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PASADENA, California (CNN) -- On Earth, Scott Maxwell drives his red Prius without paying much attention to the San Gabriel Mountains in the distance. He's lived in the same neighborhood of Pasadena for 18 years, after all.
When he's driving on Mars, though, every rock he encounters is a new discovery, a step toward humanity's knowledge of the planet he hopes to visit some day.
Maxwell has the dream job of driving rovers on Mars, and he's gearing up to take control of the biggest and most sophisticated one yet: Curiosity. He's one of about a dozen people at NASA tasked with steering the $2.6 billion vehicle from more than 100 million miles away.
"It's a priceless national asset that happens to be sitting on the surface of another planet," Maxwell says of the rover, which landed Monday morning. "You better take that damn seriously."
Maxwell loves to talk about how much he loves his job, and his effervescence is infectious, say colleagues at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, home to Curiosity's mission control.
"The thing that always impressed me about Scott was just the passion that he has for what we're doing. He just loves being a rover driver," says Steve Squyers, a Mars expert who's worked closely with Maxwell. "He thinks he's got the coolest job on the planet, and he's right, I think."
The names of the rovers Maxwell has driven so far -- Spirit and Opportunity -- speak to his upbeat attitude and thirst for immersing himself in what he enjoys doing.
Through his blog and Twitter account @marsroverdriver, Maxwell interacts with all sorts of self-professed "rover-huggers" -- people who really love rovers.
Last week Maxwell tweeted, "VIP seats for opening night of @IndyShakes's Comedy of Errors! Last chance to see a play before the baby comes Sunday."
The baby, of course, is the SUV-sized Curiosity, which came to Mars after years of planning and preparation. It's been more than eight months since it left Earth, and no one can be sure exactly how it will behave, says Maxwell.
Over dinner in Old Pasadena last week, Maxwell and his girlfriend, Kim Lichtenberg -- a planetary scientist also working on the rover mission -- playfully compared it to having a child, though neither has had children.
"We're all going to be kind of like new parents," Lichtenberg says.
"Watch it take its first steps," Maxwell adds.
Landing Curiosity was such an amazing feat of engineering that NASA billed the process "seven minutes of terror."
Like anxious parents, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena were eager to see the rover arrive safely, and so were the reporters who flooded the NASA campus.
Maxwell said before the landing that he had confidence in the JPL team responsible for the entry, descent and landing of the spacecraft. But if the amazing maneuver went wrong, the whole effort would have been "all for nothing" for the many people who've sacrificing family time and vacations to pour their hearts into it.
"That seven minutes tells you whether the last seven years of your life had a point," Maxwell says.
Shortly after the rover's arrival, Maxwell tweeted to NASA engineer Adam Steltzner and colleagues, "Well done, @steltzner and company! Thanks for delivering our baby safely!"
Later, Maxwell added, "Hey, I still have a job Monday. :-D."
A voyage to break down the wall
Maxwell's eyes widen with joy when he talks about the parts of life he thinks are "awesome": His girlfriend. His other NASA team members. The Independent Shakespeare Company (@IndyShakes). His first lemon drop cocktail. The Cotswolds.
Something about Maxwell's thin frame, boyish features and the way he gets giddy over esoteric things resembles Jim Parsons' character on "The Big Bang Theory," although Maxwell is more jovial and socially gracious than Sheldon Cooper. His arms seem almost impossibly long as they move about while he explains the rover driving process.
With a youthful complexion and hair that finishes in a short tail on the back of his neck, it's impossible to guess Maxwell is 41. The first time he ever had lunch with Lichtenberg, she thought, "Aw man, he's way too young for me. Way too young for me." Later she found out she's about six years his junior.
Lichtenberg, fair and blond, grew up with the space program close at hand: Her father is astronaut Byron Lichtenberg, a NASA payload specialist who's flown on two shuttle missions. She has a Ph.D. in planetary spectroscopy, which deals with the interaction of matter and radiation in planetary environments.
More science news from CNN Light Years
Maxwell, on the other hand, had long assumed that a career in space was out of reach.
He was raised in an economically depressed rural area of eastern North Carolina, although his accent could just as well place him from the Midwest. His parents divorced when he was 7; after his mother moved to Florida, he spent time bouncing between the two states until college.
His father was a railroad engineer for most of his career, although he previously worked as a dean at various colleges.
Carl Sagan was Maxwell's childhood hero. He adored watching the 13-part TV series Sagan hosted called "Cosmos: A Personal Voyage," first broadcast in 1980 on PBS.
In one episode, the scientist talked about what it would be like to go to Mars. Only last year, Maxwell watched the episode again and remembered it mentioned a prototype Mars rover, which at that time seemed a futuristic idea.
"I realized in that moment that that's where I get this sense that I've grown up and stepped into this fantasy world that I had when I was a kid, because I have," he says with excited emphasis.
As a child, Maxwell loved imagining what it would be like to go to other planets. But as an older teen, he assumed he would study hard and end up in a career that seemed more common and attainable than space exploration, such as banking.
"This kind of thing always seemed to me like the kind of thing other people do," he said. "There's me. And there's this big invisible glass wall. And there are people who are doing stuff like that."
Maxwell believed he could never cross over to the other side of glass wall.
It wasn't until he got hired by NASA, after completing his master's degree in computer science, that he realized the wall never existed.
Maxwell is living his fantasy now, but he hasn't always had such luck. At age 20, while double-majoring in English and computer science at East Carolina University, he learned that his swollen lymph nodes were a symptom of stage 2 Hodgkin's lymphoma. The cancer had spread in his neck and chest. He went through nine weeks of radiation treatments and has been cancer-free ever since.
Just days after the treatments ended, he left for graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Going from a state school to a prestigious engineering institution, he was floored on the first day when a professor expected everyone to have already learned the material in the first six chapters of an algorithms textbook. Maxwell had to quickly catch up on his own but says he loved learning so much at once.
And though he feared he couldn't afford his master's degree, he found work with the research and development arm of the U.S. Army and left school debt-free.
He had intended to go to Illinois to work toward a Ph.D., but ultimately the cancer changed his priorities.
"I was interested in going out and making tools for people to use," he says.
JPL came to recruit at his school in fall 1993, and he remembers telling the recruiter how he was fascinated by NASA's Voyager mission -- twin spacecraft that had photographed Jupiter in unprecedented detail. His excitement apparently made an impression: He landed an interview at JPL in January 1994, and started his job that June.
Today, he lives on a quiet Pasadena street, in a cozy house that boasts some of his nerdy treasures, including an extensive collection of science fiction books. "But then my life became science fiction," he said, explaining why he's reading more Shakespeare and Dickens these days. As he shows off his collection, his cat Molly purrs, demanding his attention. The brown and black marbling on her otherwise white fur looks somewhat like the Martian landscape, although that's not why he adopted her.
A glass-paneled cabinet hosts metallic "Star Wars" and Mars rover lunch boxes. There's a vial of a substance he calls KimSim, a material his girlfriend helped create to figure out how to rescue the Spirit rover after it got stuck in a "sand trap" of alien soil on Mars in 2009.
And there are stones from the Cotswolds, an area in England he bubbles with excitement over. He says, "Wait, wait," like a child about to demonstrate a new toy, and runs to get a book filled with images of the region. He likes the views from the ground better than the aerial shots -- ground-level is more like what a rover would see, he explains.
The wider, well-manicured street perpendicular to his own, with larger houses and roses growing on front lawns, is the sort of place where he'd always wanted to live, but he says the houses are "wicked, ridiculous, crazy expensive." Still, he loves the house he bought, with the added bonus of a lemon tree growing at its side.
It's a bit like how he loves his job driving a vehicle on Mars, even though he dreamed of becoming an astronaut.
"Things in my life aren't quite how I pictured them," he said, "but they rhyme."
At NASA, not just a sojourner
It's been 18 years, but Maxwell still occasionally interrupts himself to say things like "I can't get over that I work at a place called the Spacecraft Assembly Facility" when he mentions that building at JPL.
For the first couple of months there, Maxwell felt like he was in a foreign country where he didn't speak the language. He says it was fun to be clueless about the acronyms his colleagues were throwing around. "Now, I'll use 10 acronyms in a sentence and won't think twice about it," he says, "but you kind of have to pick up the culture."
He started out working on software to decode data from spacecraft. He also wrote software to help coordinate various teams working around the world to get commands to spacecraft.
In the mid-1990s, Maxwell was asked if he wanted to work on a mission called Mars Pathfinder. Maxwell had no idea what that was, and working on the team didn't appeal to him.
What he didn't know was that Mars Pathfinder would mark the first time NASA had sent an untethered robotic device to another planet. The 90-day mission was carried out by a rover named Sojourner.
"I just thought that was super cool, that really just captured my imagination, that you could go for a walk on another planet," he says. "Not with your squishy, frail, human body, but you could design a robot body that would go to Mars for you."
Although he passed up that opportunity, another chance came in 1999 when Brian Cooper, who'd driven Sojourner, approached Maxwell about developing rover-driving software for the next Mars mission.
"More or less before the words were out of his mouth -- like, 'Do you want to come work on this project?' -- I was like, "YES! Yes! I'd like to come work on this project, that'd be the coolest thing in the world, yes!"
That mission was eventually scrapped, but their efforts were put toward a different endeavor that did take off: Spirit and Opportunity, the twin Mars exploration rovers that launched in the summer of 2003.
Maxwell helped write the software that rover drivers would use for the pair, as well as for Curiosity. He would soon move from writing software to using it to command -- and ultimately drive -- the rovers.
His first time commanding a rover was on his 33rd birthday, in 2004. Spirit hadn't started moving across the Mars surface yet, but Maxwell and his colleague were checking out the instruments. Maxwell told the rover to ignore the state of a switch on one of the instruments -- not exactly driving, he said, "but by golly, I commanded a Mars rover that day."
The real drama came about three weeks later when he got behind the wheel, so to speak. He remembers obsessing over what he had to do, checking everything multiple times, before sending the driving instructions.
He remembers going home afterwards: "I'm lying there, looking at the ceiling, realizing there's a robot on another planet doing what I told it to. And that notion of, 'I'm getting to do this. I'm not dreaming about this anymore. It's real for me now.'
"I reach out across 100 million miles of emptiness and move something on the surface of another planet. That feeling has never left me."
The opportunity to drive
You might think a rover driver would control the vehicle using a joystick and virtual reality interface, much like a video game. That's not how it works. The reason for that: Signals take at least four minutes to travel from Earth to Mars (it could take up to 20 minutes, depending on where the planets are in their orbits), and then the same amount of time for confirmation data to come back.
So rover drivers don't tell the vehicle to move forward and then wait several minutes for confirmation that it happened before sending the next command. Instead, drivers spend their days writing directions for what the rover will do the next day, sometimes even a few days if it's a holiday weekend.
Maxwell and colleagues spend the Martian night generating a single batch of commands, which they send to the rover after the vehicle sees sunrise. Drivers work in overlapping 8- to 10-hour shifts preparing the rover for the day ahead. "It's as if we're e-mailing the rover its to-do list for the entire day," Maxwell explains. And at the end of its day, the rover sends information back saying what it did. During the Martian night, the rover goes to sleep.
That might sound risky, letting a vehicle roam around on a planet for several hours without someone guiding its every move in real time. But safety checks are built in. Curiosity will know how far its wheels are moving up and down, so it will stop if it heads into something deeper or higher than the drivers had planned. In that sense, the rover is more like a boat than a plane -- stopping is a fine course of action if additional direction is needed, Maxwell explains.
Curiosity can travel up to about 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) per minute, says rover driver John Wright, but in practice it will go a lot slower because the science team will want it to stop and examine its surroundings. A rover may stop and take photos, or -- as will be the case with Curiosity -- the scientists will want it to stop to perform chemical analyses.
Photos the rover takes of its surroundings help the drivers determine where to send it next. The drivers use a 3-D simulation created from the photos to visualize what the rover is seeing. The virtual model of Mars lets drivers work out which commands to transmit each day. Video games have helped several rover drivers hone their skills, including Maxwell, since driving on Mars requires planning and multidimensional thinking.
Any game that shows a large open world, such as "World of Warcraft," can hone these skills, says Cooper, the first rover driver and the only person to have driven all three rovers NASA has landed on Mars.
"You're essentially driving a robot with a keyboard 100 million miles away," says Maxwell. "You can't always believe what the simulator tells you. If anything does go wrong, there's no one there to hit the panic switch."
Besides being manually controlled, the rover also has the capability to drive by itself, detecting hazards through cameras and driving around them. This autonomous mode takes more time, however, so it's employed less often.
Curiosity landed in Gale Crater, where it may find evidence the area once was a lake. It will take at least a year to drive Curiosity to its ultimate destination, Mount Sharp, where the rover will examine layers of sediment for organic molecules, which would be signs -- but still not proof -- that life may have existed on the planet.
Maxwell will see some of the images Curiosity takes before anyone else does, but he loves that the public will get to view them soon after on NASA's website. "I get to take everybody in the world along in the backseat," he said.
Beyond rover driving, Maxwell genuinely loves the science of Mars. The rover science team has its own busy agenda, but during the mission involving Spirit and Opportunity, Maxwell would point out rocks that might be interesting to examine further, or suggest photographing the sunset on a given day. Sometimes the science team would take him up on his ideas.
"He's always looking to try to get as much out of the vehicles as possible," says Squyers, lead scientist of the Mars Exploration Rover mission, which involved Spirit and Opportunity. "Scott is, within the bounds of safety, one of the most enthusiastic rover drivers there is."
The spirit of his first car
There's a special love that Maxwell has for Spirit, the first rover he ever drove. Spirit was only supposed to last about 90 days, but the rover kept operating for more than five years.
When Spirit got stuck in May 2009, Maxwell felt like he was in an Indiana Jones movie, trying to rescue the vehicle. The rover's wheels broke through a crust and the vehicle fell into a sandy trap called Troy, like a car driving into a pool of flour. Even before the accident, one of its six wheels had quit working.
Maxwell and his colleagues were almost able to pull Spirit out, but not quite. They had figured out a technique, but with the Martian winter coming, the solar panels were tilted away from the sun. Plus a second wheel malfunctioned during escape tactics. Over the winter, something broke -- Maxwell says humanity may never know what.
The Opportunity rover, which Maxwell has also had a hand in driving, is still operating. Still, he is nostalgic about the Spirit.
"It's very much the way you feel about your first car," Maxwell says. "Spirit was my first car. She was just on Mars. That was the emotional closeness that I felt to her."
Even after it stopped moving, Spirit was able to continue scientific operations until March 2010, when NASA lost communication with it. The place it got stuck turned out to be extremely interesting -- while trying to escape, the rover found soil rich in minerals called sulfates, a component of steam, suggesting that there may have once been conditions on Mars able to support life.
It -- or rather "she," says Maxwell -- accomplished this with an attitude of "persistence and determination and never say die."
Scientists kept trying to communicate until May 2011, when they gave up.
"Spirit will be there for a million years, but I sure hope that there are Martian cities surrounding her," Maxwell says. He envisions trails commemorating the rovers' paths and hopes people someday will be "walking the Spirit trail."
Loving to be curious
Given the busy schedule and odd hours, it helps to be in love with someone who works on Mars, too.
Maxwell and Lichtenberg had been hearing each other as disembodied voices on NASA conference calls for years, while Lichtenberg was a graduate student at the University of Washington in St. Louis. She visited JPL with her adviser on the five-year anniversary of the Spirit and Opportunity mission.
They met in person at a group lunch; each thought the other was attractive. Maxwell spent a couple days working up the nerve to ask her out and finally did on the day beloved science fiction author Ray Bradbury gave a surprise speech at NASA. Maxwell began by asking her, "Is anybody doing anything tonight?" She said a group was going out; he replied that he wanted to go out with a cute girl he'd just met. After she realized he meant her, she said yes -- much to Maxwell's astonishment.
Last week, just days before the Curiosity landing, the couple had dinner with me at a quaint Mediterranean restaurant in Pasadena's Old Town. When they weren't holding hands, Maxwell was putting his arm around the back of her chair. As they said goodnight for the evening, they kissed three times -- and both said they planned to stay up late and sleep in to practice shifting to Mars time.
Part of the fun of working on Curiosity will be living on Mars time for about the first 90 days, Maxwell says. The days on Mars are 40 minutes longer than on Earth. That means Maxwell might start at 8 a.m. Monday, 8:40 a.m. Tuesday, 9:20 a.m. Wednesday and so on. Before long, he'll be working overnights.
"I like to say I sleep 40 minutes more, I actually work 40 minutes [more]," he said.
Lichtenberg is the co-lead on the science planning team for the Curiosity mission. That means she helps other scientists decide what they will do with the rover every day, given how much power and time the tasks will take and how much data will be required.
On their first date about three and half years ago, Lichtenberg was sold when Maxwell told her that while healing from a martial arts-induced shoulder injury, he decided he would read all of Shakespeare's plays. And he did.
"He really sticks to his convictions, and I really, really like that about him," Lichtenberg says. "Being around him makes me want to be a better person."
Maxwell insists that Lichtenberg did not move to Southern California for him. She agrees that she wanted to work at JPL anyway, but Maxwell was at least "a small bit" of the decision. These days they work down the hall from each other, and although they are on the same operations team, they are assigned to different shifts.
The affectionate, happy partners share a love of Mars and, if possible, would both like to go some day.
"If NASA set up a flight tomorrow, I'd be the first one. They wouldn't have to bring me back," Maxwell says.
He'd be gone in a snap, even if there were just one seat. Lichtenberg, although she likes the idea of visiting Mars, is not sure she'd just pack up and go by herself.
"I totally understand that you would," she tells him. "It's OK, I accept that. Totally."
"It's not that I like Mars better than I like you," he assures her. They peck each other on the lips.
But there is something powerful that draws Maxwell to Mars. It's partly the idea of being on the surface of another world. There's also his own mortality. He believes the radiation treatments he had in his 20s will ultimately lead to a different form of cancer (he actually had a possible thyroid cancer a few years ago, which turned out to be benign). Maxwell estimates -- without a hint of regret in his voice -- that he has about 20 years left to live.
"I've only got so long anyway, you might as well make it something really good. Right? You might as well make it count," he tells me and Lichtenberg. "And what am I going to do that's going to be better than actually going to Mars? Go on, name three things I'm going to do that are better than that."
"Drive a Mars rover," says Lichtenberg.
Maxwell agrees his job is "awesome" but says going to Mars would be "even better."
With that level of passion and spirit, Maxwell may one day indeed follow his Curiosity.


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Lane's story culminates as she and the remaining Fellowship follow their own paths to Gondor. Lane finally thinks she has a shot at the happiness she's never before experienced, but choices are yet to be made if she ever wants a taste of it. Will she be allowed to stay in Middle-earth, or will she even be given a choice?
Categories: Book-verse, Movie-verse Characters: Aragorn, Beregond, Bergil, Denethor, Elladan, Elrohir, Eomer, Eowyn, Erkenbrand, Eru / Iluvatar, Faramir, Gandalf / Olorin, Gimli, Halbarad, Imrahil, Ioreth, Legolas, Merry, Namo / Mandos, Nazgûl, Original Character, Pippin, Sauron, The Fellowship, Théoden, Vaire
Genres: Action/Adventure, Angst, Drama, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Romance
Warnings: AU (alternate universe), Character Death, Graphic Sex, Rape, Torture, Violence
Series: Protect and Serve
Chapters: 15 Table of Contents
Completed: Yes Word count: 100730 Read Count: 25097

subset: commoncrawl


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The Detroit Water and Sewerage Department is putting businesses on notice that it will shut off water service if they don't pay their bills following recent efforts to crack down on residential customers who are in arrears.
The department planned to send warning letters this week to about 200 commercial and industrial customers with accounts listed as more than 60 days overdue, including a golf business and a cemetery, The Detroit News reported.
Active commercial and industrial sites account for about one-third of the $90 million in past-due bills that the department said it is owed. The top 40 on that list, according to the department, have past-due accounts ranging from around $35,000 to more than $430,000.
"All we're doing is taking enforcement action to protect the integrity of the system," said Bill Johnson, a department spokesman. "We have not been very aggressive in cutting off water over the years. We admit that. The people will pay their bill when they're forced to pay their bill.
"Part of it is our fault. We've never had a strict enforcement policy on paying the bills."
The department in March announced plans to crack down on residential customers, leading to thousands of shutoffs and prompting protests from longtime Democratic U.S. Rep. John Conyers of Detroit and others who want water service restored to those homes.
More than 22,700 accounts in the city are listed as commercial or industrial. The department said they collectively owe $33.8 million.
One owner of a Warren real estate group that owes more than $80,000 said the problem with its account stems from a tenant.
"The property doesn't have active water on the site — not even a meter," said Michael Samhat, president of Crown Enterprises Inc. "We're not sure how this bill got generated. Right now, we're working with the tenant trying to help them and we want to work with the city of Detroit water department."
The News and the Detroit Free Press reported that the water department has unveiled a $1 million program to help low-income residents pay their water bills. The program is funded by a voluntary program that takes 50 cents from each paying residential customer's bill, along with varying amounts from commercial customers, the department said.
Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, following a Tuesday news conference, said the delinquent water bills "could have been handled in a far more sensitive way."
"We should have had funds for those who genuinely can't pay set up ahead of time," Duggan told reporters. "We should have had more rigorous notices before we saw people turning off water."


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On Tuesday, I was at the Accessibility 2.0 conference hosted by AbilityNet. The conference introduced some important topics currently effecting web professional, touching on accessibility with Silverlight, support of HTML5 and WAI-ARIA on assistive technologies as well broader discussion on accessibility on mobile devices. The events were organised into a series of presentation and discussion panels from a group of distinguished speakers
Christian Heliman keynote "Finite Incatatem – Accessibility is not black magic" slides are available on slideshare, the main focus of his presentation was to increase the profile of universal design (accessible design/development practices) in web development and particularly to include accessibility early on the development phase. He also, introduced the work done on Easy YouTube player an attempt at making YouTube videos more accessible to people with disabilities. Further presentation on making multimedia accessible is presented by Open University at Techshare 2009, with an interesting comparison of media players including easy-youtube.
Silverlight accessibility was touched on by Saqib Shaikh (Microsoft), who introduced Silverlight as cross platform, cross browser, open standard and demonstrated accessibility features built into the platform such as colour contrast, keyboard access and the potential to create accessible videos. A series of demonstration were made showing how screen readers (NVDA) interacted with an open source accessible Silverlight media player particularly reading closed captions/audio descriptions from W3C timed text files associated with the video.
Steve Faulkner presented on HTML5 and WAI-ARIA, he reported current browser support for HTML5 is limited, with Microsoft Internet Explorer yet to fully support this. HTML5 form controls were poorly supported by assistive technology at present, with very few exposing even basic keyboard access. The HTML5 canvas element was criticised for being an accessibility black hole, since no content is exposed to assistive technologies, although workaround for producing accessible content have been suggested. Video element was also criticised for lacking support for caption/subtitling at least in the first release of the standard.
Steve compared WAI-ARIA support reporting support was much better across browsers and assistive technologies such as JAWS, NVDA and ORCA. JAWS public beta shows support for a variety of roles from Drag-drop to ARIA Live Region used commonly with AJAX. He also demonstrated the use of landmark roles to mark specific regions of a page and quaintly described as "super charged skip to content links".
Two discussion panels were held during the day, the first was on "Accessibility beyond the desktop discussion" and second on "To comply or not to comply? That is the question". The first considered the impact of mobile technology on accessibility and considered how content could be presented accessibly to wide group of people. The second considered the challenges of producing accessible web solutions within the constraints of a work environment, presenting the issues faced by developers and offered recommendations. Detailed transcripts of the discussion panels to follow shortly with links to slides as and when published by AbilityNet.
Update – Speaker presentations
- Keynote: Finite Incantatem (Easy Slideshare) Christian Heilmann
- Accessibility with HTML 5 and WAI ARIA (Powerpoint, 972k) Steve Faulkner
- Silverlight Accessibility (Powerpoint, 108kb) Saqib Shaikh (Microsoft)
- Considerations for Accessible Mobile Application GUI Design (PDF, 1.5MB) Greg Fields (Blackberry)


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Lithia Park Ashland, OR
Hal, It was a great day for a run! Thanks for organizing. Hey, are you ever going to do the results by age? The older runners-well, it kinda keeps us keeping on! Linda Murphy
Free Pictures!! 2012 - Tar N Trail
Great weather! Good training run! Good crowd.
Only one minor glitch--I believe we were one place off on the times. My stopwatch said 51:22, and my listed time was a half minute slower for the results. No bigge.
If you like trails and hills, the Britt Woods' training runs begin Monday's at 6 pm on March 19th by the kiosk above the Britt amphitheater. We go one to six miles, with different ability levels.
The 11th Britt Woods 10k is Saturday, July 28th. We have a staggered start based on age and sex--you could win this one!
Keep on running, and best regards,
Dr. Doug Naversen
Hi Linda - I'll get those ages up ASAP, just preliminary. Glad you enjoyed the run and the spectacular weather.
@Doug - we may have flipped your pull tag in the chute with the runner before you on the results list. I'll look into it, thanks.
Best race I've run in the great state of Oregon! Thanks for marking such a beautiful course! I was happy all day, what a great way to start out the weekend with a great group of people. Thanks again for putting on such a fun and well run event:)
To Hal and the entire crew of volunteers - thank you for your efforts putting on the 2012 edition of the TnT, much appreciated. Loved the revised course - maybe it should be a 'keeper'. Like Heather I was "happy" all day!
It was a perfect day for a perfect race. A BIG THANK YOU to Hal and Carli and all the supporting volunteers.
If any of you runners you really enjoy the TNT race there is another 10 miler mountain run up at Applegate lake June 17th @ 9am. This race is part of the Granite-Man multisport weekend. Grab your running shoes and join us for fun filled events all weekend long. ..


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HP Deskjet F4180 Driver Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10 XP, Vista, Mac OS And Linux
In this article we provide HP Deskjet F4180 drivers for windows, Mac and linux operating systems. Choose the appropriate driver for your computer's operating system.
HP Deskjet F4180 Driver
Supports To:
♦ Windows XP
♦ Windows Vista
♦ Windows 7
♦ Windows 8
♦ Windows 8.1
♦ Windows 10
♦ Mac Os
♦ Linux
Type 1: The procedure of installing the driver for HP Deskjet F4180.
Procedure to install HP Deskjet F4180 printer driver Using the installation CD
- Make sure your Notebook is equipped with CD / DVD drive.
- Require disc installation for HP Deskjet F4180 printers that are included also with accessories bundle.
- USB cable to connect to your HP Deskjet F4180 printer.
Driver Install Procedure for HP Deskjet F4180 via CD / DVD drive.
- Activate your notebook to install HP Deskjet F4180 printer drivers.
- Until if asked for you to connect USB to notebook do not connect.
- Then insert the CD / DVD into your notebook and then run the setup file. This will trigger to start the installation wizard. Then follow the instructions to complete.
- While the next process you will be asked to connect your USB cable with HP Deskjet F4180 and notebook printers.
- So wait and connect if it already asks you to connect it. This process will detect the HP Deskjet F4180 printer and then continue to advance to the next step if everything goes smoothly.
- Change the steps in the wizard until the installation is complete.
- Now you can to try printing with your HP Deskjet F4180 printer.
Type 2: Processor Installed HP Deskjet F4180 Printer Driver by Using Setup File (Without CD / DVD)
- Download the appropriate HP Deskjet F4180 driver file with your operating system from the link below.
- USB cable is connected with HP Deskjet F4180.
How To Install HP Deskjet F4180 Driver Using the Setup File You Have Downloaded Earlier.
- Turn on your notebook
- Until unless you would advise to connect the USB cable of your printer to the notebook, do not connect.
- Download the setup file from the link below if not already download it.
- Then run the setup file as administrator. This will trigger to start the installation wizard. Then follow the instructions that appear to completion.
- At the time of this wizard execution process all you have to do is connect the USB cable between HP Deskjet F4180 and your notebook.
- So wait and then connect only when asking you to connect it. This process will detect the HP Deskjet F4180 and proceed to the next step if everything goes well.
- Follow every step that comes out in the wizard and until the installation is complete.
- Now your printer is ready for use as HP Deskjet F4180 software is installed successfully.
Type 3: Manual Install Procedure for HP Deskjet F4180 Printer.
Using the "Add a Printer" Option On Your Windows Operating System, Do the Following.
- Download the HP Deskjet F4180 printer driver that suits your notebook operating system from the recommended links below.
- The USB cable is connected to your printer HP Deskjet F4180.
How To Install HP Deskjet F4180 Drivers Using Downloaded Driver Files.
- Turn on your notebook
- Just connect the USB cable between the notebook with your printer.
- Extract the zip driver files that have been downloaded earlier.
- Then click Start button and type in word "Printer". You will find options like "Add a printer". Then select it.
- The next instruction will ask you to show where the driver is located. Then do it according to progress.
- Follow the commands that come out during the installation process to complete.
Installation Procedure HP Deskjet F4180 Driver For Macintosh:
- Click the link to download the driver for your macbook.
- The driver will automatically start downloading to the macbook.
- With the Safari browser on your macbook, the downloaded file will be saved in the Downloads folder by default. You can check the progress of the download by looking at the download progress icon that appears in the top right corner of the macbook Safari browser window.
- Then click 2 times the driver file you just downloaded earlier to launch start the installation process.
- Follow the instructions to complete.
HP Deskjet F4180 Driver for Windows (32-bit) – (64-bit) and Macintosh Operating System.
Operating System(s): Windows 10 (32-Bit), Windows 10 (64-Bit), Windows 8.1 (32-Bit), Windows 8.1 (64-Bit), Windows 8 (32-Bit), Windows 8 (64-Bit), Windows 7 (32-Bit), Windows 7 (64-Bit), Windows XP (32-Bit), Windows XP (64-Bit)
- HP Deskjet F4180 Windows XP Printer Driver Download (162.90 MB)
- HP Deskjet F4180 Windows 7 Printer Driver Download (245.67 MB)
- HP Deskjet F4180 Windows 8, 8.1 Printer Driver Download (218.9 MB)
Operating System(s): Mac OS X 10.12, Mac OS X 10.11, Mac OS X 10.10, Mac OS X 10.9, Mac OS X 10.8
- HP Deskjet F4180 Mac Printer Driver Download (135.04 MB)
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Horseback riding tours
Rides in
Intro to USA
Guest Ranches
Riding Clinics
Guest Ranches
Working Ranches
Cattle Drives
Horse Drives
Wilderness Rides
Pack Trips
Inn to Inn Rides
Short Getaways
Family Vacations
Women Only
- Choose Continent -
South America
Central America
Northern Africa
North America
Eastern Africa
Southern Africa
Middle East
Remotely located in the Wind River Mountains, the ranch lies at the edge of the Popo Agie Wilderness area of the Shoshone National Forest, the world's first National Forest! At 9,200 feet above sea level, you will find sparkling mountain lakes, glaciers and pristine forests right outside your cabin porch. Rustic comfort, western hospitality and friendly staff make this place perfect for your summer vacation! Your stay in a cozy handcrafted log cabin includes family style meals in the lodge, daily horseback riding, wild trout fishing, natural history hikes and wildlife watching.
Children age 6 and older are welcome and encouraged to participate in all ranch activities with their parents. Overnight wilderness pack trips are also available as an upgrade. You may also explore the nearby Wind River Indian Reservation, historic gold mining towns, Yellowstone Park or go white water rafting. Friendly and informal, the ranch has only 4 guest cabins, assuring you a personalized and relaxing wilderness experience.
This ranch is the perfect place for a family vacation, a summer retreat or a mountain getaway. Since 1973, the Allen family has owned and operated the ranch with their staff of friendly wranglers. Jim's grandfather was also a dude rancher and outfitter here during the 1920's and 1930's. You can rely on the Allen's to provide a memorable wilderness vacation.
Since we are Wyoming's highest and most remote dude ranch, we are off the grid. We are proud of the rustic comfort we provide guests in each painstakingly handcrafted log cabin. The ranch is small, yet friendly with propane lights, sink and heater in each cozy cabin with showerhouse nearby. Daylight lasts until bedtime during the summer ranch vacation season. After dinner, we often enjoy conversation on the porch of the main lodge while viewing spectacular alpine sunsets over towering snowcapped peaks. The nightly horse stampede is also exciting as 70 horses thunder through the corral gate to graze unfenced mountain meadows.
Experience our unique wilderness hospitality and the mountain grandeur that can only be enjoyed far away from noisy highways and crowded civilization. What better way to spend time and create lasting memories with your family.
Guest Ranch Camping Ride with pack horses Short Getaway Family Vacation Riding with fishing options
Next to daily riding, other activities on the ranch include hiking and trips to nearby hot springs. Also, for non-riders, or those that like fishing, the ranch is in a prime location to spend the days waiting for a tug on that fishing rod.
Cutthroat trout are the only native fish in the Wind River Range. However, thanks to the old-timers who horse packed young fingerlings in milk cans to secluded lakes, today you can also enjoy catching golden, rainbow, mackinaw, brook and beautifully colored hybrid trout.
These parts of the Winds are so vast that most folks sign up for one of our 5 - 7 day pack trips to reach just a few of the 30 lakes and many streams available from the ranch. We encourage catch and release fishing, but recommend fresh pan-fried trout at least once during your stay.
Approximate riding times for the pack trips are:
Middle Lake - 4 hrs/ 10 mi
Valentine Lake - 6 hrs/ 15 mi
Cliff Lake - 5 hrs/ 12 mi
Dutch Oven Lake - 5½ hrs/ 14 mi
Baer Lake - 5½ hrs/ 15 mi
Washakie Lake - 7 hrs/ 17½ mi
Lonesome Lake - 6½ hrs/ 17 mi
Grave Lake - 8 hrs/ 20 mi
The inlet of Grave Creek on Grave Lake is as far as we can go for a one day charge.
Baptiste and Mt. Hooker are a 10 hour ride and charged at two days.
Popo Agie Wilderness Area
The Popo Agie Wilderness was first established as a primitive area on March 2s, 1932. The area, containing 101,991 acres, was classified as wilderness by the Wyoming Wilderness Act of 1984. It is bounded by the Wind River Indian Reservation on the north, and the Bridger Wilderness on the Bridger- Teton National Forest on the west.
The Popo Agie Wilderness is within the boundaries of the Shoshone National Forest in western Wyoming. It lies immediately east of the Continental Divide, l8 miles west of Lander, 135 miles west of Casper, and 80 miles north of Rock Springs, Wyoming. It is accessible via trailheads which may be reached by US Highway 287, Wyoming Highway 131 and secondary roads.
The topography of the Popo Agie is very rough, consisting of high jagged peaks separating many beautiful stream courses in deep, narrow valleys and canyons along a 25-mile stretch of the southern Wind River Range. Sheer granite walls are prevalent. There are several permanent snowfields along the Continental Divide.
Wind River Peak, 13,255 feet in elevation is the highest peak associated with the Popo Agie. It is on the western boundary which is common with the Bridger Wilderness on the Bridger-Teton National Forest. Over twenty summits above 12,000 feet in elevation are present within the Popo Agie Wilderness. The lowest elevation, 8,400 feet, is at the point where the eastern boundary crosses the Middle Fork Popo Agie River.
Over 300 lakes and ponds are dispersed throughout the area. Headwaters of the Middle Fork Popo Agie, North Fork Popo Agie, and South Fork Little Wind Rivers originate here. All are tributaries of the Wind River.
The montane, subalpine, and alpine vegetative life zones are represented within the wilderness.
We breed, raise and train our own sturdy, gentle mountain-wise horses for your use on the ranch.
Lander area
Average High Temperature (°F)
Average Low Temperature (°F)
Average High Temperature (°C)
Average Low Temperature (°C)
Average Precipitation (days of rain)
The maximum summer temperatures in June, July and August rarely exceed 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Winter minimums may reach to 40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. There is no frost free period and snow can be expected during any month.
Average annual precipitation is between 25 and 30 inches and occurs chiefly in the form of snow. Occasional heavy rains occur during the summer and light thunderstorms are common during the afternoons.
Summer comes late to the high country and leaves early, so our season is late-June thru mid-September. Ice-out marks the beginning of good fishing and it comes to the highest lakes as late as mid-July. Snowdrifts can also block trails above timberline until then, but there are some beautiful lake basins accessible before that. July has abundant wildflowers, great fishing, and mosquitoes. August also has great fishing, no bugs, but more visitors. September is autumn with red and yellow leaves on the aspen and willows, great stream fishing, no people, but always the threat of snow. Proper planning and equipment will help you enjoy any season.
Keep in mind that the Wind River Mountains are in a remote wilderness area. Staying dry is essential for your safety. Cotton and down are cold when wet, however polar fleece, wool and Hollofil are warm when wet. Hypothermia is more prevalent on summer camping trips than winter, so be prepared and use proper outdoor clothing and gear for an enjoyable wilderness vacation!
For pack trips: Pack your gear in nylon zipper duffels 26" long, or similar. No large army duffels. Try to limit personal gear to 30 lbs. Buy your fishing licenses before coming up to Dickinson Park. Fishing rods must be in hard cases, shorter is safer on a pack horse.
The only thing between you and the elements is your clothing. Plenty of layers (including fleece, wool, polypro and dacron) and GOOD QUALITY 2 piece rainsuits are essential. Ponchos are extremely dangerous because they spook horses when it's windy. The mountains are noted for unpredictable and changing weather and at 11,000 ft. elevation with no timber (Bears Ears trail esp.), high winds and sideways rain and sleet storms are not an uncommon occurrence; but so is lots of sunshine! Sorry we cannot guarantee the weather; please come prepared for either extreme! We suggest putting your name on all your gear and on outside of your bags, we cannot be responsible for lost items.
We do not provide alcoholic beverages but you may furnish your own.
This list is only a guideline for you
For Cabins:
Average ratings
(see details below)
The Ranch Vacation is a stationary ride, so all nights will be spent at the ranch.
The Pack Trip involves 3 or 5 nights tenting.
The ranch is the highest one in Wyoming and the only ranch at the edge of the 100,000 acre Popo Agie (pronounced Puh-Posia) Wilderness Area. Since we are Wyoming's highest and most remote dude ranch, we are off the grid. We are proud of the rustic comfort we provide guests in each painstakingly handcrafted log cabin. Daylight lasts until bedtime during the summer ranch vacation season when we light our propane lights, free from electricity. After dinner, we often enjoy conversation on the porch of the main lodge while viewing spectacular alpine sunsets over towering snowcapped peaks. The nightly horse stampede is also exciting as 70 horses thunder through the corral gate to graze unfenced mountain meadows.
With only 4 guest cabins and a capacity of 10-15 ranch guests per week, we offer you a friendly, personalized dude ranch experience. Cabins are complete with bedding, pillows, and towels, as well as a wood stove for heating. Facilities include a traditional ranch cookhouse for meals and shared shower houses and outhouses.
Experience our unique wilderness hospitality and the mountain grandeur that can only be enjoyed far away from noisy highways and crowded civilization. The stars at night, you will be in awe at the vast expanse of the milky way. With no distraction of town lights, the skies become a stargazers paradise. What better way to spend time and create lasting memories with your family.
There is no laundry or WIFI available at the ranch.
Room Options
If we are unable to find another rider to share, single supplement is mandatory.
For the pack trips, you will stay in 4-person dome tents. You will be sleeping on the ground/ a sleeping pad if you choose to bring one. You will need to bring your own sleeping bag. Washrooms are trench outhouses and bathing can be done in the streams. Please bring a solar charger to charge any electronics.
Your stay includes three meals a day, cooked at the ranch. Meals are hearty, with meat three times a day, and done in class ranch style. Coffee, juices and tea are available throughout the day. Feel free to bring your own alcohol.
Dietary Restrictions
We can cater to dietary restrictions if given prior notice.
This trip includes
and can accommodate special dietary requests.
Valid passport required by all nationals referred to in the chart ; validity varies - for most countries the passport must be valid for at least six months from the date on which the holder enters the USA. If not, the holder will be admitted until the expiration date on the passport; check with the embassy (see Contact Addresses).
Passport Note
(a) For nationals included in the Visa Waiver Program (see below), passports must be valid for at least 90 days from date of entry.
(b) All travellers entering the USA under the Visa Waiver Program require individual machine-readable passports. Children included on a parent's passport also now require their own machine-readable passport. Travellers not in possession of machine-readable passports will require a valid USA entry visa.
(c) Passports issued on or after 26 October 2005 will need to have a biometric identifier in order for the holder to travel visa free under the Visa Waiver Program (VWP). Machine-readable passports issued between 26 October 2005 and 25 October 2006 require a digital photograph printed on the data page or an integrated chip with information from the data page. Machine-readable passports issued on or after 26 October 2006 will require an integrated chip with information from the data page (e-passport).
The US has announced new measures that require all travellers to provide details online 72 hours prior to travel.
ESTA: The Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) came into force on 12 January 2009. It is a fully automated, electronic system for screening passengers before they begin travel to the United States under the Visa Waiver Program. ESTA applications must be submitted at least 72 hours before travel to the USA. Some websites may charge you for the service but you can apply online for free at www.dhs.gov. The granting of an ESTA does not guarantee entry to the USA.
New Requirements for Travellers: As of 23 January 2007 all persons, including US citizens, travelling by air between the USA and Canada, Central and South America, the Caribbean and Bermuda are required to present a valid passport, or other approved document, when entering or re-entering the USA. Similar requirements for those travelling by land or sea will be introduced on 1 June 2009.
For further details about the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, visit the website of the US Department of State: (website: http://travel.state.gov/travel/cbpmc/cbpmc_2223.html).
Not required by nationals referred to in the chart above for stays of up to 90 days except:
1. nationals of Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Romania and Slovak Republic, who do require a visa.
Visa Note
(a) Landed Immigrants of Canada and British residents of Bermuda who are citizens of, and have valid passports from, Commonwealth countries or Ireland are not eligible to enter the USA without a visa. (b) All passengers using US airports for transit purposes are required to obtain a transit visa. This does not affect qualified travellers travelling visa free under the Visa Waiver Program. (d) To qualify for visa-free travel under the Visa Waiver Program, nationals must travel on a valid passport, for holiday, transit or business purposes only and for a stay not exceeding 90 days. (e) Passengers must have the full address and ZIP code of where they are staying in the USA to be able to fully complete the I-94W form. Note: Airlines are also required to collect passenger details, including the address of their first night's accommodation in the USA, before they board the aircraft. (f) 2. Holders of UK passports with the endorsement British Subject, British Dependent Territories Citizen, British Protected Person, British Overseas Citizen or British National (Overseas) Citizen do not qualify for the Visa Waiver Program. A passport which states holder has right of abode or indefinite leave to remain in the UK does not qualify for visa free travel. (g) A visa does not expire with the expiry of the holder's passport. An unexpired, endorsed visa in an expired passport may be presented for entry into the USA, as long as the visa itself has not been cancelled, is undamaged, is less than 10 years old and is presented with a valid non-expired passport, provided that both passports are for the same nationality. (h) Nationals of countries not referred to in the chart above are advised to contact the embassy to check visa requirements (see Contact Addresses).
Types of Visa and Cost
Tourist, Business, Transit and Student: US$131.
Visas may be used for travel to the USA until the date it expires. Some visas are valid for multiple entries. The length of stay in the USA is determined by US immigration officials at the time of entry but is generally six months; there is, however, no set time.
Applications to:
Embassy or consulate (see Contact Addresses).
Working Days Required
Usually five after interview. Some cases may take up to 12 weeks – check with embassy/consulate.
Passport Required?
Other EU
Visa Required?
Other EU
Return Ticket Required?
Other EU


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The Xbox 360 console software is updated periodically with new features. If you're having one of the following problems, updating your console software might fix it:
Note The version of the console software available here is from 5/22/2018.
If you've already tried to install the update and it failed, go to Troubleshoot problems with an update to your Xbox 360 console.
The easiest way to update your console software is to connect to Xbox Live. To update your console by using Xbox Live, all you need is an Internet connection.
To connect your Xbox 360 console to the Internet, see the Xbox 360 First-Time Connection Solution.
If you receive a connection error, try using the Xbox 360 Connection Error Solution.
If you haven't connected to Xbox Live in a while, your console software might need updating. If a game disc includes a newer version of the console software than you currently have, the game disc will prompt you to install the update when you start the game.
Note If you choose not to update your console software, you'll receive a prompt to update the next time you start the game. Some Kinect games require a console software update to work properly.
If you can't connect your Xbox 360 console to the Internet, you can copy the console update from your computer to a USB flash drive and then install it on the console.
Note The USB flash drive must use the FAT32 file system. For information about how to format a USB flash drive, see the "Format a USB flash drive" section of Using USB flash drives with Xbox 360.
You can update your Xbox 360 console software by downloading the update to your computer from Xbox.com, burning the update to a CD or DVD, and then installing the update on your console. Here's how:
I get an error code when I try to update my console. What does it mean?
If you see a specific error code or status code, use the search box on the Error & Status Code Search page to find information about how to solve the problem.
What does the update cost?
Nothing. It's free.
How can I tell if my console software is up to date?
Consoles connected to Xbox Live will have the latest console software. When you connect to Xbox Live, your console automatically prompts you to update your software if an update is available.
Do I have to install the update?
No. However, if you want to play or communicate on Xbox Live, you must have the latest console software. New games might also require the update before you can play them. Also, Kinect games might not play properly if your console software is not up to date.
Can I go back to the old software version if I change my mind?
No. An updated console will stay updated.
I can't connect to Xbox Live. What should I do?
If you can't connect to Xbox Live, try using the Xbox 360 Connection Error Solution.
To see what other users are saying about these topics, or to ask your own questions, go to our Xbox Support Forums and view the following conversations:
Please note that Xbox Support Forums content is available only in English. To translate Xbox Support Forums content into another language, paste the URL into an online translation tool such as Bing Translator.
Thanks for your feedback!
Provide feedback for this topic
Would you like to contact Support regarding the "How to get a new Xbox 360 update" issue you were reading about or a different issue?


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Through our travel trade partnerships we have created some of the most innovative Canadian travel products in the market.
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Reliability from prompt replies through to our 24 hour emergency service.
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Creativity in sourcing new products and understanding our clients' needs.
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Nobody does it quite like JacTravel.


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How we did it:
For any feedback, any questions, any notes or just for chat - feel free to follow us on social networks
Mark Seemann
"Dependency Injection in .NET" is a comprehensive guide that introduces DI to .NET developers. It covers core concepts and patterns, and introduces important DI frameworks, such as StructureMap, Windsor, and Spring.NET.
Jamie Kurtz, Brian Wortman
The ASP.NET MVC Framework has always been a good platform on which to implement REST-based services, but the introduction of the ASP.NET Web API Framework raised the bar to a whole new level. Now in release version 2.1, the Web API Framework has evolved into a powerful and refreshingly usable platform. This concise book provides technical background and guidance that will enable you to best use the ASP.NET Web API 2 Framework to build world-class REST services. New content in this edition includes: • New capabilities in Web API 2 (currently version 2.1). • Support for partial updates, or PATCH. • API versioning. • Support for legacy SOAP-based operations. • How to handle non-resource APIs using REST • How to best expose relationships between resources • JSON Web Tokens, CORS, CSRF Get ready for authors Jamie Kurtz and Brian Wortman to take you from zero to REST service hero in no time at all. No prior experience with ASP.NET Web API is required; all Web API-related concepts are introduced from basic principles and developed to the point where you can use them in a production system. A good working knowledge of C# and the .NET Framework are the only prerequisites to best benefit from this book. What you'll learn • Introduction to the REST architecture • How to design a REST API • New capabilities in ASP.NET Web API 2 • Understanding ASP.NET Web API controller activation • Automatic lifetime management for database connections and transactions • Using NHibernate with ASP.NET Web API • Easily secure a REST service, using standards-based authentication and authorization and JSON Web Tokens • Supporting legacy SOAP callers with ASP.NET Web API • How to expose relationships between resources • Supporting partial resource updates under REST • Web API versioning Who this book is for Intermediate level developers in .NET, REST, C# Table of Contents1. ASP.NET as a Service Framework 2. What is RESTful? 3. Designing Our Sample REST API 4. Building the Environment and Creating the Source Tree 5. Controllers, Dependencies, and Managing the Database Unit of Work 6. Securing the Service 7. Dealing with Relationships, Partial Updates, and Other Complexities 8. Leveraging new Web API Features to Simplify Your Code and Support Legacy Systems 9. Putting It All Together


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Hi All,
Just wanted to let you know that Greg and I will be making the trek out to Bourbonnais, IL July 7-8, to compete in at the Premier K9/SOPS PSA Trial.
I'm not sure if Greg is showing, but I'll be there with TJ...once again trying for a leg on the Level 3 Title.
Hope to see some of you there!!! (let me know if you want more info on location, etc)...


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Choose the Grid? Absolutely.
by Paul Knight. Average Reading Time: about 10 minutes.
Fanis Grammenos, a principal of Urban Pattern Associates, recently published an article at Planetizen.com titled "Choosing a Grid, or Not." The article addresses the question "What should be the preferred layout for a new neighborhood?" while focusing specifically on the grid plan. I encourage you to read the article, but to summarize here are three points that were made which I would like to focus on:
- Many grids with small blocks are inefficient due to their low developable land to total area ratios.
- Towns and cities throughout America and the world have either abandoned the grid or avoided the grid because they found it undesirable.
- Grid plans are outdated because many of them were established at a time when horse and buggies and unsustainable development patterns proliferated.
While I commend the thorough analysis that was done for the article and welcome the discourse on the grid plan, I must disagree with some of the conclusions that were drawn and the negative assessments that were presented. That being said, as a grid-enthusiast I feel compelled to defend the orthogonal grid on each of the above points.
1. Land Use Efficiency
With data on 20 different American grid plans, the article presents a comparative analysis looking specifically at "land use efficiency" (which I will shorten to "LUE"). LUE is defined as a simple ratio of sellable (or useable) land divided by total area including rights-of-way. Or, put another way:
LUE = Private Land / (Private Land + ROW's)
The idea behind this ratio makes sense: the more land available to be utilized per unit area the better. In other words, a city is more efficient when a maximum of available land is obtained with minimum access. In this view, a city that is comprised of an inordinate amount of land devoted to rights-of-way is considered inefficient since much of the city's land is used simply to access the rest of its land. Portland, OR is the main example highlighted in the article as an inefficient city because so much of the city's land is taken up by its rights-of-way (41%) leaving only 59% of it to be available for actual development.
While this analysis has some validity, the problem with LUE is that it makes suburban superblocks look highly efficient when we know this not to be the case. To get a more efficient reading using the LUE ratio you would have to minimize the number of rights-of-way. Superblocks do just this. They maximize their interiors and minimize their exteriors.
The rise and fall of cities is not based on the amount of land they have available alone. I propose to supplement or replace the LUE ratio with the concept of street frontage and access. What makes a grid plan so efficient is not the gross land devoted to one thing or another but the subdivision of the land itself into organizable and useable units. As an analogy, a pile of books on the floor is almost useless to the researcher who must be able to efficiently find and access information. The library fixes that problem by providing a framework of shelves within which books can be placed. The aisles between those shelves provide the access. Similarly, the fine-grained and orthogonal framework of rights-of-way in grid plans gives both organization and access to towns and cities.
Street frontage is critical in creating vibrant, varied, and sustainable places. More streets means more route options, more corner lots, more store fronts, more front yards, more access. It is not just the quantity of space that is important; the accessibility of space is equally as important. While a city composed of nothing but rights-of-way is useless so too is a city composed of nothing but private property.
The article's analysis shows that Portland only has 59% of its land available for development while Salt Lake City has 72%. This makes Salt Lake City appear to be much more efficient than Portland. However, if you calculate the amount of street frontage within an area you get an entirely different story. Within a 1.5 square mile area, Salt Lake City has 180,480 lineal feet of street frontage. The same area in Portland yields 474,000 lineal feet–that's 163% more than Salt Lake (see notes 1 and 2 below). Comparing these numbers, Portland's urban permeability is the clear winner. While Portland has less developable land than Salt Lake, it makes up for this with its superior distribution and access. If efficiency is the goal, one should promote quality of space over quantity of space.
Note #1: Even if you take into account the fact that Portland's small 200 foot blocks could only have at most 2 sides of front-facing lots (not 4) because the depth restricts it, Portland would still have 237,000 lineal feet of front-facing lots or 31% more than Salt Lake.
Note #2: This is not an argument necessarily supporting Portland's small 200 foot dimension which over time has proven to be difficult to work with. The point being made here is that LUE and street frontage are two different measures of efficiency with two different interpretations.
2. The Grid: Avoided and Abandoned
The article presents a number of quotes, references, and studies that all cast the grid in a poor light. For example:
If replication is any indication of merit, the historical record of towns that abandoned the original square mile gridded plan as they grow in size does not bode well for the simple grid.
While it is true that towns and cities have essentially abandoned the grid, this is not the grid's fault. Numerous other factors are responsible; chief among these are the unintended consequences following the Enabling Acts of the 1920's. The concept of the master street plan as specified in the Standard City Planning Enabling Act was intended to allow municipalities to establish streets ahead of time just as they did in Manhattan in 1811. Unfortunately this was not carried forward. Instead, the City Planning Act was overtaken by the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act and essentially forgotten. Zoning was adopted first because people were literally dying from their proximity to "incompatible uses" (houses next to coal-burning factories, etc). Zoning saved lives, but as we know today the States put the cart before the horse by addressing zoning first without the master street plan. Zoning provides no physical framework for a city in the way that a master street plan does, but as zoning gained in popularity, street planning lost its appeal. As states and cities lost their desire to plan and connect streets, the grid was given no where else to go.
Secondly, regulations began to attack the basic components of the grid including its small blocks, connected network, incremental development, etc. For example, half streets and dead-end streets are necessary for developers to share the burden of construction and create opportunities for future street connections. Early on, regulations forbade half streets and the connection of dead end streets (as they did in the 4th chapter of Atlanta's 1954 ordinance). This made the incremental development of grids difficult or impossible to execute. A developer could no longer leave a street open for future connections to be made; rather, they were forced to complete all of their streets fully within their property lines. Thus, it is not surprising that the cul-de-sac proliferated under such conditions. Add on top of this large minimum block size requirements and again the grid was being regulated out of existence.
Finally, the grid was simply unable to sustain the barrage of academic attacks from the likes of Ebenezer Howard, Le Corbusier, et al, who all pushed their utopian visions of Garden Cities and free flowing highways. Even John Reps, with his masterful work and clear understanding in his book The Making of Urban America, had little if any appreciation for the grid beyond viewing it as an historical artifact.
With all of this, it is no wonder that the grid has waned.
Finally, the article presents a quote by Christopher Alexander, et al, saying that:
"For thousands of years, historical cities avoided straight lines."
While it is certainly true that many historical cities either intentionally or unintentionally avoided the grid, this neither supports nor denies the counter claim that many cities did in fact embrace the grid. Hundreds if not thousands of Roman grid towns employed the 90-degree angle of the Cardo and Decumanus. Hundreds if not thousands of towns were framed by the Laws of the Indies. Thousands of years ago, the urbanized world was first introduced to the grid plan. Here at home, every one of the United States have utilized the grid plan. While the grid has been avoided in some places it has been celebrated in others for literally thousands of years.
3. The Grid is Outdated?
The article concludes by calling the grid "outdated" and proposing three steps for updating the grid:
Breaking the convenient, but outdated, uniformity of…American grids would be a first step… A second step would be to include block sizes that can accommodate building types and sizes unknown in the 1800s… A third step would be to adapt its streets for the now universal motorized mobility of cars, buses, trucks, trams and motorcycles, that is radically different from when oxen, equine and legs shared the transport of goods and people.
Before I respond, first take a look at the images below:
A dump truck in Savannah, Georgia.
Subway entrances, cell phones, semi-trucks, moving vans, pharmacies, high rises, baby strollers, and telephone booths in New York. There may be a Segway in there, too.
Multi-story parking deck in Chicago with Trump Tower in the background.
The grids of Savannah, New York, and Chicago were drawn hundreds of years ago. Yet you will notice that modern life has found its way within all of them. In each picture you see building types that were unknown in the 1800s and modern means of mobility that have advanced far beyond the horse. Still, the block dimensions that were handed to us have readily accommodated all of this.
When James Oglethorpe designed Savannah did he seek to accommodate dump trucks, movie theaters, and high rises? When the New York commissioners designed the Manhattan grid in 1811 did they knowingly prepare for subways, grease traps, and the Empire State Building? These early city planners were not fortune tellers. The plans they developed were not imbued with some divine power of foresight. Rather, the dimensions that were chosen have simply perpetuated themselves into our built environment over decades and centuries allowing these city blocks to accommodate one future after the next.
The fact that horses were driven through the streets of Chicago in no way prevented the accommodation of the future automobile; if anything they assisted it. After all, horse drawn carriages and modern minivans are roughly the same size. Rather than make predictions, these city planners simply left us with a dimensional framework that continues to work for us.
The repetitive, uniform, monotonous blocks of Manhattan have accommodated everything from farms to skyscrapers—literally. For example, the block at Madison Ave. / 71st St. used to be Lexington Farm–a rural farm surrounded on all sides by right-angled streets and sidewalks. Today, that exact same block has been dramatically repurposed to include skyscrapers. Now that is an efficient use of land.
With this in mind, it is critical that today's city planning professionals trust precedent. The grid simply works. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of precedents of the grid in every corner of the United States and every corner of the world that can easily support this claim. The grid is not outdated; far from it. The grid is timeless.
Grammenos raised some interesting and important questions in his article, but I disagree with some of the negative assessments of the orthogonal grid plan. I would be the first to concede the ineffectiveness of the grid if it consistently produced failing, boring, and undesirable towns and cities, but the precedent that the grid has set does not lead me to throw in the towel. Chicago, New Orleans, San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Oak Park, Great Falls, Owatonna–each one of these lively towns and cities share the exact same geometry. The grid is not a precedent in need of help; it is one which has already proven itself for centuries. In many cases, copying the grid uncritically would be OK.
To summarize my stance on the grid plan I wrote this poem in a previous blog post. In closing, I reproduce it here for your convenience and reading pleasure:
We live in rectangular places, we park in rectangular spaces / The orthogonal grid—it thrives, due to the way that we live our lives.


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Woodinville, Wa — For club owners who think outside the box, Scott Logan has a proposition: Why not Escape Ordinary? Escape Ordinary is the theme of the campaign that SportsArt Fitness, Woodinville, WA, has been using since October 2006 when the company introduced its Xtreme Series product line. Logan, marketing director at Sports-Art, says the Escape Ordinary campaign works on many levels, including challenging club owners to look beyond the largest equipment manufacturers to consider the equipment that his company has to offer.
"You can choose products outside your normal prism," Logan says. "It may actually help your business. It may give you a unique selling position to have different products if all your competitors have the same products."
As part of the campaign, the company redesigned its Web site, industry trade advertisements and marketing materials to include outdoor imagery rather than just the typical image of equipment. The company also developed a package of in-club materials, 80 percent of which are geared to increasing member sales and referrals for club owners. The company offers products for club owners to give members who generate the most referral members and signage for club owners to use to support that recruitment campaign. Signage about SportsArt's products also is available so club owners can inform members about a new piece of equipment.
SportsArt's campaign even extends to escaping the ordinary manufacturing and shipping processes. SportsArt was one of the first manufacturers of self-powered elliptical trainers and developed an AC servo motor for treadmills that uses 32 percent less power than normal AC servo and DC motors. The system could save club owners with 12 treadmills $3,000 per year.
SportsArt has stopped using Styrofoam for its commercial product packaging and instead uses 60 percent to 70 percent post-consumer paper in its cardboard packaging. In its Woodinville, WA, operation, SportsArt recycles paper, reuses boxes for parts packaging and is replacing standard bulbs with energy-saving fluorescent lights.
This eco friendliness pervades the design of SportsArt's production facilities in Asia, too. Rainwater and wastewater from the production of walk belts at the Tainan, Taiwan, factory water the grounds. Treated wastewater from the painting process washes dirt off the street and keeps the grounds green. At the Zhuhai, China, factory, such wastewater is used to flush the toilets. The Tainan plant has tinted windows that let in sunlight but keep heat out, reducing the need for electric lights, and a sandwich-like exterior wall that naturally cools the building.
Although the environmentally friendly aspect of the company won't stop, the Escape Ordinary campaign will end, but not for another 12 to 18 months, Logan says.
"It's just so strong and has been so well received," he says. The company's name recognition since implementing the campaign has increased from 30 percent two years ago to 70 or 80 percent today. The company's commercial sales also are up year to date from this time last year.
"As we look at some of the new products to be introduced in the fourth quarter [of this year] or first quarter [of next year], this campaign still has applications to those products," Logan says.


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(NAPSI)—The next time you consider expanding your family to include a hamster, Guinea pig, bunny or other small pet, you won't be alone. Some 16 million U.S. families currently co-habitate with small pets, according to the American Pet Products Association National Pet Owners Survey.
Of particular importance for small pets is their living environment. Unlike dogs and cats, which enjoy more mobility, most small animals are confined to enclosures that become their entire world.
Creature Comforts
Each item that goes into the pets' living spaces requires careful consideration, especially the bedding, as there is a wide variety of options, including wood shavings (pine, aspen and cedar), paper (reclaimed sludge-based and sludge-free), corncobs, pellets made of wood, paper, wheat and other fibers, and crinkled paper. They're not all alike, however. Some bedding products may actually contain toxins. A review by the Michigan State University Diagnostic Center for Population and Animal Health of previous testing confirmed that beddings made using reclaimed pulp fibers are "…more likely to contain detectable levels of dioxin than other products such as wood shavings or by-product papers."
Reclaimed pulp beddings are made with fibers collected from pulp mill sewage systems. Though the paper industry has made efforts to rid their waste streams of the most troubling compounds, tests conducted by independent laboratories showed detectable amounts of dioxin in samples of the reclaimed pulp paper beddings tested. In addition, pellets made from recycled newspaper also tested positive for dioxins. Both of these types of beddings are widely used by consumers.
What To Look For
When you choose small-pet bedding, there are certain functional features to look for, such as absorbency, odor control, limited dust and ease of use. The price per use of these beddings varies, with pine typically being the most cost effective, followed by aspen and cedar, corncob, paper and various pelletized products, in order of least to most expensive. Safety is also an important consideration, and it is recommended that pet owners focus on bedding that is all natural, sludge-free and dioxin-free.
With that foundation, then make your bedding choice based on what is most important for you and your pet.
Learn More
You can access free, downloadable small-pet bedding information, and many pet care facts and tips, at the website of the leading provider of animal bedding in the United States, American Wood Fibers (AWF): www.awf.com/smallpetcare.
On the Net:North American Precis Syndicate, Inc.(NAPSI)


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I'm a lot earlier in my math education that most of the people on this site. Currently I'm studying computer science, and I'm interested in looking into statistical and optimization applications, as well as theory (yeah, I know that sound broad, but I'm quite early in my education!). Anyways, I want to get deep into the math behind these things - statistics, combinatorics, linear and integer programming, maybe some analysis. Algebra also interests me.
I've found that math studies go okay, but from time to time I have trouble. Understanding delta-epsilon proofs was a big obstacle for calculus back in high school, and more recently generating functions have been giving me serious trouble.
If I pursue a path towards graduate level studies, what sort of things should I watch out for? More generally, since I don't know where I'm going, what concepts did you find hardest to grasp during your undergrad/early graduate studies?


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Selena Gomez 'Flaunts' Sideboob at Magazine Party [PHOTOS]
Selena Gomez has a sexy feature in the new issue of Flaunt in which she discusses why she keeps parts of herself private. Well, she wasn't modest or private at the Beverly Hills party for the publication (Nov. 7), where she "flaunted" her enviable assets. She showed off some maaaaaj sideboob in her Cushnie Et Ochs dress and Jimmy Choo heels.


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Mirror 280ml 9,5fl.oz
Pull Can'it isotherm Miroir 280ml/Mirror 9,5fl.oz
INSULATED - Double-wall stainless-steel insulation technology maintaining drinks hot for 5 hours and cold for 10 hours.
FUN - Pull the ring to sip, or twist off the lid, drinking is fun and healthy!
RELIABLE - Spill-proof technology with sealed lid.
SIMPLE - Easy to carry / easy to twist off / easy to clean.
COMFORT - Attractive design / large choice of colors / multiple sizes (280 and 500ml).


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This is based on what exactly and why do you think it is worth mentioning?heuristically_alone wrote:I think overall, even though the vote between me and Dethstalker was tied, Dethstalker was seen as more scummy.
Why? In case you're also town scum doesn't need to do anything to push a mislynch so why do you think it is more likely to find them on one wagon rather than the other?heuristically_alone wrote:I find it unlikely for both the scum to be on me. One for sure on Dethstalker if not the other.


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Headaches, grumblings, and lazinessFebruary 18, 2003
Having the same problem as Meg, my host doesn't give me stats on who you guys are and when you're coming by. I'm curious, just like you. I enlisted the help of SiteMeter, a cheesy hit counter that actually goes a lot further and breaks down actually useful things like domain, OS, time zone, language, etc.
Problem being: while the javascript it spits out is more or less okay by the W3, Mozilla seems to think it doesn't close a comment field properly. Hence, anything following it graciously vanishes without a trace until the next —> shows up. In this case, my entire right sidebar went AWOL, and broke a few more things on its way out the door.
Closing an extra comment that IE doesn't think is open, of course, means we get the extra —> showing up on the page. No sweat: I'm being subversive and using a blocking DIV to cover up the meter anyway. If you look way down to the bottom of the page, about 2 lines below the space in "See all…", hover your mouse until you get a link. See? Sneaky. Now you know my dirty little secret.
Netscape 7 now gives my site the thumbs up, IE remains happy, and even the W3C is playing along. I could take the easy way out and shift blame to the meter itself being the culprit, but it's embarrassingly obvious that I didn't test this redesign last week in anything other than IE6. Which goes to show that although a standard is a standard, you still have to check your work.
Lesson learned.
Reader Comments
Oh, is that what that's all about? I've had a few referrals from there and seeing the login screen made me wonder what I was looking at. It shows I didn't read any of the supporting text; I was thinking I was getting hit by referral spam.
I'll check it out, thanks Paul. I added hotstats last night which seems to be working alright, but it's not giving me quite as much info as SiteMeter does.
http://www.reinvigorate.net/system/ - better stats system than sitemeter.


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The star-studded field at this year's Hopman Cup will start the tennis season off in Perth, Australia with eight eager teams ready to battle each other for the title. Top seeded Serbia will look to make quick work of their Kazakhstanian opponents on January 2, while Justine Henin and her Belgian counterpart will play the first match against Australia on New Year's Day.
Group A:
(1) Serbia- Ana Ivanovic and Novak Djokovic
(3) Belgium- Justine Henin and Ruben Bemelmans
Kazakhstan- Yaroslava Shvedova and Andrey Goublev
Australia- Alicia Molik and Lleyton Hewitt
Group B:
(2) Great Britain- Laura Robson and Andy Murray
(4) Italy- Francesca Schiavone and Potito Starace
France- Kristina Mladenovic and Nicolas Mahut
United States- Bethanie Mattek-Sands and John Isner
This post will highlight in detail the top four seeds chances at the finals and briefly touch upon the other four unseeded teams in the field.
(1) Serbia- Ana Ivanovic and Novak Djokovic
These two lifelong friends will partner each other for the second time (they also played with each other in 2006) at the Australian event and based on the second half of 2010, they look to be in great shape to take the title in 2011. Novak Djokovic played impeccably well in the US Open semis against Roger Federer to make the finals only to lose to Nadal. But, more significantly, Djokovic led his Davis Cup team to the title at the beginning of December in his native Belgrade. In addition, Ana Ivanovic made an incredible late-season surge up the rankings taking International titles in Linz and the second-tier year-ending championships event in Bali. All signs point to a spectacular 2011 for these two Serbian phenoms and the Hopman Cup will surely be an indicator of how the new season will progress.
(2) Great Britain- Laura Robson and Andy Murray
Reaching the final of this event together last year, the British duo of Robson and Murray will look to go one better at this year's edition of the tournament. But, it should be noted that last year Robson only one of her singles matches (against Martinez Sanchez in the final) and she will have to improve upon that statistic if she hopes to lead her team to glory. While she has yet to score a hair-raising victory against a top player, she won't face too much competition from the other females in her group, with the exception of Francesca Schiavone, as she is scheduled to face Bethanie Mattek-Sands (#58) and Kristina Mladenovic (#300). Andy Murray, on the other hand is by far the strongest male player in his group as he should be minimally challenged by Nicolas Mahut and Potito Starace. However, John Isner also resides in this group, and certainly shouldn't be taken lightly.
(3) Belgium- Justine Henin and Ruben Bemelmans
The unheralded Ruben Bemelmans will want to impress his partner Justine Henin from the start, and he might have to because Henin hasn't played a tour match since Wimbledon. Henin, who appeared to be struggling with the serve and forehand at an exhibition against compatriot Kim Clijsters in December will need to play well from the get go in Perth if she wants any hope of reaching the weekend. Bemelmans on the other hand will be hard pressed to beat men like Djokovic and Australia's Lleyton Hewitt. Nevertheless, as the mantra goes: anything is possible, and it will have to be if the Belgian team hopes to have any chance at the title.
(4) Italy- Francesca Schiavone and Potito Starace
Led by the surprise Roland Garros champion, Team Italy will have a decent chance at making the finals. Schiavone, who is coming off a career-best season, will face relatively weak opposition from Laura Robson, Kristina Mladenovic, and Bethanie Mattek-Sands, whom she beat in the Fed Cup final. Starace, a perennial top-75 player on the ATP World Tour, will be the clear underdog when he goes against Andy Murray and John Isner, but could have a chance at victory against France's Nicolas Mahut. But, with the doubles skills of Schiavone, the duo will always be alive up until the final match, mixed doubles, is decided.
Other Teams: Australia- Alicia Molik and Lleyton Hewitt, Kazakhstan- Yaroslava Shvedova and Andrey Golubev, France- Kristina Mladenovic and Nicolas Mahut, and United States- Bethanie Mattek-Sands and John Isner
The remaining four teams, all full of potential, lack the stardom of the other four seeded teams, despite having several distinguished names, like Lleyton Hewitt and John Isner. Isner, who was originally partnered with Serena Williams, will now play the mixed doubles event with lesser-known, but highly capable Bethanie Mattek-Sands. The US team will have a fair shot at reaching the finals if both Mattek-Sands and Isner can win a majority of their matches. Like the US, Australia will also have a chance at the Saturday final if the stars align for Molik and Hewitt. On the other hand, France and Kazakhstan will be hard-pressed to win any of their matches because of the relatively shallow resumes of their four players. Team Kazakhstan, which could also be referred to as Team Russia as both Shvedova and Golubev hail from Russia. When it comes to their tennis, both are talented, but also young and fairly inexperienced when it comes to big matches and pressure situations, despite the fact that Shevedova won two Grand Slams in doubles last season with Vania King. If Kazakhstan was a part of Group B, along with Britain, France, and Italy, I would give them a fair chance, but Group A is far more competitive than B. Lastly, France brings two players ranked outside of the top 100 to Hopman Cup: Mahut, who is most famous for his first-round loss to John Isner at Wimbledon and Mladenovic, who much like Laura Robson won her home junior Grand Slam event as a teenager (she won Roland Garros juniors in 2009). However, both players will have chances at victories in Group B.
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On The Sunny Side Of The Street
by Edmundo Ros
Jan 1, 2000
On The Sunny Side Of The Street Lyrics
Song Meaning
Verse 1
Walked with no one and talked with no one
And I had nothing but shadows
Then one morning you passed
And I brightened at last
Now I greet the day and complete the day
With the sun in my heart
All my worry blew away
When you taught me how to say
Verse 2
Grab your coat and get your hat
Leave your worry on the doorstep
Just direct your feet
To the sunny side of the street
Can't you hear a pitter-pat?
And that happy tune is your step
Life can be so sweet
On the sunny side of the street
Verse 3
I used to walk in the shade
With those blues on parade
But I'm not afraid
This Rover crossed over
Verse 4
If I never have a cent
I'd be rich as Rockefeller
Gold dust at my feet
On the sunny side of the street
Grab your street
Writer(s):Lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, SHAPIRO BERNSTEIN & CO. INC.
Copyright: Dorothy Fields, Jimmy McHugh
Lyrics Licensed & Provided by LyricFind
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by Country Joe & The Fish


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Crayon Corner Learning Center OPEN HOUSE Thursday, May 12th, 2011 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. Come take a tour of the building, meet the teacher and sign your child up for the 2011-2012 school year! 3 year old class- Must be 3 by September 15, 2011. 4 year old class- Must be 4 by September 15, 2011.
Gladbrook Farmer's Market Gladbrook's Farmer's Market will be held on Wednesday evenings, 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. at the Gladbrook United Methodist parking lot, starting June 1st thru Sept. Anyone is welcome to sell at the farmer's market...love to have new vendors!! Gladbrook Women's Club The Gladbrook Womens Club's Annual Membership meeting will be held at Shay's Tea Room, Hunter Mansion in Newton, on Thursday, May 12. This is a chance to invite women who may be interested in joining the club. Members are reminded to gather at the Methodist Church parking lot no later than 10:10 a.m. to share rides and that annual dues will be collected at that meeting.
Gladbrook Auxiliary The Gladbrook Auxiliary Mothers Tea will be held on Mon., May 9th, at 1:30. The 3rd District President will be our guest. The Memorial Service, Graduation Service, and continuous years of membership awards will be presented. Angela Wrage will be providing a musical program. Hostesses are Lady Schmidt, Pat Sievers, Sue Koster, and Maxine Schoel.
Jr. Auxiliary The Gladbrook Jr. Auxiliary will be distributing poppies on Wed., May 11th, after school. The kids will meet at the Memorial Building for treats and will be served supper after their territory is finished. Juniors invite your friends to help. Any adults that would like to help give Jeanne a call.
Gladbrook Senior Citizens The Gladbrook Senior Citizens dinner will be hosted by the Gladbrook Women's Club at Peace Church on Friday, May 13, at 11:30 a.m. Please call Pat Oettchen at (641) 473-2530 by May 7th to make reservations.
Taco Supper Garwin 4th of July Committee will sponsor a taco supper, Friday, May 13, serving from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the Garwin City Park Shelter House.
Gladbrook City Wide Garage Sales The Gladbrook City Wide Garage Sales will be held on Saturday, June 4th, 2011. If you are interested in registering a garage sale, please contact Kandi Hendricks by May 28th at 641-750-4156 or by email at email@example.com. When calling or emailing please have the following information ready: name, address of sale and items for sale. Registration fee is $10 per sale site. Registration forms will also be available at Casey's.
Siren Testing Garwin Fire Department will test the warning sirens on the 3rd Monday of the month. This will be a year-round policy.
Library Coffee Time Stop in and join us every Friday afternoon at the Gladbrook Public Library at 2 p. m. for coffee and conversation. We might even discuss a book or two. Bring a friend and hopefully brighten your day and ours!! Pat & Karen


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This numbered edition Canvas Print, designed by Shawlin, comes with a numbered and signed certificate of authenticity. Ready to hang, this image is printed onto a 450gsm white finish, 100% cotton canvas and stretched over 1.5" deep wood stretcher bars (3/4" for XS). Each print comes with wall hanging hardware.
Emma- personalized gifts for girls
United States


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Phone: 616.406.2480
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HIV screening for donating blood (BLOOD DONATION, FALSE POSITIVE TEST 2009)
Dr. Bob,
My sister recently tried to donate blood and was denied. She recieved a letter stating that she was HIV positive. How accurate are the tests that the Red Cross performs? She is getting an HIV test but I would like to know what the accuracy is of their testing is. The person that I spoke to said that she shouldn't worry?
Please help.....thanks.
The purpose of HIV screening at blood donation sites is to protect the blood supply, not to diagnose HIV disease. The tests run at blood donation centers are very sensitive so that they won't miss any true infections. In the process they pick up some false-positives (people who are HIV negative but test positive on these very sensitive screening tests for a variety of reasons). If your sister has essentially no HIV risk, there is no cause for concern. Her follow-up tests will quickly reveal her HIV-negative status confirming that the blood donation screening test was falsely positive. If on the other hand she has been at risk for HIV infection, she shouldn't have been donating blood in the first place. In addition if indeed she is HIV positive, the donation center did her a favor by encouraging further testing to confirm her diagnosis so that she can be appropriate monitored and treated.
I'll reprint below some information from the archives that discusses HIV screening at blood donation sites.
Dr. Bob
Safe blood transfusion v. Window period Mar 25, 2006
Hi Doc! I have heard that places that accept blood (for storage and transfusion) can know if the blood is infected even if the person donating is at his/her window period. Then why don't they use this technology to straight-away determine if a person is Hiv+ or not? My second question: After sustaining a severe hollow-bore needlestick and laceration while performing a medical procedure on a patient, were you on PEP? Thanks.
Response from Dr. Frascino
The answer to your first question is a bit complex and technical, but I'll try to explain.
Blood donors have been screened for HIV since 1985. Although newer generations of the test have been developed that increase the sensitivity for detecting HIV antibodies, in rare instances infections in donors have been missed. In 2002 the FDA licensed the first NAT (nucleic acid test) for screening blood donors. NAT detects viral genes rather than anti-HIV antibodies or antigens (proteins from the virus). Viral gene detection allows for earlier detection, because the production of detectable antibodies, which is an immune response, requires time. With the use of NAT, the HIV window period has been reduced to approximately 16 days.
NAT is FDA-approved only for use in screening donated blood. It is not approved for routine HIV screening for individual patients. There are a number of reasons for this having to do with the sensitivity/specificity of the testing assay and the cost. The purpose of blood-donation screening is to protect the blood supply. Consequently the sensitivity of the screening tests is set so that it will err on the side of protecting the blood supply. In other words, if the test picks up some false positives, no problem. The questionably positive blood can then be discarded. Donors are notified to follow up with their doctors to see if their test was a false positive or if they are truly HIV infected. Again the primary purpose of these tests is not to diagnose patients, but to protect the blood supply. NAT is also extremely expensive. NAT testing is performed on pooled samples. That means usually around 20 donor samples are mixed together and tested as a batch. If the batch tests positive, then each of the 20 donor samples is tested individually by our usual serological testing methods. See, I told you this was a bit confusing.
As for your second question, my occupational exposure was in January 1991. We didn't know much about PEP back then and only a few antiretrovirals were even available. I did take AZT within moments of being stuck and continued it for a full course, but seroconverted nonetheless. The patient I was performing the procedure on had advanced-stage AIDS; consequently, his viral strain was probably resistant to AZT. We didn't have resistance tests back then. I should also point out that PEP, even when taken as directed, isn't always successful in preventing HIV infection.
Dr. Bob