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Results tagged ' Tom Selleck '
The night Tom Selleck missed meeting my mom
This is an old story but a favorite. Mother's Day reminds me what a terrific mom I have.
Fourteen years later, my non-sports fan mom Gina still regrets declining a game ticket after Ken and I had invited my parents to the Cal Ripken Jr.'s "2,131" grand events September 5-6, 1995 at Oriole Park at Camden Yards. We were allowed six tickets for each game: the tie of Lou Gehrig's consecutive game record, and the record-breaker.
For the first game, my dad Louie (peeking through the photo to your left) and my sister Pamela joined us, as did our then-16-year-old son Justin and his girlfriend Michele. Mom had agreed to babysit our youngest son at our house, then aged 3. She didn't quite understand the hoopla created around such baseball milestones.
Before the game, the Orioles hosted a fabulous VIP party with some big batters in attendance: Tom Selleck, Johnny Unitas, basketball pro David "The Admiral" Robinson, The Young & The Restless soap opera star Don Diamont, Frank Robinson, Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, Earl Weaver, Olympics speed skater Bonnie Blair and other sports-related greats.
What a thrilling and memorable evening!
When I phoned Mom to check on the tot, she was frazzled. It was one of those "I want my Mommy and Daddy!" nights. He had been crying "plenty loud," she said since we left, and "Mom-Mom" was unable to console him. Worse, he had seen us on TV, retrieved the car keys, and demanded his grandmother drive him to the stadium.
A night of babysitting hell.
Adding to my mother's misery, I mistakenly mentioned, "Guess who's here? Guess who we met? … Tom Selleck!" to which my mother's wail could have been heard from our Baltimore County home all the way downtown. (She adores Tom Selleck, who doesn't?)
"Do you mean I gave up a chance to meet Tom Selleck for this?" She was – and remains – in disbelief that she was stuck at home all evening trying to calm an irate toddler while her daughters and husband hobnobbed with Hollywood.
Sorry Tom, but you missed meeting a very pleasant lady – and a great babysitter. Thankfully, being the great Mom-Mom she is, it wasn't the last time she agreed to watch our kids.
Thanks, Mom.


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Well, that's a silly question but I'll bite.
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subset: commoncrawl


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Oman Air today moved a step closer to its fleet expansion target when the airline took delivery of its first Airbus A330-200. The aircraft was handed over at a ceremony held in Toulouse today, Tuesday September 15. The ceremony was attended by His Excellency Ahmed bin Abdulnabi Macki, Oman's Minister of National Economy, Deputy Chairman of the Financial Affairs and Energy Resources Council and Chairman of Oman Air, as well as Peter Hill, the airline's Chief Executive Officer.
Powered by Rolls-Royce Trent 700 engines, the first A330-200 in Oman Air's livery flew over from Toulouse, arriving at Seeb International Airport, Muscat, later today. Configured in a very comfortable two-class layout, the aircraft provides space for 216 passengers, including 20 business class seats and 196 economy class seats.
An official delivery ceremony will be held at Seeb International Airport, Muscat, on Wednesday September 16th to unveil the new aircraft.
The Chairman of Oman Air, His Excellency Ahmed bin Abdulnabi Macki, says:
"The delivery of this Airbus A330 is a milestone in the transformation of Oman Air. This brand-new A330 is the first of seven Airbus long-range aircraft to be delivered to Oman Air. All aircraft are to be delivered to the national carrier of Oman within the next two years as part of the airline's expansion plan for its international fleet. Together with the opening of new routes to Frankfurt later this month, and Munich, Paris, Maldives and Colombo next month, these new aircraft are confirmation of Oman Air's position as a major international airline."
The new Economy Class seats will offer adjustable headrests and footrests, individual 10-inch video screens and will have a pitch of 34 inches. The Business Class seats will offer fully lie-flat beds, electrically controlled backrests and leg rests, buddy seats and 17-inch in-flight entertainment screens.
Ensuring the very best in in-flight entertainment, Oman Air has selected the Thales i5000 system, which, when combined with the Rockwell Collins Tailwind 560 platform, will provide live TV to every seat on the aircraft. In addition, every passenger will have access to e-mail, internet, and mobile phone, as well as laptop, connectivity. This, coupled with the impeccable standard of service for which Oman Air is known, will make journeys truly memorable.
Peter Hill, the Chief Executive Officer of Oman Air, concludes:
"We are absolutely delighted to be taking delivery of this superb new aircraft. Not only is the A330 itself at the leading edge of civil aviation, but the onboard products that Oman Air is offering to passengers are second to none.
"This aircraft offers Economy and Business Class cabins. Both are fitted with brand new seats that offer more space, greater comfort, fantastic in-flight entertainment options, and the very latest in communications technology. In fact, our Business Class seat goes way beyond what many airlines offer in First Class.
"The new aircraft, the new seats, together with new uniforms, menus and a host of other features, illustrate our commitment to offering all our customers the very highest levels of quality in everything we do."


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From the days of hunter-gathers to modern shoppers attempting to decipher the complexity of products on food shelves today, the way we procure our food has changed dramatically. But our need for proper nourishment remains the same. Processed food, fast food, adulterated, and chemically enhanced foods make navigating the stocking of our pantries with healthy foods a truly mystifying chore.
Many of us don't know where this food comes from, and we don't know what's really in it. Most people who walk into a grocery store think that all of the edible-appearing products on the shelves are food. The truth is that many of them are not! Many of these items contain ingredients that have the potential to be harmful.
This book will help you take back control of your pantry and your food source.
Mira Dessy's book, The Pantry Principle is a real gem! If you eat, this book is a must-read – so you really know what's in your food. It is a user-friendly, comprehensive, well-researched and eye-opening resource. I look forward to recommending it to all my clients!"
– Trudy Scott, Food Mood Expert and Nutritionist, author
The Antianxiety Food Solution
If you want to know exactly what's lurking in the packaged food you eat, what chemicals are used to try to convince you that fake food is "real" — or if you just want the skinny on how to cook with fabulous fats, you cannot afford to overlook this book! A must-read for all who care about what goes into their own and their family's bodies. And I hope that means everyone!"
– Dr. Helayne Waldman, co-author,
The Whole Food Guide for Breast Cancer Survivors
Cleaning out the pantry is the perfect place to begin a journey towards healthy eating. The Pantry Principle does an excellent job of explaining the "hidden ingredients" lurking on grocery store shelves that stand between you and good health. Mira Dessy has created an indispensable guide to put your pantry and your health in great shape."
– Rebecca Katz, author
The Longevity Kitchen: Satisfying Big-Flavor Recipes Featuring the Top 16 Age-Busting Power Foods


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Chelsea go top Southampton shock Liverpool
Chelsea put a miserable week behind them to return to the Premier League summit.
LONDON - Chelsea put a miserable week behind them to return to the Premier League summit with a 2-0 home win over Fulham as the wheels came off Liverpool's bright start in a 1-0 home defeat by Southampton on Saturday.
A first Premier League goal from Chelsea's John Obi Mikel, after Oscar had given them the lead, sealed a victory that will help consign to memory last weekend's loss at Everton and their shock midweek Champions League reverse at home to Basel.
The victory moved Chelsea on to 10 points from five matches, ahead of Liverpool on goal difference after Southampton inflicted a first defeat of the season on the Merseysiders.
Saints defender Dejan Lovren scored with a second-half header to emphatically quieten the premature talk of a title push that had been swirling around Anfield.
Unbeaten Everton celebrated a stunning 3-2 success at West Ham United with Leighton Baines twice equalising from free kicks and on-loan striker Romelu Lukaku heading a late winner to move them up to fifth with nine points.
Hull City also twice came from a goal down to win 3-2 at Newcastle United and West Bromwich Albion's debutant Stephane Sessegnon scored against his former club Sunderland in a 3-0 victory that left the visitors stuck at the bottom of the table.
Aston Villa's deadline-day Czech signing Libor Kozak came off the bench to replace the injured Christian Benteke and then scored his first goal for the club in a 1-0 win at Norwich City.
The standings could take on a new complexion on Sunday when champions Manchester United visit local rivals Manchester City, third-placed Arsenal host Stoke City and Tottenham Hotspur, who are fourth, visit promoted Cardiff City.
Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho had sought to make light of their difficult week but was no doubt aware that a third straight reverse would have prompted awkward questions.
"After a bad start that everybody kept telling me was the worst start for a decade, today I go to bed and nobody is in front of us," he told Sky Sports.
"I'm in football for a long time and when results are not good I'm not expecting people to speak well about our team."
Striker Darren Bent missed a good chance for Fulham when he shot straight at Chelsea goalkeeper Petr Cech when through on goal in the first half, but it was a brief scare in an otherwise comfortable win for the hosts.
A nervy silence greeted the halftime whistle, but normal service was resumed when Oscar tapped home six minutes after the break.
Fulham keeper David Stockdale could only parry a cross from Andre Schuerrle as well as Samuel Eto'o's follow-up and the Brazil international was on hand to prod home.
Nigerian Mikel ensured there was no tension-racked finale as he scored his first goal in 185 league games for the club with a hooked finish after John Terry headed down a corner.
Liverpool were without playmaker Philippe Coutinho after the Brazilian suffered a shoulder injury against Swansea City on Monday and his creative link play was sorely missed as the Merseysiders laboured.
Southampton grew in confidence as the game wore on and looked by far the more threatening when Lovren gave them into the lead after 53 minutes.
The Croat easily held off Daniel Agger to meet an Adam Lallana corner and directed his header back across goal and past Liverpool keeper Simon Mignolet.
The visitors held on comfortably to grab their second win of the season and move up to sixth place with eight points.
"I just thought we never got going in terms of our tempo and technically we were nowhere near," Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers said on Sky Sports.
"To lose the goal from the corner was a double blow, but the players will recover from it."
Baines was the hero for Everton after his set-pieces twice hauled them back into the match at West Ham.
The hosts went ahead through Ravel Morrison in the first half and took the lead again after the break when Mark Noble fired home from the penalty spot before being sent off after getting a second booking.
Lukaku showed parent club Chelsea what they are missing when he headed the winner with five minutes remaining.
Newcastle's only major signing of the recent transfer window, Loic Remy, was making his first home start and twice put the hosts in the lead against Hull.
His hopes of being the match-winner however were ended when Robbie Brady and Ahmed Elmohamady cancelled out his first-half goals and Sone Aluko fired in a stunning volley to give promoted Hull victory.
Sunderland manager Paulo Di Canio will perhaps be rueing comments he made about his former player Sessegnon's commitment after the Benin international opened the scoring for his new club West Brom in a comfortable win.
Sessegnon, who signed on deadline day and was granted a work permit this week, was making his debut and marked the occasion with the opening goal, tapping in from close range.
Liam Ridgewell then volleyed a second and Morgan Amalfitano netted with an angled effort to make it 3-0.


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The new Facebook Terms of Service
Sorry about the lack of links in this blog post, its was written offline
So, Facebook fsck'd up, and then reverted to the old Terms of Service. I'm glad to see that wasn't enough, since lots of people actually ended up reading the previous Terms of Service, that were already bad enough.
The most offending - for me at least - on any version of Facebook's TOS was the "blank contract" clause, a clause unfortunately seen in lot's of Terms of Services, and that basicly say "you're agreeing with this but you shouldn't even bother reading this stuff, because we can change it whenever we like and you automaticly signed the new terms".
Fortunately, it seems, a new set of terms is being drafted and scheduled to replace the old ones by the 29th of March. Now in a phase of discussion (with their users only, so those who don't have a Facebook account because they don't agree with the actual terms - probably the most critics about them - don't have much chance of voice their worries about the new Terms), this terms (until further re-draft, which might happen thanks to the comments being submited by Facebook users) replace the previous "blank contract" clause with this:
12.1 We can change this Statement so long as we provide you notice through Facebook (unless you opt-out of such notice) and an opportunity to comment
12.2 [...] we'll give you a minimum of seven days notice
Unfortunately, I still think this is hardly acceptable. You are warned about the new terms in the service, and if you don't act in seven days, even if you didn't read your Facebook messages in that period, you are automaticly accepting the new Terms.
With this, further discussion about other items is more or less irrelevant, since even if all the rest is acceptable, there's no warranty that one month after you sign it, the Terms are still the same. Remember: this isn't acceptable in any "paper contract" you sign, how come should it be acceptable in an online contract?
Anyway, let me highlight some other items in that Terms that should worry you...
2.3 For content that is covered by intellectual property rights (like photos and videos), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub.licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use, copy, publicly perform or display, distribute, modify, translate, and create derivative works of ("use") any content you post on or in connection with Facebook
3.2 You will not collect users' information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scapers) without our permission
4.5 You will keep your contact information accurate and up-to-date
5.6 You will not use our copyrights or trademarks (including Facebook, the Facebook and F Logos, FB, Face, Poke, Wall and 32665) without our written permission
6.2 In the event you change or deactivate your mobile telephone number, you will promptly update your account information on Facebook to ensure that your messages are not sent to the person who acquires your old number
Sorry Facebook, to get me as an user, you still have a lot of work to do.


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Catching Fire Costume Designer Interview | Video
Meet the Woman Behind Katniss Everdeen's Wardrobe
Trish Summerville is one of Hollywood's biggest costume designers, having outfitted Rooney Mara for her turn as Lisbeth Salander in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and now Jennifer Lawrence for her role as Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games films. We spoke with Trish yesterday ahead of her big night being honored at the 2013 Style Awards, held right at the beginning of Fashion Week. Trish took us behind the scenes of some of her big-screen work and also dished on her new Capitol Couture collection for Net-a-Porter.
On Allie: J.Crew shirt and necklace


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This past weekend's NBAPA Top 100 High School Camp in Charlottesville, VA was a different experience than in years past, and in many respects that was not a good thing. Media access was restricted significantly, quality one-on-one interviews were very tough to come by, and the whole atmosphere was a tad flat.
Whether the reason was the coaches just failing to reach the kids, or the players themselves not bringing much energy, the result was some unusually uninspired basketball on a huge stage. After a lackluster start to the event, the kids finally put their games into gear on the final day. But the truth nevertheless is that more players hurt their ratings than helped themselves.
It's no secret that Duke had only a few real targets at the event, those being Jabari Parker, Al Freeman, and Semi Ojeleye. Here's what I saw from those three as well as a number of others:
Jabari Parker - His skill set makes him a man among children. He can pretty much do it all on the court; I saw no weaknesses in his game in the two games he [private] played. When he wanted to score, he put the ball on the floor and scored, utilizing a variety of driving moves to do so. Jabari was cordial and open with the media, but no matter what others claim, he did no one-on-one interviews, other than one national one. Michigan State has made a move on Parker, but Duke is still right there. My pal Van Coleman, who you will hear more from this week, said he understood Duke led for his services. Maybe they do, but I am not by any means ready to call Duke the clear leader here. A quick look at Duke's outstanding offers and the way they're recruiting certain positions suggests they may feel as I do. The Blue Devils certainly are a player for Parker, but in all honesty I do not feel as good about it as I did a year ago when I felt he was Duke's to lose. He will trim his list in July, and regardless, the Blue Devils will make that final cut.
Al Freeman - When I first heard Duke had offered Freeman, I was stunned. I had watched him play at the Carolina Challenge and frankly, could not see it. I haven't changed my mind, or more accurately, his play hasn't changed it. Freeman is a good defender who gets after it at that end, but he is not a point guard and certainly not a shooting guard either. Dave Telep really overrated this kid early on, but he will drop in the rankings. Freeman is stuck in tweener land, and it hasn't helped him that his chemistry with Cat Barber for the Boo Williams AAU squad has been average at best. Nobody invited to an event like the NBAPA is a "bad" player of course, but in my opinion Freeman is just not a kid who can help at the level Duke plays. Freeman had so-so numbers this weekend, and did nothing to get anyone talking about him. But I do give him high marks for talking on the court and trying to pump his teammates up. I was unable to catch Freeman for an interview, but from all accounts little has changed beyond his recent decision to transfer to Findlay Prep in Las Vegas.
Semi Ojeleye - As you already know, this kid is mature, bright and grounded. But can he play? Yes. As Andrew has mentioned, Semi has that ESPN-ready game, meaning he will launch the 3 pointer and also throw down the thunderous dunk. It is a bit freaky to see a 6'6" 220 pound player launch three point shots at this stage in his career, but Semi does it. But he needs to tighten his handle and go to work down low more. He is usually stronger than his opponent, so get down on the blocks more, already! Ojeleye is a good defender and had a lot of steals. His team made it to the finals, but lost to a team featuring 7'5" Mamadou Ndiaye. Ojeleye held his own guarding Ndiaye. 7'5"? That's insane. BTW, his first name is pronounced "Shimi," and we had a laugh at me wrecking his name a couple of times after asking about it. Talk about tongue tied. Ojeleye is a good team player and I would love to see him in a Duke uniform.
Anthony Barber - This kid is quick off the dribble, gets to the rack fast, and finishes well. He's also stronger than he looks. But he looks for his shot first and said as much to me in our interview. He will project as a PG and in time will be fine there, but right now he is a shooting guard. He lets his dribble get too far away from his body at times, causing a lack of control, but this is easily missed by many observers who are in awe of his speed. I think he should be a better defender too. But again, he is a bit of a black hole, hunting his shot on every play, so it was not surprising that while Barber was the camp's top scorer, his assist totals were less than impressive. That may be the reason campers did not vote him to the All-Star game. Regardless, in my book he was a top 10 player at this camp, and most other analysts agreed. Barber will remain at or near the top of the list when talking guards in his class. There are some kids you can tell are enjoying the game and Barber is one of them. I like his game a whole lot, but I am not sure Duke likes it enough to offer.
Parker Cartright - So, I started to hear that Cartright grew up a Duke fan, so I made sure to ask him about that, as you will see in an interview. Most everybody at the camp liked him, but he looks like a junior high baller in that he has a slight build and may be 5'9" on his tiptoes. The kid is unselfish and really involves his teammates in the action, and his speed can break a defense down. He's a pesky defender, but if a bigger player gets him on his hip, he has a hard time recovering. He is high energy and has the drive to get better, and those are two things all coaches look for in a prospect. Great kid to talk to and has offers from Arizona and UCLA, but he lit up when I asked him about Duke. Problem is Duke is in with so many PG types, and many analysts feel he will be tough to get off the west coast in any event.
Cliff Alexander - I wanted to see where his head was and it is in the midwest. Duke will not waste its time unless something changes. He dominated at the camp and was clearly the best center there, keeping in mind that post play as a whole was not impressive in Charlottesville. Alexander has a mature body for his age and has the will to battle inside.
Noah Vonleh - His game impressed me; his off-court demeanor did not. I hardly got anything out of him during a multiple site interview, meaning he plays it close to the vest and/or is not enthused. UNC is on him hard and Duke may get involved with this 2014 kid, but my impression from the interview is that it may be too late to get in deep here unless Duke increases its effort level soon.
Wayne Selden - Wayne Selden is always consistent, but he did not stand out this weekend. Duke feels he will be a long shot and will likely stay on the sidelines on this one, but I like his game and his size.
Kavon Looney - This was the first time I focused in on his game and I liked him a lot. The 2014 star can do a little bit of everything and he played well here, holding his own against older players, particularly on the boards. We tried, but never could manage to get together for a one-on-one. He is worth keeping an eye on.
Others who caught my eye at the NBAPA Camp - Kuran Iverson, Andrew Harrison, Brannen Greene. Iverson appeared to be more motivated than when many last saw him, and he seemingly impressed everyone. Harrison is a complete player and was the better of the twin brothers on this weekend. Greene has improved leaps and bounds since the last time I saw him play.
Rodney Hood - No, he was not there. But I got asked by everybody what I thought about his pending decision.
Small world - So one writer who worked in Indy and is now with Rivals asked me about Hood. Turns out he wrote that controversial article on Coach K that appeared in the Indy paper during the FInal Four weekend when Duke defeated Butler. It was the article in which they acted as if a child used a crayon on the front page, drawing devil horns on Krzyzewski. It was tacky and unprofessional -- a true brain poot by anyone's standards. I then got the low-down and will only say he met with Duke officials per his paper's request. For our SID's privacy and others I will refrain from the details. He claimed he was awoken by a call from a friend, who asked, "What were you thinking?" He also claimed he knew nothing about it. When asked who did it, he claimed he didn't know. Yeah, right. How does it not come out who took it upon themselves to let the paper go out as it did before being yanked off the newsstands?
Site shake ups - I saw Jerry Meyer in a 247 Camp and asked him when he went with them. As you know, 247 has courted us in a big way, but we chose to remain independent. Turns out Rivals let him and his big salary go, leaving Eric Bossi in charge along with the newly-hired Alex Kline, who uses smoke and mirror tactics better than anybody I know. Anyhow, I then learned ESPN shut down its High School division and that there was a major loss of jobs in the process.
Trouble ahead for the NBA? - A power struggle is brewing with the NBA and you could feel the tension in many cases. I had an interesting conversation with Dave Wasserman and while I cannot share what was said, let's just say they will have a mess of legal issues once the Finals end.
The USA Basketball effect - Many were dismayed at the talent level at the NBAPA camp. It was the worst I've seen to date. Some quickly pointed the finger at USA Basketball, but I found it interesting what the overall take was on the future of patriotic hoops. The consensus was that props go to Mike Krzyzewski for his role in getting the world's best on the same page and wanting to play. But many feel that once he steps down, USA Basketball will lose a lot of its popularity, and as a result the camps will be full again. Only time will tell on this one, but the theory is plausible and if accurate, it's a real testament to Coach K's influence. Speaking of USA Basketball, I will head to Coach K's press conference tomorrow, and look forward to seeing what he has to say about his upcoming adventures. [/private]


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Home > Career Center
Syracuse, NY – Veterinarian
Lyncourt Veterinary Hospital in Syracuse, NY is seeking an associate veterinarian to join the team. We are a full-service animal hospital that provides quality veterinary care for dogs and cats. We are fully equipped with digital radiograph as well as dental. This position offers a full time schedule with no after-hours appointments require
This is an ideal opportunity for new grads or experienced veterinarians ready to help expand and develop our services to offer more diagnostic and surgical options for our patients. Our modern and inviting hospital boasts superb veterinarians and caring support staff that are dedicated to our patients, clients, and community.
Lyncourt is a northwest suburb of the city of Syracuse, located in Onondaga County, is the regions major metropolitan center. It has been appropriately called the Crossroads of New York State, due to its central location. Pursue your passions while creating new experiences! Whether it's being stopped at the country's only upside-down stoplight; climbing the world's largest indoor suspended ropes course inside of Destiny USA, New York's largest shopping, dining and entertainment center; getting down to a live band and finger-licking good BBQ at Dinosaur Bar-B-Que. Syracuse has something to offer everyone!
If you are committed to continued improvement in patient care and client service, we would love to hear from you! We are part of a family of practices with a long history and reputation that separates us from others – see what all the buzz is about! We support our veterinarians with superior salary, benefits (including health and dental, 401(k), CE allowance, vacation, dues, and liability coverage), outstanding practice teams, and a family friendly atmosphere
NOVA is part of the Virginia Community College System
Northern Virginia Community College © 2011


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Wings in the Dark
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|In his dedicated pursuit of technology that will aid pilots to safely "fly blind" during adverse conditions. aerial innovator Ken Gordon is literally blinded in an accident, but this setback doesn't deter him from his goal.
|Directed by:
|James Flood
|Myrna Loy, Cary Grant, Roscoe Karns, Hobart Cavanaugh, Dean Jagger, Russell Hopton, Matt McHugh, Graham McNamee


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The Ratings Game
In 1996, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, remarked on "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" that there were two superpowers in the world the United States and Moody's bond-rating service and it was sometimes unclear which was more powerful. Moody's was then a private company that rated corporate bonds, but it was, already, spreading its wings into the exotic business of rating securities backed by pools of residential mortgages.
Obscure and dry-seeming as it was, this business offered a certain magic. The magic consisted of turning risky mortgages into investments that would be suitable for investors who would know nothing about the underlying loans. To get why this is impressive, you have to think about all that determines whether a mortgage is safe. Who owns the property? What is his or her income? Bundle hundreds of mortgages into a single security and the questions multiply; no investor could begin to answer them. But suppose the security had a rating. If it were rated triple-A by a firm like Moody's, then the investor could forget about the underlying mortgages. He wouldn't need to know what properties were in the pool, only that the pool was triple-A it was just as safe, in theory, as other triple-A securities.
Over the last decade, Moody's and its two principal competitors, Standard & Poor's and Fitch, played this game to perfection putting what amounted to gold seals on mortgage securities that investors swept up with increasing élan. For the rating agencies, this business was extremely lucrative. Their profits surged, Moody's in particular: it went public, saw its stock increase sixfold and its earnings grow by 900 percent.
By providing the mortgage industry with an entree to Wall Street, the agencies also transformed what had been among the sleepiest corners of finance. No longer did mortgage banks have to wait 10 or 20 or 30 years to get their money back from homeowners. Now they sold their loans into securitized pools and their capital thus replenished wrote new loans at a much quicker pace.
Mortgage volume surged; in 2006, it topped $2.5 trillion. Also, many more mortgages were issued to risky subprime borrowers. Almost all of those subprime loans ended up in securitized pools; indeed, the reason banks were willing to issue so many risky loans is that they could fob them off on Wall Street.
But who was evaluating these securities? Who was passing judgment on the quality of the mortgages, on the equity behind them and on myriad other investment considerations? Certainly not the investors. They relied on a credit rating.
Thus the agencies became the de facto watchdog over the mortgage industry. In a practical sense, it was Moody's and Standard & Poor's that set the credit standards that determined which loans Wall Street could repackage and, ultimately, which borrowers would qualify. Effectively, they did the job that was expected of banks and government regulators. And today, they are a central culprit in the mortgage bust, in which the total loss has been projected at $250 billion and possibly much more.
In the wake of the housing collapse, Congress is exploring why the industry failed and whether it should be revamped (hearings in the Senate Banking Committee were expected to begin April 22). Two key questions are whether the credit agencies which benefit from a unique series of government charters enjoy too much official protection and whether their judgment was tainted. Presumably to forestall criticism and possible legislation, Moody's and S.&P. have announced reforms. But they reject the notion that they should have been more vigilant. Instead, they lay the blame on the mortgage holders who turned out to be deadbeats, many of whom lied to obtain their loans.
Arthur Levitt, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, charges that "the credit-rating agencies suffer from a conflict of interest perceived and apparent that may have distorted their judgment, especially when it came to complex structured financial products." Frank Partnoy, a professor at the University of San Diego School of Law who has written extensively about the credit-rating industry, says that the conflict is a serious problem. Thanks to the industry's close relationship with the banks whose securities it rates, Partnoy says, the agencies have behaved less like gatekeepers than gate openers. Last year, Moody's had to downgrade more than 5,000 mortgage securities a tacit acknowledgment that the mortgage bubble was abetted by its overly generous ratings. Mortgage securities rated by Standard & Poor's and Fitch have suffered a similar wave of downgrades.
Presto! How 2,393 Subprime Loans Become a High-Grade Investment
The business of assigning a rating to a mortgage security is a complicated affair, and Moody's recently was willing to walk me through an actual mortgage-backed security step by step. I was led down a carpeted hallway to a well-appointed conference room to meet with three specialists in mortgage-backed paper. Moody's was fair-minded in choosing an example; the case they showed me, which they masked with the name "Subprime XYZ," was a pool of 2,393 mortgages with a total face value of $430 million.
Subprime XYZ typified the exuberance of the age. All the mortgages in the pool were subprime that is, they had been extended to borrowers with checkered credit histories. In an earlier era, such people would have been restricted from borrowing more than 75 percent or so of the value of their homes, but during the great bubble, no such limits applied.
Moody's did not have access to the individual loan files, much less did it communicate with the borrowers or try to verify the information they provided in their loan applications. "We aren't loan officers," Claire Robinson, a 20-year veteran who is in charge of asset-backed finance for Moody's, told me. "Our expertise is as statisticians on an aggregate basis. We want to know, of 1,000 individuals, based on historical performance, what percent will pay their loans?"
The loans in Subprime XYZ were issued in early spring 2006 what would turn out to be the peak of the boom. They were originated by a West Coast company that Moody's identified as a "nonbank lender." Traditionally, people have gotten their mortgages from banks, but in recent years, new types of lenders peddling sexier products grabbed an increasing share of the market. This particular lender took the loans it made to a New York investment bank; the bank designed an investment vehicle and brought the package to Moody's.
Moody's assigned an analyst to evaluate the package, subject to review by a committee. The investment bank provided an enormous spreadsheet chock with data on the borrowers' credit histories and much else that might, at very least, have given Moody's pause. Three-quarters of the borrowers had adjustable-rate mortgages, or ARMs "teaser" loans on which the interest rate could be raised in short order. Since subprime borrowers cannot afford higher rates, they would need to refinance soon. This is a classic sign of a bubble lending on the belief, or the hope, that new money will bail out the old.
Moody's learned that almost half of these borrowers 43 percent did not provide written verification of their incomes. The data also showed that 12 percent of the mortgages were for properties in Southern California, including a half-percent in a single ZIP code, in Riverside. That suggested a risky degree of concentration.
On the plus side, Moody's noted, 94 percent of those borrowers with adjustable-rate loans said their mortgages were for primary residences. "That was a comfort feeling," Robinson said. Historically, people have been slow to abandon their primary homes. When you get into a crunch, she added, "You'll give up your ski chalet first."
Another factor giving Moody's comfort was that all of the ARM loans in the pool were first mortgages (as distinct from, say, home-equity loans). Nearly half of the borrowers, however, took out a simultaneous second loan. Most often, their two loans added up to all of their property's presumed resale value, which meant the borrowers had not a cent of equity.
In the frenetic, deal-happy climate of 2006, the Moody's analyst had only a single day to process the credit data from the bank. The analyst wasn't evaluating the mortgages but, rather, the bonds issued by the investment vehicle created to house them. A so-called special-purpose vehicle a ghost corporation with no people or furniture and no assets either until the deal was struck would purchase the mortgages. Thereafter, monthly payments from the homeowners would go to the S.P.V. The S.P.V. would finance itself by selling bonds. The question for Moody's was whether the inflow of mortgage checks would cover the outgoing payments to bondholders. From the investment bank's point of view, the key to the deal was obtaining a triple-A rating without which the deal wouldn't be profitable. That a vehicle backed by subprime mortgages could borrow at triple-A rates seems like a trick of finance. "People say, 'How can you create triple-A out of B-rated paper?' " notes Arturo Cifuentes, a former Moody's credit analyst who now designs credit instruments. It may seem like a scam, but it's not.
The secret sauce is that the S.P.V. would float 12 classes of bonds, from triple-A to a lowly Ba1. The highest-rated bonds would have first priority on the cash received from mortgage holders until they were fully paid, then the next tier of bonds, then the next and so on. The bonds at the bottom of the pile got the highest interest rate, but if homeowners defaulted, they would absorb the first losses.
It was this segregation of payments that protected the bonds at the top of the structure and enabled Moody's to classify them as triple-A. Imagine a seaside condo beset by flooding: just as the penthouse will not get wet until the lower floors are thoroughly soaked, so the triple-A bonds would not lose a dime unless the lower credits were wiped out.
Structured finance, of which this deal is typical, is both clever and useful; in the housing industry it has greatly expanded the pool of credit. But in extreme conditions, it can fail. The old-fashioned corner banker used his instincts, as well as his pencil, to apportion credit; modern finance is formulaic. However elegant its models, forecasting the behavior of 2,393 mortgage holders is an uncertain business. "Everyone assumed the credit agencies knew what they were doing," says Joseph Mason, a credit expert at Drexel University. "A structural engineer can predict what load a steel support will bear; in financial engineering we can't predict as well."
Mortgage-backed securities like those in Subprime XYZ were not the terminus of the great mortgage machine. They were, in fact, building blocks for even more esoteric vehicles known as collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.'s. C.D.O.'s were financed with similar ladders of bonds, from triple-A on down, and the credit-rating agencies' role was just as central. The difference is that XYZ was a first-order derivative its assets included real mortgages owned by actual homeowners. C.D.O.'s were a step removed instead of buying mortgages, they bought bonds that were backed by mortgages, like the bonds issued by Subprime XYZ. (It is painful to consider, but there were also third-order instruments, known as C.D.O.'s squared, which bought bonds issued by other C.D.O.'s.)
Miscalculations that were damaging at the level of Subprime XYZ were devastating at the C.D.O. level. Just as bad weather will cause more serious delays to travelers with multiple flights, so, if the underlying mortgage bonds were misrated, the trouble was compounded in the case of the C.D.O.'s that purchased them.
Moody's used statistical models to assess C.D.O.'s; it relied on historical patterns of default. This assumed that the past would remain relevant in an era in which the mortgage industry was morphing into a wildly speculative business. The complexity of C.D.O.'s undermined the process as well. Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, which recently scooped up the mortally wounded Bear Stearns, says, "There was a large failure of common sense" by rating agencies and also by banks like his. "Very complex securities shouldn't have been rated as if they were easy-to-value bonds."
The Accidental Watchdog
John Moody, a Wall Street analyst and former errand runner, hit on the idea of synthesizing all kinds of credit information into a single rating in 1909, when he published the manual "Moody's Analyses of Railroad Investments." The idea caught on with investors, who subscribed to his service, and by the mid-'20s, Moody's faced three competitors: Standard Statistics and Poor's Publishing (which later merged) and Fitch.
Then as now, Moody's graded bonds on a scale with 21 steps, from Aaa to C. (There are small differences in the agencies' nomenclatures, just as a grande latte at Starbucks becomes a "medium" at Peet's. At Moody's, ratings that start with the letter "A" carry minimal to low credit risk; those starting with "B" carry moderate to high risk; and "C" ratings denote bonds in poor standing or actual default.) The ratings are meant to be an estimate of probabilities, not a buy or sell recommendation. For instance, Ba bonds default far more often than triple-As. But Moody's, as it is wont to remind people, is not in the business of advising investors whether to buy Ba's; it merely publishes a rating.
Until the 1970s, its business grew slowly. But several trends coalesced to speed it up. The first was the collapse of Penn Central in 1970 a shattering event that the credit agencies failed to foresee. It so unnerved investors that they began to pay more attention to credit risk.
Government responded. The Securities and Exchange Commission, faced with the question of how to measure the capital of broker-dealers, decided to penalize brokers for holding bonds that were less than investment-grade (the term applies to Moody's 10 top grades). This prompted a question: investment grade according to whom? The S.E.C. opted to create a new category of officially designated rating agencies, and grandfathered the big three S.&P., Moody's and Fitch. In effect, the government outsourced its regulatory function to three for-profit companies.
Bank regulators issued similar rules for banks. Pension funds, mutual funds, insurance regulators followed. Over the '80s and '90s, a latticework of such rules redefined credit markets. Many classes of investors were now forbidden to buy noninvestment-grade bonds at all.
Issuers thus were forced to seek credit ratings (or else their bonds would not be marketable). The agencies realizing they had a hot product and, what's more, a captive market started charging the very organizations whose bonds they were rating. This was an efficient way to do business, but it put the agencies in a conflicted position. As Partnoy says, rather than selling opinions to investors, the rating agencies were now selling "licenses" to borrowers. Indeed, whether their opinions were accurate no longer mattered so much. Just as a police officer stopping a motorist will want to see his license but not inquire how well he did on his road test, it was the rating not its accuracy that mattered to Wall Street.
The case of Enron is illustrative. Throughout the summer and fall of 2001, even though its credit was rapidly deteriorating, the rating agencies kept it at investment grade. This was not unusual; the agencies typically lag behind the news. On Nov. 28, 2001, S.&P. finally dropped Enron's bonds to subinvestment grade. Although its action merely validated the market consensus, it caused the stock to collapse. To investors, S.&P.'s action was a signal that Enron was locked out of credit markets; it had lost its "license" to borrow. Four days later it filed for bankruptcy.
Another trend that spurred the agencies' growth was that more companies began borrowing in bond markets instead of from banks. According to Chris Mahoney, a just-retired Moody's veteran of 22 years, "The agencies went from being obscure and unimportant players to central ones."
A Conflict of Interest?
Nothing sent the agencies into high gear as much as the development of structured finance. As Wall Street bankers designed ever more securitized products using mortgages, credit-card debt, car loans, corporate debt, every type of paper imaginable the agencies became truly powerful.
In structured-credit vehicles like Subprime XYZ, the agencies played a much more pivotal role than they had with (conventional) bonds. According to Lewis Ranieri, the Salomon Brothers banker who was a pioneer in mortgage bonds, "The whole creation of mortgage securities was involved with a rating."
What the bankers in these deals are really doing is buying a bunch of I.O.U.'s and repackaging them in a different form. Something has to make the package worth or seem to be worth more that the sum of its parts, otherwise there would be no point in packaging such securities, nor would there be any profits from which to pay the bankers' fees.
That something is the rating. Credit markets are not continuous; a bond that qualifies, though only by a hair, as investment grade is worth a lot more than one that just fails. As with a would-be immigrant traveling from Mexico, there is a huge incentive to get over the line.
The challenge to investment banks is to design securities that just meet the rating agencies' tests. Risky mortgages serve their purpose; since the interest rate on them is higher, more money comes into the pool and is available for paying bond interest. But if the mortgages are too risky, Moody's will object. Banks are adroit at working the system, and pools like Subprime XYZ are intentionally designed to include a layer of Baa bonds, or those just over the border. "Every agency has a model available to bankers that allows them to run the numbers until they get something they like and send it in for a rating," a former Moody's expert in securitization says. In other words, banks were gaming the system; according to Chris Flanagan, the subprime analyst at JPMorgan, "Gaming is the whole thing."
When a bank proposes a rating structure on a pool of debt, the rating agency will insist on a cushion of extra capital, known as an "enhancement." The bank inevitably lobbies for a thin cushion (the thinner the capitalization, the fatter the bank's profits). It's up to the agency to make sure that the cushion is big enough to safeguard the bonds. The process involves extended consultations between the agency and its client. In short, obtaining a rating is a collaborative process.
The evidence on whether rating agencies bend to the bankers' will is mixed. The agencies do not deny that a conflict exists, but they assert that they are keen to the dangers and minimize them. For instance, they do not reward analysts on the basis of whether they approve deals. No smoking gun, no conspiratorial e-mail message, has surfaced to suggest that they are lying. But in structured finance, the agencies face pressures that did not exist when John Moody was rating railroads. On the traditional side of the business, Moody's has thousands of clients (virtually every corporation and municipality that sells bonds). No one of them has much clout. But in structured finance, a handful of banks return again and again, paying much bigger fees. A deal the size of XYZ can bring Moody's $200,000 and more for complicated deals. And the banks pay only if Moody's delivers the desired rating. Tom McGuire, the Jesuit theologian who ran Moody's through the mid-'90s, says this arrangement is unhealthy. If Moody's and a client bank don't see eye to eye, the bank can either tweak the numbers or try its luck with a competitor like S.&P., a process known as "ratings shopping."
And it seems to have helped the banks get better ratings. Mason, of Drexel University, compared default rates for corporate bonds rated Baa with those of similarly rated collateralized debt obligations until 2005 (before the bubble burst). Mason found that the C.D.O.'s defaulted eight times as often. One interpretation of the data is that Moody's was far less discerning when the client was a Wall Street securitizer.
After Enron blew up, Congress ordered the S.E.C. to look at the rating industry and possibly reform it. The S.E.C. ducked. Congress looked again in 2006 and enacted a law making it easier for competing agencies to gain official recognition, but didn't change the industry's business model. By then, the mortgage boom was in high gear. From 2002 to 2006, Moody's profits nearly tripled, mostly thanks to the high margins the agencies charged in structured finance. In 2006, Moody's reported net income of $750 million. Raymond W. McDaniel Jr., its chief executive, gloated in the annual report for that year, "I firmly believe that Moody's business stands on the 'right side of history' in terms of the alignment of our role and function with advancements in global capital markets."
Using Weather in Antarctica To Forecast Conditions in Hawaii
Even as McDaniel was crowing, it was clear in some corners of Wall Street that the mortgage market was headed for trouble. The housing industry was cooling off fast. James Kragenbring, a money manager with Advantus Capital Management, complained to the agencies as early as 2005 that their ratings were too generous. A report from the hedge fund of John Paulson proclaimed astonishment at "the mispricing of these securities." He started betting that mortgage debt would crash.
Even Mark Zandi, the very visible economist at Moody's forecasting division (which is separate from the ratings side), was worried about the chilling crosswinds blowing in credit markets. In a report published in May 2006, he noted that consumer borrowing had soared, household debt was at a record and a fifth of such debt was classified as subprime. At the same time, loan officers were loosening underwriting standards and easing rates to offer still more loans. Zandi fretted about the "razor-thin" level of homeowners' equity, the avalanche of teaser mortgages and the $750 billion of mortgages he judged to be at risk. Zandi concluded, "The environment feels increasingly ripe for some type of financial event."
A month after Zandi's report, Moody's rated Subprime XYZ. The analyst on the deal also had concerns. Moody's was aware that mortgage standards had been deteriorating, and it had been demanding more of a cushion in such pools. Nonetheless, its credit-rating model continued to envision rising home values. Largely for that reason, the analyst forecast losses for XYZ at only 4.9 percent of the underlying mortgage pool. Since even the lowest-rated bonds in XYZ would be covered up to a loss level of 7.25 percent, the bonds seemed safe.
XYZ now became the responsibility of a Moody's team that monitors securities and changes the ratings if need be (the analyst moved on to rate a new deal). Almost immediately, the team noticed a problem. Usually, people who finance a home stay current on their payments for at least a while. But a sliver of folks in XYZ fell behind within 90 days of signing their papers. After six months, an alarming 6 percent of the mortgages were seriously delinquent. (Historically, it is rare for more than 1 percent of mortgages at that stage to be delinquent.)
Moody's monitors began to make inquiries with the lender and were shocked by what they heard. Some properties lacked sod or landscaping, and keys remained in the mailbox; the buyers had never moved in. The implication was that people had bought homes on spec: as the housing market turned, the buyers walked.
By the spring of 2007, 13 percent of Subprime XYZ was delinquent and it was worsening by the month. XYZ was hardly atypical; the entire class of 2006 was performing terribly. (The class of 2007 would turn out to be even worse.)
In April 2007, Moody's announced it was revising the model it used to evaluate subprime mortgages. It noted that the model "was first introduced in 2002. Since then, the mortgage market has evolved considerably." This was a rather stunning admission; its model had been based on a world that no longer existed.
Poring over the data, Moody's discovered that the size of people's first mortgages was no longer a good predictor of whether they would default; rather, it was the size of their first and second loans that is, their total debt combined. This was rather intuitive; Moody's simply hadn't reckoned on it. Similarly, credit scores, long a mainstay of its analyses, had not proved to be a "strong predictor" of defaults this time. Translation: even people with good credit scores were defaulting. Amy Tobey, leader of the team that monitored XYZ, told me, "It seems there was a shift in mentality; people are treating homes as investment assets." Indeed. And homeowners without equity were making what economists call a rational choice; they were abandoning properties rather than make payments on them. Homeowners' equity had never been as high as believed because appraisals had been inflated.
Over the summer and fall of 2007, Moody's and the other agencies repeatedly tightened their methodology for rating mortgage securities, but it was too late. They had to downgrade tens of billions of dollars of securities. By early this year, when I met with Moody's, an astonishing 27 percent of the mortgage holders in Subprime XYZ were delinquent. Losses on the pool were now estimated at 14 percent to 16 percent three times the original estimate. Seemingly high-quality bonds rated A3 by Moody's had been downgraded five notches to Ba2, as had the other bonds in the pool aside from its triple-A's.
The pain didn't stop there. Many of the lower-rated bonds issued by XYZ, and by mortgage pools like it, were purchased by C.D.O.'s, the second-order mortgage vehicles, which were eager to buy lower-rated mortgage paper because it paid a higher yield. As the agencies endowed C.D.O. securities with triple-A ratings, demand for them was red hot. Much of it was from global investors who knew nothing about the U.S. mortgage market. In 2006 and 2007, the banks created more than $200 billion of C.D.O.'s backed by lower-rated mortgage paper. Moody's assigned a different team to rate C.D.O.'s. This team knew far less about the underlying mortgages than did the committee that evaluated Subprime XYZ. In fact, Moody's rated C.D.O.'s without knowing which bonds the pool would buy.
A C.D.O. operates like a mutual fund; it can buy or sell mortgage bonds and frequently does so. Thus, the agencies rate pools with assets that are perpetually shifting. They base their ratings on an extensive set of guidelines or covenants that limit the C.D.O. manager's discretion.
Late in 2006, Moody's rated a C.D.O. with $750 million worth of securities. The covenants, which act as a template, restricted the C.D.O. to, at most, an 80 percent exposure to subprime assets, and many other such conditions. "We're structure experts," Yuri Yoshizawa, the head of Moody's' derivative group, explained. "We're not underlying-asset experts." They were checking the math, not the mortgages. But no C.D.O. can be better than its collateral.
Moody's rated three-quarters of this C.D.O.'s bonds triple-A. The ratings were derived using a mathematical construct known as a Monte Carlo simulation as if each of the underlying bonds would perform like cards drawn at random from a deck of mortgage bonds in the past. There were two problems with this approach. First, the bonds weren't like those in the past; the mortgage market had changed. As Mark Adelson, a former managing director in Moody's structured-finance division, remarks, it was "like observing 100 years of weather in Antarctica to forecast the weather in Hawaii." And second, the bonds weren't random. Moody's had underestimated the extent to which underwriting standards had weakened everywhere. When one mortgage bond failed, the odds were that others would, too.
Moody's estimated that this C.D.O. could potentially incur losses of 2 percent. It has since revised its estimate to 27 percent. The bonds it rated have been decimated, their market value having plunged by half or more. A triple-A layer of bonds has been downgraded 16 notches, all the way to B. Hundreds of C.D.O.'s have suffered similar fates (most of Wall Street's losses have been on C.D.O.'s). For Moody's and the other rating agencies, it has been an extraordinary rout.
Whom Can We Rely On?
The agencies have blamed the large incidence of fraud, but then they could have demanded verification of the mortgage data or refused to rate securities where the data were not provided. That was, after all, their mandate. This is what they pledge for the future. Moody's, S.&P. and Fitch say that they are tightening procedures they will demand more data and more verification and will subject their analysts to more outside checks. None of this, however, will remove the conflict of interest in the issuer-pays model. Though some have proposed requiring that agencies with official recognition charge investors, rather than issuers, a more practical reform may be for the government to stop certifying agencies altogether.
Then, if the Fed or other regulators wanted to restrict what sorts of bonds could be owned by banks, or by pension funds or by anyone else in need of protection, they would have to do it themselves not farm the job out to Moody's. The ratings agencies would still exist, but stripped of their official imprimatur, their ratings would lose a little of their aura, and investors might trust in them a bit less. Moody's itself favors doing away with the official designation, and it, like S.&P., embraces the idea that investors should not "rely" on ratings for buy-and-sell decisions.
This leaves an awkward question, with respect to insanely complex structured securities: What can they rely on? The agencies seem utterly too involved to serve as a neutral arbiter, and the banks are sure to invent new and equally hard-to-assess vehicles in the future. Vickie Tillman, the executive vice president of S.&P., told Congress last fall that in addition to the housing slump, "ahistorical behavorial modes" by homeowners were to blame for the wave of downgrades. She cited S.&P.'s data going back to the 1970s, as if consumers were at fault for not living up to the past. The real problem is that the agencies' mathematical formulas look backward while life is lived forward. That is unlikely to change.


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The Sam Bernstein
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|15% ~ 90%
|Operating Temperature
|5°C to 50°C (41°F to 122°F)
|Storage Temperature
|-25°C to 70°C (-13°F to 158°F)
|Physical Characteristics
|Product Height
|4.4 cm [1.7 in]
|Product Length
|81 mm [3.2 in]
|Product Width
|18 mm [0.7 in]
|Weight of Product
|38 g [1.3 oz]
|Packaging Information
|Package Height
|31 mm [1.2 in]
|Package Length
|17.7 cm [7 in]
|Package Width
|14.4 cm [5.7 in]
|Shipping (Package) Weight
|111 g [3.9 oz]
|What's in the Box
|Included in Package
|1 - x4 PCI Express to SFF-8643 adapter
|1 - low-profile bracket
|1 - full-profile bracket (installed)
|1 - quick-start guide
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Product Support
Data Sheets
Frequently Asked Questions
Before You Buy
There are no known incompatibilities between this hard drive adapter and any SSDs or motherboards; however, certain SSDs and motherboards may be incompatible with each other. Before you use an SSD and motherboard together, you should check with the SSD and motherboard manufacturers for any potential compatibility issues.
For example, the Intel 750 series SSD may not work as expected when you use it with certain motherboards. For more information, refer to the Intel documentation for the 750 series located here: www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/solid-state-drives/consumer-ssds/000005729.html.
You can use this hard drive adapter to boot an operating system from; however, depending on the SSD and motherboard that you are using, you may need to update the driver or BIOS in order for the hard drive to be seen when you initially boot the operating system.
If you experience issues when you use the hard drive adapter to boot an operating system, check with the manufacturers of the SSD and motherboard for updates.
You should also check to make sure that the SSD and motherboard are compatible. For more information, refer to the following FAQ: https://www.startech.com/faq/hard_drive_accessories_m2_u2_compatibility.
Although M.2 SSDs come in similar form factors, only an M.2 PCIe drive with an M.2 NGFF M key will operate with this device. M.2 drives that are SATA or drives that have a different key position are not compatible with this device.
This device can adapt an M.2 PCIe drive to connect to PCIe connections, which is not possible for a SATA based M.2 drive. The key type refers to the connector type on the M.2 PCIe drive, and the M key can only be M.2 PCIe. It is important to check the specifications of the drive to see if it supports PCIe M key.
No, you cannot use this adapter to connect SAS drives to your motherboard. This adapter converts SFF-8643 to PCIe for use with PCIe SSDs.
This hard drive adapter is plug and play. You do not need to install any drivers or complete any additional setup tasks other than installing it in your computer and connecting a compatible SSD.
Note: Depending on the SSD you are using, you may need to install drivers, update firmware, or update the motherboard's BIOS. Refer to the manufacturer of your SSD or motherboard for more information.
Compliance and Safety
Compliance Letters
Safety Measures
- If product has an exposed circuit board, do not touch the product under power.
- If Class 1 Laser Product. Laser radiation is present when the system is open.
- Wiring terminations should not be made with the product and/or electric lines under power.
- Product installation and/or mounting should be completed by a certified professional as per the local safety and building code guidelines.
- Cables (including power and charging cables) should be placed and routed to avoid creating electric, tripping or safety hazards.
* Product appearance and specifications are subject to change without notice.


text:
Q: Touch screen phones don't work very well for me. When I touch the screen of a smartphone it often doesn't recognize that I've touched it. The strange thing is my mom has the same problem with touchscreens. We've always figured it had something to do with our circulation or something, but neither of us has cold or clammy hands. So my question is two part. First, what's up with that? Why don't touch screens like me? And second, I'm getting to the point where I need to upgrade my old phone which has a fold-out keyboard. Can you recommend a new phone that has a keyboard?
A: That does seem kind of unusual. I did a little Googling though, and you're not alone in your complaint. Some people refer to it as 'zombie fingers'. But don't worry, you're probably not about to develop a taste for brains.
The first thing you need to know is that there are two types of touchscreens - resistive and capacitive. Resistive screens are pressure sensitive. They are composed of two layers, and when you press down on them the layers make contact and send out an electrical signal.
Capacitive touch screens, on the other hand (hah!) work based on the fact that human skin is electrically conductive. When your finger makes contact with a capacitive screen, it creates a tiny electrical disturbance which the phone detects to know that it's been touched.
It used to be the case that there were lots of phones with each type of screen; nowadays most modern high-end phones feature capacitive screens and it's getting harder to find a good resistive screen phone. You have to apply pressure to get a resistive screen to recognize your touch, while with a capacitive screen you don't (that means that pushing harder on your iPhone screen won't make you any better at iPhone games). Most people don't like that, and they're voting with their fingers, er, feet.
Now, I haven't found any scientific studies on people whose fingers don't get along with capacitive screens, but my guess is that … More
Q: I am thinking about getting a TV for our apartment for Christmas. How big should it be? I would like a bigger TV, but our apartment is small. What else do we need to know?
A: If you're like most guys, ourselves (Tom and Ray) included, it's hard to imagine there ever being such thing as a television set that is too big! However, HDTVs have managed to get so big that they can be uncomfortably large in smaller living rooms. If the screen is too large, you'll find yourself moving your head to keep up with the action on the screen. Also, the image on a TV that is too large for your room will not look as sharp because it will be easier to see the pixels. On the flip side, a TV set that is too small will be uncomfortable too, as you'll find yourself hunched over squinting to see the action.
There's a simple formula to calculate how big your TV 'should' be, based on how far away you will be sitting from it. The minimum TV size should be your distance from the screen in inches divided by 3. The maximum is the distance divided by 1.5. So if you are sitting 10 feet (120 inches) from your screen, take 120 and divide it by 3 to get the minimum TV size of 40 inches. At that distance your maximum TV size of 80 inches. However, if your sofa is only 6 feet (72 inches) away from where your television set will sit, you should get a television between 24 inches and 48 inches in size. You will find that you can have a pretty large TV unless you are going to be sitting extremely close. If you're having trouble with the math, we made a spreadsheet to make it easier. Just change the distance from your couch to your TV to find out the best size TV for your living room.
The size of your TV can also determine what screen resolution you need. If you decide to go with a smaller TV, 720p is cheaper and probably sufficient. If the screen is small, the lower resolution won't be as noticeable. But if you're going big, 1080p is definitely the way to go.
The other … More
Q: How do I switch my iTunes account from my old computer to my new computer if my old computer is dead? I've downloaded iTunes onto my new computer, but it doesn't recognize my account. I have all my music on my iPod, but I can't put any new music on it, and I can't transfer any music off of it without wiping the iPod. This happened the last time I changed computers, and I had to start a new account on the new computer.
A: It sounds like you have a couple of problems. First of all, you should be able to log into your iTunes account regardless of the condition of your old computer. Go to iforgot.apple.com to reset your iTunes password. Once you have done that, you should be able to log into iTunes on your new computer. You can redownload any music that you bought through iTunes, or if you have iTunes Match, you can redownload your entire iTunes library.
If you don't have iTunes Match, the other problem is that the only copies of your music are trapped on your dead computer and your iPod. There is a way to rescue your music from at least one of them. If you still have your old computer, open the My Music folder (Music on Mac), then open the iTunes folder. Save the files named iTunes Library.itl and iTunes Library.xml files to a flash drive or external drive. Copy your music files from your old computer and save them to the same external drive. Now, open the same folders on your new computer, and replace those files with your library files from the older computer. Make sure that you move everything into the exact same location on your new computer as it was on your old computer. Assuming you do it correctly, you will be able to open iTunes and everything will be back to the way it was. If not, you'll still have your music, but you'll have to import the music into your new iTunes library on your new computer.
If you have unfortunately already gotten rid of your old computer, you can still copy your music from your iPod. What ever you do, don't sync your iPod … More
Q: I just bought a new Macbook Pro laptop, and I am planning on selling my old laptop. I have Adobe Creative Suite for on my old Mac laptop and I want to move it to my new Mac. Is there anything I need to do to put it on my new laptop or can I just install it?
A: You can go ahead and install it on your new computer, but you ought to deactivate it on your old computer before you sell it. Adobe only lets you activate the software on as many computers as you have paid for; with a single license for Adobe software you may install it on two computers. So, if you do not deactivate it on the first computer and you only have paid for one license, you will not be able to install it on any other computers. Fortunately, if you have already sold your old laptop, there is still a way to deactivate the old computer, but you'll have to contact Adobe.
Here's how to deactivate the software from your old computer if you still have your old computer. First, make sure that your old computer is connected to the Internet. Next, click Help, then Deactivate, and select Deactivate Permanently. That will take care of it. Now you can activate the software on another computer.
If you still have the computer, but you've already uninstalled the software, all you have to do is reinstall it. Then, you'll be able to follow the directions above.
If you don't have your old computer, you'll have to talk to somebody at Adobe. Go to the Adobe website and click the Chat Now button at the bottom to chat with an agent. They'll be able to deactivate the old computer for you.
Q: I have two old computers that I would like to donate to a school or organization. How can I erase any personal information on the hard drive before I donate them? Is there an inexpensive way to do this?
A: We've talked about this once before, but it never hurts to repeat. You have the right idea. You definitely want to wipe your computer before you give it away or sell it. If it's a Windows PC you're getting rid of, use a program like Eraser or CCleaner, or if it's a Mac, there's a program called Permanent Eraser. All of these programs will completely eradicate any data, and they are free.
However, one of our listeners pointed out that these programs will not wipe the entire hard drive clean unless you wipe the operating system. This is true. To wipe the entire hard drive clean, you need to either boot it from the USB or CD/DVD drive or remove the hard drive and use a USB adapter to attach it as an external hard drive to another computer.
Most computers these days come with a recovery partition. Depending on who made your computer, you will press a button like F11 during the boot up process to access the recovery procedure. A prompt will tell you what button to push when you boot the computer. If you can create a bootable DVD or CD, there will be an option in the recovery menu. You'll have to look for the option in the menu or check the manufacturer's website for more information.
If you don't have a recovery partition, you should have received a bootable recovery disc. If you don't have a recovery partition and/or you can't find your recovery disc, you'll have to get one or create one. Check the manufacturer's website. If they offer one to download or send you for free or cost, you'll be able to order it there.
Another option is to take the hard drive out of your computers, and plug them into an external hard drive adapter. Then, plug the hard drive into another computer and run Eraser or CCleaner Also, If you simply … More
Q: My cat walked on my computer one day, and now my Dell laptop boots upside down. That is, the screen is upside down. To get it right I have to press the Windows key and the "p" button to duplicate the screen. Then, when I press it again the screen reverts back to normal. How can I get it to boot up correctly?
A: I know cats can be pranksters, but yours has taken it to new extremes. Fortunately, as easy as it was for your cat to screw up your computer, it is just as easy to fix.
For some reason, some genius at Microsoft thought it was a good idea to have a hot-key combination that changes the orientation of your screen. I can see why very occasionally you might want to flip your screen 90 degrees, but I can't imagine doing it often enough that you would need a short sequence of keystrokes to do it. Basically, Microsoft created the ultimate hotkey shortcut for pranksters or cats.
You can change the orientation of the monitor on most Windows laptops by pressing Ctrl-Alt and an arrow key at the same time. To change the orientation of your screen, once you've logged in upside-down, hold down Ctrl+Alt+Up, and that ought to return your screen to normal. Ctrl-Alt-Down will flip it upside down, and Ctrl-Alt-Left and Ctrl-Alt-Right will flip the screen sideways facing left or right respectively.
Do us a favor though: once you change your screen back, don't use this knowledge for evil. Nothing will make your IT department hate you more than dozens of calls from frantic coworkers because their screens have flipped sideways and upside down.
If you try the hotkey trick and it doesn't work for some reason, there is another way that will definitely fix it for you.
Click the Start menu and open "Control Panel."
Click "Adjust Screen Resolution"
Click to open the "Orientation" menu.
Choose from : "Landscape," "Portrait," "Landscape (Flipped)" and "Portrait (Flipped)" Click your desired orientation option to have Windows … More
Q: Do you have a recommendation for a calendar app for my iPhone? I've kept my calendar as a list in my notes for years and have accidentally deleted it multiple times, which is all stupid, I know. I haven't found a calendar app yet that I like. I want to be able to integrate tasks I've given myself for the day and I'd like it to be easy to cut/paste from date to date. Suggestions?
A: Honestly, the built-in calendar app on the iPhone is pretty good, at least since iOS 7 came out. (Side note, if you have an iPhone 4S or higher and you haven't updated yet, you should update to iOS 7. It's great. However, if you have an iPhone 4, you should read my article before you update.) There are a few good alternatives like Cozi and Calendars by Readdle, Week Cal and Fantastical, but I honestly don't think you want a calendar app. I think you want a good task manager or to-do list app.
Maybe I am too much of a stickler for the Getting Things Done method, but you should only use a calendar for events that are set in time, not for tasks. In other words, the meeting you have scheduled for Tuesday at noon goes on the calendar, but the presentation that you have to get prepared for the meeting goes on your task list. You can set deadlines for your tasks, but you shouldn't put them on your calendar.
The built in app Reminders in iOS is actually a pretty decent basic task app, and you can even use Siri to set reminders for you. Clear is another simple to do list app that many people swear by. However, if you're looking for something a little more comprehensive, Toodledo is a great app that will let you organize your tasks by context and by location. You can also create sub-tasks, and even assign tasks to other people.
One last note. If you really just prefer keeping a text list of tasks, you may be able to restore those lost notes that you have accidently deleted. If you have a Gmail account or a … More
Q: Every time I take a photo and try to upload it to Facebook from my iPhone 5 it keeps adding it to a folder of old photos. It looks like the comments from my friends are from all the old photos. How do I get this to stop and just upload one photo at a time in a post?
A: You can upload photos to Facebook from your iPhone in one of two ways: from inside the Facebook app or directly from the built-in iPhone Camera and Photos apps. For some reason, Facebook puts every photos that you upload to your profile into Albums now. If you upload them directly from the Camera and Photos apps, it will automatically place them into the "iOS Photos Album." You can change which folder the photo goes into, but you cannot place them into a new folder.
However, if you upload them from inside the Facebook app or on the Facebook website, you can create a new folder for it to go into.
Here's how to do it. Open the Facebook app and tap the Photo icon at the top of the screen.
Choose the photo or photos that you want to upload from your Camera Roll by tapping them. If you want to take a new picture, tap the camera icon in the bottom-left corner. Once you have selected the picture, tap the blue button in the bottom-right.
On the next screen you can write something to caption your picture with. Just above the keyboard, you'll see a row of icons. Tap the fourth one from the left which should be a photo album.
In the next screen you can choose which photo album you would like the photo to go into, or create a new album by tapping New in the top-right corner.
Enter the name of the Photo Album, and optionally, you can write a short description of the album. You can choose who can see your new photo album by tapping the icon in the bottom-right corner.
Tap the audience you want to be able to see your new photo album.
Tap Save, and your album is created.
The photo album icon should turn blue.
Finally, tap Upload, and … More
Q: I am considering changing my internet service provider. However, a lot of my accounts on other websites are connected with the email address from my ISP. Is there any way I can keep my email address even if I change my ISP? If not, is there a service that will forward my emails from my old email address to my new email address?
A: Unfortunately, when you change service providers, you cannot take your email address with you. It's just like it used to be in the old days with phone numbers; you just can't transfer them. When you close that account, your email address will be closed with it. Also, there isn't any service that can forward your emails after you close the account either. Only the ISP could do that since they own the email servers, and it doesn't make good business sense to help people leave their service. The smartest thing to do is get an email account that will move with you. You can get a free email account from Gmail, Yahoo Mail, or Outlook.com, just to name a few. Then, once you have setup your new email account, you can set up forwarding on your old ISP email account to your new email address before you close it. You'll have to manually change those accounts online, but this will make it much easier. If you setup a Gmail account, you can create filters that automatically label any email addresses are forwarded from your old account so that you can keep track of which companies are still using your old email address.
To setup email forwarding in Comcast/Xfinity email, go to https://customer.comcast.com/Secure/UserSettings and sign in. Then click Email Settings, and Email Forwarding.
To setup email forwarding in att.net follow these instructions.
These are the two major Internet service providers in Jacksonville. If you are using a different Internet service provider, let us know in the comments down below.
Q: I have an iPhone 4. I like the new iPhones, but I am not in the market for a new phone any time soon. I just bought my iPhone about 3 months ago. However, I really like iOS 7. Can I upgrade my iPhone 4 to iOS 7, should I upgrade it to iOS 7, and, of course, how do I upgrade it to iOS 7?
A: Every time Apple releases the latest version of iOS everyone rushes to download it. In fact, so many people were trying to download it on the 18th of September that when my wife tried to download it, it told her it would take 51 hours! However, just like Mom used to say, just because everyone else is doing something doesn't mean you should. The reviews have been saying that iOS 7 does not run well on the iPhone 4.
Technically, iOS 7 works on the iPhone 5S, 5C, 5, 4S and 4, but the older generation phones have lower and lower specs. In fact, Apple claims that every iPhone since the 4 can run up to twice as fast as the previous iPhone. So, an operating system designed to run on an iPhone 5S might not run perfectly on a phone that is three years older. It is likely because of that reason that the iPhone 4 does not get some of the latest and greatest features of iOS like Siri, camera filters, panoramic camera mode, and full screen Safari. Even with the missing features, according to Ars Technica, most applications take almost twice as long to launch in iOS 7 than they did in iOS 6.1.3.
Here's something that should also give you pause before you update to iOS 7: Once you update, there's no going back. Apple has made it so that once you upgrade to the latest version, you cannot downgrade to iOS 6.1.3 or earlier. It is somewhat possible to do with an iPhone 4, but you have to jailbreak your iPhone before you upgrade, and you have to have saved your SHSH blobs. No, I did not just make that up. Suffice it to say, if you think an SHSH blob sounds like a quiet monster from a B-rated movie, you probably don't want to mess with it.
However, if you still … More


text:
Blood-sucking heartthrob Robert Pattinson thinks romance bites.
When it comes to wooing the ladies, the 23-year-old vampire hunk says he can be a bit of a jerk.
"I can't think of a single romantic thing that I've ever done," he told People.com when he made the media rounds while promoting his new "Twilght" movie in Los Angeles over the weekend.
U.S. & World
The day's top national and international news.
Pattinson, who plays blood-thirsty vamp Edward in the teen movie sensation "Twilight" and is rumored to be romantically linked to co-star Kristen Stewart, said he was scarred by a high school courtship gone wrong.
"I would never serenade someone to be romantic. ... I put a flower in someone's locker when I was 15-years old, this girl called Maria," Pattinson told People. "She thought that it was someone else and the other guy claimed it as well, which is great."
Pattinson said the latest film, "New Moon," has an element of romance in it, but bristled at the suggestion that only women will enjoy the latest installment in the series.
"It's like saying guys can't appreciate romance," he said. "I've watched 'Titanic,' and I didn't think 'Oh, this is a girl's film.' I felt like the storyline in 'New Moon' is very heartbreaking and true. I didn't think I was doing something just for the sake of romance."


text:
This text relates the core principles of quantum mechanics to modern applications in engineering, physics, and nanotechnology. The book's applied emphasis illustrates theoretical concepts with examples of nanostructured materials, optics, and semiconductor devices.Miller, David A. B. is the author of 'Quantum Mechanics for Scientists and Engineers', published 2008 under ISBN 9780521897839 and ISBN 0521897831.[read more]
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