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Remy Royale Double Drawn Human Hair Weft Weave Extensions - Jet Black (#1)
This royale human hair weft/weave is truly a crowning beauty, made with premium quality AAAAA grade 100% remy human hair. these gorgeous locks are double drawn, which means its tips are as thick as its top, with a soft, smooth and silky feel. This weft/weave is extremely versatile and can be glued in, weaved in, sewn in and clipped in! it can also be cut, dyed, straightened, curled ad used as your heart's desire. This gorgeous weave is 72 inches in width, which gives you plenty of options to customise this beautiful crown for your head!
SpecificationsHair Colour : Jet Black (#1)
Lifetime : 6-12 months (depending on care and use)
Colour : Black
Length : 14 - 22 Inches
Total Width : 72 inch (182cm)
Type : Weft / Weave
Set Weight : 120g Hair
Number of Wefts : one
Hair Type : Double Drawn 100% Remy Grade AAAAA Hair
Hair Style : European Straight Hair
Usage : Can be curled, straightened, tonged, washed & dyed
Our extensions are made from 100% Remy Human Hair, however they have to cared for slightly differently then your own hair. We have made a quick summary of hair extensions do's and don't's for you. For detailed instructions please check our hair care page.
- You can curl, tong & straighten them
- You can use your GHDs on them without any problem
- You can wash hair extensions
- You can dye them
- Don't use products containing alcohol as they can dry out the extensions and you don't want that happening
- Don't use shampoo designed for volume or for dyed hair
- Don't bleach or lighten the extensions
- Standard Recorded Delivery - 2 to 3 working days - FREE
- Next Working Day Delivery - £4.99 (orders placed before 4.00pm)
- Next Day by 9am - £14.99 (orders placed before 4.00pm)
- Saturday Delivery - £6.99 (orders placed before 4.00pm on Friday)
- Royal Mail - within 5-10 working days - FREE
- DHL - within 1-2 working days - £12.99 (orders placed before 12pm)
- Royal Mail - within 4-10 working days - FREE
- DHL - within 1-2 working days - £9.99 (orders placed before 12pm)
- Royal Mail - within 7-15 working days - FREE
- DHL - within 3-4 working days - £12.99 (orders placed before 12pm)
- Royal Mail - 7-21 working days - FREE
- DHL - within 3-5 working days - £19.99
Due to the ever-changing circumstances of the coronavirus, we have now extended our returns policy to a flexible and hassle-free 90-day returns policy during this time. Our goal is to ensure your complete satisfaction with your purchase, and so for whatever reason, if you are dissatisfied with your purchase, you can return the product for a refund or exchange within 90 days of the receipt, provided the items are unworn, unused and unaltered .
At Cliphair, our goal is to ensure your complete satisfaction with your purchase. We strive to provide expert guidance to help you choose the best possible products for your needs. We also understand that sometimes a product just doesn't quite fit, and so for whatever reason, if you are dissatisfied with your purchase, you can return the product for a refund or exchange within 30 days of delivery.
We offer FREE COLOUR EXCHANGES. In case the colour is not right, you can send us a hair snippet /sample of old extensions; OR send photos through our Colour Matching Service to get correct colour match. Exchanges are processed within 24 hours of receiving the item back.
Please note that due to health and hygiene reasons, we can not accept any modified hair extensions which have been cut, toned or dyed. Please check the colour and length before removing extensions from their packaging. If the extensions have been removed from their gold hygiene bands, we reserve the right to refuse exchange / refund.


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Maybe it's just me, or I cared even less, but Halloween seems more low-key this year.
The only advantage I see is that my kids have been giving ME candy. I've been getting a slight time-out while the kids make haunted houses, spiders and masks.
For some reason Kawasaki seems to be the epicentre of Halloween celebrations. They had a parade this year that I missed once more. Oh well.
These were on the steps of a Kawasaki shopping mall.
The Azalea shopping area is uncannily like Yokohama's Diamond one.
I have a feeling the same town planner created both places. Come to think of it, he probably designed all of Tokyo.
Thou shalt have Pachinko near every station!
Of course, Halloween is not complete without the Mickey Jack-o-Lantern is it?
Like every other sequel this one is yet again a let down. Can't wait till Halloween 2009.
Friday, 31 October 2008
Halloween II
Maybe it's just me, or I cared even less, but Halloween seems more low-key this year.
Posted by Jimmy In Japan at 11:59 pm 0 comments
Wednesday, 29 October 2008
Hey there!
It's been a few days now and I'm really getting my head around my new iPhone.
Trying it out at the shops, I wasn't as impressed as I am until now, when I've got the chance to really see what it can do. Coming from a Windows phone, the experience is just smoother and more polished.
Yes, it does lack the much-requested, and often denied "cut and paste", and a video recorder, but I've found a way to get around things like that. Coming from the "user decides" upgradability of windows ROMs, the process isn't that difficult.
What I'm looking for now, is a good case to protect this little bundle of goodness.
Most of the big stores only have a small selection of cases. Luckily today in Yokohama I found a great range at Yodobashi in Yokohama. The ones that have caught my eye, are from Switcheasy. They really stand out, and look pretty funky.
So what were my other options instead of getting the iPhone?
Well, if your heart's not set on (or brainwashed) to get an iPhone, the next best thing is the Emobile S21HT, otherwise known as the HTC Touch Diamond.
On the eMobile plan they offer an unlimited internet plan that maxes out at 5,000 yen. What makes that deal particularly sweet is that you can tether, that is use the mobile as a modem to get internet to a PC, which is something Softbank don't allow without paying through the nose.
What stopped me from that was the S21HT's fixed japanese menus and the slow, laggy interface. My TYTN II had better performance than this!
The other alternative option was to get one of the new Dell mini 9's and an eMobile modem for anywhere internet on a similar plan to the mobile.
The other plus is the Dell's apparent hackability to run Apple's OSX, Leopard. If only Apple would make their own netbook!
I guess for now the iPhone is the next best thing. Internet in your pocket.
Gotta love that.
Posted by Jimmy In Japan at 11:35 pm 0 comments
Monday, 27 October 2008
What Customer Service?
I got the call today from Bic Camera to say they won't exchange my phone because the mark is too small.
It seems pointless for them to even ask me to look it over if that's their attitude. Like I said previously, the mark is tiny. I can't even photograph it, because I don't have any macro function on any of my cameras. But it's still quite easy to spot with the naked eye.
The point is, "customer service" is not just selling the product, it has to do with customer satisfaction, and after-sales service as well.
Japanese are good at making the sale an experience, but if you come back with a problem, or not happy with it, "Too Bad".
You just have to grin and bear it.
I wonder if they even bothered to try to get me a replacement. I waited over an hour for them to call last night. If they were not going to do it, they could've saved me the wasted minutes of my life going back into Shinjuku to pick it up today.
Having said all that, Softbank are giving 5000 yen credit to people who recommend others to their service, AND to the new subscriber.
So, if you aren't too fussed about the (lack of) customer service in Japan, let me recommend you, and at least you and I can get something more out of this.
Posted by Jimmy In Japan at 11:22 pm 0 comments
Sunday, 26 October 2008
I Have One But I Don't
Finally I went and did it. I've got an iPhone. Well actually I DON'T.
Today I went into Shinjuku to Bic Camera to get that phone. I decided on a white one. It took ages to process the application and just before I was ready to walk out of the store, the clerk got me to look over the phone to make sure I was happy with it.
Pretty quickly I saw a small dirt-sized spec on the white back that didn't come off. I know that I shouldn't be so precious with a white one, but before I walked out I wanted it to be flawless.
Unfortunately it couldn't be resolved straight away so I come home empty-handed.
I made a new contract even though I am with the same company. For new customer's contracts, the phone outright is 80,640 yen, but if you're an existing customer the same phone is 87,840 yen! Great customer service. Hmm.
So, I'm leaving my old, existing number connected to pay out the rest of my phone installments, and set up a new contract for the iPhone. (It would work out the same if I payed it off. Why should I give SB all that money upfront?)
So why did I pay for it in full? Points!
If you have a point card you can claim, usually a 10% of the purchase price towards something else. In this case it gives me 8000 yen to play with. Going to the phone company directly gives you zero, zilch.
Besides this bonus, from the third month of the contract SB will discount 1920 yen every month, the same as if I payed it off per month.
24, 27 months, the real price for the phone is 34,560 yen (with the 10% store credit this becomes 26,496 yen). So, it makes that big, scary upfront payment much more palatable now, right?
The downside?
The phone is locked to the evil phone company, even when the contract is completed. Hopefully in the near future some skilful persons will work out the phone unlock, or else I'll have to use one of those lil' chip sim cards that ride on top of your existing SIM to spoof the network.
Now I just have to wait for Bic Camera to call me with my baby.
Wow, almost $3000 in a matter of days! There'll be lots of days eating just rice from now on.
Posted by Jimmy In Japan at 11:15 pm 0 comments
Friday, 24 October 2008
Lock It In Eddie
Travel agents in Japan are really misleading.
You see some really fantastic looking airfares in the local rags, Metropolis and Tokyo Notice Board. (The later has an unintentionally funny or desperate lonely hearts classified section).
One of the "tricks" is that all these wonderful fares are excluding any fuel and tax surcharges that you always have to pay. In Australia, Qantas tried to get away with the same stunt to bait people into buying their tickets.
Unlike Japan, a LOT of people didn't like these tactics, and not too long after that they decided to publish the real, full price of tickets that they sell. Japanese people don't want to "upset the harmony", so they just put up and shut up.
Another trick is to charge foreigners more than Japanese because of the mistaken belief that foreigners will buy a cheaper return ticket and not use the return flight.
Of course they can say the cheap flight seats have been booked out. Mark Up!
Another miserable, rainy day in Tokyo made me wish for a nice summer vacation back home with my family, my car and guitars. That, and the homesickness I'm feeling from too much Japanese and not enough English.
So I wandered into the local travel agent hoping for a decent fare to let me take a well-earned break (and to get the hell away from Japan for a while).
I tried a few weeks ago, but I baulked at a fare that was about 170,000 yen return.
I should have booked that. When I returned today the only option was a 167,000 fare. (Of course taxes were an additional 70,000 yen!). I politely declined and went to my lessons feeling a little more down than usual. It actually made me want to be back in Australia even more.
Coming back to the apartment, I got a second wind and thought if I couldn't go back home, I'd try to book a flight somewhere else like Hong Kong. Unfortunately while the fare was much more favourable, the timings weren't so great.
Feeling defeated I tried Plan C, which according to Plan C's wasn't the worst possible option. (That would be staying in Tokyo and bearing the freezing winter).
I thought to look at Jetstar, a subsidiary of Qantas. At the time of writing, they are the cheapest way to Australia, minus frills like food and drink.
The Australian dollar isn't so great right now (AU $0.58 = 100 yen), so it's a particularly good time to travel to Australia, and to be earning a salary in yen!
To cut a long story short, the fare was quite a bit cheaper than the one I was quoted at the agency, so I just went ahead and booked it. Once I hit that process button I felt an instant wave of calm thinking that soon I'll be back in a land without endless compromises and.. English!
Mostly I've been to-ing and fro-ing if I want to spend another year in this place. I know that coming home will help me decide for sure. If it's anything like last year's letdown, I'll probably be here for another one.
I guess we'll just have to wait and see, eh?
Posted by Jimmy In Japan at 11:59 pm 0 comments
Saturday, 18 October 2008
Pocky Cheerleader
This is the new Pocky "cheerleader" ad from Glico I've seen often, while walking across the busy Shibuya crossing. Makes me want one right now. One of her..
Here's a making of..
This is the lovely Shiori Kutsuna in fantasy cheerleader costume, giving me an irresistible urge to have some Pocky right now.
Could this bring about a defection from Crunky?
Posted by Jimmy In Japan at 11:48 pm 0 comments
Wednesday, 15 October 2008
Anytime, Anything
This is one way to get students.
This was innocently located on the noticeboard. The rest was in Japanese.
I often get asked what's it like to be an English teacher in Japan. It's kind of hard to describe but if you listen to this, it'll give you an idea what it's like inside the bubble -
The funniest line I thought was, "I ate out my wife".
That is hilarious because you actually hear stuff like that. Other classics are, "Get pushy" and "I'll have a small Coke".
Think about it.
I'm waiting for you.
Posted by Jimmy In Japan at 11:30 pm 0 comments
Tuesday, 14 October 2008
"Are You Engrish Teacher?"
I was asked this at Yotsuya train station tonight.
I should've said "No, I'm a doctor" or something. Dammit, is it that obvious?
Anyhow, this woman wanted to have some private lessons to learn English. I haven't taken up any offers of extra lessons yet, but I'm warming to the idea.
Some more money to complement my "lavish" lifestyle would be great right now.
From our short conversation I'd put her at a fairly low level of English, but it might be something I can work with. She said she didn't have enough money for language schools, so I hope she's not expecting ultra-cheap lessons.
Any other Japanese looking for some help with English, PM me. Let's talk!
Posted by Jimmy In Japan at 10:33 pm 0 comments
Monday, 13 October 2008
Sports Day
I'm really happy that Japan has a LOT of holidays. Today just happens to be Sports Day which goes by the "Happy Monday" system of moving holidays to mondays to allow for a three day weekend.
Apparently it's a day to commemorate the Olympics to promote health and fitness.
For me it would've been another day of laziness and doing nothing.
I hadn't been there for almost a year and a half, so I decided to go back to Toyko Dome City in Suidobashi. These days it's not so far from Yotsuya.
I wasn't feeling too genki so I chickened out of riding "Thunder Dolphin" again. That, and a forty minute line put an end to that thought.
By the time I got home it wasn't late so I went into Shinjuku and had another meal at that Indian restaurant again. Third time and still good!
Posted by Jimmy In Japan at 10:11 pm 0 comments
Friday, 10 October 2008
Ghibli Playing Cards
While I've been a really good boy and stayed away from playing the UFO catchers (I still went, but I didn't play most of the time), I had a job to do.
The gf wanted to buy a pack of Ponyo playing cards for her friend's daughter. Looking around the shops it's quite hard to find them. So the only answer was for me to "win" them at the catchers.
For those that don't know, Ponyo is the latest animation for Studio Ghibli. Those that have seen it say it's not that great. More a children's tale than some of the others.
For me, my favourite Studio Ghibli is My Neighbour Totoro. If you see only one of these animations, let it be this one. Trust me, it's the best by far. For kids and adults it can't be beat.
Later after work I thought it'd be a good idea to go for the Totoro cards as well. Unfortunately this was harder than the Ponyo cards. If my maths is right, it cost me 1,200 yen. Not quite a bargain.
One nasty side effect of Ponyo publicity is hearing the theme song sung constantly on Japanese TV by 8 year old brat, Nozomi.
I'll take the Totoro song any day. Alternatively I'm open to "Don't Know Why Y Didn't Come".
Elmo makes this great.
Posted by Jimmy In Japan at 10:34 pm 0 comments
Labels: Kawasaki, UFO catchers
Thursday, 9 October 2008
Happy Xmas, Jimmy Stink® Is Over (For Now)
Some may think this may be a redundant post (like the other 300 or so other ones I have done so far), but I'm feeling quite happy right about now.
One thing you find out pretty quickly is that Japanese deodorants aren't too good, judging from the funk you might smell on peak-hour trains in the summer. Actually even still now that summer is over, because JR and co. have decided that we don't need air-con on at all these days.
Worse yet, one of the most popular brands of Japanese deodorants (the one I always see on the shelves) is called "Gatsby". sugai! Yes, so gay.
The deodorant I was using in the meantime was Ag+ by Shiseido.
Yes, it's a girl's deodorant, but it's scentless, so I didn't smell like a girl thankfully.
It worked ok. I didn't really smell too bad, but it didn't make me feel dry. The hilarious thing is that for their advertising they use Grandma Betsy Lyons. You MUST check out the video on the previous link.
Anyway, thanks to BBD I now have some roll-on deodorants from the land of the free (and probably less stinky), a Mennen "Speed Stick" and Axe Dry "Essence".
On the Mennen Speed Stick it says on it "great clean scent". To this nose it smells like a just cleaned bathroom. Freshness!
For a bit of useless trivia, Mennen also produced the "Teen Spirit" deodorant for girls that Nirvana used as the title of their big breakthrough hit.
The Axe smells a bit more "manly". A bit hard to describe, but it's a typical scent if you're familiar with this brand.
I don't know which one to start with.
I was suggested one under each arm to see which one works best. So, from now on there will be slightly less Jimmystink® from me.
Posted by Jimmy In Japan at 4:31 pm 0 comments
Thursday, 2 October 2008
Discogrooving in Ginza
Yes, it's a school night, but tonight I'm venturing to a disco in Ginza. No, not a club, a disco.
Why so? Because the clientele were mostly salarymen and "office ladies".
One thing that should come as no surprise to people who've observed Japanese trying to dance, it's actually quite funny. The best way I can describe it, is imagine how people sing at karaoke. Got it? That's how they dance as well.
Unlike some blogs you read I am not bad-mouthing these people. I want to empower them with the courage to not dance the same two-step moves that I used to do in primary school. Let go and forget about your sarari-man lives!
Unfortunately when I arrived there, it was mostly a sausage fest, but thankfully after a short while, there were a few not too shabby ladies making an appearance.
A lot of the girls don't do much better than the guys and need non-Japanese to show them how to dance. It's like "Footloose", where people need to be told it's ok to dance like a fricken idiot.
So.. in "teaching" these people how to do "it", we let it go showing those Japanese what it means to dance. Dance like a fool, and let them follow.
Posted by Jimmy In Japan at 11:59 pm 0 comments
Labels: Ginza

subset: commoncrawl


text:
I want to integrate my Switchvox with Zoho
We would like it so that as a new caller called in a screen pop would appear with the client info from Zoho. Show their 5 most recent activity/call log, and any open potentials etc..
Important: a text box in Switchvox popup to type call notes in which would populate into Zoho CRM.
Has anyone been successful in the integration who can help me.


text:
Twelve years ago Frank Marlow, a retired registered professional engineer and current president of Metal Arts Press, Huntington Beach, Calif., was looking for a book that did more than just rehash welding theory. He wanted to know the little tips and tricks that you can learn only from experienced welders themselves. When he couldn't find such a book, he decided to go out and write his own.
Welding Know-How, Marlow's fourth published work, is not your ordinary welding overview. While it does include basic information on the various welding and industrial cutting methods like many other welding textbooks do, it also includes DIY tutorials on things like removing a struck steel bearing, removing a rusted nut, or repairing punctured aluminum tubing, just to name a few. Other topics discussed are metallurgy, distortion control, and component design.
Marlow recently sat down with Practical Welding Today® to discuss his new book, Welding Know-How: Tips & Techniques of Master Welders, which was released in March.
Q: What compelled you to write a book about welding?
A: I was an electrical engineer and I worked in a variety of sales, marketing, and product development jobs in my career. No matter where my career took me, I never really lost my love for technology and circuit design.
After I retired I went to Orange Coast College, Costa Mesa, Calif., in 1995 and started taking welding courses. I'd always been interested in welding, but I'd never been trained. As I took the course I realized there were a lot of things that I didn't know that weren't in the textbook and that were not discussed by the instructor. I was a very serious student while I was in welding school. I read and studied the textbooks in detail and found they were disjointed and a lot of the pictures were filler. They had very limited relationship to the text. There are a couple of exceptions, of course—there are a few really outstanding textbooks—but in general these types of books are not written from the perspective of a skilled craftsman. So I thought, you know, I'm not a writer, but I think I can do a little bit better. I made friends with some folks who knew a great deal more than I did about welding and machine shop work, and that really launched me into the book writing business.
We produced our first book, Welding Essentials, in 2000. It took roughly two years from start to finish. We sold it to a major industrial publisher in New York and it sold right away, probably because there aren't a whole lot of people that write on the subject. Welders don't write and writers don't weld.
Q: How is Welding Know-How different from your first book?
A: It's 50 pages longer, it's a lot more dense, it has a lot more material in it, and it benefits from my having learned a lot in 12 years since the first one. And that's not an understatement.
Q: What have you learned?
A: Welding has a lot of facets, and what I have learned is that it can give you a tremendous amount of options when you're in a machine shop. I learned how powerful it is to have the option of welding and cutting in a machine shop. Most people think of welding for construction, I-beam welding, and the amateurs are always making lawn ornaments or trailers. Those are popular projects. They don't usually think of using welding in a machine shop. That was an eye-opener. I came to find out that people I knew were very good at integrating welding within their machine shop work.
Nowadays people will approach a machine shop with a broken part and the company they've purchased it from is out of business, so they can't get another one. You have to figure out how to make this part. Sometimes the part simply can be repaired by adding metal to it and reshaping it. For example, somebody came into my friend's shop with a housing from a 1912 automobile. It was one of a kind and no replacement part was available. So he added metal to it; shaped it, filed it, ground it, and it's as good as new. It's very common. Gears break and welding is a beautiful way to fix them.
I also learned that there are a lot of things that are not documented well. There are very few secrets in this business but there's a lot of know-how, and the only way people are introduced to that is by working with experienced people in a shop.
Q: What's next for you?
A: I plan on doing another welding book that will cover more in the way of projects and techniques. All the good stuff—the basic stuff like MIG and TIG—are well covered, but there are always things that experienced people can do like making a fixture, for example, or a repair that was clever and might not be obvious. I'd like to get them into print because a lot of the people with these experiences are leaving us.


text:
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text:
Any Lexus LFA is a fascinating, if controversial, work of ultra-tech and corporate pride. This particular one is even better: it's chassis #003, the first available to the public. You've seen it before, but it's even better on the move.
The first half of the clip, shot and edited by eighteen-year-old prodigy Zak Kerbelis, dotes on the sublime details of the LFA — of which there are many (those mirrors!). Fantastic detail work may be the abiding legacy of Japanese styling efforts: the LFA's overall shape may not be the most classically beautiful, but the subtleties and intricacies are amazing.
That overall shape does clean up nicely when put in motion, especially in a proper setting like Road Atlanta's brutally fast confines. Less disputed is the sensual pleasure of the V10's exhaust note, likewise included for our gratification. Forged Performance, who made the gorgeous GT-R for the LFA's owner, assures us that this particular sound effect is heard on a regular basis; this may be the first of its kind, but it gets used as intended.


text:
NEW YORK (AP) — U.S.-based advocates of international adoption, who have grown accustomed to discouraging news in recent years, have a new cause for dismay: a bill moving through Russia's parliament that would bar Americans from adopting Russian children.
The measure, which won overwhelming approval Friday in the lower house of parliament, is retaliation for a new U.S. law imposing sanctions on Russians deemed to be human rights violators.
"It's two countries duking it out," said Adam Pertman of the Donaldson Adoption Institute. "The adults are playing politics, and it's unfortunate to the extreme that children are being used as pawns."
The fate of the bill is uncertain. It needs approval by parliament's upper house and by President Vladimir Putin. Yet already it has added to an array of controversies and policy changes that have muddled the image of international adoption in the U.S.
Adoptions from abroad seemed to be on a perpetual upswing but peaked at 22,884 in 2004 and have declined steadily since then to 9,319 in 2011, because of factors ranging from corruption and fraud to nationalist pride.
In the case of Russia, UNICEF estimates it has more than 700,000 orphans and abandoned children. More than 60,000 of them have been adopted by Americans over the past 20 years, but the annual figure has plummeted from 5,862 in 2004 to 962 in 2011.
Chuck Johnson, CEO of the National Council for Adoption, said there is a faction of Russian politicians who have long-term antipathy toward foreign adoptions and have seized upon the pending bill as a vehicle for their cause.
"The Russian Duma is ignoring the many thousands of very happy children who have been adopted by loving U.S. families," Johnson said. "The bottom line is children should not fall victim to senseless politicking."
Among the adoption advocates who have been following the Moscow events closely is Alexander D'Jamoos, a 21-year-old sophomore at the University of Texas.
D'Jamoos, who was born without legs, grew up in one of the many Russian orphanages that accommodate children with disabilities. In 2006, at age 15, he was flown to Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children in Dallas, where physicians fitted him with prosthesis to enable him to walk.
The Dallas couple who had agreed to host him temporarily, Helene and Michael D'Jamoos, became so fond of him that they proceeded to adopt him in 2007. Since then, the young man has climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, became a talented skier, and is pursuing studies in government, international relations and Russian.
He has been following the progress of the proposed adoption ban in Russia with growing anger.
"It uses children as a tool for political demagoguery," he said. "It's extremely insensitive to children in Russia who've spent their whole lives in those orphanages, and insulting to the happy families here in the U.S. who have adopted Russian children."
Russia has tried to increase domestic adoptions over the past several years, but there also has been resentment about adoptions by Americans, fueled by a few high-profile incidents.
In 2010, a Tennessee woman sent her 7-year-old adopted Russian son back to Moscow on a plane alone, saying he had emotional problems and she could no longer care for him. In 2008, a Russian toddler adopted by a Virginia family died after his father left him in a hot car for hours; the father was found not guilty of involuntary manslaughter.
According to the National Council for Adoption, 19 Russian adoptees have died at the hands of their American parents. Those deaths were among the factors that led to a painstakingly negotiated U.S.-Russia adoption agreement that took effect Nov. 1.
The agreement tightens oversight of adoption agencies, requires prospective adoptive parents to complete up to 80 hours of training and permits Russia to engage in post-adoption monitoring of children adopted by U.S. families.
The bill pending in Moscow would nullify that agreement. Its fate may rest with Putin, who on Thursday described the measure as a legitimate response to the new U.S. law targeting human rights violators but did not specify whether he would sign it.
The U.S. law, called the Magnitsky Act, stems from the case of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who was arrested after accusing officials of a $230 million tax fraud. He was repeatedly denied medical treatment and died in jail in 2009. Russian rights groups claim he was severely beaten and accused the Kremlin of failing to prosecute those responsible.
Regarding the retaliatory adoption ban, the U.S. says it would needlessly stop hundreds of Russian children from finding families.
"The welfare of children is simply too important to be linked to other issues in our bilateral relationship," U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul said in a statement.
U.S.-based adoption advocates indicated there were intensive efforts under way to derail the bill.
The Joint Council on International Children's Services, which represents many U.S. groups interested in adoption and child welfare, said it was working with both American and Russian officials to resolve the matter, urging them to "put the needs and best interest of each child as the primary consideration."
Others tracking progress of the bill include Denise Bierly of the American Academy of Adoption Attorneys, who called it "a significant step backward for the welfare of children," and Bill Blacquiere of Bethany Christian Services, one of the largest U.S. adoption agencies.
Blacquiere said that child welfare needs in Russia are extensive, and that its special-needs children would be better served if Russia availed itself of American expertise rather than strain bilateral relations. Russia has taken some steps to improve its foster care system and move more children out of orphanages, he said, but needs to invest more government funds.
Several adoption advocates suggested that the Russian bill was damaging even if it doesn't become law.
"Even if it just bravado, it still does harm," said Adam Pertman, the Donaldson Institute's executive director. "International adoption is already cast in a bad light, and some people will say, 'This is just a minefield. I'm not going to go there.' The losers are the children."
Follow David Crary on Twitter at http://twitter.com/CraryAP
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.


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Dale Earnhardt Jr. is on the pole for the first time in nearly two years. He's hoping it will lead to Victory Lane.
Earnhardt claimed the pole Friday night for the Kobalt Tools 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway with a blistering speed of 192.761 mph. It will be the first time Junior has taken green at the head of a Sprint Cup field since the April 2008 race at Texas.
"It's good to be on the pole and I'm real proud of it," Earnhardt said. "Getting a pole anywhere is good for our team. We're so hungry to do well on Sunday."
He's coming off a miserable season in which he failed to win a race, cracked the top 10 only five times, led a mere 146 laps in 36 races and finished 25th in the overall standings -- despite racing for Hendrick Motorsports, the best team in the business.
After a major shake-up within his group, Earnhardt is hoping to be a Chase contender in 2010. He hasn't won a race since June 15, 2008, at Michigan.
Taking advantage of a chilly 50-degree night that boosted speeds on the high-banked oval, Earnhardt put up a lap that was faster than any pole-winning speed since Martin Truex Jr. won the Texas pole on Nov. 4, 2007, at 193.105, before the full-time introduction of the Car of Tomorrow.
Mark Martin was the pole-sitter last year in the spring event at Atlanta with a speed of 187.045. He went much faster this time (191.814) but it was only good enough for fourth.
Kyle Busch (192.280) will start from the outside of the front row, beating out Juan Pablo Montoya (192.106). Jeff Gordon (191.774) was fifth, giving Hendrick Motorsports three of the top five spots.
The fourth Hendrick driver, Jimmie Johnson, managed only the 16th-best speed (190.640) on the 1.54-mile trioval.
Former Cup regular Casey Mears again failed to qualify for his first race of the season. Also failing to crack the 43-car field were Aric Almirola and Terry Cook.
Earnhardt Jr. earns pole with fastest time
Dale Earnhardt Jr. is on the pole for the first time in nearly two years. He's hoping it will lead to Victory Lane.


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This Is the Future of Shopping
LAS VEGAS — When you go to the store, how often do you pick things up off the shelf, examine them and then put them back? Some items make it into the cart, others do not. Thanks to the check-out counter, retailers know when something's been bought, but not much about what made you stop and choose it in the first place. Now, 3D sensing technology may offer an unlikely, yet powerful, solution.
In a small suite adjacent to the massive CES 2013 convention hall, Primesense and partner Shopperperception showed me a rather remarkable technology that uses the former's 3D sensing technology, and an iPad-based analytics app to give retailers an aggregated view of what shoppers are doing at store shelves.
Primesense, which unveiled its tiny Capri 3D sensor at the show, also provides the 3D sensing technology for Microsoft's Kinect for the Xbox 360. Its low-cost, tiny motherboards bathe the area in front of it in an infrared 3D mesh that a second camera interprets. It's how interactive games know not only where multiple people are in a room, but also exactly what each of them is doing. It's obviously super useful for virtual dancing and driving, but as Primsense demonstrated to me, the open platform can do far more than just play games.
In the case of Shopperception, a Primesense 3D sensor sits high above a store shelf. It's so small that most shoppers probably wouldn't notice it, and it's not taking pictures. Instead the sensor is watching as people touch products on the shelf, take them off the shelf and even as they put them back. Shopperception's app aggregates the data for all the shoppers who interacted with the shelves to create a real-time consumer response report. There's even a heat map to show which items had the most — and least —shopper activity.
Primsense execs tell me that Shopperception is already in some stores and a typical use case scenario is one brand (like Heineken) or manufacturer setting it up to evaluate how their own products and promotions are doing.
You can see Shopperception in action in the video above. Watch and the let us know in the comments what you think of the latest innovation in retail.


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Trading Places
Steve Rosa still remembers the day he knew he had to go home to Providence. It was July 14, 1992, his father's 70th birthday. "My dad's not getting any younger," Rosa thought. Rosa lived just 60 miles away, in Boston, but he was putting in 80-hour weeks at the four-person advertising agency that he'd started there three years before. He just didn't have time to drive an hour or more for dinner with the family. So at age 28, Rosa moved himself and his business, Advertising Ventures Inc., to Providence. He figured he would still be within easy reach of the high-tech clients that he had attracted in Boston. The best of both worlds, right?
Wrong. What he didn't realize was that his clients would see things just a bit differently.
Heidi Lang, however, knew a little something about relocation long before she moved her company. She had emigrated from her native Germany to Canada when her husband was transferred to Toronto, in 1987. That's where she started her photo-frame business, Transatlantic Marketing Group (TMG), in 1995. With backing from a venture-capital firm, she built a small factory in a Toronto suburb, where the company made private-label frames for retailers. By 1999, TMG had revenues of $3.4 million (U.S.) and had twice made Profit magazine's list of the 100 fastest-growing companies in Canada.
But practically all her customers were in the United States. Lang, who was bringing in 80% of the company's sales, was spending a lot of time on the road; sometimes four or five days a week. So she decided to move the company to the States. Her VCs suggested suburban New Jersey. She considered Atlanta. Finally, she settled on Jacksonville, Fla. "We looked at all three of them, and I said, 'Well, I tell you, I like the beach!' " Lang says.
Her investors thought she was crazy.
Then there's George Liebmann Jr., whose six-year-old company, Permafresh Corp., is based in Santa Fe, N. Mex. The place has been good to him, but it's not where Liebmann started out, and it probably won't be where he ends up.
Liebmann was a 24-year-old consultant in New York City when he developed the product that would lead to Permafresh: a cork system that preserves the wine in opened bottles with a layer of argon gas. Tired of flying cross-country to meet with wine producers in California's Napa and Sonoma valleys, he moved to Santa Fe in 1997. In that small state (population 1.7 million), it wasn't hard to make connections. The state economic-development department and the staff of Senator Pete Domenici aided Liebmann in many ways, from getting him oriented to putting him in touch with the state's European and Asian trade representatives.
But New Mexico simply doesn't have many development programs available for businesses. Nor does it have a great supply of the sort of business-support services that Permafresh needs as it grows: investment banks, accounting firms, package-design firms, marketing consultants. "I'm spending an enormous amount of time on airplanes, flying to the East Coast," says Liebmann. But where should he move? Back to New York -- where some of his angel investors are? It would make sense, but there's a problem. New York City just is not Liebmann's kind of town.
Why do entrepreneurs and CEOs move their businesses? After all, running a company is hard enough without the stress of relocating it. But location can make a big difference in the success of a company, even though most entrepreneurs tend to start a business in a particular place simply because they live there. That's fine -- for a while.
Consultant David Birch of Cognetics Inc., in Waltham, Mass., has studied the effect of location on growing businesses for eight years and annually compiles our lists of best cities. He says that two kinds of considerations come into play when a CEO decides on a location for a company: business reasons and personal ones. "They're often in tension with each other," says Birch. "As the company grows, I think, the business considerations start to swamp the personal ones." Maybe it's increasingly important to be closer to customers or suppliers, he says. Or to be near a bigger or better labor pool. Maybe the costs of doing business are significantly lower somewhere else.
If there's a poster child for what can go wrong when personal considerations take precedence, it might be Rosa. He didn't do much planning before relocating his agency to Providence. He just picked up and moved. He expected his Boston clients to barely notice the difference, but within a few months he saw that they were not renewing their contracts. Worse, Rosa couldn't find enough new clients to replace them in Rhode Island, a smaller market suffering from a recession and a statewide credit-union crisis. He remembers calling on one Rhode Island manufacturer. "The first thing she says to me is, 'You're crazy for coming here. Go back. I'm moving to North Carolina,' " he says.
It's a different story with Heidi Lang. She's thrilled with her company's new home, in Jacksonville. "Building a company is a tremendous stress," she says. "Now I go home, and I'm going to open my convertible as soon as I hit that one bridge and I see the ocean. I'm like, Yesss!"
Unlike Rosa, Lang based her decision on what made business sense as well as on her desire to live by the beach. She takes pride in knowing her retailer customers inside out -- the look and feel of their stores, what kind of consumers shop there -- so that she can recommend a line of frames tailored to their markets. It was hard to do that from Toronto when most of the chains she sold to had stores across the United States. "You have to do a lot of homework on these stores, and we had none of these stores in Canada," she says.
Besides, starting fresh in a new city gave Lang a clean break, an opportunity to make over her rapidly growing company and prepare it for the next level. "We were very much aware that we needed to change managers," she says. "After you grow to a certain point, you have a set of managers at that time, and then you go to the second plateau of the company and then you require a different type of manager."
The plan was to start over in the United States with a brand-new team: a chief financial officer instead of a controller; a sales manager; and an expanded sales staff. In particular, Lang wanted managers who had experience with small growing companies and knew something about mergers and acquisitions and initial public offerings.
Lang's venture-capital backers were less than thrilled by the relocation plan. Why not stay put and enjoy a slower but safer growth rate -- say, 20% a year? they asked.
But Lang, determined to head south, put a plan together for the move and started selling it to her investors. Luckily, she controls 60% of the company and had the leverage to make the decision stick. "It took a lot of convincing for everybody," she says. "I just felt that if we don't do it now, it might be too late for us, and our company might not grow as quickly as I want it to grow."
Of the three sites under consideration -- New Jersey, Atlanta, and Jacksonville -- Lang leaned toward Jacksonville, a place that she knew from sales calls to retailer Stein Mart Inc. Jacksonville seemed to be a modern southern city and had those Florida beaches. It was only a 30-minute flight from Atlanta and within easy striking distance of many of her customers. And it was the cheapest of the three options when it came to rent.
She learned soon enough that sunny, inexpensive Jacksonville had some drawbacks, too. Once she had found space in an office park there -- at $4.50 a square foot, which included the majority of the buildout -- she gave her administrative staff in Canada five months' notice, with the promise of bonuses up to $6,000 if they stayed until the end. (Almost all of them did stay, she says.) But finding replacements in Florida was harder than she expected -- perhaps because the Jacksonville unemployment rate was then hovering around 3%. When TMG advertised its openings, "I had a good response, but they were in lines that were not related to what I was looking for," Lang says. Fortunately, she had allowed herself enough time to keep searching. She ended up hiring managers not just from Jacksonville but from neighboring Gainesville and St. Augustine, 70 and 40 miles away respectively.
TMG's Jacksonville office opened for business last May, and the final phase of the move took place in September. It's too early to tell whether Lang's bet on Jacksonville will pay off. But she says that TMG's revenue growth -- projected at 45% to 55% for 2000 -- has stayed right on track since the move. So far, she says, her VCs don't have anything to complain about.
Liebmann of Permafresh would agree with Lang that a company needs to be in different places during different phases of its life. But his business is nowhere near as large or established as TMG. When Liebmann made his move from New York to Santa Fe, he was specifically looking for a city that would nourish a start-up.
Living in Santa Fe was a lot cheaper than living in New York, and the flight time to the California wine country was just two and a half hours. Plus, Santa Fe offered a culture and a lifestyle that appealed to him as an entrepreneur. For several years before the move, Liebmann, who has an extracurricular interest in chaos theory, had been making regular visits to the Santa Fe Institute for seminars and other events. He was wowed by what he calls the "amazing minds" that he met in New Mexico -- the academic and scientific community centered around Los Alamos National Laboratories, including a number of scientists-turned-entrepreneurs. "It gets pretty lonely -- in New York I was probably the only inventor-entrepreneur that I knew about," he says. "So I had peers here."
And to some extent, that network has paid off. A lunch Liebmann recently had with the CEO of a biotech company in Albuquerque, for instance, yielded some ideas for industrial applications of his product. Liebmann has joined business networking groups (Santa Fe's Safari Club and Albuquerque's Home Run Club) with some good results. Last February, he found his chief financial officer, Dallas Renner Jr., former director of investor relations and financial services at the spice company McCormick & Co., through the Home Run Club.
Other connections have remained elusive, though. Theoretically, Santa Fe has scads of potential investors in the form of seriously moneyed retirees and vacationers, the so-called hill and valley crowd. Liebmann has made a lot of visits to Los Alamos's Coronado Ventures Forum, which aims to match such angels with local entrepreneurs. But in three years, he says, he hasn't been able to tap into any of that wealth.
New Mexico's relative lack of business services also presents a problem. Permafresh works with a bank in Washington, D.C. The company's patent lawyer is in Princeton Junction, N.J. Its industrial-design firm is in New York City. So for the next stage of Permafresh's growth, with the rollout of its first product scheduled for 2001, business considerations are going to trump personal ones. Liebmann wants to move Permafresh's executive offices back to New York, where he can find the services and the talent pool needed to take Permafresh to the next level.
Yet he doesn't need to move the whole kit and caboodle to New York. As with a lot of growth companies, it makes sense to relocate only certain key operations. Splitting up a business in that way can help a CEO track down scarce resources, such as labor, more easily. So here's Liebmann's plan: The assembling and packaging of Permafresh components will probably stay in New Mexico, specifically in Albuquerque, where labor and space are relatively inexpensive. Liebmann will move to New England for at least part of the year. He's not hot on returning to New York, so after hiring a president to take over the day-to-day running of Permafresh in New York, Liebmann will probably move to Vermont, close to his alma mater, Dartmouth College, to concentrate on research and development and strategic planning. Splitting up the company probably would have been impossible when it was still a start-up, when the founder was running the business practically single-handedly, but now that Permafresh is established, that arrangement should work fine.
Lang has taken a similar tack. Although she has moved her company's executive offices to Jacksonville, she's decided to leave TMG's factory operations in Canada. Given the volume of orders these days, she says, it would be far too risky to lose her experienced manufacturing workers and have to retrain new ones.
Relocating only part of a company can free up an entrepreneur to pursue new opportunities more easily. Take Tom Hursman of Spectrum MedSystems Corp. He wasn't even thinking about moving any of his medical- and safety-products business out of Irvine, Calif., where he had been based for five years. He just wanted funding to launch a new line of business: producing a new plastic insert for work boots. Then he found out that by relocating part of Spectrum's manufacturing operations to an economic-development zone in Syracuse, N.Y., the company could really save money. It would be able to qualify for low-interest loans from the state of New York, buy discounted electricity from Niagara Mohawk Power Corp., and even get free land for the factory from the city of Syracuse.
The move made sense from a logistics standpoint, too, since Syracuse was closer to Hursman's insert customers, mostly boot makers based on the East Coast. The rest of Spectrum, however, stayed in California, although Hursman has moved his remaining manufacturing operations to a smaller space in Pomona.
Relocating isn't for everyone, though, as Lori Northrup can tell you. For 20 years the CEO ran a tool manufacturer called Stride Tool in the village of Ellicottville, N.Y. Ellicottville, which is about 50 miles south of Buffalo, is a pretty Victorian ski town that Northrup had fallen in love with as a teenager. In that rural area, with its relatively high unemployment, she found inexpensive space and plenty of labor. By 1998 Stride Tool had revenues of $40 million and was growing so rapidly that it earned a spot on the Inc. 500 list.
But by then Northrup was at work on a new venture. As early as 1995 she had become interested in creating an online brochure and using the Internet as a marketing tool for the industry. Then she realized that she could actually sell products over the Internet. The result was ToolSource.com.
Northrup figured that an Internet start-up belonged in Silicon Valley, ground zero of the dot-com revolution. Then came the clincher: an almost-rock-solid promise of funding from a Silicon Valley venture-capital firm, on the condition that ToolSource relocate to San Francisco. In early 1999 Northrup hired an executive recruiter to put together a management team and started dividing her time between Ellicottville and San Francisco. "It was exciting there," Northrup says of the Bay Area. "It certainly felt like you were in the center of what was happening."
But the new company had to face the usual Silicon Valley hiring woes: skyrocketing salaries and rapid turnover. At the direction of the company's potential VC backers, Northrup and her team spent much of 1999 trying to refocus ToolSource on the ever more crowded consumer market. Then, at the end of the year, the promised VC investment failed to materialize -- just as the company's landlord announced that he was about to renovate the building ToolSource was in and triple the rent. "It just seemed like the crowning blow," says Northrup. "Everything out there was hostile."
So she went home again, and everything began to come together. There were no more landlord problems: Northrup owned a building that had once housed Stride Tool. And within a month of her return, she landed funding from Buffalo's Seed Capital Partners. As it happens, one of Seed Capital's partners has a second home in Ellicottville; he and Northrup meet regularly on Sunday mornings at a local deli.
Although she worried about whether she would find enough technical talent in Ellicottville, Northrup found she could attract IT workers willing to make the commute from Buffalo. The village itself became her "secret weapon" as job candidates were won over by some of the same small-town factors that she loved. Her executive vice-president, David Lokes, had reduced his role to the level of a consultant instead of relocating while ToolSource was still in San Francisco. He couldn't envision moving his family out from his home in Connecticut (from which he was commuting to San Francisco while still executive VP), he says. Once the company was back in Ellicottville, however, Lokes reconsidered. Now he lives in New York State, half a mile away from work. He can go home for lunch. He doesn't miss Connecticut at all.
The sojourn in San Francisco wasn't entirely wasted, Northrup says. It gave her firsthand experience in what running an Internet company was all about, from the accelerated pace to strategic partnerships to employee ownership -- the kind of exposure she could have gotten only by being there. "I'd grown up in very midwestern, traditional manufacturing," she says. "It was a whole different way of doing business."
Then there's Rosa, who decided to stick it out in Providence. In the end he has shown that sometimes an entrepreneur can make even an unpromising city work -- if at least some of the pieces are in place and if he or she has some luck, creativity, and patience.
Although Providence lacked some things that Rosa needed -- like customers -- it did offer other resources, such as a talent pool of creative professionals, thanks to the Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University.
When he first moved his company to Providence, Rosa shared space with some designers, photographers, and other ad people, and soon he figured out how to operate as a virtual ad agency, hiring freelancers on an as-needed basis. He relied on Providence's convenient airport to make frequent trips to Chicago, where trade journalists pointed him toward some potential clients, and he cold-called his way into landing work from them. By taking advantage of Providence's lower expenses, he could sell himself to New York clients as a low-cost alternative.
A referral from a company in Chicago brought Rosa his first major client in Rhode Island. He hung on, and eventually the Rhode Island economy recovered and boomed -- in part because of the revitalization of downtown Providence. Today Advertising Ventures has 15 employees and draws 50% of its clients from Rhode Island.
It's quite possible, of course, that Rosa's ad agency would now be even bigger and more successful had he stayed in Boston. But he has no regrets. From his office in a now-chic neighborhood of renovated factory buildings, he can drop by for lunch with his parents. He runs into people that he knows on the street or in restaurants. He feels grounded, he says. And that makes him better at running his business, he thinks. "I wouldn't be the same person [somewhere else]," Rosa says. "I don't think I'd be as valuable to my clients. I became complete here."
Emily Barker is a senior staff writer at Inc.
Movers and Shakers
Big cities that blasted up the list
Since 1993 these large metro areas have shown the most improvement in their business climate.
|1993-1994 rank
|1999-2000 rank
|Phoenix, AZ
|Dallas-Fort Worth, TX
|Memphis, TN-AR-MS
|Detroit, MI
|Kansas City, MO-KS
|Baltimore, MD
|Boston, MA
|San Antonio, TX
|Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL
|St. Louis, MO-IL
Source: Cognetics Inc.
Rank in 1999-2000: 1
Change in rank since 1993-1994: +25
Big reason for rise: Rapid population growth
Phoenix is the country's second-fastest-growing large metro area, with a 34% increase in population from 1990 to 1999. Phoenix also enjoys an overall operating cost advantage of 7% to 13% over cities of comparable size, according to Rick Weddle, president and CEO of the Greater Phoenix Economic Council. And the region's high-tech roots are paying off. Large manufacturers have formed partnerships with local universities to create a more educated workforce, and refugees from companies like Intel have provided a ready source of employees for many start-ups, according to Tim Riester, president of Phoenix-based ad agency Riester-Robb. Plus, "you wake up every day, and it's beautiful," says Riester. --Mary Kwak
Movers and Shakers
Big cities that plunged down the list
Since 1993 these large metro areas have shown the biggest decline in their business climate.
|'93-'94 rank
|'99-'00 rank
|Greensboro-Winston-Salem, NC
|Seattle, WA
|Los Angeles, CA
|Portland, OR-Vancouver, WA
|Milwaukee-Racine-Sheboygan, WI
|Miami-Fort Lauderdale, FL
|Nashville, TN
|Cleveland-Akron, OH
|Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, CT
|Rochester, NY
Source: Cognetics Inc.
Rank in 1999-2000: 40
Change in rank since 1993-1994: -28
Big reason for drop: Being overshadowed by boomtowns Raleigh-Durham and Charlotte, N.C.
What North Carolina's triad area -- Greensboro, Winston-Salem, and High Point -- seems to be missing is critical mass. Yes, the Triad has universities, venture capitalists, incubators, entrepreneurial networking groups, and other small-business support organizations. It just doesn't have as much as the neighboring Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill nexus has. "There is a sense of a brain drain from the 25- to 39-year-old demographic: people graduate from school, spend a couple of years here, decide it's a lousy place to find a mate, and move to Charlotte and Raleigh," says Michael Dougherty, president of Kindermusik International, which teaches music and movement to children. --E.B.
Movers and Shakers
Small cities that blasted up the list
Since 1993 these small metro areas have shown the most improvement in their business climate.
|'93-'94 rank
|'99-'00 rank
|Portsmouth-Dover-Rochester, NH
|Corpus Christi, TX
|Fort Collins-Loveland-Greeley, CO
|Flint, MI
|Fargo-Moorhead, ND-MN
|Portland, ME
|Duluth, MN
|Brownsville-McAllen, TX
|Huntington, WV
|Waco, TX
Source: Cognetics Inc.
Rank in 1999-2000: 31
Change in rank since 1993-1994: +68
Big reason for rise: Scenic, lower-cost alternative to Boston's high-tech corridor
As the Boston area fills up, companies are heading north to the "E-coast," where prime office space can cost $20 to $24 a square foot -- as much as 50% below the rates along Boston's famous Route 128 technology belt. But Portsmouth isn't just cheap; it's becoming cool. "If we located down in the Route 128 area, we'd pretty much be just another company somewhere off an exit," says Jack Serfass, cofounder of Bowstreet, an E-commerce software company. "We wanted competitive differentiation to attract the first 100 people, and Portsmouth proved to be a great area to do that." The outdoor lifestyle is a magnet for work-hard-play-hard new-economy employees. -- M.K.
Movers and Shakers
Small cities that plunged down the list
Since 1993, these small metro areas have shown the biggest decline in their business climate.
|'93-'94 rank
|'99-'00 rank
|Honolulu, HI
|Lancaster, PA
|Spokane, WA
|Salinas, CA
|Reading, PA
|Melbourne, FL
|Allentown, PA
|Hickory, NC
|Santa Barbara, CA
|Tallahassee, FL
Source: Cognetics Inc.
Rank in 1999-2000: 105
Change in rank since 1993-1994: 102
Big reason for drop: Hawaii's economic doldrums
The Hawaiian economy wiped out in the recession of the early 1990s. Then the Asian crisis of 1997 slowed the flow of tourists. "Unlike the mainland, we're not in a boom," says Jim Richardson, associate professor of management at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Entrepreneurs also face some indigenous challenges: high real estate, energy, and freight costs combined with a small market and labor pool. "If we were in California or Kansas, we could drive further down the road to find new customers. We can't do that here," says Bernie Boltz, founder of Intech Inc., which makes products from recycled paper. But Hawaii is looking to the high-tech sector to diversify its economic base. --Emily Barker
Click here for more on the Best Cities to Start and Grow a Company in Now.
Please e-mail your comments to email@example.com.


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Health and fitness presentation (widescreen)
Add this template to your fitness routine. It features a title slide with 3 photos: a person lifting weights and two runners, which promotes exercise, an apple and tape measure to promote weight management and healthy eating. Use the photos as is or replace them with your own. Content slides in this presentation include table and SmartArt graphic. This widescreen (16X9) template is appropriate for fitness trainers, health club operators, athletes, lifestyle coaches, and weight management counselors. This is an accessible template.


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Latter-day Saints, Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints, Church of Jesus Christ of, name of the church founded (1830) at Fayette, N.Y., by Joseph Smith. The headquarters are in Salt Lake City, Utah. Its members, now numbering about 5.7 million in the United States and 13 million worldwide (2008), are commonly called Mormons.
Sections in this article:
- Introduction
- Beliefs and Organization
- History
- Bibliography
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
See more Encyclopedia articles on: Protestant Denominations


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Truck YeahThe trucks are good!
I doubt there's much Dodge Neon left below this poorly-spray painted body, but it sure looks like a viable compromise between the backcountry-capability of a compact car and frugality of a lifted truck. Or do I have that backwards?
If you really want to stir up your local Home Owner's Association or make your five-year-old kid jump for joy it's for sale in Detroit:
Will trade for golf cart/pontoon/mustang/moped scooter/gator just let me know Wut u got and well talk unless u want to just buy
I know, I totally would have guessed Florida too!
Image: Craigslist
G/O Media may get a commission


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Composr 10.1 beta18
This is a Microsoft Web Platform Installer package of Composr. We will update this routinely when we release new versions, and update Microsoft with the the details.
It can be manually installed into IIS running the Web Deploy Tool, but it should soon be featured in the Web App Gallery directly. Therefore accessing this archive directly is probably of no direct use to you. If you do want to install on IIS manually, the regular Composr installers can do it fine.


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The new U.S. financial risk council should publicly share more details about its closed-door meetings on emerging risks to markets, a congressional watchdog report has found.
The Government Accountability Office said the Financial Stability Oversight Council, a group made up of the top U.S. regulators, fails to provide insight, even on information that is not market-sensitive.
The GAO's report raises similar concerns about the Treasury's Office of Financial Research, another new office created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law to analyze data about market threats.
"Public information on FSOC's and OFR's decision making and activities is limited, which makes assessing their progress in carrying out their missions difficult," the GAO said.
FSOC is chaired by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and includes the Federal Reserve chairman, and the heads of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission, among others.
The group meets regularly in both open and closed sessions, but has been criticized for sharing little information about its views on big market events, such as the European debt crisis and the collapse of major brokerage MF Global.
FSOC has also been called out for being secretive in its deliberations on major regulatory responsibilities, including picking a list of "systemic" financial institutions that will then be subjected to much stricter oversight.
In a letter responding to the GAO's report, Treasury's Under secretary of Domestic Finance, Mary Miller, said the council and the OFR are "firmly committed to operating in an open and transparent manner."
She also noted that the council and the OFR are relatively new organizations that still have improvements to make.
A Treasury spokeswoman declined to comment beyond the letter.
On Thursday, the two key U.S. House Republicans who had requested the GAO study sent a letter to Geithner expressing dissatisfaction with the findings.
"We are concerned that these continued verbal and written commitments from FSOC and OFR are in direct conflict with the findings of the GAO report," wrote House Financial Services Chairman Spencer Bachus and House Financial Services oversight subcommittee chairman Randy Neugebauer.
In addition to urging more transparency, the GAO also found that the FSOC and the OFR both need to develop "systematic and comprehensive mechanisms for identifying and monitoring" risks.
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How the hell can there be a trailer for a movie that doesn't come out for 5 months?! Someone needs to explain this to me. But here's the first trailer for "Men In Black 3" which doesn't come out till May 25th. I assume the DVD will be released sometime in April though so look for that.
So there's an "American psycho" remake coming obviously and today we've got some exciting news on who might be taking the lead role of Patrick Bateman. Or really I should say who novelist Bret Easton Ellis is demanding take the role or he isn't going to sign off on the film. Who does he want? Scott Disick or Miles Fisher of course. For those of you keeping track at home that's the guy who's married to one of the Kardashian's or the guy who played Tom Cruise in "Superhero Movie". It's so hard to choose, maybe both of them can split the movie.
If there's one thing the world needs more of it's vampire/comedy/horror/romance/revenge flicks. Oh and there's also some signs that lead me to believe that "Bloodsucka Jones" might be a soft core porn. But other than that the trailer looks awesome. Or maybe I should say because of that the trailer looks awesome. I don't know. I'm not god!
I don't even know what to say about this. Here's a bunch of stills and a trailer for the new zombie flick fresh out of Taiwan called "Zombie 108". Alright I'll be honest it doesn't look that crazy or anything, standard run of the mill end of the world zombie take over movie, but I'm really tired and I really have no idea what to say. I'm a giant let down I know.


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Europe could be in for change, if voters in three different countries over the weekend have anything to say about it. In France, Greece and even Germany, they ousted candidates who supported austerity and opted instead for messages advocating growth.
Bloomberg reported Monday that in France, President Nicolas Sarkozy went down to defeat by Socialist candidate Francois Hollande, who ran a campaign that espoused growth, not cutbacks, and said after the results were announced that he would persevere in promoting growth.
Sarkozy was the first president of France in more than 30 years to fail to win re-election, and his was the ninth head to roll in the past two years in the euro zone as turmoil over the debt crisis exacted its toll on government leaders.
Hollande is the first Socialist in 17 years to win control of France's government. He took approximately 52% of the vote, and told supporters after the election, "Europe is watching us. Austerity isn't inevitable. My mission now is to give European construction a growth dimension." He promised to pursue growth rather than austerity.
He could have a tough time delivering on that pledge, depending on the outcome of elections for seats in the lower house of Parliament scheduled for a few weeks from now. Sarkozy's party has vowed to keep fighting, and they could make it difficult for Hollande to turn his back on austerity policies—although, according to Alastair Newton, political analyst at Nomura International in London, it is more likely that Socialists will win there too, offering Hollande a more "left-leaning stance."
Greece too chose to repudiate austerity, giving an unexpected amount of support to the Syriza party and putting it ahead of the Pasok party of Evangelos Venizelos, who negotiated the country's second bailout package. Syriza means "Coalition of the Radical Left," and its leader, Alexis Tsipras, said in the report, "The people of Europe can no longer be reconciled with the bailouts of barbarism. European leaders, and especially Ms. Merkel [Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany], should realize that her policies have undergone a crushing defeat."
Although Syriza came in second, its unexpectedly strong showing gives it clout that could make it difficult for the government to keep promises it made in exchange for that second bailout. Tsipras, who is determined to stop the bailout, also urged Greeks not to be "blackmailed" by threats of a departure from the euro. Just two weeks ago he was quoted saying, "The crisis isn't just Greek, it's European."
He added, "There will either be a collective, sustainable and fair European solution to the public debt issue or it will collectively fall apart. The Greek people should understand that this blackmail is false and they must stop blackmailing them with a supposed exit of just Greece without the destruction of the euro."
Germany saw its share of protests as well, as in regional elections in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein Merkel's party suffered its worst showing in over 50 years. Failure of the Christian Democrats to retain control in the state could affect Merkel's chances of reelection in 2013.
Regional elections were also held in Italy on Sunday and Monday, although results were incomplete on what the Italian government reported as low turnout on Monday morning. Pushback against Prime Minister Mario Monti and his austerity policies had been expected, although such results would have little immediate effect on his government.
Still, fallout from other European elections could have even more of an effect. Reuters reported Monday that one of the major parties on which Monti depends to implement austerity policies is calling for lesser austerity in the wake of Hollande's election in France.
Stefano Fassina, economic spokesman for the center-left PD party, said that Italy should react to Hollande's victory by relaxing austerity policies, raising its deficit targets and holding off on its approval of new and tougher European Union (EU) rules regarding public finance.
Fassina was quoted saying that Hollande's election provided a chance for Italy to end "mistaken economic policy choices." He added that Monti should "delay parliamentary approval of the EU fiscal compact and at the same time slow the process towards deficit reduction." Fassina also advocated a major boost in public investment.
Even though Monti has been among those European leaders advocating that austerity requirements not drive out all thought of a need for growth, Fassina is far more outspoken against austerity measures. He is also responsible for his party's official position on economic policy. His PD party compelled Monti to modify the original version of his labor market reform policy, still to be voted on by Parliament, by changing its specifications on easing firing restrictions.
Fassina also said Hollande's victory marked "a defeat for the blind austerity advocated by the European Central Bank which is dragging everyone down, and so we must go in the opposite direction, the one that can save us from a shipwreck."


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Battle of Cape Ortegal, "Strachan's Action", 4th November 1805
Towards the end of the Battle of Trafalgar, Rear-Admiral Pierre Dumanoir le Pelley, in command of the van of the combined fleet, attempted to assist the collapsing combined fleet centre. After an unsuccessful attempt to break through to Villeneuve's flagship, the 80-gun Bucentaure, he commanded his ships to disengage and sail southwards. The Four French ships of Dumanoir's squadron - the 80-gun Formidable, and the 74-gun ships Scipion, Duguay-Trouin and the Mont-Blanc - had only suffered slight damage during the battle and managed to escape. The ships cleared Cape St Vincent on the 29th of October and entered the Bay of Biscay on the 2nd of November.
One of the British ships that were on the look out for French ships in the area was the 36-gun HMS Phoenix, under the command of Captain Thomas Baker. Baker had received information that Zacharie Allemand's Rochefort squadron had been sighted in the Bay of Biscay, and he sailed southwards to investigate. The Phoenix arrived just as Dumanoir was entering the bay.On sighting the four ships, Baker closed in presuming them to be part of the Rochefort squadron. Dumanoir's ships sighted the Phoenix and gave chase. Baker fled south with the plan to lure the French ships towards a British squadron commanded by Captain Sir Richard Strachan.
At 3pm Baker sighted four sails heading south. Dumanoir also saw the sails, and discontinued the chase, allowing Baker to keep the French sails under observation to ascertain the strength and disposition of the French ships. Baker then resumed sailing towards the fours ships he assumed to be Strachan's squadron. The Phoenix fired guns and signaled to the four ships as she attempted to catch them. Two British frigates, the 38-gun HMS Boadicea and the 36-gun HMS Dryad, who had previously encountered and lost Dumanoir's squadron, sighted Phoenix and the four sails to the south at 8.45pm that evening, and signaled them. However, suspicious of the new sails, Baker continued sailing to the squadron in the south. On receiving no reply to their signals, the frigates drew away at 10.30pm and took no further part in the battle.
At around 11pm Baker reached Strachan's squadron. Strachan's squadron was badly scattered, and he initially set sail to intercept the French with the 80-gun Caesar, the 74-gun Hero, Courageux and the 32-gun frigate Aeolus. Baker was sent to round up the remaining ships and order them on to support him. Strachan chased the French, who were now sailing north west, until 1.30am when he lost them in hazy weather. Shortening sail he then waited for the rest of his squadron. At daylight on the 3rd of November he was joined by the 36-gun frigate Santa Margarita and the chase began again. The French ships were once again sighted at 9am, and at 11am the Phoenix, the 74-gun Namur and the 38-gun frigate HMS Révolutionnaire - who had stumbled across the chase - were sighted astern, catching up. By that evening, the Santa Margarita and the Phoenix had overtaken the main British force and were leading the chase. The 74-gun Bellona had not been able to rejoin the squadron and took no part in the battle.
At 5.45am on the 4th of November, the Santa Margarita approached the Scipion and opened fire. At 9.30am she was joined by the Phoenix. At this time Strachan's main squadron was still well behind the French ships, and the Namur and Révolutionnaire were still further astern. The British frigates were successful in slowing the French squadron by constantly harassing the Scipion allowing the British line to overhaul the French ships. By 11.45am Dumanoir realised action was unavoidable and ordered his ships to form line ahead on the starboard tack, with Strachan approaching from windward on the French ships' starboard side.
By noon, all four British frigates were in action attacking the Scipion on the portside and the Namur was close to rejoining the squadron who were firing on the Scipion's starboard side. Dumanoir had ordered his ships to tack in succession, to bring his leading ship, Duguay-Trouin into the action, but the Duguay-Trouin did not obey the signal until 12.15pm after a 45 minute delay. The French line turned towards the British, and the two lines passed alongside each other with Dumanoir hoping to isolate Namur before she could join the British line. However, Dumanoir found that Strachan had doubled his line, with frigates on one side and ships of the line on the other, and the French ships suffered heavy damage as the lines passed. This damage rendered Dumanoir's ships slow and unmanoeuverable, allowing Strachan to tack his line, keep his ships alongside the French, and successfully add the Namur to the line.
The heavy bombardment of the French line continued, and by 3.10pm the Scipion and the Formidable had struck their colours. At this point, the Mont Blanc and the Duguay-Trouin attempted to escape but were chased by the Hero and the Caesar and captured by 3.35pm.
by Robert Phillips, Canvey Island, September 2013
Strategema Games


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Civil War in Russia (2)
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The M48 Patton is a medium tank that was designed in the United States. It was the third and final tank to be officially named after General George S. Patton, commander of the U.S. Third Army during World War II and one of the earliest American advocates for the use of tanks in battle. It was a further development of the M47 Patton tank. The M48 Patton served as an interim tank in U.S. service until replaced by the U.S. Army's first main battle tank (MBT), the M60. The M48 served as the U.S. Army and Marine Corps's primary battle tank during the Vietnam War. It was widely used by U.S. Cold War allies, especially other NATO countries.
The M48 Patton tank was designed to replace the previous M47 Pattons and M4 Shermans. Although largely resembling the M47, the M48 Patton was a completely new tank design. Some M48A5 models served well into the 1980s with American forces, and many various M48 Patton models remain in service in other countries. The M48 was the last U.S. tank to mount the 90 mm tank gun, with the last model, the M48A5, being upgraded to carry the new standard weapon of the M60, the 105mm gun.
The Turkish Army is the largest operator of the modernized M48 MBT, with more than 1,400 M48s in its inventory (around 1,000 have been phased out/in storage or modified to ARVs).M48A3In February 1963, the US Army accepted its first of 600 M48 Patton tanks that had been converted to M48A3's, and by 1964, the US Marine Corps had received 419 Patton tanks. These Pattons were to be deployed to battle in Vietnam. Because all M48A3 tanks were conversions from earlier models, many characteristics varied among individual examples of this type. M48A3 tanks could have either 3 or 5 support rollers on each side and might have either the early or later type headlight assemblies.


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The moment we have all been waiting for........summer!!!! However, we couldn't leave you without some funny academic fails to spice up the beginning of your summer h
Here they are!!! The best fails of this week are up and ready to get you laughing. Which one was your favorite??Let us know what you think or submit a video at failarmy.c
Soooo closeeee! Here are some of the best close calls in our collection. We also tested out a new intro card. What do you think? Let us know! If you have a video of someo
Here we go again!!! The best fails of the week are up and ready to get laughed at. Let us know what you think or submit a video at failarmy.com. Salute!!
What To Watch N
This weekend was Mother's Day here in the US. As a way to salute our mom's we took all the funniest mom fail submissions and put them in an epic fail compilatio
How the hell is it May already? Anyway, here are the best fails of the week submitted by you and compiled by us. Let us know your thoughts down below, submit a video at f
Damn nature, you scary! Especially when we decide to build boards and boats and attack you head on. Here are some of the funniest surfing and wave fails submitted by you
Here they are, the best fails submitted to us this month. As always, if you have a good fail, submit it to us at www.failarmy.com. Which fail was best? Chill out, Let us
BABY COME BACK!!!! Here are a bunch of our favorite "Getting Away From You Fails". Wheels, ATV's, Skis and more, sometimes our toys can't stand us. Le
Here they are, the best fails of the week. We want to respond to your comments more personally. Last week we asked you how your fails made the world a better place and we
We've been talking about doing this compilation for years now and finally had enough clips to do it. Maybe we really are heading toward a planet of the apes. What do
BUTT PASTE! Here they are all the newest hottest video memes and fails submitted to us this week. Take a look and leave a comment below, let us know what you think. Hope
Not everyone got an A in Driver's Education. Here are some of the wierdest, funniest and craziest driving fails submitted to us over the last few years. A huge shout
Are you ok, hunny? Does she look OK to you mom? Thank you to everyone who has been submitting videos over the last month. We're catching up on some older stuff but h
I hope you guys enjoyed the Win Compilation last week. We may try to do them a bit more often, or maybe keep it to a couple of times a year. This week we go back to basic
Before we started posting Fails, we would fire up our Pentium Processors and compile wins for you guys. Sure the internet was dial-up and I was 7 years old, but the compi
Spring has sprung. So get sprung with some spring loaded fails. Trampolines? Check. Other types of spings? Check. Rubber bands and stuff? Check. Let us know your thoughts
Alright back to our regularly scheduled programming. Not too bad of a week, but keep those submissions coming. If you have a good clip or know someone who does, send it o
Here they are, the best fails of all time so far. A lot of you guys have asked us to do an ultimate fails compilation ever and this seems like the right time to do it. A
Theres not much to say other than Thank You. Thank you to everyone who submits videos, thanks to everyone who leaves funny comments every week, and most of all the savage
By the time you're reading this we may have hit 10m. I'm scheduling in advance, so there's really no way to tell. What I can tell you is that if we do hit
Shout out to everyone who submitted a drunk fail. I want to use this moment to urge all of you, when capturing a fail drunk or not, record it horizontally. You'll be
Wow. Not only are we on the countdown to 10m subs but you guys came through huge with submissions this week. Excellent compilation. We're putting together the best f
The year is halfway over and its time for some snow. Shout out to everyone who sent us their winter fails. Here's a collection of some of the best ones in our collec
DONT CLICK THE SPAM LINKS. Its not us posting that stuff. I'm working to resolve it...
Anyway - Happy March everyone. The year is half over, but the good news is th


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Prayin' for A Sweet Start (The Brownies @ De Garden)November 14, 2011 | 8,056 views
A Gift from the Heart?
Tomorrow's my first day at work. Slight jitters? Nah …. this is not the first time I am experiencing a change in working environment, but still, the thought of adapting to everything from scratch does bear its hovering cloud of uncertainties.
Lending a substantially more gloomy atmosphere to the situation, the rainy spell continues in the Klang Valley (and I am sure elsewhere too); to a point where good old Subang was hit by a freak hailstorm yesterday evening. It felt as though the sky's tearing up and not relenting for even a single day.
As I am writing this post, I am gleefully chomping on delicious pineapple puffs from a small town less than 100km away from KL. I wanted to share that recent excursion with you, but probably on another day. Just too many photos to sort out from the pile of excessive/obsessive/compulsive shots. Pardon the amateur abilities, for I'm still familiarizing myself with the DSLR camera.
Are you craving for a sweet start to the working week as well? If you are, then this post is meant for you. Read the rest of this entry »


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Home > Jewelries & Watches > Jewelries > Necklace > Stainless Steel Grenade Charm Pendant for Men - Silvery
Product Details
- Cool and fashionable pendant with grenade shape
- Very unique and exquisite design, really fits for men
- Great accessory for DIY decoration marking
- A hanging ring on its top for hanging on a chain or necklace
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- Grenade Height: Approx. 0.67 inch / 17mm (hanging ring not included)
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Lexene David
Commercial Sales & Leasing Manager
A Cronulla enthusiast, Lexene was born in the Shire and has chosen to raise her family in the Shire.
Lexene started working for Sid Payne, the founder of the company at Sutherland in 1978 when she completed her real estate licensing course.
Throughout her career Lexene has developed her on the job skills further, managing 650 tenants for 4 years, then moving onto the role of sales support and sales consultant where she concentrated on selling waterfront properties and exclusive units and houses. After being honoured with 'Employee of the Year twice, Lexene joined the management team in 2000, where she provided valuable input in running the company. At the same time Lexene developed her role in the accounts department where she managed the company's finances, GST, taxation and payroll until late 2008.
Lexene now uses her wealth of real estate knowledge and skills to provide the highest level of service as manager the Commercial Sales and Leasing department.


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Cluster analysis involves applying one or more clustering algorithms with the goal of finding hidden patterns or groupings in a dataset. Clustering algorithms form groupings or clusters in such a way that data within a cluster have a higher measure of similarity than data in any other cluster. The measure of similarity on which the clusters are modeled can be defined by Euclidean distance, probabilistic distance, or another metric.
Cluster analysis is an unsupervised learning method and an important task in exploratory data analysis. Popular clustering algorithms include:
- Hierarchical clustering: builds a multilevel hierarchy of clusters by creating a cluster tree
- k-Means clustering: partitions data into k distinct clusters based on distance to the centroid of a cluster
- Gaussian mixture models: models clusters as a mixture of multivariate normal density components
- Self-organizing maps: uses neural networks that learn the topology and distribution of the data
The distinguishing feature of each of these algorithms is the metric to measure similarity.
Cluster analysis is used in bioinformatics for sequence analysis and genetic clustering; in data mining for sequence and pattern mining; in medical imaging for image segmentation; and in computer vision for object recognition.
For more details on cluster analysis algorithms, see Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox™ and Deep Learning Toolbox™.


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The fight card for August's WEC 50 event is quickly filling, and a pair of once-beaten lightweights are the latest competitors targeted for the event.
MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com) has learned from sources close to the event that Dave Jansen (14-1 MMA, 1-1 WEC) and Ricardo Lamas (8-1 MMA, 3-1 WEC) have verbally agreed to meet on the evening's preliminary card, and bout agreements are expected to be finalized shortly.
Featuring a bantamweight title fight between current champ Dominick Cruz and challenger Joseph Benavidez, "WEC 50: Cruz vs. Benavidez" takes place Aug. 18 at The Pearl at the Palms Casino Resort.
The main card airs live on Versus.
Jansen looks to bounce back from the first loss of his career after dropping a unanimous decision to Kamal Shalorus in January. Jansen stood toe-to-toe with the Iranian brute, but it was Shalorus who absorbed the shots, returned fire and walked away with the win.
Jansen debuted for the WEC in October 2009 with a win over Rich Crunkilton. The win was "The Fugitive's" 14th-straight victory to open his career, and eight of those wins cam via submission.
Lamas also opened his WEC career with a 1-1 mark after earning a March 2009 win over Bart Palaszewski and falling victim to a Danny Castillo TKO in August 2009.
Lamas has since bounced back with a unanimous-decision win over James Krause and a devastating knockout of Bendy Casimir at WEC 47 in March.
For the latest on WEC 50, stay tuned to the MMA Rumors section of MMAjunkie.com.
(Pictured: Ricardo Lamas)


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Getting picked last in gym class is one thing, but getting picked 22nd in the NFL Draft when you were one of the crowd favorites? That's just torture.
But that's what happened to good ol' Johnny "Football" Manziel Friday night when the Houston Texans and other NFL teams announced their first round draft picks.
All the media cameras were focused on the former Texas A&M quarterback as he was skipped again, again and again.
And the Internet pounced at the opportunity, building all sorts of memes and joke images aimed at the poor Heisman Trophy winner. On Twitter, the hashtag #BeforeManzielGetsDrafted continued to be among the top trending items a day later.
The jokes went on even after the Cleveland Browns finally signed him.
Above are some of the best memes that have come out since the Draft began.