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Mar 9, 2014 at 5:40 pm
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — The 19-year-old driver of a car that lost control on an icy highway near Sleepy Eye, killing four people, is still recovering in the hospital.
State Patrol Lt. Eric Roeske says Kansas Adams, of Sleepy Eye, was the only one wearing a seatbelt when the car he was driving was broadsided by a pickup truck after veering into oncoming traffic Friday night.
Killed were 18-year-old John Mangen of Fairfax, 17-year-old Caleb Quesenberry, of St. Peter, 17-year-old Payton Adams of Sleepy Eye, and 20-year-old Tyler Hadley of Sleepy Eye. The driver of the pickup and his two children suffered injuries that weren't life-threatening.
Trudy Marshall, spokeswoman for the North Memorial Medical Center, says Adams was in critical condition Sunday. Kansas Adams is Payton Adams' brother.
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Mon December 1, 2014
Fri December 5, 2014
Sat December 27, 2014
Sat December 27, 2014
Wed December 31, 2014


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Americans Have More Toxic Flame Retardants in Their Bodies Than Previously Thought... Free Test Can Determine if You're Sitting on Toxic Furniture
EWG Releases Dirty Dozen Guide to Food Additives
Shocking Facts About the Meat Industry
Dr. Mercola and Mark Kastel Discuss The Yogurt Report
Dr. Mercola and Dr. Rowen on Ebola and Ozone Therapy
Dr. Mercola Interviews Dr. Seneff About Cholesterol Sulfate
View All Health Videos
Why? Because if you do, you have a 99% chance of emerging with a "disorder" along with a prescription for a risky substance that can likely cause far more negative health consequences than all...
If you respond to work e-mails at all hours of the day, the small increase in efficiency may be offset by a serious risk to your health.
Laughter is a form of universal communication that has profound effects on your mental and physical health and well-being.
Engaging in these 14 habits helps you maximize the pleasure in each and every day, and may hold the secret to becoming a happy, more joyful person.
Your immune system takes a hit during the grieving process, and the elderly may be especially vulnerable to infectious and chronic disease during this time.
It might not seem like a problem, but a Cornell University study has found that it can wreak havoc on your waistline and psychological health. And that's just scratching the surface...
A mother's fears may be passed on to her children within days of birth, possibly even when the trauma occurred before she was pregnant.
It's measurable, dangerous, yet hardly anyone ever rejects it. Floods your body with corrosive hormones, weakens your immune system, shrinks your brain, and makes your blood vessels a magnet for plaque. Conquer it today, because otherwise it can be an early killer.
FAR worse than they appear... so though they're handed out like candy, you'd be smart to avoid them and their inherent death risk.
The people around you, and those you watch on TV, can have a major influence on your emotional health, for better or for worse.
Happiness is associated with healthier lifestyle habits, but research also suggests it may have a more direct impact on your physical health.


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Plan B at OpenMoko: Remaining Developers Let GoJun 04, 2009
In a message to the community, OpenMoko CEO Sean Moss-Pultz explained how things with the open source mobile phone are to go from this point on.more »
SanDisk to Streamline Solid State Drives for NetbooksJun 04, 2009
Data storage specialist SanDisk announced at Computex the redesign of its solid state drives. The flash memory is intended to be quicker and more precise than the first generation.more »
Asustek Retracts, Puts Qualcomm Android Eee PC on IceJun 04, 2009
June 1 Qualcomm presented its new superflat Eee PC with Snapdragon chipset and Xandros or Android to the public. But the enthusiasm waned shortly thereafter.more »
Smartbooks on Their Way: ARM-Based Mini-NotebooksJun 02, 2009
When the Computex show opens in Taipei on June 2, among the announcements will be a series of Linux notebooks with ARM processors.more »
First Glance at KDE 4 in Netbook ContextJun 02, 2009
KDE hackers are working on a netbook user interface for KDE 4. First results are evident.more »
FSF Settles with Cisco over LicensingMay 21, 2009
In December 2008, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) filed a lawsuit against network giant Cisco, claiming that its subsidiary Linksys had multiple violations of the GPL. The two parties have now reached an agreement.more »
Latitude 2100: Netbook Not Just for StudentsMay 20, 2009
Dell takes the new 10" 2100 netbook out of its Latitude business series to target students, but it also serves as a mobile business device. Ubuntu 8.10 runs on it.more »
WOW Effect: First Beta of Moblin 2.0May 20, 2009
The first beta of the Moblin distro for netbooks and mobile Internet devices shows what's possible in an innovative interface.more »
Issue 170/2015
Buy this issue as a PDF
TOR Network Isn't So Anonymous
A new study says it is possible to unmask 81% of TOR users.
.NET Goes Open Source
Redmond joins the revolution by turning the .NET Core Runtime into a GitHub project.
Drupal Advisory Unleashes a Torrent of Attacks
Users only had 7 hours to update before the intrusions started.
HTML5 Gets Promoted to a Standard
It's official: The new web arrives
Linus Addresses Criticism for Harsh Language
Kernel king admits his tone has alienated volunteers, but says the demands of the process require directness.
New SSL Attack Lets a Malicious Listener Steal Session Cookies
New flaw in an old encryption scheme leaves the experts scrambling to disable SSL 3
Leading Open Source Coder Rants about Rants
Lennart Poettering wants to change the way Linux developers talk to each other.
HP Splits into Two Companies
Enterprise giant frees itself from ink and home PCs (and visa versa).
Mozilla Labs Shuts Down
Mozilla's product think tank sinks silently into history.
Internet Giants Launch Collaboration to Improve Open Source
TODO group will focus on open source tools in large-scale environments.


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The post When to replace a legacy system? appeared first on Energized Work.]]>
Companies that postpone taking informed action to replace their legacy systems at the time when the economic option tells them they should be doing something, claim they're risk-averse. Actually, they're change-averse. The compound risk of not doing something eventually exceeds the risk presented by undertaking the necessary action way back when. Then you're stuck! When all you want is reduced time and effort to introduce new and updated business services to better manage profitability, you find the business held to ransom by critical legacy systems that have become expensive to operate, and are too brittle to build on and too risky to replace. Commercially, that's not a good place to be.
At Energied Work, we have developed a unique approach to legacy replacement and application modernisation, designed to lower the risk associated with such migration programmes. If you're interested in finding out more, please read our White Paper about solving legacy.
The post When to replace a legacy system? appeared first on Energized Work.]]>
The post Commercial Contracts: Guarantees, commitments and risks appeared first on Energized Work.]]>
"When you buy something, you want to know exactly what you'll get and how much it will cost. It makes sense."
Our very own Simon Baker wrote this back in 2007. This is the prevailing mindset when anyone buys something, whether it is a personal purchase or multi-billion pound government contract. When we "buy" something we automatically want a guarantee that we will get something for our money.
But Simon immediately goes on to say…
"But this doesn't work when you're buying software development."
As many have done before and since Simon describes the various follies that arise from trying to "buy software" where the contract specifies exactly what you want (fixed scope), exactly how much you will pay (fixed cost) and when you will get it (fixed time). But if this doesn't work what's the alternative?
The extreme opposite is to abandon any notion of guarantees around scope, cost and time. A client can hire a supplier to deliver software and pay for their time until the client has what they want. However, in this arrangement all the risk is plainly and openly carried by the client. The client either places a great amount of trust in the supplier that they will act in the client's best interests or the client must tightly manage their supplier. For many people and organisations this kind of arrangement isn't palatable, especially for any work of significant size, or where they haven't worked with the supplier before.
Even if the client is happy to carry the risk they will often face internal obstacles that will make it difficult to get sign-off. Procurement and legal department policies may mandate how contracts must minimise exposure and risk in the event that trust breaks down in the client/supplier relationship. Unfortunately these policies are often based on the incorrect assumption that "building" software is relatively predictable and comparable to other "building" activities like construction. It's not surprising then that fixed price, fixed cost contracts continue to dominate our industry despite their flaws.
The agile community have championed the risk-reducing effect of delivering early and often within iterative and incremental cycles. When they looked at traditional commercial contracts it was obvious that they clashed with the values and principles of the agile manifesto. However most, if not all, have focused on better aligning contracts with agile process and management methods such as Scrum and Extreme Programming. This was a step forward, allowing clients to limit their risk with smaller statements of work, permitting changes in scope without expensive penalties, and even the option of cutting an engagement short if they thought no more significant value could be delivered.
However, as people like Susan Atkinson and Gabrielle Benefield have pointed out the traditional contract model for software and their agile derivatives still fail to make any guarantees to the client that what a supplier delivers will actually be of value. Even with a more progressive agile contract, where a supplier is more incentivised to do a good job and deliver features early and often, they are still not contractually obligated to ensure what is delivered satisfies the clients needs. This means that whilst the contract reduces exposure to risks, in terms of cost and time, it doesn't reduce risk around value which ultimately remains the responsibility of the client. Contractual incentivising this kind of value/cost asymmetry can have serious consequences.
So is it possible to have a contract that aligns the client and supplier so they may equitably share the responsibility for delivering value? And if so, how? What would it look like? What would we need?
From day one at Energized Work we lived by the agile manifesto principle that "our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software". However, as our approach has matured and evolved we realised that it is a somewhat simplistic statement and being able to objectively evaluate what is of value in a way that is testable and measurable is essential to success.
It is simplistic because there are, invariably, multiple stakeholders who need to be satisfied or are impacted in some way by any software delivery. We must therefore have the means to make effective prioritisation and design trade-off decisions to meet our stakeholder needs so they get the biggest "bang for buck" from our time and efforts.
Objectivity is required because balancing the needs of all our stakeholders is extremely difficult unless we can have rational, constructive, conversations to agree on how valuable a particular need is in comparison to another. Defining value requires us to be able to agree on the facts, explain our reasoning and capture our critical assumptions.
Our definitions of value must be testable and measurable to make our prioritisation method meaningful and effective. As decision theory expert Douglas Hubbard points out at the start of this talk, decisions made on the basis of expert intuition, consensus voting or arbitrary scoring methods might make you feel more confident about your decisions but it probably won't make them more effective. A more scientific, data-driven method is therefore required.
With these key realisations and having been inspired by Tom Gilb's Competitive Engineering we have adopted an outcome-based and data-driven approach where we define the underlying needs of our client's (and their stakeholders) in clear and unambiguous terms, but most importantly in a way that can be tested and measured. I will talk more about how we do this in future posts.
As we started to run more and more engagements toward measurable stakeholder outcomes we came to the conclusion that we could go a step further and make this a part of the commercial agreements with our clients. This has in fact been a strategic decision for Energized Work. We believe, like Tom Gilb does, that there are many benefits for our clients and ourselves. But primarily, our view is that outcomes-based contracts, where a significant part of our fee is tied to meeting those outcomes, ensures that the responsibility and risk of delivering value in a project is shared fairly between client and supplier.
To close, I invite you to try a small thought experiment based on the opening quote of this post. What if you changed the word "buy" to "invest"? How would that change your perspective and how might it make you think differently software contracts?
Here's my attempt: "When you invest in something, you …."
… you want a good return on your investment
… and you understand that nothing is absolutely certain and there are no guarantees
… and that the potential return on your investment should be high enough to outweigh the risks
… and that anyone you are investing with or in should have their interests aligned with your own and share the risks (and rewards)
Does this make sense? If so, how would you manage an investment in software to deliver a return on your investment?
The post Commercial Contracts: Guarantees, commitments and risks appeared first on Energized Work.]]>
The post Deliver outcomes not features appeared first on Energized Work.]]>
The posts:
The post Deliver outcomes not features appeared first on Energized Work.]]>
The post The problem with estimates part 2 – all cost, no value appeared first on Energized Work.]]>
Software teams are often required to painstakingly produce precise estimates of cost, time or some proxy for one or both e.g. story points. However, it's rare to see value-affecting variables being estimated beyond broadly-scoped revenue projections used to build an initial business case.
This avoidance of or extreme imprecision about value in the models we use for decision making severely limits their usefulness.
Value variables (e.g. conversion rate increase) can have a far greater impact on the ROI for a particular project or change than its cost. This is almost always true where the product or feature is innovative, yet often our models are built to forecast the arrival date and cost of the product, but not whether it was worth building.
Fixating on cost, time and effort inevitably leads to a belief in "on time, on budget" as the only important outcome.
Why does this happen?
Firstly, there's the problem of tangibility. Cost, time and their proxies are easy to conceive of and easy to measure. Value on the other hand can't be defined by a single, linear scale. Value has many factors, which vary according to context and are often assumed to be intangible – "How much market share could we gain through this?", "How will perception of our brand be affected?", "By how much will this reduce customer churn?". This belief leads to value being expressed vaguely and qualitatively – "This will give a huge bump to our brand image".
A shift in mindset can help here. Many of us perceive as intangible anything that doesn't fit with our conception of measurement, usually formed by an early education involving rulers, stop watches and weighing scales. But measurement is fundamentally just a quantitative reduction in uncertainty through observation (to paraphrase the scientific community's definition). According to this definition anything that can be observed can be measured, albeit with varying difficulty and precision. Once you start with the assumption that the thing you care about can be measured (and therefore estimated), finding a way to do it is usually only a Google search or two away. Tom Gilb's book Competitive Engineering has some useful practical advice on quantification and measurement of "intangibles".
Another cause is engineering teams' subordinate position in many organisations. Developers are compelled to be highly precise while their business sponsors can choose to be as vague as they like, motivated by a desire to avoid scrutiny of marginal-value pet features, or even to allow the goal posts to be shifted after the work is complete, spinning the impression of success whatever the outcome.
This problem is rather harder to manage, although some recent trends so more CIOs at board-level and deeper integration of IT into business verticals, may help improve the tech team/business relationship and thus the conversation about value.
For most companies, "on time, on budget" isn't good enough over the long term. But unless we put value on a level playing field with cost, that's the best that we can hope for.
The post The problem with estimates part 2 – all cost, no value appeared first on Energized Work.]]>
The post The problem with estimates part 1 – uncertainty appeared first on Energized Work.]]>
So why do we estimate?
One answer is to help stakeholders make good decisions – decisions likely to produce desired outcomes. But estimates alone aren't enough – it's only when they're used as inputs to a model of reality (even if that model exists solely in your PM's head) that they have the potential to become useful.
With that in mind, the standard practice of expressing estimates as a single number looks extremely flawed. Software projects are inherently uncertain endeavours, yet we routinely scrub all information about uncertainty from the inputs to our models.
This has a number of negative consequences. An absence of uncertainty information usually leads to overly optimistic forecasting and unrealistic expectations. "Late" and "over budget" are common stakeholder laments for projects planned without risk adjustment.
Dropping uncertainty information reduces a team's ability and incentive to engage in discovery work. When confronted by a task with many unknowns, common sense says you should devote some effort to research, technical spikes or experiments before committing to delivery. With quantified uncertainty, prioritising discovery activities is straightforward and uncontroversial. Without it, we're left with a slightly dodgy heuristic – do we know enough about this task to give it an estimate or not?
How can we do better?
There are several ways to express estimates with associated uncertainty. A simple solution is to provide a tolerance in addition to the central value e.g. 2 weeks ± 5 days. Another is to provide two values, one with 50% confidence and one with 90% confidence. A similar approach is to specify a 90% confidence interval i.e. "I'm 90% confident the value is between X and Y".
Estimates in any of the above forms allow you to build a reality model whose outputs are ranges and probabilities, rather than single predictions. With this in hand, you can have a better kind of conversation with your stakeholders – "I believe we have an 85% chance of delivering this before the Christmas rush" as opposed to "It'll be done by the 15th of December".
We can take this further. By specifying estimates as probability distribution plus range, projects can be modelled as Monte Carlo simulations*. In addition to providing some extra accuracy, this approach also lends itself to quickly running "what if" analyses e.g. "what if we simplify this feature?", "what if we reduced the uncertainty of this estimate by 20%?". Doing this is a good way to determine where to apply additional discovery effort.
Whatever approach you end up taking, one thing is certain – better decisions will be made when uncertainty is made explicit and discussed openly.
In my next post on this topic I'll talk about another common estimation flaw – fixating on cost and ignoring value.
* For a good explanation of this see chapter 6 of Douglas Hubbard's book How to Measure Anything
Header image: Photo taken by Moritz Wickendorf, 2010.
Creative Commons Licence.
(Changes made to image: Black overlay with some transparency applied.)
The post The problem with estimates part 1 – uncertainty appeared first on Energized Work.]]>
The post Replacing Legacy Systems? Mind the gap! appeared first on Energized Work.]]>
Parts of London's Tube system date back over 150 years. Carrying 9.5 million people in the first year, the Tube network today serves over 1,107 million passengers.
Commuters compare the Tube unfavourably to the mass transit system in Hong Kong or Tokyo. But those who run London Underground, quite reasonably, point out the difficulties of continually patching, extending and adapting an old system dealing with a load it was never designed for.
Yet as for the idea of closing down the Tube completely and fitting an entire new system – the entire city would grind to a halt! The cost would be unthinkable!
It reminds me of IT systems
Legacy systems on which the company depends are also creaking at the seams, costing more each year to maintain, limited in capacity and always carrying the risk of a shut-down. The patches and adaptations not only get harder to do but become a competitive liability as other companies introduce new functionality and efficiency. Yet when the senior managers think about the risk and cost of replacing the legacy system wholesale, they are horrified. And rightly so. There are numerous examples of enterprise replacement systems which have cost business dearly in performance, money, time and reputation.
Is there any other option?
We believe there is.
Software, thankfully, is not the Tube system. We don't have to close down the road and railway system while we dig a new tunnel! Instead we can keep the old system running in its entirety while we isolate a single strand of functionality – a single tube-line, if you like – and replace just this.
The clever bit (and where the metaphor collapses) is to ensure both lines work so that the switch over from old to new appears seamless to users.
Sounds easy, right? The problem, of course, is that the few intersecting lines of the Tube are simple compared to the tangled mess which most legacy IT systems represent. It can be a tangle where even the staff charged with maintaining it barely know why or how it works and are terrified to change anything in case it breaks. It's not unusual to have hundreds of thousands of lines of code with no test coverage, no version control and no documentation.
Specialists in modernising legacy
At Energized Work, we've become expert in replacing legacy systems: knowing how to map the mess, create a safety net of tools that make changes safe, disentangle individual strands, extract and replace them one by one.
Eventually the whole big ball of mud is replaced with new services that are understood, run more efficiently and allow companies to take advantages of new opportunities or deal with competitive threats.
It's much safer, and in the long run, it tends to be much cheaper than any big-bang replacement.
Making it really work
We pioneered and then began specialising in this kind of step-wise approach to modernising legacy systems. We took on a particularly challenging project with Travis Perkins and their Universe based system, parts of which dated back to the late 1980s. The small team achieved an astonishing amount of progress in a short time and demonstrated that a stepwise approach to legacy replacement is indeed feasible. You can read more in the Travis Perkins case study.
That meant we also developed a plan for how to proceed with any legacy system and a set of custom tools for mapping, reporting and testing in particular domains and technology stacks. We have put the detail together into a new White Paper called Solving Legacy.
With 62% of companies believing that maintaining legacy systems offer a negative ROI, it's time to look at Energized Work's stepwise approach to modernising legacy.
It's just a shame we can't do it with the Tube.
The post Replacing Legacy Systems? Mind the gap! appeared first on Energized Work.]]>
The post Modernising Legacy Systems in the Financial Sector appeared first on Energized Work.]]>
"Large retail banks with outdated technology face extinction unless they can replace IT legacies"
This is a bold claim made by Karl Flinders in a Computer Weekly article published in January 2014 titled Big banks' legacy IT systems could kill them. Is it too late for retail banks to overhaul IT and survive?
Karl suggests an explanation for the unfortunate situation financial institutions find themselves in. Historically, he claims, banks have under-invested in their IT infrastructure during good times, when business was plentiful. These cumbersome IT infrastructures make it impossible for them to compete today, when more nimble alternatives are emerging.
To compete effectively, particularly in an industry reliant on technology such as finance, a business must innovate constantly. But how can innovation happen when legacy IT systems grind business agility to a halt? This isn't simply a technical problem. Because of their pivotal role, ageing legacy systems constrain business innovation and are primary sources of operational cost and risk.
At Energized Work, we help our clients design and manage a strategic programmes of work focused on two areas: modernising legacy systems and creating sustainable innovation capabilities. We commit to, and deliver business outcomes. Some of our clients have experienced disruption first hand. Some are the disruptors.
Mohamed El-Erian talks about a similar trend in the financial sector in his Guardian article from April 2014 titled The democratic disruption of finance:
"Having redefined media, similar developments are slowly beginning to play out in finance – in a rather isolated way for now, but soon likely to start transforming how capital is mobilised and allocated in support of economic growth and employment."
In a recent blog post, Zachary Townsend, co-founder of silicon valley venture Standard Treasury explains how his company views the legacy systems of large banks as a strategic path to market disruption.
When facing disruption, the most common choice, extending the life of aging systems, proves to be a poor long term strategy as it merely postpones the inevitable. Instead, businesses must have viable options to fight their way back to the top. Our expertise can provide you with these options.
In a new white paper titled Solving Legacy, we describe a unique stepwise approach to the modernisation of business critical, enterprise legacy IT systems. This approach provides a low risk, high throughput path to escaping the deadlock of legacy. It serves as a stepping stone to enable the innovation necessary for financial institutions to remain competitive with new players leveraging the latest technology to disrupt the market.
Are your legacy systems proving to be a business continuity risk? We'd love to hear how you've decided to deal with this challenge.
The post Modernising Legacy Systems in the Financial Sector appeared first on Energized Work.]]>
The post Experience over Language appeared first on Energized Work.]]>
The essence represented by the boots, the pick-up and the friend is probably close to 'reliable after many knocks'. That's good enough for the sake of the discussion. We had shared our different referents with each other, perhaps through drawing or telling a tale. We moved beyond the ambiguity of words. We talked about the things behind the name tags. And now we agree that when we use the word 'robust' as our requirement, we can start looking at how to measure a) 'reliable' and b) 'after many knocks' to compare our candidate designs. People use language marked by ambiguity, yet computers rely on unambiguous instruction. In between lies the hard but rewarding work of understanding each other (human-to-human communication) before we worry about translating that into ones and zeros (human-computer communication). Header image: Photo taken by Sascha Kohlmann, 2012. Creative Commons Licence. (Changes made to image: Black overlay with some transparency applied.)
The post Experience over Language appeared first on Energized Work.]]>
The post Agile on the Beach 2014: Contracted to deliver outcomes appeared first on Energized Work.]]>
Many thanks to all who came to the presentation and the great team that organised the conference. Thanks for having me and I hope to see you again soon!
The post Agile on the Beach 2014: Contracted to deliver outcomes appeared first on Energized Work.]]>
The post On Productivity appeared first on Energized Work.]]>
Q. If it were even possible, how would you go about measuring the productivity / effectiveness of an engineering Dev team ?
The productivity question comes up time and again, from lots of different people. Technical leadership want to understand whether their strategy is effecting tangible improvement. Investors and programme managers want reassurance that they are funding a department or group that represents value for money. Financial controllers want something that they can compare across a portfolio. HR would like something solid to base their incentive schemes upon. Large integrators and consultancies want to establish "baselines" that show their own capabilities in the best possible light, usually to try convince CFOs or similar to outsource to them or change suppliers.
Before getting into the details of 'how', I'll first try to establish some definitions for the terms 'productivity' and 'effectiveness'*:
Historically, productivity was viewed as the rate at which a given team could turn a written specification into code and despite the changing specification formats (e.g. use cases, user stories) this is still the prevalent view in project management circles. I have many issues with this view.
First off this view has its roots in the traditional cost-accounting view that written software is an asset that can be capitalized and written down on the balance sheet. Therefore more software equals more assets. Nothing could be further from the truth! Software is expensive to operate and maintain, and suffers from rapid obsolescence. Additionally, software reuse is not free. In fact, it is nowhere close to free and in many cases the desire to reuse has cost more in time, money and opportunity than building afresh.
Secondly, critical quality aspects of software are usually unquantified and quietly ignored in this view, even though quality, "the knife-edge of experience", is the aspect that users most care about. If these resource and performance requirements (sometimes referred to as non-functional requirements) are unspecified and untested, comparison is meaningless.
Thirdly, this view is highly solution dependent. I've seen many projects that have created large quantities of software at a good pace to address problems that could have been solved using far simpler means. They are productive, but only by their own yardstick.
Lastly this view is very susceptible to gaming, as teams fall into what Drucker referred to as the "activity trap", prioritizing busy work (and looking busy) over high value work. I've lost count of the times I've seen teams cheat to make the numbers look better (e.g. inflating estimates, descoping work that was required but not specified) while sub optimising the actual value being delivered.
From a risk perspective, managing using this productivity view is dangerous. The two most critical risks that complex technology projects face are "white-space" risk and integration risk . "White-space" risk is the risk of critical tasks not being identified and planned until they surface unexpectedly, usually late in the project lifecycle (e.g. "I just found out that we must upgrade to Google OAuth 2.0″). Integration risk presents itself when multiple work items are considered complete but they do not work together (particularly prevalent in multi-team single-platform and silo'd organisations). Focusing on team productivity increases these risks, or at best lets them go unchecked, by locally optimizing for output at the cost of overall coherence.
In recent times we've seen the measure of productivity change from pages of specification to the number of features or user stories completed per unit time – "velocity". The critical definition here is that of "completed" (or "done" as they say in agile circles). There is a massive difference between, say, "ready for test" and "in customers' hands earning money". There are numerous articles on the 'net arguing about what completed actually means (e.g. "done" vs. "done done"). Again, if there is no consistent, testable and measured concept of completed, comparisons are meaningless. Other work has attempted to come up with a consistent measure of complexity for given pieces of work (usually in function points), but this is difficult to apply consistently as the measurement of complexity in software is difficult and still an active topic of debate.
Another approach to measuring productivity looks instead at process metrics. How often are developers integrating their code? How often is the software built? How many automated tests are run and what's the coverage? Is the code readable? How much duplication is there? This data can be useful to assess the health of a team, especially in measuring the gap between their actual working practices and the values that they espouse. Once again this data is not easily comparable between teams due to their own unique context and methods. The issue with focusing on this type of measure is that the voice of the customer is lost and there is nothing here that can measure design quality.
External views of productivity – ones that we ourselves have used in the past – have included measures such as frequency of release to production, feature utilization (is the feature being used, how much and by who?), number and impact of production incidents, stakeholder opinion/satisfaction, system obsolescence (e.g. how many components depend on technology older than 3 years), operational overhead and cycle time (time from start to finish) and lead time (time from request to start) for different types of work. These measures can provide a good view of how predictable a team is and can highlight areas for improvement, but again, do not provide anything that can be used rigorously for comparison with other teams.
The other side – effectiveness – must be viewed in context of the purpose of the system (or team). What is the purpose? There is a big difference between a stated purpose of "write software at ever-faster rates" (local optimisation) compared to "create viable products and services". We've been working on refining our methods to define and agree top quantified programme goals with stakeholders for use as a measure of effectiveness. This is why we have adopted a "product stream" approach in that past – it does not make sense to measure the effectiveness of a small component of a product team (e.g. development, product management, design) but you can measure macro product performance.
There's more to be said on this topic but I can summarize as follows:
Measures can be categorized as activity (e.g. no. of builds), output (e.g. no. of completed stories) or outcome (e.g. no. of new customers).
Activity and output measures can be viewed as "means" while outcomes can be viewed as "ends".
Activity and output measures can be useful for understanding performance qualities such as predictability and for highlighting areas for improvement.
Unless quality measures (both resource and performance) are numerically quantified, comparisons with other contexts are meaningless.
Unless the definition of completed (or "done") is the same, comparisons with other contexts are also meaningless.
Effectiveness can be measured as progress against predefined, numeric, quantified stakeholder objectives (per unit time).
The most important question to ask is – why measure?
* note: these are my working definitions of productivity and effectiveness (there are many).
The post On Productivity appeared first on Energized Work.]]>


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Arriving in Rio
Dear all our fabulous followers. As a first post of many, do get excited about all our future updates. Luckily we have arrived in Rio so there's a start. After forgetting to write down Jane Woods address (who we are blessed to be staying with for our time in Rio) we are now sitting on their balcony overlooking the Christo who is being a ...
World Cup final!
... past time. Next stop was the beach. And it was absolutely packed!! No joke, people everywhere. I have never seen so many people. The atmosphere was electric and it was at least 5 hours before kickoff. We chilled at a coconut stall, ate our lunch and watched the fans chant battle each other! Next minute....Jess couldn't find her wallet......she looked everywhere. Long story short it must have been left in the cab that we got to the fan fest. Poor Jess, there was ...
Entra Rio for finals week.
... shelter at a hotel and then stopped to eat some Japanese/Thai food. After this, we crossed the road and caught the cab to the FIFA fan store. We did fall asleep in many of these cabs but we made it to the store in short order, from here, we sprinted out of the cab into the store. I have a feeling that most of the stuff had sold out as there wasn't much to purchase and even less to look at. So we left feeling a little deflated and returned home. We then ...
Another Hike?!?
... We head out and check-out some of the shops around town. We buy what we need and go back to the apartment where David is patiently waiting. We proceed to wait for Alex and his friends who still have all of their stuff in our apartment since the USA game on Sunday. They show and grab their ****. They head back to their place in Rio and the three of us head down Copacabana beach to find a restaurant to watch the 2nd half of the Colombia/Japan ...
Working with Project Favela in Rio
... up at the cathedral - a very modern, concrete building which I hated from the outside. However, the inside was a real surprise - the way the light came in through the windows was beautiful. The second week that followed was a whirlwind of pretty much the same kind of thing - crafts with the 3 year olds, fun with the older kids in the afternoon and some partying in the evenings (although not every evening - I'm too old for that!). We introduced some cooking classes this ...


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Thursday, October 6, 2011
Are Sam Gagner's Days As An Oiler Numbered?
The second that it was announced that Ryan Nugent-Hopkins was the Oilers answer to its search for a first line center, I had a feeling that Gagner's days here might be numbered.
Minimal progression both statistically and physically IMO are at the root of Sam Gagner's problems. On top of RNH's addition, strong camps from Anton Lander, Tyler Pitlick, and Ryan Martindale must have been noticed by Oilers brass as well as teams that might have a use for #89. Add in the signing of Eric Belanger and the immovable object that is Shawn Horcoff, and Gagner is in an uphill battle to remain an Oiler.
A few arrows are pointing at the Toronto Maple Leafs in terms of a potential suitor. Coincidentally the Leafs are stacked with NHL defensemen and Brian Burke has shown that he is not afraid to move picks in an attempt to win now.
Music to Tambellini's ears! Picks and defensemen, it sounds like one stop shopping for an ongoing Oilers rebuild. While it is rather doubtful that the Oilers could pry TO's 2012 first round pick, if Tambellini could convince Burke that trading up into the first round in the 2011 draft should have pacified his teams fans after not drafting in the 1st in 2010, maybe it could be done.
Even if the Oilers walk out of a deal with Toronto acquiring a serviceable defenseman that is more than a stop gap and a 2nd round pick, I believe that a return like that as well as a potential return on an Ales Hemsky deadline trade would be enough to call the Oilers drafting portion of the rebuild complete.
Posted by Bryanbryoil at 10:02 PM
1 comment:
- Lisa McRitchie said...
I also see a trade or a move in Gagner's future. Several media members close to the team have mentioned that they see Gagner as a winger in the future.
It seems counter-productive to send away players who have NHL experience but if the Oilers could get an experienced defencemen that would solve a lot of questions and concerns.
- October 8, 2011 at 6:08 AM
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Then surely you know who his parents are>
Since initial response have found data that
would indicate he is frm line of Geo-3 of
Buncombe co NC ...his name either Ervin or
Irving/Erving..tombstone has Jerry E. 1833-
1903 bur Jocassee Cem Transylvania co NC..he m/1850's Harriet Thomas d/o Hughey Thomas.
He later moved to Alabama. Chn I have are:
Catherine, Peter, Martha/Matilda, John Thomas, Caroline, Elizabeth,Joseph, Dona.
None of this is documented. Makes me wonder
if the one born 1833-1903 is maybe father of
Jerry 1888-1970, who married Janie with chn
Estell, Madee, Ramond, Jesse, Roxie.........
Any definitive dates and places would help
connect this family to the main line. Thanks
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VIDEO: First Look at Comedian Matt Braunger's BRAUNGERPLICITY
Comedian Matt Braunger had his fill of stand-up and is having a crisis about his future, putting him on the verge of quitting. But before he makes any irrational decisions, two familiar faces to help change his mind. The clip also features fellow comedian TJ Miller and is inspired a bit by the movie Multiplicity with a dash of A Christmas Carol thrown in for good measure. Check it out below!
Enjoy the clip, which is sponsored by Comedy Central's new direct-to-fans initiative CC: Stand-Up Direct. A new initiative, available at ccdirect.comedycentral.com, provides fans of stand-up comedy with unprecedented ease of access to a wide range of stand-up content at an affordable price ($5 per special) and provides comedians featured on CC:Stand-Up Direct with a new revenue stream and an important promotional platform that will expose them to millions of stand-up fans via Comedy Central's multiple brand extensions including the channel,cc.com, Comedy Central Certified Clubs, radio, and Comedy Central Live Entertainment.
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- STAGE TUBE: BBC One's STRICTLY COME DANCING Defies Gravity with WICKED-Themed Performance
- STAGE TUBE: Neil Patrick Harris Previews NBC Variety Show on CHARLIE ROSE
- STAGE TUBE: Miss Tony Bennett & Lady Gaga's CHEEK TO CHEEK: LIVE? Watch it Here!
- STAGE TUBE: MODERN FAMILY's Sarah Hyland Sings 'Don't Speak' with SCREAM! Co-Star
- STAGE TUBE: Shia LaBeouf Explains What Led to CABARET Arrest
- STAGE TUBE: Trailer for New Broadway Webseries THE LUKE AND JEFF SHOW
- VIDEO: Nick Jonas Teases Behind-the-Scenes at COSMO Photo Shoot
- STAGE TUBE: Jenna Leigh Green Needs a Favor for THE RESIDUALS Season 2
- STAGE TUBE: Watch Glenn Close Stuff Her Face on THE TONIGHT SHOW
- STAGE TUBE: Watch the New AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 2 Promo!


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Helping answer the question of: "What's Dad's/Grandpa's old army stuff worth?"
Warman's World War II Collectibles, 3rd Ed., offers a unique review of a wide range of military objects (helmets, medals, field gear, uniforms) used and worn by men and women from the United States, Germany, England, Japan, and the former Soviet Union, while in service between 1939 and 1945. The items that fill the pages of this full-color book are those which are most commonly seen today, in antiques shops, flea markets, online auctions, and discovered in the trunks, drawers, and boxes in the homes of veterans.
The book is divided into eight chapters, including:Uniforms and footwear; headgear; accoutrements; medals; firearms; bayonets, knives, daggers and swords; personal items; groupings (a new category in this edition). In addition to color photographs (1,800 in all) and values (listed both in U.S. dollars and English pounds), at the beginning of each chapter you'll find a rating chart. The ratings represent: Availability of items, Price, and prevalence of reproductions of that particular type of relic. Plus, you'll also find first-person accounts of the war and from long-time collectors of military.
Simply put, this book allows readers to: "Evaluate military objects that he or she may find in attics, closets, flea markets, garage sales, or thrift stores," writes author John Adams-Graf, in the introduction. "This book is also for the families who encounter a box or trunk in an attic, filled with the souvenirs and remembrances of a relative's service to his or her country."
About the author:John Adams-Graf, who has a Master of Arts degree in historical administration and worked in the museum profession for 20 years, is a lifelong military collector. He is the longtime editor of Military Trader and Military Vehicles Magazine and also catalogs collections for prominent militaria dealers and auction companies. He is the author of a number of books, including Warman's Civil War Collectibles (1st and 2nd editions), Warman's World War II Collectibles (1st edition), Standard Catalog of Civil War Firearms, Badgers for the Union, and U.S. MRAP Vehicles in Action.
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Announcing Winter Quarter Adventure Program Trips!
Winter Quarter is right around the corner! We've got lots of trips planned for you and we can't to get outside. Read about our registration details and check out our full read more…
Do You Rent Climbing Shoes?
Do you rent climbing shoes on Sundays? The Outdoor Center will no longer be open on Sunday afternoons. If you plan to climb on Sunday and rent shoes from SOE, be read more…
SOE Winter Closures
The Outdoor Center and AOERC Climbing Wall will be closed the week of Thanksgiving, 11/22-11/30. Winter closure begins on Saturday, December 12th. We will reopen our facilities on Monday, January read more…
Welcome to Stanford Outdoor Education
Stanford Outdoor Education (SOE) is housed in the Department of Athletics, Physical Education, and Recreation (DAPER) within the Physical Education, Recreation, and Wellness organization. SOE is the organizational unit that advises outdoor education experiences for DAPER, Student Activities and Leadership (SAL), Stanford School of Medicine (SURG), and other formal SOE campus partners.
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Looking around the web for information on creating a new shell from Go, I kept finding the same answer: "You can't do it." Actually, you can do it, and it's not hard.
For episode 44, we sit down with Lanette Creamer, a proponent of context-driven and agile QA practices to discuss what "quality" means in a world moving toward DevOps practices. Lanette started in QA back when solving "the blank screen" involved "typing in win.exe" and has been testing everything.
I've been using wxPython for quite a while now and I see certain questions come up on a fairly frequent basis. One of the popular ones is how to ask the user for their credentials before loading up the rest of the application.
Make sure you didn't miss anything with this list of the Best of the Week in the DevOps Zone (July 4 to July 10). This week's topics include continuous delivery patterns, web tests in NodeJS, Java 8 and Java EE 7, Rackspace's best practices, continuous integration and continuous delivery provisioning tools.
Recently I wrote a lot of Jasmine tests for a small personal project. It took me some time until I finally got the feeling of getting the tests right.
Then we hit this issue of how do you create a definition of DevOps that is not too far away from the folks doing the work, but is still meaningful to the whole organization. We even talked a bit about how the name "Dev" "Ops" may be causing confusion!
In Diagramming Spring MVC webapps, I presented an approach that allows you to create a fairly comprehensive model of a software system in code.
Thucydides plays nicely with BDD tools such as JBehave, and traditional tools like JUnit, to make writing automated acceptance tests easier, and to provide richer and more useful living documentation. In a series of two articles, we will look at the tight one and two-way integration that Thucydides offers with JIRA.
This is the first of a series of posts that is going to discuss the different faces of tests. Let's start with validity. Admittedly, it's not the first of attribute I thought about. What are the chances we're going to write a wrong test?
Automate ENV preparation with Docker and Vagrant.
While it is possible to construct situations where double produces an error, it is also just as easy to construct situations were BigDecimal get an error.
Packaging and deploying an application consisting of Puppet manifests and Chef cookbooks (Docker container requests also). Easy integration with Jenkins; XL Deploy takes care of targeting the manifests/cookbooks at the appropriate hosts and all the orchestration of the invocations. Piece of cake!
Microservices are an architectural style where each service is implemented as an independent system. They can use their own persistence system (although it is not mandatory), deployment, language...
New vulnerabilities are frequently discovered in open source components previously thought to be safe, so to keep your applications from going sour, you should rely on automation to alert you when new risks are discovered in existing applications.
Here are a few quick tips to examine your existing code to identify reuse candidates:
For maintenance purposes, it is often beneficial to separate projects into their own projects. Furthermore, the commit history for the extracted project should not be lost. With Git, this can be achieved using git-subtree.
Let's put it this way: If the test fails the evaluation, there's going to be work later to fix it. When would you rather do it – now, when the test is fresh in your head, or later, when you have to dive in again, into code that you haven't seen in 6 months, instead of working on the new exciting feature you want to work on?
In the webinar Death to Manual Deployments we highlight a common problem in enterprise IT: configuration updates to middleware and applications are made on an "as-broken" basis. A developer will change the application to need a configuration tweak, which she makes on her own laptop.
Two examples of Spring Security's authentication replacement feature, often referred to as Run-As, that can replace the current user's authentication (and thus permissions) during a single secured object invocation.
The entry point of a Continuous Delivery pipeline is its Commit Stage, and as such manages the compilation, unit testing, analysis, and packaging of source code whenever a change is committed to version control.
Make sure you didn't miss anything with this list of the Best of the Week in the DevOps Zone (June 27 to July 3). This week's topics includes code complexity, code refactorings, unit testing database code, injection as a security risk, and an interview with PagerDuty on incident management in DevOps.
When making these tests, I allowed for a little flexibility as well: By setting environment variables, the same tests can be run with a manually deployed server, so you can use it to verify that your staging server is up and running (for example).
As a leader in distributed computing architectures, FastConnect brings its unique expertise to assist you in redesigning your information and your business applications involving system implementation methodologies and the most advanced technologies.
Here's a little demo video that I put together to explain pushing/pulling with multiple remotes and how tracking branches make this easier.
Continuing with my interview series from DevOps Days Austin, today's interview is with Matt Barlow. Matt established Rackspace's support offering around DevOps automation late last year. Hear about it and how it all came to be.
Discover best practices and the most useful tools for building the ideal integration architecture.


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Mark Sanchez
Tom Brady Reminds Everyone Who's MVP And Other Patriots Leftovers
Tom Brady likely didn't enjoy hearing all week about how his offense was going to struggle without Rob Gronkowski.
What To Watch For: Patriots-Jets Thanksgiving Edition
A few things to watch for in the Patriots-Jets Thanksgiving night clash.
Week 8 NFL Picks: Mark Sanchez Due For Big Game Against Dolphins, Packers To Manhandle Jaguars
Where do you go when you've already gone back to basics, back to the drawing board and back to square one? Asking for a friend.
Phil Simms Answers Questions About NFL's Top Story Lines
Phil Simms answers questions about the state of the NFL after seven weeks.
Simply Surviving Won't Lead To Super Bowl And Other Leftover Patriots Thoughts
The Patriots simply need to be better.
Patriots-Jets Week 7 Predictions
The Patriots are heavily favored against the New York Jets this weekend, but what does the CBSBostonsports.com Sports Team think of Sunday's game? Find out in this week's predictions!
Patriots-Jets What To Watch For: An Angry Brady
What to watch for in this Sunday's Patriots-Jets match-up.
Bledsoe On Gresh & Zo: Patriots 'We're All Accustomed To' Should Return Against Jets
Patriots Hall of Fame quarterback Drew Bledsoe joined 98.5 The Sports Hub's Gresh & Zolak on Friday to preview this weekend's match-up between the Patriots and Jets.
Gresh & Zo: Patriots Need To Make A Statement
Scott Zolak and Andy Gresh want to see the Patriots make a statement this weekend against the Jets.
Belichick, Patriots Preparing For The Many Roles Of Tim Tebow
Mark Sanchez may be Jets starting quarterback, but Bill Belichick and the Patriots will be ready for Tim Tebow at quarterback, running back, speacial teams, and pretty much everywhere else on the field come Sunday.


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The Detroit Lions quarterback joins the show to discuss his team's 2011 season and shares his prediction for who will win Super Bowl XLVI. Joe Fortenbaugh
Episode 51: Matthew Stafford's Super Bowl pick
Guest: Matthew Stafford, quarterback, Detroit Lions
Location: Murat Theatre, Indianapolis
Synopsis: Detroit Lions starting quarterback Matthew Stafford looks back on his team's success in 2011 and discusses what the Lions need to do in order to take the organization to the next level. The former Georgia Bulldog also shares his prediction on which team will come out victorious in Super Bowl XLVI.
Mobile device users CLICK HERE.
Follow Van Heusen on Twitter: @VanHeusen
Hit me up on Twitter: @JoeFortenbaugh
NOV 20 Joel Corry
Will there be first ballot Hall of Famers in 2015?
A detailed look at the eight candidates vying for that unique honor.
NOV 18 Dion Caputi
Cleveland quarterback Brian Hoyer has overcome long odds to put his team in contention for a playoff berth.
NOV 13 Joel Corry
The NFL's most underpaid players
10 players who are delivering big returns for their respective franchises.
NOV 11 Jeff Fedotin
K.C. synergy: how the Royals have bolstered the Chiefs
Teams bonded while chasing postseason berths.


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Wiki Headlines
18th Nov: We've switched servers and will be updating the old code over the next couple months, meaning that several things might break. Please report issues here.
1401 Envyus, Sat, 14th May '11 12:02:22 AM from Behind you
Dark Herohere is another fun fact you know how Raiden saving Johnny Cage from Motaro resulted in most of the deaths in this game here is some fun little things If Raiden had not saved Johnny here is what would have happened Johnny would have died then he would have come back to Life later Raiden would have been around when Kintaro showed up and would have killed him instead preventing him from coming back till Amrmagedon Sindel would have stayed in Outworld and had a Heal Face Turn and everyone would be alive but Johnny Motaro would have been killed out of hate by Sheeva who planning on overthrowing Shao Kahn as well would have been killed with by him with some help from Kano. The killing of Motaro sparking a civil war between the Shokan and Centaurs After Kahn was beaten with Sindel Turning Edinia would have been spearated from Outworld Also had Raiden not asked Kung Lao to fight then Baraka would have gotten sliced in half until he somehow recovered Now then who do you think is going to rule outworld with Kahn dead the two people in the runing for ruler I would guess are Milliena and Goro.
edited 14th May '11 12:48:44 AM by Envyus
1402 Actually Comma, Sat, 14th May '11 12:18:40 AM from a mysterious place
I am making sense!Against Shao Kahn, iirc I just did jumpkick + superman over and over again... either that or: cross-up jumppunch, FK-FK-BK-superman, but that's a little trickier.
Except [condescending response follows]. Because [sarcasm here]. You do understand [snark], right? POTHOLE TO SARCASM MODE
1403 Mighty Kombat, Sat, 14th May '11 4:27:29 AM from Are explosions science?
And? And? And? And? AND?All that previous talk of "X beating Y" reminded me of the climax of that one arc in the Malibu comic where Sub-Zero curbstomps Goro. You don't think they were homaging that by having Cyb-Zero take on Goro and Kintaro and win?
1404 Known Unknown, Sat, 14th May '11 10:53:06 AM from Here. There. Everywhere.
Fresh For 2014It's pretty interesting, though, that stuff like Motaro dying happened without much input from visions - it's like messing with the past altered history in general even without direct input. For example, Kung Lao's backstory is fairly different even without Dark Raiden's interference.
"My final prayer: O my body, always make me a man who questions!" — Frantz Fanon
Speaking of Dar K Raiden, the entire intro to 9 is quite bizarre. Raiden seems to be good old simple Raiden again despite the fact we saw he was still a Dark Messiah in Armageddon Konquest. And of course there's no indication of who actaully defeated Blaze. Some assume it was kahn which explains his glow and his uber powerfulness. Others say Taven still won but his ending meant nothing was changed so Kahn remained nigh-unbeatable.
Legendary Outlaw? ...Forget it.No, he was still Dark Raiden. But at this point, everyone is dead except him and Shao Kahn (and Shinnok, since he sent an impostor) and he's pretty much thinking "Well, I fucked that up real nicely. Let's see if I can fix it..."
Friendships are defined by boundaries; close friendships are defined by undefined boundaries. —Malchus
I don't know, Raiden looked like he had a vision right before going to rescue Johny Cage from Motaro. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMH6k-4oo1Q Around 0:15
1408 Handsome Rob, Sat, 14th May '11 2:39:21 PM from A very angry place Relationship Status: I made a point to burn all of the photographs
Scary little buggerx7 That's interesting. So you believe that the death of Motaro was a tipping point. That if Raiden had not have done that, none of the less favorable actions of this remake would have happened. It makes sense, but at the same time, it was because of those deaths that Raiden went to Quan Chi to make that deal, and that led to him realizing what needed to be done to stop Shao Kahn. So you have to ask: Can you have both? Raiden had been struggling to grasp the meaning of "He must win" for the entire game. What else could have triggered his revelation about that? Plus, even if Raiden did realize the truth, and stop Kahn, Shang Tsung and Quan Chi would have still been around, and we would have had Deadly Alliance all over again. Is there a winning path here. Defeat of the villains, with mimimum losses to the heroes.
edited 14th May '11 2:41:05 PM by HandsomeRob
No, I'm not a Zombie, they piss me off.
Legendary Outlaw? ...Forget it.Take Shao Kahn's body with you when you win the second tournament. He can't be saved from the brink of death if he's in his ememies' possession.
Friendships are defined by boundaries; close friendships are defined by undefined boundaries. —Malchus
1410 Handsome Rob, Sat, 14th May '11 2:57:23 PM from A very angry place Relationship Status: I made a point to burn all of the photographs
Scary little buggerThat might work, you know, except for the fact that it's SHAO FRICKING KAHN!! He'd be killing all those weak pathetic fools before they could so much as test their might.
No, I'm not a Zombie, they piss me off.
Legendary Outlaw? ...Forget it....He's already mostly dead at that point. All they have to do is keep his body away from Shang Tsung and they're done with him.
Friendships are defined by boundaries; close friendships are defined by undefined boundaries. —Malchus
1412 Actually Comma, Sat, 14th May '11 3:45:53 PM from a mysterious place
I am making sense!You're supposed to just keep punching him until he turns to stone and blows up. Pretty straightforward.
Except [condescending response follows]. Because [sarcasm here]. You do understand [snark], right? POTHOLE TO SARCASM MODE
1413 Tomoe Michieru, Sat, 14th May '11 4:01:10 PM from Huntsville AL
Samurai TroperI would love to see a Raiden-Fujin fight in story mode.
Legendary Outlaw? ...Forget it.To whomever was wondering whether Motaro killing Johnny was one of Raiden's visions, it was. It was in the original message Dark Raiden sends to his past self. EDIT: Just realized something else, though. The events of the tournament were changed immediately after Raiden received the message. Things like Nightwolf and Kitana being there can be Hand Waved for practicality's sake (if they weren't there, they'd show up out of nowhere when the story gets around to the game they were introduced) but that's not what I'm talking about. The very first fight of the tournament is against Reptile. In the original timeline, I'm pretty sure none of them even knew Reptile was there, since he was a secret character.
edited 14th May '11 6:59:37 PM by BadWolf21
Friendships are defined by boundaries; close friendships are defined by undefined boundaries. —Malchus
1415 Otogi, Sat, 14th May '11 6:55:52 PM from Around...
The House of Void/HiphopAlright, so I had another fight with Shao Kahn, and fallowed the advice and promptly got my ass kicked. I'll try again, but if I spend the whole day with winning tomorrow that game is being sold. Maybe even broken over my knee or run over.
1416 X 2 X, Sat, 14th May '11 6:58:53 PM from the Darkness Beyond Time Relationship Status: Sinking with my ship
[insert quip here]For what reason? The two are buddies, dating back to ages ago. Dude, that is some seriously good Fridge Brilliance right there.
1417 Actually Comma, Sat, 14th May '11 7:22:01 PM from a mysterious place
I am making sense!
The very first fight of the tournament is against Reptile. In the original timeline, I'm pretty sure none of them even knew Reptile was there, since he was a secret character.MK 1 (and 2 and 3) were already retconned to hell and back before this game came along (seriously: in retrospect you can spot at least one thing 'wrong' with pretty much every bio, ending, and intro screen). I would interpret every other apparent inconsistency as even more retconning.
Except [condescending response follows]. Because [sarcasm here]. You do understand [snark], right? POTHOLE TO SARCASM MODE
1418 Envyus, Sat, 14th May '11 7:57:12 PM from Behind you
Dark Herothe best advice i can give you is to use teleport to avoid his attacks and then attack him the best you can that or lay off story mode for a bit and do latter mode with Raiden to get some practice
In regards to Fujin vs. Raiden, I could only see that happening if he was still Dark Raiden. As is though, it is unlikely. Raiden honestly seems like he's going to be The Hero from now on... He was the one who ultimately saved the world in this new timeline. Coupled with the fact Liu Kang had an utterly pathetic and somewhat hilarious death, Raiden just seems to be taking center stage. And given his backstory of fighting Shinnok in the ancient past, that gives him even greater importance in the next game. Of course, more Richard Epcar is only a good thing.
edited 14th May '11 8:27:05 PM by Nikkolas
1420 X 2 X, Sat, 14th May '11 9:26:27 PM from the Darkness Beyond Time Relationship Status: Sinking with my ship
[insert quip here]Maybe Fujin will take up the reigns as his Number Two this time around, with Nightwolf's death and all. I wonder how the Forces of Light with be configured in this next game. Fujin and Kenshi are obvious choices, and maybe Sonya will be able to save Cyrax, but where will the others fit in, especially the ones we don't know about (i.e. Skarlet)? Boon's Twitter hints at Rain and Tanya, as well as rumors of Frost and Mavado (facedesk). Khameleon cameoed in the story at the Outworld tournament (in her Trilogy attire; she's the grey Classic!Kitana lookalike), and she's trying to have Reptile's babies so that their race can repopulate. And I bet that we'll probably see some guys like Kai and Reiko, not to mention I get the feeling Nitara will return simply because Boon said he wanted to flesh out the Vampire race.
edited 3rd Jun '11 1:37:24 AM by X2X
Legendary Outlaw? ...Forget it.Well, Bo' Rai Cho would be involved, I'm sure, and he'll probably bring Kai, and maybe Li Mei with him (personally, I hope not. I find her really boring). Nitara's a possibility, but Sareena's more likely, I think. If Nitara's in the game, I'd bet on her being a neutral party, rather than joining Raiden's group. Kenshi, Sonya, and Cage will be there for sure. And we don't know who Skarlet allies herself with, but if it's the heroes, she'll be there too. And Fujin, but that's obvious.
edited 14th May '11 9:45:24 PM by BadWolf21
Friendships are defined by boundaries; close friendships are defined by undefined boundaries. —Malchus
Ah Tanya, the best Murderous Thighs in the series. Or was it knees...whichever she used to twist your neck around in her MK 4 Fatality. As for Rain and Mavado, even the Kano-lite Black Dragon Jarek chose to align with the good guys to fight off Shinnok. Even Evil Has Standards or simply choosing not to align with the Devil because it will be worse for you if said Devil wins could provoke such an alliance with Rain. I kinda feel bad for Reptile. He was kinda the Butt Monkey of MK 9 and I get the feeling he joins up with the villains side less because he's evil and more because he's: a. ostracized due to his appearance and nature b. misguided I mean, just look at his MK 4 ending. (I ws just thinkinga bout this earlier actually. One of my fave endings in the series)
edited 14th May '11 9:51:27 PM by Nikkolas
I'm thinking Ermac may go Light Side and possibly Scorpion too or maybe he'll just go from Quan Chi's ally to Quan Chi's enemy
Also given some character's drastically different personalities in this new world, I foresee Frost being less evil. She was always a fan favorite from what I see and one of the few characters to bring in the shippers to the MK kommunity. (her and Sub-Zero obviously)
1425 X 2 X, Sat, 14th May '11 9:57:33 PM from the Darkness Beyond Time Relationship Status: Sinking with my ship
[insert quip here]Scorpion's gonna find out sooner or later. And he's going to go apeshit. Again. You know who I'd like to see? Tremor (the Black Dragon member from Special Forces). He's this minor darkhorse in the fanbase simply because he's the only "ninja" not to make it to the roster of any games. Also, his Shockwave Stomp and pseudo-Earth-based powers might make him a good replacement for Jax.
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STAMFORD, Conn. — Drugs and guns were seized from a home on Custer Street Wednesday, Lt. Tim Shaw of Stamford Police said.
Two sawed-off shotguns were found in the attic along with a cooler containing 293 grams of marijuana, 15 folds of heroin, a scale and more than $3,000 in cash, Shaw said. Police also found one-half gram of powder cocaine, baggies, cash, and more marijuana elsewhere in the house, the lieutenant said.
Street value is estimated at $1,500 for the marijuana and $300 for the heroin, Shaw said.
Police had information that there were guns in the residence for about six months, and were executing a search warrant on Wednesday, Shaw said.
The suspect, Richter Rinvil, 19, was charged with operation of a drug factory, two counts of possession of a sawed-off shotgun, two counts of criminal possession of a firearm, sale of a controlled substance, two counts of possession of a controlled substance within 1,500 feet of a school and possession of narcotics, among other charges, police said.
He was held in lieu of a $250,000 bond and is scheduled to appear in court on Thursday, Shaw said.
- 1 Prosecutor Slams Stamford Schools As Administrators Get Accelerated Rehab
- 2 Elderly Woman Mauled By Dog Dies At Bridgeport Hospital
- 3 Connecticut OKs Funding To Replace Metro-North Bridge In Norwalk
- 4 Stamford's Cloonan Middle School Earns School Of Distinction Honor
- 5 Bridgeport National Guard Member Killed By Unsafe Lane Change, Police Say


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You're leaving Wedding Paper Divas to see the Deal of the Day at our parent site, Tiny Prints.
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"I ordered these cards with a photograph on the front and one on the back. The quality of the print was great and the invitations looked beautiful! I also ordered the RSVP cards and directions insert which are part of the suite. I was thrilled with the finished product and I highly recommend these invitations! Thank you!"
"I ordered the invitations, RSVP cards and enclosure card for reception information and it all came looking better than I had even expected. I'm having a very neutral wedding so I went with the silver/gray text and it was the perfect touch. They are elegant and timeless invitations, I definitely will not be looking back in 10 years wondering what was I thinking."
"I was thrilled when these invitations arrived. I did tons if personalization so I wasn't sure how it would turn it. It turned out perfectly! Couldn't be happier. I was surprised how much I loved the paper. It's a textured one which is the standard with the purchase. I added a picture to this review to show off the invitations."
"If you order the light pink, it is actually Peach. Just beware, color is not as depicted in the images. Beautiful, but very different."
"Fell in love with these immediately and after shopping around, nothing else compared so we bought them. I just did regular paper, nothing fancy, and they look great. We are sending them out with the invite, reply card, and a small note on parchment paper to get more info on our matching website, and are bounding the invite package with burlap ribbon. Looks awesome and "vintage-y" :)"


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Find records of Mildred Nickens
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Mildred I Nickens (1915 - 2004) was born on September 7, 1915. She was born into the Nickens family.
There are no known spouses or children on file for Mildred. Mildred died on September 23, 2004 at age 89.
Mildred I Nickens's last known residence is at Gonzales, Ascension County, Louisiana.
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Última modificación: 18/01/2011 20:42:41
Since 1904, the American Lung Association has been working to ensure that people breathe easier. Our mission is to prevent lung disease and promote lung health. The American Lung Association, through the work of its many volunteers and staff across the nation, helps people with lung disease lead healthier lives. We teach children how to understand and control asthma. We fund scientists seeking better treatments and cures for all lung diseases. We work to prevent kids from smoking and give help to smokers who want to quit. We also champion the cause of cleaner air for all.
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Matt Schaub on J.J. Watt playing offense: 'Definitely all for it'
On Tuesday, NFL Defensive Player of the Year J.J. Watt said he would be interested in helping out the Texans on offense. On Wednesday, Texans quarterback Matt Schaub responded, enthusiastically. "Definitely all for it," Schaub said. "It would add to his legacy. He's a big target. I wouldn't mind just throwing it up and letting […] [Read More]
Watt would like to pitch in on Texans' offense
J.J. Watt's Tuesday morning joke turned into a Gary Kubiak afternoon tease. First, the 2012 NFL Defensive Player of the Year expressed interest in temporarily joining the Texans' offense. "I've been lobbying since day one," Watt said after the morning practice. "It hasn't worked yet, so I don't think it's going to work anytime soon. […] [Read More]
Texans report: Salutes, swordsmanship safe from punishment
There was confusion after the morning practice regarding officials cracking down on excessive celebrations. The rule is already on the books, but it's been loosely called until now. It turns out that J.J. Watt, Antonio Smith and Arian Foster have no problems with their celebrations. The rule stipulates that as long as the celebration isn't […] [Read More]
Texans report: Rookie OT Brennan Williams a no-go for now
The Texans didn't have good news to report on tackle Brennan Williams, who, after going for an MRI on Tuesday because of swelling in his recently scoped knee, had to have fluid drained. Williams won't practice again this week, which will leave him further behind after missing most of the rookie minicamp and OTAs. He […] [Read More]
In Wade we trust? The Texans defense and the read option
The hot topic of the NFL off-season? What is the best way for NFL teams to defense the read option offensive scheme? The Packers defense reportedly were fighting among themselves when they faced the 49ers in the playoffs because they couldn't stop it. The 49ers this year are practicing against it because they face both […] [Read More]
J.J. Watt fifth, Arian Foster eighth on NFL Network's top 100
Texans defensive end J.J. Watt made the highest debut ever on NFL Network's Top 100 players list. In his first appearance on the list, Watt, who was the NFL's defensive player of the year, ranked fifth. Texans running back Arian Foster was also in the Top 10, announced tonight on the network, at No. 8. […] [Read More]
Watt announces release date for new signature sneaker
For those looking to add to their shoe collection, you won't have to wait long for the distinct look of the 'Megawatt.' Texans defensive end J.J. Watt confirmed the shoes will be available for purchase Saturday. June 1st. #MegaWatt — JJ Watt (@JJWatt) May 30, 2013 Hearing that @jjwatt's limited edition signature shoe the […] [Read More]
Texans top pick Hopkins offers his support for Rockets
Receiver DeAndre Hopkins is taking a page from J.J. Watt's book on how to gain acceptance from fans. The Texans' first-round draft pick and native of Central, South Carolina is already embracing Houston as his adopted hometown. With the Rockets winning their first playoff game in four years, Hopkins took to social media to pledge […] [Read More]
J.J. Watt raises $300,000 with a packed stadium at his charity softball game
Houston's newest rockstar: J.J. Watt — by Tania Ganguli. As fans filed into Constellation Field in Sugar Land, J.J. Watt had to separate the offensive and defensive teams in different batting cages. "There's some tension between the offense and the defense," Watt said. "We got two separate batting cages going because offense didn't want to […] [Read More]
Two Houston sports giants in one photo
J.J. Watt hosts his charity softball game on Saturday. On Friday, he went to take batting practice. And he was joined by another Houston icon. [Read More]
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Stage 2&3
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Challenge level:
Can all unit fractions be written as the sum of two unit fractions?
The Egyptians expressed all fractions as the sum of different unit
fractions. Here is a chance to explore how they could have written
different fractions.
A country has decided to have just two different coins, 3z and 5z
coins. Which totals can be made? Is there a largest total that
cannot be made? How do you know?
Charlie and Abi put a counter on 42. They wondered if they could visit all the other numbers on their 1-100 board, moving the counter using just these two operations: x2 and -5. What do you think?
What size square corners should be cut from a square piece of paper to make a box with the largest possible volume?
Imagine you have a large supply of 3kg and 8kg weights. How many of each weight would you need for the average (mean) of the weights to be 6kg? What other averages could you have?
Can you find the values at the vertices when you know the values on
the edges?
If you can copy a network without lifting your pen off the paper and without drawing any line twice, then it is traversable.
Decide which of these diagrams are traversable.
Spotting patterns can be an important first step - explaining why it is appropriate to generalise is the next step, and often the most interesting and important.
Try entering different sets of numbers in the number pyramids. How does the total at the top change?
A collection of games on the NIM theme
Jo has three numbers which she adds together in pairs. When she
does this she has three different totals: 11, 17 and 22 What are
the three numbers Jo had to start with?"
Caroline and James pick sets of five numbers. Charlie chooses three of them that add together to make a multiple of three. Can they stop him?
Start with any number of counters in any number of piles. 2 players
take it in turns to remove any number of counters from a single
pile. The winner is the player to take the last counter.
A game for two people, or play online. Given a target number, say 23, and a range of numbers to choose from, say 1-4, players take it in turns to add to the running total to hit their target.
How many moves does it take to swap over some red and blue frogs? Do you have a method?
Euler discussed whether or not it was possible to stroll around Koenigsberg crossing each of its seven bridges exactly once. Experiment with different numbers of islands and bridges.
An article for teachers and pupils that encourages you to look at the mathematical properties of similar games.
One block is needed to make an up-and-down staircase, with one step up and one step down. How many blocks would be needed to build an up-and-down staircase with 5 steps up and 5 steps down?
Consider all two digit numbers (10, 11, . . . ,99). In writing down
all these numbers, which digits occur least often, and which occur
most often ? What about three digit numbers, four digit numbers. . . .
What would you get if you continued this sequence of fraction sums?
1/2 + 2/1 =
2/3 + 3/2 =
3/4 + 4/3 =
Take any two positive numbers. Calculate the arithmetic and geometric means. Repeat the calculations to generate a sequence of arithmetic means and geometric means. Make a note of what happens to the. . . .
Can you find sets of sloping lines that enclose a square?
The sum of the numbers 4 and 1 [1/3] is the same as the product of 4 and 1 [1/3]; that is to say 4 + 1 [1/3] = 4 � 1 [1/3]. What other numbers have the sum equal to the product and can this be so for. . . .
Find some examples of pairs of numbers such that their sum is a
factor of their product. eg. 4 + 12 = 16 and 4 × 12 = 48 and
16 is a factor of 48.
Choose a couple of the sequences. Try to picture how to make the next, and the next, and the next... Can you describe your reasoning?
Square numbers can be represented as the sum of consecutive odd
numbers. What is the sum of 1 + 3 + ..... + 149 + 151 + 153?
Triangle numbers can be represented by a triangular array of squares. What do you notice about the sum of identical triangle numbers?
This article for teachers describes several games, found on the
site, all of which have a related structure that can be used to
develop the skills of strategic planning.
Imagine a large cube made from small red cubes being dropped into a
pot of yellow paint. How many of the small cubes will have yellow
paint on their faces?
In this problem we are looking at sets of parallel sticks that
cross each other. What is the least number of crossings you can
make? And the greatest?
Imagine we have four bags containing a large number of 1s, 4s, 7s and 10s. What numbers can we make?
How could Penny, Tom and Matthew work out how many chocolates there
are in different sized boxes?
Can you find an efficient method to work out how many handshakes
there would be if hundreds of people met?
Use the animation to help you work out how many lines are needed to draw mystic roses of different sizes.
Charlie has made a Magic V. Can you use his example to make some more? And how about Magic Ls, Ns and Ws?
It starts quite simple but great opportunities for number discoveries and patterns!
Nim-7 game for an adult and child. Who will be the one to take the last counter?
Imagine we have four bags containing numbers from a sequence. What numbers can we make now?
Can you describe this route to infinity? Where will the arrows take you next?
This challenge asks you to imagine a snake coiling on itself.
The aim of the game is to slide the green square from the top right
hand corner to the bottom left hand corner in the least number of
How many pairs of numbers can you find that add up to a multiple of
11? Do you notice anything interesting about your results?
Imagine starting with one yellow cube and covering it all over with
a single layer of red cubes, and then covering that cube with a
layer of blue cubes. How many red and blue cubes would you need?
When number pyramids have a sequence on the bottom layer, some interesting patterns emerge...
List any 3 numbers. It is always possible to find a subset of
adjacent numbers that add up to a multiple of 3. Can you explain
why and prove it?
It would be nice to have a strategy for disentangling any tangled
Pick a square within a multiplication square and add the numbers on
each diagonal. What do you notice?
We can show that (x + 1)² = x² + 2x + 1 by considering
the area of an (x + 1) by (x + 1) square. Show in a similar way
that (x + 2)² = x² + 4x + 4
Can you see how to build a harmonic triangle? Can you work out the next two rows?


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Swimming/Diving Competes in Fresno November 15, 2014 On a beautiful Saturday morning, the Banana Slugs participated in their first competition in three weeks. [read more]
Swimming/Diving Finishes Third in Simons Fraiser/San Jose State Univ. Meet October 25, 2014 UC Santa Cruz finished up their second of two meets on Saturday as they took on NCAA Division I member San Jose State University and NCAA Division II member Simon Fraser University at the Aquatics Center at San Jose... [read more]
Swimming/Diving Competes in First Home Meet October 25, 2014 On a rainy Saturday morning in Santa Cruz, the Banana Slugs hosted their first swimming meet of the season. [read more]
Swimming/Diving Wins Bay Area Invitational Combined Team Title October 18, 2014 On a gorgeous fall day in Oakland, the UC Santa Cruz men's and women's swimming and diving teams kicked off their 2014-2015 schedule at the Bay Area Invitational. The invitational was hosted by Mills... [read more]
SCAC announces Spring 2014 Student-Athlete Academic Honor Roll June 25, 2014 30 members of the Swimming and Diving team make the Spring 2014 Student-Athlete Academic Honor Roll [read more]
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I kind of enjoyed following your thinking...
but I can not agree with the conclusion. Ed Snowden, just a guy, American citizen, informing the public on government spying and privacy infringement. Sure, we all already knew what was going on, but his leaks have woken up a lot of sheep to what WE already knew.
Personally, I think this whole "Snowden is a false flag" meme is ridiculous. I think the theory that the man portrayed as Jeff Bauman in Boston not being Jeff Bauman holds more water than this one. But I digress... Boston is taboo here. Apparently "false flag whistleblowers" aren't though. Oh well... you win some and you lose some, I guess.
My Political Awakening: I Wanted to Change the World...
I am NOT Anti-America. America is Anti-Me - Lowkey
How to Handle POLICE STATE Encounters
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The foods we eat have tremendous effects on how well our bodies function, even if the benefits don't become immediately obvious. Unlike the well-publicized links between the foods we eat and medical conditions like heart disease and diabetes, the connection between nutrition and eye health often gets neglected – until a problem arises.Read more »
Latest Blog Posts
Food Choices with Focus On Eye Health
For Weight Loss, Start Organizing Your Kitchen
We all know that a cluttered work space can interfere with our productivity and hinder creativity. Turns out, the same is true for the kitchen, where we plan and prepare meals, and store our supplies. As a registered dietitian, I've had many clients who were so overwhelmed with the clutter in their homes that it interfered with their ability to incorporate healthful changes into their eating habits and lifestyles. Here's a sampling of simple changes for streamlining your kitchen.Read more »
For Lasting Weight Loss, Go Fast or Slow?
Shedding pounds too rapidly has long been considered by experts as a recipe for short-lived success, almost inevitably leading to reoccurring weight gain. A better approach was thought to be losing one to two pounds a week, enough time to let the body adjust and make the changes permanent. But the idea that slimming down at a reduced rate produces better outcomes long-term may be delusional, according to a new study that found no differences for participants in so-called crash diets by comparison to their counterparts who took a slower pace.Read more »
Chronic Sleep Deprivation Considered a Public Health Threat
Nearly half of American adults are regularly sleep-deprived, according to a Gallup poll that has been tracking people's sleep habits for decades. Less than seven hours a night has become the rule rather than the exception, down by more than an hour since the 1940s. Especially those who are starting careers and young parents don't get the amount of sleep they need, and it has long-term consequences for their health.Read more »
Promoting Bone Health Can't Start Too Soon, Scientists Say
Insufficient Calcium and Vitamin D intake during childhood and adolescence increases the risk of osteoporosis later in life, according to a new study by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Unfortunately, many youngsters don't get enough of these important nutrients in their diet, and sedentary lifestyles and indoor activities like watching television or playing video games don't help.Read more »
Healthy Pantry Essentials
A well-stocked pantry is essential to ensure you can create healthy and delicious meals at a moment's notice. What's more, having a kitchen stocked with good-for-you options can help you peel off unwanted pounds. That's because home-cooked meals typically amount to smaller portions and fewer calories than restaurant food, less saturated fat and added sugars than in processed and ready-to-eat items, and more fruits and vegetables than in most dishes you get served away from home.Read more »


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A key ally of Ivory Coast's disputed leader Laurent Gbagbo has resigned as head of the Central Bank of West African States amid regional pressure.
Governor Philippe Henri Dacoury-Tabley, an Ivorian, quit after a bank meeting on Saturday.
The bank said he had failed to implement an order to no longer accept Mr Gbagbo's signature for funds.
The internationally recognised new president Alassane Ouattara has been asked to designate a new bank chief.
Mr Ouattara says Mr Gbagbo has withdrawn hundreds of millions of dollars from the bank since the disputed November presidential election.
Mr Gbagbo has refused to step down as president.
Late on Saturday he said he rejected the resignation of Mr Dacoury-Tabley.
The Central Bank of West African States groups the treasuries of eight West African countries.
'Technical reasons'
The European Union had said it would impose sanctions on Mr Dacoury-Tabley, making his position untenable.
According to a declaration of heads of state from West Africa's single-currency zone after an emergency meeting in Mali: "The conference is concerned about the impact of the non-application of the decision [on Mr Gbagbo] on the stability of the economic, financial and monetary system of the union.
"The conference has taken note of the resignation of Mr Philippe Henri Dacoury-Tabley from his post."
Mr Dacoury-Tabley blamed "technical reasons" for not applying the measure.
Ouattara ally Patrick Achi told Reuters news agency the resignation had been "what we have been calling for".
"This will reduce the money leaving the account. We are heading towards the control of the accounts but it will happen in stages."
UN peacekeepers are protecting Mr Ouattara in his temporary headquarters at a hotel in the main city of Abidjan.
Separately on Saturday, Mr Gbagbo said he had cancelled the accreditation of the French ambassador.
He was responding to a move by Paris to accredit Ali Coulibaly, Mr Ouattara's pick as Ivory Coast's envoy to France.
France said the removal of its envoy's accreditation was "devoid of any legal standing".
The presidential election in November was supposed to reunify Ivory Coast, divided since a 2002 civil war.
The country's electoral commission said Mr Ouattara had won - a position backed by the UN mission in Ivory Coast, which helped organise the poll.
But Mr Gbagbo's supporters said that the New Forces rebels who control the north had rigged the poll in favour of Mr Ouattara.
The Constitutional Council, headed by an ally of Mr Gbagbo, then annulled votes in these areas and declared Mr Gbagbo the winner.


text:
One cyclist got a scary reminder that train barriers exist for a reason.
Article Comments
(RJ Sangosti, Denver Post file)
SportsPro Football Focus helps determine player worth beyond basic NFL stats
In this age of vast knowledge, of phones operating as computers, the NFL's lure remains simple.
(Denver Post file photo)
Local NewsDouglas County authorities seek to reunite "substantial" cash, owner
The Douglas County Sheriff's Office is hoping to reunite a "substantial amount of cash" with the unlucky person who lost it.
(John Raoux/AP)
Amusement parks challenged by home entertainment
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Your local fun zone, amusement center and theme park is facing an existential challenge these days. Full Story


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A constipated obese nerd who tries to crap himself
Dude I can hear him yelling in the stalls! He's such an Odieon
by spittlespat April 19, 2011
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