text:
| What's New?
| Get Started
| Site Map
| The Crash
| Contribute
| Resources
| Disclaimer
| Contact
Depending on the server settings at your ISP and in your web browser, sometimes when a
page has been updated you may still see the old version of the page.
If a page is listed here as updated, you may wish to press the "Refresh"
button on your web browser (or the F5 key), which should then update
the page.
Added the new page Bow Drill Fire Making Videos.
Prepping.com.au is a new web site I've been working on for a while in my spare time, when I've had some time. The focus will be on preparing to survive a collapse of society, and/or a crash
of the economy, war, and other severe disruptions to modern life as we know it.
Added the new page Make an Instant Tracking Box to Learn Animal Tracking.
Added the new page Animal Tracking Quiz.
Substantially improved the sizing of fonts and other elements across different types of mobile browsers on all pages. The cache may take a while to update for some of the changes to take effect.
Added the new page Australian Bush Food Plant Quiz.
Added a few new products to the gear page.
Updates to the Nuclear War Survival page. The RSS feed should now work, or at least better than it did. Previously I had to manually add every entry
and then manually validate it (usually multiple times) and it was very time consuming. I hadn't even got around to updating the RSS since
about 2013. Now it should auto-generate itself from the source code of this
page (new.php). It might not work fully yet but it will be a lot better than no RSS updates at all.
Added the new pages: Using a Trail Camera to Practice Trapping and/or Study Animals and The Most Essential Survival Gear/Equipment.
Added the new page: Australian Bird Quiz.
Added the new page: Australian Spider Quiz.
Added the new page: Monthly Rewilding Skillshares. Added ReNourish ReWild to the Survival Courses page.
Added the new page: Long-Distance Running Training Calculator.
Added several new Christian Books.
Added six new books to the Invertebrates Section of the nature books page — four about spiders and two about insects.
New page added: Christian Books.
Added six new spiders to Australian Spiders and their Faces, bringing the total to 25.
Added several photos of spiders faces and changed the name of the spiders page to Australian Spiders and their Faces. Added two new spiders.
Added the new page Australian Spiders. This is a new section still partly under construction. There are 17 spiders so far, and more on the way, with information still being added.
Added the new page Reasons to Become a Christian.
Added new page Learning the Phases of the Moon, which is also a continuation of the secret spot journal. This page will be updated daily (or almost daily) for the next month.
Added new section on the Foxfire Books to the Instant Armageddon Survival Bookshelf page. This section is only short so far, but will be expanded over the rest of April 2017.
Improvements to the home page and the specials page. The website now mostly works with https (SSL), i.e. secure encrypted browsing. Added the new page Red Fox. Added an introduction to the top of the Indicators of Overuse of the World's Natural Resources page. Added a summary to the top of the EMP page.
Updates to the page What to Do about the Coming Economic Crash.
Added the new page Specials - Discounts - Items on Sale.
Added the Koala, the Common Wombat and the Southern Hairy-nosed Wombat to the Mammals page. Fixed the mammals page so I can add more species much more easily.
Added the new section Fish of Australia - Australian Sea and Freshwater Fishes with 7 fish to start it off. Added the new page Finding a Secret Spot.
Added the new pages Instant Bookshelf to Survive The Apocalypse and Black Rat.
Added 3 new books here. Updates to the Nuclear War Survival page.
First draft of making survival.org.au mobile browser friendly. There's an algorithm which should hopefully correctly detect if you're using a mobile device (like a phone, with a really small screen) and adjust the font size to be bigger than it was before. Most of the images are done but some are still too big or too small. I'll keep working on it. Eventually I'll probably add an option to change back to the original view on a mobile phone browser. I haven't done the contact form boxes yet or the search results page.
Added Booktopia links to all the available books on the Survival Books page and the Books by Tom Brown, Jr. page.
New page added: Indicators of Overuse of the World's Natural Resources. Short summary update to oil.php. To improve readability, the background images behind the text are slightly lighter, and there's more vertical spacing between lines of text.
Updates to the Nuclear War Survival page including a new section on Nuclear War Strategy.
Some updates and a few new books on the Australian Field Guides and Nature Books page.
Improvements to the Permaculture Books page. Added 12 new books, added links to more sources for the existing books, and added proper cover images of all the books.
Fixed some of the broken links to books, especially on books.php and the fruit trees and gardening pages.
Updates to the Nuclear War Survival page including the What is Nuclear Fallout section, adding recommended reading, adding this inspirational quote and fixing some of the broken links. Fixed some other broken/outdated links on the website.
Added the new page: Preparing for an EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse). Minor updates to the Nuclear War Survival page to reflect the 2017 setting of the Doomsday Clock.
Changed the homepage video from Walking Softly with Koa to Solo Survival: How to Survive Alone in the Wilderness for 1 week.
New page added: Survival Radio and Long-Distance Communication.
A few additions to the Nuclear War Survival page. Two new sections, improvements to the simulator, some new points in the "Quick Facts" summary at the top of the page, and other minor improvements.
New page added: David Holmgren — Upcoming Events.
New page added: Witchetty Grubs. Until I typed in the date above I hadn't realised that today is the 13th anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001.
Many more books added to Dystopian Fiction / Novels, but (so far) mostly without proper reviews, which will get done when there is more time...
Major additions to How to Survive a Nuclear War.
Added the new page How to Drain Your Hot Water Heater For Survival Water. Added a picture to nuclear-war-survival.php (many more pictures coming soon).
Added the new page How to Read the Sky at Night: Practical Astronomy for Date, Time and Direction Finding. Added two new books (both really good): The Weed Forager's Handbook and a newly republished version of Bushcraft by Richard Graves.
Changed the homepage video from Four Horsemen to Walking Softly with Koa. Walking Softly with Koa — Thrive and survive in the Australian bush. For Koa his lifestyle is a quest for the kind of freedom a wallaby has, knowledge to provide for yourself in the Australian bush, drawing on a lifetime of living close to nature. Koa has copped some flak for inaccuracies with his plant edibility, however he has managed to survive and thrive for over 35 years of living off the land without needing money or entering a bank. Research any plants in depth before eating and enjoy the video!
Updates to what.php and nuclear-war-survival.php.
New pages added: Dystopian Fiction / Novels and How to Survive a Nuclear War.
New page added: Strategies for a Changing Economy: Survive and Thrive - National speaking tour with Nicole Foss and David Holmgren.
New page added: How to Make Your Own Meat Stock and Bone Broth.
Last week I added a new section Quick Proof that Really is Quick to crash.php.
New page added: Armageddon and the One-World Government.
New page added: Astronomically Correct Countdown Timer for the December 2013 Solstice.
In the last few days there have been additions to the pages Why the Global Economy is About to Crash and What to Do About the Upcoming Economic Crash.
New section on bugging out in the page What to Do About the Upcoming Economic Crash.
New page added: Bulk Billing Doctors in Sydney Forced to Quit.
Major updates to Why the Global Economy is About to Crash and What to Do About the Upcoming Economic Crash.
Each word in the list of keywords at the bottom of each page now links to the search page for that keyword, so if you click on a word it searches survival.org.au for that word. If you hover the mouse over a word in the list, you can see how many times it occurs on that page.
Added the embedded youtube video about non-VR general practitioners to the home page.
New page added: Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) Course Directory.
New page added: Astronomically Correct Countdown Timer for the 21 December 2012 Solstice.
New page added: Surviving the Economic Crash — Web Links. Updates to the Permaculture, Self Sufficiency And Sustainable Living Books page.
New page added: Survival Courses Near Sydney and the Blue Mountains.
New page added: What the Economic Crisis Really Means - and What We Can Do About It (Online video).
Updates to the pages What is Peak Oil?, and What to Do About the Upcoming Economic Crash.
A new page added with all the native bush tucker plant foods listed on the one page.
Some updates to the pages Why the Global Economy is About to Crash and What To Do About the Upcoming Economic Crash.
New pages added: Online Video Section, What A Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire (Video), The End of Suburbia (Video), Arithmetic, Population and Energy (Video), and other videos (see the video index page).
Updates to the pages Why the Global Economy is About to Crash and What To Do About the Upcoming Economic Crash.
New pages added: Why the Global Economy is About to Crash, What To Do About the Upcoming Economic Crash.
Updates to the Books About Survival in the Future Hard Times section.
New page added: The Waterproof Bible.
I've added a facebook "like" button to the top of the pages. This is a new feature and I'm still experimenting with it. It seems to work ok so far though. If you're not a facebook user, just ignore it. I've also added a Twitter "Tweet" button which will share the page on Twitter (at least I think that's what it does) and a button for "Share This" that allows people to share the page on a whole lot of other types of electronic media.
New free video bible course added called "The Stranger on the Road to Emmaus".
New page added: Books About Near-Death Experiences. Overview of near-death experiences plus one detailed book review (more coming soon) and short descriptions of four other books.
I've added reviews of 7 more Survival Books.
I've added another 9 more Edible Weeds.
I've added 12 more Edible Weeds. I will be adding more bush tucker plants and edible weeds in the near future.
Added a new page about how to Make a Simple Wire Snare Loop.
In the last week or so I have also some new books to the Australian Field Guides and Nature Books page, and added Bush Tucker Man DVDs to the Survival DVDs page.
Added a new page with reviews of all the Books by Tom Brown, Jr. A few of the reviews are not fully complete yet, but I will do them as I get the time.
In the last week or so I have also added new books to the Survival Books page, the Australian Field Guides and Nature Books page and the Permaculture/Gardening books page.
Added a new page about Survival DVDs. So far 12 DVDs or DVD sets are described.
Added 14 new survival books to the Survival Books page.
Added 13 new birds to the Australian Birds Identification section of the website. The birds are the White-throated Treecreeper, Golden Whistler, New Holland Honeyeater, Bell Miner (Bellbird), Common ("Indian") Myna, Noisy Miner, Magpie-lark (Peewee), Grey Butcherbird, Black-faced Cuckoo-shrike, Red Wattlebird, Australian Magpie, Sulphur-crested Cockatoo, and the Channel-billed Cuckoo.
Also there are new photos for the Red-browed Firetail (Finch), White-browed Scrubwren, King Parrot, Wonga Pigeon, Crimson Rosella, Little Pied Cormorant.
Added 7 new plants to the Bush Tucker Plant Foods Section of the website. Added the new Growing Fruit Trees section to the website, with 19 new web pages.
Added new pages, The Bush Tucker Diet — A Nutritional Analysis and The Bush Tucker Survival Guide.
Added bird paintings from 'The Birds of Australia' by John Gould (published 1848) to most of the birds in the Australian Birds section of the site. I will be adding more images and more birds as I get around to it.
Six new birds (all with high-resolution photos) added to the Australian Bird Identification Section of the website.
New page added: Surviving Christmas.
I've added a lot of links to survival and self-sufficiency related products on Amazon.com.
New page added: Tracking Animals - How To Read Animal Tracks.
I changed the look of the site by adding an extra column to the right of the main page column, so I can put in more links and extra stuff. There are pictures at the top of the right column (for most of the pages) which indicate what section of the website you are looking at.
New page added: Survival Essentials: How To Survive In The Wilderness.
New page added: Permaculture, Self Sufficiency And Sustainable Living Books.
Made updates to the books pages Australian Field Guides and Nature Books, My Top Two Survival Books. Added links (to some of the most useful books) to purchase them from The Nile in Australia.
Added three snakes to the Australian Reptiles section, and a mammal to the Australian Mammals section. Made some improvements to the Kamana page.
Added new pages Proof That God Exists and How to Find Water.
New Australian Reptiles section gets underway with one reptile to begin with.
I am experimenting with new page backgrounds for the site. I have regular internet access again so I should get the mailing list working again soon hopefully.
Ten new birds in the Australian Birds section, all of the ten have high-resolution images available and two can be used as desktop wallpaper for your computer.
The birds are (in order of size from smallest to largest), the House Sparrow, the Masked Lapwing (Spurwing Plover), the Silver Gull (Seagull), the Australian King-Parrot, the Rock Dove (Feral Pigeon), the Crested Pigeon, the Tawny Frogmouth, the Yellow-Tailed Black-Cockatoo, the Red-Tailed Black-Cockatoo, and the Powerful Owl.
New Australian Mammals section gets underway with one mammal to begin with.
Made some improvements to the How to Get Started page.
Added new page Jesus (Part 2). Added 19 new birds to the Australian Birds section. A few of the new birds now have high resolution downloadable images, and I will keep adding more of these in future.
Added a site search box at the top of every page. Recent pages (less than about 1-3 weeks old) will not yet be indexed by Google and will not be found by the search page.
Added new Australian Birds section.
Improvments to the Sitemap page. Added the new pages Bow Drill and Hand Drill Firemaking Woods and Triglochin - Water Ribbons.
The website is now running on a new web server with a new hosting company, so it should be a lot more reliable than it has been for the past several months.
Changed the old "Skills Index" page to the new Site Map page, which has all the links from the Skills Index plus many new ones (the idea is that every page on the site should now be linked from it).
Added the new page Caretakers.
Added the new pages Getting Started With Container Gardening,
Mulching for Free, Creating A Raised Garden Bed, Easy Tips on Indoor Plant Care and Picking the Ideal Location
for your Garden.
Added the new page Doctors Weigh In On Phone Brain Cancer Links.
Added the new page Mobile Phone Radiation — Urban Survival.
Added the new page Swine Flu Survival — Surviving the Pandemic. This is the first page of the new health section of the website.
New pages added: Survival Books, The Psychology of Gardening, The Basic Gardening Tools, Starting An Orchard, Swine Flu Prevention — Superfoods.
Added the new page Move Up In The World — Reverse Your Thinking. This is the first page of the new psychology section of the website.
Added the first page to the new news section of the website.
Improved menu with pictures for the front page of the new bush tucker food plants section.
New section added with photos and descriptions of wild food "bush tucker" plants. Currently there are 32 plants described.
Created a page for the website on facebook. (It doesn't exist anymore).
New page added: Jesus.
New page added: The Man Who Planted Trees.
New page added: Starting a Vegetable Garden.
Added several new banner pictures for the tops of the pages.
Added a new section to the banking
page, explaining why modern societies cannot exist without growth.
New page added: Starting Your Own Box Garden.
New page added: Making Cordage from Mat Rush.
New page added: The Paiute Trap.
Added links on the skills page to the peak oil
Added a new picture to the Making a Stone
Axe page.
The website now displays correctly in the
Opera and Apple Safari browsers. The filenames of pages within the
site now
end with .php rather than .htm.
New page added: Making a Stone Axe.
New page added: The Hand Drill Fire
Added an icon to go at the left of the page name in the browser address window
and in shortcuts (bookmarks) to the site. Fixed up the formatting so the pages
display correctly in the Mozilla Firefox and Netscape browsers.
New page added: The Bow Drill Fire
Added the new page Springpole Deadfall Trap.
Added new banner photos for the peak oil pages and the farming
Changed the heading and link colours and added new banner photos.
The website was copied from its former address www.primitivetechnology.org to
its new domain survival.org.au. Some major modifications to the site are in the pipeline...
Minor edits to a few of the pages.
Fixed up the page: Ancient Futures -
Learning From Ladakh.
Fixed up the page on Australian Field Guides and Nature Books.
A few days ago I uploaded the new look template for this website.
page added (still under construction): Ancient
Futures - Learning From Ladakh.
This is just boasting: currently I am number one in Google for "figure
four trap".
New content added to the Farming Page.
The contact page now has a contact form,
rather than just an email address.
If you would like to be notified
by email of updates to this site, click
here to join the mailing list.
New page added (still under construction): Family
and Community Farming.
New page added: What are the most important
basic survival skills to learn?
New page added: List of Plants for the
Blue Mountains (and Sydney).
New section on the naming of plants.
Some more links on the resources
New page (still under construction): My Top
Two Survival Books.
couple of other new links on the resources
New page added: Kamana.
New quotes added: Here, here, and here.
I have reduced the horizontal width of the pages, so that
they print correctly in Internet Explorer.
New page added: Grandfather Stalking
New page added: Living on the Edge.
New page added: Edible Weeds.
New page added (still under construction): Australian Field Guides and Nature Books.
New page added (still under construction): Get
started with learning plant foods - make yourself a task list.
Why Learn Survival Skills? - page updated.
New page added: The Contented Man.
Site Map has been slightly updated.
page added: Figure
Four Trap.
page about happiness in our culture.
Thom Hartmann's foreword to "Original
Wisdom" by
Robert Wolff.
new photos have been added to the end of the fire
The domain name was registered and the site first went online as www.primitivetechnology.org. The version in this link is from the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, dated 5 May 2006.
added august australian birds books bush crash december economic economy february friday july links march monday nature november nuclear october page pages photos php plants saturday section september site spiders survival survive thursday top tucker tuesday upcoming updates video war website wednesday why
Website by Linkworks®. Content is copyright © Survival.org.au 2005-2019. Terms of Use. Definitely read the disclaimer before trying anything from this website, including the practices and skills.
What's New?
Basics and General Skills
Psychology and Attitude
Permaculture & Gardening
Bush Tucker Plant Foods
Animal Foods
The World in Crisis
Australian Birds
Australian Mammals
Australian Reptiles
Australian Fish
Australian Spiders
Australia's #1 Outdoor Gear Store. Wild Earth stocks Australia's most comprehensive range of hiking, camping and outdoor gear. Shop online today!
Nuclear War Survival
Edible Weeds
Bush Tucker Survival Guide
The Bush Tucker Diet
Australian Field Guides and Nature Books
Bush Tucker Plant Foods (All on one page)
How to Find Water
Survival Radio
Survival Essentials
Bush Tucker - Fruits
The Upcoming Global Crash
Survival Courses - Sydney and the Blue Mountains
My Top Two Survival Books
The Bow Drill Fire Kit
The Hand Drill Fire Kit
Permaculture Books
Friction Firemaking Woods
Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh
Survival Books
How can I get started?
How to Make a Stone Axe
What To Do About the Crash
Starting a Vegetable Garden
Permaculture Course List
New YouTube Channel SurvivalAU
Bow Drill Firemaking Videos
New Prepping Website www.prepping.com.au
Make an Instant Tracking Box to Learn Tracking
Tracking Quiz
Bush Food Plant Quiz
Essential Survival Gear
Using a Trail Camera
Bird Quiz
Spider Quiz
Rewilding Skillshares
Running Training Calculator
Christian Books
Australian Spiders and their Faces
Reasons to Become a Christian
Learning the Moon Phases
Specials / Discounts
3 New Mammals
Finding a Secret Spot
Black Rat
Instant Survival Bookshelf
Indicators of Overuse
Preparing for an EMP
David Holmgren — Upcoming Events
Witchetty Grubs
How to Drain Your Hot Water Heater For Survival Water
Practical Astronomy: How to Read the Sky at Night
Nuclear War Survival: How to Survive a Nuclear War
Dystopian Fiction / Novels
National speaking tour with Nicole Foss and David Holmgren
Make Your Own Meat Stock
Armageddon and the One-World Government
Countdown Timer for the December 2013 Solstice
Bulk Billing Doctors in Sydney Forced to Quit
Major updates to crash.php and what.php
Permaculture Design Certificate Course List
Surviving the Economic Crash — Web Links
Doing It Ourselves (Video)
The Crash - Quick Start
Peak Oil Update
Online Video Section
What A Way To Go
Arithmetic, Population and Energy Video
The Upcoming Global Economic Crash
Waterproof Bible
Free Video Bible Course
Books About Near-Death Experiences
7 More Survival Books
Even More Edible Weeds
New Edible Weeds
Simple Wire Snare Loop
Books by Tom Brown, Jr.
Survival DVDs
14 More Survival Books
12 New Birds
Growing Fruit Trees
7 New Plants
The Bush Tucker Diet
Gould's Birds of Australia
New Australian Birds
Surviving Christmas
Survival Essentials
Permaculture and Self Sufficiency Books
How To Find Water
Proof That God Exists
Jesus (Part 2)
Triglochin - Water Ribbons
Tentworld is the largest independent camping store in Australia.
Click here for more self sufficiency and survival resources


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Campaign Against Xenophobia Now on Motion
At the UN High-level Summit on refugees and migrants that took place in September 2016, the UN launched the TOGETHER campaign against xenophobia and for social inclusion of all migrant populations. The campaign seeks to engage all UN agencies and Member States as well as all factions of civil society in a concerted effort to address discrimination against migrants by promoting "respect, safety and dignity for everyone forced to flee their homes in search of a better life." The campaign differ greatly from an intergovernmental treaty, agreement, or political declaration, in that it aims to foment social change by sowing seeds of tolerance and cross-cultural contact and appreciation through community-based projects initiated and executed by schools, religious communities, and other local groups. This approach demonstrates an understanding on the part of the UN system that social change and development are bottom-up processes that may be given a grand stage on the global level but are achieved at the local level through local ownership. One way the UN is attempting to facilitate this wave of unified grassroots activism is by managing an online platform for storytelling. This website allows those working to promote solidarity and eradicate xenophobia in their communities to share their processes and successes and to shed light on the positive contributions of migrants and refugees to their communities. If you are seeking inspiration from everyday triumphs of human solidarity, visit the Join Together online publication page. If you have any stories to share with others in the global community who may be contemplating joining or starting an initiative of their own, you can submit one to [email protected] or post one on your social media pages using the hashtag #jointogether. If you do decide to share a story, be sure to call our attention to it by writing to us at [email protected].

subset: commoncrawl


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You can contact us by phone when time is of the essence, or use our convenient online service request for deliveries.
We have same day delivery drivers ready in Los Angeles County, San Bernardino County, Orange County and Riverside County.
They are waiting for your call.


text:
56 Daily Thoughts Of A 20 Year Old
7 comments :
I loved this post, I found myself laughing and thinking I do many of these things daily!! Great post lovely :) xxxReplyDeleteReplies
Awh, thanks so much! Glad you can relate! :) xDelete
i absolutely loved reading this post! Although I am not quite 20 so many of these thoughts go around my head on a daily basis!! This made me laugh a lot xxReplyDelete
Thrifty vintage fashionReplies
Haha! I'm glad you enjoyed it! :) xDelete
So cool post! I will be 20 in a few days, so I understand you! Do you want to be friends with me on bloglovin? If yes, just follow my blog there, I'll follow your blog back!!! https://www.bloglovin.com/blogs/anna-alina-3947784ReplyDelete
Haha this is amazing Jemma! I do absolutely love these kinda posts, they make me chuckle so much! Immy xReplyDelete
Hahahahahaha! This is so so funny! It's all so true lol!ReplyDelete
Fix Me In Forty Five - A Beauty & Lifestyle Blog
Blog Lovin' // Instagram


text: In today's Pet Salon Doggy Days game you are going to have the chance to play with the cutest puppies and dogs because there is a special offer at the Pampered Paws Salon. Its doggy day today and you have the great chance of working in this salon. You can learn how to take care of the cute pets and also how to run a pet salon. You will have the role of a manager and care taker and first thing you need to do, is to open the salon doors for the cute pets. Next, you need to check the computer and see which dog is next in line, then make sure he is comfortable and ready for a nice bath. You will have to wash his fur and dry it, then you need to brush the doggy's fur and make it look silky and fluffy. Play as long as you want with the dogs and pet them a lot to make them happy and comfortable. Have fun working at the pet salon in this new lovely Pet Salon Doggy Days game!


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The Importance of Water in a Balanced Diet
We always hear that "water is good for you', but what does it actually do for us? And can the way you consume water actually do more harm than good? There are many reasons, outlined below, showing the importance of getting in adequate water daily, and we will look at some of the symptoms of dehydration, tips on keeping water consumption simple, as well as some "don'ts' in terms of drinking water.
Especially with the hotter months approaching, it is all the more important to make sure you are getting the 8 to 10 minimum cups of water recommended daily. It is important to also note a lot of times when it seems that your body is signaling to you that it is hungry, it can actually be signs of thirst!
Did you know? Water is considered to be one of the seven essential nutrients our body needs to survive. It is recommended that we drink eight to ten glasses of pure water a day. What are some of the signs of dehydration? Many people who suffer from constant headaches, joint pain, skin issues, weight gain, constipation, hunger pains, over-eating, weakness, low energy levels, dizziness, and indigestion could actually just be dehydrated These are just some of the many potential symptoms of an inadequate water intake, and it is extremely important to remain hydrated and pay attention to the above mentioned symptoms as a guide. Water is the liquid that nutrients need in order to travel throughout the body, and the way we eliminate toxins. Many nutrients (notably the water soluble vitamins such as C and the B-vitamins) and hormones require water in order to be properly distributed throughout the body as well, and a lack of water intake could also keep blood pressure high and contribute to kidney stones as well. In addition, as a result of it being needed in proper digestion and elimination, as well as our livers needing it in order to metabolize fat, dehydration can also lead to weight gain.
See also: How to Reduce Gas and Bloating
10 Ways to Feel Energized in the Mornings (Without Coffee!)
How can you tell if you are dehydrated? It is actually quite simple to know if you are not drinking enough water. There are two quick ways to see, and the first is that if you are thirsty, you are already dehydrated. Another way to know is the color of your urine. It should remain a light yellow shade, rather than a darker color. The only exception to the second rule could be when you first wake up in the morning, as you have technically been fasting and not been taking in any water for hours. So if your urine is a darker shade of yellow during this time, this is not an automatic sign of dehydration. However, beginning your day with some water is still a good idea upon waking up! Another exception would be if you take B-vitamin supplements, since they can change the color of your urine to a darker yellow!
Are there other factors that cause dehydration? On top of not drinking enough water, there are also many other ways to add on the initial dehydration. There are dehydrants such as caffeiene, alcohol, nicotine, and salt. If you use or consume any or all of these often, you need to incorporate more water into your lifestyle. If you drink two cups of coffee a day, and have a beer at the end of the day, you need to make up for the additional water you are losing as a result of these dehydrants. Another factor that comes into play is if you are physically active and sweating, again, your need for water is automatically increased, as well as during the hotter months of the year. If you go for a run on a sunny day in July, you again need to make sure you are making up for the loss of water this way. Also keep in mind caffeinated teas do not count as water intake since they are actually dehydrates and not a pure form of water.
What drinking habits should be avoided? As is the case with almost everything, there are correct and incorrect ways to consume water. For many people who are not accustomed to drinking water at all, but want to correct this mistake, they may decide on chugging the eight to ten glasses at a time, or still drinking a large portion in one sitting at the end of the day to get the recommended amount in. Chugging large amounts in one sitting is a shock to your body and is never a good idea. You want to incorporate water throughout your day and here is the simplest way to make it a habit. Aim to keep a canister or bottle filled to its amount near you and measure how many cups of water it can hold. For example, if it can hold four cups, you know that you have to drink at least two of those throughout the day. Try to consistently sip throughout the day and soon it will become second-nature and you will not have to remind yourself! Drinking a lot of water with meals is also not a good idea as it actually dilutes the body's secretion of stomach acid and can cause indigestion. It is better to drink it before and after eating, but allowing some time to pass after you eat so it does not disrupt your digestive process. Drinking it first thing in the morning before eating helps your body ease into the day.
Infused water for the summer: While aiming to get used to drinking water on its own is ideal, there are also some easy and delicious ways to make water consumption even more convenient. You can fill up your large bottle with a few of your favourite berries (raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, or a mix) and add fresh cool water on top. You can drink this berry-infused water througout the day which is a great option in the summer! You can also simply twist some mint and cucumbers into your water for another refreshing alternative, or find your own preference. Just remember, if it contains caffeine it no longer counts!
Now that you know the importance, signs of deficiency and ways to consume it, make sure to get your 8-10 glasses of water a day and see the benefits of being truly hydrated!
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock


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With National Prosecco Day just around the corner on Monday (13 August), the Five Star Fitzwilliam Hotel's expert mixologist James O'Donnell has shared some of the chic hotel's most popular prosecco cocktails, so you can upgrade your favourite fizz this weekend.
No other beverage defines the Italian philosophy of la dolce vita, or the good life, quite like prosecco; and National Prosecco Day is all about embracing the remaining days of summer and embracing life's everyday celebrations.
If you don't fancy yourself as a master mixologist then you can also enjoy 2 for 1 cocktails any Friday between 4pm - 7pm at the Fitzwilliam Hotel's award winning bar. Visit www.fitzwilliamhotelbelfast.com for more information.
Prosecco Royale
- 25ml Crème de Cassis
- Prosecco
- 1 Blackberry to garnish
Method: Pour the Crème de Cassis into the bottom of a prosecco flute and top up with your favourite prosecco then garnish with a blackberry floating on top.
Fitz Fizz
- 25ml Gin
- 15ml Elderflower liquer
- Prosecco
- Ice
- Mint
- 4 Large Cucumber Slices
Method: Fill a gin goblet with ice, 3 cucumber slices and 3 whole mint leaves. Mix the gin and elderflower liqueur (or elderflower cordial) in a cocktail shaker and pour over the ice. Top up with your favourite prosecco and add sprig of mint and one slice of cucumber to garnish.
Prosecco Rossini
- 25ml Strawberry puree
- Prosecco
- 1 Whole Strawberry
Method: Pour the strawberry puree into the bottom of a prosecco flute and top up with your favourite prosecco. Cut the stalk off the strawberry and slide the whole strawberry onto the rim of the flute to garnish.
Italian 75
- 25ml Gin
- 10ml Lemon Juice
- 5ml Sugar
- Lemon peel twist to garnish
Method: Mix the gin, lemon juice and sugar in a cocktail shaker. Pour the mixture into a prosecco flute and top up with your favourite prosecco. To create the twist to garnish your cocktail, use a peeler to peel around the circumference of the lemon and then using your hands create a spiral – the peel should hold this shape. Add to the top of the prosecco flute to garnish.


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Books on Books on Books {Friday High-Fives}
This is my weekly roundup.
Enjoy the link love & have a fantastic weekend!
Taking a Summer road trip? Then here's your go-to list for the best bookstores to check out in every state. → 50 Unique Independent Bookstores You Need to Visit in Every US State
If you need some inspiration to head to the library, here you go. → 31 Vintage posters that demand you pick up a book
Itching to write a book of your own? → The Most Dangerous Writing app will make you keep writing or it deletes your work. EasyWrite makes your writing crystal clear by only allowing you to use 1,000 commonly used words, and Write Surge keeps you in the flow of writing for 15 minutes or an hour.
If you're like me, cooking a complicated recipe can make you sweat. Ikea took the scary out of dinner-making with a genius cookbook idea. → Ikea's crazy new cookbook literally cooks you dinner
And if all of the reading becomes too much, just zone out to some classic Bob Ross videos. His trees and landscapes are so soothing, right?! → Random Bob Ross


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St. Patrick's Day brought out the Irish in many MLK lions but MLK preschoolers really showed their green. They dressed up in Top O The Morning outfits, sang songs, and even danced a gig! The Luck of the Irish will surely find them.
Copyright © 2019 Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School


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Inevitable architecture
Complexity gives way to simplicity and flexibilityFebruary 7, 2017
How is your IT systems architecture holding up? CIOs are struggling with the challenge of keeping systems current while incorporating cloud, mobile, analytics, and other disruptive technologies. The path to modernization begins with automating routine tasks and revitalizing your technology stack.
In some companies, systems architecture is older than the freshman tech talent maintaining it. Sure, this legacy IT footprint may seem stable on a day-to-day basis. But in an era of rapid-fire innovation with cloud, mobile, analytics, and other forces implemented on the edge of the business fueling disruption and new opportunities, architectural maturity is becoming a persistent challenge—one directly linked to business problems.1 Heavy customization, complexity, security vulnerabilities, inadequate scalability, and technical debt throughout the IT environment have, directly or indirectly, begun to impact the bottom line. In Deloitte's 2016 Global CIO Survey, 46 percent of 1,200 IT executives surveyed identified "simplifying IT infrastructure" as a top business priority. Likewise, almost a quarter deemed the performance, reliability, and functionality of their legacy systems "insufficient."2
Previous editions of Tech Trends have examined strategies that CIOs are deploying to modernize and revitalize their legacy core systems, not only to extract more value from them but to make the entire IT footprint more agile, intuitive, and responsive. Likewise, Tech Trends has tracked IT's increasingly warm embrace of automation and the autonomic platforms that seamlessly move workloads among traditional on-premises stacks, private cloud platforms, and public cloud services.
While these and other modernization strategies can be necessary and beneficial, they represent sprints in a longer modernization marathon. Increasingly, CIOs are thinking bigger-picture about the technology stacks that drive revenue and enable strategy. As they assess the capacity of current systems to meet future needs, many are likely asking, "If I could start over with a new IT architecture, what would I do differently to lower costs and increase capabilities?"
In the next 18 to 24 months, CIOs and their partners in the C-suite may find an answer to this question in a flexible architecture model whose demonstrated efficiency and effectiveness in start-up IT environments suggest that its broader adoption in the marketplace may be inevitable. In this cloud-first model—and in the leading practices emerging around it—platforms are virtualized, containerized, and treated like malleable, reusable resources. Systems are loosely coupled and, increasingly, automated to be self-learning and self-healing. Likewise, on-premises, private cloud, or public cloud capabilities can be deployed dynamically to deliver each workload at an optimum price and performance point. Taken together, these elements can make it possible to move broadly from managing instances to managing outcomes.
It's not difficult to recognize a causal relationship between architectural agility and any number of potential strategic and operational benefits. For example, inevitable architecture—which also embraces open-source/open-stack approaches—provides the foundation needed to support rapid development and deployment of flexible solutions that, in turn, enable innovation and growth. In a competitive landscape being redrawn continuously by technology disruption, time-to-market can be a competitive differentiator.
Moreover, architectural modernization is about more than lowering capital expenses by transitioning to the cloud and eliminating on-premises servers. Indeed, its most promising opportunity for cost savings often lies in reducing the number of people required to maintain systems. This does not mean simply decreasing headcount, though in some cases that may become necessary. Rather, by automating mundane "care and feeding" tasks, companies can free critical IT talent to focus on higher-level activities such as developing new products and services, working hand-in-hand with the business to support emerging needs, and deploying a revitalized technology stack that enables rapid growth in an innovation environment.
Beyond start-ups
To date, much of the "tire-kicking" and experimentation done on the inevitable-architecture model has taken place in the IT ecosystems of start-ups and other small companies that are unburdened by legacy systems. However, recently some larger organizations have begun experimenting with one or more inevitable-architecture components. For example, Marriott Hotels, which runs VMware virtual machines on an IBM cloud, recently deployed a hybrid cloud co-developed by the two vendors. This time-saving solution makes it possible to move virtual workloads created and stored on-premises to the cloud quickly, without having to rewrite or repackage them. Marriott reports that with the new solution, a process that could take up to a day can now be completed in an hour.3
And retail giant Walmart has embraced open-source with a new DevOps platform called OneOps that is designed to help developers write and launch apps more quickly. Walmart has made code for the OneOps project available on GitHub.4
In the coming months, expect to see other organizations follow suit by experimenting with one or more of the following inevitable-architecture elements:
Loosely coupled systems: Large enterprises often deploy thousands of applications to support and enable business. In established companies, many of the core applications are large, monolithic systems featuring layers of dependencies, workarounds, and rigidly defined batch interfaces. In such IT environments, quarterly or semiannual release schedules can create 24-month backlogs of updates and fixes. Moreover, making even minor changes to these core systems may require months of regression testing, adding to the backlog.5
Over the last several years, the emergence of microservices and the success of core revitalization initiatives have given rise to a fundamentally different approach to infrastructure design in which core components are no longer interdependent and monolithic but, rather, "loosely coupled." In this structure, system components make little if any use of the definitions of other components. Though they may interface with other components via APIs or other means, their developmental and operational independence makes it possible to make upgrades and changes to them without months of regression testing and coordination. They can also be more easily "composed" than large monolithic systems.
Containers: Similar to loosely coupled systems, containers break down monolithic interdependent architectures into manageable, largely independent pieces. Simply put, a container is an entire runtime environment—an application plus its dependencies, libraries and other binaries, and configuration files—virtualized and bundled into one package. By containerizing the application platform and its dependencies, differences in OS distributions and underlying infrastructure are abstracted away.6 Containers are fully portable and can live on-premises or in the cloud, depending on which is more cost-effective.
Container management software vendors such as Docker, CoreOS, BlueData, and others are currently enjoying popularity in the software world, due in large part to their ability to help developers break services and applications into small, manageable pieces. (Current industry leader Docker reports that its software has been downloaded more than 1.8 billion times and has helped build more than 280,000 applications.)7
Though containers may be popular among developers and with tech companies such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook, to date corporate CIOs seem to be taking a wait-and-see approach.8 That said, we are beginning to see a few companies outside the tech sector utilize containers as part of larger architecture revitalization efforts. For example, financial services firm Goldman Sachs has launched a yearlong project that will shift about 90 percent of the company's computing to containers. This includes all of the firm's applications—nearly 5,000 in total—that run on an internal cloud, as well as much of its software infrastructure.9
Speed first, then efficiency: As business becomes increasingly reliant on technology for emerging products and services, it becomes more important than ever for IT to shrink time-to-market schedules. As such, inevitable architecture emphasizes speed over efficiency—an approach that upends decades of processes and controls that, while well intentioned, often slow progress and discourage experimentation. Though it may be several years before many CIOs wholly (or even partially) embrace the "speed over efficiency" ethos, there are signs of momentum on this front. Acknowledging the gravitational pull that efficiency can have on development costs and velocity, streaming service Netflix has created an IT footprint that doesn't sacrifice speed for efficiency.10
Open source: Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy once quipped, "No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for somebody else… . It's better to create an ecology that gets most of the world's smartest people toiling in your garden for your goals. If you rely solely on you own employees, you'll never solve all your customers' needs." This idea, now referred to as Joy's Law, informs open-source software (OSS) and open-stack approaches to development, both core attributes of inevitable architecture.11
Many large companies still have old-world open-source policies featuring bureaucratic approval processes that ultimately defeat the entire purpose of OSS. Yet, to quote reluctant Nobel laureate Bob Dylan, the times they are a-changin'. One recent study of open-source adoption estimates that 78 percent of companies are now using OSS.12 Even the generally risk-averse federal government is getting in on the act, having recently outlined a policy to support access to custom software code developed by or for the federal government.13
Fault expecting: For decades, developers focused on design patterns that make systems fault-tolerant. Inevitable architecture takes this tactic to the next level by becoming "fault expecting." Famously illustrated in Netflix's adventures using Chaos Monkey, fault expecting is like a fire drill involving real fire. It deliberately injects failure into a system component so that developers can understand 1) how the system will react, 2) how to repair the problem, and 3) how to make the system more resilient in the future. As CIOs work to make systems more component-driven and less monolithic, fault expecting will likely become one of the more beneficial inevitable-architecture attributes.
Autonomic platforms: Inevitable architecture demands automation throughout the IT lifecycle, including automated testing, building, deployment, and operation of applications as well as large-scale autonomic platforms that are largely self-monitoring, self-learning, and self-healing. As discussed in Tech Trends 2016, autonomic platforms build upon and bring together two important trends in IT: software-defined everything's climb up the tech stack, and the overhaul of IT operating and delivery models under the DevOps movement. With more and more of IT becoming expressible as code—from underlying infrastructure to IT department tasks—organizations now have a chance to apply new architecture patterns and disciplines. In doing so, they can remove dependencies between business outcomes and underlying solutions, while redeploying IT talent from rote low-value work to higher-order capabilities.
Remembrance of mainframes past
For many established companies, the inevitable-architecture trend represents the next phase in a familiar modernization journey that began when they moved from mainframe to client-server and, then, a decade later, shifted to web-centric architecture. These transitions were not easy, often taking months or even years to complete. But in the end, they were worth the effort. Likewise, successfully deploying and leveraging inevitable architecture's elements will surely present challenges as the journey unfolds. Adoption will take time and will likely vary in scope according to an organization's existing capabilities and the incremental benefits the adopting organization achieves as it progresses.
Once again, the outcome will likely justify the effort. It is already becoming clear that taken together, inevitable architecture's elements represent a sea change across the IT enablement layer—a modern architecture up, down, and across the stack that can deliver immediate efficiency gains while simultaneously laying a foundation for agility, innovation, and growth. Its potential value is clear and attributable, as is the competitive threat from start-ups and nimble competitors that have already built solutions and operations with these concepts.
Lessons from the front lines
Future stack: Louisiana builds an IT architecture for tomorrow
With some legacy IT systems entering their third decade of service, in 2014 the state of Louisiana launched the Enterprise Architecture Project, an ambitious, multifaceted effort to break down operational silos, increase reusability of systems and services, and most important, create the foundation for the state's next-generation architecture. The end state was clear: Accelerate the delivery of flexible, secure building blocks and the capabilities to speed their use to produce value for Louisiana citizens. Changes to how IT procures, assembles, and delivers capabilities would be not only needed but inevitable.
"We deliver end-to-end IT services for 16 executive branch agencies," says Matthew Vince, the Office of Technology Services' chief design officer and director of project and portfolio management. "With a small IT staff and that much responsibility, we didn't see any way to take on a project like this without jumping into inevitable architecture."
Given the age and complexity of the state's legacy architecture—and that Louisiana's government takes a paced approach in adopting new technologies—it was important to define a clear strategy for achieving short- and longer-term goals. The team focused agencies on architecture principles and the "so what" of the inevitable modern capabilities it would supply: enabling components and reuse over specifying "microservices," how automation could help agencies over specifying a particular IT product, and the need for workload migration and hybrid cloud enablement over specifying a particular form of virtualization.
"For example, think about containers," says Michael Allison, the state's chief technology officer. "Having the ability to jump into Docker or Kubernetes today is not as important as being able to adopt container orchestration solutions in the future. Our immediate goal, then, is to lay the foundation for achieving longer-term goals."
Laying that foundation began by aligning IT's goals and strategies with those of agency leaders and business partners. IT wanted to determine what tools these internal customers needed to be successful and what options were available from their suppliers and partners before planning, prototyping, and providing working solutions to meet those needs.
After careful consideration of business and IT priorities, budgets, and technical requirements, IT teams began developing a next-generation software-defined data center (SDDC) to serve as the platform of choice for the enterprise architecture project and future line-of-business applications. This SDDC was put into production at the end of 2016 and now supports efforts in several EA project areas, including:
Security and risk management: Replaces network segregation with software-defined data security policies.
Cloud services: Uses both public and enterprise cloud services, including commercial infrastructure-as-a-service offerings.
Consolidation and optimization: Consolidates and optimizes data center services, service-oriented architecture, and governance to increase efficiencies and lower costs.14
Progress in these areas is already having a net positive impact on operations, Vince says. "Traditionally we were siloed in service delivery. Suddenly, barriers between teams are disappearing as they begin working through the data center. This has been one of the greatest benefits: Lines between traditionally segregated skill sets are becoming blurred and everyone is talking the same language.
We are seeing SDDC technology can be used across the enterprise rather than being confined to use by a single agency," he continues. "A priority in our move to the SDDC is integrating systems, maximizing reusability, and—when legislation allows us to—sharing data across agencies. Going forward, everything we do will be to meet the needs of the entire state government, not just a single agency."15
The keys to Citi-as-a-service
Responding to a seismic shift in customer expectations that has taken place during the past decade, leading financial services company Citi is transforming its IT architecture into a flexible, services-based model that supports new strategies, products, and business models.
"The sophistication and generational change in customer expectation in our industry as well as the delivery requirements impacts everything we do now, from behind the scenes items such as how we run our data centers to the way we design branch offices, mobile and ATM capabilities, and the financial instruments we offer," says Motti Finkelstein, managing director, CTO-Americas and Global Strategy and Planning at Citi. "Due to the dynamic nature of this change, the whole design of IT architecture needs to be more agile. Infrastructure should be flexible—compute, network, storage, security, databases, etc.—with elastic real-time capabilities to meet business demands in a time-efficient manner."
Citi actually began working toward its ultimate architecture goal more than a decade ago, when the organization took initial steps to virtualize its data centers. Other virtualization projects soon followed, eventually leading to an effort to standardize and focus architectural transformation on building a broad everything-as-a-service (XaaS) environment. Finkelstein estimates that ongoing efforts to transform Citi's architecture have reduced infrastructure costs significantly in the last decade. "We are continuing on a trajectory of not only expediting time to market delivery but becoming more cost-efficient as we move our optimization efforts up the stack with technologies such as containerization paired with platform-as-a-service," he says. Container technologies are rapidly becoming enterprise ready, and may inevitability become the bank's target architecture. Barriers to adoption are diminishing with industry standards coming into place and the up-front investment required to re-architect applications onto these platforms steadily reducing.
Leaders also found that while these new technical building blocks drove cost and efficiency savings for IT, equally important were the new capabilities they enabled. "While we were investing in virtualization, automation, and XaaS, we are also building our development capabilities," Finkelstein says. "Development will become much more efficient and productive as our engineers are designing and implementing XaaS environments, reducing time to market and improving adoption times for innovation in technology." Citi has engineered a PaaS environment with predefined microservices to facilitate rapid and parallel deployments; this enables the use of clear standards and templates to build and extend new services both internally and externally, which marks a significant change from only a few years ago.
Inevitably, speed to market and rapid outcomes are attracting the right kind of attention: "When we started working to create an XaaS environment, we thought it would be based on policy requirements," Finkelstein says. "Today, everyone—including the business—understands the need for this development process and the benefit of templates standardization to build new products and services. This model being DevOps-operated needs to have a lot of visibility into the process; we are starting to see different organizations become more involved in building those templates for success. At this point, it becomes more about tweaking a template than about starting from scratch." (DevOps is the term used for agile collaboration, communications, and automation between the development and operations technology units.)16
Inventing the inevitable
Google has been passionate about the piece-parts of inevitable architecture—a cloud-based, distributed, elastic, standardized technology stack built for reliability, scalability, and speed—since its earliest days. The company's head of infrastructure, Urs Hölzle (Google's eighth badged employee), recognized the inherent need for scale if the company were going to succeed in building a truly global business allowing people to search anything, from everywhere, with content delivered anywhere. With seven of its products each having more than a billion active users, that early vision has not only been the foundation of Google's growth—it has driven the very products and solutions fueling the company's expansion.
According to Tariq Shaukat, president of customers at Google Cloud, "We recognized that our technology architecture and operations had to be built to fulfill a different kind of scale and availability. We invented many of the core technologies to support our needs … because we had to." That led to the development, deployment, and open sourcing of many technologies that help fuel the growth of inevitable architecture—including MapReduce, Kubernetes, TensorFlow, and others. These technologies have become a complement to Google's commercial product roadmap, including the Google Cloud Platform, across infrastructure, app, data, and other architectural layers.
At the heart of Google's technology landscape is a systems mind-set: deeply committed to loosely coupled but tightly aligned components that are built expecting to be reused while anticipating change. This requires that distributed teams around the globe embrace common services, platforms, architectural principles, and design patterns. As development teams design and build new products, they begin with an end-state vision of how their products will operate within this architecture and, then, engineer them accordingly. Not only does this approach provide a common set of parameters and tools for development—it also provides a consistent approach to security and reliability, and can prevent architectural silos from springing up around a new application that doesn't work with all of Google's global systems. Extensions and additions to the architecture happen frequently but go through rigorous vetting processes. The collaborative nature of capabilities such as design and engineering is coupled with tight governance around non-negotiables such as security, privacy, availability, and performance.
Google's architectural efforts are delivering tangible benefits to both employees and customers. The company's forays into machine learning are one example: In a period of 18 to 24 months, it went from an isolated research project to a broad toolkit embedded into almost every product and project. Adds Shaukat, "The reason it was possible? A common architecture and infrastructure that makes it possible to rapidly deploy modules to groups that naturally want to embrace them. It was absolutely a grassroots deployment, with each team figuring out how machine learning might impact their users or customers." By rooting agility in a systems approach, the company can make an impact on billions of users around the globe.17
My take
John Seely Brown
Independent co-chairman, Center for the Edge
Deloitte LLP
The exponential pace of technological advancement is, if anything, accelerating. Look back at the amazing changes that have taken place during the last 15 years. At the beginning of the naughts, the holy grail of competitive advantage was scalable efficiency—a goal that had remained mostly unchanged since the industrial revolution. Organizations and markets were predictable, hierarchical, and seemingly controllable. The fundamental assumption of stability informed not only corporate strategies and management practices but also the mission and presumed impact of technology. By extension, it also informed IT operating models and infrastructure design.
Then the Big Shift happened. Fueled in part by macro advances in cloud, mobile, and analytics, exponential advances across technology disciplines spawned new competitors, rewired industries, and made obsolete many institutional architectures. Rather than thinking of our business models as a 200,000-ton cargo ship sailing on calm open waters, we suddenly needed to mimic a skilled kayaker navigating white water. Today, we must read contextual currents and disturbances, divining what lies beneath the surface, and use these insights to drive accelerated action.
At a lower level, new principles have emerged in the world of computer science. Eventual consistency is now an acceptable alternative to the transactional integrity of two-phase commit. Tightly aligned but loosely coupled architectures are becoming dominant. Mobile-first mind-sets have evolved, giving way to "cloud first"—and in some cases "cloud only"—landscapes. Distributed, unstructured, and democratized data is now the norm. Moreover, deep learning and cognitive technologies are increasingly harnessing data. Open standards and systems are providing free capabilities in messaging, provisioning, monitoring, and other disciplines. The proliferation of sensors and connected devices has introduced a new breed of architecture that requires complex event correlation and processing.
Collectively, these advances form the underpinnings of inevitable architecture. They are redefining best practices for IT infrastructure and are providing new opportunities to use this infrastructure to empower the edge. This, in turn, makes it possible for companies to rapidly bring complex new ideas and products to market.
Moreover, inevitable architecture supports experimentation at the pace of overarching technological advancements. Importantly, it also provides opportunities to automate environments and supporting operational workloads that can lead to efficiency gains and concrete cost savings while also enabling a new kind of agility. Companies can use these savings to fund more far-reaching inevitable architecture opportunities going forward.
In describing Amazon's relentless focus on new offerings and markets, Jeff Bezos once famously said, "Your margin is my opportunity." The gap between exponential technologies and any organization's ability to execute against its potential is the new margin upon which efficiencies can be realized, new products and offerings can be forged, and industries can be reshaped. If every company is a technology company, bold new approaches for managing and reimagining an organization's IT footprint become an essential part of any transformational journey. They can also help shrink the gap between technology's potential and operational reality—especially as the purpose of any given institution evolves beyond delivering transactions at scale for a minimum cost. Inevitable architecture can provide the wiring for scalable learning, the means for spanning ecosystem boundaries, and the fluidity and responsiveness we all now need to pursue tomorrow's opportunities.
Cyber implications
Overhauling IT infrastructure by embracing open source, open standards, virtualization, and cloud-first strategies means abandoning some long-held systems architecture design principles. Doing so may require rethinking your approach to security. For example, if you have been a network specialist for 30 years, you may consider some kind of perimeter defense or firewall foundational to be a good cyber defense strategy. In a virtualized, cloud-first world, such notions aren't necessarily taken as gospel anymore, as network environments become increasingly porous. Going forward, it will be important to focus on risks arising from new design philosophies. Open standards and cloud-first aren't just about network design—they also inform how you will design a flexible, adaptable, scalable cyber risk paradigm.
Also, as companies begin overhauling their IT infrastructure, they may have opportunities to integrate many of the security, compliance, and resilience capabilities they need into the new platforms being deployed by embedding them in templates, profiles, and supporting services. Seizing this opportunity may go a long way toward mitigating many of the risk and cyber challenges often associated with a standardized, flexible architecture model. Moreover, designing needed cybersecurity and risk management capabilities into new systems and architectures up front can, when done correctly, provide other long-term benefits as well:
Speed: Retrofitting a new product or solution with cyber capabilities may slow down development initiatives and boost costs. By addressing cyber considerations proactively as they begin overhauling IT infrastructure, companies may be able to accelerate the product development lifecycle.
Product design as a discipline: When risk and compliance managers collaborate with designers and engineers from the earliest stages of product development and transformation initiatives, together they can design "complete" products that are usable and effective and maintain security and compliance standards.
Effectiveness: By establishing practices and methodologies that emphasize risk considerations—and by taking steps to confirm that employees understand the company's approach to managing different types of risk—organizations may be able to move more efficiently and effectively. Just as infrastructure transformation initiatives offer designers the opportunity to incorporate risk and cybersecurity into new products and services, they offer the same opportunity to instill greater technology and risk fluency in employees throughout the enterprise.
However, with these benefits come questions and challenges that CIOs may need to address as they and their teams build more flexible and efficient architecture. For example, they may have to create additional processes to accommodate new cyber and risk capabilities that their organizations have not previously deployed.
Likewise, new platforms often come with risk and security capabilities that can be deployed, customized, and integrated with existing solutions and business process. While companies should take advantage of these capabilities, their existence does not mean you are home free in terms of risk and cybersecurity considerations. Risk profiles vary, sometimes dramatically, by organization and industry. Factory-embedded security and risk capabilities may not address the full spectrum of risks that your company faces.
Embracing open source and open standards also raises several risk considerations. Some may question the integrity and security of code to which anyone can contribute, and one challenge that organizations using open source code may face is mitigating whatever risk does come from using code written by anonymous strangers. CIOs should consider performing broad risk and capability assessments as part of an architecture transformation initiative. Likewise, they should evaluate what IT and legal support should be put in place to address potential issues.
Where do you start?
In organizing systems and processes to support an inevitable architecture (IA) model, start-ups often have the advantage of being able to begin with a blank canvas. Larger companies with legacy architectures, on the other hand, will have to approach this effort as a transformation journey that beings with careful planning and preparatory work. As you begin exploring IA transformation possibilities, consider the following initial steps:
- Establish your own principles: Approaches to inevitable architecture will differ by company according to business and technology priorities, available resources, and current capabilities. Some will emphasize cloud-first while others focus on virtualization and containers. To establish the principles and priorities that will guide your IA efforts, start by defining end-goal capabilities. Then, begin developing target architectures to turn this vision into reality. Remember that success requires more than putting IA components in place—business leaders and their teams must be able to use them to execute strategy and drive value.
- Take stock of who is doing what—and why: In many companies, various groups are already leveraging some IA components at project-specific, micro levels. As you craft your IA strategy, it will be important to know what technologies are being used, by whom, and to achieve what specific goals. For example, some teams may already be developing use cases in which containers figure prominently. Others may be independently sourcing cloud-based services or open standards to short-circuit delivery. With a baseline inventory of capabilities and activities in place, you can begin building a more accurate and detailed strategy for industrializing priority IA components, and for consolidating individual use case efforts into larger experiments. This, in turn, can help you develop a further-reaching roadmap and business case.
- Move from silos to business enablement: In the same way that CIOs and business teams are working together to erase boundaries between their two groups, development and infrastructure teams should break free of traditional skills silos and reorient as multidisciplinary, project-focused teams to help deliver on inevitable architecture's promise of business enablement. The beauty? Adopting virtualization and autonomics across the stack can set up such a transition nicely, as lower-level specialization and underlying tools and tasks are abstracted, elevated, or eliminated.
- CIO, heal thyself: Business leaders often view CIOs as change agents who are integral to business success. It's now time for CIOs to become change agents for their own departments. Step one? Shift your focus from short-term needs of individual business teams to medium or longer-term needs shared by multiple groups. For example, if as part of your IA strategy, seven of 10 internal business customers will transition to using containers, you will likely need to develop the means for moving code between these containers. You may also need to bring additional IT talent with server or container experience on staff. Unfortunately, some CIOs are so accustomed to reacting immediately to business requests that they may find it challenging to proactively anticipate and plan for business needs that appear slightly smaller on the horizon. The time to begin thinking longer-term is now.
Bottom line
In a business climate where time-to-market is becoming a competitive differentiator, large companies can no longer afford to ignore the impact that technical debt, heavy customization, complexity, and inadequate scalability have on their bottom lines. By transforming their legacy architecture into one that emphasizes cloud-first, containers, virtualized platforms, and reusability, they may be able to move broadly from managing instances to managing outcomes.
Originally published at Deloitte Insights


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The main aims of this chapter are to:
An interaction design project may aim to replace or update an established system, or it may aim to develop a totally innovative product with no obvious precedent. There may be an initial set of requirements, or the project may have to begin by producing a set of requirements from scratch. Whatever the initial situation and whatever the aim of the project, the users' needs, requirements, aspirations, and expectations have to be discussed, refined, clarified, and probably re-scoped. This requires an understanding of, among other things, the users and their capabilities, their current tasks and goals, the conditions under which the product will be used, and constraints on the product's performance.
Establishing requirements is also not simply writing ...
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City smokers are being challenged to stop for 28 days, as part of the national Stoptober challenge starting on October 1.
Stoptober is the biggest mass quit attempt in the country, driving over one million to date to kick the habit. If you can make it to 28 days smokefree, you're five times more likely to stay quit for good.
Roadshows held by the Healthy Peterborough lifestyle service will be held over the next two weeks where smokers can come and find out more:
- Saturday, 23 September - Outside Town Hall, Bridge Street
- Tuesday, 26 September - Werrington Shopping Centre
- Wednesday, 27 September - Serpentine Green Shopping Centre
- Thursday, 28 September, 1pm to 5pm - Marriott Hotel
- Friday, 29 September, 12noon to 3pm - Faizare-Madina Mosque
- Saturday, 30 September - Outside Town Hall, Bridge Street
- Sunday, 1 October - Outside Town Hall, Bridge Street
- Tuesday, 3 October - Outside Asda, Rivergate
- Tuesday, 17 October, 10am to 1pm - Voyager Academy
People who can't make the events can speak to smokefree specialists on 01733 590064 or visit local GPs and pharmacies.
Cllr Diane Lamb, Cabinet Member for Public Health at Peterborough City Council, said: "There are many ways to quit and Stoptober can help you choose what works for you. These include using medication (including nicotine replacement therapies such as patches and gum) or electronic cigarettes.
"Stoptober offers a range of free support to help you, including an app and daily emails from Public Health England. There is also lots of encouragement from the Stoptober online community on Facebook.
"In addition, you can get expert face-to-face advice from local stop smoking services. Those who use stop smoking aids and who get face-to-face support from their local stop smoking service are up to four times more likely to quit successfully."
For further information, including tips and advice to stop smoking, search 'Stoptober' on a search engine or visit the Healthy Peterborough website.


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Thailand(redirected from Tailand)
Also found in: Thesaurus, Encyclopedia.
Thai·land(tī′lănd′, -lənd) Formerly Si·am (sī-ăm′)
A country of southeast Asia on the Gulf of Thailand (formerly the Gulf of Siam), an arm of the South China Sea. Various Thai kingdoms were founded from the 13th century on, frequently coming into conflict with neighboring Burmese and Cambodian powers. Siam remained an absolute monarchy until 1932, when the king was compelled to accept a constitution, and the country was renamed Thailand in 1939. Thailand was occupied by the Japanese in World War II, and most of its numerous postwar governments were controlled by the military. Bangkok is the capital and the largest city.
1. (Placename) a kingdom in SE Asia, on the Andaman Sea and the Gulf of Thailand: united as a kingdom in 1350 and became a major SE Asian power; consists chiefly of a central plain around the Chao Phraya river system, mountains rising over 2400 m (8000 ft) in the northwest, and rainforest the length of the S peninsula. Parts of the SW coast suffered badly in the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004. Official language: Thai. Official religion: (Hinayana) Buddhist. Currency: baht. Capital: Bangkok. Pop: 67 448 120 (2013 est). Area: 513 998 sq km (198 455 sq miles). Former name (until 1939 and 1945–49): Siam
2. (Placename) Gulf of Thailand an arm of the South China Sea between the Malay Peninsula and Indochina. Former name: Gulf of Siam
Thai•land(ˈtaɪˌlænd, -lənd)
1. Formerly, Siam. a kingdom in SE Asia. 60,609,046; 198,115 sq. mi. (513,115 sq. km).Cap.: Bangkok.
2. Gulf of. Also called Gulf of Siam. an arm of the South China Sea, S of Thailand.
ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:
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|Thailand - a country of southeastern Asia that extends southward along the Isthmus of Kra to the Malay Peninsula; "Thailand is the official name of the former Siam"
Sino-Tibetan, Sino-Tibetan language - the family of tonal languages spoken in eastern Asia
ASEAN, Association of Southeast Asian Nations - an association of nations dedicated to economic and political cooperation in southeastern Asia and who joined with the United States to fight against global terrorism
Indochina, Indochinese peninsula - a peninsula of southeastern Asia that includes Myanmar and Cambodia and Laos and Malaysia and Thailand and Vietnam
Malay Peninsula - a peninsula in southeastern Asia occupied by parts of Malaysia and Thailand and Myanmar
Bangkok, capital of Thailand, Krung Thep - the capital and largest city and chief port of Thailand; a leading city in southeastern Asia; noted for Buddhist architecture
Chao Phraya - a river in Thailand formed by the confluence of the Nan and Ping Rivers; flows southward past Bangkok and empties into the Gulf of Thailand
Mekong, Mekong River - an Asian river; flows through a large delta in southern Vietnam into the South China Sea
Nan River, Nan - a river of western Thailand flowing southward to join the Ping River to form the Chao Phraya
Ping, Ping River - a river in western Thailand; a major tributary of the Chao Phraya
nước Thái Lan
Thailand[ˈtaɪlænd] N → Tailandia f
Thailand[ˈtaɪlænd] n → Thaïlande f
n → Thailand nt


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Washington Post
As for Colombia, free trade would also be lopsided in favor of the United States. Colombia already enjoys duty-free access to the U.S. market under existing laws benefiting Andean nations threatened by drug traffic. The trade agreement would give U.S. exporters similarly free access to Colombia's market…The Obama administration, supposedly intent on boosting exports and the domestic jobs they create, must stop equivocating and add Panama and Colombia to its free-trade priorities in the new Congress.
San Antonio Express-News
[Congress] need to act on agreements with Panama and Colombia that opponents have stalled with small-bore complaints. The United States needs to demonstrate leadership on international trade and solidify its economic relationship with allies. These agreements will benefit American consumers, businesses and job seekers.


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