text:
Prevalence of CVC-associated Sepsis and Use of Blood Cultures in Berlin - Brandenburg
- Full Text View
- Tabular View
- No Study Results Posted
- Disclaimer
- How to Read a Study Record
Structured web-based survey in selected hospitals with intensive care units in Berlin- Brandenburg to collect data on the overall number of blood cultures (used) and the prevalence of (positive blood cultures in patients with) CVC - associated sepsis.
|Study Type:
|Study Design:
|Observational Model: Cohort
Time Perspective: Retrospective
|Official Title:
|Retrospective Analysis of Proven Bacteremia, CVC-associated Infections and Sepsis
- Total number of blood cultures drawn and total number of positive findings in ICUs [ Time Frame: 1 year ] [ Designated as safety issue: No ]Retrospective analysis of cases with positive bloodculture among patients in ICU setting compared to the total amount of blood cultures taken in the same period of time and same hospital.
- Prevalence on CVC - associated sepsis/CLABSIs [ Time Frame: 1 year ] [ Designated as safety issue: No ]
|Estimated Enrollment:
|Study Start Date:
|July 2011
|Estimated Study Completion Date:
|July 2015
|Estimated Primary Completion Date:
|July 2015 (Final data collection date for primary outcome measure)
Participating hospitals in the INABBRA alliance.
Detailed Description:
The use of CVC represents one of the major risk factors for sepsis, a highly prevalent disease in ICUs. Blood cultures obtained prior to antibiotic administration are part of the SSC Resuscitation Bundle and essential for the outcome of the patient. The CDC criteria to diagnose sepsis do not take into account the overall number of blood cultures obtained and thus, lead to an underestimation of the true incidence of sepsis. Up to now, few data is available on the total number of blood cultures obtained and the relation to the incidence of sepsis in German ICUs.
|Genders Eligible for Study:
|Accepts Healthy Volunteers:
|Sampling Method:
|Non-Probability Sample
Patients with bacteremia on intensive care units of different primary and secondary care hospitals in the region of Berlin-Brandenburg.
Inclusion Criteria:
- Intensive care units of hospitals in the INABBRA alliance.
- Patients with bacteremia.
Exclusion Criteria:
- Hospitals without intensive care unit.
Please refer to this study by its ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT01388686
|Contact: Claudia Spies, MD, Prof.
|+49 30 450 551001
|Department of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine, Campus Virchow-Klinikum and Campus Charité Mitte, Charité - Universitaetsmedizin Berlin
|Berlin, Germany, 13353
|Contact: Claudia Spies, MD, Prof. +49 30 450 551001 email@example.com
|Sub-Investigator: Maria Deja, MD , PD
|Sub-Investigator: Irit Nachtigall, MD, Dr.
|Sub-Investigator: Andreas Rothbart, MD, Dr.
|Study Director:
|Claudia Spies, MD, Prof.
|Department of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine, Campus Virchow-Klinikum and Campus Charité Mitte, Charité - Universitaetsmedizin Berlin
Additional Information:
|Responsible Party:
|Claudia Spies, Prof. MD, Director of the Dept. of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine, CVK, CCM, Charite University, Berlin, Germany, Charite University, Berlin, Germany
|ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier:
|NCT01388686 History of Changes
|Other Study ID Numbers:
|Study First Received:
|July 5, 2011
|Last Updated:
|January 27, 2015
|Health Authority:
|Germany: Ethics Commission
Keywords provided by Charite University, Berlin, Germany:
blood stream infection
blood culture
Additional relevant MeSH terms:
Bacterial Infections
Pathologic Processes
Systemic Inflammatory Response Syndrome
ClinicalTrials.gov processed this record on October 13, 2015


text:
Los Angeles has a charm all its own. Very often the weather is the same outdoors as it is in. You go outside and it is room temperature. Which is pleasant because you forget all about weather. This may add to the tendency to forgot other things too. Like naming apartment buildings properly:
Great picture (if it is not a photoshop), but it's got nothing on Reddit user AlphaF who punked her mom at the Grand Canyon. With a massive prank. . .

subset: commoncrawl


text:
STH ADVISORY: New 2014 RSL Jersey, Coming March 4th
The all new Real Salt Lake 2014 jersey will be available March 4th, 2014. Due to the timing of the new LifeVantage sponsorship deal and adidas' manufacturing/shipping timeline we will have only 1,700 jerseys available in various sizes. PRIDE Season Ticket Holders will receive first option to purchase the new jersey at a special Jersey Launch event on March 4th, 2014 (watch your email on Wednesday, February 26th for specific event information). Following the event on March 4th, the remaining available stock will be open to the general public for purchase.
Based on our current number of PRIDE Season Ticket Holders (10,000+ - THANK YOU!), we cannot guarantee availability of sizes and quantities. Due to the limited number available to us on our first order, the 2014 jerseys will be sold on a first come, first serve basis. Our second shipment of 2014 jerseys will arrive in April. At that time we will be able to accommodate more fans who would like to purchase the 2014 jersey.
We appreciate and thank you for your patience and understanding in our transition. We are very excited about our new sponsor LifeVantage and our new look! GO RSL!


text:
Dolphin Browser® Mini
by Dolphin Browser
Download this app if: you want a smaller, faster version of the popular browser.
Advisor Review
Jump through hoops with Dolphin Browser Mini for Android — On a phone, a great browser matters. Dolphin has been cranking out great mobile browsers and its latest — currently in Beta — is no exception. Dolphin Browser Mini comes billed as a lightweight browser, but it feels as full-featured as many competitors. First up, it's blazing fast. Some...
Developer Notes
Something powerful, something elegant, something valuable! It is Dolphin Browser® Mini.
Something fast, something simple, something new! It is Dolphin Browser Mini.
Browsing made wonderful.
Dolphin Browser® Mini aims at providing a friendly user experience for all of you.
Enjoy this new version...
faster? Yes... — But is it really any better? Well for now it's just faster than others. Who knows what the future will bring developmentally? For now it's just another cool looking widget in my library (that I use :)... UPDATE: the more I use this browser the more I like it! I wish they had a PC version!


text:
- Northern New York Newspapers
- Watertown
- Ogdensburg
- Massena-Potsdam
- Lowville
- Carthage
- Malone
- NNY Business
- NNY Living
- NNY Ads
After buying a house at 257 Thompson Blvd. last February, Travis W. Hartman asked his fianc�e and a couple of his friends to move in with him.
But next-door neighbor Deborah A. Cavallario was not happy a man in his 20s could be allowed to have his buddies move into the single-family house when the neighborhood was zoned Residence A.
Only a single family should be allowed to live there; otherwise, it was a boarding house, she thought. But she found out from the city Code Enforcement Office there was nothing to prevent Mr. Hartmans friends from living there.
Some of the neighbors have lived on Thompson Boulevard for 30, 35 years, she told the city Planning Board last week. Im concerned its no longer a single-family home.
But the situation raises two questions: What makes up a family? And do homeowners have the right to say who lives in their homes?
The subject of Mr. Hartmans living arrangements came before the Planning Board on Tuesday after the Watertown City Council instructed the board to review it.
Mrs. Cavallario did not say Mr. Hartman was having loud parties. She complained only about the number of SUVs parked daily in front of the two-bedroom, ranch-style home. At first, it was hard to figure out what was happening at the residence because Mr. Hartman told her he and his brother lived there, she said. He later admitted to her four friends shared the home, she said.
On Wednesday, Mr. Hartman said his fianc�e and friends were living in the 1,236-square-foot house in a residential neighborhood. While acknowledging the situation had become a neighbor dispute, Mr. Hartman said the living arrangements were no ones business, stressing the Code Enforcement Office found nothing in city codes to prevent his friends from living there.
He also said his roommates are not tenants. They dont pay rent, so their money is not going toward his mortgage, he said; instead, they share the cost of groceries. He declined to comment further.
To distinguish it from a club, fraternity or boarding house, a family consists of any number of individuals living together as a single-housekeeping unit, as long as they do not include more than four people who are not blood relatives, according to city code.
But the Planning Board decided to intervene.
I feel for your situation because I wouldnt be happy, Planning Board member Lori J. Gervera, a local real estate agent, told Mrs. Cavallario during the lengthy discussion at the meeting.
By a 5-1 vote, the Planning Board agreed to take steps to ensure friends no longer are allowed to move into a house in a Residence A zone district. They also recommended eliminating a single sentence from the city code, pertaining to a reference that allowed no more than four transient roomers living in a house in a residential district.
They also recommended the City Council look at the definition of a family. But Kenneth A. Mix, the citys planning and community development coordinator, warned it would be a constitutional quagmire to figure out what makes up a modern family.
And Planning Board member William R. David Jr. objected to changing the ordinance, contending it would be unenforceable. Shawn R. McWayne, the code enforcement supervisor, said Friday he believes the situation will be permitted even with the changes.
The City Council has the final say on the changes.
Thousands of readers like you have made Northern New York Newspapers the number one ranked website* for local news and sports coverage in the north country.
You can continue on to this article in a few seconds, or you can visit one of our websites:


text:
Want full access?
Current subscriber?Activate
Have an account? Login
Joy Lewis/Reporter-News Children fill the sidewalk in front of the Abilene Public Library's north branch with chalk art during Tween Time on Thursday, April 25, 2013.
Joy Lewis/Reporter-News Amanda Guerrero, 10, traces an outline of her twin sister, Victoria, with sidewalk chalk as Kayleigh Escamilla, 10, right, is traced during Tween Time on Thursday, April 25, 2013 at the north branch of Abilene Public Library. The next Tween Night will feature Wii games in the Activity Room at 4 p.m. on May 9.$RETURN$$RETURN$
Christopher Collins/Reporter-News Meigan Gardner, 20, and other members of the GATA social club at Abilene Christian University do their best to dress a goat at the ACU Rodeo. The event took place at the Taylor County Expo Center on Thursday evening.$RETURN$$RETURN$
Christopher Collins/Reporter-News Cole Murphy, 21, and Emily Schuster, 20, herd cattle at the ACU Rodeo on Thursday night. Schuster, a junior at ACU, said the event brought a taste of country to the students.
Eric J. Shelton/Reporter-News Abilene City Council candidates give their opening remarks during a forum at Abilene Christian University's Hart Auditorium on Thursday night. The candidates were, from left, City Council Place 5 candidates Kyle McAlister and Charles Zollars, Place 6 candidate Steve Savage and incumbent Kellie Miller.
Eric J. Shelton/Reporter-News Lee Stanley, left, gives his car keys to Durant's Automotive and Wrecker's Mike Matthews after Stanley's accident at the intersection of South 1st and Butternut Street on Thursday, April 25, 2013. The accident occurred when Stanley was hit by another vehicle that was making a left turn on Butternut at an unprotected traffic light. Simultaneously, Stanley was making a right turn on Butternut Street at a protected traffic light. No one was injured in the accident.$RETURN$$RETURN$
Eric J. Shelton/Reporter-News John Donaway searches through boxes of donated items before loading them into the TSTC trailer on Thursday, April 25, 2013.$RETURN$$RETURN$
Eric J. Shelton/Reporter-News Jacob Riddle, from left, Ephraim Goff, Jeff Howard and Taylor Sloan load a TSTC trailer with donated items for the victims of the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas Thursday afternoon, April 25, 2013.
Ronald W. Erdrich/Reporter-News Randy Meador takes his painting off the easel momentarily during his watercolor workshop at the Breckenridge Fine Arts Center Wednesday, April 24, 2013. Meador is one of the artists featured in the BFAC's Best of the Best show, a collection of work from past winners of the center's Juried Art Show.$RETURN$$RETURN$
Joy Lewis/Reporter-News McMurry University's Chris Simpson (3) evades the defense during the spring game on Thursday, April 25, 2013 at Wilford Moore Stadium.$RETURN$$RETURN$
Joy Lewis/Reporter-News McMurry University's Billy Cole (46) faces Jeff Arnold (29) and Chris Simpson (3) during the spring game on Thursday, April 25, 2013 at Wilford Moore Stadium.
Thomas Metthe/Reporter-News Stamford center fielder Ligon West (3) runs down a fly ball during the top of the fifth inning of the Bulldogs' 6-0 win over Anson on Thursday, April 25, 2013, at Wendeborn Field in Stamford.
Thomas Metthe/Reporter-News Stamford's Hagen Hutchinson (12) is congratulated by teammate Dalton Mathis (7) after Hutchinson scored in the bottom of the fifth inning of the Bulldogs' 6-0 win over Anson on Thursday, April 25, 2013, at Wendeborn Field in Stamford.
Thomas Metthe/Reporter-News Cooper junior Rosangelica Moncada throws the discus during practice on Tuesday, April 23, 2013, at Cooper High School. Moncada has qualified for the Region I-5A track meet in both the discus and shot put.
Thomas Metthe/Reporter-News Cooper junior Rosangelica Moncada throws the shot during practice on Tuesday, April 23, 2013, at Cooper High School. Moncada has qualified for the Region I-5A track meet in both the shot put and discus.


text:
ALFRED, Maine (NEWS CENTER) - The state's key witness in the Kennebunk Zumba prostitution trial spent the entire day on the stand testifying Friday.
Mark Strong is on trial, charged with 12 counts of promotion of prostitution and one count of conspiracy. Officer Audra Presby of the Kennebunk Police Department was the lead investigator in the prostitution case. She said she called in the Maine State Police and other agencies to help because the complexity of the case was overwhelming for her.
The prosecution started questioning Officer Presby when the trial resumed today and by late morning it was the defense's turn to cross examine her.
The state claims Mark Strong managed a prostitution business allegedly run by Alexis Wright.
Officer Audra Presby testified she viewed about 120-hours of videos seized from Alexis Wright. She said those videos depicted Alexis Wright engaged in sex acts for money. She said it was her opinion the voice of an unidentified man Wright was speaking with before and after encounters with clients was that of Mark Strong. The state alleges strong watched Wright having sex with clients via a Skype internet feed and snapped photos during those sessions.
During cross examination Strong's attorney questioned why his client was the only person arrested during the investigation, while Alexis Wright was facing many more charges. Presby said Wright was indicted by a grand jury and ordered to appear in court.
Attorney Dan Lilley claims Presby retaliated against Strong because he was investigating her and other members of the Kennebunk Police Department for possible unprofessional conduct. Towards the end of the day he began to expand on that questioning Presby about notes seized from Mark Strong's property with her names and the names of other Kennebunk officers. He also questioned her about an affair she had with her supervisor that lead to his resignation.
Some of the so called Johns who have already pleaded guilty in connection with the case are expected to testify when the trial resumes Monday. The state is expected to wrap up its case early next week.


text:
Julia celebrated being 89 years young on Jan. 27, 2010. She's lived in Carbon County her entire life and was married to Harold Wilson until his passing in 1995. Julia was a long time nurse at Castleview Hospital and always enjoyed her patients. She is the morther of five; Vernon (Sharron), Kenny and Gene (Stella) Wilson of Price; Jim (Maureen) Wilson of Salt Lake; Deon (Darrell) Hailey of Colorado. She is the grandmother of nine; Shane, Travis, Kendra, Lisa, Ryan, Jessica, Dustin, Savannah and Natalee. She is also the great grandmother of nine.
She will celebrate her birthday with family.


text:
Three Powerful Tools for Improving the Performance of your Drupal Site [June 21, 2012]
Want to learn more about Acquia's products, services, and happenings in the Drupal Community? Visit our site: http://bit.ly/yLaHO5.
Since its open-source inception in 2001, Drupal adoption has spread like wildfire. Developers have fallen in love with the speed at which they can innovate, and organizations large and small are exiting five+ year investments in proprietary CMSs in favor of the agility Drupal delivers to the business.
Although there are over 16,000 modules, only a small percentage are geared toward performance and scalability of Drupal applications. Acquia and its partners have solutions that make it just as easy to make a high-performing Drupal site as it is to build an innovative site.
Join this webinar to learn how you can improve the performance of your Drupal site with the help of tools available in the Acquia Network including Acquia Insight for code and configuration testing, Blitz.io for load testing, and New Relic for application performance analytics.
Participants of this webinar will learn how to:
* Uncover Drupal code and configuration mistakes
* Test performance and scalability
* Detect and resolve common Drupal performance issues
Speaker 1: Hi everyone. Thank you for joining in on the webinar today. I'm going to go over a few slides and then pass it over to Michael Cooper. Today's webinar is three powerful tools for improving the performance of your Drupal site. With Michael Cooper from Acquia, Michael Smith from Blitz.io, and Bjorn Freeman-Benson from New Relic. For more information you can always visit Acquia.com or email us at email@example.com or call us at any time. Now I'm going to pass it over to Michael Cooper.
Michael C. I want to talk to you a little bit about the Acquia network and one of our main purposes Insight that can be used to help you get better performance with your Drupal website. I'm going to give an overview of how our tools can make sure all of your bases are covered, everything's functioning properly and then from there Blitz.io will talk about how you then low test your site. Obviously it doesn't make sense to low test your site until you know everything is set up properly. Then following that, New Relic is a great tool for showing you how to dig into the reasons why your site might have either a) failed low testing or b) insure that new things don't get introduced into your site that affect performance afterwards and make sure that your up-time and your scalability stay in place.
Our main goal at the Acquia network is simply just to make it easier to fully develop and maintain Drupal websites. All aspects of a Drupal website from beginning to end are the things that we want to make sure that we help you empower you to do better with. Sort of our slogan as a of software and services to help maintain killer web experiences built on Drupal. I think the last part, even though it's not bold is the part I feel most strongly about as a geek because I want stuff to be awesome and to rock and run amazingly. I believe quite firmly that Drupal is a platform for doing that.
We have three main offerings as part of the Acquia network. We had a library which has a lot of answers. This is a knowledge-based written by Drupalists and maintained and carried by Drupalists. It gives you a lot of answers for edge cases, for weird scenarios, or even to best practices like how you do reverse proxy cashing and which one to use or to use them together; a lot of things like that that can be very useful to someone wanting to get really into the nuts and bolts of how to improve people, or just if you need to understand some of the basics.
And of course we have our Acquia support team which has your back and the cloud services which has all the tools that you can use, be that our internal tools or third party services like New Relic and Blitz that will help you make your site better. The answers I need as far as the libraries; we have 800 articles (probably a lot more than that; probably over 900 articles now), thousands of facts FAQs actually at this point, and lots of podcasts, webinars, and videos and a lot more things coming in that are going to be improving even further.
For example, Drupalize.Me you sign up for an Acquia Network subscription, you actually get a free account on Drupalize.Me and I believe they also have hundreds of additional videos on how to perform tasks with Drupal, how to improve your experience with Drupal and to just get a better overall experience. Then of course our support team which is not really a great way to think of it because these guys are actual Drupalists. These guys are all developers and site builders. Their system admins and what not who have had years of experience in the field and now operate as our customer service team that will help you with any problem you have in Drupal, be it integration with a third party service or even your own custom code. They're of course round the clock support as well. We have people all around the globe doing this; we're always there.
Then of course something to be focusing on today is the tools that you can use for extending and managing your site and improving your entire experience for yourself and for your customers. The three main tools that we have are Acquia Insight, Acquia Search, and SEO Grader; things that we'll be focusing on the most today because it provides real time analyses and proactive alerts about your Drupal site and it's configurations and a little bit about your stack in so far as how it pertains to Drupal. It's great stuff. It lets you know how your sites configured, if you have poor configuration issues, if there's a lot of obvious things that we look at and say, "Wow you should never have these two modules working together because they're going to conflict and you're going to have performance issues," or we say, "In production you should never be running this modular here because it's going to hammer your database the whole time." We make sure that we give you a lot of these basic recommendations. We make sure that all of the settings for your site are in place and proper as your baseline. Then from there you can then insure that using other tools as sort of a custom code and other scenarios and things like create new views or what not are not also not causing problems. This is an essential baseline.
It's kind of shocking. You'll see a little bit more when I get into it. Some of the things we check for here will strike you as very obvious but the thing is when you have a big website and you have a lot of people working on it or even a lot of websites; it's easy sometimes to miss some of the basic things; that's where insight really comes in to make sure that all that stuff is covered.
The SEO Grader, I'm not going to get into it today but it's an additional tool that we have that helps you configure your Drupal website to be optimal for SEO which is a pretty useful thing.
Acquia Search is all about essentially offloading all of the search overhead from your site. Search is really important but it's also one of those things that you don't want to think about too much. What we like to do is use our Acquia Search service to offload all of the search resource load and indexing and everything to our servers. All your Drupal website probably does is just sends off information to our servers because we use Apachi solar, we're using 3.5 so we have all of the latest and greatest features in there and it's just something you don't have to worry about anymore which is a great thing and also a little boost of performance too.
Something that's now available too is what we call site portfolio management and that's if you have a lot of Drupal websites running you can actually at a glance see if any of those Drupal websites have problems, if you have modules that are out of date on a particular website, if you flagged a bunch of performance issues, or security issues on the website, and gives you sort of a one-stop shop for a report card to tell if you need to do anything with your sites and what you need to do. Then from there you can create all of your to-dos off of that list.
The insight overview page is the main page you get to when you come into insight. What we do is we give you a score based on about 150 different tests that we run on your site. Not all sites have all 150 tests applied to them it really depends on what modules you're running, what versions of Drupal you're running and what not. There's a big slot that can get applied. We score your website based on how well we think you have it configured. This particular website here is a test website and it has an 83%. We have a better score but a number of important tests have failed. On this particular scenario, they're multi-security tests. Maybe some of them are minor ones so we have them flagged and the things that are important.
The number of tests that pass or fail does not always directly correlate to the actual percentage of scores because some things of course are much minor. Then down at the bottom you can see that we give historical graphs too. You can look at this and say, "Wow we did see a decrease in leads or web traffic or maybe we saw an increase in web traffic," and you can correlate that to the score and use that to determine why historical events might have occurred. Also you noticed at the top here; we flagged an important alert that one or more modules on this website has a security update that's necessary. There's a number of different alerts that are considered to be super critical that will actually service all throughout our UI to be going to the UI and this alert will there to bother you all the time saying, "You have page cashing turned off or you have modules that are out of date and security updates or you have things like the unauthenticated users can use the PHP filter," stuff like that is what will show up and constantly bother you at the top of the site.
When you have an alert there's a healthy fix it link and this is an example of what you could get. This particular one shows a database logging module enabled. They explain why you don't want to have a database logging module enabled and we provide options as far as what other systems we think can give you the same thing and in this case, Systlog is the one you should run. There might be some scenarios we understand where maybe it's a development environment or maybe you've said, "You know what this is a really small website, I'm not that concerned about database logging," and you can choose to ignore certain alerts. That way you can say, "I understand why Acquia is offering this recommendation but I have my own work around I put in place and I feel alright," and you can ignore that alert and it will no longer than count towards your score.
If you remember back to the very first page, the screen I showed you with insight, one of the things was that there was a security update for a module. What I have here is a page inside that shows all of the modules for the site that need updates and you can get to that page simply by clicking this code tab. It shows me a bunch of modules in here that need to be updates. All of these ones either have bug fixes that are the reason for the update or they're security updates. I know that this is basically a to-do list for myself or for one of the developers that needs to take care of this; so we'll go and perform these updates. If I click on one say like "panels," I'll actually see that I am running version 3.9 and that was November 1st last year and there's a new version out, 3.10 and it has security updates and bug fixes; we get the download length as well as the project page so if you wanted to get a little bit more info you can get into that.
One of things that…let me go back two slides and just point this out. You'll see looking down here, the header distance but there's a couple of things view diff over on the right. What that means is that these modules have been modified which is always the bane of anyone trying to maintain something like Drupal. You don't know…either maybe you took over a site from somebody else or you outsourced the site and you're not positive if any modules have been modified. What this allows you to do is to actually, at a glance see if any of the modules been modified and know from there what you have to do. We know we have to update these two modules and we know they're modified so we know we actually have to go in and do something about that; we can't just willy nilly update these modules because we might actually break functionality on the site.
If I look at this one module's typekit I can see in here that the developer's have made a change where they've altered from loading the typekit JS files from off of the typekit website to loading a local version of it. Obviously that probably would have been done for performance which is a good thing. We've actually flagged what was changed the module, we provided diff and we also highlighted the fact that this typekit.js file is not in the module you get off of drupal.org so that if you were to go and update this module, you're going to need to either a) see if the new version has this functionality or b) modify the new version of modules as well to have this functionality.
Another thing and this is actually kind of interesting. This is something that I spotted just using the tool while I was preparing these slides a little while back that the token module needs to be updated. I looked at it and thought that's kind of odd because it's one of those modules you would just almost never have a reason to change. When I looked at the actual module I saw here that inside of this folder there's a second copy of the token module and it says neither of these files are in the distro, yes because I look at this and I see token, token then token.module and what not. What that means is someone has accidentally instead of just updating the module at some point in the past, they put a second copy of the token module inside the token module. If you've ever looked at how Drupal sort of understands what module to load; you almost have no idea which of those two code bases are actually being used as token modules. Updating this module might not actually do anything because Drupal might read this other erroneous version of the module. This is sort of an eagle thing; it's something you may not spot on a regular basis but because insight is highlighting modules that don't look the way they're supposed to, you can quite easily pick out things like that.
Once you've got all of your modules up to date and you've got all of your security stuff in place, you know that you're in a good place and now you'll start looking at performance. We can see that this particular website is pretty good from a performance standpoint; 16 out of 19 issues are passed. We have a lot of different check, if you didn't get in the slide, they're gone off the page. We check for things like the page cashing turned on, do you have the ability to reverse proxy cashing, are you sending out the right cashable headers to browsers, are you using ADCs m-cash, all that sort of things are things that get checked. A couple of things have been flagged here; is that the views UI module isn't enabled, that's not a huge performance hit so it doesn't actually have a very big impact on the score but it is there. The database log in module can be a huge impact on performance because if you have your site set to log notices you could be writing hundreds of things into the watchdog database table on every single page load so that could be a huge performance impact. And the devel module can do a lot of extra logging and what not that could also impact performance so we recommend of course turning them all off. As you click the healthy it explains what the actual impact is or some information about that and give the link to turn it off and all that sort of thing as well.
Beyond that, everything now is good to test so what you could then do is, you could say, "You know what? I have only two issues that are currently aggravating this website, they're under security, I don't think they're a big deal, I think I'm ready now to go and actually start doing some low testing on my site. At this point we'll hand it off to Mike Smith Blitz.io and make sure your site's performing as well as you want it to.
Mike S. Hi, thanks everyone. Give me one second and I'm going to screen share and then I'll walk through a demo of using Blitz and using it to tune the performance of your site. I'll just give it one minute to load. While it's loading…I'll give a little background to Blitz. Blitz is a cloud based load testing service. It's a pay as you go service with a premium payment model. What we do is we offer a free spine up to any users. What you do when you sign up, you're able to get our basic plan which allows you to test with up to 250 concurrent users running against your site. From there you can scale up. We started scaling all the way up to 50,000 users if you're really ambitious and want to cut your site; it handles that amount of traffic. The pricing models are very flexible. You pay for the time you want to use and for how much testing you actually need.
What I'm going to walk through is an example that I've created which is using a very plain default Drupal install which I set up on a server. It has a single page. It actually is a single static page. What I'm going to demonstrate is actually the thing, one of the things that you just heard about which is the impact of turning on and off page cashing on your site, and show you how you can use Blitz io2, actually demonstrate the real world impact that is a real impact that it has on end users.
Let me go back to Blitz. Here we have our initial finance screen. I'm going to go ahead, log in. For this purpose I'm just logging in directly to the Blitz site. We also have partnerships with Acquia so that if you're using the Acquia dashboard, or via the Acquia tools you can actually add Blitz as an add-in and sign in directly to Blitz from there. The benefit of that is that 1) you don't have to sign in, create a second account and Blitz will do a single sign in for you. It's just a little bit more convenient and also as an additional thank you we are offering a free one week trial for… we'll bump your user capacity up to 1,000 up from the normal 250. It's a good way of trying out the service that's a little bit more demanding, low test.
What we have here is the first page you see when you log into Blitz. We have what we call the Blitz bar. We're going to start out by doing what we call a sprint which is really just a single request against your website. I'm going to take my URL from my example site here and I'm just going to paste that in to the Blitz bar and I'm just going to start my sprint. What's happening, or what's happened already, is there's actually a Blitz engine that's actually running in a data sprinter that is in Virginia and it performs a request against my site and told me what it got back. It told me that it responded in 125 milliseconds which is actually a pretty decent response time for a plain vanilla app. It's also giving me some additional information about the request. It tells me what the response headers were, what the request headers were. When we did the request we identified ourselves as coming from Blitz so that if you're a site admin and you see traffic coming to your site it's a little easier to know where it's coming from. You can use it if you're interested in seeing some little technical details about how your site might be configured or how Blitz is seeing your site.
One thing you might notice here is the cash control header is actually configured to do no cash which no means there's no cashing happening whatsoever. Every page load that your user will trigger is actually dynamically generating the page which is definitely a big red flag in terms of performance. Let's take the next step which is actually running a load test and seeing how the performance changes when you go from just one user to a dozen. Let's say we're going to ramp up from starting with one user, we're going to ramp up to 50 users over a period of 30 seconds. This will kind of give us a gradual ramp and we can see how the performance changes over time.
The load test starts running immediately we're seeing the results as its running. We're basically showing you both a response time and those statistics on the number of hits that your site is seeing. If we go down here we see that it initially it starts off with a response time with around 200 milliseconds. Pretty quickly we get to the point where we have about 20 users and the response time has jumped up to 1 second. Every user, it's taking them a whole page, a whole second to load the page. By default we have a time out of one second configured. At that point we actually start counting these requests as time outs. Potentially a user came to your site, it was loading for one second, they got bored and they decided to go pick out something else. That's essentially what you're seeing here. Really, when you initially look at the site with the sprint, with a single request the performance was decent but you can immediately see that once you start getting a number of concurrent users, the performance really goes down hill quickly.
If you were running this site one of the very first things you would probably want to do and one of the things which is recommended to you to do is actually turn on…configure your Druple site to enable full page cashing. I am by no means a Druple expert but I did manage to figure out that you are able to do that very easily through the configuration. What I'm going to do is turn on page cashing for anonymous users. Pretty much just a one click operation here; configuration options saved, website still up. What I'm going to do is go back to Blitz and I'm just going to run this exact same load test now. If you remember before we got to about 20 users before the performance really dropped off. Let's see how things are doing now when you have page cashing enabled. You can immediately see the response time is actually already much lower; it's less than 100 milliseconds so in this case, the page is actually being served from being pre-generated and served from the cash. It's not being dynamically generated on every hit. You can see that the performance is great. Most of the users coming to your site are immediately getting a response and your server is happily handling all the way up to 50 users. That's great news. Of course you can scale this up more. I'll go up to 250 users and we'll probably start hitting some more issues with that. From this point, you can see that Blitz is a useful tool to use when you're configuring your site, when you're trying to figure out what both your peak performance but you also might use Blitz to determine over time has the performance of your site changed. Maybe you made a configuration change, you deployed it on some different servers; something like that you want to know what the impact of that was.
Going back to our results here, what we saw was that the performance with 250 users definitely slowed down quite a bit so after a point we started getting back to more like the one second response time which is probably not ideal. We also got a number of time outs because we went over one second. From this point you might start investigating other things like doing some more database tuning, you might try pushing into more capable hardware. You might try something like deploying a load balancer running your sites. A lot of these things are something that actually do well to help you identify some of the internal bottleneck for your application.
One thing that I want to demonstrate quickly is that we actually try to integrate with the tools that our users are comfortable using. We want Blitz to be something that you can use without having to learn a bunch of new things. We want to work with what you already have. An example of that is…we have these analytics plug ins. One of the ones that we support, one of the first ones we added actually was the new LX Analytic. If you have a New Relic account, you can actually configure your Blitz account to connect to New Relic and get some internal metric on your machine such as how much memory is being used or how much BPU time is being taken and you actually have those results overlaid into your Blitz chart. It will be a good way to kind of get started in performance. Of course, from there you could actually go into the full New Relic user interface and from there you get a lot more details which log in but this was just a demonstration of how the two tools can integrate together.
One other thing that I really wanted to find out is that we actually provide an ATI so that you can run Blitz without…in an automated fashion if you some sort of internal tools that you want to integrate with; we provide ATI for ATI clients for a variety of different languages. We put into ATIT is one of our newer ones. There's really a lot of flexibility. There are a lot of capabilities…of course we don't have time to cover today but I definitely would encourage everyone to check it out. Preferably if you are a member the Acquia Network and you can take advantage of the one week offer than that would be great. I think that's about my time. I think at this point I can go ahead and hand it off to New Relic. And they'll gave you a little bit more of the more introductions as to how you can use New Relic to further tune the performance of your site.
Speaker 2: Well let's see. Hopefully the slide will switch to my slides and people can hear me. Maybe someone will speak up if they can't. That was great from Mike looking at Blitz. That's pretty interesting stuff. I'm going to tell you about New Relic monitors, the web applications, and how you can use it maybe with the Acquia Insight or with Blitz or just stand alone. Just a brief background; New Relic is an application performance monitoring tool that runs on your site in production. We deliver software to service just like Acquia does; monthly subscription. We track both the application performance and actually the real user performance which is a typical job description so we can see how long each browser it takes and we have server monitoring as well.
Mike showed how Blitz takes some of that data and shows it with their stuff as well; that's pretty cool how they integrate there. The idea behind New Relic is that it's a production monitoring system. In addition to be able to using it in testing environments you want to do it live all the time because we've found that users tend to find much more interesting problems in your site than anyone can ever imagine than in a testing environment. I'm not saying you don't want to do low testing but you definitely also want to monitor production.
I thought I'd show a few things that you find sort of common Drupal performance problems. One of the most common Drupal performance problems is slow database queries. You can find those with New Relic. Let's look at a couple examples. Here's a screen shot from when I was browsing Dries site, Dries being a Drupal site, you can look at some of this information and you see here that threes site has a certain amount of time every minute that goes to PHP and a certain amount of time goes database time and so on. We can drill down into that a bit further and say well why are we spending so much time in database time there? We drill down and we can drill down in a couple of different ways. We can either drill down in database time where we look at it specifically filtered a different way to look at which of the sequel statements that are being executed are the slowest ones on the site. Let's drill down a little bit further and here's a general view (again a screen shot of a general view of database queries) that happened on Dries' site and you'll see that the number one database query that's consuming the most amount of time is a select statement on the access log. I don't know exactly what module Dries' got running on his site there or how the code's written but I'm getting that we're looking there at whether the user is currently logged in or whether they've logged in recently and we're accessing that table a lot. There's a few other things that are taking up some time. We could drill in a little further and look at say URL alias table and find out where that table happens to be referenced in the code. If we look down at time consumption by collar we see that, the no page default will take up most of the time and then there's a techton and turn page that looks at the URL alias and so on down the line. We can drill down further and we can go even further than that and drill down and see what are the actual sequel statements that are being executed that take a lot of time.
This is a screen shot not from Dries' site but from our site that couldn't find a good example from previous sites. Here we have the actual sequel statements. Here's where we have one that took 350 milliseconds or like 4 minutes which is ridiculous. You can drill down even further and….one of the things about New Relic is that you see the general view. If you're using Blitz to drive your load and you see that as Mike was demonstrating at a slow point, you drill down into that and you just keep drilling down until you find the solution or find the problem.
Here's a screen shot of where we've drilled down all the way to find the slow sequel statement and we've done a query analysis, i.e. an explain plan; New Relic sort of does that on the fly for you and it also shows you the exact saturates of the code where it's being executed. You can see all of this and then you go, "Oh look, here's where I need to improve that particular performance."
We can look at this from another way as well. That was looking at what are the slow sequel statements but we might also look at from the point of view of what are the slow web transactions or web requests that take more time and that are caused by sequel statements. We can drill down in through transaction traces and here we see a particular piece of code called Find and Aggregate; it says a lot of sequel calls. We can then do things sort of drilling down and finding out oh when people come in with this web request, it's causing a particular set of sequel calls which are slow. This is a way you can find out what's going on there.
Now one of the things that you might be interested in is what sort of overhead we're you using in external HTTP calls. A lot of people are building sites today (we're building sites today) that make a lot of external calls and Dries's site is a perfect example of this. If we look again at this screen shot of Dries's site we see that the web external time, that dark green color has the certain amount of the overhead is allocated to that so what's going on there? Let's drill down as to why the site is making these external calls that are then slow when we're packaging together services like that. If we drill down to what's going on in the inside we find out that it's calling this particular IP address and if you look further into that IP address, you discover that what it is, is a comment spam checking service. When people post comments on Dries's blog, it called to this spam checking service which has this variable response rate.
Here's a similar shot again from our site. We have various systems that we call like Horoku, API and campfire and so on. You can see multiple services if you call multiple services. Here's another view of the same thing for Dries's site. Here we're showing that Dries's site calls out to database a lot of the time and external comment service some of the time and the database is very quick, the external service tends to be a bit slower. If you have a lot more services you see a much wider range of these things. You can see what the range of calls are, how fast those things are and so on. You can look at how those services are responding historically. Again, much like Mike shows you with Blitz, if you want to look at what's going on, not just today, but what has been going on in the past. Where the characteristic changes are in your performance and in this case we're looking at external performance not just…external services you're using not just the services that I've written. You can compare them historically or you can drill down into particular time frames. If we look at this particular time frame, we see that briefly that the external used for comments filtering took a bit more time than it had before during a particular time period so we could look into spikes and find out why they're slow.
A third reason your site might have performance problems is you're just kept getting a lot of traffic. If you were using, again, Blitz and you generate a lot of traffic you might know why it had a lot of traffic but what if you had a lot of traffic just in general in your production site? Well you can go look at the grass and you can see what your output is. Dries's doesn't get a lot of traffic or it didn't when I was taking these snapshots; 20 to 30-page hits per minute. But if you had more than that you could drive and look at what was going on production wise.
This is one of my favorite charts in New Relic partly because it's just pretty with lots of colors but also because it's very useful for looking at what the scaling issues are as your site undergoes more and more load. We have been running this chart with that example that Mike was showing with Blitz; we would see a different curvage. Here we're seeing a very horizontal line which is showing that the site scales very well with load. In that second example that Mike showed where when he started having 250 users his site started to suffer under the load. You would see much more of a hockey stick in this particular shape. Again, here's Drie's site; here's one with more data points. This is the one from our particular site. Notice that we're running somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 requests a minute through our site and New Relic is collecting all of that information and showing that we're getting pretty much a linear response time there.
You can also see by the coloring that we tend to get a lot more of our hits in the day; fewer of the hits during the night; sort of classic North American performance curve there.
Another thing that might cause your Drupal site to be slow and you would want to check within what's in the load tester. It's just using too much TPU time. One of the things that New Relic has is that again I said we monitor not only application but also the underlying server and user browser as well. Here we're clicking into the server's tab, looking at all the servers that are running and we see a page that shows various things that servers; unbelievably boring which of course as an ops person everything you want to see is unbelievably boring; nice level graphs of low averages and so on. There could be cases where it's not unbelievably boring when things are taking a long time.
Here's a case where we had some of our code which was taking a long time and if you look at those response times for particular individual functions they were taking a long time for certain pages for certain customers and so we could drill down into those particular transactions and find out what's taking all the CPU time. In this particular example we see that this function called find and aggregate is taking most of the time followed by this multi app data which taking another chunk of the time. We can continue drilling down into that to find out why exactly are those things taking all of the time and we'll see that in this case I can just tell you because I know what the code did, find and aggregate was doing in our scripting language what we should have been doing in sequel. So instead of using the powerful sequel engine to doing and purging the data, we were doing it by grabbing the data and then aggregating in our code base and so it was a lot slower in terms of CPU time then it would have been if we had done it in sequel; which we then changed the code to doing it in sequel. You find the same sort of thing when you write custom codes in your Drupal module that you're not taking advantage of right place to do that computation, you'll find slow transactions and you can drill down and see what's going on there.
As Mike pointed out in his click demo, one of the best things you can do to improve your Drupal site is to cash in. How do you detect cashing from them when you're looking at New Relic? Again, it's looking at that overview page. You look at the historical performance or the performance of pre-site there. Well, are there in cashing problems. It turns out Dries site is very well structured so it's kind of hard to find problems in demoing Dries site but if we were to find such a thing, here's an example where we had a cashing problem in one of our applications and you'll see that the ruby code (because our application's written in ruby not HP but you get the same thing when you look at Drupal) the ruby code was taking up a lot of the time; the database time, the garbage collection time but the ruby code was taking up a lot of time. The problem was that we weren't cashing page fragments just like it turned on there for his Blitz demo. That deployment line showing up on the chart is when we then deployed a new version of the code that had cashing of page fragments. You'll notice that very quickly the application time went down, as the cashing kicked in and we started cashing more and more of those fragments and our total computation time went down.
When you see a historical chart which is sort of the reverse of this where it used to be at a particular rate and then it went up dramatically, that's typically a case where you've accidentally turned off cashing in your application and you can go and configure it one way or another to turn cashing back on again. You can also find this by just looking at again the transaction traces where the web requests come in to see which ones are taking a lot time. If there's certain one's that are taking a lot of time that on average don't take a lot of time, you go look at cashing. In this particular case we're going to drill in and we're going to find that once again it wasn't cashing, not once again but in this case it wasn't cashing but it's this external service that Dries created to do comment spam filtering that was taking up the time. It's not a cashing problem in this case but you might have assumed it was by looking at the performance there but again by drilling down you can go oh in this case it wasn't a cashing problem and you could look at it in more detail.
That's a quick overview of New Relic and some of the things you can do with it for looking at performance problems inside Drupal. I think it goes really well with Acquia and with Blitz because we're looking at the three different areas that you can within your over all website build in. The Acquia insight is a fabulous tool for deciding whether you built your Acquia, your Drupal system well and you use Blitz to run some low tests against it and then once you're in production, you can use New Relic to make sure that your customers are still using your site the way you predicted they were going to use them. Acquia customers think that New Relic automatically provisioned by clicking a few buttons and with that I'm going to hand it back over to I think it's Michael.
Michael: Thanks for wrapping it up. That's exactly how I feel about these services too and how well they complement one another. I think that Hannah's going to read off some Q & A questions.
Hannah: Yes, please ask any questions you may have in the Q & A section of the Webex UI. Our first question is how much performance overhead does New Relic typically have?
Speaker 3: That's an excellent question and of course you always want to know that before you put anything into your production site. We've measured the performance. We have an internal goal of having less than 5% overhead for doing continuous monitoring and we've measured our overhead to be around 2-3% on your typical application. It's always possible as an engineer I have to tell you, it's always possible to write a diabolical application where the overhead will be more than our measured 3-4% but we've discovered across Drupal sites of all of our customers, we're looking at about 3-4%.
Hannah: Okay, that's it for questions. Could people please ask any questions they may have in the web XTY section? Alright that's it. Thank you everyone for joining and thank you for the great presentations. Again, the slides will be posted at slide share and the recorded webinar will be posted to Acquia.com in the next 48 hours. Thank you.


text:
i use spamassassin with kmail and it works great
first of all, get the latest stable version of spamassassin (2.31). when it's installed, open kmail and go to the filters section.
then add a new filter and set it up like this:
<any header> matches regular expression .
in the textbox where u type the regular expression make sure u type a space before the dot.
then for Filter action choose "pipe through" and in the textbox put: spamassassin -P -F 0
then uncheck the option "If this filter matches, stop processing here"
then set up another filter and put it below the <any header> filter. set it up like this:
<message> contains SPAM: -------------------- Start SpamAssassin results ----------------------
and for filter actions choose "move to folder" and then select "trash". i also set up another action that marks the spam mail as read. this way the spam goes directly to my trash bin and i don't even see it.
after putting the filters in, click the apply button and then the OK button.
hope this helps


text:
Monday, September 8, 2008
Block Love
ALQS2 swap quilt ... well, that was my original intent, but I'm quite tempted to keep going and make myself a larger quilt from these blocks.
26 comments:
John, these blocks are really fantastic. The fabric choices are great too. I have to find that book!ReplyDelete
John, your blocks are awesome and really effective! I love them! Maybe you need to ask for a commission on selling lots of copies of their book... we're all inspired!!ReplyDelete
Hi John,ReplyDelete
I just stumbled on your blog from the ALQS site, and just wanted to say that these are fabulous! This may be my next book to hunt down on half.com! All your stuff is great - thanks for blogging everything!
Wonderful blocks! Great fabric choices too! 8-)ReplyDelete
Happy stitchings!
Great blocks. I might have to put this book on my Christmas list.ReplyDelete
these are stunning! I've added this book to my library/amazon wishlist :)ReplyDelete
What great blocks! And I relly like the way you've departed from the original colour scheme!ReplyDelete
I've leafed through that book many times but haven't bought it yet. The designs are so pretty, but I keep thinking I wouldn't make them. I may have to get it...I love your blocks!ReplyDelete
They look GREAT!ReplyDelete
I DO like the simplicity of the designs with the solid fabric. Very nice!ReplyDelete
These are beautiful! Keep going! Make a big quilt to keep ;-)ReplyDelete
Good thing I am single! No hubby to ask why I bought more Kona or another book!ReplyDelete
Great inspiration!
These look great! Go Quilt Dad!!ReplyDelete
John, these blocks are great and I too must have this book. I love the use of solids they are so over looked in the quilt shop.ReplyDelete
Oh how very cool!! Your blocks look great. I have a brother and a good friend that are both into Asian culture and now I'll have to find that book so I can make quilts for them. Thanks for sharing!ReplyDelete
I love the combo of the Japanese block with the pastel colors - very creative and beautiful.ReplyDelete
Wow, for how simple they are they sure are sharp. I just might have to put this on my want list. They're just SOOOOO cool.ReplyDelete
These look great! I would be tempted to go big too :)ReplyDelete
i love this book...i picked it up on our anniversary trip in oregon at powells books. i love to page thru and look at all these fab blocks. cheers to you that you actually made some!ReplyDelete
Love those blocks. Better than ice cream! :-)ReplyDelete
I think i could easily become obsessed with blocks like these. maybe I need to order that book for myself? your blocks look perfect! you should make a larger quilt for yourself, I think.ReplyDelete
I've had this book for several months now and hope to dig into it and another japanese technique book I own....once I finish my Dear Jane quilt :)ReplyDelete
Your blocks came out wonderful!
John, I'm so happy my book has inspired you and I love your ultra pastel versions of those blocks! I'm an Amy Butler fan too. The original versions of those blocks used a dark blue tsumugi by Olympus (Japan) from Euro Japan Links Limited in the UK and the shot cottons for the mid blues were Colourshott by Oakshott (handwoven in India). I'll be posting photos of the sampler quilts from "Japanese Quilt Blocks" on my blog in a few days time - they are touring the Grosvenor Exhibitions autumn quilt shows in the UK right now. BTW, the Kodansha International edition of JQB is about to be reprinted, so if it is temporarily unavailable in the USA, please wait for it to reappear in the bookstores! Best wishes, SusanReplyDelete
I jumped over to your blog from Loft Creations. I really like these Japanese blocks. Very nice.ReplyDelete
-- Michele
Hi John! That is just the best book, isn't it? I like the ones that you did.ReplyDelete
love the pink plaid block.ReplyDelete


text: Research and consultancy In 'Research and consultancy' Research and consultancy Back to 'Centre for Urban and Regional Studies' Strategic spatial planning We provide analytical research and support for the development of strategic spatial planning resources at a variety of scales from the neighbourhood to the region. We undertake this through socio-economic, environmental and policy analysis, and subsequently strategic site planning and the development of the approaches and techniques of wide-area spatial analysis. Through this research, and our long standing connections to local, regional and national policy making and professional planning communities, we seek to critique current planning practice and provide a set of analytical tools that will which present issues and options for decision making. Economic development We aim to enhance understanding of the development and re-organisation economic activity at different spatial scales. Though a focus on; the role of knowledge networks around businesses, universities and governmental agencies in promoting economic change; the evolution of sectors and clusters of strategic importance for local and regional economies (automotive, creative industries) ; and the development and evaluation of policies responding to economic changes affecting cities and regions. By studying these and related themes in and around the economy we aim to contribute to evolving academic debates and to provide policy makers at different levels (European, national, regional, local) with the guidance they need to address contemporary economic change. For more information see the Institute for Economic Development Policy. Urban regeneration and resilience Economic restructuring in recent years has resulted in profound changes in our urban environment. Our work analyses the critical success factors for sustainable regeneration, housing policy and addresses the governance structures required to facilitate its management and effective community engagement in these processes. In this regard we continue to work closely with the University's Third Sector Research Centre. The University of Birmingham is also making a major investment into the innovative research area of Resilience and Urban Living. Linking the subjects of human geography, psychology, engineering and social sciences, our focus is on understanding the capability and capacity of social and/or physical urban systems to withstand and adapt to social, political, environmental and economic change. Place leadership Working with the Homes and Communities Agency we have developed a targeted and tailored leadership capacity building and research programme (Leadership of Place). This programme will help leaders of place combine the required spatial literacy with the relational skills to develop collective understanding and common purpose, key to delivering large scale projects. This team of work is also connected to the Centre for Leadership at the University of Birmingham (CLUB).


text:
(WZZM) -- It seems like a new phone, tablet or PC comes out every day. With the holidays right around the corner, the choices can be overwhelming.
To help narrow things down WZZM's parent company, Gannett, turns to partner Reviewed.com to check out the hottest electronics.
To see what items you should take a look at, watch the video on the player box on this web page.


text:
Contact CNR
CNR's McCall Outdoor Science School earns ID21 award for innovative teaching
MOSCOW, Idaho - The University of Idaho's College of Natural Resources McCall Outdoor Science School (MOSS) is one of six recipients of the ID21 Awards from the J.A. & K. Albertson Foundation for 2012. As one of the recipients from a pool of 167 nominees, MOSS will receive $50,000 and be honored at the foundation's award ceremony on October 16 at the Boise Egyptian Theater.
The ID21 Awards are designed to discover and reward programs in Idaho that revolutionize how students learn. MOSS is recognized in the category for "challenging traditional education with creativity and innovation." Nominees in this category are required to establish that programs are innovative, empowering, successful, creative and sustainable.
"This prestigious award from the J.A. and K. Albertson Foundation validates the excellence of the MOSS programs in achieving our goals of providing innovative learning opportunities for K12 students," President M. Duane Nellis said. "MOSS is one example of the University's commitment to the advancement, sustainability and development of 21st century learning opportunities in STEM education in the state and beyond."
"Receiving this grant is an affirmation of the innovative approaches we're taking at MOSS to effectively engage students in science, engineering, technology and math," said CNR Dean Kurt Pregitzer. "When we invest in Idaho's students, we are investing in Idaho's future - and our future is bright."
MOSS is the state's only publicly operated residential environmental science education center. The school's mission is to facilitate place-based, collaborative, scientific inquiry within the context of Idaho's land, water and communities.
"We challenge the traditional understanding of what science is, how it is practiced and who can participate," says MOSS Program director Greg Fizzell. "Our vision is that when teachers and students are asked to describe science and the people involved in the profession, they talk about themselves."
For more than 10 years, MOSS youth, AmeriCorps, teacher education and community programs have engaged more than 18,000 Idaho K-12 students and more than 100 U-Idaho graduate students and 2,000 adult learners in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).
MOSS will use the ID 21 Award funds to meet future programming needs, and to continue the development of its master site plan, which will outline long-term operations on the McCall Field Campus.
"Considering that many sectors of Idaho's economy, such as agriculture, manufacturing and health care services, require STEM-educated employees," says Fizzell, "there is overwhelming evidence supporting the importance of continuing STEM education."
Fizzell says that MOSS's methods of introducing students to STEM through hands-on activities helps them see themselves as scientists. This, he says, will lead more young people to make future education and career choices in science and engineering, supporting the national effort to ensure that all U.S. students receive the skills and knowledge required for success in the 21st Century workforce.
The J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation is a private family foundation committed to limitless learning opportunities for all Idahoans. Since 1997, the Foundation has invested more than $500 million to improve education in Idaho.
See KTVB Boise News coverage video clip


text:
16 U.S. Code § 410z - Establishment
prev | next
(a) Acquisition of properties by donation or with donated funds
In order to preserve for the benefit and inspiration of the people of the United States as a national historical park certain historic structures and properties of outstanding national significance located in Boston, Massachusetts, and associated with the American Revolution and the founding and growth of the United States, the Secretary of the Interior (hereinafter referred to as the "Secretary") may, in accordance with the provisions of this subchapter, acquire by donation or by purchase with donated funds, all lands and improvements thereon or interests therein comprising the following described areas:
(b) Acquisition of properties with appropriated funds
In the event that the properties described in this section are not donated to the United States or purchased with donated funds, they may be acquired by the Secretary with appropriated funds: Provided, That, except for privately held lands within the Charlestown Navy Yard as described in subsection (d) of this section, the Secretary shall not acquire any such properties by eminent domain so long as he determines that a binding, written cooperative agreement, assuring the preservation and historical integrity of such properties remains in force and effect. Lands owned by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, or any of its political subdivisions, may be acquired only by donation.
(c) Publication of notice
At such time as the Secretary determines that sufficient lands, improvements, and interests therein have been acquired or that cooperative agreements satisfying the preservation and historical objective of this subchapter have been executed, he may establish the Boston National Historical Park by publication of notice to that effect in the Federal Register, together with a detailed description or map setting forth the properties included therein.
(d) Charlestown Navy Yard
As used in this section, the Charlestown Navy Yard shall include the United States Ship Constitution and the lands generally depicted on the map entitled "Boundary Map: Charlestown Naval Shipyard—U.S.S. Constitution, Boston National Historical Park", numbered BONA 20,000 and dated March 1974 which shall be on file and available in the offices of the Director of the National Park Service, Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C. As used in this section, the Charlestown Navy Yard shall also include the properties known as the Ropewalk and Tar House and the Chain Forge and Round House, designated on such map as buildings numbered 58, 60, and 105. All right, title, and interest in the Federal properties and improvements included therein shall be transferred to the Secretary of the Interior: Provided, That he may, by written agreement with the Secretary of the Navy, permit the continued use of any such buildings and facilities as the Secretary of the Interior determines to be necessary for the preservation and maintenance of the Constitution, which agreement shall provide that the Department of the Navy shall transfer to the Department of the Interior funds sufficient to cover the costs attributable to the functions and services which are provided by the Department of the Interior. The Secretary shall consult with representatives of the city of Boston and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts concerning the development of suitable transportation plans consistent with the purposes for which the Navy Yard was included in the historical park and the Secretary is authorized to grant, in accordance with such terms and conditions as he deems necessary and consistent with the purposes of this subchapter, easements and rights-of-way to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts or any political subdivision thereof including the Boston Redevelopment Authority for purposes of the vehicular, pedestrian and utility access to that portion of the Boston Navy Yard outside the boundaries of the Park. Such grants of easements and rights-of-way shall be upon the express condition that the grantee convey to the United States the property known as Building No. 107, being a part of the Boston Navy Yard and owned by the Boston Redevelopment Authority.
Source(Pub. L. 93–431, § 2,Oct. 1, 1974, 88 Stat. 1184; Pub. L. 95–625, title III, § 310(a), (d),Nov. 10, 1978, 92 Stat. 3478; Pub. L. 96–344, § 5,Sept. 8, 1980, 94 Stat. 1134.)
1980—Subsec. (d). Pub. L. 96–344inserted provision including within the Charlestown Navy Yard properties known as the Ropewalk and Tar House and the Chain Forge and Round House, designated as buildings numbered 58, 60, and 105.
1978—Subsec. (a)(8). Pub. L. 95–625, § 310(a), added par. (8).
Subsec. (d). Pub. L. 95–625, § 310(d), authorized grant of easements and rights-of-way for vehicular, pedestrian and utility access to the Boston Navy Yard outside the boundaries of the Boston National Historical Park upon express condition that the grantee convey to the United States the part of the Boston Navy Yard owned by the Boston Redevelopment Authority.
Short Title
Pub. L. 93–431, § 1,Oct. 1, 1974, 88 Stat. 1184, provided: "That this Act [enacting this subchapter] may be cited as the 'Boston National Historical Park Act of 1974'."
Authorization of Appropriations
Pub. L. 95–625, title III, § 310(c),Nov. 10, 1978, 92 Stat. 3478, provided that: "There are authorized to be appropriated such sums as may be necessary for the acquisition of lands or interests in lands designated by subsection (a) of this section [enacting subsec. (a)(8) of this section] as a component of the Boston National Historical Park, and for the development of such component."
LII has no control over and does not endorse any external Internet site that contains links to or references LII.


text:
Effect of CER-001 on Plaque Volume in Homozygous Familial Hypercholesterolemia (HoFH) Subjects (MODE)
- Full Text View
- Tabular View
- No Study Results Posted
- Disclaimer
- How to Read a Study Record
The available medications used to treat HoFH are targeted at reducing circulating levels of total and LDL-cholesterol. These measures can retard the progression of cardiovascular disease, however, they are unlikely to regress existing disease due to years of cholesterol accumulation in the vessel walls and therefore cannot adequately reduce the existing risk for an ischemic event. HDL has multiple actions that could lead to plaque stabilization and regression, such as rapid removal of large quantities of cholesterol from the vasculature, improvement in endothelial function, protection against oxidative damage and reduction in inflammation. This study will assess the effects of CER-001, a recombinant human Apo-A-1 based HDL mimetic, on indices of atherosclerotic plaque progression and regression as assessed by 3Tesla MRI measurements in patients with HoFH.
Homozygous Familial Hypercholesterolemia
Drug: CER-001
Phase 2
|Study Type:
|Study Design:
|Endpoint Classification: Safety/Efficacy Study
Intervention Model: Single Group Assignment
Masking: Open Label
Primary Purpose: Treatment
|Official Title:
|Modifying Orphan Disease Evaluation (MODE) Study: A Multicenter, Open-label Study of the Effects of CER-001 on Plaque Volume in Subjects With Homozygous Familial Hypercholesterolemia (HoFH)
- Percent change from baseline to follow-up in carotid mean vessel wall area [ Time Frame: Baseline then 6 months and/or ~2 weeks post final dose ] [ Designated as safety issue: No ]Percent change from baseline to follow-up in carotid mean vessel wall area
- Change in carotid vessel wall volume [ Time Frame: Baseline then 6 months and/or ~2 weeks post final dose ] [ Designated as safety issue: No ]Percent change in carotid vessel wall volume , as assessed by 3TMRI, from the baseline measurement to the follow up taken ~2 weeks following the final dose of study medication.
|Study Start Date:
|November 2011
|Study Completion Date:
|August 2014
|Primary Completion Date:
|October 2013 (Final data collection date for primary outcome measure)
|Assigned Interventions
Experimental: CER-001
Open label single arm study of CER-001
Drug: CER-001
Biweekly infusion
|Ages Eligible for Study:
|12 Years and older
|Genders Eligible for Study:
|Accepts Healthy Volunteers:
Inclusion Criteria:
- Male or female subject 12 years or older
- Subject presents with Homozygous FH
Exclusion Criteria:
- Weight >100 kg
- Subjects with significant health problems in the recent past including blood disorders, cancer, or digestive problems
- Female subjects of child-bearing potential
- Known major hematologic, renal , hepatic, metabolic, gastrointestinal or endocrine dysfunction
- Contraindication to MRI scanning that would preclude the use of contrast-enhanced 3TMRI
Please refer to this study by its ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT01412034
|United States, Connecticut
|Clinical Research Facility
|Hartford, Connecticut, United States, 06102
|United States, New York
|Clinical Research Facility
|N. Massapequa, New York, United States, 11758
|Canada, Quebec
|Clinical Research Facility
|Chicoutimi, Quebec, Canada, G7H 7P2
|Clinical Research Facility
|Quebec, Canada, G1V4M6
|Clinical Research Facility
|Rome, Italy, 100161
|Clinical Research Facility
|Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1105AZ
|Clinical Research Facility
|Maastricht, Netherlands, 6229 HX
|Clinical Research Facility
|Nijmegen, Netherlands, 6500 HB
|United Kingdom
|Clinical Research Facility
|Manchester, United Kingdom, M13 9WL
|Principal Investigator:
|John J. Kastelein, MD PhD
|Amsterdam Medical Center
|Responsible Party:
|Cerenis Therapeutics, SA
|ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier:
|NCT01412034 History of Changes
|Other Study ID Numbers:
|Study First Received:
|August 5, 2011
|Last Updated:
|July 28, 2015
|Health Authority:
|United States: Food and Drug Administration
Canada: Health Canada
France: Afssaps - Agence française de sécurité sanitaire des produits de santé (Saint-Denis)
Italy: The Italian Medicines Agency
Netherlands: The Central Committee on Research Involving Human Subjects (CCMO)
United Kingdom: Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency
Keywords provided by Cerenis Therapeutics, SA:
Homozygous Familial Hypercholesterolemia
Familial Hypercholesterolemia
HDL mimetic
Additional relevant MeSH terms:
Hyperlipoproteinemia Type II
Genetic Diseases, Inborn
Lipid Metabolism Disorders
Lipid Metabolism, Inborn Errors
Metabolic Diseases
Metabolism, Inborn Errors
ClinicalTrials.gov processed this record on October 13, 2015


text:
We're delighted to announce the debut of BJT's new website. At the easy-to-navigate www.bjtonline.com, you'll find everything you need to know about business aviation, including the latest news, the 2011 edition of our award-winning Buyers' Guide and the full contents of the print publication.
BJT Waypoints
November 7, 2011
November 4, 2011
Gulfstream Aerospace has unveiled "Elite" interiors for the G550 and G450. The extra-cost package incorporates much of the look and feel of the interior for the new ultra-long-range G650 and includes the wireless Gulfstream Cabin Management System (GCMS).
November 4, 2011
Dassault Aviation has signed a memorandum of understanding with China's Minsheng Financial Leasing for 10 Falcon 7X and 10 Falcon 2000S business jets. The deal, which the companies expect to finalize before the end of the year, follows firm orders for five Falcon 7Xs that Minsheng placed earlier in 2011 and an order for a Falcon 900LX.
November 4, 2011
Business aviation services provider Oxfordjet has signed a three-year exclusive agreement to offer bespoke flight solutions within Europe to users of the MasterCard World Elite credit card.
November 4, 2011
Presenting a unified front, the Business Aviation Association of India (BAAI) has merged with India's newly formed Business Aircraft Operators Association (BAOA). The combined organization will operate as the BAOA.
"Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest. "
-Mark Twain
Most Popular
September 13, 2015
September 13, 2015
September 16, 2015
September 20, 2015
September 27, 2015
October 12, 2015
September 30, 2015
October 2, 2015
September 13, 2015
September 27, 2015
February 1, 2012
January 12, 2012
December 1, 2011
May 30, 2013
December 5, 2012
November 26, 2012
April 30, 2012


text:
Discover some of the world's oldest cities on a seven-night tour through Israel for $995 per person, including taxes.
Saving $400 on the regular package price, this Travelzoo exclusive from Classic Escapes is available for arrivals in Israel Nov. 24 - Dec. 14 -- during Hanukkah and just ahead of the Christmas holiday season.
The itinerary includes:
For $200 more per person, arrive during Israel's peak weather season June 30 - July 9. Or spend the holidays in the birthplace of three major religions for $300 more per person, arriving Dec. 22-24. This vacation does not include roundtrip international airfare.
Traverse the cobblestone streets of 5,000-year-old Jerusalem to iconic sites like Mount Zion and Via Dolorosa. Spend a day touring Nazareth, Capernaum and the famous baptismal site where the Jordan River leaves the Sea of Galilee. End the journey with a few days at the Dead Sea, the world's largest salt lake and lowest point on Earth at 1,300 feet below sea level.
Travelzoo Tip: Plan the perfect vacation to Israel by exploring these highlights, tips and itinerary recommendations.
Please go to your email and confirm your subscription.


text:
Should energy consumers pay extra taxes to fund government-mandated and subsidized renewable energy technologies? "Absolutely yes," says John Bryson, President Obama's nominee for Commerce Secretary. He made the remark at a meeting of the Commonwealth Club of California in 2009 and went on to extol the virtues of hidden rates in California, a state encumbered with some of the nation's highest electricity and unemployment rates.
Bryson, retired CEO of the electric utility Southern California Edison (SCE) and its parent company Edison International, excused the practice, saying, "That's been a part of the regulatory environment for the investor-owned utilities for as long as I've been close to it."
He has been close to it for more than three decades, but his resume shows that the current regulatory environment is largely his legacy rather than his inheritance. His bureaucratic career began in 1976 when then-Governor Jerry Brown appointed him to California's State Water Resources Control Board and as chair of the state Public Utilities Commission three years later. David Bier of the Competitive Enterprise Institute describes the outcome of his public service.
Click here to read the entire article.
Photo of John Bryson (left) with Arnold Schwarzenegger: AP Images


text:
The movie is based on one of the best mathematical tales ever written. Inhabiting a two-dimensional world populated by polygons and ruled by circular tyrants, a bright young hexagon, through sheer mathematical willpower, imagines a third dimension.
Given that 14 billion years have elapsed since the birth of the Universe and that the cosmos contains a mind-boggling 1024 stars, can Earth really be the only planet in the entire Universe to contain life?
Sylvia Nasar told the story of John Nash's troubled life in her book A Beautiful Mind, although probably better known as the film with Russel Crow.
The basis of this wonderful book came in a series of questions about modern maths sent to Philip Davis by a friend of his, Christina.
I suspect maths in primary school would be greeted with far more enthusiasm if students had Ian Stewart as a teacher. Any man who can explain electromagnetism, gravity and atomic nuclear forces in terms of a piggy fridge magnet and a smashed kitchen plate is, surely, a communicator to be reckoned with.
How to cut a cake is the latest volume holding reprinted articles from Stewart's regular maths column in Scientific American between 1987 and 2001.


text:
Lactic acidosis congenital infantile
News & Events
On this page
ORDR Co-Sponsored Conferences
The Spectrum of Caregiving and Palliative Care in Rare Diseases, Tuesday, June 09, 2015
Location: Building 31, 6C, Room 6, Bethesda, MD
Description: The findings and recommendations resulting from the Workshop will provide guidance to the extramural community as well as to NINR and other Institutes, Offices (e.g., ORDR), and agencies in developing strategies for advancing the science of palliative care and caregiving in rare disease and research programs. It is anticipated that a funding opportunity announcement will result from the Workshop.
American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy (ASGCT) 18th Annual Meeting, Wednesday, May 13, 2015 - Saturday, May 16, 2015
Location: New Orleans, LA
Description: From our plenary lectures, this year to be given by Drs. Steven Rosenberg and Anthony Atala, to our 19 scientific symposia featuring invited speakers from across our discipline, to our nightly abstract poster receptions, where the majority of the over 700 abstracts submitted to the Annual Meeting are presented, the ASGCT Annual Meeting is certain to be the premiere scientific meeting in our field.
RDCRN 3rd Conference on Clinical Research for Rare Diseases, Tuesday, October 02, 2012
Location: Hilton Washington DC/Rockville Hotel & Executive Meeting Center, Rockville, MD
Description: Clinical research in rare diseases presents a number of challenges and unique issues that are not usually considered in the training of clinical investigators through existing training programs. Goals of the conference include: direct instruction of trainees and new investigators in rare disease research methodology; development of a reusable curriculum/syllabus on rare disease research methodology; and stimulation of ideas regarding the unique issues facing investigators engaged in the study of rare diseases.
VI International Conference on Rare Diseases and Orphan Drugs (ICORD 2010): Global Approach to Accessibility in Rare Diseases, Orphan Drugs and Neglected Diseases , Thursday, March 18, 2010 - Saturday, March 20, 2010
Location: Palais Rouge Convention Center, Palermo, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Description: For the first time, the VI International Conference on Rare Diseases and Orphan Drugs (ICORD 2010) was convened in the southern hemisphere in agreement with its aim of globalization of rare diseases research and orphan products development activities.
Nutritional Challenges in the High-Risk Infant, Monday, September 14, 2009 - Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Location: DC Metro Area,
Description: Evidence was critically evaluated at this workshop. Current gaps in knowledge in this area were identified and research priorities were formulated. The workshop summary will provide NICHD and the scientific community a template to address the scientific and clinical issues related to nutrition and neonatal care.
United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation Annual Symposium , Wednesday, June 24, 2009 - Saturday, June 27, 2009
Location: Washington, DC
Description: The objectives of this symposium were to (1) describe the latest findings regarding mitochondrial diseases; (2) share research findings and award new research grants; (3) explore the clinical manifestations of mitochondrial disorders, including diagnosis and treatment considerations, and understand the concepts of mitochondrial disease therapy; and (4) evaluate the links between mitochondrial disease and a host of more well-known diseases.


text:
15 U.S. Code § 20 - Repealed.
Section, act Oct. 15, 1914, ch. 323, § 10,38 Stat. 734, related to a $50,000 yearly, aggregate limitation on purchases and contracts between a common carrier and any entity with whom such carrier has any form of interlocking directorate, etc., required filing with ICC of a full statement of transactions excluded from such limitation, and set forth fines and penalties for violation of such limitation.
LII has no control over and does not endorse any external Internet site that contains links to or references LII.


text:
- Northern New York Newspapers
- Watertown
- Ogdensburg
- Massena-Potsdam
- Lowville
- Carthage
- Malone
- NNY Business
- NNY Living
- NNY Ads
CANTON - Twirling in petticoat skirts and Western shirts, more than 100 men and women from both sides of the international border gathered Saturday afternoon to celebrate their common love of square and round dancing.
Members of clubs from Prescott, Brockville and other Canadian border towns traveled to Canton to help the Skirts N Flirts club celebrate its 40th anniversary during a square and round dance party at Canton Centrals Banford Elementary cafeteria.
This is lovely, said Shirley Hull of Prescott, Ont. as she took a break from swirling in a skirt decorated with pastel-colored tulips and puffed out with crinoline.
A professional caller directed their dance steps, calling out phrases like do-si-do, wheel and deal, ocean wave and promenade. Participants practice modern Western square dancing which was derived from traditional square dancing and barn dancing. They also perform round dancing which is cued ballroom dancing that progresses in a circular pattern.
A square dancer for the past 10 years, Mrs. Hull said shes drawn by the friendly people, the exercise and the music. She owns roughly 75 square dance outfits.
I find some at boutiques. A lot of us girls make our own, she said.
Founded in Canton in 1973, Skirts N Flirts had 116 members graduate from its first class in the spring of 1974. The group was spearheaded by Maurice and Bernita Spicer with help from Paul and Miriam Clements and Lellan and Lavern Freeman.
The club is part of the Seaway Valley Square and Round Dance Association, which includes groups from both the U.S. and Canada.
Several of the charter members attended Saturdays event and spent time leafing through old photo albums and reminiscing. Refreshments and door prizes added to the festivities.
Skirts N Flirts President Alen R. Brown, Harrisvile, said many of the long-time members are getting older, and he wants to encourage younger people to try out square dancing to keep the activity alive for future generations.
Several years ago there were about a dozen square dance clubs in Northern New York, but Skirts N Flirts is the only one that remains, he said. By contrast, the number of Canadian clubs has grown.
Were trying to get new members all the time. We want people to know its not just an old persons activity. Anyone can join and have fun, he said. It keeps you moving. Its better than staying home watching TV.
He noted that his 26-year-old granddaughter is a member.
Skirts N Flirts now has about 26 members who gather Friday evenings from September to May at the Banford Elementary cafeteria. Newcomers start with 10 weeks of lessons. The group is open to couples and single people of all ages, as well as whole families. Besides dances, the group meets for picnics, pizza nights, covered dish dinners, theme nights and outings to other clubs.
The clubs original caller, Keith R. Hubbard of Kingston, Ont., traveled the 90 miles to Canton nearly every Friday for several years, often traveling in snowy weather that forced him to stay overnight. He spent 41 yeas as a caller for different clubs before retiring last year.
I love it. You cant meet nicer people than square dancers, the 78 year old said.
Hannah and Carson Emhof of Canton have been members of Skirts N Flirts since the club started in 1974. They joined the party to see old friends.
We loved the friendships and the people, Mrs. Emhof said. Its a welcoming group.
Linda M. Dibble, Skirts N Flirts club secretary, said she hopes others will check out the club.
If people knew how much fun it is, I think more would get involved, she said. We are all a big happy family.
For more information, contact Mrs. Dibble at email@example.com or by calling her at 518-529-7726.
Thousands of readers like you have made Northern New York Newspapers the number one ranked website* for local news and sports coverage in the north country.
You can continue on to this article in a few seconds, or you can visit one of our websites:


text:
This item cannot be found.
by Syuzi
by Etto
View All
Search Photos
Sort by:
LatestMost PopularRandom
by helena loermans
by Andrew Moore
by Aniela Hoitink
Welcome toFashioning Technology
Sign Upor Sign In
Or sign in with:
© 2015 Created by Syuzi.
Badges |
Report an Issue |
Terms of Service
Please check your browser settings or contact your system administrator.


text:
- Cut the Cost, Not The Quality When You Buy Open Box Or Refurbished At Tech For Less
- Buy With Confidence: 30 Day Return Policy & Manufacturer Warranties
- Shop Now - Get More For Less & Join Over 2 Million Satisfied Customers Since 2001
Shop Speakers Accessories:
What Our Customers Are Saying
Ordering process went very smooth. Package arrived as scheduled. Just got the speakers set up on my 60 inch plasma Panasonic 3d HDTV. The sound quality is fantastic. I'm still learning all the options and how they work on the speaker system. Couldn't ask for a better Christmas present.- Ray H. (Olympia, Wa)
I have always been a bit skeptical on ordering anything online that might have something wrong with it, but I must say Tech4Less is 100% accurate on everything they list and it's condition. Honesty and amazing customer service is what this company offers. They can count on me being a return shopper as I have placed 2 orders and am very happy with the purchase.- Jose F. (Henderson, NV)
The Tech For Less Promise:
Join the over 2 Million satisfied customers we've been serving since 2001. We inspect and test all of our products to ensure it meets the manufacturer quality standards. We have a 30 Day Return Policy and every product has the Manufacturer Warranty against defects. If there does happen to be an issue, we will work with you to make it right!
Contact Us
1610 Garden of the Gods Rd.
Colorado Springs, CO 80907
Sales: 1.866.880.1230
Operating Hours
Monday — Friday
Outlet Store:
9:00am to 6:00pm MT
Phone Inquiries:
8:00am to 6:00pm MT
Email Us
Sales/Product Questions
After Sales Support
Customer Service Request Form
Stan B. - Sep 30th 2015


text:
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — Mark Petrino is calling it quits and heading West.
"I'm ready for something new," said a cheerful Petrino on Tuesday, who opened his namesake cafe on the Main Street corner barely a year ago. What's new is an offer he couldn't refuse from Colorado State, which will put him back into college food service.
It was Williams College that brought him to the Berkshires, then long miles traveling to colleges around the area for for AVI Foodsystems put him back into restaurant mode. Now he's ready for academia again.
Petrino's is the third eatery to try the corner of Holden and Main, following in the footsteps of the Cup & Saucer and Applachian Bean. It offered up fresh and local fare for breakfast and lunch, with various wraps along with some really great burgers, coffees and specialties. All the sandwiches were named after "relatives" to give it a homey touch. Our favorite is the Cousin Mary (chicken, chipotle sauce and Provolone) with an occasional Counsin Paulie (turkey, spring greens and feta on a panini roll).
It's no secret that the restaurant biz is the hardest, and this season has been brutal — too much snow and cold was keeping people inside. The restaurant has been closed on Mondays since February and rumors of its closure were going around weeks ago. Asked last week on the eatery's status, Petrino said he hadn't made a decision yet.
But Petrino says the new owner (he didn't want to say who yet) is in negotiations with building owner David Carver and is expected to take ownership as soon as next week. The new proprietor is considering getting an alcohol license and change to later hours, he said.
The cafe could close for a couple weeks to give the new owner a chance to do some renovations and "put his stamp on it," said Petrino, but it will be open in time for the avalanche that is the Solid Sound Festival in June.
"He knows Wilco is a cash cow," said Petrino, "he'll be open."
On a related note, we received some concern over the status of Desperados on Eagle Street on Monday after a large blue tarp was seen covering the entrance. No vandalism, broken glass or anything drastic — the restaurant was putting down new floor tile and had covered the entranceway to create a workspace.
Stephanie Farrington of Berkshire Food is contributing to our Eats blog — all about food, all the time.
Seasonal Farmers Markets
Berkshire South Community Market
15 Crissey Road, Great Barrington
Saturdays through Oct. 27 from 11 to 3
Berkshire Mall Market
Sears parking lot, Route 8
Wednesdays & Saturdays through November from 8 to 2
North Adams Farmers Market
St. Anthony's Municipal Parking
Saturdays through Oct. 27 from 8 to noon
Great Barrington Farmers Market
Taconic Avenue & Castle Street
Saturdays through October from 9 to 1
Lenox Farmers Market
70 Kemble St., Shakespeare & Company
Fridays through Oct. 5 from 1 to 5
Oits Farmers Market
L & M Auto, 2000 East Otis Road (Rte. 23)
Saturdays through Oct. 6 from 9 to 1
Pittsfield Farmers Market
First and Fenn streets, across from the Common
Saturdays, May 11 through Oct. 26, from 9 to 1
Sheffield Farmers Market
Old Parish Church, Main Street
Fridays through September from 3 to 7
Williamstown Farmers Market
Spring Street parking lot
Saturdays, May 25 through October, from 9 to 1
Hoosick Falls, N.Y.
The Armory
Wednesdays, 4 to 7