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More pounds of pig at Oak Harbor's annual roast
Last year, there was a lot of pig. This year, there's going to be 300 pounds more.
The fourth annual Oak Harbor Pig Roast on Fidalgo Avenue will be held Sunday, Aug. 14, and promises 1,600 pounds of pork and a whole lot of tangy sauce.
Like last year, the 2011 block party will feature a professional barbecue competition with piggy bank prizes awarded for people's and judges' choice. But for the first time, Whidbey's amateur roasters will form a league of their own.
Event organizer Roger Anglum of Smoketree BBQ said the professionals will roll in extensive equipment, but that won't fly in the amatuer competiton.
"We're looking for people to bring in their backyard barbecues," owner Scott Fraser of Frasers Gourmet Hideaway said.
Unlike the professionals, the amateurs will not be judged by their peers, but solely by a panel of judges. Fraser said the judges will mainly be folks with barbecuing clout, but some will be well-known city leaders like Whidbey Island Naval Air Station Commanding Officer Capt. Jay Johnson and North Whidbey Fire and Rescue Training Officer Ray Merrill.
Anglum will compete among the pros and is confident his product will have people licking their fingers and begging for more.
"I guarantee you'll think you've died and gone to heaven," he said. "I'll be up at about 2 in the morning on Sunday starting my rig. It takes about eight hours to smoke all that stuff up."
People will be able to sample all of the pros' dishes and plenty of pork will be available in the free food line alongside potato salad, pasta salad, coleslaw, corn and baked beans.
"People can come for a full meal," Fraser said.
Though the event is free, giant wooden barrels painted pink and posing as pigs will be rolled through the streets to collect donations. The money raised through donations, raffle ticket and alcohol sales will be split among local charities. Half of the money will be given to the North Whidbey Help House and the remainder will be divided among WISH, Youth Dynamics and the Medical Safety Net of North Whidbey. Last year, $12,000 was raised and Fraser said he's hoping to come close to that mark again this year.
Like a traditional block party, the pig roast, originated by Fraser as a way to thank the community, will close down portions of Fidalgo Avenue and Dock Street in order to spread out the entertainment. Live music will be performed by local bands at 12:30 and 4:30 p.m. and a vendors market with about 18 booths will be open throughout the afternoon.
For children, there will be gold panning, a visit from L-Bow the Clown, balloon artists, a climbing wall, a bouncy room and hot dog and pie eating contests at 2:30 and 3:30 p.m. Additionally, children will be invited to participate in a chalk piggy picture contest along Pioneer Way from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Event organizers stressed that the pig roast is kid-friendly but that adults also have a lot to look forward to.
"There will be a beer garden," Ron Apgar said, "that's the adult-friendly part. It'll be a nice hot day for a cold beer." Apgar owns Paint Your World on Pioneer Way and is helping plan the roast along with Fraser and Anglum. Frank Scelzi and Kristi Jensen, who own a few businesses inside Old Town Mall, are also on the planning committee and will open the mall parking lot to festivities. Greg Hampton of Whidbey Beer Works will be providing beverages.
After the close of the event on Sunday, Fraser said many community and Navy volunteers will help clean up the barbecue remains.
"We've got a lot of people helping out," Fraser said, "but we'll take anyone."
For details, see www.oakharborpigroast.com or call 279-1231.
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CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Before the game, Hornets Coach Byron Scott said his mood had mellowed since his Thursday outburst at practice during which he upbraided his team for its performance in New Orleans' 87-79 loss to the visiting Atlanta Hawks on Wednesday night.
"They thought practice yesterday was hard; it was hard because we didn't do anything offensively, " Scott said. "Everything we did was running and defense. I guess I took out what we call our free-throw game, where we can scrimmage -- and the message was we've got to be a better transition defensive team, we've got to be a better defensive team as far as our rebounding and protecting that paint. We didn't need to run anything offensively. For about an hour and 45 minutes, basically it was just running.
"I wasn't very happy yesterday. I'm a lot better today, and I think they sensed that because of my tone -- and the things I said in that huddle. We'll see how we react to it."
He got his answer rather quickly.
And the Hornets, no doubt got another earful after a second consecutive miserable outing, this time against the Charlotte Bobcats, who stunned New Orleans 92-89 on Friday night in front of an announced crowd of 13,435.
Charlotte forced 17 Hornets turnovers, which the Bobcats converted into 30 points, and had a decided advantage at the free-throw line, making 29 of 31 attempts.
The Bobcats also held Chris Paul scoreless in the first half, forcing him to defer to teammates who were not hitting open shots.
"I think you look at the 30 points they got off turnovers and 29 points off the free-throw line. That's pretty much the ball game when you get about 65 percent of your points off turnovers and free throws, " Scott calmly said later. "Defensively, I thought we did a much better job of being aggressive and more active, but we've got to do a better job of playing defense without fouling."
The Bobcats seemed to do whatever was necessary to neutralize Paul, who rallied the Hornets in the second half with 20 points and five steals. The Hornets went on a 15-2 run that began toward the end of the third quarter and carried over into the first four minutes of the fourth, taking a 73-68 lead when Rasual Butler made a reverse layup.
But Charlotte answered with a 17-5 run, going ahead 85-78 on a 3-pointer by New Orleans native D.J. Augustin with 2:52 remaining.
"I just thought he played so well, " Bobcats Coach Larry Brown said of Augustin, a rookie who finished with 11 points and four assists. "It's important he plays against a guy like Chris. I don't think there's a better player in the league than him."
The Hornets got to one point of the lead twice after two 3-pointers, by Butler with 56.4 remaining and Peja Stojakovic with 14.6 to go, that made the score 90-89.
"They did a good job of closing off the lane, " Paul said. "I wasn't able to get in there and create shots for our shooters. They did a really good job, played an all-round good game. They made me work really hard to get the ball back at half court. It's early in the season, though. We can find different ways to counter that."
Yet early on, when Paul was deferring, his teammates weren't hitting shots.
The Hornets were 11-of-40 in the first half. Take away Stojakovic's 4-of-8 shooting in the half, and the numbers were far worse.
New Orleans endured long stretches between second-quarter points -- from the 8:36 mark when Devin Brown hit a jumper to the 4:55 mark when James Posey dunked, to the 2:45 mark when David West hit a jumper to 45.2 remaining when Hilton Armstrong sank a free throw.
In all, the Hornets scored seven second-quarter points. If that wasn't dismal enough, Tyson Chander picked up his fourth personal foul with 3:16 remaining in the quarter while Armstrong was waiting at the scorer's table to check in after Chandler had gotten his third foul with 4:07 remaining.
Posey was assessed three personals in a 21-second span of the quarter and was replaced by Morris Peterson with 1:01 remaining.
All the while, the Bobcats, who weren't exactly putting on a clinic offensively, built a 12-point halftime edge.
"We just didn't play well, " said West, who fouled out and had 11 points on 3-of-12 shooting. "I didn't play well. This is two games now when we didn't have a collective good enough effort. I just thought we didn't play well enough. Myself individually, the last couple games, I haven't been aggressive enough.
"I've just been out of it. In order for us to win, I have to play better. That's just the bottom line."
. . . . . . .
Jimmy Smith can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.com or 504.826.3814.
More Hornets coverage from The Times-Picayune:
Brother Martin's Augustin a quick study

subset: commoncrawl


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GENESEE COUNTY, MI -- Good morning and welcome to your daily look at what's happening in Flint and Genesee County.
Some city leaders and residents in Flint aren't happy with how long it's taking city workers to clear snow from residential streets. Residential neighborhoods in Flint should be cleared of snow by Saturday, Jan. 11, the city said.
Crim's Fitness Foundation continues to expand outside of its annual summer events with the addition of two new races. On Feb. 22 at 4 p.m., Crim is hosting a 5K that starts and finishes on UM-Flint's campus. It's called Run Your Ice Off. In July, Crim will take over Crossroad Village's Huckleberry Hustle 5K trail run that has been around for the past decade.
More you might have missed
Blake Thorne is a reporter for MLive-The Flint Journal. Contact him at firstname.lastname@example.com or 810-347-8194. Follow him on Twitter or Facebook.


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New video by Igor Juget of Mathias Delplanque's concert at Détail (Paris, November 12 2015).
New album to be released on Ici d'Ailleurs on December 11 2015.
Preorder here.
Listen to "Drachen 7" here.
Bruit Clair releases the first EP by french duo PLY: "Le pays de l'alcool".
Mathias Delplanque's new album "Transmissions" OUT NOW on Cronica Electronica !
Exhibition at "La Maison des Polders" (Roz sur Couesnon, FR, 35). From 16.05.14 to 29.06.14.
Sound installation by Mathias Delplanque. Photographs by Estelle Chaigne.
Exhibition organized by Le Bon Accueil (Rennes).
"Des visites répétées", new album by Mathias Delplanque &
Iris Lancery is now available to download (free) !
"Intimités", new album by Eddie Ladoire is now available to order !
New videos of their concert at the Musée du Quai Branly (Paris, 23/02/13).
"Chutes", new album by Mathias Delplanque is now available to order on the label's website !
It is also available to download on various plateforms (Boomkat, Beatport, Amazon, Itunes ...).
Mathias Delplanque will have a residency with Ensemble 0 (Sylvain Chauveau, Stéphane Mathieu, Joël Merah & Stéphane Garin) at La Centrifugeuse (Pau) from October 15 to 19. They will give their first concert together the 19th in the shape of the festival Acces-s.
Audio excerpts from Mathias Delplanque's last concert at the festival Le Son du Salagou (August 2012).
Mulhouse, France
Mathias Delplanque solo


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There were a few new names for the Vandercook Lake High School boys basketball team who played key roles Thursday night in a 68-51 road victory at Grass Lake.
Names like William Rodriguez, Logan Foster and Devin Hamlin were large contributors for the two-time defending Cascades Conference champion Jayhawks, as well as another unfamiliar name to Vandercook Lake basketball: zone defense. The pesky Grass Lake team forced Vandercook Lake to change defenses during the game.
"I told the kids, 'I think I can count on both of my hands the games we've played zone in the last 10 years,' " Vandercook Lake coach Paul Varner said. "Our defense is not where we'd like it to be yet, and we were getting into foul trouble and were having trouble containing their drives, so that was kind of the idea to contain them.
"They made a few from the outside, but it definitely forced them to shoot more from the outside."
Although returning starter Tyler Applegate led the way with 25 points, it was the supporting cast of Rodriguez, Foster and Hamlin who helped Vandercook Lake hold off the Warriors as the Jayhawks improved to 4-1 overall and 3-0 in the Cascades.
Rodriguez, who started at point guard after playing junior varsity last year, had 17 points, eight rebounds, six assists and four steals.
"He's a good player," Varner said. "He is gaining in some confidence and still turns it over a little too much, but he's a fabulous passer, and he can score. With Thye Fischman out with a bad ankle, we put the ball in his hands, and he had to take care of it for us."
Foster was pressed into more game action when starting center Josh Sheets got into early foul trouble. Foster finished with 10 points, four rebounds and praise from Grass Lake coach Joel Cook.
For Chip Mundy's full story, click here.


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The Republican Daily Photo Gallery, December 11, 2012
Tuesday, December 11, 2012 9:05 AM
12/08/12 Easthampton - Staff photo by Michael Beswick - The Pioneer Valley Habitat for Humanity's first annual Gingerbread Build Contest fundraising event was held at the Eastworks Building Saturday. 40 teams with up to 5 members on each team were in this year's event.
Related articles
- Stars and frosty cold air return December 11, 2012, 4:00 PM


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Every year a few players slide through the cracks, but it's pretty rare that a player among the Rivals100 can do so.
4-star LB forgotten
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Jeremy Maclin's season is almost certainly over. He tore the ACL in his right knee on Saturday.
His replacement looks like it may come from within. The Eagles have not reached out to several of the notable wide receivers on the free-agent market, according to multiple sources. Instead, they're looking for Jason Avant, Riley Cooper, Arrelious Benn and Damaris Johnson to pick up the slack. Rookies Russell Shepard and Ifeanyi Momah also have an opportunity to impress and contribute.
But aside from the wide receivers, general manager Howie Roseman expects the lost production — Maclin led the team with 857 yards receiving and seven touchdowns — to mostly come from players at other positions.
"We have a lot of faith in our skill position group as a whole. That's kind of how we look at it," Roseman said. "We're not only looking at the wide receivers, but we look at the running backs, at the tight ends. Those are the guys we have high hopes and expectations for."
Roseman specifically mentioned offseason signing James Casey and second-year running backs Bryce Brown and Chris Polk. The Eagles expect significant second-year jumps from the latter.
Cooper will also receive a long look to start opposite DeSean Jackson during training camp and the regular season. He has size and skills that the Eagles really like.
"When you talk about Riley — we talk a lot about traits — he's big, he's strong, he can go up and get the football," Roseman said. "He can block. For a big guy, he can drop his weight and run routes.
"I think he had the lockout in 2011 and last year he broke his collarbone. So I think he's never had a chance to have a training camp and offseason where he can full develop and put that to use. He has the potential. It's up to him."
It sounds as if the Eagles may also be willing to use Johnson with Jackson some, but that is not something they see as a season-long answer. More likely, Benn or Cooper would assume Maclin's role if they don't make a signing or trade before the start of the season. Benn, however, has been sidelined with a knee injury he suffered the first day of training camp.
"Durability is the most important ability," Roseman said, quoting coach Chip Kelly's line from earlier in the week. "He knows he has to get back out here and show what he's capable of. He's a talented guy, but part of that is being out here and being reliable."
In the meantime, Maclin will remain on the Eagles' 90-man roster. There is no date yet for his surgery and he would count against the roster number even if they put him on injured reserve right now.


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Syracuse, NY - The Onondaga Community College men's basketball team will host Corning Community College on Saturday afternoon. Tip-off is at 1:00 pm in the SRC Arena & Events Center on the Onondaga campus. The Lazers (7-16, 1-6) will be looking to avenge a 75-60 loss to the Red Barons (11-9, 6-1) on January 11th in Corning. Saturday's game will will also follow the annual Onondaga Alumni Game, which will tip off at 11:00 am, also in the SRC Arena. Many former Lazers, including All-Americans Devin Warmack and Joe Olsen, are expected to be in attendance.
In the first meeting between Onondaga and Corning both teams suffered through cold shooting games, with the Lazers connecting on only 31.1% of their field goals attempts, and the Red Barons only finding the mark on 37.8% of their attempts. With 13 minutes left in that contest Corning used a 10-0 run to take control, and kept the Lazers at bay the rest of the way. Sayquan Chambers, the leading scorer in the Mid-State Athletic Conference, led Corning with 25 points and 11 rebounds. Tyler Ladd and Jacob Kleya added 15 and 13 points respectively. Tyler Bliss (Liverpool) was Onondaga's only double figure scorer, posting 14 points.
Onondaga enters Saturday's game having been off since suffering a 96-94 overtime defeat at Cayuga Community College last Saturday. In that game the Lazers were unable to hold onto a 16-point second half lead, as Cayuga held a 56-40 rebounding advantage and attempted 97 shots from the floor. Vaughndell Brantley (Cicero-North Syracuse) led Onondaga with 27 points, while Trevor Smith (Camillus West Genesee) topped the 20-point mark for the second straight game, totaling 25. On the season Brantley leads the Lazers, averaging 15.6 points per game, while Bliss is averaging 14.4 points and a team best 9.0 rebounds per contest, and shooting 55.6% from the floor. Ben Honahan (Malone Franklin Academy) leads Onondaga with 3.2 assists per game, while connecting on 55 three-point goals.
Corning also played Cayuga in their last contest, a 90-65 home win for the Red Barons on Wednesday night. Chambers recorded 35 points, 10 rebounds, and 6 assists, and Conning made 13 of 23 attempts as a team from behind the three-point arc. On the season Chambers is averaging 21.0 points and 10.2 rebounds per contest. Ladd averages 12.4 points per game, while Issachar Small chips in 11.1 points per contest.
Next up after Saturday's game, the Lazers will travel to Binghamton next Wednesday for an 8:00 pm tip-off at SUNY Broome. The next home contest will be on Saturday, February 8th, when Onondaga hosts Jefferson Community College at 3:00 pm in the SRC Arena & Events Center.


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The great outdoors beckons my father on a daily basis.
He isn't exactly an avid outdoorsman, that is unless Jimmy Houston suddenly devotes a show to the most effective method of edging around a curb and how to properly select the right rock for backyard stepping stones.
Still, the old man has a habit of returning to nature several times a day. Make that a bad habit.
A few years back, Mom succeeded in smoking dear ol' Dad out of the house.
Dad, who has tried unsuccessfully to kick his smoking habit, was banished outside if he desired to light up.
This exile has remained for years.
Dad still smokes, but he does so in the wide open spaces, or in the garage when the weather outside is frightful.
By mutual consent, if not continued marital bliss, this household smoking policy has worked.
The parties involved, specifically Mom and Dad, realized that a compromise was in order and reached an amicable solution, albeit with a little arm-twisting on Mom's part.
Ah, but there is a difference between a little arm-twisting and forced compliance.
Pardon the pun, but where there's smoke, there is indeed fire. And the controversy is blazing in Oklahoma.
As of July 1, restaurants and similar businesses in the Sooner State with no-smoking sections and seating capacities of 50 or more are required to have separate enclosed and ventilated smoking sections.
An Oklahoma district judge issued a restraining order Tuesday temporarily halting the regulations, but the fire has not been extinguished.
The dangers of secondhand smoke have become well-documented and generally accepted, and few would argue with the public health aspect behind the law. It is just the process by which the law was implemented that has fired up the opposition.
The law was not passed by the Legislature or a public vote. The state department of health issued a recommendation which was then approved by Gov. Frank Keating.
This little bureaucratic maneuver sparked an ember into a firestorm. Restaurant associations have taken the matter to court.
And while the public health aspect of the law seems legitimate, it isn't hard to see why some business owners might be hot under the collar for being forced to either become a totally non-smoking enterprise or assume the financial cost of providing a separate smoking room.
Many restaurant owners actually support what the health department is trying to do.
Naifeh's Steakhouse in Guymon got the jump on the health department, becoming totally non-smoking Jan. 1.
"It has worked beautifully. We're very, very pleased," said Dee Naifeh, who operates the family-owned restaurant. "I can count on my right hand how many did not approve and left. As a matter of fact I have some heavy smokers who continued to come and just not smoke.
"I wish we had gone that way long before."
Naifeh, who is an asthmatic, said just working in the previous environment was difficult.
Louis Ramirez, owner and manager of K-Bob's Steakhouse in Woodward, considers the policy appropriate and more smoke than fire.
"For the most part the feedback we have gotten from restaurants in the K-Bob's chain is they have already gone non-smoking. They feel it is a non-issue," said Ramirez, whose restaurant went non-smoking July 1. "You might lose a little business at first from your smokers, but they'll come back.
"We haven't noticed a difference in clientele, maybe a few different faces. Some of the more stubborn ones, or addicted ones, I guess, are not coming back, but it is minimal."
While he understands some business owners cannot afford to meet the new smoking room requirements, Ramirez is actually glad the law was implemented, which took the decision to go totally non-smoking out of his hands.
Still, you can't blame those business owners who feel they've been burned like a marshmallow at a campfire.
The state had a reasonable recommendation, one that private business owners should be able to determine for themselves whether to implement, or at least voice their opinions on to their elected representatives.
Instead, a law that potentially could have had broad public support, even by restaurant owners, faces a fire hazard in the courtroom because of an impatient or heavy-handed government bureaucracy.
Look at it this way. With a little persuasion and reason rather than coercion and obstruction, even dear ol' Dad understood the smoke signals.
Dave Henry is an editorial writer for the Amarillo Globe-News, P.O. Box 2091, Amarillo, Texas 79166. His e-mail address is firstname.lastname@example.com. His column appears Thursdays.
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It's tough to get a real feel for a city until you've seen the local women gyrate topless for tips (or at least that's what Woodrow Wilson used to say). As all strip joints are not created equal, though, how does an out-of-towner know where to go for overpriced cocktails and meaningful conversation? Yelp, of course! Which is why we scoured the site for some of the choicest quotes from club-goers apparently devoid of any semblance of shame. Here are the best.
NOTE: Add a big fat (sic) to pretty much every sentence below.


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Monica started out by asking the question: "How often do Firefox users change their default preferences?". Security and privacy are her focus at Mozilla, so she collected data to see what percentage of users change various security and privacy preferences and see what insights could be gleaned.
More details on her blog here : http://monica-at-mozilla.blogspot.com/2013/02/writing-for-98.html]]>
This year I've been trying to attend conferences besides the small set I've attended in the past. One thing that attracted me to the AppSec USA conference was OWASP's focus on building secure software and websites, not just on breaking software or finding new vulnerabilities.
In Austin, I spoke to several attendees who were extremely interested in the security features we are working on for Firefox and had some especially good discussions about Content Security Policy (aka CSP). CSP was mentioned frequently over the course of the conference presentations and it was also listed as a 'top 10 web defense'. I spoke to folks from several major sites who were either testing CSP or planning to start rolling it out over the next year. This is particularly personally relevant as I've been working on making Firefox CSP 1.0 compliant [1]. It was extremely encouraging and motivating to hear so much advocacy for CSP, it seems like it's really starting to gain momentum on the web. I also heard two other neat uses for CSP : detecting mixed content on one of your site's pages and also detecting infected browsers via catching their requests to malicious sites. CSP's ability to specify a report-only policy so sites can try out a policy and evaluate what violations occur without the risk of breakage seems like a particularly favorite feature. Additionally, I told folks interested in CSP about the User CSP add-on (written by Kailas Patel as his Google Summer of Code project), which allows a user to apply a custom CSP to a site or auto-generate an initial CSP. There are many similar projects under development to help generate a policy for a site.
Mozilla's CTO Brendan Eich gave an interesting and well received talk on how we ended up with the same origin model of the web today and future developments towards more secure JavaScript. Yvan Boily from the Security Assurance team also spoke on how Mozilla delivers security at scale, involving both community participation and developing open source automated security tools. Michael Coates, Mozilla's Director of Security Assurance, was part of a panel on bug bounties along with speakers from Etsy, Facebook and Google. The bug bounties panel was popular with attendees and afterwards quite a few people said they would look into starting their own bug bounty programs based on the experiences shared by the panelists.
I also attended quite a few sessions about issues with SSL/the current CA system. It was great to hear folks pushing HSTS (By the way, Firefox now has an HSTS preload list, thanks to David Keeler. See his blog post for more details.) and CA Pinning, which Camilo Viecco is currently working on.
Overall, I really enjoyed being able to talk to other folks on the defense side of security. Additionally, I feel like I saw and heard a lot to support our Security Engineering roadmap – it seems to be really well lined up with the mechanisms folks who protect sites are looking for browsers to provide. I really hope to be able to attend the next AppSecUSA in NYC in 2013 to continue the dialogue and maybe get some ideas for some new security features !
(PS: speaking of CSP and security mechanisms, I'll also take this chance to plug the work Isaac Dawson recently has done to look at which security headers are used by the Alexa Top 1,000,000 Sites, this is some fascinating research !)
[1] For details, see bug 783049 and bug 746978]]>
At the end of last May, Mozilla sponsored the HackWEEKDAY contest at the third annual Hack In the Box conference in the Netherlands. The contest ran alongside the rest of the HITB conference which featured
presentations on security topics including new iPhone jailbreaks and a second day key note from Bruce Schneier.
Lucas Adamski and myself travelled from San Francisco to Amsterdam where we met up with Christian Holler and Frederik Braun, a former Mozilla security intern. Both Christian and Freddy are based in Germany, so it was good to be able to and catch up with them in Europe and hear about Christian's current projects and Freddy's Masters degree research on web browser security.
The HackWEEKDAY contest goal was pretty simple : write an Firefox add-on related to security. The contest had previously been run at an earlier HITB conference in Malaysia, where Gary Kwong was Mozilla's representative. I made sure to talk to Gary before leaving for the conference and got some great insights into what to expect. Additionally, I took his suggestion to bring along lots of Firefox swag! The prize to be awarded for creating the best add-on, judged by a panel of Mozilla and HITB representatives, was 1337 euros.
HITB's Youri van de Zwart and Dirk Van Veen did an excellent job preparing for the contest. The contestants had a great space in which to hack, their own wireless network separate from the main conference, and a SVN server for their code.
The contest took place over two days, with a six hour hacking session each day. The Mozilla representatives (including myself) attended to help brainstorm project ideas and to aid with add on development. For many of the contestants, HackWEEKDAY was their first exposure to writing a Firefox add-on.
The participants ended up forming into four teams and working on four different Firefox addons :
* Sernin van de Krol and Sander Kerkdijk created an addon to prevent password reuse. It alerts when a user creates an account using a password that they have previously already used and saved in Firefox's password manager. It also highlights when a user attempts to reuse a password on a site with an HTTPS login page that has already been saved for a site with an HTTP login page, since that password could have easily been passively intercepted.
* Vianney Darmaillacq and Klaus de Graaf built an addon to integrate GPG with Firefox to make it easier for users to encrypt and decrypt text in the browser. The user can select a piece of text in Firefox, right-click and choose to encrypt. The data is passed to GPG via running it in a shell and then the encrypted text is copied to the clipboard for ease of pasting into an email or something similar. Similarly, the user can highlight encrypted text, choose "decrypt" and the plain text will be pasted to the clipboard after GPG has decrypted it.
* Paul Hooijenga also focused on password reuse. His addon took a different approach to the other project : it checks currently saved passwords to see if there are duplicates and alerts if so. Additionally, it also uses a publically available blacklist of sites that store passwords unencrypted and warns if a password used on one of those sites is reused elsewhere.
* Pieter Vlasblom and Erik Kooistra made an addon to automatically verify hashes of files that the user downloads. When a file is being downloaded, the addon looks for a file in the same directory on the server with the same name and an .md5 or .sha1 extension. It then tries to download those hashes, preferring SSL and falling back to HTTP if necessary. The SHA1 hash is preferred to the MD5 hash if both exist. A message to the user is displayed unobtrusively if the verification succeeded, but if the hash exists and does not match the computed hash for the download file, the file is deleted and a warning displayed.
After some serious debate, it was decided that the winner was Pieter and Erik's hash checking addon. The panel discussed the fundamental bootstrapping problem with checking hashes during the judging – eg. if the hash is downloaded over HTTP, it can't be trusted. Likewise, if the page containing the links to the download and its hash are accessed over HTTP, those links can't be trusted, even if they are HTTPS links, and so on and so on. Since the addon was something most users could immediately use, adding security transparently without requiring users to make a security decision, the panel still felt this was the best project, although all of the addons submitted were quite good and had their advocates. The winning team was presented with their prize by Lucas and Dirk during the closing ceremonies of the conference.
To close on a more personal note, I really enjoyed the whole experience – it was particularly interesting to me to finally attend a security conference in Europe and to be able to compare and contrast the experience against the many conferences I have attended in North America. I also got a chance to do a brief demo of B2G for the contestants, Christian spoke about his adbfuzz framework and gave a brief demo, and Lucas chatted with many folks interested in what Mozilla is doing at the moment, both related and unrelated to security. The conference and contest was a great opportunity for us to connect with the larger security community in person, and I'm very thankful I got to be a part of it !]]>
I joined Mozilla in May 2011 to work on client security, mostly focusing on desktop and mobile Firefox. I've worked in various security roles throughout my career, but personally feel that an engineering role is where I am the happiest and have the most to offer. Although I've been interested in security since I was a teenager exploring the Internet, development is where my professional career began. I worked on Solaris at my first job, and subsequently began a long stint as a Windows programmer at a number of companies. At one of these companies, I even worked on software for Windows CE, helping build one of the first-generation mobile firewalls. I became more and more interested in focusing on security professionally and I found myself oscillating between 'security consulting'-type work and 'security engineering'-type work. Both have different challenges and their own set of pros and cons. As brilliantly described by David Mandelin in a blog post about starting employment at Mozilla, the hardest problem I had to face on my arrival was figuring out where to focus my efforts to most improve our users' security and privacy. Among other things, I worked reviewing Firefox's silent updates feature, reviewing the Android Sync client side implementation, and tracking and advising on security matters for Firefox on Android. I also participated in many feature security reviews, worked on a few random security bugs (which helped a lot with learning my way around the Mozilla codebase and development environment), and finally began work on a Firefox feature I hope to discuss further in a future blog post once it's landed !
In February 2012, Mozilla's security teams reorganized. Previously, the security teams had been organized into separate groups responsible for operational security (securing, hardening, and monitoring servers and devices throughout Mozilla), infrastructure security (web applications and website security) and client security (Firefox for desktop and mobile and other client side applications – including fuzzers looking for security bugs in these products). The reorganization merged all teams responsible for reviewing and maintaining security across the organization into the Security Assurance team and established the Security Engineering team to focus on implementing security and privacy features. Security Engineering works on these features both in conjunction with other browsers and websites to improve the security and privacy of the web as a whole, and to attempt to advance the state of the art by going where other browsers cannot or will not go, in alignment with Mozilla's manifesto of putting users first. After the reorganization, I am now a member of the Security Engineering team – it's been a very busy first few months for us! Of course, in classic Mozilla style, teams have pretty fuzzy boundaries, so I still work with the same people every day on our shared goal of improving security.
One thing that is incredibly refreshing about working on security at Mozilla, as many of my colleagues will attest, is being able to talk about our plans and what we are working on – this is very unusual for many security folks! Security engineering follows the same open and public approach to developing features the rest of the Mozilla project takes. This means that we open ourselves up to getting advice and input on our security work from the rest of the community, which is especially valuable early on in a project's lifecycle. By "community" I mean both the security community (just like in cryptography, the more folks who try to break your system the better!) and the Mozilla community, where we can gain insight into the security issues and challenges our users are facing. We can ship early versions of features disabled by default (like click to play) in Nightly builds, and people can turn the feature on, try it out, and provide feedback, ensuring we're not planning the feature in a vaccuum.
At the first few meetings of the Security Engineering team, we focused on updating the existing Security Roadmap. The roadmap began as a survey conducted by Lucas Adamski in early 2011. Respondents essentially played a variant of Planning Poker, in which everyone was given a set number of points to allot to various ideas for security features or research that had been generated in a previous brainstorming session. This helped gauge the feelings of people interested in security within the Mozilla project on what was most important to focus on security-wise. Sid Stamm, Mozilla's Lead Privacy Engineer, established a Privacy Roadmap along similar lines last year, focusing on improving the privacy of our users on the web.
The key to both of the Security and Privacy roadmaps is that they are discussed and refined on a regular basis. This agility allows us to keep the roadmaps responsive to current events on the Internet and also helps make sure we are in line with the overall priorities of the Mozilla project. It lets us set long term goals and make sure we are focusing on the right things. We tend to keep projects that aren't actively being worked on at a lower priority, ensuring we finish the higher priority projects first or have actively decided to change an project's priority. It's no surprise that many of the Security Engineering team's quarterly goals are pretty much lifted from our roadmap.
Personally, I'm currently working on two P1 items on the Security Roadmap:
Another P1 roadmap item, the Security Engineering team has been spending a fair bit of time discussing and pushing along is "opt in activation of plugins", often referred to as "click-to-play for plugins". Our aim for this feature from a security-focused perspective is to help drive users to update their plugins and prevent 'drive by' attacks attempting to exploit plugin vulnerabilities.
The Security Engineering team is hard at work on many other interesting projects as well :
All this exciting stuff is in addition to our attempts to keep up on everything going on with security and privacy on the web (and as part of the Mozilla project) and discussing security and privacy with community folks whenever we can!
In closing, if you're interested in Mozilla's Security Engineering efforts, our meetings are on Thursdays at 3pm PST. Meeting announcements are posted to mozilla.dev.planning and mozilla.dev.security every week.
We also warmly welcome feedback and discussion on security features or the Security/Privacy roadmaps on the mozilla.dev.security mailing list/group or on #security on irc.mozilla.org
And.. if this all sounds challenging and really interesting (and often fun!), we're hiring security and privacy engineers !
Thanks to Lucas Adamski, Sid Stamm, and Tanvi Vyas for reviewing and providing feedback for this post !]]>
Recently I was lucky enough to be sent by Mozilla to Miami to attend the INFILTRATE 2012 Security Conference. The conference is in its second year and took place January 12th and 13th at the Gansevoort Hotel in Miami Beach. It was a single track event (which I greatly prefer) focused on offensive security (ie. attacking rather than defending) and had somewhere around 150 attendees. This year I'm attempting to go to smaller conferences, particularly ones I haven't attended previously, and the lineup looked great, so off I went !
Here's my attempted recap of the two days of presentations :
Keynote – Thomas Lim (organizer of SyScan conference, COSEInc)
Thomas Lim's first day keynote was incredibly entertaining. The two main themes of his presentation were security conferences and cyberwar. His opinion on conferences is that there are just too many, too many repeat presentations and not enough good speakers to go around. These factors bring down the quality of all conferences. As someone who has put on many conferences in Asia, Thomas pointed out that getting into throwing security conferences to make money is foolish, as most of them don't. His list of hard-learned mistakes is : thinking a good speaker program is enough to make a successful conference, undercharging for admission (you need to cover your costs !) and accepting great talk submissions that ended up being given by terrible speakers. (At INFILTRATE, the organizers had the speakers give the presentation to them, providing a lot of feedback and suggestions – it showed !) On cyberwar, Thomas presented his personal opinions of what's really going on currently and predictions of what the future holds. This talk was laced with humour throughout and set a really good tone for the rest of the conference.
Blackberry Playbook – Ben Nell & Zach Lanier (Intrepidus Group)
This talk shared the results of researching the security configuration and design choices of the Blackberry Playbook. The architecture of the Playbook and its security mechanisms were discussed, as well as ways to circumvent them, such as a recently published jailbreak. Installing updates for the Playbook follows the familiar pattern of polling for any new updates over HTTPS, getting update metadata over HTTPS and then downloading the actual update over HTTP. The speakers revealed that the QNX Software Development Platform is full of useful tools that they took advantage of to analyze the device. One of their main findings was that a file with weak permissions on the device leaked a huge amount of useful info, including a session token that could be used to connect to the proxy used for networking with other Blackberry devices. They also dropped a few other interesting findings including how to download any app (for free) from the Playbook app store.
Unearthing the World's Best WebKit bugs – Michel Aubizzierre
This talk was one I was very interested to hear, as it builds on the research done by Adam Barth et al on mining public bug trackers (using Bugzilla/Firefox as an example) to identify vulnerabilities. Michel referred to the previous paper in the beginning of his talk and then went on to describe how he used a machine learning library to be able to predict if a particular commit is a vulnerability fix (and hence interesting to an attacker). The tool looks at data points such as: who committed the fix ? does the commit message reference a private bug ? does the commit message include an 'interesting' word such as 'crash' ? was the fix reviewed by a member of the security team ? etc. Michel also pointed out how nice it is (for an attacker/exploit developer, at least) that commits also often include automated tests – a free PoC to trigger the vulnerability ! He stated that while Chrome itself picks up WebKit security fixes quite quickly, other vendors and platforms are much slower – particularly on mobile where carriers have to be involved in shipping fixes.
Effective Denial of Service Attacks Against Web Application Platforms – Alexander Klink & Julian Waelde
The key finding in this presentation was that many web application platforms use a hash function that can fairly easily have collisions induced, which leads to an easy denial of service against the server. Many web application frameworks deliver HTTP request params to the applications running on them as a hash/associative array (implemented with an underlying hash table). For example something like params['a_param'] is a common pattern. If a request can be crafted so there are many params which all hash to the same value in the underlying hash table, this leads to the worst case performance ( O(n^2) for lookup/storage ) The speakers presented two techniques that can be used to find hash collisions : using equivalent substrings or a "meet in the middle" approach. The hashing function used by the hash table determines which technique must be used. Using their approach, they found that in practice a 500K POST request could consume ~1 min of CPU time. Alexander and Julian also discussed their experiences reporting this issue to a variety of web framework vendors. A common mitigation used by vendors was to limit the maximum number of params to lessen the amount of collisions that can be created via one request. The actual fix suggested is to use a randomized hash function that avoids collisions as much as possible (djb suggests using a treemap instead of a hash table, for what it's worth). The speakers also made the important point that since the malicious request can just be a normal POST, it can be triggered via an XSS of a webpage – making it possible to make browsers complicit in DDoS'ing a server. Another interesting point is that Perl fixed this issue in 2003, but many other web frameworks were vulnerable to their attack until they reported the issue in 2011.
Slides are available here : http://www.immunityinc.com/downloads/Effective_DoS_Attacks_against_web_application_platforms_INFILTRATE_2012.pdf
Heap of Trouble : Breaking the Linux Kernel SLOB Allocator – Dan Rosenberg
SLOB is one of three kernel heap allocators used by Linux. It's commonly found in embedded systems which require a low memory footprint but not often used in mobile devices at the current time. As SLOB is slightly different from the other heap allocators, sometimes vulnerabilities which are difficult or impossible to be exploited otherwise can be used against systems which utilize it. Dan went into the technical details of SLOB and covered some techniques for exploiting heap overflows on a system using this allocator.
For those interested in details, check out his slides at http://vulnfactory.org/research/slob.pdf
Real World SQL Injections – Leonardo Alminara
Leonardo talked about some of the difficulties associated with exploiting blind SQL injections in the real world (Unicode languages, delays/unreliability resulting from bad network connections or having to go through many hops). He also presented some techniques to optimize and better detect SQL injections, including timing attacks and script behaviour prediction. A technique for validating results via using SQL functions themselves to checksum the retrieved data was also demonstrated.
A Sandbox Odyssey – Vincenzo Iozzo
This was another talk I was really looking forward to, and it did not disappoint ! Vincenzo's talk discussed the OSX process sandbox, which is based on TrustedBSD and its Mandatory Access Control framework. He first dived into the implementation of the sandbox, the structure of its policies and how they are enforced by OSX . He then went on to talk about possible sandbox escape avenues – it turns out that not everything can be enforced with the current implementation, since there are some APIs that do not have hooks for sandboxing checks. Vincenzo discussed the kernel surface exposed to a sandboxed process and potential avenues of exploitation that different components may offer. Commonly in the real world, we see that the most secure policy for a process may not always result in something usable. This was demonstrated to be true yet again when reviewing some sample sandbox policies for some popular applications : they have to allow a large number of potentially dangerous operations to function correctly. As a counter example, Vincenzo showed that Chrome's renderer process sandbox is extremely tightly locked down. He compared many sandbox policies to essentially being a chroot and gave the example of grabbing the system keychain and sending it off the machine, allowed by the sandboxes for some common processes ! He made a strong point that sometimes exfiltrating data (as in the previous example) is the ultimate goal of the attacker. This is much more difficult to prevent than escaping the 'chroot' or escalating privilege. Vincenzo emphasized that there is a plethora of 'interesting data' inside or accessible from within a browser process – such as SQLLite db's. He demonstrated an attack along these lines to hijack a popular mail website without needing to escape the sandbox at all. Overall, this was a really awesome presentation – technical details of the sandbox itself, some solid research on how it's used in the real world by apps, and some really thought provoking ideas and attacks that sandboxing almost certainly isn't the right way to mitigate.
Man vs Machine – Andrew Cushman (Microsoft)
Andrew Cushman was the keynote speaker to begin the second day of the conference. The gist of his talk was expounding his belief that the biggest current challenges in cybersecurity are in the political realm, ie. the regulation and policy space. He pointed out that countries have differing views on how the Internet should be run and (not) controlled. His talk also touched on the work Microsoft has done implementing their Secure Development Lifecycle and the results : for example, infections per 1000 machines has dropped from 20% for Windows XP to 5.7% from Windows 7 – compelling numbers ! Microsoft's executives mandated making the SDL compulsory in 2004, beginning a slow, steady and sustained effort to improve the security of Microsoft products. Andrew's view is that this has greatly increased the cost of finding usable vulnerabilities against Windows and other Microsoft products. By rapidly detecting and suppressing exploits and focusing on removing entire classes of vulnerabilities, the progress since the days of Code Red et al has been immense.
Proximity Card Access Systems – Brad Antoniewicz (Foundstone)
Brad discussed the security (or lack of) around access card door systems, including a demo of how easy it is to get close to someone with a valid card in their pocket and then clone their card, gaining all their allowed physical access. He explained the basics of how common access card systems work and did a cool demo of how to brute force a card reader using a custom tool he built with an Arduino microcontroller. Brad also delved into possible vulnerabilities on the back end systems used by these access card systems, including the web-based admin interface. The best demo was sending the command to the door to open itself, while performing no logging at all in the admin console !
Easy Local Windows Kernel Exploitation – Cesar Cerrudo (IOActive)
This presentation started by giving a brief recap of the state of most Windows kernel exploit techniques: they aren't generic, don't work across Windows versions, and execute code in kernel mode, which makes it very easy to blue screen the system. Cesar set out to find an easy, reliable, portable way to exploit Windows kernel vulnerabilities. His insight was that most of the time an attacker is not necessarily interested in executing code in ring 0, but instead in elevating privileges. Once elevated, the attacker can access any restricted data or hijack a security-critical process (for example, injecting code into LSASS to be able to obtain, and later crack, password hashes). Cesar found that he could remove the ACL of almost any Windows object, enable any privilege in a process token, or replace a process' token entirely with a privileged token. He discussed performing any of these three attacks with just one (sometimes two) writes to the kernel and without needing to run any kernel mode shellcode whatsoever. One key technique is that Windows (at the current time at least !) hands out a lot of useful information (like the address of kernel structures) to an unprivileged user mode process via the NtQuerySystemInformation call. This is different to other operating systems where an attacker must rely on information leakage vulnerabilities to obtain this sort of information. Using this technique leads to extremely portable and reliable exploits. A caveat is that if you steal another process' token, you have to increment the token's refcount in the kernel – otherwise when your process using the stolen token exits, the token will be released when the refcount goes to 0, often causing the true owner's process to crash ! Another surprising bit of info he revealed is that Windows doesn't check the token type when doing access checks. He was able to steal an identity token (which shouldn't allow authenticating as that user) and set that as his process' primary token, giving it SYSTEM privileges. Cesar also pointed out there are many other things in Windows kernel structures that could be overwritten in this way via a kernel overflow; there's definitely some more interesting research to be done here. This presentation was full of technical details and quality research.
Secrets In Your Pocket – Mark Wuergler (Immunity)
This talk started with the premise "In the battle between security and convenience, convenience is winning." From there, Mark went on to explore the data that is revealed about a user by their wireless device, starting with examining the SSID's a device has saved and keeps attempting to connect to. Once an attacker/stalker knows what SSID's your particular device is looking for, this gives them some information about where you go (e.g. Starbucks) or where you work (e.g. Mozilla corporate wireless). The talk went on to cover information stored in your cookies which can be obtained by an attacker once they crack your wireless network – if they need to – by injecting sites into your HTTP traffic and winning the race against the legitimate HTTP response. Injecting content can also trigger browser password autofill as well. Mark also made the point that many sites require SSL for login pages only but not the rest of their content – meaning once you're authenticated all sorts of information including contents of emails, social network profile data etc. is unprotected from a sniffing attacker. A demo was shown presenting an attack against Facebook application installs. The Facebook application permissions shown when asking a user if they want to install an app are implemented client side. Mark showed that an attacker could sniff a necessary token and then change the permissions requested by the app to ask for ALL permissions (without displaying this to the victim). When the user installs the application, it's then allowed full access to any of the user's Facebook data. The closing remark of this talk was "Information disclosures weaken the security of the organizations you are associated with" – obtaining information that could answer a secret question for a password reset was an example given. Pro-tip : turn off wireless when not using it and think about what your saved networks are broadcasting about you !
Mark's slides are available at http://prezi.com/rpx0w4krsi3y/secrets-in-your-pocket-mark-wuergler/
The Stack is Back – Jon Oberheide
Another immensely entertaining and educational presentation. Jon was speaking about exploiting stack overflows – not stack BUFFER overflows, but a true stack overflow where the stack itself exceeds the bounds of its allocated space. Although it seems like this sort of vulnerability is 'impossible' to exploit, Jon refused to admit defeat and explained and demonstrated his research on how to exploit stack overflows in the Linux kernel. The key is that while getting anything useful out of exploiting a process' kernel stack overflow itself is difficult, an attacker can create processes until there are two with adjacent kernel stacks. The first process can overflow its kernel stack into the second process' kernel stack, overwriting a return address there. grsec and PaX take steps to prevent this exploitation technique, while a conference attendee stated they don't believe it's possible to use it on Windows.
Modern Static Security Checking for C/C++ – Julien Vanegue (Microsoft)
Julien presented an overview of the problems inherent in static analysis : trying to achieve a 'sound' analysis (with no false negatives) that is also a 'complete' analysis (with no false positives) – in practice, this is often a tradeoff. He discussed the work being done at Microsoft to improve the results of static analysis on their code. MS has created a tool called HAVOC (Heap Aware Verifier for C and C++ programs). It's a plugin for the MSVC compiler that uses manual source code annotations to aid its analysis. The annotations can be in a separate file, existing side-by-side with the source code, which avoidsthe common pain of cluttering up the code with annotations that only the static analysis tools care about. One very interesting data point was a screen shot of Task Manager on a machine being used for analysis at MS : a 48 core machine with 100 GB of RAM ! An example cited was an analysis of around 300 KLOC in the Windows kernel to see if all pointers passed to the kernel are validated (ie. point to somewhere sane in user space) – this took about six hours to run. One key difference between HAVOC and other static analysis tools is that it doesn't do 'state merging'. To prevent analyzing the almost infinite amount of states a program can pass through with respect to control flow, many tools 'merge states' when control flow reconverges, which loses a lot of information about, for example, the values variables can actually take on during the actual program's control flow. This can lead to a multitude of false positives that require time consuming manual review. Another important point Julien made is that, although many vulns are found at MS with static analysis, fully automated analysis (without humans aiding the tools by means of annotations, for example) is not really feasible : his advice is think cyborg, not robot !
Slides are here : http://www.immunityinc.com/downloads/infiltrate-jvanegue.pdf
Undermining Security Barriers – further adventures with USB – Andy Davis (NGS Secure)
At this point, the conference was up against a hard deadline and things were a little behind schedule, through no fault of the organizers. That said, Andy did an outstanding job of condensing his presentation without rushing through it and still shared his interesting research into USB security. He started with a brief overview of USB and vulnerability classes commonly found in USB stacks before diving into the details of his attempt to fuzz USB by emulating it with an Arduino. Due to performance reasons, this didn't really work super well, so he moved on to controlling some commercial USB test hardware (which runs about $1200) via some Python scripts. Using this approach, he found a crash in one of the Windows 7 USB drivers, as well as vulnerabilities in the XBOX 360, OSX and Solaris USB stacks ! One of the standout quotes from this presentation was "Some vendors don't consider USB vulnerabilities a security issue." (The old quote about being entirely theoretical never gets old, does it ?) Andy then released a USB device fuzzer live at the conference – it uses wxPython/libUSB/pyUSB and has already found some bugs (memory corruptions in iOS5 on the iPhone 4, for example).
You can check out the tool and research at http://ngssecure.com/research/infiltrate
Don't Hassle The Hoff – Breaking iOS Code Signing – Charlie Miller (Accuvant)
Charlie first gave a brief overview of how code signing is enforced on the iPhone – the crux of the matter is that pages can't be both writeable and executable. This allows Apple to review apps and find malware, since whatever app they review can't be self modifying. In essence, as Charlie put it "Apple acts as your AV". He went over the actual implementation of the page protection checks and signing enforcement in great detail, using public code where available or approximate code he reverse engineered where needed. It turns out that there's an exception to the W+X restriction : pages allocated for the purpose of JIT compiling Javascript. However, this special 'allocate for JIT' flag is only allowed to be used when an application's signed plist file contains a special entitlement. This entitlement is currently only given to Mobile Safari and other apps that try to claim it won't be approved by Apple obviously. This special 'JIT allocate' entitlement only allows the process to create a single W+X page once. As an aside, it was also mentioned how most current jailbreaks work : patching out the checks to ensure a process has no W+X pages, disabling checking the hashes of binaries and having the signed binary check always return true. Moving on, Charlie described how he spotted an implementation flaw in the checks around mapping a W+X memory segment and proceeded to try and exploit it. In the end he submitted two apps to the Apple app store that used this technique. The first one was rejected for not being 'useful enough' – it was a Daily Hasselhoff app, hence the talk title. The second one got approved and was in the app store for a few months. While Charlie took careful precautions to ensure that his app would only load and execute dynamic code for very specific periods of time (when he was demo'ing it, for example), he was still banned from Apple's developer program 'for at least a year'. This was a really awesome presentation, full of great technical details – it was obvious that a lot of effort went into this research. Also entertaining was how many times Charlie mentioned he was no longer an official Apple Developer. A very fitting end to the conference.
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Kit Description:
Get ready for crisp air, falling leaves, hayrides, and trips to the pumpkin patch! The Crisp Fall Days collection is perfect for all your autumn-themed pages or layouts in need of an "earthy" feel with vibrant colors. This is not only great for layouts of Autumn, but perfect for any playful photos. This kit is really versatile and fun – from the "fun" papers to the "cute" elements, you will turn to it again and again. 2 other matching paper packs and alphabet are also available....
This Kit Includes:
- 12 backgrounds (12x12)
- crows
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Filesize: 30.15 MB
These embellishments can be used with templates and pages at all dpi resolutions and dimensions.
Kit designed by Michelle McCoy


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Business Digest May 10, 2013
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Sport Clips Haircuts opened a salon at 2323 30th St. in Boulder. The sports-themed haircutting franchise will be open from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday.
Nonprofit organization First Nations Development Institute moved from 351 Coffman St. to 2432 Main St. in Longmont. Phone number remains the same, 303-774-7836.
Bank of Commerce Mortgage changed its name to Commerce Mortgage. The California-based mortgage lender has an office at 1637 Pearl St., Suite 203, in Boulder.
Lyons-based Two Rivers Foods, the maker of SolBites, all-natural cracker-and-spread packages, is expanding its distribution network. Two Rivers Foods will be offering its products in 100 more Whole Foods Market Inc. grocery stores and in all 263 Cost Plus World Market stores in 30 states.
Broomfield-based Arca Biopharma Inc. (Nasdaq: ABIO) will use a heart monitor made by Medtronic Inc. in a clinical trial for Arca's heart drug Gencaro. The trial will compare Gencaro to controlled and extended release metoprolol for prevention of atrial fibrillation in patients with heart failure and reduced left ventricular ejection faction. Approximately 200 patients will be tested. Depending on the results of an interim analysis, the study could be expanded to include an estimated 420 additional patients. Each patient will have heart rhythm monitoring via a Medtronic device. Medtronic (NYSE: MDT) Medtronic is based in Minneapolis and has operations in Louisville.
RGS Energy, the commercial and utility division of Louisville-based Real Goods Solar Inc. (Nasdaq: RSOL), is working with Smart Energy Capital LLC on a $20 million solar-installation project for the Stockton Unified School District in California. The 5.1 megawatts of solar power will bring clean energy to 18 schools and facilities in the district. The solar installations are expected to save the district $600,000 on its energy bill in the first year. RGS also completed installation of solar-power systems at four Stop & Shop grocery stores in New York, bringing the total number of Stop & Shop stores with RGS-installed systems to 32 in the Northeast.
Boulder-based SparkFun Electronics LLC has begun handling its public relations in-house through Lara Boudreaux, marketing department project manager. SparkFun previously engaged Boulder-based Catapult PR-IR for its marketing needs.
Charter jet-service company Mountain Aviation has added a Pilatus PC-12 turbo-prop aircraft to its fleet. The PC-12 has a cruising speed of 300 miles per hour and a range of 1,700 miles. It will be housed at Eagle County Airport in the Vail Valley and at Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport in Broomfield, where Mountain Aviation is headquartered. Mountain Aviation also has bases in Denver, Eagle, Aspen, Fort Collins and Boise, Idaho. It operates a fleet of Gulfstream, Hawker, King Air, Piaggio, Pilatus, Citation Jet and turbo-prop aircraft. Pilatus is based in Switzerland and has a manufacturing operation in Broomfield.
Niwot-based natural foods company Boulder Brands Inc. (Nasdaq: BDBD) reported profit of $45.6 million in first-quarter 2013, an increase of 29.9 percent from the same period a year earlier. The company experienced strong growth for its gluten-free brands, including its Udi's products made in Colorado, according to a press statement. Profit was $35.1 million in the first quarter of 2012. Net revenue for the first quarter rose 34.5 percent to $106.7 million, compared with net revenue of $79.3 million in the first quarter of 2012.
Niwot-based shoemaker Crocs Inc. (Nasdaq: CROX) reported revenue of $311.7 million and a profit of $29 million, or 33 cents per share, for its first quarter that ended March 31. Revenue for the quarter increased 14.7 percent compared with revenue of $271.8 million reported in the first quarter of 2012.
Deposits and loans increased during the first quarter at FirstBank Holding Co.'s branches serving the Boulder market. The Lakewood-based bank's deposits in the Boulder market increased 12.8 percent to $636.9 million for the first quarter ended March 31 compared with $564.4 million in the first quarter of 2012. Loan values were up16.7 percent to $348.5 million in the first quarter compared with $298.6 million in first-quarter 2012.
Broomfield-based can manufacturer Ball Corp. (NYSE: BLL) reported income of $72 million for its first quarter that ended March 31, a decrease from $88.3 million for the same period a year ago. The Broomfield-based company (NYSE: BLL) price per share for the quarter was 58 cents, an 8 percent decrease from 63 cents per share for the same period in 2012. Revenue was $1.991 billion for the quarter, compared with $2.042 billion for the same quarter a year earlier. Ball's subsidiary Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. in Boulder reported income of $17.9 million for the first quarter of 2013, down from $19.7 million for the same quarter in 2012. Revenue was $231.4 million in the first quarter, compared with revenue of $201.6 million in 2012.
Broomfield-based Level 3 Communications Inc. (NYSE: LVLT) reported revenue of $1.577 billion, for the first quarter of its fiscal that ended March 31, but the telecommunications company incurred a loss of $78 million, or 36 cents per share. Level 3's loss narrowed compared with a loss of $138 million, or 66 cents per share, on revenue of $1.586 billion during the first quarter a year ago.
Longmont-based DigitalGlobe Inc. (NYSE: DGI) has expanded its customer base in China through its joint-venture partner Siwei Worldview. DigitalGlobe provides images of Earth taken by cameras aboard its satellites that orbit the planet. Financial terms of the agreements were not disclosed. Siwei WorldView secured an agreement to provide more than 3.4 million square miles of imagery, covering approximately 90 percent of China's landmass, to a prominent organization in the country. The imagery will support the organization's ongoing mission to create a nationwide basemap.
The food and beverage division of Aspen/Snowmass hired Boulder-based ad agency Vermilion to develop a brand message and program identity for its on-mountain restaurants. The goal is to reflect the progress Aspen/Snowmass has made providing healthy food using organic, locally sourced and ingredients.
Broomfield-based Level 3 Communications Inc. (NYSE: LVLT) was hired by Medical Billing and Management Services LLC, one of the largest radiology billing companies in the United States, to provide network services to support the growth of its business, to improve communications among its locations and to improve customer response times. MBMS, based in Newark, Delaware, provides billing services to more than 450 radiologists in the United States. Level 3's network is interconnecting six of MBMS' locations in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware.
Publicly traded Fusion-io Inc. (NYSE: FIO) acquired data-storage appliance firm NexGen Storage Inc. in Louisville for $119 million. Salt Lake City-based Fusion-io paid $114 million in cash and $5 million in stock, according to a press statement. The company will add about 50 NexGen employees to its team. John Spiers, a founder of NexGen, will serve as senior vice president at Fusion-io and general manager of the NexGen Products division.
Broomfield-based Corgenix Medical Corp. (OTC BB: CONX), a developer and marketer of diagnostic test kits, and provider of contract services to the diagnostics, life sciences and pharmaceutical industries, expanded its contract-services business and launched a website, www.corgenix.net, dedicated to contract services. The new site complements the company website, www.corgenix.com.
The Boulder-based Outdoor Industry Association launched a tool to gather data on how companies manage chemicals used to manufacture clothing, shoes and outdoor equipment. Companies can use the software tool, which cost $100,000 and was paid for by membership dues, to identify and reduce the future environmental impact of the outdoor products they manufacture. To input data into the software tool, go online to outdoordindustry.org/cmpilot. Information gathered could be used to market products in terms of how environmentally friendly they are.
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I made this cake for one of my best friends daughters baptism. It is a pound cake covered in buttercream and the figure is MMF and gumpaste.
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A Hand Made Business
Leia Menlove / Concentrate
Friday, February 18, 2011
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What if you want to do-it-yourself but don't know how to? While many suffer from the mass market blues, not everyone is ready to craft their own jewelry, sew their own clothes or corner the
market with their incredibly innovative whatchamacallit.
Siobhan Lyle feels your pain. It's why she opened the
Blue House
, a place where kids of every age get together to make, learn and share creative ideas. The focus is on do-it-yourself but not necessarily by yourself.
Now rounding the corner of its first year in business, this intimate space is a workshop where locals learn how to make things, market them, and, hopefully, sell them. But founder and owner Lyle, an Ann Arbor native, stresses that these aren't your grandmother's handicrafts. "They're handmade and hip."
When you first walk in, you're liable to stumble over any number of precocious children laboring away at workstations and tables scattered with shreds of mixed-media. In one corner of the central space is a set of well-kept sewing machines with thread and fabric arrayed above in orderly fashion.
Step through the back door, nearest the small parking lot, and you'll find yourself in a kitchenette festooned with mobiles, works of art, and signboards filled with flyers and announcements for upcoming events and gatherings. The walls in each of the vintage house's small rooms are rich with color, tempered by the civilized lines of original Victorian-era wooden moldings. Upstairs a pair of studios stand ready for instructional workshops or photographers needing space.
In the tiny shop in the Blue House's front room, precisely wrapped and finished stationery, paintings, and jewelry are evidence of ever-busy hands and minds. The work of 20 to 30 artists populate the store at any given time. Many of them lead the Blue House's workshops -- usually one-session affairs that teach everything from photography and silk-screening to purse-making and knitting. Class sizes are small (usually less than 10), allowing for a hands-on focus.
While locals generally sign up for classes and events so that they can learn or hone a skill, they also get a rare community experience, says Lyle. "In pioneer times, people would get together to make things -- quilts, barns, etc. Now that's largely absent from our lives," she explains.
Indeed, recapturing the benefits of a bygone tradition is partially why she hosts the Blue House's well-attended MakersMEET sessions. These are open invitations to crafty people to come work on their projects alongside other makers. Although the popular sessions are free, Lyle suggests a donation of $5.00 to cover costs and keep the effort going.
Craft shows are also a hit with Ann Arborites - typically drawing so many people (between 200 and 250) that Lyle is now seeking a larger venue. The Blue House even facilitates swap events, held for makers to exchange their excess craft supplies.
"There are so many talented people who have been out there doing it on their own because they had no outlet through which to share their talents," says Lyle.
Not homemade - hand made
There is nothing half-finished about the works of art populating the Blue House's artisan shop. "Each one is beautiful, finished, and conceived in the mind of an individual artist," Lyle boasts.
Of course, Lyle's artists takes a great deal of care with the presentation and appearance of each work for sale -- and the example they set is the foundation of yet another teaching opportunity. One of the Blue House's most popular classes is "Etsy 411" -- a class that helps artists maximize their sales potential on
the popular artisans' sales website
through coaching, strategy, marketing and more.
If there is one thing the ongoing economic downturn has accomplished, it has been to create a little more freedom for some to experiment with and invest time in arts and crafts when other avenues for making money are closed. Less income and more time creates a drive to pursue new avenues for generating income, Lyle points out. She believes a growing market exists for unique, handmade products, with the better artisans finding a viable second income stream via the web and local shops.
This same cost consciousness has led to strong interest in Blue House classes like "Do It Yourself Portraits" and "How to Take Really Good Pictures of Your Kids." The workshops frequently sell out.
If there is one challenge Blue House continues to face, it's getting the word out about its classes, opportunities and community. Lyle laments the shortage of affordable outlets for advertising in Ann Arbor. "There is no real avenue for small businesses with small budgets around here." Lyle has therefore focused most her business on word-of-mouth,
, Twitter and her website.
A hand-crafted business
Lyle is a self-confessed dreamer and dedicated "maker of stuff." Throughout her life she has produced hand-made arts and crafts, and was always on the lookout for a place where kindred spirits could share their time, knowledge and skill. Eventually, she did what any true maker does: she made it herself.
But life, as it usually does, initially took Lyle in a different direction. A graduate of the University of Michigan (she played soccer there as well) Lyle first went to work in marketing and communications for various companies. In the process she met her husband, started a family, and settled in Ann Arbor.
The Blue House (originally just a blue house) on Main Street had long been in Lyle's husband's family. When its long-term tenant decided to leave and the troubled economy made finding the right new tenant an uncertainty, Lyle saw an opportunity to get back to what she loved most.
"It was a kick in the pants," she laughs.
After all, she thought, why not fill the space with something more interesting than just another tenant? Why not create a space dedicated to creative inspiration, high-quality workshops, mentorship and a venue for purchasing local artists' work?
The first step was to determine whether such an idea could be made into a viable business. After all, nothing like it had ever been done in Ann Arbor. So, Lyle researched other craft/art organizations such as
Renegade Handmade of Chicago
("the creme de la cr�me of handmade goodness," Lyle claims). What she discovered convinced her that her idea could work. She then found several Ann Arbor-based artists who were very enthusiastic about the prospect of having a similar venue nearby.
Of course, funding was an issue: "No bank is going to give money to an art studio in this economy," says Lyle. "We had to figure out how to make it work on a young family's income."
And so, with a lot of creativity, hard work, and a massive renovation, The Blue House opened for business about a year ago. "And we'll see how we did!" she laughs. "I haven't filed my taxes yet."
Risk-takers and dreamers are behind any successful business or community. Lyle is a poster-child for this attitude, even if she did have moments of fear and doubt here and there. "I've learned to stop
being a perfectionist and let the Blue House organically become what the community wants."
"I'm looking at this as our test year to see if artists want it," says Lyle.
The answer so far has been a resounding yes.
Leia Menlove is a crafty gal. She is also an Ann Arbor-based writer and regular contributor to
. Her previous article was
Ann Arbor's Old Lonesome Sound
Send your comments/feedback
All photos by
Doug Coombe
Siobhan Lyle at The Blue House in Ann Arbor.
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A Britney Spears' cover tune and a clogging bass player? Nickel Creek provided both and more in a two-hour, "farewell for now" concert at the Michigan Theater Tuesday night.
And what a show it was, with siblings Sean (guitarist, vocalist) and Sara Watkins (fiddle, vocals), plus mandolin/banjo player Chris Thile, delighting the crowd of just over 1,000 with selections from throughout the band's career, and even a new song from Sara Watkins, "All This Time."
The set started off with the instrumental "Ode to Butterfly," from Nickel Creek's first album, and continued with "When In Rome," from the group's most recent CD, with Thile's voice quavering almost to the breaking point. But it was songs like "House Carpenter," an extended tour de force showcasing the instrumental skills of the three principal musicians, and a rockin' cover of Spears' pop hit "Toxic," complete with Britney-esque hip gyrations from Thile, that really got the crowd going.
One after another, the tunes kept coming: "Smoothie Song," "Reasons Why," "Stumptown," "Can't Complain," "This Side" and also the Thile-penned "The Lighthouse Tale" which started off soft and rose to a climax that shook the rafters. It was surprising some strings didn't snap. Touring bassist Mark Schatz was the one responsible for the step dancing, done with aplomb.
While it sometimes seemed that Thile and Sara Watkins got most of the time in the limelight, Sean Watkins got to step out on his own as well, particularly on the recent "Somebody More Like You."
Although billed as a farewell, the band members aren't leaving the biz - Thile has a new group called The Punch Brothers, and a record deal with Nonesuch just announced.
Sara and Sean Watkins continue their popular "Watkins Family Hour" at Hollywood's Club Largo, while working on solo projects. Granted, it's a bit sad to see such a successful and skillful group - its members have played together for 18 years - split up. It's hard not to wonder how they will fare as they go their separate ways. Clearly each is a formidably talented instrumentalist and Thile in particular has the look and charisma of a pop star/heart-throb.
Their generous encore consisted of a cover of the Jackson Five's 1969 hit "I Want You Back," a rousing version of the fiddle classic "The Fox" and a sweetly-sung cover of Bob Dylan's "Tomorrow Is Such a Long Time," an appropriate sentiment for a farewell tour such as this. It was almost as if they were reluctant to leave the stage, a sentiment the audience might easily have been feeling as well.


text:
There is a wonderful piece of life on the stage at the smaller theater at The Spire, this weekend.
''Tuesdays With Morrie'' by Jeffery Hatcher and Mitch Albom is based on a set of real-life encounters between Albom and Morrie Schwartz, his favorite college professor. The professor is suffering from Lou Gehrig's Disease, an always fatal ailment which methodically robs the patient of his ability to live his life, before it takes the life, itself.
In this case, the dying professor turns his weekly visits from his former student into a class for one, on how to live, as well as how to die.
The play is very sad, obviously, yet it is also very happy. The playwrights make obvious that even those of us who aren't cursed by this terrible disease, do the same things to ourselves. We don't dance because we might look ridiculous if we danced. We don't sing, we don't touch one another, we don't ask for favors others might be perfectly willing to do for us. We give away the things which make us live, because we are self conscious about needing them, and then there's nothing left to do, but die.
The production opened Thursday evening, in a benefit performance for Chautauqua Hospice. There were some awkward moments and some opening night jitters, as the two men are on stage and talking, through the entire play. But, the interaction between the two actors was obvious, and was truly touching.
Adam Hughes portrayed the young sportswriter, daring not only to visit a former teacher whom he has neglected for many years, but to continue going back, even when it meant that ambitious young writers were snapping up the stories he was leaving undone to visit Morrie. Hughes was wonderfully real, very open, both with the actor playing his teacher, and with the audience.
Ron Robertson had the very difficult chore, instead of building to a climax, as a normal actor's duty is, but rather to visibly weaken and to allow himself to become clouded and uncertain, and yet to shine through the fog. It was a masterful performance, indeed.
Robert John Terreberry directed the play, allowing a great deal of natural interaction and maintaining interest despite a significant lack of action on the stage.
It was a very fine evening of theater, and I hope you catch one of its remaining performances, tonight and tomorrow at 7:30 p.m., at the Spire, directly across Third Street from the post office.


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Shelby Lynne
~ Person
Born: Quantico, Virginia, USA
Older sister of Allison Moorer
Shelby Lynne (born Shelby Lynn Moorer, October 22, 1968, Quantico, Virginia) is an American singer and songwriter. The success of her 1999 album I Am Shelby Lynne led to her winning the Grammy Award for Best New Artist, even though she had, by that time, been active in the music industry for some time. She released a Dusty Springfield tribute album called Just a Little Lovin' in 2008. Since then she has started her own independent record label, called Everso Records, and released three albums: Tears, Lies and Alibis, Merry Christmas, and Revelation Road. Lynne is also known for her distinctive contralto voice.
Showing official release groups by this artist. Show all release groups instead, or show various artists release groups.


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Several thoughts of a fairly diverse nature crossed my mind as I watched on national television the shocking sight of Brian Tobin and his seemingly inconsolable wife escorting their son Jack to a waiting car after he had been charged in Ottawa with impaired driving causing death.
I couldn't help but recall, for instance, a time back in the late 1990s when I was greeted with some surprising resistance from the handlers of the normally publicity-addicted premier to my efforts to produce a documentary on his career.
As I discovered while seeking an explanation for his uncharacteristic reticence to have a documentary camera crew shadow him for a week or so, Tobin — whom I had known since his days as a run-of-the-mill reporter with CJON Television (now NTV News), a time when no one could have foreseen his amazing success on both a provincial and federal stage — was willing to co-operate just as long as his children were not involved in any way in the production. It was an easy ground rule to observe, and I subsequently compiled a one-hour documentary on Tobin that aired on a CBC program called "Soundings."
But it was his non-negotiable insistence that his kids stay out of the public spotlight back then that struck me as I watched that family tragedy unfold in front of a horde of reporters.
There was certainly no way Tobin could protect his son this time around from the glare of cameras. In fact, it is Tobin's high profile, as the former premier of Newfoundland, as a former federal cabinet minister, that generated the country-wide coverage of the charges against his son. If Jack Tobin did not have a famous father, the story of what police believe was a night of drinking gone horribly wrong (as reporters are inclined to describe such events) would have received, at most, some local coverage.
Now, though, it's a national story and will continue to be so as it plays itself out, one of the prices to be paid by families of those who work in a very public arena. Tobin could keep his youngsters away from the cameras those many years ago. Not this time.
Life goes on
The image of a stricken family was also a stark reminder that politicians are subject to the same ups and downs and ebbs and flows of life as the rest of us.
That's not a particularly profound revelation to non-journalists, but for those of us who've spent an unusual amount of time covering politics, there's a tendency to depersonalize those men and women who make their living in that world, to view the politicians as microphones with legs, almost robotic in their determination to make sure their every quote, their every action, is part of the ongoing desire to endear themselves to their constituents, those people who keep them employed.
And Tobin in particular epitomized the kind of political personality that provoked what some might think of as a cynical detachment on my part: he was always "on," the consummate spin-doctor, perpetually adorned in the political costume, making it difficult to think of him as a husband or a father. He was — for me, anyway — strictly Brian Tobin, politician.
His spinning prowess, in fact, caused me to wonder as he talked to reporters last week whether he was once again in spin mode, trying desperately to portray his son as a victim, as much the victim, he seemed to be saying, as the younger Tobin's best friend who was killed in the incident. Ultimately, though, I concluded, as best I could, that the television event showed the human side of Brian Tobin.
The other thought I had was much more personal, a realization of just how fortunate, how damn lucky I was not to have wound up in the kind of life-altering mess in which the young Tobin apparently finds himself.
I don't know the full circumstances of what led to the death of that young man, of why Tobin has been charged with such a serious crime, other than the information from the police who believe a truck was being driven recklessly in a parking garage, and that the man died when he fell from the vehicle and was crushed under its wheels. But what I do know for a fact is that I did some incredibly crazy things when I was the age of Tobin and his best friend, that I was, to put it mildly, frighteningly irresponsible on more occasions than I even care to remember. And that it was a miracle my lifestyle did not precipitate a tragedy.
As I say, that news item on CBC Saturday night provoked a cross-section of reactions on my part.
An eye-opener on a number of levels.
Bob Wakeham has spent more than 30 years as a journalist in Newfoundland and Labrador. He can be reached by email at firstname.lastname@example.com.


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Chamber picks finalist trio for Citizen of Year
The Sequim-Dungeness Valley Chamber of Commerce announced Tuesday its three finalists for 2011 Citizen of the Year and two Community Service Awards.
The finalists include Dick Hughes, Cynthia Martin and Donna Tidrick.
Chamber members and families of the honorees will recognize the finalists and announce the two Community Service Awards and the Citizen of the Year at a luncheon at 11:45 a.m. Tuesday, Feb. 28, at Sunland Country Club, 109 Hilltop Drive, Sequim.
Hughes was nominated for his dedication and involvement in the Sequim Education Foundation and
the many programs the foundation produces. He also is active in Sequim Noon Rotary, Sequim Wolf Pack Youth Football, Sequim Middle School Interact Club and Dungeness Valley Health & Wellness Clinic.
Martin was nominated for her advocacy of early childhood education. She is president of the Parenting Matters Foundation that oversees the First Teacher program. She also is involved with Prevention Works, Clallam County Literary Council and United Way.
Tidrick was nominated for her 29 years of service to Sequim Community Aid and her efforts to secure contributions and donations to fund the help the organization gives to the residents of Sequim.
A committee of previous recipients selected the top three finalists from a pool of Sequim citizens who were nominated by members of the community.
Finalists are chosen based on their history of outstanding volunteer service to the Sequim community.
The awards luncheon is a buffet; cost is $20 per person, $3 for coffee or tea.
The community is invited.
Reservations are due by Feb. 24; call 683-6197 or e-mail firstname.lastname@example.com.
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Helping Hands fends off trash, thefts
ARLINGTON Helping Hands of Arlington welcomes donations of usable goods, but its all-volunteer staff is tired of being dumped on, literally.
Weve come in to find garbage stretching from the patio to the fence, said Shirley Cochinella, the groups secretary. Two weeks ago, we found 27 TV and computer monitors, most of them broken, had been dropped off here.
Helping Hands cannot accept TVs, computers, microwaves, stoves, refrigerators, washers, dryers, tires, batteries or anything thats been broken, but they continue to find all these items, and more, sitting outside their building on a daily basis.
If it doesnt work, dont bring it, said Lana Lassley, the groups vice president. We accept usable and gently-used items, but it should be the sort of things that youd be willing to use yourself, or give to your family members. We get cooking pans with their Teflon completely stripped off and filthy, worn-out shoes with no laces.
Helping Hands has barely more than half a dozen volunteers to sort through the donations they receive. The proceeds from the sale of donated items go directly to local organizations such as the Arlington Boy Scouts and Cocoon House.
Lassley lives closer to the building, which is owned by the city of Arlington, than many of her fellow volunteers, who come from Marysville and Camano Island, so she often resorts to patrolling the site to check for both garbage dumps and thefts of dropped-off donations.
Theyll trash the place, Lassley said. Thieves have ripped open plastic bags of clothes and strewn stuff all over, just to get some things that they wanted.
Lassley expressed pride in providing affordable shopping for families in need, but she admitted that the number of unusable donations, such as dirty and torn clothes, have left her feeling dismayed.
We want to do good work here, Lassley said. We take pride in helping people.
Helping Hands is located at 127 W. Cox Ave. in Arlington and is open Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 9 a.m. to noon. Call them at 360-435-2214.
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