Ah Counter tracks annoying speaking habits, so that speakers can become aware of and correct them.
The Grammarian encourages correct use of language.
Evaluators listen carefully to the speakers and give oral and written feedback.
The General Evaluator evaluates the evaluators and reports on the conduct of the meeting.
During this section of the meeting, the club's business is handled, usually by the President.
At the same time, the club practices effective meeting management skills, so that club business can be dealt with quickly and efficiently.
New members are usually voted in to the club during General Business and are presented with their new member pack.
Other awards and presentations may be given during this part of the meeting.
Clubs that hold two-hour meetings usually have a 10 minute break at the half-way point for tea/coffee and something to eat. This is also an excellent chance for guests to ask any questions they may have. The home baking is sometimes the highlight of the meeting!


For GOP governors, making their case against the Washington establishment is all too easy.
Republican governors at the Conservative Political Action Conference would like the next president to be a Republican governor.
And why not? Over the past two years, Republican national leadership has been portrayed in terms of stasis and infighting. While Congress has been squabbling, Republican governors (who largely benefit from like-minded legislatures) have been making changes in their states.
There's an objective logic to that argument — want Washington to change? We know how to change things! — which Govs. Rick Perry of Texas and Chris Christie of New Jersey made at the convention. (True, Bobby Jindal also spoke at the convention, but he focused his speech less on his home state of Louisiana than on ad hominem attacks on the president).
As Perry put it in a speech Friday morning: "It's time for a little rebellion on the battlefield of ideas." Translation: The current Republican guard in Washington isn't cutting it. He, like Christie on Thursday, made references to other Republican governors such as Nikki Haley, Rick Scott, Jindal, and Scott Walker as leaders making actionable decisions in their states.
The governors also have easy speech writing here. While senators like Marco Rubio can make arguments against big government, Christie and Perry can prove they have made cuts at home. "The red-state, blue-state debate really matters, because it is about the future of America," Perry said, along with statistics that show blue powerhouses like New York are losing jobs to conservative wonderlands like Texas.
Christie began his speech on Thursday "with a story from New Jersey" about how he combated the public employee pension fund. "We put together a plan to do the things they should be doing here in Washington, D.C., on entitlements." He then went on and explained how he turned a hostile crowd of firefighters over to his reforms.
Perry likewise spoke of Texas's economic growth and the state's recent population boom. It lends credibility to the ending credits of his speech, where he calls for Washington to "get out of the health care business, get out of the education business." His largest applause came when he said the country ought to keep delivering the mail on Saturdays.
"It's not too late for America to lead in the world, but it starts by leading at home," Perry said.
"And what you see in Washington is people who only want to talk. They can't stop talking," Christie said in his Thursday speech.
Taken together, in front of a crowd of conservatives who so deeply dislike the nation's direction, it's not a bad time to be a Republican governor.


text:
package com.google.api.ads.adwords.jaxws.v201406.video;

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;
import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlAccessType;
import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlAccessorType;
import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlRootElement;
import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlType;

/**
 *
 *             Adds, updates, or removes targeting group criteria.
 *             Note: TargetingGroupCriterionOperation does not support the REMOVE operator. To
 *             remove a targeting group, set its status to REMOVED.
 *             @param operations A list of unique operations.
 *             @return The list of updated targeting group criteria, returned in the same order as the
 *             operations array.
 *             @throws ApiException if problems occurred while updating targeting group criteria.
 *
 *
 *
Java class for mutate element declaration.
 *
 *
The following schema fragment specifies the expected content contained within this class.
 *
 *

 * <element name="mutate">
 *   <complexType>
 *     <complexContent>
 *       <restriction base="{http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema}anyType">
 *         <sequence>
 *           <element name="operations" type="{https://adwords.google.com/api/adwords/video/v201406}TargetingGroupCriterionOperation" maxOccurs="unbounded" minOccurs="0"/>
 *         </sequence>
 *       </restriction>
 *     </complexContent>
 *   </complexType>
 * </element>
 *

 *
 *
 */
@XmlAccessorType(XmlAccessType.FIELD)
@XmlType(name = "", propOrder = {
    "operations"
})
@XmlRootElement(name = "mutate")
public class VideoTargetingGroupCriterionServiceInterfacemutate {

    protected List<TargetingGroupCriterionOperation> operations;

    /**
     * Gets the value of the operations property.
     *
     *

     * This accessor method returns a reference to the live list,
     * not a snapshot. Therefore any modification you make to the
     * returned list will be present inside the JAXB object.
     * This is why there is not a set method for the operations property.
     *
     *

     * For example, to add a new item, do as follows:
     *

     *    getOperations().add(newItem);
     *

     *
     *
     *

     * Objects of the following type(s) are allowed in the list
     * {@link TargetingGroupCriterionOperation }
     *
     *
     */
    public List<TargetingGroupCriterionOperation> getOperations() {
        if (operations == null) {
            operations = new ArrayList<TargetingGroupCriterionOperation>();
        }
        return this.operations;
    }

}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
© London School of Architecture
22 Jun 2017 – 25 Jun 2017
6, 9, 11, 13, 15, 23, 77a, 91 and 176, while the River Bus Service can be taken to Embankment and Savoy Piers.
Temple, Covent Garden, Charing Cross and Embankment.
Charing Cross, Waterloo and Blackfriars.
Save Event: London Tomorrow
Add to my calendar Exhibition: London Tomorrow in London, United Kingdom
Share London Tomorrow
Share Exhibition: London Tomorrow in London, United Kingdom
London Tomorrow, a weekend with the London School of Architecture, supported by Swarovski, will present new designs for the future of cities from the first students to graduate from the LSA.
Today, half of humanity lives in cities. As the 21st century progresses, cities will be of paramount importance in tackling global issues such as climate change, population growth, and inequalities in income, housing, health and education. The design of our spatial environment must adapt to this era of rapid change.
Facebook Somerset House
Twitter @SomersetHouse ##@LSofARCH
InstagramSomerset House
Alice Broughton
Save / follow Alice Broughton
This page was added 20th June 2017, 09:05 by Alice Broughton


text:
Where Do Americans Share Transportation?
Jeremy Adam Smith| February 19, 2010 July 31, 2019
In this fantastic and helpful infographic, artist Martha Kang McGill reveals how the people of eight major U.S. cities get to work, based on numbers from the 2008 U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey. The people at the bottom of the letters share transportation, through biking, walking, taking public transit, or carpooling. The people at top, represented by the orange, drive themselves.
Thanks, Infrastructurist!
Tagged: bicycles, Carfree, infographics, public transportation
Jeremy Adam Smith
Jeremy Adam Smith is the editor who helped launch Shareable.net. He's the author of The Daddy Shift (Beacon Press, June 2009); co-editor of The Compassionate Instinct (W.W. Norton
Jeremy Adam Smith is the editor who helped launch Shareable.net. He's the author of The Daddy Shift (Beacon Press, June 2009); co-editor of The Compassionate Instinct (W.W. Norton & Co., 2010); and co-editor of Are We Born Racist? (Beacon Press, 2010). His essays, short stories, and articles on parenting, popular culture, urban life, and politics have appeared in Mothering, The Nation, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Utne Reader, BusinessWeek.com, Wired, and many other periodicals and books. Jeremy has also been interviewed by numerous media outlets, including the New York Times, USA Today, GQ, Nightline, The Today Show, Salon.com, ABC News, NBC News, and many NPR shows. Before helping to launch Shareable.net, Jeremy was the senior editor of Greater Good magazine, where he still serves as contributing editor. During Jeremy's tenure with the print edition, Greater Good was nominated multiple times for Maggie and Independent Press awards. He is also the founder of Daddy Dialectic, which is widely considered to be one of the most influential, pioneering, and authoritative fathering blogs. In 2010-11, Jeremy will be a Knight fellow at Stanford University. You can, of course, follow him on Twitter.
Things I share: Mainly babysitting with other parents! I also share all the transportation I can, through bikes and buses and trains and carpooling.


text:
For the first time, former felons can vote in Florida but there's a catch
Reporter: Andrea Guerrero
Published: October 4, 2020 6:56 PM EDT
Updated: October 5, 2020 11:06 AM EDT
Voters approved a change back in the 2018 election stating that former felons can now vote for president or in any other election. So this, for many, is the first time they can vote! However, they have to pay off all fines and fees first.
One group is outlining how these former felons could make a huge difference in their communities if the debt requirement wasn't an obstacle.
Neil Volz is just one of the more than 1.5 million Floridians who has had his voting rights restored than to the passage of Amendment 4 in 2018.
"I voted for the first time in 16 years last August and it was an overwhelming experience," Volz said.
Lance Wissinger filled out his first ballot just a few weeks ago. "I just voted for the first time ever in my life back in August for the primary and was ecstatic," Wissinger said. "I had no idea how much of a big deal that was going to be until I actually got to do it and I was visibly shaking."
However, there were over 700,000 former felons who thought seeing their right to vote being restore would be a good thing. Until they all realized they had to pay off fines and fees after serving time.
"They went to bed a few months ago thinking they were going to be able to participate in this election and then found out a few weeks ago after a court decision in fact they were not going to be able to participate in democracy," said Volz, who is the Deputy Director of Florida Rights Restoration Coalition.
Neil Volz says he and others had their spirits crushed when they heard the news. "We have 88,000 people in the state and country donate into our fines and fees fund simply because they believe the barriers should be torn down so that people can participate in democracy," he said.
Volz and others who work with the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition have created the fund to break the barriers that debt brings. They also don't want a past life of crime to affect people's future in voting.
"We as returning citizens have taken on the obligation of showing the world that we can be assets, that our past mistakes does not define us. It just enhances our ability now to be even better service to the community," said Desmond Meade, Executive Director of FRRC.
The deadline to pay these fines and fees is Monday, October 5.
Andrea Guerrero


text:
<?php

namespace Sanma\CheeseBundle\Controller;

use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Controller\Controller;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request;

class HelpController extends Controller
{
    public function indexAction(Request $request)
    {

        // 言語判定
        if($request->query->has('lang') === true){
            $lang = $request->query->get('lang');
            if($lang != 'ja' && $lang != 'en' ){
              $lang = 'ja';
            }
        }else{
            $lang = 'ja';
        }

        //言語設定
        $request->setLocale($lang);

        return $this->render(
            'SanmaCheeseBundle:Help:index.html.twig',
            array('lang' => $lang)
        );

    }

}


text:
from model.group import Group
from random import randrange

def test_delete_some_group(app):
    if app.group.count() == 0:
        app.group.create(Group(name='Test'))
    old_groups_list = app.group.get_group_list()
    index = randrange(len(old_groups_list))
    app.group.delete_group_by_index(index)
    new_groups_list = app.group.get_group_list()
    assert len(old_groups_list) - 1 == app.group.count()
    old_groups_list[index:index+1] = []
    assert old_groups_list == new_groups_list

def test_delete_all_groups(app):
    if app.group.count() == 0:
        app.group.create(Group(name='Test'))
    groups_list = app.group.get_group_list()
    app.group.delete_all_groups(groups_list)
    assert app.group.count() == 0


If you're tired of washing dishes by hand or you're ready to upgrade the dishwasher you currently have, then the idea of a new, reliable dishwasher has been kicking around in your head. Dishwashers are one of the most convenient modern-day appliances and can add a lot of time back into your day. You can load most dishes without pre-washing them, and you can find plenty of dishwashers on the market that are energy-efficient, using very little water to run and saving you money in addition to time.
But which dishwasher should you choose? Here are a few considerations.
Ask yourself if you'll use the bells and whistles included in the most expensive dishwashers. While a few extra features are nice if your budget allows it, consider looking for a dishwasher that will give your dishes a sparkling clean for the price you can afford. Head to a store or sit down in front of your computer with a budget in mind, so you can avoid overspending.
What Kind of Space Are You Working with?
You're probably picturing a dishwasher as a standard size (about 24 inches wide and 35 inches high), but they're available in a range of sizes. And one is likely to fit your space!
Measure your kitchen and the space for your new appliance before you shop in stores or online. This is easy to do if you're replacing the appliance, but it's especially important if you're having one installed for the first time. You may have to give up some storage space, so know what you're willing to sacrifice before you shop.
Also take the size of your family into account, as well as how many dirty dishes you make in a day. Do you want room in your dishwasher for all of them? You could need a bigger appliance. If you only have a few dishes by the evening, a smaller one will probably do.
Do You Care About Energy Efficiency?
There are plenty of energy-efficient dishwashers on the market now, and a green choice is a great option. It uses minimal water, which helps the environment and your water bill!
To find a green dishwasher, look for the Energy Star label, which is a sign of efficient quality. Energy Star dishwashers can be a little more expensive upfront but may save you money in the long-run. Looking at the EnergyGuide label makes it easy to compare one dishwasher to another and can give you more insight into savings.
The CEE rating is also a valuable resource. To qualify for this rating, a dishwasher must be energy-efficient, using less than 270 kWh per year and 3.5 gallons of water each cycle. If you're considering replacing your dishwasher, take your current appliance's age into account and compare the number of gallons it uses.
If it's your first time buying a dishwasher in a while (or ever), you may be stunned by all the features today's dishwashers can come with! Some of these features make dishwashers more expensive, so it's important to know your budget and the options before you shop.
Not all dishwashers clean dishes in the same way. While one may pre-rinse for you, another will require you to rinse dirty dishes in the sink before they're loaded. Do you mind rinsing by hand, or would you prefer a heavy scrub setting in your dishwasher? The model you choose should take your preference into account.
Also make sure the models you're considering have the cycles you'd like, including air-dry and other cleaning settings.
Before purchasing a dishwasher, look into its noise level. It probably has the decibels listed right on its information page. One of the quietest examples is a Miele at 38 dB, which is just louder than a normal conversation.
Most dishwashers today are insulated, but if your machine will be located close to your bedroom or to a sensitive neighbor, you may want to opt for one that is practically silent.
A self-cleaning dishwasher empties the filter for you and will even clean its own interior! Stainless steel tubs can look better and are designed to resist stains on the exterior.
Save room in a kitchen that's short on space.
Use one dishwasher to store your clean dishes and another to load your dirty ones – This is great if you're tired of putting dishes away.
No two dishwashers are alike, but reliability should be a top priority when you look for your new appliance. According to a Consumer Reports survey of readers, Bosch is the clear winner for the most reliable dishwasher brand. The Bosch 300 Series is a top pick of wirecutter. This dishwasher is quick, easy to use, efficient, and stainless. If you don't like the look of one, there are 17 variants of this model.
Right behind Bosch on the Consumer Reports survey is Whirlpool and Miele. All three received the honors of being less repair-prone than others in their market.
Ask friends what they like.
Shop around, both online and offline.
Are you looking to install your new dishwasher? We can remove your old appliance and securely fit your new purchase in place. And if your new dishwasher is part of a kitchen remodel, we're happy to lend our expertise! Call 972-395-2597 to set up an appointment that works for you.
Chris Edmonds is the owner of C&W Plumbing, located in Lewisville, Texas. Chris has been a master plumber since 1999, and lives in Highland Village with his wife Karen and two daughters.


text:
The Fun Times Guide > Food and Cooking Guide > Home & Garden > Fun Food Stuff >
Top 10 Questions To Ask Yourself Before Eating Peanut Butter
Wow, there certainly has been a lot of controversy in the news lately!
By now, you've heard about:
The peanut butter recall…
And the latest wacky Britney Spears stories (as Jimmy Kimmel said last night: "It looks like Britney Spears has decided to give up rehab for Lent")…
And, of course, JetBlue's unfortunate chain of events which kept airline passengers in limbo for hours, which turned into days…
Not to mention the 3-ring circus surrounding Anna Nicole Smith's death right now…
What do all of these things have in common?
And what does this have to do with peanut butter, you ask?
Each of these things was alluded to in David Letterman's Top 10 list on the Late Show last night.
(Granted, some were very loose correlations… but still.)
So here you have it, one of my favorite Top 10 Lists from David Letterman in years:
#10 "If I die, will I stick to the roof of the coffin?"
#9 "Do I really want the word 'chunky' in my obituary?"
#8 "How can I get salmonella when I didn't even order the salmon?"
#7 "Is this what killed the mummified guy in Long Island?"
#6 "Should I just stick with the tainted spinach?"
#5 (No number 5 — writer sick from bad peanut butter)
#4 "What would Britney do?"
#3 "Does Smuckers make an antibiotic jelly?"
#2 "What will my kids say when they learn their father was killed by Peter Pan?"
#1 "How can I blame JetBlue for this?"
Pretty good, huh?
Jim says you kinda had to be there… it's not nearly as funny in print as it was hearing Dave read through the list.
Check out the archives for Letterman's Top 10 Lists. They're new & improved… and searchable by keyword!
Filed Under: Fun Food Stuff, Home & Garden Tagged With: peanut butter


text:
Active contours without edges Active contours without edges T.F. Chan and L.A. Vese 2001
Paper summary kakumarabhishek ## **Introduction** This paper presents an active contour model to detect and segment objects in images whose boundaries may or may not be defined by their gradients. The curve evolution is based on the Mumford Shah energy functional and the level set methods, making it less susceptible to curve initialization errors. ## **Method** Using an implicit shape representation, the boundary(s) C can be represented using the zero level set of an embedding function $\phi : \Omega \rightarrow$ **R** such that $$ C = \{x \in \Omega \:|\: \phi(x) = 0\} $$ Such a representation of the boundary does not require a choice of parameterization. The embedding function $\phi(.)$ is defined as $$ \phi(x) = \pm \: distance(x,C) $$ where the sign is either + or - depending upon whether the point is inside or outside the curve. This means that the boundary can be determined by finding out the point at which $\phi$ changes its sign. According to the level set method [1], the embedding function is zero at all the points on the curve C at any time. $$ \phi(C(t),\:t) = 0 \:\: \forall t $$ Consider the piecewise Mumford Shah energy functional model [2] with 2 regions $\Omega_{1}$ and $\Omega_{2}$ such that $\Omega = \Omega_{1} + \Omega_{2}$. Let us define the Heaviside step function as $$ H\phi \equiv H(\phi)\left\{ \begin{array}{@{}ll@{}} 1, & \text{if}\ \phi > 0 \: \Rightarrow x \in \Omega_{1} \\ 0, & \text{otherwise}\ \Rightarrow x \in \Omega_{2} \\ \end{array}\right. $$ Moving from an energy functional defined on the boundary C to one defined on the embedding function $\phi$, we get $$ E(\phi) = \int\limits_{\Omega_{1}} \: ({I}(x,y) - \mu_{1})^{2} \: dx + \int\limits_{\Omega_{2}} \: ({I}(x,y) - \mu_{2})^{2} \: dx + \nu \left| \partial \Omega_{1} \right| $$ where we approximate the average brightness/intensity of all the pixels in the $\Omega_{1}$ and $\Omega_{2}$ regions to be $\mu_{1}$ and $\mu_{2}$ respectively. The term $\left| \partial \Omega_{1} \right|$ represents the length of the boundary and is added as a penalizer/regularizer. Simplifying this expression, we get $$ \begin{align*} E(\phi) & = \int\limits_{\Omega} \: \Big[\big[({I}(x,y) - \mu_{1})^{2} - ({I}(x,y) - \mu_{2})^{2}\big]H\phi \\ & + ({I}(x,y) - \mu_{2})^{2}\Big]\:dx + \nu \int\limits_{\Omega}\left| \nabla H\phi \right|\:dx \end{align*} $$ Since $H(\phi)$ is not differentiable everywhere, we assume a slightly smoothened Heaviside function such that $$ \frac{\mathrm{d} H(\phi)}{\mathrm{d} \phi} = \delta(\phi) $$ One such choice of the smoothened delta function is $$ \delta_{\epsilon}(\phi) = \frac{1}{\pi} \frac{\epsilon}{\epsilon^{2} + \phi^{2}}, \: \epsilon > 0 $$ Now, the gradient descent equation can be computed as $$ \frac{\partial \phi}{\partial t} = \delta(\phi) \Big[\: \nu\:div\Big(\frac{\nabla \phi}{\left|\nabla \phi\right|}\Big) + ({I}(x,y) - \mu_{1})^{2} - ({I}(x,y) - \mu_{2})^{2}\Big] $$ As the embedding function $\phi(.)$ evolves over time, the boundary points can be detected when it undergoes a sign change. ## **Discussion and Shortcomings** As compared to the edge-based segmentation approaches such as geodesic active contours [3], this method uses region based segmentation, and can, therefore, result in curve evolution that is not just local. The segmentation results are not dependent on the initialization of the curve. Because of the choice of the embedding function $\phi$ as a signed distance function, the curves can split and merge. Moreover, unlike geodesic active contours [3], new curves can also be formed. This is because of the numerical approximation of the delta function - since the delta function never actually goes to 0. This means that objects with interior contours such as a ring can also be segmented, which was not possible with previously available active contour models. #### [1] S. Osher, and J. A. Sethian, "Fronts propagating with curvature-dependent speed: Algorithms based on Hamilton-Jacobi formulations,'' *Journal of Computational Physics*, vol. 79, no. 1, pp. 12-49, 1988. #### [2] D. Mumford, and J. Shah, "Optimal approximations by piecewise smooth functions and associated variational problems,'' *Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics*, vol. 42, no. 5, pp. 577-685, 2006. #### [3] V. Caselles, R. Kimmel, and G. Sapiro, "Geodesic Active Contours,'' *International Journal of Computer Vision*, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 61-79, February 1997.
dx.doi.org
scholar.google.com
Active contours without edges
T.F. Chan and L.A. Vese
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing - 2001 via Local CrossRef
Summaries/Notes 2
[link] Summary by Anmol Sharma 1 year ago
Typically, the energy minimization or snakes based object detection frameworks evolve a parametrized curve guided by some form of image gradient information. However due to heavy reliance on gradients, the approaches tend to fail in scenarios where this information is misleading or unavailable. This cripples the snake and renders it unusable as it gets stuck in a local-minima away from the actual object. Moreover, the parametrized snake lacks the ability to model multiple evolving curves in a single run. In order to address these issues, Chan and Vese introduced a new framework which utilized region based information to guide a spline, and tries to solve the minimal partition problem formulated by Mumford and Shah.
The framework is built upon the following energy equation, where $C$ is a level-set formulation of the curve:$F(c1, c2, C) = \mu . \text{Length}(C) + v . \text{Area}(inside(C))\\
\lambda_1 \int_{inside(C)}|u_0(x,y) - c_1|^2 dxdy + \lambda_2 \int_{outside(C)}|u_0(x,y) - c_2|^2 dxdy$
The framework essentially divides the image into two regions (per curve), which are referred to as inside and outside of the curve. The first two terms of the equation control the physical aspects of the curve, particularly the length, and area inside the curve, with their contributions controlled by two parameters $\mu$ and $v$.
The image forces in this equation correspond to the third and fourth terms, which are identical but work in respective regions identified by the curve. The terms use $c_1$ and $c_2$, which are the mean intensity values inside and outside the curve respectively to guide the curve towards a minima where the both regions are consistent with respect to the mean intensity values.
The proposed framework also utilizes an improved representation of the curve in the form of a level set function $\phi(x, y)$, which has many numerical advantages and naturally supports multiple curves evolved during a single run, as compared to the traditional snakes model where only one curve can be evolved in a single run.  The unknown function $\phi$ is computed using Euler-Lagrange equations formulated using modified Heaviside function $H$, and Dirac measure $\delta$.
The proposed framework was applied on numerous challenging 2D images with varying degree of difficulties. The framework was also capable of segmenting point clouds decomposed into 2D images, objects with blurred boundaries, and contours without gradients, all without requiring image denoising.
Due to the formulation of $\phi$ approximation routine, the framework has tendencies to find actual global minima independent of the initial position of the curve. However the choice of multiple parameters namely $\lambda_{1,2}, \mu, v$ is done heuristically, and seem to be problem dependent. Also, the framework's implicit dependency on absolute image intensities in regions inside and outside of curve sometimes fail in very specific cases where the averages tend to be zero, though the authors proposed to use image curvature and orientation information from the initial image $u_0$.
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[link] Summary by Kumar Abhishek 7 months ago
## **Introduction**
This paper presents an active contour model to detect and segment objects in images whose boundaries may or may not be defined by their gradients. The curve evolution is based on the Mumford Shah energy functional and the level set methods, making it less susceptible to curve initialization errors.
## **Method**
Using an implicit shape representation, the boundary(s) C can be represented using the zero level set of an embedding function $\phi : \Omega \rightarrow$ **R** such that
C = \{x \in \Omega \:|\: \phi(x) = 0\}
Such a representation of the boundary does not require a choice of parameterization.
The embedding function $\phi(.)$ is defined as
\phi(x) = \pm \: distance(x,C)
where the sign is either + or - depending upon whether the point is inside or outside the curve. This means that the boundary can be determined by finding out the point at which $\phi$ changes its sign.
According to the level set method [1], the embedding function is zero at all the points on the curve C at any time.
\phi(C(t),\:t) = 0 \:\: \forall t
Consider the piecewise Mumford Shah energy functional model [2] with 2 regions $\Omega_{1}$ and $\Omega_{2}$ such that $\Omega = \Omega_{1} + \Omega_{2}$.
Let us define the Heaviside step function as
H\phi \equiv H(\phi)\left\{
\begin{array}{@{}ll@{}}
1, & \text{if}\ \phi > 0 \: \Rightarrow x \in \Omega_{1} \\
0, & \text{otherwise}\ \Rightarrow x \in \Omega_{2} \\
\end{array}\right.
Moving from an energy functional defined on the boundary C to one defined on the embedding function $\phi$, we get
E(\phi) = \int\limits_{\Omega_{1}} \: ({I}(x,y) - \mu_{1})^{2} \: dx + \int\limits_{\Omega_{2}} \: ({I}(x,y) - \mu_{2})^{2} \: dx + \nu \left| \partial \Omega_{1} \right|
where we approximate the average brightness/intensity of all the pixels in the $\Omega_{1}$ and $\Omega_{2}$ regions to be $\mu_{1}$ and $\mu_{2}$ respectively. The term $\left| \partial \Omega_{1} \right|$ represents the length of the boundary and is added as a penalizer/regularizer.
Simplifying this expression, we get
\begin{align*}
E(\phi) & =
\int\limits_{\Omega} \: \Big[\big[({I}(x,y) - \mu_{1})^{2} - ({I}(x,y) - \mu_{2})^{2}\big]H\phi \\
& + ({I}(x,y) - \mu_{2})^{2}\Big]\:dx + \nu \int\limits_{\Omega}\left| \nabla H\phi \right|\:dx
\end{align*}
Since $H(\phi)$ is not differentiable everywhere, we assume a slightly smoothened Heaviside function such that
\frac{\mathrm{d} H(\phi)}{\mathrm{d} \phi} = \delta(\phi)
One such choice of the smoothened delta function is
\delta_{\epsilon}(\phi) = \frac{1}{\pi} \frac{\epsilon}{\epsilon^{2} + \phi^{2}}, \: \epsilon > 0
Now, the gradient descent equation can be computed as
\frac{\partial \phi}{\partial t} =  \delta(\phi) \Big[\: \nu\:div\Big(\frac{\nabla \phi}{\left|\nabla \phi\right|}\Big) + ({I}(x,y) - \mu_{1})^{2} - ({I}(x,y) - \mu_{2})^{2}\Big]
As the embedding function $\phi(.)$ evolves over time, the boundary points can be detected when it undergoes a sign change.
## **Discussion and Shortcomings**
As compared to the edge-based segmentation approaches such as geodesic active contours [3], this method uses region based segmentation, and can, therefore, result in curve evolution that is not just local.
The segmentation results are not dependent on the initialization of the curve. Because of the choice of the embedding function $\phi$ as a signed distance function, the curves can split and merge. Moreover, unlike geodesic active contours [3], new curves can also be formed. This is because of the numerical approximation of the delta function - since the delta function never actually goes to 0. This means that objects with interior contours such as a ring can also be segmented, which was not possible with previously available active contour models.
#### [1] S. Osher, and J. A. Sethian, "Fronts propagating with curvature-dependent speed: Algorithms based on Hamilton-Jacobi formulations,'' *Journal of Computational Physics*, vol. 79, no. 1, pp. 12-49, 1988.
#### [2] D. Mumford, and J. Shah, "Optimal approximations by piecewise smooth functions and associated variational problems,'' *Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics*, vol. 42, no. 5, pp. 577-685, 2006.
#### [3] V. Caselles, R. Kimmel, and G. Sapiro, "Geodesic Active Contours,'' *International Journal of Computer Vision*, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 61-79, February 1997.
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text:
"""
Script that takes a ST dataset (matrix of counts)
where the columns are genes and the rows
are spot coordinates
        gene    gene
XxY
XxY
...

and a file of spot classes

XxY 1
XxY 1
XxY 2
...

And slices the matrix into regions given as input

1 2 ...

slice_regions_matrix.py --counts-matrix dataset.tsv --spot-classes classes.txt --regions 1 3

@Author Jose Fernandez Navarro <jose.fernandez.navarro@scilifelab.se>
"""

import argparse
import sys
import os
import pandas as pd
from collections import defaultdict

def main(counts_matrix, class_file, regions):

    if not os.path.isfile(counts_matrix) \
    or not os.path.isfile(class_file) or len(regions) == 0:
        sys.stderr.write("Error, input file not present or invalid format\n")
        sys.exit(1)

    # Get the file name
    base_name = os.path.basename(counts_matrix).split(".")[0]
    # Read the data frame (genes as columns)
    counts_table = pd.read_table(counts_matrix, sep="\t", header=0, index_col=0)
    # Load the spot classes
    spot_classes = defaultdict(list)
    with open(class_file) as filehandler:
        for line in filehandler.readlines():
            tokens = line.split()
            assert(len(tokens) == 2)
            # Assure  spots have two decimals
            x = round(float(tokens[0].split("x")[0]), 2)
            y = round(float(tokens[0].split("x")[1]), 2)
            spot = "{}x{}".format(x,y)
            spot_classes[tokens[1]].append(spot)
    # Iterate the regions and slice the matrix
    for region, spots in spot_classes.items():
        if region in regions:
            slice = counts_table.loc[spots]
            slice.to_csv("{}_{}.tsv".format(base_name, region), sep='\t')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description=__doc__,
                                     formatter_class=argparse.RawDescriptionHelpFormatter)
    parser.add_argument("--counts-matrix", required=True,
                        help="Matrix with gene counts (genes as columns)")
    parser.add_argument("--spot-classes", type=str,
                        help="Path to the file containing the spot classes as\nSPOT INTEGER")
    parser.add_argument("--regions",
                        help="The regions (CLASSES) to split the dataset into",
                        required=True, nargs='+', type=str)
    args = parser.parse_args()
    main(args.counts_matrix, args.spot_classes, args.regions)


text:
Roy Jones On Wheels
Alternative Medical Treatments
Osteopathic Manipulative Treatment
Disability Information Access Line (DIAL)
New Hotline to Improve Access
to COVID-19 Vaccines for People with Disabilities
The U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) announced the launch of a first-of-its-kind national hotline to connect people with disabilities to information and services to improve access to COVID-19 vaccines.
The Disability Information and Access Line (DIAL) is now available to help people with disabilities find vaccination locations in their communities, assist callers with making vaccination appointments, and connect callers to local services – such as accessible transportation – to overcome barriers to vaccination. The hotline also can provide information and resources to answer questions and address concerns about the vaccines and can connect callers to information and services that promote independent living and address fundamental needs, such as food, housing, and transportation.
DIAL was created through a partnership between the Administration for Community Living and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help older adults and people with disabilities get COVID-19 vaccines. With support from CDC and ACL.
acl.gov/dial | 888-677-1199 from 9:00 AM to 8:00 PM ET | DIAL@n4a.org
Information shared on this page is meant for EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY and not official medical advice. For Official medical advice, contact a Healthcare Professional. If you think you may have a medical emergency, call your doctor, go to the emergency department, or call 911 immediately.
Site powered by Hayford Marketing
Logo Provided By: ponytailscott.com


text:
Q: GO:I am trying to make a guess My number, but my program will not interpret numbers correctly package main

import "fmt"
import bf "bufio"
import "os"
import "strconv"

type SVC int

func main() {
        fmt.Println("Loaded")
        var gmber = bf.NewScanner(os.Stdin)
        gmber.Scan()
        i := 1
        for i < 40 {
                fmt.Println("\n")
                i++
        }
        var input2 = bf.NewScanner(os.Stdin)
        fmt.Println("Make a guess:")
        var input21, err = strconv.Atoi(input2.Text())
        var gmber1, err0 = strconv.Atoi(gmber.Text())
        input2.Scan()
        for {
                if input21 == gmber1{
                        break
                }
                if input21 > gmber1 {
                        fmt.Println("Too high, Guess again")
                        input2.Scan()
                }
                if input21 < gmber1 {
                        fmt.Println("Too low, Guess again")
                        input2.Scan()
                }
        }
        fmt.Println("You win!")
        fmt.Println(err)
        fmt.Println(err0)
}

I when I run this program, my program will always spit out "Too low, Guess again". I input: 100 as the number to be guessed, then guessed the number 101, and it said too low. I just do not really know what to do now, does anybody understand why this program does this?
NOTES:
input21 is ALWAYS=to 0

A: You need to understand how type Scanner works. Read the documentation for type Scanner and its methods carefully and take a look at the examples.
package bufio: type Scanner
For example, "Scan advances the Scanner to the next token, which will then be available through the Bytes or Text method."
For buffered stream input, it's dangerous to have more than one scanner per file.
It's no fun to guess a number that you input yourself. Use a random number generator, for example, 'package math/rand`.
It would take too long to explain all the problems with your code, so here's a simple example,
package main

import (
    "bufio"
    "fmt"
    "math/rand"
    "os"
    "strconv"
    "time"
)

func main() {
    rand.Seed(time.Now().UnixNano())
    var number = rand.Intn(100)
    fmt.Println("Make a guess:")
    var scanner = bufio.NewScanner(os.Stdin)
    for scanner.Scan() {
        var guess, err = strconv.Atoi(scanner.Text())
        if err != nil {
            fmt.Print("Input error")
        } else if guess == number {
            break
        } else if guess > number {
            fmt.Print("Too high")
        } else if guess < number {
            fmt.Print("Too low")
        }
        fmt.Println(", Guess again:")
    }
    if scanner.Err() != nil {
        fmt.Println("I give up!")
    }
    fmt.Println("You win!")
}

A: Whenever you have a function that returns an error value, you must check whether that is nil. Only after you have done that may you access any other value that the function returned.
When you add this proper error handling, you will see where your program fails.

A: I was not resetting the scanners, at the end of the if's where the scanner is re-evaluated, you have to re-declare the strconv.Atoi

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Q: Deserialize JSON into C# Variables hi i want to read this json string into my local variables in c# anyone can tell how do i do it
{
   "type":"object",
   "error":"",
   "warning":"",
   "info":"",
   "response_code":"200",
   "response":[
      {
         "MeterID":"6",
         "KWHMainActual":"0.0",
         "KWActual":"0 ",
         "KWHDGActual":"0.2",
         "MeterOnOff":"1",
         "MeterDefective":"0",
         "RecordDateTime":"2016-08-17 12:46:49.000"
      }
   ]
}

A: To generate classes you can use JSON2CSHARP and  to desrialize your JSON use  Json.NET.
Model:
 public class Response
    {
        public string MeterID { get; set; }
        public string KWHMainActual { get; set; }
        public string KWActual { get; set; }
        public string KWHDGActual { get; set; }
        public string MeterOnOff { get; set; }
        public string MeterDefective { get; set; }
        public string RecordDateTime { get; set; }
    }

    public class RootObject
    {
        public string type { get; set; }
        public string error { get; set; }
        public string warning { get; set; }
        public string info { get; set; }
        public string response_code { get; set; }
        public List<Response> response { get; set; }
    }

and deserialize method
JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<RootObject>("jsonString");

Edit:
Using WebRequest You can get your json from uri, try this method
public async Task<string> GetFromUri(string uri)
    {
        var request = (HttpWebRequest) WebRequest.Create(new Uri(uri));
        request.ContentType = "application/json";
        request.Method = "GET";

        // Send the request to the server and wait for the response:
        using (var response = await request.GetResponseAsync())
        {
            // Get a stream representation of the HTTP web response:
            using (var stream = response.GetResponseStream())
            {
                var reader = new StreamReader(stream);
                var message = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<string>(reader.ReadToEnd());
                return message;
            }
        }
    }

call method
 var jsonString = await GetFromUri("uri");


text:
Q: How to check SharePoint Cumulative Updates I have two web servers installed SharePoint 2007, my intention is to check is the Cumulative Updates for SharePoint 2007 installed on both servers is the same.
I've check the SharePoint version from Site Actions --> Site Settings --> Modified All Site Settings, Version : 12.0.0.6421.
If the version were same, is that mean both SharePoint installed same Cumulative Updates?
Please help, thanks in advanced.

A: That's correct!
if you ever need to confirm which update/revision of SharePoint you are running, without accessing the binary files themselves, these version numbers correspond to the version numbers reported in SharePoint Central Administration.  You can find this by going into the Operations tab, and under Topology and Services, select Servers in Farm.
For all SharePoint 2007 updates, you will need to install the update on each server in the farm where you have SharePoint installed (not the SQL Server unless it's also got SharePoint** installed on it, nor things like your SMTP server) and then run the Config Wizard on the server to complete its upgrade. Another note: DO NOT run the Config Wizard concurrently on more than one server at a time. The installation package updates the bits in your server and the Config Wizard then performs updates in the farm's SQL Server databases; running the Config Wizard on more than one server in a 2007 farm at the same time can cause major conflicts or corruption in your farm's databases.

A: Yes, that is correct. Version number also indicates the CU level of the farm.
Here is one random blog article listing 2007 CU levels and corresponding version numbers.
You seem to have SP2 with no CU's installed after that.