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Currying with C#
Posted by Garry Shutler in Functional
At the Brighton altnetbeers on Tuesday night we ended up talking quite a bit about functional languages. One of the concepts I often forget the meaning of is currying. Mike Hadlow was kind enough to remind me of what it was and I thought I'd write a blog post explaining what it was in terms of C# to help me remember in the future.
Currying is what happens when you call a function without providing all the required parameters. Instead of failing to compile functional languages such as F# will instead return a function that takes the unspecified arguments as parameters.
Now that probably makes bugger all sense without knowing what currying is in the first place. As this is meant to be an explanation I'll show you an example of how we can emulate currying in C#. This is almost better than showing you it in a functional language as it will show the nuts and bolts of what functional languages do for you.
I'll be dropping my usual use of var as specifying the types should make it easier to follow what's going on.
We'll start with a simple method to add two numbers together:
int Sum(int x, int y)
return x + y;
At the moment we can only call our method by providing both arguments:
int sum = Sum(2, 3);
What currying does is create an overload that lets you call the method with one argument. But rather than pass a default value for the second argument and call the original function, it instead returns a function that will provide the second argument.
Wow, this is hard to explain in words. Maybe some code will make it clearer:
Func<int, int> Sum(int x)
return y => Sum(x, y);
This lets you store an instance of a function that performs a certain manipulation like this:
Func<int, int> addTwo = Sum(2);
int three = addTwo(1);
int five = addTwo(3);
With a single function this is a novelty. The power comes when you can curry functions together. To demonstrate this we'll need to add a multiply method:
int Multiply(int x, int y)
return x * y;
Func<int, int> Multiply(int x)
return y => Multiply(x, y);
Functional languages also let you specify functions as arguments in place of specific values. That starts getting a little trickier to emulate in C#:
An hour or two passes whilst I work out how to do this!
It took me a while to work it out but you need to get a whole lot more functional to do this bit. That means all our methods have to start using Func<int> instead of plain int. In hindsight this was obvious because in functional languages everything is a function, hence the name. Even numbers are represented by functions that return the number in question rather than the number itself, referred to as literals.
This is what this actually looks like:
Func<int> Sum(Func<int> x, Func<int> y)
return Literal(x() + y());
Func<Func<int>, Func<int>> Sum(Func<int> x)
return y => Sum(x, y);
Func<int> Multiply(Func<int> x, Func<int> y)
return Literal(x() * y());
Func<Func<int>, Func<int>> Multiply(Func<int> x)
return y => Multiply(x, y);
Func<int> Literal(int x)
return () => x;
The literal method isn't really required but makes the code a lot clearer rather than having empty lambdas dotted about the place.
To take a step back for a second our original sums:
Func<int, int> addTwo = Sum(2);
int three = addTwo(1);
int five = addTwo(3);
Will now look like this:
Func<Func<int>, Func<int>> addTwo = Sum(Literal(2));
Func<int> three = addTwo(Literal(1));
Func<int> five = addTwo(Literal(3));
It's more verbose but it lets us curry functions together which was our original aim.
On to the currying function itself. Now if you're allergic to angled brackets and lambdas you are going to want to skip this chunk of code. It's pretty
awesome horrendous.
Func<Func<int>, Func<int>> Curry(Func<Func<int>, Func<int>> x, Func<Func<int>, Func<int>> y)
return a => y(x(a));
What this is doing is creating a new function which when it gets passed a literal it determines the result of invoking the x function and returns the result of passing that on to the y function. Again, an example will probably help demonstrate what's going on.
Func<Func<int>, Func<int>> addTwo = Sum(Literal(2));
Func<Func<int>, Func<int>> timesThree = Multiply(Literal(3));
Func<Func<int>, Func<int>> addTwoTimesThree = Curry(addTwo, timesThree);
Func<int> twentyOne = addTwoTimesThree(Literal(5));
Now because of how the code is now structured we could keep nesting these simple functions together to create much more complex functions. This is the root of the power of functional languages.
Well that was interesting. I definitely understand currying and functional languages a bit better now and I hope someone else has learnt something in the process.
I've put a full code listing up on gist in case anyone wants to grab it and play about with it.
Mapping a GUID to a string with NHibernate
Posted by Garry Shutler in NHibernate
In a project I'm working on at the moment I needed to back a GUID to a string as it didn't seem to be working out of the box with my SQLite database. It was saving it to whatever type of column I gave it in what looked like byte form leading to some crazy characters. However, it was falling over when trying to hydrate the field from that column.
Now I'm probably epic failing and there's a much easier way to do this but I ended up creating a custom user type for doing this which I've made available on gist. I won't be surprised if there's an easier way and please let me know about it with a comment. I've also included the Fluent NHibernate class map to show how it use it if you're not familiar with custom user types.
This got me moving again and googling how to do this came up blank, hence the blog post.
LINQ and the Law of Demeter
Posted by Garry Shutler in Extension methods, LINQ, Refactoring
During Mike Wagg and Mark Needham's talk on applying functional constructs to your C# code I had a bit of an epiphany. Derick Bailey recently wrote about how extension methods don't count towards the Law of Demeter. For those of you unfamiliar with the Law of Demeter it says that you shouldn't play with your friends members. You can look at them but you shouldn't touch them. For a much drier and complete description you should read the wikipedia article on the Law of Demeter.
Now a lot the application of the Law of Demeter comes down to feel. As a geek this is annoying. I would much prefer something you can measure and then say you are breaking the Law of Demeter. Instead we have to have conversations about how I feel you're breaking the Law of Demeter and you can argue that you feel your not. How… unscientific.
So all I can offer is a bit of insight into what I feel contributes to the Law of Demeter in terms of LINQ and extension methods in a more general sense.
Take this example LINQ statement:
company.Employees.Where(employee => employee.Salary > 10)
If we embark on a purely dot counting exercise we'll see that we have three. In my eyes there are only two relevant dots as I look at the statement like this:
company.Employees.Where(employee => employee.Salary > 10)
If you consider what we are doing we are looking at the employees of the company, which is one step. Then for each employee we are inspecting their salary, which is a second step. The LINQ statement is not doing extra traversal for us, it's just helping us write less code.
Does that mean this LINQ statement is ok? No. Two relevant dots starts my spider sense tingling. I can smell some encapsulation is required. What we really want is to pull this business logic into our domain:
public IEnumerable<Employee> HighlyPaidEmployees()
return employees.Where(employee => employee.Salary > 10);
Why would you do this? It seems like a lot of additional work for such a simple LINQ statement. This is one of the things that Mike Wagg highlighted that I would echo. If you don't encapsulate this logic from the start you will end up with 10 easy-to-write LINQ statements at various places in your code that do the exact same thing. After all it's easier to write the query again rather than refactor other calls back into your domain.
Also notice how we now only a single dot per method, Demeter would be pleased:
public IEnumerable<Employee>
return employees.Where(employee => employee.Salary > 10);
Why can we ignore most LINQ statements when thinking about Demeter? It's because of what the code would be like if they weren't being used:
public IEnumerable<Employee> HighlyPaidEmployees()
foreach (var employee in employees)
if (employee.Salary > 10)
yield return employee;
When using your own extension methods, the logic contained within them may not be as flat and simple. Just by using a single extension method you may be breaking the Law of Demeter. If the method you are calling breaks the Law of Demeter then by calling that method you also break the Law of Demeter. Think of it as handling stolen goods, just because you didn't steal them doesn't mean you're not culpable.
The Law of Demeter boils down to the number of layers you traverse as part of your statements. Here's a LINQ statement that would make Demeter cry:
company.Employees.Where(employee => employee.Department.Manager == dave)
What we are doing is getting everyone who is in the department managed by Dave. We are traversing down to the employees of the company, up to their department and across to their manager.
company.Employees.Where(employee => employee.Department.Manager == dave)
Conversely, here's a LINQ statement that is no worse than one we started with:
.Where(employee => employee.Salary > 10)
.Where(employee => employee.Manager == sandra)
.Where(employee => employee.StartDate < DateTime.Today.AddYears(-2))
Why is this just as bad even though there's a hell of a lot more dots? It's because we're looking at a company's employees, then searching for the ones highly paid, that work for Sandra and have been at the company more than two years. The number of traversals is the same even though there's a lot more code.
The one thing I would want you to take away from this is that the Law of Demeter is not a dot counting exercise. Think about what your code is doing rather than what it looks like and you'll have a much better idea of whether Demeter wants to hurt you.
Describing the journey
Posted by Garry Shutler in Mentoring
Often when explaining something it's easy to straight to the end goal saying: "This is how to do it. Isn't it awesome?!" At this point you will get a blank stare and quite possibly a "why?" This can be frustrating, you're showing something that's an order of magnitude better than the current solution but they can't see it.
This isn't their problem. They aren't idiots. It's your fault.
In order to understand a solution you have to understand each step that was taken in order to reach it. You may think you're doing them a favour by helping them avoid all the trials and tribulations you undertook; but you're not. You're doing them a disservice. Understanding the journey taken will give them a deeper knowledge and understanding of the destination.
If when you learnt to ride a bike your dad rode past you going: "Look isn't this great? Now you do it." You'll try, faceplant and go home crying. The pain of you learning to ride a bike would be your burden alone. You might have still learnt to ride a bike, in a rather painful way, but you would be more likely to have given up. What your dad actually did was hold on to you, put stabilisers on your bike and taught you each part of the process individually. He shared in your pain, invested in you and ultimately he shared in your success.
If you really invest in teaching something to someone you'll tell the story. Make sure they understand the initial problem, explain the various approaches you took before selecting the final one. Describe the ones you dismissed out-of-hand and why you did that. With all this knowledge then the student will be in the position to say "this is awesome" and the teacher won't have to.
Do anything less and you aren't sharing your knowledge, you're sharing a solution. If all you share are solutions you aren't enabling people to create their own.
What's so good about OpenRasta?
Posted by Garry Shutler in Architecture, ASP.NET MVC, Community, Open Rasta, Quality, REST, Unit testing
I've been proclaiming the greatness of OpenRasta to anyone unfortunate to start talking to me about web development recently. I thought it was about time that I recorded the reasons I love it so much somewhere everyone can see.
OpenRasta is by no means a finished product but it has principles at its core that I value greatly and give it massive potential.
Unless you've been hiding under a rock for the past few years you'll know how important I and many others think testability. If you don't know why it's important I suggest you go and check out Scott Bellware's blog. He has written a series of post recently about how accountability and constant verification are vital in the search for productivity.
OpenRasta has been built with tests from the ground up and this fact shines through throughout the code base. I've never seen a code base like it; it's beautiful. The entire framework is a testament to SOLID design principles which means extending it is childs play. When you've been used to frameworks like ASP.NET MVC where you will end up coding yourself into a sealed or extremely hard to test corner; OpenRasta is like a typhoon of fresh air.
Building upon a testable framework makes your code easier to test. For example, how many magically bound properties do you think your handlers (the equivalent of controllers) have? Zero. Zilch. They don't even have an interface, never mind a base class. I'll let you digest that one for a moment. No base class, no monolithic controller context, no magically appearing model state.
So what happens when you want to look at the details of a request or any of the state that OpenRasta has created as part of your request? OpenRasta, to enable it's testability, revolves around a dependency resolver. All the details of the request are registered to this dependency resolver so all you need to do is take the relevant interface (yes I did say interface, not class, welcome to a world where everything you wish had an interface does) as a dependency to your handler. It really is that simple.
From the testablity you get a great deal of extensibility. There are several ways to jump in at various points of the request in order to manipulate it. The main ones are pipeline contributors and operation interceptors which I've shown how to implement before. OpenRasta comes with a default set of contributors and interceptors but gives you the ability to remove or replace any of them. Sure you can get yourself in a real mess if you don't know what you're doing but I like my tools sharp, powerful and dangerous. Especially something as pivotal as the framework I'm building upon.
You can of course implement your own binders, URI resolvers, etc. if you so wish. You could alter OpenRasta to work just like ASP.NET MVC if you desired. Though I wouldn't recommend it!
As part of extensibility you can't overlook the fact that this is true open source. Wish there was an enhancement to the core of OpenRasta or an extra method on an interface? Discuss it on the mailing list, code it (with tests of course) and submit a patch.
What I want from to see from a web framework is a deep understanding of web standards and the HTTP protocol. You will not find many people who know more about RFCs and HTTP than Sebastien Lambla, it's actually quite disturbing how much he knows about them.
OpenRasta revolves around resources not controllers, generating URIs from types and individual objects rather than strings or at best lambda expressions. This takes a little time to get used to but it's more powerful and easier to test. Why is it easier to test? You probably saw this coming but URI resolution is of course done behind an interface. Ahhhhh. So much easier than mocking a controller context.
OpenRasta also ships with content type negotiation. Your handler operations (akin to controller actions) return straight resources or operation results with a response resource attached. How this resource is returned to the client is a entirely separate function. Want to get a response in JSON instead of XHTML? Add .AsJsonDataContract() to your resource registration and just ask for it with the relevant Accept header. OpenRasta will transcode your resource to JSON for you and return it to the client.
If you directly return a resource from your operation, it is assumed that the request went ok and so a response code of 200 OK is sent back to the client. If you want to report a missing resource you can return an OperationResult.NotFound which will return 404 Not Found rather than just displaying your 404 view with a response of 200 OK. Why does this matter? It makes your javascript cleaner as you can request the resource in JSON format and check the response code rather than having to send a flag or some other work around.
There's a growing following for OpenRasta, it's being presented by Kyle Baley at MIX10 and this has caused the lovers of OpenRasta to pull together. We're intending to improve the documentation giving more example of it's use and generally helping Seb knock the edges off what is a great framework.
The OpenRasta mailing list is very active with people providing very rapid responses to any questions. If you uncover a bug Seb will often have a fix committed the very same day, with regression tests of course.
What next?
In the near future I'm going to churn out a series of blog posts or perhaps screen casts showing how I leveraged vanilla OpenRasta to create a simple wiki. Hopefully, this will help more people get started with OpenRasta.
If there's anything in particular you'd like me to cover leave a comment below.
Questioning commonly held opinions
Posted by Garry Shutler in Architecture, ASP.NET MVC, Open Rasta, Rails, REST, Unit testing
I've been looking into rails recently, partly to learn rails itself, partly to try and gain inspiration for the direction to take both the framework we use at work and Jamaica. It's triggered me to question a lot of things that I'm doing in .NET so I'm going to attempt to record my thoughts.
Having testing and persistence baked in
One thing that has struck me is that I'm watching railscasts from years ago and they are demonstrating solutions to problems ASP.NET MVC is struggling with now. It really does have testing baked in but often not through the use of abstractions, instead they have made integration tests easy to write. It appears the entire request can be processed in memory without having to fire up a server all the way through to rendering the view. This is something OpenRasta is capable of and one of the reasons I get so excited about it.
Another benefit rails has is that it comes with a "model" baked in. This is something that is sorely lacking from ASP.NET MVC. Whereas the .NET world (particularly the ALT.NET sphere) favours NHibernate for persistence, they instead use a simple but well implemented active record implementation. Why have they chosen this? Partially because it works so well with a dynamic language, everything is DRY as code can be generated from the database at runtime. It's also damn quick, something that has always bugged me about NHibernate is the 10-20 seconds it takes to create the session factory before you can get started.
Because NHibernate is so powerful and configurable it can quite frankly be bloody confusing for most developers, I get asked to help with problems almost daily. With active record everything is kept simple, this object is a row in that table. There aren't often complex mapping files, it just works. Rails' active record implementation has a layer of syntactic sugar based around pattern matching on missing methods which looks nice and works well. However, in .NET we have LINQ which is statically typed, very powerful and can serve the same purpose.
Why do we chose NHibernate?
The reasons given for choosing NHibernate are persistence ignorance, reducing the impedance mismatch, amongst others. Why do we insist on ignoring the fact that our applications are running on top of a relational database? What ever happened to embracing the technologies we are using to get the best out of them?
NHibernate lets you persist your domain models directly. So what? Who's domain models are that much beyond dumb data stores in reality? I'd bargain it's a hell of a lot less than those that claim to be doing domain driven design. Also, why does your domain have to be persisted directly? Why couldn't you provide an empty domain object with a few active record objects and have it process them and spit other active record objects out the other side? Something CQRS-ish. Then your domain would contain nothing but business logic.
What does this mean?
I'm looking away from NHibernate, no tool should be chosen without question, even the great NHibernate. I just don't think it is serving my needs as well as it could so I'm going to look for alternatives. Subsonic is top of my list, followed by revisiting LINQ to SQL, hell I might even take a look at the Entity Framework.
While we're at it, why do we chose relational databases without question? I've been working with Lucene.NET a lot recently, it's really easy to use and you get full-text indexing for free if you were to use it as a data store. Only want to deal with aggregate roots? Store all the data of that aggregate root in a single document, it can easily emulate nested structures.
Random deviation onto REST
I'm also being influenced by how REST appeals to me. It seems like a simple yet powerful way of dealing with the web. If we consider everything we work with as a resource, a representation of an idea, why can't that representation be stored as an active record? The transition of an idea between resources could actually be a record transferring between tables. The old representation could even hold a reference to what the idea became, allowing you to redirect to the current representation. Hell, wasn't the web made for storing and linking documents before it got bastardised into the beautiful beast we have today? Perhaps a document database would be ideally suited!
Pain points of ASP.NET MVC
Talking of REST brings me back to another problem I have with ASP.NET MVC. The routing revolves around controllers and actions rather than the resources and HTTP methods. In order to generate URIs, you will at some point end up having to manipulate strings or create anonymous objects. How do rails and OpenRasta deal with this? By using resources and their types to determine the URIs. This is so much more powerful and dare I say easier to use and understand. I can see it empowering the use of generics within .NET and it cuts out a hell of a lot of crap around URI generation.
Ah, cutting out the crap. ASP.NET MVC is testable, until you want to test something that isn't a just a controller action. Like a HTML helper, URI generation or store the IP address of the request. Most of these things are kind of testable, but you have to mock out a complex object graph like HttpContextBase or ControllerContext. "We got rid of HttpContext.Current and replaced it with something slightly less monolithic and slight less sealed, go us!". Know how OpenRasta deals with this? It has dependency injection at it's core and there's an interface that lets you retrieve everything you need, either separately or together. There's everything from IRequest to ICommunicationContext (the equivalent of ControllerContext) and everything in between. You need it, you can retrieve it and it's bloody easy to test.
Wrapping up
There's a lot of random ideas here, I can't say which I'll end up using. Perhaps none of them, perhaps an unforeseen combination. If nothing else writing this down has helped me distil a few of them into clearer thoughts.
Here's to questioning everything you believe to be true.
Test-Driven Development – 3 Years On
Posted by Garry Shutler in BDD, Quality, Unit testing
I've been questioning my own practices recently, seeing if there were places that I could improve, both in quality and productivity. Part of this process involved an evaluation of my test-driven approach (TDD) to developing software.
I have gained and learnt so much by practicing TDD. I believe there is no better way to instil the SOLID principle within both yourself and your code than to practice TDD. Violate any of the principles and you feel the pain in your tests, they will either become monolithic and hard to write or continuously break.
Here lies the chicken and the egg situation: to write good, robust tests you have to understand SOLID; to understand SOLID you have to be testing your code. This creates quite a hurdle that many people don't put forth the effort to overcome. This is a shame but I think an excellent way of splitting the wheat from the chaff. In order to become proficient at testing you either need to have a natural talent for writing good code or the persistence to break through to the required level of understanding. Both of these qualities are equally valuable, having both would be fantastic.
The quality of code produced by TDD has never been in doubt in my mind. What I am questioning is the return-on-investment (ROI) of each test I write. Sometimes I feel I am writing a test for the sake of writing a test, producing very little value in the process. The kind of scenario where this is most apparent is the sort of code where if you were to not have written it properly nothing would happen or it would blow up in your face. Code with real binary levels of success, often with a single path through it.
This is the elephant in the room of all TDD discussions. When am I testing too much? The standard response of "NEVER!" is a lie but you have to have practiced TDD for a decent while until you can judge when you're going to be writing tests with little worth. I've identified a subset of tests that I'm probably wasting my time in writing which are clouding the overall message of my test suite. The problem is that I am responsible for mentoring several developers in how and when to craft tests. I have to lead by example and until the whole team reaches a higher level of understanding of TDD I have to test everything despite knowing some of the tests I write have little to no value.
How can I test everything without writing these low value tests? Currently I'm looking at integration acceptance tests that describe the behaviour of the system. These will verify that the several layers of the application interact as expected in given scenarios to produce the desired behaviour of the system. These will likely have meaty setups and meaty verifications but they will remove the need for multiple low ROI tests. They are likely to be more brittle than unit tests but so long as I verify outcomes rather than interactions they should be fairly robust. What I'd love to experiment with is getting the stakeholders to help me write these acceptance tests, but this will have to wait until I've settled on a style for writing them. There's nothing that harms adoption of a practice more than the first interaction to be a bumbling mess as you are not sure of what you're doing!
As a company, we are also looking to hire testers this year. This is another thing stopping me from cutting out the low ROI tests. If I do not test my code, it will not get tested through anything but a manual process. Once we have testers I may be able to just write the tests that drive the behaviour and design of my code, leaving the full suite of tests to be developed by the testers.
So what have I learnt over the past few years? Is test-driven development worth the effort? Most definitely. The quality of my code has come on leaps and bounds and each time you do a major refactor of a well tested code base is a revelation. I find I write less code to do more and writing less code is always a good thing.
It's harder to be sure you spend less time fixing bugs if I'm honest but I'm confident it's the case. If you're just starting out with TDD or unit testing in any form, start tracking the hours spent developing versus bug fixing. It would be interesting to see some empirical values on the subject.
Here's to future years of TDD. It's going to be interesting to see where my practices go.


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Marlow Turnlock Chain Crossbody
Carried as a clutch without the strap or worn crossbody, this versatile bag is the perfect choice for both dressed up and casual looks. Secured with our iconic turnlock closure, it's crafted in refined leather. The organized interior zip and open pockets hold a phone, cash, coins and cards.
Product Details
Refined calf leather
Two credit card slots
Inside open and zip pockets
Turnlock closure, fabric lining
Outside open pocket
Detachable chain strap with 56cm drop for shoulder or crossbody wear
19.5cm (L) x 12.5cm (H) x 3cm (W)
Style No.38966
Have Questions?Ask An Expert
Exchange and Returns Policy
Our goal is that our customers are completely satisfied with their purchases. Therefore, we will be happy to accept the return/exchange of the merchandise, provided it is unused and in perfect conditions. The returned merchandise should include the original packaging, the supplier´s label and be in the same condition it had when received by the customer.
The company reserves the right not to accept a return, if it does not fulfil the aforementioned requirements.
The company won't accept undocumented returns. Please, print the return confirmation email or attach a copy of the delivery note. You can also create a document with the order number.
There is a period of 2 days, since the date of delivery, in order to be able to return or exchange any product.
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Coach.sa allots a 14 days Refund period for items on original condition (unworn, undamaged and unused, with all tags attached and the original packaging, branded boxes and dust bags, if placed inside a protective outer box for shipping), credit cards will be refund on their account, COD will be transferred to Your bank account, 50 SR will be deducted for return shipment charges, Any returns that do not meet our policy will not be accepted.
Thank you for reading and your understanding!

subset: commoncrawl


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The guys over at Five Tool Tool dropped their Top 10 Tips For Sports Blog Traffic a few days ago. I wanted to talk about a few of the things they've mentioned and add a couple of thoughts. Here's a review of the FTT list:
- Current Events
- Whore Yourself
- Whore Others
- Whore Strangers
- Tech Fun
- Cheap Heat
- Keywords
- Gambling
- Lists!
My list looks like this:
1. Good Material: It doesn't guarantee traffic, but you have to have something interesting for the masses if they find you. How many boring blogs have you stumbled upon and then bookmarked? Exactly. It doesn't matter if your post are breaking news, spins on mainstream stories, youtube clips, faux interviews, real interviews, something original, or a crazy story, you want to have something that can keep people's attention.
2. Ass Kissing/Get Links: If you've crafted a masterpiece or you got a story/angle nobody's going with, you gotta get the word out. The biggest sneezers in the sports blogosphere are DeadSpin, The Big Lead, and With Leather. If one of those sites picks up your story, you're looking at a good day numbers wise. On the mainstream side of the tracks, your traffic's gonna boom if you get picked up on SI's Hot Clicks or The 10 Spot Blog… You're fooling yourself if you think any of those folks have time to sit and read through every blog, so your gonna have to point them in the right direction.
3. Be Social: The number one stop for a sports blog trying to get a rep is Ball Hype. It's the easiest way to connect with other bloggers, and you can check out what everybody else is doing. In a nutshell it's Digg for sports… Other bloggers see your stories on Ball Hype and they hype 'em up or down. On a good day, a number of sites will link to your story because they saw it on Ball Hype.
Don't limit yourself to BH and Digg.. Go do some searching around and find which social site works for you. Blog Carnival is another site that can get you some new traffic, but I can't explain how it works even though I know how it works… It's just one of those things. All I can say is find a carnival, hop on, and enjoy the ride.
4. Spread Love: Traffic is the ultimate goal, but you have to remember you got brothas and sistas in the struggle for numbers. You see a story you like, link to it, or you can have the increasingly popular "link dump". The "dumps" are a collection of stories from around the blogosphere. I have Bloggas Be Typin but you can check out Cheap Shots or Spanning The Blog as other examples. When you've linked to others, it encourages them to link to you. You can call it karma, I call it the Blogger Way.
Deadspin's "Blogdome" is the most popular link dump, even if it's been getting some neg(ative) press lately. Earlier this week Stop Mike Lupica wondered who's leg do you have to hump to get a link on Deadspin, and got a few people aggy.. I definitely see certain blogs linked more often than the rest, but it is what it is. Like I said in tip #2, sometimes you gotta point people in the right direction.
5. Cheap Heat/Keywords/Window Shoppers/Current Events: I use this category to draw people that are passing through.. People that are looking for sports but not really. These terms draw the most people to me through search engines:
The key there is the women. They don't say sex sells for nothing. I wrote about the first story and linked to the last two, and everyday people find my blog by searching for those terms. I'm not saying those are the 3 best, but those perform for me.
Just like sports radio hosts can yell "Pete Rose" or "Steroids" and watch the phone lines light up, bloggers have some automatics they can go to. I like to call 'em Kobe and the 7A's (A-Rod, Arenas, Artest, & African-American Athlete Arrested). Everybody does it in one way or another, and the only down side to this technique is if it's your only technique.
These sites, technorati/alexa, allow you to track your ranking according to their guidelines. If you want all of your numbers delivered to you in one place check out popuri.us. Hopefully all of the tips above will have you climbing up the charts.
Top Ten Tips For Sports Blog Traffic. Courtesy of Five Tool Tool


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"Boston Legal" Will Return for the 2005-06 Season with 27 Original Episodes
The ABC Television Network announced today that "Grey's Anatomy" will continue airing Sundays at 10:00 p.m., ET, through the end of the season, with "Boston Legal" scheduled to return for 2005-06 with 27 original episodes, which will include the episodes not aired this season.
"We're in the enviable position of having two shows that have each performed extremely well for us Sundays at 10:00 - 'Boston Legal and 'Grey's Anatomy.' We had already picked up 'Boston Legal' for next year based on its stellar run thus far this season. Now, with the strong debut of 'Grey's Anatomy,' we are very optimistic about having an additional asset of tremendous value heading into Fall," said Stephen McPherson, president, ABC Entertainment. "However, with this embarrassment of riches comes a tough decision. Ultimately we decided that, without having adequate lead time or marketing dollars to devote to moving either show so late in the season, we'd continue to let 'Grey's' build on its tremendous momentum through May. We're extremely excited that this will give us the amazing luxury of bringing 'Boston Legal' back next season with an unheard-of 27 original episodes."
Season to date, since its March 27 premiere, "Grey's Anatomy" is a dominant No. 1 in its time period, overshadowing its closest competition by 6.7 million viewers (17.0 million vs. 10.3 million - NBC) and beating the combined delivery of CBS and NBC in the time slot by 32% among Adults 18-49 (7.4/18 vs. 5.6/14=CBS and NBC combined). "Grey's Anatomy" is delivering ABC's best retention yet in the time period coming out "Desperate Housewives." The show qualifies as the highest ranking midseason TV program and also has the distinction as the only drama this television season (returning and new) to build its audience from Week 1 to Week 2. In addition, "Grey's" is producing ABC's strongest series ratings among young adults in the hour since "The Practice" during the 2000-01 TV Season.
"Grey's Anatomy" stars Ellen Pompeo as Meredith Grey, Patrick Dempsey as Derek Shepherd, Sandra Oh as Cristina Yang, Isaiah Washington as Preston Burke, Katherine Heigl as Isobel "Izzie" Stevens, Justin Chambers as Alex Karev, T.R. Knight as George O'Malley, Chandra Wilson as Miranda Bailey and James Pickens, Jr. as Richard Webber.
Shonda Rhimes ("Introducing Dorothy Dandridge") is creator and executive producer. Mark Gordon ("Saving Private Ryan"), Betsy Beers ("200 Cigarettes") and Jim Parriott ("The American Embassy") are executive producers. Peter Horton is co-executive producer. "Grey's Anatomy" is a Touchstone Television Production.


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Spring Training is the perfect getaway for Padres fans
The destination for Padres Spring Training is The Peoria Sports Complex in Peoria, Ariz.
However, before we get to the how to reach Peoria and where to stay and eat, let's discuss why Spring Training is the perfect getaway for Padres fans, particularly youngsters.
Spring Training is baseball at its best -- up close and personal. Although the Padres start their exhibition season Feb. 27, it's not just the games that make Spring Training special.
Attend a morning practice and you can be close enough to the action to hear the crack of the bat and the whoosh of a fastball as it heads for the catcher's mitt.
Spring Training is the perfect time to get that ball autographed. Bring your own pen -- players like to sign with Sharpies -- and ball or notebook. The key word is "Please!" And it helps to know your players.
Throughout spring -- even when the exhibition games are being played -- Padres players start arriving at the complex around 6:30 a.m. Early birds can get autographs outside the gate to the players' parking lot. Another prime time for autographs is when the players leave the parking lot every afternoon. But that is not your only opportunity to see the players up close.
All Padres practice fields and practice mounds have viewing areas. Players will often pause while moving from one field to another to sign an autograph or two.
And, once the Minor League players report, their exhibitions are free to the public.
Here are some tips for young fans seeking autographs:
• Make yourself stand apart from the professionals seeking autographs to sell. Players can spot the true fans in the crowd. Padres Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn, for example, always looked for the kid with dirty hands clutching a well-used baseball.
• Hold out your baseball or autograph to make it easy for the player to make a quick stop. And saying "Please, Mr. Headley" doesn't hurt.
• Remember, players also have a schedule. They can't always stop. But don't give up. The Padres usually report to the practice fields just after 9:15 each morning. Practice extends to around 1 p.m., before the start of exhibition games. Once the exhibition season begins, players leave the practice fields earlier to prepare for games.
Most Padres fans making the trek to Peoria head to Arizona after the start of exhibition games -- watching practice in the morning and taking in the game after lunch. Peoria Stadium is home to both the Padres and the Seattle Mariners of the American League.
Although the majority of exhibitions are played in the afternoon, there are night games.
One of the pleasures of Spring Training is visiting the other complexes around the Valley of the Sun.
Adult box seats at Peoria Stadium range from $20 to $28. Bleacher seats go for $15. But, try sitting on the lawn bank around the outfield for $7.
The details:
Reaching Peoria: There are 17 flights daily from San Diego to Phoenix. We found round trips for as low as $171. But, be advised, rental car charges at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix are some of the highest in the nation (some of the fees go toward building sports venues in the area). Rates are cheaper at satellite rental desks.
By car, the Peoria Sports Complex is 360 miles from Mission Valley. Allow yourself 6 1/2 hours for the trip, although it can be done an hour quicker. It is a freeway or four-lane, divided highway for all but about 10 miles.
The directions are simple: Take I-8 east to Gila Bend, Ariz. Take Arizona-85 north 33 miles to the I-10. Take the I-10 east to the north 101 loop. Exit to the right on Bell Road. Take another right on 83rd. Turn left at the second light for the Padres side of the Peoria Sports Complex. Gasoline is usually at least 20 cents a gallon cheaper in Arizona.
Where to stay: There are 21 hotels of every variety within a seven-mile radius of the Padres complex, including four within walking distance. Be aware, Spring Training falls in the middle of Arizona's peak tourist season. Snowbirds are everywhere. Those cheap Arizona hotel rates of the summer are not available in February and March. Rooms begin to fill up once the exhibition games begin. Cheaper rates are available at hotels along the I-10 and I-17. There are also nine RV parks within a short drive from the Padres complex.
Where to eat: Almost every chain known to man has a franchise in close proximity to the Peoria Sports Complex. For fast food aficionados, there is a Chic-fil-A within walking distance, and an In-N-Out Burger. My favorite dinner spots are The Texas Roadhouse and Famous Dave's, but I'm partial to steaks and barbecue. There is something for everyone at every price. Try Jason's Deli for sandwiches. Want something different in fast food? Travel two miles south on 83rd to Culver's. The hamburgers are sensational and the frozen custard is the perfect end to a day.
What to wear: Yes, it is a desert. But the mornings and nights can be very cold, especially in February and early March. Pack warm clothes, as well as shorts.


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KARRATHA, Australia (AP) — For nearly three decades, Chinese peasants have left their villages for crowded dormitories and sweaty assembly lines, churning out goods for world markets. Now, China is turning the tables.
Robert Yu, president of Chinese car maker ZhongXing Automobile Auto, presents models in Tijuana, Mexico.
Here in the Australian Outback, Shane Padley toils in the scorching heat, 2,000 miles from his home, to build an extension to a liquefied natural gas plant that feeds China's ravenous hunger for energy.
At night, the 34-year-old carpenter sleeps in a tin dwelling known as a "donga," the size of a shipping container and divided into four rooms, each barely big enough for a bed. There are few other places for Padley to live in this boomtown.
Duct-taped to the wall is a snapshot of the blonde girlfriend he left behind and worries he may lose. But, he says, "I can make nearly double what I'd be making back home in the Sydney area."
The reason: China.
For years, China's booming economy touched daily life in the West most visibly through the "made-in-China" label on everything from clothes to computers. But now, economic growth is giving rise to something more that can't be measured just by widgets and gadgets — a shift in China's balance of power with the rest of the world.
China's reach now extends from the Australian desert through the Sahara to the Amazonian jungle — and it's those regions supplying goods for China, not just the other way around. China has stepped up its political and diplomatic presence, most notably in Africa, where it is funneling billions of dollars in aid. And it is increasingly shaping the lifestyle of people around the world, as the United States did before it, right down to the Mandarin-language courses being taught in schools from Argentina to Virginia.
China, like the United States, is also learning that global power cuts both ways. The backlash over tainted toothpaste and toxic pet food has been severe, as has the criticism over China's support for regimes such as Sudan's.
To understand why China's influence is increasingly pushing past its borders, just do the math.
When 1.3 billion people want something, the world feels it. And when those people in ever increasing numbers are joining a swelling middle class eager for a richer lifestyle, the world feels it even more.If China's growth continues, its consumer market will be the world's second largest by 2015. The Chinese already eat 32 percent of the world's rice, build with 47 percent of its cement and smoke one out of every three cigarettes.
China's desire for expensive hardwood to turn into top-quality floorboards for its luxury skyscrapers has penetrated deep into the Amazon jungle. For example, in the isolated community of Novo Progresso, or New Progress in Portuguese, one of the biggest sawmills was started by the mayor with financing from Chinese investors.
China accounts for 30 percent of the wood exported from logging operations in remote towns across Brazil's rain forest, where trucks carry the finished product hundreds of miles along muddy roads to river ports, said Luiz Carlos Tremonte, who heads an influential wood industry association. Many Chinese purchasers now travel to Brazil to clinch deals, and are almost always accompanied at business meetings by friends or relatives of Chinese descent who live there.
"Ten years ago no one knew about China in Brazil; then the demand just exploded and they're buying a lot," Tremonte said. "This wood is great for floors, and they love it there."
The Bovespa stock index in Brazil has climbed more than 300 percent since 2002, riding the China wave.
China is buying coal mining equipment from Poland and drilling for oil and gas in Ethiopia and Nigeria. It has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Zambia's copper industry. It is the world's biggest market for mobile phones, headed for 520 million handsets this year. The list goes on.
Along with looking to other countries for goods for its people, China is also going far and wide in search of markets for its products.
In war-torn Liberia, where electricity is hard to come by, Chinese-made Tiger generators keep the local economy humming. Costlier Western brands, favored by aid agencies and diplomats, are beyond the reach of small business owners such as Mohammed Kiawu, 30, who runs a phone stall in the capital, Monrovia.
A used Tiger generator costs around $50, he said over the steady beat of his generator. "But even $250 is not enough to buy a used American or European generator. They are not meant for people like myself."
The Chinese generators are more prone to break down, Kiawu said. When the starter cable snapped on one, he replaced it with twine. But by making items for ordinary people, he predicted, China "will take control of the heart of the common people of Africa soon."
China is having to make up for decades of economic stagnation after the communist takeover in 1949.
When Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping began dabbling in economic reforms in 1978, farmers were scraping by. By 2005, income had increased sixfold after adjusting for inflation to $400 a year for those in the countryside and $1,275 for urban Chinese, according to China's National Bureau of Statistics.
"The Chinese don't want war — the Chinese just want to trade their way to power," said David Zweig, a professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. "In the past, if a state wanted to expand, it had to take territory. You don't need to grab colonies any more. You just need to have competitive goods to trade."
If China stays on the same economic track, it would become the world's largest economy in 2027, surpassing the United States, according to projections by Goldman, Sachs & Co., a Wall Street investment bank. And unlike Japan, which rose in the 1980s only to fade again, China still has a huge pool of workers to tap and an emerging middle class that is just starting to reach critical mass. Many development economists believe China still has 20 years of fairly high growth ahead.
But the transition to a larger presence on the global stage comes with growing pains, for China and the rest of the world.
As Beijing plays an ever bigger role in the developing world, some Western countries fear it could undermine efforts to promote democracy. In its attempt to secure markets and win allies, China is stepping up development aid to Africa and Asia. Chinese President Hu Jintao pledged last year to double Chinese aid to Africa between 2006 and 2009, promising $3 billion in loans, $2 billion in export credits and a $5 billion fund to encourage Chinese investment in Africa. China has also promised Cambodia a $600 million aid package and agreed to loan $500 million to the Philippines for a rail project.
But China also extends aid to states such as Myanmar, Zimbabwe and Sudan whose human rights records have lost them the support of the West. Actress Mia Farrow has labeled next year's Beijing Olympics — a point of pride for China — the "genocide Olympics" because of China's support for Sudan, at a time when the West seeks to punish it for its military actions in Darfur. China buys two-thirds of Sudan's oil output.
"In some ways, it will be integrating us into a new international order in which democracy as we've known it or the right to open organized political activity is no longer considered the norm," said James Mann, author of "The China Fantasy," a book about China and the West.
China is also facing some of the unease that powers before it have encountered. In Africa and Asia, some complain that massive China-funded infrastructure projects involve mostly Chinese workers and companies, rather than create jobs and wealth for the local population. And Moeletsi Mbeki, a political commentator and brother of South African President Thabo Mbeki, likens the trade of African resources for Chinese manufactured goods to former colonial arrangements.
"This equation is not sustainable," Mbeki said at a recent meeting of the African Development Bank in Shanghai. "Africa needs to preserve its natural resources to use in the future for its own industrialization."
The backlash is also coming on the consumer front, with Chinese goods earning a dubious reputation for quality. In the United States, there is a furor over the standard of Chinese imports. In Bolivia, vendors peel off or paint over any indication that their wares were "Hecho en China," Spanish for "Made in China."
A woman selling bicycles in El Alto, a poor city outside the capital, La Paz, insisted they were made in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan or even India. With some prodding, she acknowledged the truth. "They're all Chinese," she said, declining to give her name lest it hurt her business. "But if I say they're Chinese, they don't sell."
Even those who benefit from China's growth express some wariness. Aerospace giant Boeing expects China to be the largest market for commercial air travel outside the United States in the next 20 years, buying more than $100 billion worth of commercial aircraft, U.S. trade envoy Karan Bhatia said in a recent speech.
"Right now, we're hiring every week," noted Connie Kelliher, a union leader. "Things couldn't be better."
Yet Boeing workers remain wary of China's ambitions to build its own planes. next year China plans to test-fly a locally made midsize jet seating 78 to 85 passengers. It has also announced plans to roll out a 150-seat plane by 2020.
"It's kind of a double-edged sword," Kelliher said. "You want the business and we want to get the airplane sales to them, but there's the real concern of giving away so much technology that they start building their own."
That's what happened to Western and Japanese automakers, which made inroads in the Chinese market only to see their designs copied and technologies stolen. Already, China's vehicle manufacturers are venturing overseas, exporting 325,000 units last year — mostly low-priced trucks and buses to Asia, Africa and Latin America.
"We're taking a bigger piece of the pie," said Yamilet Guevara, a sales manager for Cinascar Automotriz, which has opened 20 showrooms in Venezuela in the past 18 months, offering cars from six Chinese makers. "They ask by name now. It's no longer just the Chinese car. It's the Tiggo, the QQ."
China's biggest car company, Chery Automobile Co., just announced a deal with the Chrysler Group to jointly produce and export cars to Western Europe and the United States within 2-1/2 years.
Given the speed of China's ascent, it's perhaps not surprising that China itself is trying to calm some of the fears. Its slogan for the Beijing Olympics: "Peacefully Rising China."


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We featured two Detroit scoops in a row (the Maverick Grabber Dual Domes and the Road Runner Air Grabber), and now we must give Italy some well-deserved Hood Scoop Hall Of Fame recognition here.
We can thank Van Sarockin, rogue trebuchet for suggesting the tears-to-our-eyes amazing treble scoop setup that Alfa Romeo installed on the Giulia TZ1 in 1964.
But that wasn't the only great hood scoop Alfa Romeo (or maybe it was all Zagato's doing; I'll need to consult with Alfa expert Conrad Stevenson to get the story) put on their race Giulias during this period. How about this hinged setup, which may have provided inspiration for Chrysler's Air Grabber designers?
Image source: AllSportAuto


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http://mmajunkie.com Five fights are now official for November's Strikeforce Challengers 20 event.
The show takes place Nov. 18 at The Pearl at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas.
A previously reported light-heavyweight bout between Antwain Britt (11-5 MMA, 1-2 SF) and Lumumba Sayers (4-2 MMA, 0-1 SF) headlines the night's main card, which airs on Showtime at 11 p.m. ET/PT.
Other previously reported bouts slated for the broadcast include middleweights Anthony Smith (13-7 MMA, 1-0 UFC) vs. Adlan Amagov (8-1-1 MMA 1-0 SF), unbeaten lightweights Bill Cooper (2-0 MMA, 1-0 SF) vs. Matt Ricehouse (5-0 MMA, 3-0 SF), and 145-pound females Julia Budd (2-1 MMA, 2-1 SF) vs. Ronda Rousey (3-0 MMA, 1-0 SF).
"We love showcasing some of the best up-and-coming talent in this sport, and we expect Britt and Sayers to deliver," Strikeforce CEO Scott Coker stated. "The rest of the card is filled with great matchups, including the returns of Ronda Rousey and Adlan Amagov. This is a great card for the fight fans in Las Vegas."
A new addition includes light heavyweights T.J. Cook (12-3 MMA, 1-0 SF) vs. Trevor Smith (8-1 MMA, 1-0 SF).
Tickets for the event start at $40 and go on sale to the general public today at 3 p.m. ET (noon PT).
The latest Strikeforce Challengers 20 card now includes:
MAIN CARD (Showtime)
- Antwain Britt vs. Lumumba Sayers
- Adlan Amagov vs. Anthony Smith
- T.J. Cook vs. Trevor Smith
- Julia Budd vs. Ronda Rousey
- Bill Cooper vs. Matt Ricehouse
For more on Strikeforce Challengers 20, stay tuned to the MMA Rumors section of the site.
(Pictured: Antwain Britt)


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- This event has passed.
Friends in Focus
April 14, 2018 – 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
An event every month that begins at 2:00pm on day Second of the month, repeating until September 8, 2018
The Friends In Focus group get together to have fun and learn about photography, take photos and enhance and practise skills in a friendly, social and non-judgmental environment. We range from 'snappers' to serious photographers.
What type of pictures might we take? Landscapes, sunrises, sunsets, clouds, stars, plants, seeds, insects, spider webs, birds, and things that slither, hop or swim—and of course, people. There is no end to the possibilities.
New faces are always welcome, whenever you can make it. If you would like to join the email list, send us a message to the address below.


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The CIO is the Last to Know
A recent Goldman Sachs survey of CIOs indicates that these executives do not plan to spend much money on cloud computing in the coming year. Indeed, most of their stated plans involve reducing the amount of consulting services and hardware that they are buying. I'm certain the predictions are accurate, and this scenario will lead to even more rapid growth in cloud computing. And the CIO will be the last to know.
How does this work? If Goldman has correctly measured the intentions of the CIOs, then they will not be spending money on cloud computing. Instead it will be the business units that they are supposed to serve that will be spending the money because the service level of the IT department will not meet their needs. Recall the reduction in consultants and service personnel? When a fixed income group at an investment banking house needs to stand up 50 servers to run a set of Monte Carlo simulations to test a hypothesis, the over-stressed IT department response is going to be "we'll get to that request after we fill the 25 that are in line ahead of it. It will probably be next quarter."
The "swoosh" sound you just heard is the developer of the simulation code swiping his credit card to set up his Amazon Web Services account. Three days later, he has 100 systems standing up on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud pumping back the information he needs to help his traders make money. The credit card bill is only about $5000 per month – much cheaper than the IT chargeback for similar capability. The head of fixed income hears about the profits due to the extra simulation capacity, and the developer gets a promotion and is encouraged to spin up another 100 to 200 machines to get even more aggressive with the strategy. Relative to the millions in profit, the cost is peanuts and the IT department just can't respond to these type requests anyway. The CIO is the last to know.
It always happens this way with new technology. As the leader of North America sales for Red Hat in 2002, I remember calling on the CIO of a company in the financial services industry that processed millions of transactions daily in support of the equities market. I sat in his office while he explained to me that his operation was mission critical – the markets depend on this operation. He would never consider using Linux and open source. "Why don't we take a tour of the datacenter," he asked. I was game, so I replied "Sure."
As we walked the floor, I noticed several machine consoles indicating they were attached to Red Hat Linux 7.1 servers. Here is the conversation that ensued:
Billy: What's this?
CIO: Huh? I don't know. Steve, what's this all about?
Steve the Admin: Yeah, we're running Red Hat Linux for most of our network services.
CIO: What do you mean?
Steve the Admin: You know, Apache, BIND, SendMail, a few transaction servers and log crunchers mixed in here and there.
CIO: How many of these are we running in this datacenter?
Steve the Admin: About 25% of the machines, I would guess. About 800 servers in total.
Billy: Why don't we go back to your office and have another conversation about how much value you are getting out of Linux and open source and how Red Hat can help you.
The CIO is always the last to know about new technology. The head of engineering brought UNIX into the enterprise for CAD/CAM and analysis applications, and the CIO was the last to know. Department managers brought in PCs and Windows for personal productivity and desktop publishing, and the CIO was the last to know. System administrators brought in Linux for network services, and the CIO was the last to know. The sales force brought in salesforce.com and introduced the enterprise to SaaS, and the CIO was the last to know. Developers in the business units will use cloud computing, and the CIO will be the last to know.
The good news is that CIOs know where their bread is buttered, and eventually supporting the business units becomes the top priority. In this case, I would guess that all of that spending that Goldman noted as being earmarked for virtualization will pave the path for a hybrid approach to cloud computing. The enterprise IT function will begin to model the services that they provide after Amazon, with hypervisor virtualization as the basis of the compute capacity. Then, with a single, corporate architecture for cloud computing, applications will be able to scale seamlessly across the internal cloud infrastructure and also out into the external clouds when necessary for extra capacity. In this scenario, everyone gets what they want, and the CIO is a hero for reducing the fixed costs and operating budget associated with data center capacity. Being the last to know isn't necessarily a bad thing.


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The West remains a mysterious region
This was supposed to be "the year of the West" in national politics. States that had been reliably Republican were suddenly competitive. Two Westerners -- Arizona Sen. John McCain, a Republican, and, until he dropped out, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democrat -- were credible candidates for the presidency. The Democrats will hold their national convention in Denver for the first time in a century.
So surely the candidates and the national media would take the trouble to learn something about the West? Well, not exactly.
We can start with Hillary Clinton, a Democratic candidate who talks about "all these women in their 90s" who tell her about being born when women couldn't vote, and how excited they are that a woman is among the leading candidates. Her Colorado campaign office even produced one, a 90-year-old lifelong Denver resident named Anne Slobko, who wants to see a woman president but who doesn't remember the days before suffrage.
Of course she doesn't. Women have been voting in all Colorado elections, including those for president, since 1893, which was 115 years ago. The national narrative has it that women did not vote in the United States until the passage of the 19th Amendment to the federal Constitution in 1920, and so we often hear that, even though it's far from the truth.
In general, the U.S. Constitution of yore left voting qualifications up to the states. When Colorado became a state in 1876, its Constitution allowed women to vote in school-board elections, and scheduled a referendum on "female suffrage" for all elections, which was defeated in 1877. But another one passed in 1893, and women have voted in Colorado ever since. In 1900, Denver was the largest city in the world where women could vote.
Wyoming, "the Equality State," allowed women to vote when it became a territory in 1869, and continued after statehood in 1890. Women voted when Arizona became a state in 1912. Utah Territory gave women the vote in 1870. Montana women got the vote in 1914, and the Treasure State elected a woman to Congress in 1916: Jeanette Rankin, a progressive and pacifist Republican. She was serving in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1917-1919 -- at a time when, according to Hillary and the lazy national media, women could not vote.
The national media also seem perplexed by Mitt Romney's religion. The former Massachusetts governor is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more commonly known as the Mormon Church. Any lengthy story about Romney will attempt to explain the theology of the Mormon church, from Joseph Smith's visions in upstate New York to the 1846 trek to the Great Salt Lake, as if Mormonism were as exotic as Zoroastrianism.
This baffles me. I grew up in northern Colorado. From first grade on, I went to school with Mormons. I played with Mormons after school, and competed against them in spelling bees. At various laundries and newspapers, I worked with Mormons. They're our neighbors and about as exotic as a Chevy pickup. But if coverage of Mitt Romney is any guide, the West can boast of more religious diversity than the rest of the country.
The national media also treat populism as though Democrat John Edwards and Republican Mike Huckabee were promoting something new when they rail against Wall Street. But out here, populism is part of our political tradition. The Populists of the 1890s were a powerful third party. In 1890, they captured five congressional seats in Kansas and 96 of the 126 seats in the state Legislature. In 1892, Colorado elected a Populist governor, a dozen Populist state senators and 27 Populist state representatives. The Populist presidential candidate that year, James Weaver, carried Kansas, Colorado, Idaho and Nevada.
The Populist platform back then called for some reforms that were eventually adopted, including the secret ballot, direct election of U.S. senators, the eight-hour workday, the graduated income tax. When you read the party platform of 1892, you wonder how much has really changed: "We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. ... The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced, business prostrated, homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of capitalists."
Modern populists just don't put the same zing in their speeches. But we Westerners probably know about populism, just as we're familiar with Mormons. We also know that women could vote out here well before 1920. And it's odd that in this "Year of the West," the national media haven't picked up on that.
Ed Quillen is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country news (hcn.org). He lives in Salida, Colorado, where he publishes Colorado Central magazine and writes columns for the Denver Post.


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Jack Layton has lost his battle with cancer, dying Monday morning at his home, surrounded by those closest to him.
The charismatic, 61-year-old politician had recently stepped down as federal NDP leader, but had expressed hope that he would return when Parliament resumed next month.
On Monday, Canadians learned that was not to be.
However, in a letter written in the event of his death, Layton offered some final words of optimism and encouragement to those who had been moved by his health struggles.
"To other Canadians who are on journeys to defeat cancer and to live their lives, I say this: Please don't be discouraged that my own journey hasn't gone as well as I had hoped. You must not lose your own hope," Layton wrote, in a letter dated Aug. 20 and released Monday.
"Treatments and therapies have never been better in the face of this disease. You have every reason to be optimistic, determined and focused on the future. My only other advice is to cherish every moment with those you love at every stage of your journey, as I have done this summer."
Former political foes joined friends and colleagues Monday in praising upon Layton and offering their condolences to his family.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper, speaking to reporters in Ottawa, called Layton his "colleague and friend."
"Jack Layton will be remembered for the force of his personality and his dedication to public life," Harper said at a news conference at the House of Commons in Ottawa.
A hobby musician himself, Harper spoke of Layton's love for music and how the two politicians often talked about playing together.
"But it seemed we were both always too busy," Harper said. "I will always regret the jam session that never was."
News of Layton's death came Monday morning in a statement from his family.
"We deeply regret to inform you that the Honourable Jack Layton, leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada, passed away at 4:45 a.m. today," the statement said.
"He passed away peacefully at his home surrounded by family and loved ones."
Layton was felled by an unidentified but aggressive cancer that took hold this summer following a battle last year with the same disease in his prostate.
The latest diagnosis came in mid-July, barely a month after Layton and his wife Olivia Chow, a fellow NDP MP from Toronto, had made their historic move into Stornoway, the official Ottawa residence of the country's Opposition leader.
In his farewell letter, Layton recommended Nycole Turmel, who took over the reins of the NDP when Layton stepped down to battle his cancer, remain as interim leader until a permanent successor can be elected, at a leadership convention to be held as soon as possible.
"It's just an incredible loss, not only for the NDP but all Canadians," said NDP MP Libby Davies of Layton's passing Monday.
"I think people came to really love Jack, and they saw him as someone who had such courage, and commitment, to work for people, for a better Canada, for social justice," she said.
"He humanized politics. People feel so cynical about politics and politicians, we all get a bum rap. And I think Jack's enthusiasm — he just loved what he did."
That Layton's moment of glory on the national stage was followed so swiftly by his death will leave chroniclers of Canadian political history forever pondering the what-ifs of a career cut short at such a promising point, and whether a man who unexpectedly became the country's "prime minister in-waiting" earlier this year might one day have been able to complete the journey to the pinnacle of power.
When a thin and weary-looking Layton revealed on July 25 he'd been stricken by a second cancer, and that he would require a leave-of-absence to fight the illness "so I can be back to fight for families when Parliament resumes" in September, there were widespread doubts he'd be able to fulfil that promise or to direct his party's ultimate quest: becoming Canada's government in a future election.
"I am hopeful and optimistic about the personal battle that lies before me in the weeks to come," Layton said at the time. "And I am very hopeful and optimistic that our party will continue to move forward. We will replace the Conservative government a few short years from now."
Layton will not lead that charge. But he will be remembered — fondly by his supporters, respectfully by his opponents — for his effective, down-to-earth brand of progressive politics, and for his rise from the relative obscurity of Toronto's municipal government to become, at least in electoral terms, the most successful national leader in the 78-year history of the CCF-NDP franchise.
If the NDP without Layton manages to cement its position ahead of the Liberals at the threshold of power, perhaps alternating with the Conservatives in forming future governments, he will likely be credited with permanently changing Canada's political landscape.
"If I have tried to bring anything to federal politics, it is the idea that hope and optimism should be at their heart," Layton said in his last public address, delivered the day he disclosed his new battle with cancer.
"We can look after each other better than we do today," the fiery speaker stated in a suddenly fragile, raspy voice. "We can have a fiscally responsible government. We can have a strong economy; greater equality; a clean environment. We can be a force for peace in the world."
He remained, he added, "as hopeful and optimistic about all of this as I was the day I began my political work, many years ago."
Politics for Jack Layton was both a destiny and an inheritance.
Before becoming NDP leader, he was best known as a headline-grabbing, left-wing councillor at Toronto's city hall fighting for affordable housing, a greener environment and the triumph of community over corporate interests. But Layton — born in Montreal in 1950 and raised in the nearby anglo bastion of Hudson — came from a family of Quebec politicians with surprisingly conservative leanings.
And his political roots reach even deeper into Canadian history. His great-grand-uncle, William Steeves, was a Father of Confederation from New Brunswick and a founding member of the Senate in 1867, the year Canada was born.
Layton's great-grandfather, Philip Layton, was an English immigrant who founded the Montreal Association for the Blind and championed the rights of the visually impaired.
"Even though I never knew my great-grandfather, I will not forget the stories handed down to me of his ability to organize and empower people," Layton wrote in his 2006 memoir-manifesto Speaking Out Louder: Ideas That Work For Canadians.
Layton's grandfather, Gilbert Layton, served in the Quebec cabinet of Union Nationale premier Maurice Duplessis before breaking from the conservative party to support conscription in the Second World War.
And Layton's father, Robert, who died in 2002, was a Montreal-area Liberal activist in the 1960s and '70s before switching parties to become a Conservative MP from 1984 to 1993, serving as Brian Mulroney's minister of mines and national caucus chairman.
Today, Layton's son Michael is a Toronto city councillor, carrying on a rich family tradition of working in politics.
Educated in political science at McGill University, Jack Layton earned a PhD at York University in the 1980s and would work as a professor of politics at Ryerson University.
He married his first wife, Sally Halford, in 1969, and the couple had two children — Mike and Sarah — before their divorce in 1983. He married Chow, then a Toronto school board trustee, in 1988.
Layton counted famed McGill philosopher Charles Taylor — who ran unsuccessfully for the NDP in Montreal in the 1960s — as a prime shaper of his world view. And Layton, originally a Liberal like his father, had described how Pierre Trudeau's heavy-handed response to the FLQ Crisis in October 1970 led him to embrace the NDP and its leader, Tommy Douglas, who famously compared Trudeau's imposition of the War Measures Act to "using a sledgehammer to crack a peanut."
First elected to Toronto city council in 1982, Layton emerged as the leader of an influential NDP slate of municipal politicians. He headed the city's board of health and served a host of other municipal bodies over the years, then ran unsuccessfully as the left-wing candidate for Toronto's mayoralty in 1991.
He worked as a lecturer and environmental consultant before returning to Toronto council, then took a nationally prominent post as head of the Canadian Federation of Municipalities.
Layton lost twice as a federal NDP candidate in Toronto in the 1990s, but in January 2003 — with a crucial endorsement from party icon Ed Broadbent — succeeded Alexa McDonough as the national leader of the New Democrats.
Layton's first federal campaign in 2004 improved the NDP's popular vote and its seat count — including his own — from 14 to 19 in the House of Commons. But his performance was marred by a shrill accusation that prime minister Paul Martin was personally responsible for the deaths of homeless people because of Liberal cuts to affordable housing.
In a CBC interview during this year's election, Layton recalled the 2004 incident when asked to describe a significant mistake he'd made as a politician.
Layton said he was "so upset about the cancellation of the affordable housing program and the deaths due to homelessness that I said something that made it (sound) as though I was saying that Paul Martin somehow was responsible for those fatalities. And that was wrong to do."
Several months after the 2004 election, a budget deal struck between Layton and Martin kept the latter's minority government alive at a time when the new Conservative leader, Stephen Harper, and Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe were ready to defeat the Liberals.
In May 2005, in a move Layton characterized as his greatest achievement as NDP leader prior to the 2011 election, he won agreement from Martin to shift $4.6 billion in proposed corporate tax cuts to $4.6 billion in spending on an array of NDP-backed social programs, environmental initiatives and other measures.
In Speaking Out Louder, Layton boasted that the deal with Martin produced "the first NDP budget in Canadian history."
He added: "We had the opportunity to put some of our ideas into practice for a change, instead of just talking about them."
In Martin's own political memoir, he suggests Layton and his NDP advisers "had only the vaguest idea of what to ask for" in the budget deal, but that the Liberals shaped an agreement "that worked splendidly for us and allowed Layton to claim a policy victory."
By the end of 2005, however, Layton was aligning himself with Duceppe and Harper to bring down Martin's government over fresh revelations about the sponsorship scandal that had unfolded in the early 2000s.
The forcing of that election — scheduled for January 2006 — prompted Green Party leader Elizabeth May to blame Layton for putting politics ahead of the planet and risking the collapse of an "urgent" climate change conference aimed at salvaging the Kyoto Protocol and set to begin in Montreal.
"I had known and liked Jack since he was on Toronto City Council," May recalled in her 2009 book Losing Confidence: Power, Politics and the Crisis in Canadian Democracy. She wrote that he once told her "when he ran for leader of the NDP that he was only seeking a role in federal politics to deal with the climate crisis."
Now, she argued, Layton was set to "sabotage the most important global climate negotiations in history" and she "begged him" to delay the defeat of the Liberal government.
"It was to no avail," she wrote, highlighting the incident as proof that both Layton and Harper were willing to sacrifice the key Kyoto negotiations to prevent a Liberal publicity coup.
The 2006 election, which gave Harper a minority Conservative government, also pushed the number of NDP members to 29 — among them was Olivia Chow.
"For me, the most disappointing aspect of 2004 was that Olivia didn't win and wasn't able to join me right from the start in the House of Commons," Layton noted in his book. "So 2006 was certainly a thrilling result."
The 2008 election consolidated and extended the gains made in 2006, increasing Layton's caucus to 37 members. The party's growing support under Layton's direction and his own strong leadership numbers in national polling positioned the NDP well at a time when the Liberals were facing internal tensions at the end of Stephane Dion's time as leader.
But first came the coalition gambit. Layton was a key player in the failed bid to form an opposition governing alliance following the 2008 election. Before the plan collapsed amid Liberal infighting and after Harper had successfully prorogued Parliament, Layton was slated to become a senior cabinet minister in a Dion-led Liberal-NDP government backed by the Bloc Quebecois.
While the planned coalition never materialized, Layton strengthened his national profile over the next two years as he vied with new Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff for the best strategy and timing to defeat Harper's government.
Layton, occasionally referred to as "affable Jack," was nevertheless a combative partisan, at once critical of attack-style politics and a skilled practitioner of the art.
He was relentless in the House of Commons, in media scrums and on the campaign trail in pushing his political agenda, neatly summed up in his trademark promise to "make policies for the kitchen table, not the boardroom table."
Layton was in full stride as NDP leader by 2010. But in early February of that year, ahead of his appearance at a hastily called news conference in Ottawa, there was rampant speculation among media that he must be stepping down from the post. What else would the major announcement be?
Instead, Canadians learned that Layton was seriously ill.
"It's the same kind of prostate cancer that my father was diagnosed with 17 years ago," he told reporters. "His treatments were successful, and I intend to tackle this with the same determination that he did. Like my dad, I am a fighter. And I will beat this."
That fight appeared to be going well as Canadians approached another federal election this spring. But in early March — less than a month before Layton and the other party leaders would embark on an arduous six-week campaign — he was forced to endure a four-hour operation to repair a broken hip, the precise circumstances of the fracture never explained.
The state of Layton's health became a significant tactical issue in the days leading up to the 2011 election call. Who would compel a cancer patient recovering from hip surgery to hit the campaign trail? But Harper — his hand forced by a unanimous opposition motion finding the Conservatives in "contempt of Parliament" — dropped the writ on March 26 for a vote on May 2.
From the outset, Layton played down worries about his health and dismissed concerns he'd be unable to conduct an effective campaign.
"It's time for you to choose a prime minister who will help your family get ahead and put political games aside," he said in his first major speech of the race, in Edmonton. "Well friends, I'm running to be that prime minister."
Initial media reports about small turnouts at Layton campaign stops and the hobbling effects of his hip operation soon gave way to stories about Layton's energetic appearances before large, enthusiastic crowds — particularly in Quebec. The walking stick that seemed to reflect Layton's weaker, marginal position at the beginning of the election came to be seen as a symbol of his scrappiness, humility and sincerity.
Pollsters detected a Layton love-in taking shape among the electorate, with Quebec voters — finally weary of the Bloc's tired messaging — particularly drawn to the easy manner and street-smart French of the mustachioed NDP leader, who talked about in upbeat terms about creating "winning conditions" for federalism in Quebec.
At some unidentifiable moment in mid-April, as Canadians weighed their options ahead of what would prove to be a landmark May 2 vote, an idea had crystallized among an unprecedented portion of the country's voters that the ever-smiling chief of the NDP was the right man to lead the nation's government.
An "orange wave" led by Layton, affectionately nicknamed "Jacq" in his home province, began to roll across Quebec and threatened to recapture the Bloc's separatist stronghold for federalism.
The single most memorable moment of the 2011 campaign had been Layton's bulls-eye strike against Ignatieff during the English-language leaders' debate over the Liberal leader's dismal attendance record in the House of Commons. That sharp exchange between the ascendant Layton and Ignatieff, headed for free fall as it turned out, symbolized the pivotal red-to-orange shift of allegiance that took place among so many voters in the election.
The seismic shift would not be enough to catapult Layton and his New Democratic Party — a perennial also-ran in federal elections since its emergence from the CCF in 1961 — to power in Ottawa.
Yet Layton — all but written off as a serious contender in the early part of the election fight, his campaign initially dogged by doubts about his health and his party's relevance in the "two-way race" expected between Harper's Conservatives and Ignatieff's Liberals — was indeed poised to make history.
While Harper would secure the majority mandate his party had been pursuing for years, the remarkable rise of the Layton-led New Democrats was surely the most startling result of the election. Buoyed by Layton's unmatched personal popularity, the NDP won a stunning total of 103 seats — eclipsing the party's previous record of 43 — and elected 59 of Quebec's 75 MPs, obliterating the Bloc, relegating the Liberals to third place nationally for the first time in the history of Canada's "natural governing party," and seizing the role of official Opposition for the NDP.
And while the Quebec results were truly earth-shaking, Layton's achievement on May 2 was so enormous that the NDP also elected more MPs from outside of that province — 44 — than the party had ever sent in total to the House of Commons.
"My friends, it's a historic night for New Democrats," a jubilant Layton said on election night. "Spring is here, my friends, and a new chapter begins.
"Tommy Douglas, our first leader, said 'Dream no little dreams,' and I've always taken that to heart," he added. "It's time to roll up our sleeves and get back to work, and let's not stop until the job is done."
Becoming Opposition leader proved to have its own challenges. Layton's Quebec caucus, packed with political neophytes and — at least nominally — former separatists, demanded special attention from a leader suddenly juggling more responsibility and a higher profile than any of his NDP predecessors.
And, as Canadians now know, he was also dealing with devastating news about his own health almost as soon as he'd settled into his new, centre-stage role in the political life of the country.
"Oftentimes," Layton observed in his 2006 memoir, "life's highs and lows are inextricably linked."
Political triumphs and setbacks, he noted, seem to tightly follow one another; personal achievements and disappointments, too.
"That has certainly happened to me," he wrote, "and, occasionally, the ups and downs were virtually simultaneous."
From the distant vantage of history, the height of Layton's life will appear to coincide precisely with its end. There may be some solace for his followers — and for all admiring Canadians — that Layton's death will be inextricably linked with his finest hour.
with files from Sharon Kirkey, Postmedia News


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| 5°C Belfast
Manchester United's pay-off for David Moyes will be "single-digit millions" it has emerged, as club chiefs promised major investments on new transfers to ensure a return to the Champions League.
United executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward also said an announcement on a new manager would be made "in due course" - it is understood the expected appointment of Dutch coach Louis van Gaal will not take place before next week.
Woodward said in a conference call to club investors that the cost to United of not playing in the Champions League next season would be "in the mid-£30millions" and that there was a determination to return to Europe's top club competition.
Woodward said finishing seventh in the Premier League had been "very disappointing" and suggested missing out on Europe had led to the sacking of Moyes last month.
He said: "The club's expectations - and you will see this reflected in the transfer market and what we have recently done from a managerial perspective - are absolutely to get back into the Champions League.
"We will be active in the transfer market and deals will be done."
In relation to the pay-off to Moyes and his backroom staff who also left the club, investors were told the figure would be revealed in September and it was expected "to be single-digit million pounds".
Woodward said record revenues for the third quarter of the financial year puts United in a good position to invest in the squad and challenge for the title next season.
United reported revenues of £115.5million for the quarter, up 26 per cent, mainly due to rises in income from Premier League broadcasting money and sponsorship deals.
"We once again generated record revenue," added Woodward.
"This puts us in a healthy financial position to continue to invest in the squad. Everyone at the club is working hard to ensure the team is back challenging for the title and trophies next season."
The players' wage bill was also up however by 18.9 per cent, reflecting the arrivals of Juan Mata and Marouane Fellaini plus new deals for Nani and Adnan Januzaj.
Wayne Rooney also signed a new deal during the current financial year but it is understood that is for the same level as his previous contract - around £230,000 a week - but he earns more from a separate image rights contract which is not reflected in United's staff costs.
Sponsorship income rose 43.5 per cent while United's overall debt is down 4.3 per cent at £351.7million, while the cost of servicing that debt also fell - there was a £2.8million reduction in interest payable following refinancing in June last year.
Broadcasting revenue for the third quarter was £35.6million, an increase of £13.9million, or 64.1 per cent, due to increased revenue from the Premier League.
Woodward said the increase from the Premier League would soften the financial impact of missing out on Europe.
He said: "Due to relatively high broadcasting revenues we estimate that the isolated impact for not qualifying for European football will be in the mid £30millions of pounds which includes a 15 per cent reduction in the price of executive facilities next year."
The club and 62-year-old Van Gaal, currently coach of Holland, are understood to have reached a broad agreement but no deal has yet been signed.
Van Gaal is busy with preparations for Holland's friendly against Ecuador at the Amsterdam ArenA on Saturday, and sources close to the club have ruled out any announcement taking place either side of that fixture.
United's interim manager Ryan Giggs was photographed leaving a hotel in the Dutch town of Noordwijk on Wednesday, where it is understood the 40-year-old had a meeting with Van Gaal.
Giggs' playing contract expires in June and he is expected to be offered a senior coaching role, though it is not known whether he intends to keep playing next season.


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Sometimes you want to wear something that's geeky, but a bit more subtle than a fan t-shirt. These Star Wars neckties let you show off your Imperial (or Rebel) allegiance while still remaining stylish.
Currently, these silk ties are available only through Kotobukiya in Japan for ¥ 5,040 (around $50.72 USD). No word on whether we'll be seeing them in North American shops, or when we'll be seeing a TIE Fighter necktie.
Star Wars Narrow Tie [Kotobukiya via Fashionably Geek]
G/O Media may get a commission


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Weekly Photo Challenge: Possibility. Opportunity. Potential. New year. New adventures. Let's inspire one another — show us what's new.
There is this girl I know. She is one of the first few people I've known since the starting days of my blogging. We've been friends ever since. I just texted her to ask how long have we known each other and she replied 1.4 years and I couldn't believe how far we have come since then. It's seems like yesterday when I started my blog and we first chatted. I love her to bits and pieces, one of the best people I know here. She is as genuine as it can get, kindhearted, warm and an avid animal lover! Who is this amazing person you ask??!!
Her name is Kruti and she writes this blog:
Kruti Mehta:
AUTHOR AND POETESS IN-MAKING "Your Eyes Show the Strength of Your Soul"
Why I am telling you guys all of this today you must be wondering? What's New? It's with immense pleasure I'm announcing today that her second book Chords Of Life is out !! *jumps up and down in excitement* Yaey yaey yaey!!!
I've read the book and let me tell you *my totally biased* opinion, It's AAAAH-MAAYY-ZINGGGGG !!! This book is an inspiration to my new year. So for this week's photo challenge here is an image of her new book I'm reading.
"Chords of Life is a collection of strange, morbid, unusual tales of my mind. Our life is like Chords of a Guitar each filled with different emotions at every stage. We may not face the same level of harshness as others, but we do know the bitter truth about cruelty. Each story is crafted with a different emotion within itself."
Today I'm asking you to show support to this blogging community, support each other! Please go buy her book. You are going to love it.
For free shipping – http://www.cyberwit.net/publications/734
Other links – http://www.flipkart.com/chords-life-symphony-darkness-english/p/itme39hqsetbeanw?pid=9788182535534&otracker=start&q=9788182535534&as=off&as-show=off
If you guys are still not convinced about buying the book, I'm going to let you in on a little secret, One of my stories is also featured in that book!! Some of you might remember the story from my blog as I posted it once here. (It's not here anymore so don't go snooping around for it! Haha just kidding! )
So please please please go buy that book, what are you waiting for??!!
Go Go Go!!!! \o/
*Cheering you on* 😀
(Oh and if you guys could please spread the word any way feasible for you that'd be much appreciated too. Share it through Tweet, Facebook, Reblog, Pinterest, Tumblr? Anything would work. You can find all of these sharing options below the post. Thank you so much ! ❤ )


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Dialysis is a procedure that is done routinely on people who have acute or chronic kidney (renal) failure. The process involves removing waste substances and fluid from the blood that are normally eliminated by the kidneys. Dialysis may also be used for people who have been exposed to or ingested toxic substances to prevent kidney failure from occurring. There are 2 types of dialysis that may be done on your child: peritoneal or hemodialysis:
Peritoneal dialysis. Peritoneal dialysis is done by surgically placing a soft, hollow tube into your child's lower abdomen near the navel. After the tube is placed, a solution called dialysate is instilled into the peritoneal cavity. The peritoneal cavity is the space in the abdomen that houses the organs and is lined by two special membrane layers called the peritoneum. The dialysate is left in the abdomen for a designated time that will be determined by your child's doctor. The dialysate fluid absorbs the waste products and toxins through the peritoneum. The fluid is then drained from the abdomen, measured, and discarded. There are two different types of peritoneal dialysis: continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis (CAPD) and continuous cyclic peritoneal dialysis (CCPD):
CAPD does not require a machine. Exchanges, often referred to as passes, can be done 3 to 5 times a day, during waking hours.
CCPD requires the use of a special dialysis machine that can be used in the home. This type of dialysis is done automatically, even while your child is asleep.
Hemodialysis. Hemodialysis is done in a dialysis center or hospital by trained health care professionals. A special type of access, called an arteriovenous (AV) fistula, is placed surgically, usually, in your child's arm. This involves joining an artery and a vein together. An external, central, intravenous (IV) catheter may also be inserted, but is less common for long-term dialysis. After access has been established, your child will be connected to a large hemodialysis machine that drains your child's blood, bathes it in a special dialysate solution that removes waste substances and fluid, then returns it to your child's bloodstream. Hemodialysis is usually done several times a week and each session lasts for 4 to 5 hours. Because of the length of time hemodialysis takes, it may be helpful to bring games or reading materials for your child to keep him or her busy during this procedure.
Vidant Health can connect you to health care professionals to help you understand your condition and guide you through the treatment process. Let's chat.