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Over many years, in the five households the couple shared, the wife hired scores of servants to help take care of her rich husband. Then, in 2005, she hired someone to tail him. Margaret Ritchie Rhea Battle Scaife (whose friends call her Ritchie) suspected Richard Mellon Scaife (whose friends call him Dick) of committing adultery, so she enlisted the services of an investigator. It was a private act that would have very public consequences. Richard Mellon Scaife is the best-known living member of Pittsburgh's storied Mellon clan, whose eponymous bank made the family a 19th-century fortune, which grew steadily with diversified investments, including major coal, steel, and real-estate interests, and Gulf Oil Corporation. Scaife, who owns several newspapers, is a major backer of conservative causes; his political donations fueled the rise of the New Right and its moral crusade against Bill Clinton, making Scaife the central figure in Hillary Clinton's "vast right-wing conspiracy." In the 1990s, his gift of $1.8 million to The American Spectator funded investigations into Whitewater and Bill Clinton's personal life, including David Brock's notorious "Troopergate" exposé, which led to Paula Jones's sexual-harassment suit against the president.
In December of 2005, the private detective proved Ritchie's fears to have been well founded: he took pictures showing the reclusive 75-year-old billionaire with a woman named Tammy Vasco, a tall, blonde 43-year-old whose criminal history includes two arrests for prostitution. The pair was photographed at Doug's Motel, a roadside establishment near Pittsburgh, where rooms rent for $49 a night, or $31 for three hours.
Dick and Ritchie's relationship, which began when they were married to other people, was always unconventional. During their decade-long courtship, Dick bought Ritchie a house in Pittsburgh's wealthy Shadyside neighborhood, a few blocks from his own—a domestic arrangement that didn't change when they were married, in 1991. Yet they moved easily back and forth between the homes until, the week after Ritchie discovered Dick's betrayal, a servant refused to let Ritchie enter her husband's Georgian mansion—and Ritchie saw Vasco's Jeep parked in the garage. Ritchie demanded to be let in, banging on windows and doors. Dick called the police, who told Ritchie she was trespassing and had to leave.
She got in her car, drove to a neighbor's driveway, then crept back to Dick's dining-room window (inside, the table was set with candelabras for a "romantic dinner"), hoping to document her husband's dalliance by using the camera on her cell phone. But when she set off the security lights in the yard, the police handcuffed her and charged her with "defiant trespass." The 60-year-old socialite spent that night—three days before Christmas—in a holding cell at the Allegheny County Jail, where her fellow prisoners passed the time by petting the fur collar of her coat.
Ritchie was released the next morning, and the defiant-trespass charge was eventually dismissed. But as her lawyer announced several months later in a divorce filing, "The marriage was over!"
Some details of the Scaifes' split were reported in local newspapers (the first account appeared in Richard Scaife's own paper the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review), but the legal filings were sealed by the court. Then, last August, owing to an apparent clerical error, the filings were posted on a court Web page. Poring over them, Dennis Roddy, of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette—the city's oldest newspaper, and the liberal rival to Scaife's conservative Tribune-Review—disclosed previously unknown financial details about Richard Scaife's $1.4 billion fortune and about Ritchie's jaw-dropping, court-ordered interim support payments of $725,000 a month. (This stream of income, Scaife's lawyers noted, "produces an amount so large that just the income from it, invested at 5%, is greater each year than the salary of the President of the United States." Unconfirmed reports suggest that Ritchie's interim monthly payments have since increased, to more than $1 million.) The Post-Gazette posted the court documents on its own Web site; locals took rooting interest in the story's many subplots (alleged hair-pulling fights with the help, dognapping, and battles royal over a 94-page itemized list of art and objets, from a million-dollar Magritte to an $1,800 set of asparagus tongs), which almost make one pray for Aaron Spelling's resurrection from the dead.
What, exactly, is at stake in the war of Scaife versus Scaife? Money, to be sure. Astonishingly, the Scaifes were married without a pre-nuptial agreement, so Pennsylvania statutes automatically entitle Ritchie to 40 percent of Dick's net monthly income, but only until the divorce is final. Ritchie won't have any legal claim on the core of Dick's inherited wealth—but she is entitled to claim part of the appreciation in value of most of the assets he held during their marriage. According to Pennsylvania law, "marital misconduct" does not affect the equitable division of property in a divorce. Instead, settlements are determined by factors such as length of marriage, income disparity between spouses, employability, and "liabilities and needs of each of the parties." Ritchie, who spent the better part of 14 years running Dick's households, has a comparatively minuscule income of her own (and, as a 60-year-old, has less than stellar employment prospects), which might incline a judge to give her a hefty settlement. State guidelines for distribution of assets in a divorce are so broad, though, as to make it impossible to predict such decisions. Albert Momjian, a leading Philadelphia divorce lawyer, says that out-of-court settlements are usually preferable where fortunes are in play. In a case like Dick and Ritchie's, he says, "so much depends on the reasonableness of the parties."
Reputations are also at stake, and Ritchie, Dick, and their respective defenders are squaring off with rival narratives. In the first interviews he has given in eight years, Richard Scaife spoke with Vanity Fair about the divorce saga, depicting his estranged wife as conniving, greedy, and abusive. Through one of her attorneys, William Pietragallo II, Ritchie Scaife at first declined to be interviewed. On her behalf the lawyer told a simple story of "a woman scorned," a "very supportive and caring" wife who saved a husband from his "demons," only to be thrown over for a harlot.
Later, Ritchie changed her mind and agreed to what turned out to be a long and highly animated interview. Seated between Pietragallo and another of her attorneys, Eddie Hayes (the model for the scrappy defense lawyer in Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities), Ritchie described a marriage that swung between emotional extremes, from the days when "I always called him 'my snuggle bunny' … and he called me his 'precious' " to the public embarrassments brought on by their breakup, which she compares to "the tortures of the damned."
The estranged couple and their intimates aren't the only ones with an interest in this divorce. Richard Mellon Scaife is the man who funded the movement that made "family values" a watchword of the right and badly damaged the Clinton presidency. Many would now dearly love to hang him in the gallery of hypocrites whose Dickensian comeuppance exposes the moral bankruptcy of the culture wars.
The Angora Sweater
Richard Mellon Scaife is an uncommonly boyish 75-year-old, with riveting pale-blue eyes and a sharp, lopsided grin that brings to mind Jack Nicholson's wily poise and Paul Lynde's smirking bitterness. An enthusiastic conversationalist, he comes across as more intuitive than intellectual, and he can be candid about his own blind spots. Asked whether a book has ever changed his life, he thinks a moment, shrugs, and, with a disarming smile, answers, "I guess the quick answer to that question is 'No!' "
Two hours later, in the course of the same interview, without a hint of guile or self-awareness, he abruptly names John O'Hara as his favorite writer, and Appointment in Samarra as his favorite book. Appointment in Samarra is the story of a rich young man who yields to the temptation of his most self-sabotaging urges—but whose private fear of judgment and retribution for his rashness drives him to a self-destruction that neither he nor anyone who knows him ever fully understands. (And the rich young man is from Pennsylvania.)
Scaife's charm has an odd sweetness to it (he recalls a period of unhappiness when his favorite TV show, The Simpsons, began running at the same time as Lou Dobbs, who took precedence), but he also takes petty swipes (his favorite characters on The Simpsons, he says, are Marge's cynical and trashy sisters, Patty and Selma, "because they remind me of Ritchie"). A curvature of the spine gives Scaife a shuffling gait, and since undergoing cochlear-implant surgery he has worn two bulky, high-tech hearing aids. But he remains a courtly presence in bespoke suits and with impeccably groomed snow-white hair.
Dick and his sister, Cordelia, spent most of their formative years in the gilded cage of Penguin Court, a family estate in Ligonier that was designed by an architect better known for building prisons. The gloom of the mansion was compounded by the family's isolation from Pittsburgh's larger Mellon clan: Sarah Mellon's decision to marry Alan Scaife, the scion of a Pittsburgh steel family, was never fully embraced by the Mellons. Her father, Richard Beatty Mellon, is said to have quietly answered "No" when Alan asked for Sarah's hand, and her brother, Richard King Mellon, the man who led Pittsburgh's renaissance in the 1940s, treated Alan with disdain, and seems never to have been close to Dick.
Alan joined the O.S.S., the precursor of the C.I.A., when Dick was young, and returned from his travels with gifts for the boy: newspapers from around the world, which Dick organized on racks of wooden poles in the family library. At the age of nine Dick was severely injured when his horse, Newsgirl, fell on him, and he spent his fourth-grade year in bed, reading newspapers. Another childhood enthusiasm was politics: he told the Mellon-family biographer, Burton Hersh, that, when the family lived in Washington, D.C., for a while, "I made it a kind of hobby to meet as many senators and congressmen as I could."
Dick caught what he calls "the Irish disease" of alcoholism early. (Both his mother and his sister also had drinking problems.) After it got him kicked out of Yale, he returned, flunked out, spent six months pumping gas, and eventually took his degree from the University of Pittsburgh. In 1956 he married Frances Gilmore, and they had two children (David, 41, now a Pittsburgh Porsche dealer, and Jennie, 44, who lives in Palm Beach). But he kept drinking, and his name and fortune alone were not enough to win Pittsburgh's respect. Kicked off the board of the Carnegie Museum of Art, he patronized small regional museums such as the Brandywine, in Chadds Ford. Marginalized within the family banking and oil businesses, Dick started buying small newspapers, and made one of them, the Tribune-Review, in Greensburg, into a conservative alternative to Pittsburgh's Post-Gazette.
With Franny, as his first wife is known, Dick became involved in Republican politics during Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign. Later disillusioned by Watergate (after he'd given more than $1 million to Richard Nixon's 1972 campaign), he focused his donations on conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation (an incubator of Reagan's foreign policy, supply-side economics, and Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America") and later the Federalist Society (a legal network formed to combat what its members see as a liberal bias in elite law schools and the legal establishment). The aim was to provide intellectual infrastructure and train policymakers for the contemporary conservative movement.
Around the time that these investments started bearing fruit, he met Ritchie Battle, the charming, gorgeous southern wife of a young lawyer named Turner Westray Battle II, at a 1979 Pittsburgh dinner party for Jack Heinz II, the father of the late senator John Heinz.
Ritchie's friends, and even many of her enemies, describe her as fiery, fun, brash, and resourceful—comparisons to Scarlett O'Hara are common. In high school, the young beauty and her boyfriend were voted "Most Attractive Couple" by her senior class; she remains exceptionally alluring today, dressed for an interview in a green cashmere turtleneck and plaid Oscar de la Renta suit, with brown suede Manolo Blahniks. Her manner, like her dress, embraces the earthy and the immaculate. Her face is elegant but elastic, often stretching into imitations of the people she talks about. Her anecdotes are peppered with cinematic allusions. "She's Mrs. Danvers," Ritchie says of a hyper-officious servant; "Think of 'Rosebud,' " she explains after suggesting that Dick sold most of his parents' furniture from Penguin Court—"but kept all the maple furniture that was the help's." (Dick says he kept a lot of his parents' furniture.) To her lawyers' consternation, she seems to take pleasure in speaking about the forbidden. "It's a man's world, darling," she purrs, after being chastised by one attorney for off-the-record remarks about jewelry and divorce law.
Ritchie's father was a Georgetown, South Carolina, bank examiner who died of a heart attack during a family day at the beach, when Ritchie was 10 years old. After his death, Ritchie's mother worked as a secretary to support her three children; she committed suicide when Ritchie was 21. In high school, Ritchie worked at a department store selling Avon products. Later she studied at Queens University of Charlotte, where she met and married Battle, then a Davidson undergraduate. (Their son, Turner Westray Battle III, 33, is a navy lieutenant who has twice been deployed to the Persian Gulf.)
Ritchie's dark doe eyes flit among a disparate swarm of emotions when she describes her "terrible" first marriage and the "torrid love affair" with Dick that swept her out of it. Some in Pittsburgh say that Ritchie was socially ambitious and that the dinner party was a setup. But the party's hostess, Pamela Bryan, the whispery-voiced ex-wife of Houston department-store magnate Bob Sakowitz, says her intentions were innocent. There were too many men coming to the party, and too few women, "and it was beginning to look like a stag dinner. So I remember speaking to Westray and saying, you know, 'Would it be all right … ?' So I put her next to Dick."
The place card, Ritchie remembers, came with a warning from the hostess: "I've got a job for you. I know that if you sit next to him, he won't leave." Leaning forward, as if confiding, Ritchie explains, "I think he had a reputation of leaving dinner parties if he was bored." A beat. "Well!" she sighs. "I didn't get rid of him for many years after that." The tone has both rue and triumph in it, as does the slender, red-lipped smile with which she underlines such interjections.
Ritchie says Dick started pursuing her immediately. Dick himself says that he didn't see Ritchie again for another six months. Then one day she came to his office, soliciting for a charity; he couldn't take his eyes off her white angora sweater. That afternoon, he adds with a wink, "we did what comes naturally."
"Never owned an angora sweater," Ritchie protests, aghast and lilting. "I'm allergic to things like that!"
Ritchie and Westray were divorced in 1981. Her alimony and child support, combined, amounted to a scant $1,200 a month. She didn't have to worry. Dick bought Ritchie a condominium, and then the house, and their affair grew increasingly public. They started socializing as a couple when he took her to Alcoa heir Alfred Hunt's Christmas party in 1984, and then to a reception for the Hoover Institution at the White House. "He was forcing the point with Franny," Bryan explains.
By then, he had been forcing it for a while. The first time Dick's son, David, laid eyes on Ritchie was in 1982, when, after a night out, he says, Dick tried to drop her off but she refused to get out of his car. Drunk, he drove her home, where 16-year-old David, from inside the house, heard what he remembers as "yelling and screaming and all sorts of noise, and Dad came to the door and said, 'Get your mother.' I saw this woman, lying on the ground. I couldn't even decipher what she was saying. My mother came down. She had always sort of suspected that something was going on, but this was the first time that she had really confronted this person." David goes on: "I had always seen my mother act ladylike," but that night, David says, Franny walked out of the house, "kicked her, and called her a guttersnipe."
When asked about the incident, Ritchie says it "never happened." Two days later, she calls from one of her lawyers' offices in Pittsburgh. She wants to say that, in 1981, she did go to the door of Dick's house on a day when Dick wasn't home, to speak with Franny face-to-face: "I said, 'If I have to know about you, you have to know about me.' I later learned that her daughter was at the top of the stairs. My intention was never, ever—and I had had too much to drink—my intention was never to hurt anybody."
David says that Ritchie soon won him over: "My grades were so bad at school at that point, I just thought, Well, instead of getting yelled at," siding with Dick against Franny could be "a new chapter to our friendship. All of a sudden, he and I were drinking buddies." When Dick and Ritchie visited him at Deerfield Academy, David claims, Ritchie brought pot for them to smoke together, and his father bought him alcohol.
"To take marijuana to a child? To a prep school?," Ritchie marvels, when asked about the story. "Never," she declares, her petite hands holding one another in her lap. "And how dare anyone even make a comment like that?"
Dick, who regretfully confirms the details of his son's story, says that he did not inhale.
Pre-nup? What Pre-nup?
Franny filed for divorce in 1985, but a final settlement (sealed by the court but reliably rumored to be about $35 million) was not reached until 1991. Dick and Ritchie's relationship remained outrageously volatile; Ritchie once kicked Dick in the crotch, according to a friend, and his testicles swelled to such a size that he had to be taken to the emergency room. Asked about the incident, Dick chuckles and says, almost plaintively, "I'd forgotten." Ritchie issues another denial: "I don't remember ever kicking him!"
In 1987, according to Dick, the two went to the Betty Ford Center together. He calls his estranged wife "a total pill popper," who had to be taken to "the loony bin" after a suicide attempt.
Wearily, deliberately, Ritchie says the only reason she went to Betty Ford was to support Dick in the "family program." Has she ever had any kind of substance-abuse problem? "Never," she says, four times.
Dick and Ritchie's wedding, planned on two days' notice, took place the same week that Dick's divorce was finalized. His lawyer Yale Gutnick prepared a pre-nuptial agreement, which Scaife refused to sign. "I was a fool!" Scaife says. "I begged him," Gutnick adds, explaining that Ritchie threatened to leave Dick if there was a pre-nup.
Ritchie laughs out loud at Gutnick's suggestion that she threatened to call off the marriage over this issue. She says she actually asked for a pre-nup, after witnessing the bitterness of his split with Franny. "I mean, you think I'm going to kick them both in the you-know-what to make him marry me? It wasn't very difficult," she scoffs. "He wanted to marry me."
And again, a second later, bemused, on velvet: "It wasn't difficult, darling."
For the exchange of vows, on the old Penguin Court property (Dick had had the gloomy mansion torn down after his mother died, in 1965), Ritchie wore a short white dress. For the reception, at Ligonier's Rolling Rock Club, the new wife surprised her husband, a fireworks aficionado, by hiring Zambelli, which is responsible for the July Fourth shows on the Mall in Washington, to create a blazing sign on the lawn that proclaimed, in sparkling letters, ritchie loves dick. Even today, a certain set of Pittsburgh women, including wives of some of the country's most brass-knuckled industrialists, speak of Ritchie's flaming double entendre as among the most shocking moments of their lives.
It was not a double entendre, Ritchie says, with tears in her eyes: "My mind doesn't work that way. Please. His name is Dick. His name is Dick, and I thought of the human being. And how evil of them, because I was saying I loved my husband."
Many say marriage to Ritchie mellowed Dick. They say that Ritchie was instrumental in reconciling Dick with his sister, though Dick denies this. (Cordelia did not speak to him for more than 25 years after the death of her husband—ruled a suicide—on the day he was indicted for tax fraud, just after a blowup in his friendship with Dick, according to news reports.) They also say that she encouraged his sobriety, though in 1994 he started drinking again. By his own account, Dick has been sober since 2003.
"Ritchie was always ironical about her position" as Dick's consort-cum-wife, according to Ed Harrell, a close friend of the couple's and the former president of Dick's publishing company, Tribune-Review. Playing off her husband's fabled middle name, Ritchie carried a jeweled Judith Leiber bag in the shape of a melon. She teasingly begged Dick for gifts, according to a friend, calling him "the Prince of Pittsburgh" and pleading, "Daddy, you're so rich, you can afford it. Daddy, you could buy me anything." She once told the friend that she was planning to build an extra guest room for her son at the Scaife house on Nantucket; when the friend asked, "What will Dick think?," she says, Ritchie answered, "He'll never notice"—and he apparently didn't.
In happy moments, their hedonism could attain a Zen-like plane: when Ritchie fell in love with a 2,800-square-foot Sol LeWitt mural on exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Art, a friend overheard him tell her, "It's yours," and Dick in fact bought the painting (as a gift to the museum) in her honor.
Another of Dick's gentler interludes, in Ritchie's account, sounds a bit like the last reel of Citizen Kane. The couple lived at the Hotel Bel-Air while Dick recovered from ear surgery, and at his insistence they watched, again and again, How Green Was My Valley, John Ford's melodrama, in which a coal-mining family dreams of a better life in a fast-changing world that defeats their traditional ideals. During that time, Ritchie says, her voice distant and soft, Dick also "liked to watch trolley videos … just trolleys …a trolley car, going down the road, for hours."
He could also be cruel. Dick lost most of his hearing in the late 1990s, and when Ritchie suggested that they learn sign language together, one friend says, "he told her, 'I'll give you sign language' "—and raised his middle finger. ("No, that didn't happen," Dick says, laughing, "but I wish it did.")
Yet Ritchie, by many accounts, has the more unpredictable temper. Several associates and friends of the Scaifes shudder when they speak of "Ritchie moments." These are high-decibel events—such as the afternoon on Nantucket when she allegedly warned the staff that she would walk into the ocean if a misplaced set of winter slipcovers for the summer furniture wasn't located right now.
"I think this is just the stupidest thing I've ever heard," Ritchie says. "Please. Do I look like somebody who'd walk into the ocean over curtains? Please."
Jewelry, Dick says, reliably restored her equilibrium. After an ultimatum delivered in the kitchen of their Pebble Beach estate, he bought her a ring from Borsheim's, Warren Buffett's Omaha jewelry store—a $600,000, 10-carat diamond that, Scaife recalls, was delivered to his office "by a very nice lady from Rhodesia, very pretty, with two armed guards."
"It was a 55th-birthday present!" Ritchie cries, and produces a handwritten love note from Dick that she says accompanied the gift.
Dick and Ritchie grew increasingly isolated, and, Dick says, Ritchie intentionally drove a wedge between him and his son. A few months after David Scaife married Sara Deutsch, Dick and Ritchie visited them to look at wedding pictures and presents. The couple say Ritchie disapproved of them from the start. On this day, Sara says, Ritchie was drunk and dropped all pretense of discretion when they found themselves alone. "It was literally like I'm showing her, like, a china pattern or something, and then she just turned on me with 'And, by the way, you're a nobody from nowhere,' berating me and yelling at me."
After Dick and Ritchie separated, Sara says, Dick told her that " 'Ritchie would take photographs of you out of a newspaper or a magazine, and she would stick pins in them.' He said, 'It was so disturbing, it was so horrible.' " Sara adds, "You want to say to him, 'But, Dick, did you do anything at the time?' "
Ritchie denies every detail of this story. There was an altercation, she admits, but she says it was Sara who "went berserk."
And did she stick those pins in the pictures?
"No, Dick did."
Her lawyer interrupts: "—Ehh—"
"It's true!," Ritchie says.
Pietragallo: "Stop. Stop."
Sara's story of their altercation sounds much like the judgment an element of Pittsburgh society passed on Ritchie when she married Dick. During the marriage, they mostly kept their opinions to themselves as Ritchie took her place on the boards of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Opera, and Parks Conservancy (whose director of development calls her "a God's blessing" to the group, for which she helped launch a version of the New York Central Park Conservancy's traditional Hat Luncheon). Eventually she was even admitted to the holy of holies, the Carnegie Museum of Art Women's Committee.
Ritchie says that she was aware of some resistance to her arrival on the scene "in the beginning. But once I was Mrs. Scaife, listen, they were falling all over me."
Sipping a martini at four p.m., the decorator Louis Talotta, who worked for the Scaifes during Dick's first marriage, says that when he met Ritchie "I think she cut her own hair. She didn't have art. She didn't have anything. She was just a dumb southern girl." From the tip of his Marlboro, an ash falls toward the pale upholstery of his 18th-century Jacob chair. "She couldn't even set a table."
(At this, Ritchie laughs mirthlessly. Setting a table is "one thing a southern girl knows how to do, if she's lived with her grandmother, and I don't care how little money you had in the South, you had your silver. I never saw stainless steel till I moved to Pittsburgh with all those rich folks.")
And there are ladies in bouclé (asking not to be named, because they'd "hate to hurt anybody") eager to tell their story of how Ritchie never wanted anything but Dick's money and his name. Pursing their lips, they say, one after another, that "Do you know who I am?" was Ritchie's signature line.
(Ritchie, bewildered: "Never. Never. If anything, I said, 'Call me Ritchie,' because that's the name I know I'll always have.")
Still, for all the stories of Ritchie's behavior, it seems impossible to separate most of the moral assessments by detractors from their quiet rage over this outsider, this nobody from nowhere, having dared to dream that she could walk among them.
Battle over Beauregard
This same tone, transposed a few octaves bassward, colors William Pietragallo's voice when, in a conference room in a Pittsburgh skyscraper—coincidentally, directly beneath Richard Mellon Scaife's office—the lawyer asks, "Have you seen Miss Vasco?," and, with one eyebrow raised, produces a photocopied enlargement of Tammy Vasco's driver's-license photograph, thumping his index finger on the page. In Pietragallo's account of the marriage, there were no troubles until Dick met Tammy—whose purported arrest history he rattles off in detail (and lards with defensive provisos: "I don't know this.… I'm not telling you this as a fact"). Quite the contrary. Pietragallo claims that, except for the times when Ritchie nursed Dick back to health from alcoholism ("She slept on the hospital floor, she slept on a chair"), their life was an exercise of shared passions for antiques and travel. "Flowers were a really important part of their life together," Pietragallo says. He describes Ritchie as "a sensible, grounded individual" who in her life with Dick was "a giver, a non-taker."
Precisely how Dick became involved with Tammy remains something of a mystery. This was the only personal question that Scaife's lawyer would not let him answer. Certainly since Ritchie discovered Dick's relationship with Tammy, she and Dick have been playing the emotional equivalent of Australian Rules football. The whole imbroglio has begun to resemble a Christopher Guest parody.
After Dick had Ritchie arrested and thrown in jail (and stories about it appeared in his newspaper), Ritchie and the Scaife's three dogs—including Dick's favorite, a yellow Lab named Beauregard (Dick says Beauregard was a gift from Ritchie; Ritchie says the couple owned the dog together)—moved in with Pietragallo and his wife, Helena, who is one of her oldest friends. Then, in March 2006, Dick arranged for a sign to be made and placed on his front lawn: wife and dog missing—reward for dog.
Beauregard, who is said to be a descendant of a dog that belonged to a King of England, is the only member of his species to have had his portrait painted by Chas Fagan, an artist perhaps best known for the official White House portrait of Barbara Bush. Soon after the missing sign appeared in Dick's front yard, Beauregard disappeared from the Pietragallos' backyard—"snatched" by an employee "who was actually a double agent" working for Dick, Pietragallo says. Not long afterward the sign on Dick's lawn was replaced by a new one that said, welcome home, beauregard.
Then, on April 6, 2006, Ritchie was driving down Dick's street and saw Sue Patterson, Scaife's 54-year-old housekeeper, walking the dog. According to court documents, Ritchie stopped the car in the street, got out, and ran toward Beauregard, screaming "He's taking everything from me; I'm taking his dog." She then allegedly beat the woman about the head and neck, pulled her hair, pushed her down, and kicked her—leaving a footprint on her white blouse. When Genevieve Still, Dick's head housekeeper, came to Patterson's aid, she claims, Ritchie kicked her too. ("And she knows I have cancer," says Still, who is 79.) Dennis Bradshaw, a former Secret Service officer now in charge of Scaife's security, attempted to break up the fight. Ritchie allegedly scratched his face and broke his glasses and threw them on the ground.
Assault complaints against Ritchie were eventually dismissed, after a hearing where a bystander testified that Ritchie, while wrestling for the dog, also hollered, " 'Keep the prostitute,' or something like that." (From a distance, the witness said, the clash over Beauregard "looked like two kids fighting over a toy.") The ruling magistrate in the case said, "They should've given her the dog," adding, "This is nonsense. I'm not going to participate in this. This is absolute, total nonsense." With personal-injury lawsuits against Ritchie by all three employees pending, Pietragallo forbade Ritchie to answer questions about the incident.
Ritchie's next reported legal entanglement came when Vasco's daughter filed a criminal-harassment complaint, which has also been dismissed, after finding a note in her mailbox that said, according to Dick, "God will get you" and "All whores go to hell."
(Coincidentally, after interviewing Ritchie Scaife, I found an anonymous letter in my mailbox: a Christmas card emblazoned with the greeting "Have a Ho Ho Ho!" In imitation of a child's scrawl, someone wrote, "Hope you can use this!," evidently referring to the color snapshot of Dick and Tammy that was included with the card. A printed slip of paper provided the photo's caption: "Richard Mellon Scaife and Tammy Sue / On the waterfront terrace of Wit's End / Pebble Beach, California." Wit's End is Dick's estate there.)
For his part, Dick does not believe that any of his efforts to humiliate Ritchie were excessive. Erecting those signs in his front yard, he says, was just plain "fun." Do the end of the marriage, its escalating vindictiveness, and the ongoing consequences of such anger make him in any way sad? His eyes go blank, and he says, "No, I don't think about that. I just don't want her near me. That's all I think about."
Asked whether his infidelity is hypocritical, in light of his political commitments, he refers not to a moral principle but to his own personal history. "My first marriage ended with an affair," he says, amused. And monogamy is not, he continues, an essential part of a good marriage. "I don't want people throwing rocks at me in the street. But I believe in open marriage." Philandering, Scaife says with a laugh, "is something that Bill Clinton and I have in common."
Lunch with Bill
Those are surprising words indeed to hear from a man who spent so lavishly to uncover Bill Clinton's sexual peccadilloes and to advance the movement fueled by family values. But it would be a mistake to read the saga of Richard Mellon Scaife's divorce as simply a story of moral hypocrisy. His treatment of women, especially his first wife, suggests a high regard for his own gratification. His commitment to conservative politics has never been primarily about upholding traditional morality; it has been about promoting policies that help to preserve his own wealth and that of people like himself. On the subject of Clinton his weather vane is now spinning wildly. Scaife speaks of a "very pleasant" two-hour-and-fifteen-minute private lunch with Bill Clinton at the former president's New York office last summer. "I never met such a charismatic man in my whole life," Scaife says, glowing with pleasure at the memory. "To show him that I wasn't a total Republican libertarian, I said that I had a friend named Jack Murtha," a Democratic member of the House of Representatives from Pennsylvania. "He said, 'Oh, Jack Murtha. You're talking about my golfing partner!' " In the midst of these backslapping memories, though, Scaife goes carbuncle-eyed and refuses to answer on the record when asked if he still thinks Vince Foster's suicide was, as he once told The New York Times, "the Rosetta Stone to the Clinton Administration."
Scaife left the meeting with an autographed copy of Bill Clinton's My Life and a head full of thoughts about the "scourge of aids" in Africa, which the two had discussed in detail—though Scaife emphasizes, twice, that Clinton "did most of the talking." Back in Pittsburgh, Scaife decided to send a $100,000 personal check to the Clinton Global Initiative. That got him thinking about aids locally, he says, and so when he found a direct-mail solicitation for persad, Pittsburgh's aids service center, in his mailbox, he wrote that group a check, too. Does he think his best gay friends should be able to get married? Scaife throws his hand in the air and exclaims, "Yes, I do!" A moment later he adds, "I haven't really thought about it. But if they want to get married, that's their business. I couldn't care less."
It is this contradictory bundle of a human being who arrives on a rainy November evening at the mahogany-paneled Duquesne Club, in downtown Pittsburgh, the sanctuary of that city's upper crust, to be honored with the Speaker Franklin Award at a fund-raising dinner for the Commonwealth Foundation, a Pennsylvania think tank affiliated with the Heritage Foundation. An invocation praises Scaife as a selfless "servant-leader" who, like Joseph in the book of Genesis, "could have just worried about himself. But like Joseph," he worried about his country. In a video tribute, former attorney general Edwin Meese calls Richard Mellon Scaife "the unseen hand behind so many important causes," the man who brought "balance and sound principles back to the public arena" and "quietly helped to lay the brick and mortar for an entire movement." Scaife's donations to conservative causes, the crowd seems to agree, are the best measure of his character, because, as another speaker declares, "checkbooks are the most accurate account of a person's values and priorities."
The drive from the Duquesne Club to Doug's Motel (recently renamed the Huntingdon Inn), where Ritchie's private detective photographed Dick and Tammy, takes about half an hour. Behind the river-stone exterior of Room 5, where the two are said to have dallied, is a small rectangular space containing a queen-size bed with a thin, soft mattress, two lumpy pillows, and a push-button phone on the brown bedside table. To match the brown bedspread, there is brown wood paneling, a brown carpet with its nap rubbed away, a brown dresser, and a chair with little nicks in the veneer. There is despairingly little else to describe.
It's All About Dignity
The Mellon-family fortune was assembled largely by Andrew Mellon, the banker and industrialist who served as secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. Richard Mellon Scaife is Andrew's great-nephew. "The first time the Mellons have ever been 'in print,' " Andrew Mellon himself once ruefully noted, was in 1910, when his divorce from Nora McMullen (an unsuitable young Englishwoman whom he'd married on a whim) made Pittsburgh "ring with scandal." For Andrew, divorce brought embarrassing public revelations about his wife's infidelities and his own foolishness. Yet Mellon controlled the damage to the best of his ability. To ensure that his divorce would not be tried by jury, which would have exposed even more of his private life, he arranged for Pennsylvania's legislature to outlaw jury trials for divorce.
The story of Andrew Mellon comes to an end in the 1930s, with his gift to the American people of the National Gallery of Art. The final chapter for Ritchie and Dick foretells no such grandeur. Richard Mellon Scaife, who vows he will never be married again ("too many responsibilities," he says with a sigh), is still dating Tammy Vasco, and in what may be the most emotional moment of a long conversation, he voices distress that she has been publicly drawn into this situation. "Miss Vasco is a very loving individual," he says with tears in his eyes. Her depiction in the press, he goes on, "really troubles me."
As for Ritchie, "after the night she was put in jail by her husband, from that day forward she wanted to get on with a new life," Pietragallo says. Her new life, he adds, will focus on charitable involvements and "starting a foundation" whose goals have yet to be defined. Perhaps that night in the holding cell holds the answer. Ritchie emerged, Pietragallo says, with a passion to "do something to improve conditions for women in prison."
Ritchie affirms all of this, and, mustering a bright face, adds, "I want you to know I'm not bitter. I'm not an embittered person. You know, it is what it is, and life has to go on, and there are a lot more issues in this world that have relevance, and this really has no relevance on the face of the earth when you think of all the issues that are in the world right now, the problems. I have no bitterness. I just want to go forward. And I hope that he is happy. I don't wish anything bad to happen to him. And it's just sad for me that we couldn't end our marriage in a dignified way."
Gravely, Pietragallo reminds her: "We still can."
Ritchie says, "Because dignity's very important to me."
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text: Mississippi River Improves, but Not in the Clear January 25, 2013 10:12 AM Tweet While the Mississippi River remains open, barges are being forced to load at lighter loads due to the low river levels. This is forcing some shippers to look for other means of transportation, including rail. TAGS: Marketing, Overseas December 18, 2014 By Tyne Morgan US Farm Report Host Email The chances of a river closure seem to be diminishing, but there is still work to be done. "Right now, the river has come up quite a bit," says Michael Petersen, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spokesperson, as he overlooks the low river. Even with a recent bump in levels, the river is at a negative 3.6. To put that into perspective, that's almost 37 feet lower than it was at the peak of 2011 and 50 feet lower than water levels during the flood of 1993. "A negative 3.6 doesn't mean there's no water in the river," explains Lt. Colin Fogarty, spokesperson for the U.S. Coast Guard. "What it means is that based on historical river levels, a zero is marked at one arbitrary time. And that way it gives mariners an idea of what the levels are at." The Coast Guard says there is still 11 feet of navigable water, but that continues to fluctuate. "Although the river remains open, we're still limited to a nine foot draft on our barges and 15 barges per towboat" says Marty Hettel with AEP River Operations. "So, we're actually still operating, but at only 45 percent of our capacity." Despite several cries of warning from industry about river closures in the future, work by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has ensured traffic remains afloat. And this has industry changing their tune. "What we've been able to do with a combination of dredging and rock removal work, we're going to be able to guarantee a nine foot depth all the way down to a negative seven in St. Louis, which is below the record low we have at St. Louis," says Petersen. The U.S. Coast Guard told AgDay the portion of the river where rock removal is taking place near Thebes, Illinois, has been closed 16 hours each day. Commerce will soon have open waters, as the rock work is being complete ahead of schedule. "Thank goodness the Corps got in and got those pinnacles removed by working with their contractors," says Hettel. "I can't say enough about the great job they did." While it's positive news the rock work will be completed ahead of schedule, a line of barges has been a mainstay near Thebes, waiting for the river to open for just eight hours each day. Add to that barges being loaded at lighter levels, it means delayed transit times and ultimately increased shipping costs. "At least the river is staying open," says Hettel. "We've moved 380,000 tons this month in the St. Louis corridor. Now, keep in mind, that could have moved over 600,000 tons." "There was certainly a period of time where the lack of certainty whether the river would be open created a situation where the export industry was a little reluctant to put on deferred sales to customers," says Rick Calhoun, president of Cargo Carriers, Inc., a branch of Cargill. "We've passed on some business we would have otherwise done. Unfortunately, that business has gone away and probably isn't going to come back this year." As fertilizer makes its way up the river for spring applications, Calhoun says those barges are also being forced to carry lighter loads to ensure the boats can make it through. While the chances of a river closure seem to be diminishing, we aren't in the clear yet. "In addition to Thebes, there are other areas we have rocks near grand tower, Illinois," says Petersen. "And that work is coming. We're working on the contracts right now to get that and get out there and hit the most critical areas." "Our primary concern is safety," says Fogarty. "So, if the river becomes unnavigable or unsafe, the U.S. Coast Guard will use its right and authority to shut the river down. However, that being said, we don't foresee that happening in the near future. We still have a few months to go before water is released from the Missouri River this spring. Hettel says this will help improve levels from April through December. If the drought persists, we could end up in the same boat next spring. "If we do have this scenario next year, we can better prepare our customers," Hettel says. Back to news

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iTouchless Forever Last Flashlight DLX
Have you ever fumbled in the darkness for a flashlight during a power outage only to discover that your batteries were dead? You'll never have to worry with the Forever Everlife Flashlight DLX. That's because it doesn't require batteries. Just shake it for 60 seconds and you'll have up to 100 minutes of continuous bright light.
iTouchless Forever Last Flashlight
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Humvee Twin Pack Shaker Lights
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Humvee GI Xenon Angle Head
Angled head. High pressure xenon bulb for ultra bright area & distance light. 4 colored lenses: red, yellow, green, & white. Anodized aircraft aluminium body. Digital multiphase on/off switch. Available in Black (shown) or Tan.
Guardian Shake Flashlight
These shake flashlights contain no batteries. Many new "fake shake" flashlights claim to be rechargeable when actually they use generic lithium batteries. These are the real deal. The waterproof case floats in water and the light is visible up to one mile.
Guardian Rechargeable Squeeze Flashlight (Set of 10)
These handy 2 LED flashlights are the new hot item right now. They are inexpensive, yet very efficient and bright. They have 2 bright LED bulbs. They also contain long lasting lithium batteries but they do not need them. They are recharged by squeezing a handle and are perfect for stressful situations since squeezing has been proven to be therapeutic.
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This flashlight is recharged through pulling a cord. The pulling dynamo system is 50% more efficient than the traditional cranking dynamo system. It is a very bright 5 LED flashlight which can run for 50,000 hours without ever fading in brightness. Nokia phones can plug directly in. This charger will work for every phone battery.
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ABU DHABI: Please don't stop the music, Rihanna, but do cover up (?)
The organizers behind acclaimed Barbadian singer Rihanna's planned concert in Abu Dhabi on New Year's Eve are denying media reports that the star has been told to trade in her trademark revealing, raunchy stage gear for a more wholesome look in her gig at the Emirates Palace Hotel in the emirate.
"The facts and figures recently reported around Rihanna's Abu Dhabi concert are totally inaccurate," said concert organizer Flash in a statement quoted by the United Arab Emirates-based English-language newspaper Gulf News.
The wardrobe row surfaced after the British tabloid the Daily Mirror claimed in a report over the weekend that Rihanna had been instructed to dress more conservatively for her show in Abu Dhabi and that the 21-year-old star was "tearing her hair out over what to do" about it.
The article also claimed Rihanna was being paid a whopping $500,000 for her performance, a sum for which the Daily Mirror said the star is likely to leave her latex body suits and extravagant bras in the closet.
So Rihanna's team is now said to be working around the clock to somehow figure out a way to make Rihanna's daring stage outfits go along with the local traditions in Abu Dhabi, which prides itself as the more mature and conservative brother of neighboring, freewheeling Dubai.
But Rihanna's supposed scrambling for a more wholesome look so as to not upset her conservative fans might prove a challenge.
"She knows that she'll have to compromise her style to fit in with local traditions, but a huge part of her show is her sexy stage gear," an unidentified source told the Daily Mirror.
Aside from maybe having to cover up in a sweater and a pair of jeans in her planned New Year's Eve gig, the British tabloid also suggested that Rihanna and her crew might also have to ring in the new year with soft drinks and juice instead of champagne, saying the singer may have to obtain a special license to store alcohol in her dressing room during the concert.
The incident is likely to mark this year's last wardrobe row in the Middle East, but it's certainly not the year's first.
Only two months ago, Islamic conservatives in Egypt branded pop singer Beyonce's concert in Cairo an "insolent sex party."
Hamdi Hassan, a lawmaker from the Muslim Brotherhood, reportedly submitted a written complaint about the concert to the Egyptian Interior Ministry.
He said the posters advertising the show, in which Beyonce was shown wearing a revealing outfit and gripping a pair of motorcycle handlebars extending from her hips, threatened Egypt's "social peace and stability."
-- Alexandra Sandels in Beirut
Photos: Rihanna has supposedly been told to skip her raunchy stage gear and cover up for her show on New Year's Eve in Abu Dhabi. Credit: www.rihannanow.com. Lower image: The British tabloid paper the Daily Mirror suggests Rihanna might be performing in a sweater if conservatives in Abu Dhabi get their way. Credit: Associated Press


text:
|Jun 14, 2012
Gone fishing: Researchers' imaging technique trolls in quiet cellular seas
|(Nanowerk News) Experienced anglers know that choppy waters make for difficult fishing, so they try not to rock the boat. Thanks to a new microscopy technique, cell biology researchers can heed that same advice.
|University of Illinois researchers developed a method they call trolling AFM, which allows them to study soft biological samples in liquid with high resolution and high quality. Led by mechanical science and engineering professor Min-Feng Yu, the group published its findings in the journal Nanotechnology ("Intrinsically high-Q dynamic AFM imaging in liquid with a significantly extended needle tip"; free access).
|Trolling AFM: By attaching a long nanoneedle to the end of an AFM probe, researchers can gain high-resolution images of samples in liquid while keeping the cantilever in open air. (Image: Majid Minary)
|We developed a highly sensitive method for high-resolution imaging of soft biological samples, such as living cells, in their physiological condition, said Majid Minary, a recent graduate of Yus group and first author of the paper. Minary now is a professor at the University of Texas-Dallas. We improved the quality factor of common atomic force microscopy imaging methods by two orders of magnitude, Minary said.
|The widely used atomic force microscope provides images of tiny structures with high resolution at the atomic scale. The AFM has a sharp probe at the end of an arm, called a cantilever. The tip of the probe skims the surface of a sample to measure mechanical, electrical or chemical properties.
|When scientists want to study cells, tissue or other live biological materials, the samples must be submerged in a liquid to keep them alive. This poses difficulties for atomic force microscopy, because the cantilever has to be submerged as well.
|Cells and tissues are so soft that if the AFM probe were simply dragged across the surface, it would damage or displace the sample instead of reading it. Therefore, scientists have to operate the AFM in oscillation mode with the probe gently tapping along the sample and detecting resistance.
|But oscillation in liquid brings a tide of complications in its wake.
|Oscillating a relatively large structure, such as an AFM cantilever, through liquid also causes the liquid to surge up and down with the oscillation, like waves in a tidal pool, causing even more drag.
|Theres a huge amount of hydrodynamic drag associated with operating a such a big cantilever, compared to the resolution youre trying to approach, said Yu, so it causes lots of disturbance, recorded as noise, which overwhelms all the actual data youre trying to get from the sample.
|The high noise level requires the probe to tap harder to find a signal. This means the tip deforms a cell as the probe presses down, and only large, stiff structural elements such as the nucleus are visible, rendering AFM unable to resolve the membranes structure, properties and contours with high resolution.
|Yus group devised a solution to the problem by allowing the cantilever to oscillate in air above the liquid while the sample is still submerged. They attached a thin, long nanoneedle a structure the group developed previously to the end of the probe, effectively extending the tip.
|We call it trolling mode AFM, as in fishing where a part of the fishing line is immersed in water and the other part above, Yu said.
|While AFM of soft tissues with a submerged probe is like trying to club fish with a large paddle in a wave pool, the new arrangement is like trolling a fishing line in a calm pond. The nanoneedle displaces very little of the liquid and causes very little drag, yet is very responsive, so that the cantilever can oscillate very gently with very small amplitude.
|Once you remove the noise, all the information youre getting is from the sample, instead of from the interaction between the tip and the liquid, Yu said.
|Using trolling AFM, the group gained high-resolution topographical images of human cells.
|We can tap with such small force that we can reveal the regional contours of the membrane, said Ning Wang, a professor of mechanical science and engineering and a co-author of the paper. Not only that, more importantly, we get the viscoelastic map. We put a little bit of force on it, and see how viscoelastic it is.
|Thanks to the minimal disturbance, trolling AFM also can operate at high frequency, which could allow researchers to study the dynamics of cellular structures that previously were not detectable.
|Next, the researchers want to expand the utility of this instrument with additional dynamic measurement capability. The team also will work with biologists to identify issues relating to cell membrane and refine trolling AFM to resolve structures in the membrane.
|Source: University of Illinois
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Marianne H. Mitchell is Professor of Education, Department of Counseling and Educational Psychology, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.Gibson, Robert L. is the author of 'Introduction to Counseling and Guidance ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780131738218 and ISBN 0131738216.[read more]
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Builds on the fantastic Stronghold heritage, combining beautifully crafted visuals and balanced gameplay with the epic legends of the Middle Ages.
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Is it just me, or are the postings for IT jobs utterly ridiculous these days? Lately I've seen some postings that appear to be jobs for two or three positions collected into one hire. Reading through some of them, I have to wonder if the person they're looking for exists. If they do, they surely aren't seeking work because they must be a wizard and/or god.
[ Also on InfoWorld.com: Read Paul Venezia's instant classic, "Nine traits of the veteran Unix admin." | Then, if you dare, join the debate about rebooting Unix-based systems. ]
This is a slightly embellished example -- and I do mean slightly, because it's based on a few postings I've seen recently.
WANTED TO HIRE - System Administrator
Fergenschmeir Systems is an advanced technology company specializing in advanced technology. We are a growing and fast-paced group that has just completed our first round of financing and is looking for driven, focused, and talented people to enable us to achieve our shared vision.
The role of System Administrator is the key to enabling our team to work smarter and simpler. This person must be able to maintain a positive outlook, work one-on-one with other team members and stakeholders in developing solutions to problems, and take ownership of their roles and responsibilities. This fast-paced position requires knowledge of key technologies and computing foundations and will involve interactions with the rest of the company, in addition to customer-facing tasks. This person must be able to communicate extremely well and present positive, take-charge attitudes at all levels of engagement. Hobbies and families are frowned upon.
- Provide technical problem resolution at all levels of Fergenschmeir's infrastructure
- Assist with customer infrastructure integration, problem resolution
- Present highly technical information clearly to other team members and customers
- Provide a wealth of deep technical information on all technical subject matters
- Assist sales in the construction of proposals
- Provide presales technical assistance to sales during customer interactions
- Build and maintain new technologies internal to Fergenschmeir's operation
- Work closely with engineers on developing new, revolutionary technology products
- Attend trade shows to present technical resources to event participants
- Know all competing products and technologies, and remain current with their progress
- Provide on-call services for a far-flung, international stakeholders and customers
- Care and maintenance of the break room and refrigerator contents


text:
Friday, April 8, 2011
Why startups in India find it hard to hire devs
(1) The very good devs can work for multinationals (Google,Microsoft etc) and local startups can't match the compensation.
(2) Indian services companies have lock in contracts
(3) No real history of non founders making lots of money from a startup
(4) Those who do want to work for startups have "unreasonable expectations" (quotes mine, not his)
Manoj Govindan (who works for (startup) Perfios - due disclosure - I reccomended him to Perfios - guilty as charged! :-) ) responded with four reasons why these startups don't hold any allure for good devs
(1) very few Indian startups offer significant equity to early hires.
(2) Many Indian startups give employees little say in strategic decision making. In the end, you are still a "coding body".
(3) Signal/Noise ratio - too many "social this" "cloud that" clone startups out there than innovative ones. Noise attracts noise.
(4) "Very good guys" like to make own technical decisions. Here they find them already made and locked in before they join. Often tech stacks are in place even before people actually decide what to do.
I have some sympathy for both view points. Is the question such a complicated one though?
There is a simpler explanation. All the points above can be subsumed under "Whenever there is a demand and supply gap, and some kind of free market mediating the two, prices rise". That is it.
Good devs, those with the combination of tech chops, communication skills, attitude and *ambition* (iow the exact type you want for your startup) are a scarce resource generally and particularly so in today's market. Demand is very high (this fluctuates) and supply is very low (this is constant). In such a scenario, the price varies from very high to high. Right now it is very high. And that is it.
You just can't buy gold for peanuts (speaking metaphorically. In reality you can trade a few truckloads for some gold). I can't. You can't. It is a value neutral statement - just the way the market works. You can sometimes marginally route around the Iron Law of supply and demand - Zoho trains people who wouldn't be considered for normal dev jobs for e.g - in effect, creating their own supply - but you can't escape it.
Even then, the argument goes, the "price" for good devs isn't necessarily all about money. True enough.
Look at how Silicon Valley's startups (or even more narrowly, YC funded companies) hire good devs - If you can't match (or exceed) market price in terms of compensation you need to make it up with (a) significant equity and/or (b) advanced tech and/or (c) a compelling business model with some traction and/or (d) a "change the world" product (think SpaceX) or (e) credible, proven founders. This is true *everywhere*, not just in the valley, though details and leeway differ. If you are a company trying to hire the very best developers, you have to pay the price somehow.
The typical Indian "lean startup" fails on all counts - it is often doing some whacky buzzword heavy, content lite, mobile/social mini app, works on PHP and MySQL, has no money (and so offers bare minimum salaries), is often run by clueless MBA/undistinguished engineer types and will give a prospective employee 1% equity in a doomed product for an endless 18 hour working day.
Why the hell would anyone half way technically good want to work with such outfits?
Devs are sometimes economically stupid but they aren't *that* stupid.
If they want to do interesting tech stuff they can go work for Google (Mountain View, not Bangalore!), start their own "great tech" companies, work on Open Source projects, work from home for US based startups doing interesting things or wait for Indian startups with cutting edge tech to proliferate, meanwhile drawing a steady salary and honing their skills.
If you must stay in Bangalore, but want great tech and a small company, go work for Gluster. All the tech and Open Source you want. Or apply to Tachyon. Or Notion Ink. There are a *lot* of companies attempting technically interesting things in Bangalore these days. And there is space for many many more, if you have founder dreams.
If you want to do services web dev, and work with small teams of bright people in a great office atmosphere, they should go work for someone like C42. Good company I vouch for.
If you just want to get out of that crappy enterprise services bodyshop, but don't want to get stressed about whether your children will starve, *and* want to do something "like a startup, but stable",go work for (a) someone with traction and funding, but aren't quite a startup any more (say SlideShare or Inmobi or Flipkart) (b) work with one of the many offshore centres of product companies, who have plenty of money. (say Intuit,or Zynga).
If you choose to be an employee (and it is an honourable choice), always make sure you are getting what you are worth - be that in terms of money, equity or technical challenge or whatever your individual preference is. This is just plain common sense.
If you want to be entrepreneurial and don't mind the stress, be a (co)founder, not an employee. That way you can still work on the latest social/mobile ripoff idea in PHP (or the blue sky idea in your own custom language!) and scrounge around for money, but you'll be in control of your destiny and won't have to factor in crazy bosses. ;-)
Nutshell : The law of demand and supply explains all phenomena in a free market. If you are any good at programming, you have more options now than you ever did. If you want to hire such people, create a compelling value proposition. If you aren't getting enough applications from qualified devs your "offer" isn't good enough.
The End.
EDIT: someone asked about good startups in Pune. The only Pune based startup I know of is Infinitely Beta (who have no problems recruiting afaik). But I am no expert on Indian startups.Do your research!
EDIT 2: I dashed this off while waiting for a build to complete. Apologies in advance for any typos/flaws.
17 comments:
- Manne Rajesh said...
Nice to read one good article that has summed-up all the points that one can think of. I appreciate it for bringing in lots of facts with a great insight.
My Take on this, not very different from yours but would like to write,
1) Devs are hard to find because there are very few that are being made(Supply-Demand). Most of the best devs that I came across are self-made. So hardwork pays off later but not immediate.
2) Service companies don't have much of an innovation in terms of product development. Those who got locked in will soon end-up rotten. They become weak and lose vigor. So make good choices in your career. Or else you end up making bad choices and finally only regret is left as a residue in your mind.
3)Ecosystem plays an important role in nurturing startups. For example I find "ET The Power of Ideas" to be totally laughable.Also i have no idea what's the present condition of "TATA NEN Hottest Startups". So VC's and other organisations should comeup with better ideas.
4)I haven't seen one "serial entrepreneur" who had started & got successful with multiple start-ups one after another. I don't know the whereabouts of the burrp.com founder. Also bazee.com
Rajesh Manne
//Would like to write many points. But me too have no time right now. :(
- April 8, 2011 at 7:17 AM
- Ram said...
4 - Bazee founder is a VC at Nexus
Burrp founder Deap has started another company
- April 9, 2011 at 9:44 PM
A few nits.
Some of the companies you have mentioned here were started by people with deep pockets and deep networks like Perfios and Infintely Beta. Not really the struggling garage types - not that its important per se, but it's important to know. The InMobi folks are well funded to the point that they cannot be considered a startup. As for Tachyon, the founders have parted and their transliteration (or whatever) product has been sold. They are now reportedly into joint product development or develop software for other companies for payment++ .
- April 14, 2011 at 10:00 AM
- Ravi said...
@anonymous thanks for the data (I don't keep up to date on these things, so updatesappreciated) Good nit picking, but the larger point is still unaffected though.
Deep pockets are *good* news for an employee. Deep networks are even better. And companies don't become "non startups" just because they have or acquire money or networks.
Besides, I specifically said in the article that if you need some guarantee of steady money you should join companies which are smaller, newer and nimbler than the average services behemoth but still have money (or as you put it "deep pockets") and are prbeyond the "garage" stage. And if you join a "garage" stage startup for less than market rates take a good look at how much equity you get.
As always readers of this (or any other) blog should do their own research. (and commenters with good comments shouldn't be anonymous ;-) ).
- April 14, 2011 at 10:10 AM
- Harish Mallipeddi said...
Well written.
I've said more or less the same things when Swaroop was collecting feedback on the same question - http://www.swaroopch.com/blog/reasons-indian-startups-struggle-hiring/
- April 14, 2011 at 11:08 AM
anon here again:
My point is that once people are well funded, they are going to start acting like big companies again.Mainly work keeps getting split to the point where the mgmt feels comfortable that there are no dependencies and there are no superstars. Second, once they get more funding they are gonna bring in more managers, make no mistake - and where were those managers previously ? service companies -simple math. If good managers are hard to find, good product managers are an order-to-two harder to find. And remember the great VCs here in India are mostly from service backgrounds - very few of them have real product experience. You can't take funding and not lose control. OK there are A-list VC funded companies in India - tell me about a few of them, honestly ... They have received more funds than YC's $17000 + $150000 (of late) ...
- April 15, 2011 at 10:41 AM
- Ravi said...
@anonymous I tire of this hair splitting. Besides extended conversations with people who choose to be anonymous are drags and boring.
All of your suppositions and imaginings of the failings of managers and so on have nothing to do with my central points in this entry - which have to do with the law of demand and supply as they apply to hiring developers for startups.
You are reacting to things in your head and complaints against specific companies than to anything *I* said. If you have hangups about the imperfections of varous Indian companies, you'll have to work them out elsewhere.
So, adios and au revoir.
- April 15, 2011 at 12:01 PM
- Deepak Honnalli said...
Well written, I should say. For people who are considering some work on C/Unix Kernel modules, work outside is pretty scarce, or I probably do not know where to look.
- April 23, 2011 at 7:57 PM
I feel a lot of Indian start-ups don't have their own identity and are trying to be like the big-wigs in US. Sometimes you need to realise if you pay more and get a good developer, not a rockstar mind you, the more probability of you getting things right. Lot of start-ups are looking for success, short term and hence target aptitude and not attitude. If a lot of companies bothered about telling their stories instead of their rockstar and ninja, more and more people like me would be willing to take that pay cut and believe in you. Don't smooth talk, talk sense.
- April 24, 2011 at 6:26 AM
- cies said...
while i work for an indian startup, mostfit.org, but usually live in the Netherlands. i think one important reason it is so hard to hire good devs in india is because parents (fathers) quite often make education choices for their children. because of this the percentage of devs with no real passion for IT is quite high compared to the NL or the US.
my Rs.2 :)
btw.. if you are truly passionate about IT, have some experience (preferably with linux/ruby/rails) then you should consider getting in contact with us.. we're a wonderful team disrupting the market for mico-credit administration software with our open source (!) offering.
- April 24, 2011 at 9:59 AM
- Ankur said...
having worked at two startups - vegayan systems and thinklabs [seedfund funded] and now at HP ... I understand how things work at both side of the fence. What you have written here is true. Would like to add that Startups are unable to match salaries and benefits for employees of 4-7 years work experience with those offered by well established companies. Also sadly society at large looks down upon one who work in small unknown companies.
I work at HP now and everyone thinks I am doing a great job working on difficult problems and my work is impact millions of life. Let use leave the truth aside ... Does people's perception matter ... yes it does and most that i know of don't think much of small companies aka startups
- April 24, 2011 at 11:09 AM
- Gautam said...
Good article. I wish I could work for any of the startups.
- April 24, 2011 at 12:40 PM
- RK said...
I work for Flipkart. We are hiring and we have competitive compensation as well good stock option plan.
Check us out http://www.flipkart.com/s/careers
- April 24, 2011 at 8:56 PM
- basant rajan said...
- agree in principle on the laws of demand & supply determining cost of labour.
have been on both sides of the fence and feel that ...
- the premium an indian professional places on 'job security' is rather high and this queers the pitch, more than just a little, against a start-up.
- by the time, the typical indian developer has developed an appetite and/or a tolerance for some risk, few manage to hold on to the passion for actually coding - their aspirations have long since been run down by our 'industry expectations' to being managers.
- larger companies seem to have worked around the acute dearth of 'skilled' manpower by substituting pre-employment education with post-hire training, which is unviable for the smaller players.
- the relatively significant contribution one can make at a start-up vs. being a small unseen cog in a large MNC is often steeply discounted by many of the younger professionals.
- price is not really what gets in the way of our hiring (sol/hpux/linux kernel & python); coming across 'programmers' or worse still, 'coders', as opposed to 'engineers', is.
- April 26, 2011 at 9:30 AM
- Quakeboy said...
nice article.. gave me some clarity on the decisions I have to make being a 5yr exp Dev now.
Its sad and unfair I feel when you work your ass off putting 12-18 hours for a start up and still treated as a coding factory. Thanks for sympathizing with the sentiments.
- August 14, 2011 at 7:46 AM
For Tachyon Technologies :They still hold the rights over their product Quillpad.
They are licensing this technology to companies but they haven't sold it.
- April 8, 2012 at 8:39 AM
Love your post. As someone itching to start something on their own, this resonates a lot with me.
PS: Anyone can make a typo so don't feel obliged to add "I dashed this off while waiting for a build to complete. Apologies in advance for any typos/flaws.", when you totally didn't. This is a well thought out and structured post. Cheers!
- December 29, 2012 at 9:44 AM


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Update – Missoula Police Offer Photo of Armed Robbery Suspect [AUDIO]
Missoula police are asking the public to be on the lookout for a man suspected of armed robbery at a local pharmacy on Saturday morning.
Sergeant Jerry Odlin says the robbery took place at about 9:40 a.m. At Palmer drug on Southwest Higgins.
The suspect left the pharmacy on foot with an undisclosed amount of pills. He should be considered armed and dangerous. Anyone with information is asked to call Crimestoppers at 721-44-44.
Sergeant Jerry Odlin


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FORTUNE — The heated battle for mobile payments just got more heated. On Thursday, Square, the pioneer in mobile point of sale systems, announced a new pricing model that gives merchants the option to pay a monthly fee of $275 instead of the current 2.75% fee on every transaction. Merchants who make more than $10,000 per month in business would pay less under the new pricing plan. Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Square, says it is all part of a move to make it easier for consumers and merchants to move away from cash. Dorsey, who just last week announced a deal with Starbucks (SBUX) to process the coffee chain's credit card transactions, spoke with Fortune's Miguel Helft about the latest announcements. This is an edited transcript of their conversation.
You are offering fixed pricing to merchants. Why?
If you look at the history of the industry, 1950 was first time that a merchant was charged to accept a credit card. It was 7% per transaction for Diners Club. And that per-transaction fee has not been changed in 62 years, it has not been rethought as a model. Two hundred and seventy-five dollars a month and zero fees is something entirely new. The reason we are doing it, is to make it more approachable. When a merchant has to pay credit card fees, they often don't know how much it's going to be.
But your previous pricing plan of 2.75% per transaction was already pretty transparent.
Yes, you know exactly what you are paying. But you still have to calculate that. [Now] you pay $275 per month and everything you swipe is in your bank account the next day.
This is a good deal for merchants who do more than $10,000 a month in transactions. What percentage of existing customers do you think will shift to the new pricing model?
This is designed explicitly for small businesses. A small business is characterized by the IRS as someone who makes under $250,000 a year. There are 27 million small businesses in the United States alone that don't accept credit cards. This opens the door even further for them to start accepting credit cards.
Every existing merchant who switches to the new pricing model and who exceeds the $10,000 in monthly transactions is going to pay you less.
Yes, but you are probably using the system more. What we care about the most is the experience. We see a massive decline in cash and in payers carrying cash. We see a massive increase of mobile card transactions and mobile payments. The more payments we can enable to accept these forms of payments, the better.
Competition seems to be escalating. Intuit (INTU), PayPal (EBAY), Verifone (PAY), NCR (NCR) and others have mobile point of sale solutions. And they are innovating in price. Verifone, for example, has a plan that combines a monthly fee $9.95 with a per transaction fee of 1.95%. That's cheaper than your old plans for many merchants, and cheaper than the new plan for merchants that do less than $13,000 or so in monthly business. Is your new pricing plan being driven in part by competition?
Not at all. Our new pricing model is driven entirely by making it easier for merchants to get in the door. We are not going to be reactive.
Is the competition more intense for the bigger merchants, say mid-sized businesses, as opposed to the hairdresser or personal trainer?
We've always built the company and the technology with the mindset that we want to be able to carry every single transaction in the world. We are enabling more and more people and more and more classes of businesses to get on. I don't think there's significantly more competition in the individuals than in the larger merchants.
What's this new pricing model going to do for the Square business overall?
We think it is going to grow the merchant base dramatically. That's good for merchants. And it's good for payers.
Lets talk about the Starbucks deal. Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, said the deal will help them lower credit card transactions fees. How is Square able to get better processing fees than a giant retailer like Starbucks?
It's not their business. Their business is coffee. They should not have to worry about all the payment mechanics.
We are engineers. Most merchants have to go through multiple hops to get through to the end bank. Each one of those hops takes a percentage, takes a fee. We've engineered [the system] so we can go direct to the sources and that allows us to get more efficient the transaction costs.
The other thing is that we are effectively one merchant. Starbucks is one merchant. That combined volume is massive and it does afford us some negotiating power in terms of rates.
Third thing, all the cost in credit cards is based from risk and fraud. We have more information than anyone else on risk and fraud, which means that we can minimize risk and fraud, which means that we can minimize the cost better than anyone else.
These three things add up pretty significantly.
So how much will they save?
We are not disclosing that.
You've told me before that the Square innovation you are most proud of is the Pay with Square app, and specifically, the fact that it allows you to walk into a store a pay by simply saying your name. You never have to take your phone out of your pocket. This is not coming to Starbucks yet. Why?
We wanted to start small and start simply. They built QR codes on every single counter. If we had to change every single point of sale system, it would be a much longer lead time. We wanted to get started and learn a lot and then figure out how to evolve the hardware. But the reason that Starbucks came to us in the first place was because of the experience Pay with Square afforded.
You've always been proud that Square spread itself by word of mouth, that you do not need a sales force to grow the business. Clearly, word of mouth didn't cause the Starbucks deal. Should we expect Square to continue to court larger retailers?
We are only focused building a utility that can scale from the individual to the larger retailer. This is the first in that class. Absolutely, we want to build a system that any merchant can use.
So this represents a shift, if not of your goal of serving both sides of counter with new technology, but at least in focus for Square?
No. It's always been merchant based. Small merchants self selected into it. You can imagine many, many retailers enabling Pay with Square.
Are you building a sales force to go after larger retailers?
No. I talk to them to them. But I'm not going out and doing a tour [of major retailers].
As part of the Starbucks deal, they invested $25 million in a Series D round of financing. It's unusual to announce to a portion of a financing round without disclosing the whole thing. Can you tell us how much you raised and at what valuation?
Was the Starbucks deal necessary to persuade the other investors to get on board?
No. Not at all. This conversation was completely independent. It happened to coincide with a Series D raise and we invited them to invest. Our investors who are leading the round, had no idea that Starbucks was coming when they set a price and when they invested.
There is no user benefit to announcing rounds. My preference is not to. But people care about this and we will announce the round when the time is right.


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Not your everyday calendar, here you can find important events in literary history, authors' birthdays, and a variety of holidays, all with related activities and resources that make them more relevant to students. View by day, by week, or by month.
March 12, 2019
On this date in 1901, Andrew Carnegie gave $5.2 million to New York City libraries.
Students write expository and persuasive pieces with the help of the Persuasion Map and Essay Map interactives, and compare the essential features of the two modes of writing.
Grades 3 – 12
Types of Calendar Activities
Authors & Texts
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Notable people and happenings in history
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UltraVNC by itself has no encryption, but there are, of course, plugins that do it.
Problem is, this only works when both server and client are UltraVNC. Other servers use different encryption methods.
It would be desirable to be able to use UltraVNC viewer with these servers.
Specifically, i'd like to see ANONTLS encryption supported. I have no preference about the support being built-in or being a plug-in.
If you want to learn about these encryption methods, i would suggest you start with http://www.karlrunge.com/x11vnc/ssvnc.html viewer, which claims to support all of them (i'm not sure what name the UltraVNC encryption extension goes under in their terminology, but ssvnc claims to support it too, though i never bothered to try to make it work, as i already have SSH tunnels available), which means that you should be able to at the very least ask the devs for specs or directions (brief googling have not allowed me to find these) and at most just look at their source code.
By the way, ssvnc viewer works very well with UltraVNC server, i have almost no complaints.


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Colts offensive coordinator Bruce Arians has been released from the hospital, which means that it's time for him to start talking to teams about head coaching jobs.
One of the teams reportedly interested in Arians is the Chargers. During an interview with 1090 AM in San Diego, Arians said that an interview hasn't been set up yet but that the team's decision to hire former Colts exec Tom Telesco as their general manager upped his interest in the job.
"I would be now that Tommy's there," Arians said, via SportsRadioInterviews.com. "I think so much of [the] success that teams have are great relationships between general manager and head coach. And it's not who has control of the roster, it's how do we get the best players? … I had the opportunity to work for 12 weeks as a head coach this year with Ryan Grigson and Tommy Telesco, and it was a fantastic relationship. And I wouldn't want to work in any other situation as a head coach, unless it's that type of relationship where nobody's got a power player [and] we're all in this together trying to win."
Arians has an interview scheduled with the Bears this weekend and said during the interview that he'd like to wrap the process up as quickly as possible. His familiarity with Telesco could make that easier.


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Ways to cooking Tofu Recipes
You've seen tofu. You've eaten tofu. And you may have even purchased tofu at the grocery store it's available just about everywhere these days.
But, like most people, you probably have no idea what to do with it. The truth is that tofu is one of the easiest and healthiest foods to cook it's easy to work with, it has an extremely mild taste that goes with anything, it's full of quality protein, it's cheap, and it's fast.
But in order to turn this white brick of pure potential into dinner, it helps to know a few tricks and tips. Here are some tofu cookery basics to get you going:
Tofu needs to be "pressed."
Tofu is packed in water, and it's a lot like a sponge if you don't press out the old water you can't get any new flavors in. This is really easy it just takes a teeny, tiny bit of advanced planning. Here's the breakdown (this assumes the use of extra-firm, water-packed tofu, not the silken kind in the little boxes):
- Slice open the package and drain out the water. Cut the block of tofu width-wise into however many slices you want I like to do 4 or 6.
- Lay a dish towel on a cookie sheet or tray; place some paper towels on top of that.
- Spread the slices of tofu out in a single layer on top of the towels. Put more paper towels and another dish towel on top of that.
- Set some heavy objects on top. I usually put another cookie sheet on top, and load it up with some canned goods, cookbooks, or my Cuisinart.
- Leave it alone for at least 30 minutes, but preferably a couple of hours. You can leave it like this all day or night if you put it in the fridge. If you're really in a hurry, you can apply some "manual pressure" and cut back the time to 15 minutes, but it's not going to be quite as awesome.
- Uncover; leave as "tofu steaks" or cut into cubes, marinate, and cook according to your recipe!
Tofu loves being marinated.
If you don't marinate it, it will taste like nothing.
Tofu hates marinades containing oil.
Tofu has a lot of water in it, even after you press it, and oil and water don't mix. Using oil in your marinade will actually create an oil slick on the tofu and the flavors will never sink in. Skip the oil in your marinades replace it with extra vinegar, soy sauce, citrus juice, or stock.
Get crispy with cornstarch.
If you're going to panfry or stir-fry your tofu, simply coat it in cornstarch after you've marinated it. A medium/light coat is best just put your marinated tofu in a big plastic zipper bag, add 1/2 cup cornstarch, close, and shake well. I like to dump it all into a colander over the sink to shake off the excess. This will give your tofu a fantastic, crispy coating, and it also really, really helps the tofu not stick to the pan.
Don't forget about broiling, grilling, and grill pans.
Tofu is great on the grill, in a grill pan, and under the broiler. Just marinate it, spray your grill or pan with a little canola oil spray to prevent sticking, and cook until you get nice grill marks or crispy edges (about 7 minutes per side can be less on a scorching-hot grill!). Tofu doesn't actually need to be cooked at all, so no worries about internal temps, and this is a super-healthy way (unfried) to prepare tofu.


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Hauppage takes aim at Slingbox with TV Anywhere
Cheaper, but not digital
Hardware sites appear to be going crazy for Hauppage's TV Anywhere, a system that brings together the company's USB-connected TV tuner and Orb video streaming software, all for just £100. However, we don't think Sling Media, make of the Slingbox, needs lose any sleep over it just yet.
Over here, the Slingbox is more expensive - it's around £185 - and can transmit content to PCs only. US users can stream broadcast TV to Windows Mobile 5.0 and, soon, Macs too, but these platforms aren't available to British Slingbox owners just yet.
Slingbox still has the edge over the Hauppage set-up, though. Firstly, it's got a digital tuner - the Hauppage PVR2 box is analogue. Crucially, though, you don't need a PC to host Slingbox - it's a standalong product. Not so the Hauppage offering, which has to be connected to a PC running 24x7 if you want to watch local telly from anywhere in the world.
TV Anywhere does allow you to stream your MP3s and photo slideshows, but Slingbox can tap into other video sources, such as Sky boxes and DVD players, not only taking their output but controlling the devices too.
Both products share one thing, however: they're both sold exclusively by UK retail chain DSG - aka Dixons. ®


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GPS and Geocaching Begins an Eight Billion Dollar Upgrade
The U.S. is upgrading its constellation of GPS satellites. They'll be replaced in an effort to greatly improve accuracy. Good news for geocachers. The replacement satellites are expected to sharpen the accuracy of your GPS device from about 20 feet to just an arm's length. They're also touted as being more reliable – meaning you won't lose the signal as often.
Hopefully, this means fewer Did Not Finds (DNFs) on the horizon. But it'll take a while to reach the horizon. The first generation of satellites will reportedly be swapped out one for one over the next decade.
The launch of the first of the next generation of GPS satellites has been scrubbed three times due to weather or technical glitches. The fourth time proved to be a charm. The rocket carrying the satellite lifted off Thursday, May 27th from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The satellites' software will be upgradable while they are in space and also continue to broadcast an atomic clock, keeping time to a billionth of a second.
Besides guiding travelers to destinations, ambulance crews to emergencies and owners to lost dogs, how else do we use GPS each day?


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MONTREAL -- Emotion shouldn't be a problem for the Dallas Stars when they visit the Montreal Canadiens on Tuesday night at the Bell Centre.
The Stars (28-25-6) should be fired up as they fight for a playoff spot in the Western Conference. They are holding the first wild-card position with 82 points, two more than the Colorado Avalanche, who hold the second wild card, and three more than the Los Angeles Kings, who are on the outside looking in.
The Stars will play the second game of a big six-game road trip against the Canadiens (25-32-12) after starting the trip with a 3-1 loss to the Penguins in Pittsburgh on Sunday.
Dallas held an optional skate at the Canadiens' suburban practice facility on Monday.
In addition to what's at stake in the playoff race, the Stars can expect to get some emotion from forward Alexander Radulov, who will play his first game in Montreal since turning down the Canadiens to sign a five-year, $31.25 million with Dallas during the summer.
Stars coach Ken Hitchcock said Radulov, who also played three seasons in Nashville for the Predators, has performed well against his old teams. He played against the Canadiens Nov. 21 in Dallas.
"He's gone and performed awful well in Nashville. And he's done fine there and he played well against Montreal, so I anticipate that he'll be able to do the same again. But you're right, it is an emotional distraction," Hitchcock told dallasstars.com. "But I think just where everything's at playoffs-wise, we've all got to just get beyond all of that stuff right now."
Hitchcock spent Monday tweaking the Stars game plan against the Canadiens.
"At this time of year, you really leave the emotion to the players and you provide tactics and adjustments, and that's your job as a coach," Hitchcock told the team's website. "If you're having to take care of the emotion at this time of year, you haven't done your job for the first 60 (games). And you weather it with the players.
"Sometimes, it's going to be really emotionally draining and tough like (Sunday) was, and sometimes, it's going to be in good shape. So you just have to weather that storm with the players, and that's really important."
The Stars are without top goaltender Ben Bishop, who has missed the past three games with a knee injury. He skated Monday in full equipment for the first time since the injury.
"He's a couple of steps away, but it's a good sign to have him on the ice today with gear on," Hitchcock said.
Kari Lehtonen has started the past three games and is 1-2-0, but has given up only four goals in those three games.
The Canadiens return home for a brief two-game homestand. After hosting the Stars, they play the Pittsburgh Penguins at Bell Centre on Thursday. The Canadiens were 1-4-1 on their road trip and are coming off a 5-2 loss to the Blue Jackets in Columbus on Monday.
The Canadiens, who are without top defenseman Shea Weber (out for the season after foot surgery), captain Max Pacioretty (knee) and goaltender Carey Price (concussion), have lost five games in a row (0-3-2).
The Canadiens will be looking to improve their special teams. The Blue Jackets scored on two of their three power-play chances and the Montreal penalty killing has slipped to 19th in the league.
"For us, when you're struggling on special teams, the best thing to do is not to overcomplicate it," Canadiens forward Brendan Gallagher, one of the few Canadiens having a good season, told Montrealcanadiens.com. "Just simplify it, understand, do your job, trust that your teammates are going to do their own. At times right now we're maybe overworking and it's allowing seams and plays to open up."
Gallagher scored his 25th of the season, a new career high, against the Blue Jackets. He has four goals and two assists in his past six games.


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More Distracted Driving Figures [AUDIO]
The link between cell phones and car crashes is well known.
But now two separate groups - the National Coalition For Safer Roads and FocusDriven - are out with new reports showing red light runners in this country are usually paying more attention to their phones than the road.
ABC News has more on the findings.