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Happy Bald Eagle Day!June 21, 2013 at 1:52 am | Posted in The Wild Side | Leave a comment
Tags: Bald eagle, eagle, raptor, Wildlife
What a beautiful, majestic bird it is. A symbol of our country. So to all of you raptor lovers out there, Happy Bald Eagle Day!
Palm Beach ZooMarch 21, 2013 at 3:29 pm | Posted in For the Family | Leave a comment
Tags: animals, ant eater, Bald eagle, birds, black bear, flamingos, Florida, florida panther, giant anteater, jaguar, koala, koala bear, komodo dragon, maccaw, monkeys, new guinea singing dog, ocelot, otter, palm beach zoo, river otter, Roseate Spoonbill, scarlet ibis, spider monkey, Spoonbill, tamarin, tapir, tiger, white alligator
Another beautiful South Florida day means another perfect day at the zoo. I know what you're thinking. "This girl goes to the zoo a lot!" OK, guilty, I do. I happen to live an hour or less from 3 great zoos and I have a 2 year old son, of course I do! Plus, with annual passes, why not! This AZA accredited zoo is a great place to spend just a few hours or the entire day. During the summer time I can promise you won't see so many trips to the zoo. But that's not what this post is about, we're here to talk about the animals we saw!
The first direction we always head when entering this zoo is to the left. Call it habit. We love to see some of the zoos larger reptiles, including Mardi, the zoo's White Alligator. Seeing him is always very cool… My son loves alligators and this is one you're able to see quite close, I always find myself amazed that Mardi is one of only 10 White Alligators in the world (truly white, not albino, they have blue eyes), making him an incredibly rare sight!
There are a lot of other adorable and entertaining animals as you make your way into the zoo. You'll come across animals from the slow Sloth to two breeds of quick little Tamarins, colorful Macaws, and the always playful Ocelots. Today the Ocelots we playing with whatever was nearby, chewing on bundles of plant debris and ambushing each other and they moved around their enclosure.
In the Australian area of the zoo you'll find some of coolest and cutest Aussie animals out there. The New Guinea Singing Dogs aren't always super active, but today we got lucky! The pair actually approached the fence, tails wagging, and actually seemed genuinely interested in visitors. The kids loved that they were able to get so close and the dogs even licked their hands through the safety of the fence, we even got to hear one "sing". You'll also see Wallaby's and Australian water fowl when you enter their habitat, being separated by a mere gate on the boardwalk. The Australian Birds habitat features some of the islands famous feather species. On this particularly cool day we watched at the Red Kangaroo did absolutely nothing. Sounds exciting, right? It was actually quite adorable, it laid itself out in the sun as if it were a tourist laying out at the beach. And of course, the Australian Exhibits main focal, Oz and Abby the Koalas. Palm Beach Zoo was chosen by the AZA to participate in the Koala Species Survival Plan, recieving this adorable pair in hopes that they will reproduce. Their enclosure is fronted with glass, allowing people to get a close look at these precious little marsupials, and hopefully leaving them with a lasting impression to care and take action toward Koala conservation.
The Asian area of the zoo has a good selection of critters from Asia, including the Howler Monkey who's yells are rivaled only by my son and a walk through Asian Bird aviary with colorful birds from the continent. The big feature of this area is obviously Asia's famous big cats, the Tigers. This May, Tiger Cubs Jaya, Bunga, and Penari will be celebrating their 2nd birthday. Their births at the Palm Beach Zoo was a huge success for their breeding program and the zoo deserves a high five for taking such great care and ensuring the success of their program of this critically endangered species. With any luck, they will continue with their success!
Over in the Tropics of the Americas display you'll find some wonderful animals from Central and South America. Here you can see the beautiful resident Jaguar, check out the Nocturnal Animal Observation, and kids can take their pictures on structures in the Mayan Plaza. When you cross the bridge you may catch a glimpse of Tapir's swimming in the water and Patagonian Cavy's lounging around. Also be on the look out for Delilah, the zoos baby Giant Anteater. Look carefully, that adult Anteater doesn't have a hunched back, that's actually little Baby Delilah hanging on her mothers back.
Heading along our way, we walked past the Spider and Capuchin Monkey Islands. The sight on the Spider Monkey Island stopped me (and everyone else) in my tracks… a little bitty baby hanging on its mother. It was too cute for words! I watched as Momma Monkey climbed down the tree and over to the water to grab herself a drink. Just as I thought for sure there was no way possible the sight could get any more adorable I was proven wrong. Anyone who argues that animals don't have emotional feelings needed to see the precious moment we watched. Momma Monkey walked over to another monkey sitting alone and they threw their arms around each other and embraced in a monkey hug. It was a moment I almost missed capturing on film because I was too busy "Awwwwwww"ing the precious moment between these two friends.
Our last stop at the zoo was the Florida Wetlands area. Here you can see on display our very own wildlife found here in Florida. There is an aviary with Roseate Spoonbills and Scarlet Ibis, a pair of beautiful Bald Eagles, an Alligator display, and Florida Black Bears just to name a few. A favorite of so many, including my son now and myself as a kid (and admittingly now) is the River Otter display where you can watch Otters swim and play and glide by you. They seem to love an audience, even pressing against the glass when people gather to watch them.
Naturally, no Florida display would be complete without the Florida Panther. This endangered cat's population is dangerously low in the wild with only around 100 cats remaining, though this is a serious improvement from the estimated 30 in the early 90's. Last march the zoo lost their Panther of 17 years, Colin Patrick, but were fortunate enough to add two new cats over the summer, both orphaned rescues. The two here at Palm Beach Zoo are still considered kittens, and boy were they acting like it today! They were pouncing at each other, chasing one another, and climbing everything in their enclosures. In case you're looking at one of the above photos and thinking "Why is there trash in their enclosure?", it's not. The cardboard box is part of the zoos enrichment program, giving the animals safe objects to play with they they don't usually have within their enclosure, providing physical and mental exercise. They seemed to love it and be enjoying life.
This is a great zoo to visit and time of year. During the summer it is well shaded and has a fountain the kids can play in. They also offer special events throughout the year after regular hours like overnights and nighttime parties as well as birthday parties and weddings. For more information, visit them here…
Pic of the Week – 1/5January 10, 2013 at 3:37 pm | Posted in Pic of the Week | 2 Comments
Tags: Bald eagle, eagle, Pembroke Pines Eagles, South Florida Eagles
While it's not the clearest picture I've ever taken, it sure was an exciting sight to see! Right into the New Year, my friend and I traveled down to Pembroke Pines to see the one and only nesting pair of Bald Eagles in South East Florida. It's in a residential area, across the street from a school, not really where you would expect to see a pair of Eagles. But year after year, this pair returns to this nest to lay their eggs and raise their young. Finding it was a bit tough, funny as it may sound. You can park along the street and see the nest across the street. It took a little scouting and referring to a web site set up for this pair to find them, but once we saw the nest we though "How did we not see this?" (For the record, South Fl. Eagle Watch has made it incredible easy to locate the nest, giving you very specific instructions on where to stand for the best view.) Momma Eagle was sitting in the nest, Daddy Eagle was nowhere to be seen. We watched her as she preened herself and arranged her nest while watching over her egg. Since an egg has been laid, there will always be at least one Eagle present until the Eaglets are ready to fledge, so if you're in the South Florida area now is the perfect time to go have a looksy! Maybe you'll come up with your own pic of the week.
If You Go:
A Symbol of America on ThanksgivingNovember 28, 2012 at 3:56 pm | Posted in Creature Feature, The Wild Side | Leave a comment
Tags: Bald eagle, eagle, eagle nest, Florida
On Thanksgiving day, on the way home from Sanibel, I was still kicking myself for missing the opportunity to snap pictures of the Bald Eagles we had seen that day. Little did I know, my real opportunity was 5 minutes down the road from my inlaws at the Dollar General! Yes, that's right, the Dollar General of all places. We were making the final right turn toward our families neighborhood when I spotted two large birds on top of a large bare tree. Most of the day, I had been getting my hopes up of seeing these majestic birds only to find out what I though could have been them from a distance was actually an Osprey or a Turkey Vulture. This time though, with their bright white heads glowing in the sunset, I was sure! I frightened my husband into popping a u-turn and going back.
With around 1,200 nesting pairs, Florida has the third largest population of breeding eagles, with Alaska having the most and then Minnesota. Bald Eagles usually make their way down to Florida around September for the winter/breeding season, often returning to the same nest they have used in years before. Because Eagles return to their old nests, organizations have been able to install "Eagle Cams" at the nests while the pair isn't using it. This gives anyone with internet access the ability to check in on a nesting pair and watch from the time eggs are laid until the young fledge.
While I didn't see a nest in sight, I'm certain this pair of Eagles will be nesting nearby. Three times we drove past the Dollar General, three times at least one of the raptors was there, if not on the old tree than perched upon a cell tower on the other side of the building. Cape Coral has around 11 pairs of nesting Eagles in or near the town, we were pleasantly surprised to find this pair was practically our neighbors.
Photos taken with my Nikon D3100
To locate a nest in Florida, try FWC's Nesting Locator…
Not near a nest but want to catch the nesting action anyway? Try one of these Eagle Cams…
Pic of the Week 11/24November 23, 2012 at 7:54 pm | Posted in Pic of the Week | Leave a comment
Tags: Bald eagle, Cape Coral, eagles
I realize I'm a slacker, missing last weeks pic of the week, but I'm hoping this makes up for it. While spending Thanksgiving weekend with family in Cape Coral, Fl, I spotted a pair of Bald Eagles by a Dollar General in a dead tree. After seeing them throughout the day while driving and missing the opportunity to take their pictures, this was exactly the moment I had been waiting for! So after popping a u turn and a little frantic driving to get to them before they flew away (and they did, those pictures should be up in the best few days), I was able to capture this American icon on Thanksgiving Day, and my pic of the week.
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Reasons Why Plastic Surgery Is Done
Surgical procedures are serious and should be handled with the utmost care and precision. Both the surgeon and the patient should do their part in ensuring that the process is successful. As a potential surgery patient, one of your responsibilities is to ensure that you know why you are going through the procedure and what the expected outcome is. This is primarily because after the procedure is done, there is a recovery process whose success is mainly dependent on how you follow instructions.
Plastic surgery in Perth can be done to rectify parts of the body so that they can be in their original form and function. Let's look at some of the reasons why plastic surgery may be done:
To Correct Birth Defects
One of the reasons why plastic surgery is greatly appreciated in life is that it restores the quality of life that a baby may otherwise lack. There are instances where a baby is born when parts of their body are not fully developed. One of this is the cleft lip as well as the cleft palate. The cleft lip condition mainly affects the upper lip while the cleft palate affects the mouth's roof known as the palate.
If a child is born with birthmarks that are associated with dysfunctions within the blood vessels such as a haemangioma, he or she qualifies for plastic surgery. Perth is one of the places that has the best plastic surgeons who are both qualified and trained to perform the surgical procedure. Another issue that develops at birth that can be corrected through plastic surgery is craniosynostosis which causes the child to have a head that has an abnormal shape at birth.
Plastic surgery can also correct both ear and hand problems. This is where a baby has very small ears or none at all or where the baby has fingers that are webbed or either the fingers are few or more than the actual number.
Later Life Conditions
There are other issues that develop over time and need to be treated by a plastic surgeon. Perth has surgeons who can carry out reparative and reconstructive procedures to treat acquired problems. Cosmetic Plastic Surgery are conditions that are caused either by cancer, trauma, infection or extensive burns. For example, cancer patients that require skin repair procedures or reconstruction of body parts such as the breasts.
Traumatic encounters such as development of wounds which are severe such as the ones caused by animal bites need to be treated by a plastic surgeon. Skin that has been severely also needs the touch of a plastic surgeon to repair and also enhance the appearance.
There are some conditions that can warrant the services of a plastic surgeon. These health conditions include arthritis of the bone and pressure ulcers. Also in situations where a person gets an infection in the skin, plastic surgeons can get rid of the dead tissue and help to treat the area surrounding the wound.
Plastic surgeons in Perth can therefore help you to get back your life by helping you to have the kind of quality life that you should have regardless of the experiences you go through. Visit http://www.cosmetic-plastic-surgery.com.au/.

subset: commoncrawl


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In most cases a Grails application uses a database to store its content. Fortunately Grails is tightly coupled with GORM to ease the use. Since Grails distinguish between different deployment environments, it uses a special configuration for development and production. Therefore you have to think of a database in production environment while you don not [...]
Continue reading about Deploy a Grails Application into Glassfish
I set up an mobile application that sends data via a REST based interface to a Grails-based server. Unfortunately J2ME does not support all HTTP methods. To overcome this weakness we have to emulate the methods PUT and DELETE. Like Rails just did this by adding a "_method=PUT" parameter to the query URL, we will [...]
For my current grails project I use the Spring Security Plugin (formerly Acegi Security) to secure my views and services. A tutorial at the Grails site gives a great overview how to install the grails plugin.
Right after installation I faced some issues:
Secure your Rest Services
This sounds quite easy due to a simple switch within the [...]
Check out how easy the integration of OpenID into Grails is:
1. Create a new grails application: grails create-app openID
2. Change into directory: cd openID
3. Install Plugin: grails install-plugin openid
4. Create a new controller: grails create-controller User
5. Create logon.gsp at grails-app/views/user
6. Add the following lines of code
<openid:css />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8″/>
<meta name="layout" content="main" />
<openid:css />
<div [...]
Continue reading about 10 Steps to Integrate OpenID into Grails


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Adams High School senior Alba Tomasula y Garcia received two gold medals in the writing portion of the annual National Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.
She also received a silver medal for her art portfolio in the art category of the awards.
Several other area students received national awards, including AlbaÂ?s sister Ava Ambrose Tomasula y Garcia, who is a student at LaSalle Intermediate Center. She received both a gold medal and an American Visions medal in drawing.
Other gold medals in art went to Marian High SchoolÂ?s Laura Herron in photography and Sturgis High SchoolÂ?s Jana Blodgett in jewelry.
In writing awards, Alba TomasulaÂ?s two gold medals were for a personal essay/memoir titled Â?Pilgrim in My Own Back YardÂ? and for a science fiction piece titled Â?Rash.Â?
Other writing gold awards went to John Glenn High SchoolÂ?s Nicole Noland in the humor category for a piece titled Â?A Mental Interaction.Â?
The national award winners will be invited to the awards ceremony June 4 at Carnegie Hall in New York City.
The local award recipients:
Writing Awards
Adams High School Â? Alba Tomasula y Garcia, gold, Personal Essay/Memoir, Â?Pilgrim in My Own Back Yard;Â? and Science Fiction/Fantasy, Â?Rash.Â?
John Glenn High School Â? Nicole Noland, gold, humor, Â?A Mental Interaction.
NorthWood High School Â? American Voices Medal, Shawn Kronk, short story, Â?Blood Brothers.Â?
Penn High School Â? Rhiannan Laird, silver, short story, Â?The Stone.Â?
Art Awards
Adams High School Â? Hilary Springman, silver, ceramics & glass; Alba Tomasula y Garcia, silver, art portfolio.
Elkhart Memorial High School Â? Rubia Hagans, silver, ceramics & glass; Kaitlyn Robison, silver, photography.
LaSalle Intermediate Center Â? Ava Ambrose Tomasula y Garcia, gold, drawing, and American Visions Medal, drawing.
Marian High School Â? Laura Herron, gold medal, photography
Riley High School Â? Brittnee Thompson, silver, drawing.
Sturgis High School Â? Jana Blodgett, gold, jewelry.
Upton Middle School (St. Joseph) Â? Anthony Miller, silver medal, painting


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Yes! Yes! A thousand times yes!!!
Besides, everyone knows stamp-collector groupies are major babes.
I will admit, not bitching about politics and other current events has taken away a large incentive to post regularly. It wasn't exactly a conscious decision, more like 'jeez, give it a rest'. There's no real incentive to start ranting about the outrage of the day. With this administration, there's another one coming along and it's more tiresome than anything else.
Remember when Obama was supposed to be this great agent of hope and change? A lot of people saw that he had no actual experience taking difficult leadership positions, and usually voted "present" in his career. But those people didn't vote for him. Over halfway through his Presidency, his style of leadership is quite clear. Serious question for those who voted for him, two years later, what other explanation could there before why he gets pushed around by Reverend Wright, Bill Ayers, Rahm, the Republicans, Iran, Qaddaffi? Obama's not going to stand up for what's true and right and decent, why else would he wait two more years to fight for repealing Bush tax cuts? Why else did he campaign against the individual mandate and then sign Obamacare as written?
Now, does anybody remember anything concrete about him? His leadership position on Middle East turmoil? A brilliant forward-looking plan anywhere? The State of the Union was barely a month ago, did anything come out of that? [I recall something about Sputnik and choo-choo trains...]
Will he win re-election? Well, unless some serious sea change has happened in America's black communities that nobody has noticed, blacks are going to vote for him as unanimously in '12 as in '08. I think racial solidarity is a bad decision to base one's vote on, but it is a democratic right. That's the only thing giving him a fighting chance. The leftists know they're being taken for granted - who else are they going to vote for? - and every other Democratic constituency is fed up with defending their guy. The economy is worse under Obama, and he's not leading on any front. Any other President, he'd be unquestionably toast. As it is, he has virtually no chance, unless everything magically falls his way. Such things are not unprecedented.
Very little is happening as proscribed. The Muslim world is trying to unite, and the required step is a federalist sort of Islam that can credibly support a Caliphate. It could be housed in Cairo, Baghdad, Tehran, Beirut, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Mecca, I'm sure Kabul would work in a pinch, or Khartoum.
A united Islam would be a formidable enemy, but long before achieving major victory, their own internal dissension would tear them apart. Arab versus African, Shi'ite versus Sunni, tribalist versus globalist. The question - from our side - is how much damage they could inflict before this pan-Islamic civil war began. A true Caliphate accepted from Indonesia to Venezuela (ahem) would have to be a peacable one, with Caliphs replaced by means closer to the Pope in Rome than has traditionally been the case.
We'll know Islam is ready for such a state when the individual Muslim communities are able to police themselves in civilized manners. There are hopeful signs, the Egyptian protestors are making a point of cleaning up after themselves. Even the Muslim Brotherhood would have to know that actual governing on existing Middle Eastern models isn't possible without the horrible results demonstrated so far. [Except in Iraq and, to a lesser extent, Afghanistan] Anybody looking to be the next Qaddaffi? The next Saddam? The next Arafat?
The book continues, depressingly slowly. I'm about an eighth of the way through the third draft, and well over 40 corrections per page on average. I was hoping to have it at the printer's by mid-March, and that's been thrown out the window. What if I have to do a 4th draft? I'd be lucky to have the book printed by this year's NANOWRIMO.
I am pleased with the way it's turning out. Very few of the corrections are for anything other than grammar or polish. When I wrote the first draft, I had no idea what would actually happen by the end, and by the time I reached the end, I barely remembered anything from the beginning. That obviously carried over to the second draft, but now that I'm reading the book for the second time, everything fit together very well. The second draft was going through structural deficiencies and finding very few. Now I'm tracking the consistency of the characters and what's going on chapter by chapter. As long as the continuity is maintained, I'll be happy. The whole story needs to fit into a timeline, so that's the other priority of the third draft.
I'm also going back and forth on what else to include in the printed book. As a tribute to NANOWRIMO, my intention has always been to include blog posts and other stuff I wrote during the period of the first draft. I also just like the idea of making the book a complete package, more like an album. The question here is how much extra stuff do I want to include? And how much extra work is that worth?
I like the idea of including "extras". If nothing else, I'd like to have a polished readable version of the material. ["we decided that one big book was better'n two little books and rather than bring one up we decided to throw ours down..."] However, the "pure" notion of nothing between the covers except the story itself is a tempting one. The "vanity" part of "vanity press" would still be satisfied. And it would cut out much time and effort and still give me a book I'd want to read.
Ah well. I've got weeks left before I'll come close to needing to make that decision. The last half-dozen pages I've done of the third draft each have at least 55 corrections per page. There's no incentive to keep going beyond 'if I don't do it, it won't get done.' Depressing.
Speaking of depressing, one assumes the Baby Boomers must be in full *give me grandkids* mode by now, because I'm guessing there's a huge segregation in that population these days. The ones who are retiring have to fill up the hours with something. This will be particularly hard for those whose jobs really were everything in their lives, and the ones who have a crop of grandkids to play with will be noteworthy for that reason.
Anecdotal evidence suggests a resurgence of girly-girl-ism in the female of the species. That's where the Boomers who really didn't think about things like 'family values' before start seeing what really lasts. Read a story a while back about Madonna being horrified at some of the clothes her teenage daughter wanted to wear. I'm guessing that being an Italian Catholic school girl is a little harder to shake off than she thought it was. And if there's anyone who deserves to be shocked by her daughter's rebelliousness...
I've been listening to a bit of different music lately, now that I've overloaded on Steinman for the time being. I've burned a lot of CDs and listened to stuff on the car's stereo. Some stuff is surprisingly good. I still haven't gotten tired of such standards as Michael Jackson's "Man in the Mirror", Jim Croce's "I Got a Name", a Trans-Siberian Orchestra song or two. I've included some early-pop punk stuff, early albums by the Go-Go's ("We Got the Beat") and Big Star (albums didn't sell, but they were influential). Both bands are tolerable, but will probably be removed from the next batch of CDs. Joe Satriani's debut album, Surfing With The Alien was the biggest hit instrumental rock album in ages, and it wasn't just the rip-off of John Byrne's Silver Surfer on the cover that sold it. An outstanding guitarist. He's also joined with Sammy Hagar to lead Chickenfoot, whose debut album is excellent hard rock.
I'm actually becoming quite interested in Sammy Hagar. Best known as the guy who replaced David Lee Roth in Van Halen and he did that 'I Can't Drive 55' song, he's actually had a long and impressive career. Keep in mind, I haven't actually listened to most of his music, but I'm becoming more and more impressed with what I'm finding.
His first released album was as a member of Montrose in 1973, and up through his second release with Van Halen in 1986, he almost kept up an album a year release schedule. Since then, he's averaged an album every two years. Not noteable for much in the way of hits other than his VH-era releases, he always showed a relentless work ethic to tour and release material, and get to know the record company and radio guys. His collaborations with others became more and more high-profile until he stepped in to give Van Halen its biggest commercial standing.
This would be transitory, as the David Lee Roth releases continued to outsell Van Hagar in the long run. Indeed, modern Van Halen seems intent on erasing Hagar's time in the band at every opportunity. But Sammy continued releasing albums, working with other people, running a liquor empire.
I've only got most of his VH albums, the one he did after leaving/getting kicked out, the three songs he did for their reunion greatest hits tour/album, Chickenfoot, and his cover of Patti Smith's "Free Money" from one of his first solo albums.
The Smith song has always been a favorite of mine, from her excellent debut album in 1976-7. Smith and her band were basically rock critics who knew how to play instruments. She played up the poetess dancing up front while they were a tight rock band who knew all the facets of their craft. The debut album, Horses, has deservedly lived up to the hype, and "Free Money" has always been the song I think sounded most 'pop'. There's psychelic stuff and jams and heavy guitar stuff, none of the lyrics make any sense, and "Free Money" did a really good job of compacting all that in an appealing way.
So, if you only know Sammy Hagar as the generic hard-rock shouter who gets to work and party with A-list rockers, a great guy but not especially deep or outstanding in any field, you might not expect much from his cover of Patti Smith's New York punk poem. I sure didn't.
But I spent a buck on amazon's mp3 section and what I heard was an amazing cover that builds on the original in so many ways, I honestly have no idea which I prefer more. I want to like the original, but...
Here's a cover of some song I've never heard from his first solo album, the one before including "Free Money". This does a lot of the same thing, and I'm sorely tempted to do with Sammy what I did with Rush and Billy Joel, say 'screw it, I'm downloading everything'.
But yeah, Hagar's "Free Money" is perpetually listenable. I'd always wanted to hear "Sixteen Tons", and now I love it. A few standout tracks come from Dennis Wilson's debut album which sound nothing like the surfing Beach Boy burnout he actually was. Very deep and evocative mood music with a raspy voice he never had on Brian Wilson's tunes. Roxette did some great songs in the late 80's, and then redid the vocals in Spanish, so I've been enjoying those. Jim Morrison and Blondie mashed up for "Rapture Riders".
I don't know if Phil Spector needs the money or what, but a three disc set of most of his biggest records has become available, and it's very much worth it. The Ronettes, the Crystals, Darlene Love. It's not complete, no Righteous Brothers or Tina Turner, but most of his pre-Beatles output is represented. "Da Doo Ron Ron" and "He's A Rebel" are excellent productions, and if you can put aside the issue of giving money to a psychotic gun-toting lunatic like Spector, and you like his work, it's well worth the money.
If you can't put that issue aside, it's perfectly understandable. Exceptions will be made for people who create worthwhile commercial work that an audience will continue to desire. If anybody's interested in Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby as classic movies, the pedophile rapist who made them will benefit, that's just the way history works. Personally I didn't follow the Spector trial much. His out-of-control behavior was well documented over the decades - just the details given in Albert Goldman's book on John Lennon are enough - that it's less a case of him being a murderer as it is that someone finally died as a result. The amazing thing is that it hadn't happened earlier, and in that level of success, those around you will let you get away with quite a lot. "Nothing bad has happened yet" will excuse an awful lot of partying.
There's other stuff, Brian May's female pop singer who gave May songwriting credit on songs she did before him, as well as remaking old/new May/Queen songs. The best songs on Slash's album are still among my faves. He played "Sweet Child Of Mine" with Fergie at the Super Bowl show. Didn't watch it, but like Hagar, he's worked himself up to a high-profile superstar. He just took a lot more drugs than he should have to get there. G'n'R could have stayed at that level, but Axl couldn't hack it. [Slash, by the way, played guitar on the opening track of Sammy's first album post-VH, the one that came out seemingly only a few months after he was kicked out.]
The best songs on Chinese Democracy are still on my playlist too. I'm hearing new virtues in "Street of Dreams", and I thought it was a pleasant song back when bootlegs called it "The Blues". [The words 'street of dreams' appears once in the whole song, the words 'the blues' appears once in the whole song. Axl got the music right, but doesn't seem to grasp how to do the words.] But no, Slash got to the top of the rock'n'roll world twice, once with Axl and once on his own. He's even releasing limited edition live albums from his shows. I haven't found one to pay for yet, but the guy singing G'n'R songs does a good job on Youtube. Axl, meanwhile, reached his peak and decided to wear a Charles Manson t-shirt and record a Manson song, then busted up the old G'n'R with a cover of "Sympathy for the Devil," a song with its own bad history.
So, in addition to drugging and raping a 13-year old girl, Roman Polanski is also known for having his wife murdered by Charles Manson. Manson was influenced by John Lennon's lyrics. In the years before being murdered, Lennon lived at the Dakota, which is where Polanski shot parts of Rosemary's Baby. You know, the one about giving birth to Satan.
John Lennon, who had previously encountered gunplay while recording his last album of several with Spector, spent the last years of his life strung out on drugs while his wife bought important household goods like Egyptian mummies, and crucial services like a curse to keep Paul and Linda McCartney from stealing. Seriously. Yoko put a curse on Paul and he gets busted in Japan. John was shot a few months later. The McCartneys remained happily married for decades until one of them died in the other's arms. The other then mourned and moved on.
This all seems like the most convincing irrefutable evidence ever presented for mysticism and the occult (or at least "Instant Karma"). Yes, if you want proof that the universe operates on laws other than measurable science, there you go. More people sing "Give Peace A Chance" than "Please Please Me" (Lennon's first nationwide impact). All of the people involved in paens to Satan (thinly-veiled or otherwise) came to unhappy ends. Paul was too sensible to get so involved, and his record for winning the lottery of life is noticeably higher.
Notice how they clearly ran out of ideas for the last minute.
At least John had the sense to change his song title to "Yer Blues", because "I'm Lonely, Wanna Die" would be creepy. As it is, didn't any of the other Beatles or the producer ask if everything was all right at home? But Phil Spector went out and did "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)", a record which has nothing to recommend it beyond the shock value of the title.
06 March, 2011
I like stamp collecting, but there's a seductive lure... Is a rare 1916 Monaco Windsor worth one's immortal soul?
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Simple Meta Tags Generator 1.6
Simple Meta Tags Generator generates meta tags that should be inserted in your web pages to increase their ranking when indexed by search engines.
System Font Changer 1.0
System Font Changer allows you to change the default system font of windows elements (menus, message texts, buttons etc.) in Windows NT based systems.
Put a free download button on your own website
Support Simple Color Picker, just copy+paste this html:


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Service Resilience and why the private cloud can't be beaten
High availability is hard, and the public cloud can't do it as well as we can - read on to find out more.
Most public cloud services are not Highly Available by nature. They are designed with "cattle" in mind - that is to say, disposable units that are quickly and easily replaceable. Public cloud providers are clear on this. If you need high availability, design it into your applications.
The problem with Drupal websites, and especially in the context of (seemingly) cheaper cloud-based PaaS Drupal hosting products, is the containers running Drupal are not "cattle" - they are "pets". That is to say they are all unique and different. Perhaps not in server configuration, many of our VMs are the same in that regard, but they are absolutely unique and different when it comes to Drupal.
Long explanation follows, but for the pressed-for-time, the TL;DR here is this: our cheap "Medium" VM is highly available at the hardware level, as standard, and no PaaS provider can say the same.
Each Drupal website has a requirement for persistent data (files, databases, configuration files) that cannot be lost, not even for a moment, or the site will not function. To understand the implications of this, you need to understand what happens when a host fails in the public cloud:
A host is a big server with lots of VMs (and in turn, lots of containers, with some providers) residing on it. If that host breaks, let's say it has a power supply failure, the VMs need to be migrated. The problem is all of these VMs have many gigabytes of data associated with them, and that needs migrating too. Also, there are no set rules when it comes to prioritising migrations, it's a simple case of "join the line".
Whether migrations occur by hostname, some arbitrary randomness, or some other system, it doesn't really matter. As the owner of the VM, all you can do is sit and wait until it gets migrated to another host, which can take up to an hour, depending on how unlucky you are (e.g. how far down the migration list your VM is). We used to be platformed on the public cloud, we've been on the sharp end of this!
Now, most PaaS providers offer a highly available option, but it isn't on the cheaper plans. You need to be talking to them about their "Enterprise tier" before you even get a sniff of that goodness in any real sense.
Code Enigma's platform is very different. We use a product called VMware. I'll quote myself here, in our blog series about our hosting platform:
VMware have a thing called Distributed Resource Scheduler - DRS for short - which is basically magic. DRS continuously monitors your hypervisors and their load, and constantly moves your guests around between hypervisors. That's right, unless you turn DRS off (and why would you, because it works beautifully!) you never know where your guests are going to be from one moment to the next. What you do know is which guests they will not be sharing a host with, because happily DRS lets us set anti-affinity rules to ensure, for example, a customer's two load balancers never end up on the same hypervisor, no matter what the load patterns are doing. But for everything else, DRS is in charge.
If three or four guest VMs on the same hypervisor start getting really busy, while another hypervisor has guests that are all snoozing, DRS will push a couple of guests from the busy host to the quiet host. Seamlessly. No one will even know it happened. And if a host fails entirely, vMotion just moves the guests to the least busy hypervisors in your cluster. You can literally shut down a host machine in a VMware cluster, with no warning, and all its guests will hop over to one that's still up. And DRS will choreograph all this, so no single hypervisor takes a hammering. Like I said, magic.
In case you got lost there a moment, "guests" are our VMs. As you can now see, this is also how we mitigate the risk of vCPU being unavailable when customers need it, as mentioned above. DRS makes sure VMs are moved to where resource is available, something public cloud platforms do not do.
Is this true high availability? No, because software failure remains an issue (you only have one web server, for example, so if it crashes you need to intervene). However, it's a lot better than other platforms, because we really do have highly available hardware, which - in our experience - is more than half the battle when it comes to good resilience of service. We still sell 24/7/365 monitoring services, where we fix problems proactively and reactively, every hour of every day of the year, and we also sell highly available server layouts to ensure there are no single points of software failure - our own "Enterprise tier", if you will. But the bottom line is our hardware is highly available and extremely resilient - more so than any PaaS provider can offer.
Besides the resilience of our servers, an equally important point is our backup procedures are transparent, clear and tested. We can evidence the backup of every server under our control, we store the backups (encrypted) in AWS S3 buckets "off site" so we can restore servers on another site should anything go badly wrong with our principle data centre, and we fully test all backups quarterly. This is all documented, customers can inspect our records for their servers if they so wish.
With the exception of Acquia, I am yet to find any PaaS provider actually document how they carry out and test their backups, where they store them, what their contingency plan is if their principle provider fails, etc. They just say they do.
As for Acquia, they only state they backup databases to S3 hourly, in fact, they make a point of saying data never leaves AWS, so all eggs are in one basket. (And we found out the hard way with #AberdeenCloud what happens when a company like that stops paying their AWS bills!)
What about scaling?
A quick word on scaling is probably appropriate at this moment. Because one of the points a PaaS provider would doubtless make at this moment is their Enterprise products allow rapid scaling of the application, which is only made possible by the public cloud. And this is true.
But what problem are you solving here? One that most organisations never have, frankly. People like to talk about rapidly scaling, they like to imagine a scenario where they will suddenly have a website as popular as the BBC, but in all my time as a web developer and, subsequently, as a hosting manager, I have never seen a website that needs to rapidly scale the application layer in an unplanned manner. I have seen planned scaling (to match TV show schedules or specific events) but never the so-called Slashdot effect.
Yes, sometimes some customers will get a huge spike in traffic because of an event, or being featured on another popular website, but this traffic is anonymous. With good caching policies in place and with a low (or even no)-cost, cloud-based CDN service like Sucuri's WAF or CloudFlare's (free!) plan (blog about these options here) you can stand a huge anonymous traffic spike without ever needing to worry about your application. It need not cost you a penny.
And yes, sometimes you really need to scale the application - a great example of this is e-commerce, the Christmas rush, so-called Black Friday sales, etc. - but this is almost never unplanned. Online shops know when their key busy periods are and planning to scale is easy for us. We might not be able to flex your application in minutes, but give us a bit of notice or a sales schedule and we certainly can.
So it is our firm opinion that the "but scaling!" argument is a straw man proposal, highlighting a "problem" that doesn't really exist.
The next blog in the series is about security of service, why it matters, and how we make sure you have a strong security posture with Code Enigma.


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Webinars and Seminars
Our webinars discuss relevant topics in the international trade industry and important regulations you need to know. Attendees also receive points to maintain CSCB or NEI designation, along with a copy of all materials covered in the presentations.
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Past Webinars
Here are some of the topics we've covered in the past:
- Canadian Compliance Audits
- The Safe Food for Canadians Act
- An Overview of NAFTA
- Canadian Compliance for New Businesses
- Ins and Outs of Classification
- Staying Compliant when Exporting from Canada
- The Evolution of the Single Window Initiative
Please Contact Us or your Farrow representative.
Stay Informed
Get the latest developments on US and Canadian customs, international trade topics and border updates that are specific to your importing or exporting needs.
- Visit our Industry News or Articles of Interest pages.


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A Season of Possibility
Helping More Babies Reach Year One
All families deserve to celebrate decades of holidays together. Individualized and culturally relevant conversations about safe sleep and breastfeeding can help make that happen. This season, give the gift of better conversations by:
- Taking advantage of the new Spanish-language version of our popular safe sleep video quiz, a teaching tool for maternal health professionals.
- Watching a recent webinar to learn what approaches can improve conversations with families about breastfeeding.
Building Better Supports for Families
For children to thrive, families need better supports and services, especially during the early years of life. Keeping families from falling through the cracks means bringing together stakeholders from across the early childhood spectrum, beginning even before birth. Find out why this goal is top of mind for NICHQ President and CEO, Scott D. Berns, MD, MPH, FAAP, in this article.
Breaking Cycles of Inequity
We're committed to giving all children an equal chance to achieve their dreams. That's why, over the past year, we've made a point to identify opportunities to close gaps in health outcomes. Whether we're sharing strategies to address implicit bias, shining a light on structural racism or striving to keep families together, whenever possible, these are the stories that drive us to develop systems that help all families succeed. We hope they motivate you this holiday season.
Give the Gift of Improvement
In this season of giving, please take a moment to support NICHQ's work to drive improvement in children's health. We can make an even bigger impact if we have your support. Your donations help us:
- Explore and expand on new and innovative combinations of approaches and methods
- Scale and spread successful existing programs beyond their original scope
Big or small, every donation makes a difference and goes straight to supporting programs that make our mission a reality.
What People Are Saying
Our work to improve children's vision and eye health in the U.S. has always centered on big ideas and massive systems shifts, thus we found the process of continuous quality improvement to be an exciting new way to tackle the challenges we face in our work.
NICHQ has really supported our work by formalizing a process to do PDSA cycles, report and track how our progress is doing. As a data person, CoLab has been really instrumental in terms of gathering the data and tracking it over time.
I am so impressed by the processes that the NICHQ staff use so well to enable teams in many different locations to learn and share, to practice QI processes, to support and inspire each other. NICHQ helps busy people find time to do important and difficult work that improves clinical practice, and to sustain the changes they themselves developed. I'm lucky to have been connected to NICHQ!
For me, NICHQ is uniquely positioned to support complex, system-based efforts to improve child health and healthcare, locally and on a national scale. NICHQ helped my teams succeed by supporting collaboration, information management, and continuous learning. With NICHQ's help, the whole of our work was much greater than the sum of each of our individual efforts!
It has been an honor to work with NICHQ as a Parent Faculty member. I admire how NICHQ continues to center their work around the people directly impacted by it: families and children. They actively work to include these voices throughout project implementation, ensuring that policies remain grounded in patient experiences and feedback. The expertise and professionalism of NICHQ staff has meant that I always feel supported, and confident that all stake holders are included in the process.
I feel like I am always learning when I am exposed to NICHQ. I am actually really going to miss it when this collaborative ends!
Working with NICHQ, I have been able to assist communities all over New York State with their breastfeeding care efforts. The NICHQ staff is experienced, organized and thorough, ensuring each interpersonal interaction is maximally engaging and productive. Because of the way change efforts are organized, I find myself learning new procedural and educational techniques, and even more about my own field! Thanks to NICHQ for including me on this interesting ride.
I was very hesitant about quality improvement in the beginning but NICHQ reformed me. I have been working within our region and our state with health partners for years, but we have made more progress working with NICHQ through your learning process and collaboration than with any other group.
I'm passionate about early identification and connection to services and supports for children and families because we know acting early makes a difference. When I learned that the ECCS CoIIN leverages collaboration, innovation and quality improvement methods to improve early childhood systems, I was thrilled to get involved. There is a great focus on parent engagement too, so I was really happy to join the team and be a part of this great work.


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Check Into Cash
2565 US Highway 22 West
Union, NJ 007083083
Map For Check Into Cash
Information About Check Into Cash From Around The Web
It is generally a good idea to look locally for personal financial services if you really have an urgent financial need. Based where you are located, services can range from easy check cashing, to short term loan goods such as payday cash advances, also known as money advances . Contact the firm recorded above to find what financial services are offered in your city. Some may additionally offer installment loan options, enabling you to pay your loan back for a set period of time, to larger loans for example personal loans, which afford a wider selection of lending bundles in terms of loan quantity and rates of interest, depending on your own credit score.
Before applying for internet payday loans, you must always explore other options. If there is an emergency or unexpected invoice, try to stretch your finances. In the event you can't pay a bill, get in touch with your creditor and try and make a payment arrangement. If your need for cash takes a loan for a period that is longer, submit an application for an alternative peer-to-peer or conventional loan. If you have collateral, you can put property up to guarantee a low-interest bank loan. When you're refused resources from a conventional lending source you need temporary income until the following paycheck or because your credit credibility is shot, simple loans might look like the ideal solution to get you through a tight financial position. Taking out an advance on your own next pay check from a money lender may be your only alternative should you not need cash or a credit card in a savings account to cover the expense of a car repair or catching up on your electricity bill before services are shut off.
Applying for quick loans on the internet is a good option when sudden crises arise or the amount desired isn't worth the ding to your credit rating for starting another account. In addition, you prevent the bother of having to assemble all your financial records, submit a lengthy application and meet together with the bank's loan officer to sign packets of paperwork. In case your credit is good enough, you might be eligible for a higher limit with a present charge card company or a new account with another lender that enables you to join all of your debt into one payment. As the consolidation is processed between both companies, which puts cash in your pocket soon you normally get to bypass the following payment. You will probably be paying less complete than you were for the individual minimal payments of the different debts, when the next payment is due. Many sources of personal credit, including poor credit personal loans, have a high annual percentage rate, especially if origination fees are included in the annualized rate. Many personal loans online also have relatively short durations, frequently as little as three months. Rolling around them can prove costly, even though it might be possible to refinance these types of loans.


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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-113463902018-08-28T00:11:13.332-07:00dbrumDaniel Brumhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-11346390.post-58246978361689968742009-01-23T18:27:00.000-08:002009-01-23T18:37:36.869-08:00the end of an era?The recent Microsoft announcement about layoffs, has particular interest to me. I first started flight training in 2000, and did my C172 PPL at my local airport. I don't fly much in the real world these days, but I do "play" simulator flying, using MS Flight Simulator X - a fantastic and very close to the real thing, if you add in things like live ATC through the VATSIM network, scenery addons, aircraft, etc. It's a great world, and you can make it as real as you like.

The recent announcement by Microsoft:

"This is a landmark day in Flight Simulation, as Microsoft announces the layoffs of 5,000 employees, as well of the closure of it's ACES Studio on Friday.

ACES, home of Microsoft's PC games division, was best known as the developer of the popular 'Flight Simulator' series. As of this time, it is unclear if this will result in the end of the series, but early reports claim that it is. We will do our best to stay on top of this situation as it unfolds.

For those of us in the FSX world, this means that Microsoft is basically killing the line, the longest flight simulator family of release in the world of personal computers.

Some in the community are hoping that some other game publisher takes over the line. Others yet, are suggesting that if the line does not get picked up by another game publisher, that they not let the platform die by way of releasing it to the community - open sourcing the codebase basically. I doubt this will happen. The most likely scenario is that one of the big publishers (Activitision, Ubisoft, EA, etc) will end up taking over the codebase and the developers, testers, creative people, etc.

Let's hope MS doesn't let this wonderful product go the way of the dodo bird. It would be a real shame.
Daniel Brumhttp://email@example.com://dbrum.blogspot.com/2009/01/end-of-era.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11346390.post-487992854734922742008-12-25T11:12:00.000-08:002008-12-25T11:23:16.432-08:00Merry Xmas

Or, to my Spanish speaking family and friends, Feliz Navidad.

It's been a pretty interesting year to say the least. Looks like 2009 will be even more volatile and unstable from a markets and work perspective for many. It's exactly in times like these that you realize just how little importance material and wasteful things are. What matters is family, friends and being healthy to enjoy life to the fullest. These are the things that should matter in life.

Wishing everyone a wonderful Christmas and Happy New Years.

CheersDaniel Brumhttp://email@example.com://dbrum.blogspot.com/2008/12/merry-xmas.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11346390.post-57816344697549531652008-12-16T06:27:00.000-08:002008-12-16T06:43:14.273-08:00born-again iPhonerI have been saved, washed in the blood of the iPhone... well, that's a bit of an exaggeration.

But even Richard Dawkins would be hard-pressed to convince me that a higher life-force was not behind the creation of this wonderful device, dubbed the Jesus Phone by my early convert friends. Steve Jobs, the new Messiah?

Anyhow, this is a little story of how after many months of saying the iPhone is not good, not cool, not worth the $, not better then the BlackBerry - how I finally saw the light!

I have been using a BlackBerry since they first came out, my latest was a purchase of the Bold a few weeks ago. The local Rogers (phone carrier in Canada that does GSM) let me buy it on a 'trial' run and compare it to the iPhone. Very nice sales guys. The idea was, take each device for a trial run, then come back and take the one you love most.

I went in with the prejudice that the Bold would win hands down. In fact, I have to say the Bold is by far the BEST BlackBerry ever built. The Storm sucks from all the reviews I've read. RIM just doesn't have the cool design, the cool interface, nor the cool platform (Apple/OSX). RIM should focus solely on the professional business crowd, the lawyers and Gov. people who have all standardized on the BB platform. For this crowd, an iPhone won't cut it.

After my trial with the Bold, it was on to the iPhone. Compared to the Bold, I had an amazing initial experience. In 5 minutes I had all my contacts, email accounts all sync'd up and setup for use on my iPhone through the native sync in iTunes. This is the biggest gripe i've always had with BB's - their Mac support was useless.

Emailing is not as easy as on the BB. GMail sucks for push mail on the iPhone, which is what I use. On the BB, at least the internet mail setup would poll every 5 minutes then push it down to you - a semi-real time push mail solution to GMail. No such luck on the iPhone. That is the only negative part of the iPhone experience. It's all the other stuff it does that made me choose it over the Bold:

- sync of my favorite Podcasts daily
- sync of my favorite iPod format movies and TV shows. I get to watch some great stuff on the train each morning. I hardly notice the 25 minute subway in each morning as I'm usually laughing myself giddy watching an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm or an episode of Frontline.
- music sync in iTunes
- Apps. This is one area iPhone kills all competitors. There are so many cool, paid and free app's for this device. How can anyone catch them with this head start? Android has a chance I think, but it will be a while yet.

So I ended up keeping, and loving the Jesus Phone - Richard Dawkins, try one, you might just become a believer again!Daniel Brumhttp://email@example.com://dbrum.blogspot.com/2008/12/born-again-iphoner.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11346390.post-46855892817636217622008-11-11T11:17:00.001-08:002008-11-11T11:33:03.110-08:0011/11 - Stopping to RememberToday is Remembrance Day - a day when we're supposed to stop and remember those who served and continue to serve in the armed forces. I have always wanted to go and watch a Remembrance Day ceremony, and today was the day I finally stopped everything else I was doing to actually go. Toronto hosts several ceremonies, the largest one would be at Queens Park, the Provincial Legislature. Canada has lost a lot of soldiers in Afghanistan, and being able to attend a Remembrance Day while Canada is involved in active armed conflict has more meaning then ever.

It was a moving event, especially seeing 2 of the few remaining WW1 veterans still alive - bused in for the event from Sunnybrook Hospital where there is a dedicated Veterans retirement and care facility.

The canon salute, was incredibly loud, and shook you to the core. I can't imagine what it must have felt like in the middle of battle to hear and feel those shock waves over your body. Just standing 20 meters from one was incredibly loud and awe inspiring. The smell of gun powder, it's overwhelming.

I took some photos of the day. I'm glad I finally got to see one of these ceremonies. My father was an officer in the Army. Although he didn't see any 'action', he certainly saw his share of evil during the days of military rule in Uruguay in the 70's.

Next year I will attend the largest of these events in Canada - at the Ottawa War Memorial.Daniel Brumhttp://email@example.com://dbrum.blogspot.com/2008/11/1111-stopping-to-remember.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11346390.post-56260454732207430662008-10-24T12:25:00.000-07:002008-10-24T12:28:52.053-07:00WSO2 ESB upcoming webinarIf you're interested in hearing how you can use the WSO2 ESB to put together a real-world integration scenario that brings in things like an ESB and BPM - come check out the webinar.

I'm presenting on Tuesday @ 2:00 PM. More info here.Daniel Brumhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://dbrum.blogspot.com/2008/10/wso2-esb-upcoming-webinar.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11346390.post-89754811980801001262008-10-10T10:24:00.000-07:002008-10-10T11:26:36.424-07:00Mashup - "bad boy!" says Southwest AirlinesI wrote about Jonathan Marsh and a Mashup he put together to help get premier seating allocation on Southwest flights. Well, it didn't take long for the 'Brand Protection' Police from Southwest to issue a 'Cease and Desist' letter to WSO2. Seems this mashup violates the terms of use for their website. Can someone tell a third-party how their website is to be used, really? I can browse to any site I feel like, and use it any way I feel like. Who can tell me otherwise? If they expose things on the web, then it's fair game for anyone to make use of it, any way they want. Anyhow, that's another issue.

Check out the letter and Jonathan's reply here. Don't despair, if you're a frequent Southwest traveller, just download WSO2 Mashup, and deploy the mashup on your own local server! Hint - cache:https://mooshup.com/mashup.jsp?author=jonathan&mashup=southwestAutoCheckin into Google should get what you want.Daniel Brumhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://dbrum.blogspot.com/2008/10/mashup-bad-boy-says-southwest-airlines.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11346390.post-30510658158329794162008-10-09T13:18:00.000-07:002008-10-09T13:22:59.844-07:00fly Southwest? WSO2 Mashup can help you!Jonathan Marsh recently published a Mashup on our Mooshup.com site, which will help you a lot if you're a frequent Southwest Airlines traveller. Check out the details of how this mashup works on his blog. You can really beat the queues by using this service!Daniel Brumhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://dbrum.blogspot.com/2008/10/fly-southwest-wso2-mashup-can-help-you.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11346390.post-74172353478855518052008-10-02T09:27:00.000-07:002008-10-02T09:40:18.747-07:00the iPhone goes political?

A good friend of mine, Raven Zachary just announced the 'Obama 08 for iPhone' application which he has been working on in stealth mode since August.

Raven and I first met when we were the first members of the JBoss Customer Advisory Board back in 2004 @ the Four Seasons in Atlanta. I was with Aviva, and Raven was working for La Quinta. Since then, he went off into consulting, then as an analyst @ The 451 Group, and since a few months ago he has been following his obsession with the iPhone into a full-time role. It's always very satisfying to see someone get to work at their passion, and Raven has definetely found his sweet spot.

Congratulations Raven and the team on a major release and contribution to the political campaign. Now, if you can somehow make that app. talk to the voting machines in the US and allow Canadians with iPhones vote, you will guarantee Obama wins as most Canadians want him to win!Daniel Brumhttp://email@example.com://dbrum.blogspot.com/2008/10/iphone-goes-political.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11346390.post-23926190389295763282008-10-01T11:11:00.000-07:002008-10-01T11:15:51.649-07:00Apple waives white flagFrom Apple iPhone Dev. Program:

"We have decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software.
We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don't steal our work. It has happened before. While we have filed for hundreds of patents on iPhone technology, the NDA added yet another level of protection. We put it in place as one more way to help protect the iPhone from being ripped off by others.

However, the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone's success, so we are dropping it for released software. Developers will receive a new agreement without an NDA covering released software within a week or so. Please note that unreleased software and features will remain under NDA until they are released.

Thanks to everyone who provided us constructive feedback on this matter."

About time is all I can say. I've never heard of such a restrictive NDA for a publicly available and promoted API. They were only hurting themselves. I suspect the release of the recent Android based G1 gave the final push required.

Daniel Brumhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://dbrum.blogspot.com/2008/10/apple-waives-white-flag.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11346390.post-78836466517767350052008-10-01T07:52:00.000-07:002008-10-01T07:54:59.784-07:00SOA 2001?Google, the omni-present "don't be evil" company, just put up a circa 2001 index, in which you can search the web as it were 2001. Try it out. The lack of some of the results we take for granted today are interesting.

One example, search for "SOA".Daniel Brumhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://dbrum.blogspot.com/2008/10/soa-2001.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11346390.post-26807150315889235792008-09-25T19:44:00.000-07:002008-09-26T04:26:38.318-07:00open source movesRob Bearden of ex-JBoss fame and Benchmark Capital VC, takes over as President and COO of SpringSource. I greatly admire Rob, he did amazing things with the sales organization @ JBoss. I used to work for Rob for a time @ JBoss. Get all the details of this move @ The Register.

Some recent Springsource stories:

SpringSource changes software maintenance policy.

reports that Springsource's revenue has been going up like a rocket.

Looks like SpringSource is positioning itself nicely for an acquisition.Daniel Brumhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://dbrum.blogspot.com/2008/09/open-source-moves.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11346390.post-7923686872878074692008-09-25T06:41:00.000-07:002008-09-25T06:46:59.177-07:00Ringside winds down?
Read some sad news today about Ringside Networks, a startup founded by some ex-JBossers Bob Bickel and Rich Friedman. The news from Bob is that they are apparently winding down... read Bob's post here.

There was incredible interest and excitement surrounding Ringside's social application server - a bridge to the islands of social communities out there like FB, MySpace and countless other regional ones.

Sad to hear they were not able to get the funding.Daniel Brumhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://dbrum.blogspot.com/2008/09/ringside-winds-down.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11346390.post-67960172630223922902008-09-24T09:13:00.000-07:002008-09-24T10:09:41.367-07:00open source SOA
An interesting new book is due out shortly, from Jeff Davis through Manning.

I have been reviewing it, and I am very impressed by the quality of the writing, and for once, a book written to walk you through in small, managed stages through the process of putting together an end-to-end solution (a B2B sales order request) and includes very interesting and real-world technology concerns. The book uses Apache Synapse/WSO2 ESB as the basis for putting together the use-case, which includes:

validation - is the request received valid?

transformation - take the request and shape it to an internal data format

protocol mediation - go from SOAP/XML to JMS and others

legacy transports - legacy stuff like file polling

custom mediators - take a CSV and transform it to the internal model

error handling

Esper - Complex Event Processing

BPM - send sales requests into a wider, enterprise business process using jBPM as the engine

data enriching - lookup a customers file when the requests comes in, and enrich the data with his information before it gets sent onto the business process.

message splitting - use the iterator mediator

QoS - use WSO2 ESB's Throttling capabilities for real-world throughput issues

The many concepts in examples in this book easily make it a must for anyone working on SOA open source projects which use any of the technologies covered - ESB, BPM, WS-*, etc. All the fun stuff is covered.

Be sure to order your copy!Daniel Brumhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://dbrum.blogspot.com/2008/09/open-source-soa.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11346390.post-30942479210949164692008-09-23T11:17:00.000-07:002008-09-23T15:04:51.043-07:00the Android comes alive
Google's Android platform just had it's first phone coming out party for T-Mobile. See the promo video for what is being called the "G1" here.

Some interesting details:
- will retail for $179 on October 22 (with 2 year contract)
- limited quantities will be available to T-Mobile customers (I ordered mine already) from this site

I'm happy Google is getting into this game, we need a platform to counter the Apple iPhone reign and RIM. RIM has enjoyed their top spot for to long, and hasn't done much with improving their design and handsets. Yes, I use a BB 8800 for daily use, and they are great for email, but suck for everything else. Now with 3 major platforms (BB, Apple, Google) we will have serious competition, and that's ultimately good for end-users. Options are good and mean lower prices.

Check out the video from the Google Mobile Team:

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/z7qbPa1O8Ys&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/z7qbPa1O8Ys&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>Daniel Brumhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://dbrum.blogspot.com/2008/09/android-comes-alive.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11346390.post-43231467002675013082008-09-19T08:01:00.000-07:002008-09-19T08:47:46.617-07:00the land of Celine and Open Source?In Matt Asay's blog recently, he writes about how he is surprised that the Green Party of Canada actually lists Open Source as a key party principle in their Looking Forward mission statement.

What I find quite funny from Matt, is this statement -
Personally, I find it a bit ironic to see open source on a liberal party's platform. Conservative politics tends to be about smaller, local government solutions, even Libertarian in nature. Open source is the same, favoring tight customization/systems integrator or customer-tailored solutions. Liberal politics? Big government solutions strike me as akin to proprietary software.

Really? How does that statement jibe with what has happened the last 2 terms of US President Bush? He has easily created the largest government, in terms of programs and budget spending since any administration in the history of the USandA. Libertarian? That is a word that could never be used with Bush and his government. Why are American conservative voters under the illusion that they are living under a smaller government? Is the ideology of voting conservative, and calling oneself a conservative so blind to the facts in front of them? What's wrong with voting for a candidate or party (the better system i should point out ;-) that best represents what you really want in government, and not blindly voting like a lemming for what you "should" be voting for based on a label?

I don't consider Canada as being extremely liberal at all - we are a tolerant society, which is a big difference. In many ways, Canadians are very conservative with the one difference being we don't have the religious extremism that seems to permeate life, and politics in the USandA. Religious fervour and politics do not mix well here.

Are we perfect? Far from it. One of my biggest gripes with the land of snow and maple syrup:

Monopolistic culture. We have a small set of large companies that have enjoyed protectionist policies from every government - liberal or conservative. Examples are no DirecTV - the cable and phone companies control all media. Little to no competition in the cell phone market is also a large problem(that is changing).

I find the Green's parties stance on Open Source - the mere fact that this is mentioned in a political policy paper, very encouraging. Open Source has gone mainstream, it's here to stay. Is it the right model for all software? Of course not. There is a lot of closed, expensive software that is excellent. There is even more closed and pricey junk though. In general, for most home computing, and a lot of office or work computing, open source has a product, or various products which do the job as good, or better then the commercial alternatives. In many mission critical deployments found at the largest of companies in the world, you will find open source doing a nice job, quietly in the corner with no big hoopla.

Am I voting Green? Doubtful. They have many other policy positions which I don't agree with.

Lastly, the truly offensive comment from Matt would be to mention Celine Dion as some sort of Canadian hallmark. Now that's a low blow!Daniel Brumhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://dbrum.blogspot.com/2008/09/land-of-celine-and-open-source.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11346390.post-79400900008471342172008-09-18T09:48:00.000-07:002008-09-18T10:02:21.192-07:00SOA and PHP

At this week's ZendCon 2008 in Santa Clara (This is the big PHP lovefest) - WSO2 announced the release of WSF/PHP 2.0. If you're a PHP developer and need to do web services or work with web services, WSO2, the open source SOA company (needles to say I work for WSO2) has just the platform for you: WSF/PHP.

At ZendCon, our marketing director interviews the lead and product manager for WSF/PHP. Check out the interview here.

WSF/PHP is the industry's only PHP scripting language library that enables developers to create and consume both SOAP and REST Web services — with the security and reliability required for an enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA).Daniel Brumhttp://email@example.com://dbrum.blogspot.com/2008/09/soa-and-php.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11346390.post-30263194604207616462008-09-17T05:56:00.000-07:002008-09-17T10:42:00.246-07:00welcome to the US-SR

I hear that DHS is going to be printing new signs welcoming travellers to the USA with the new official name: US-SR. The United States Socialist Republic. Credit for this name goes to Marc Fleury on his latest blog posting about the take over and nationalization of AIG, and others in the still raging economic meltdown.
Other blogs are calling it the USSRA (United States Socialist Republic of America) but i like the US-SR much better, has a certain panache and likeable quality to it. I can't wait for the T-shirt's to start printing. Do you think we could incorporate Che's picture into it somehow? A star-spangled sickle?

Other blogs are lighting up the netwaves - here are some good one's:

RGE: The transformation of the USA into USSRA

Guardian News: Highly unusual move nationalises insurer

Comrades Bush, Paulson, and Barnanke welcome you to the USSRA

USSRA - United Socialialist State Republic of America

It's amazing that this is happening. What would the titans of capitalism say if the middle class and the sub-middle class all screamed for Uncle Sam to give them all a handout to help pay their credit cards, or their car payments, cause they were to stupid to realize that they could not manage their own debt? Every capitalist would cry foul and scream bloody murder at the thought of handing out a lifeline to the average person. Yet here we are, the largest and wealthiest executives on the planet along with the companies they control come hat in hand begging Uncle Sam to rescue them from their own lunacy.

Less government the republicans say? Well guess what... good luck with that! You just grew the government payroll by 116,000 last night and the H.R department at the White House is surely to be a busy one in the next couple of months as more and more 'critical' enterprises come for their due soon enough.

update - check out this video from Jim Cramer, which is a great commentary on the last day's events:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=858359962&play=1Daniel Brumhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://dbrum.blogspot.com/2008/09/welcome-to-us-sr.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11346390.post-57027228363613728662008-09-16T10:19:00.000-07:002008-09-16T10:34:26.647-07:00where is future of the valley funding headed?

This interesting interview with Bill Hambrecht of WR Hambrecht & Co. - a legendary VC investor. His take on the current financial crisis - called the "Worst Financial Crisis Since the Depression", and the impact to new startups and companies who will need more rounds of financing. I suspect a lot of funding options will dry-up for new startups, but even that might be wrong as there have been a good many announcements lately about new offerings being done. Can the Valley go against the crisis somehow? Will the 2.0 bubble burst be the nail in the coffin for the financial crisis?

As with many things right now, who knows what will happen, and just how much turmoil this crisis will cause. The people predicting another depression, but worldwide this time, is downright scary.
Daniel Brumhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://dbrum.blogspot.com/2008/09/where-is-future-of-valley-funding.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11346390.post-4511670439245142782008-09-15T12:46:00.000-07:002008-09-15T12:53:55.248-07:00meltdown continues melting...Everyone now is aware of the economic malaise hitting the markets. There are tons of blogs and stories out there, the news is covering it like crazy. But some of you, like me, who don't have an economics background, nor work in the industry, are wondering just how the hell did all of this happen? I have finally found a story, in which a commenter actually walks through how all of this essentially started and how it's rippling through global economies like a virus - check out the story on the Economist.com's web site. The comment, from a reader I will paste below:

R.T.G wrote: September 15, 2008 15:18

It would probably behoove everyone engaging in this debate to attempt to understand the roots of Lehman's collapse, and of the liquidity mess itself. While many comments describe the troubled investment banks as "greedy" and "stupid;" such comments are both counterproductive and widely uniformed. The beginnings of this meltdown originated years ago in the conception of sub-prime adjustable-rate-mortgages (ARMS), originally handed out by quasi-governmental corporations to low-income prospective homeowners.

With the creation of these organizations, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the United States opened a derivative market that has since evolved into a situation in which mortgages and like loans were back-sold to banks (Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, etc…) who would then repackage them with various other debts into collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), subsequently sold to investors world-wide via stock markets, most prominently the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).

Theoretically speaking, such practices yield a positive effect on the economy if one assumes the primary lenders like Countrywide are acting responsibly. Unfortunately, they were not. Once primary lenders discovered there was minimal risk on their end they began to lend irresponsibly, issuing loans to buyers with bad or no credit. Once these buyers defaulted, due to the recent crash of the U.S housing bubble, the larger banks who purchased via the derivative market got hurt, not the primary lenders.

It's not hard to visualize how the initial collapse quickly ensued. While all this liquidity is being traded, re-traded, and multiplied everyone begins to lose sight of the fact that all this money does not yet physically exist. So, what happens when the borrower goes into foreclosure, and the money never will exist? Everyone gets hurt. Compound this to thousands of companies like Countrywide issuing hundreds of thousands of irresponsible loans to homeowners who then default on their mortgages when the interest rates rise and they can no longer pay. The end result is that the big banks lose billions, investors run away from hedge funds and the like, and the real estate market collapses into a downward spiral that, as of 2008, is still two or so years away from hitting rock-bottom. Sound familiar? Now let's work on fixing the problem – in America and abroad.

Like most economic disasters, the sub-prime crisis needs to be dealt with at its roots. Brokerage firms across America must be regulated. To these ends, Congress must enact laws that would force these firms to issue loans only to buyers who are likely to fulfill their agreements, as well as mandate that the original lenders hold a certain percentage of their loan portfolios. Such measures would restore responsibility to lending, and while immediate profit for these firms, as well as the larger banks and their investors, would be cut in the short-run, this lower-risk environment would ensure that integral corporations like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers cease to collapse.

Though foreign economies are not significantly affected directly by the millions of American foreclosures, they are, in fact, ravaged by the products of the sub-prime meltdown Global corporations publicly traded in the international market place, such as CitiGroup, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, UBS, Goldman Sachs, and others, were so heavily invested in the American sub-prime mortgage market that the crisis was able to use these banks as a means to traverse borders and spread, like a virus, to nations thousands of miles away; the London, Hong Kong, and Tokyo Stock Exchanges in particular were damaged. Regardless of these incredible losses, cleanup should be secondary to immediate prevention of further re-enactment of the situation in the United States.

As problematic as it is, the sub-prime mortgage crisis is a part (granted: a large part) of the greater dilemma that has become to be known as the "credit crunch," an issue which has grown so complex it far exceeds the bounds of any comment. Consumers must also learn to spend responsibly, especially in an environment where a piece of plastic, easily swiped, can ruin credit in a blink of an eye.

With the global political and economic environments becoming increasingly non-polar to a point where more than just a few major players decide the financial fate of society, it is key that each power, whether governmental or private, learn from one another and vow to never repeat previous mistakes. As Goldman Sachs's Gerald Corrigan states, "It is indisputable that the global glut of liquidity played a role in the 'reach for yield' phenomenon…" ("Paradise Lost") power-brokers everywhere must come to this realization as well as the epiphany that a more responsible loan market will yield even greater profits and simultaneously provide for healthier economies everywhere. Until then, humanity itself remains in default.
-Richard GerbinoDaniel Brumhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://dbrum.blogspot.com/2008/09/meltdown-continues-melting.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11346390.post-82691386531334960922008-09-11T14:29:00.000-07:002008-09-11T14:37:00.559-07:00incredible reader for documentsFinally, someone has come along and developed something to truly replace printed documents, but reads and feels like holding a piece of paper. The Guardian notes a story about an annual event, the famous "Demo". The highlight for me was the product from LogicPaper which has a device which ups the Kindle from Amazon by leaps and bounds. I was thinking of getting a Kindle, but I'd rather wait for this thing to hit the stores.

Of interest also, the "Demo" conference apparently does not allow PowerPoint or other A/V aids, the speaker has just a few minutes to show their product using the product itself or other simple aids, like small cue cards. Very interesting to check out some of the presentations themselves, to see how top presenters handle this type of situation.Daniel Brumhttp://email@example.com://dbrum.blogspot.com/2008/09/incredible-reader-for-documents.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11346390.post-9665136014717962242008-09-11T06:03:00.000-07:002008-09-11T06:11:11.065-07:00Twitter for the Enterprise?TechChrunch just named Yammer their #1 of their Top 50 - it's basically twitter, but for a group, company/enterprise. Check it out... we're all using it now, and it's pretty cool just to be able to twitter updates to your colleagues. It has a desktop Adobe Air based app, along with a BlackBerry package. Very nice.

Yammer links for software clients:
BlackBerry client
Desktop clientDaniel Brumhttp://email@example.com://dbrum.blogspot.com/2008/09/twitter-for-enterprise.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11346390.post-41901416217160035682008-09-08T11:22:00.000-07:002008-09-08T11:43:28.568-07:00what is Money Supply?
I've been reading Marc Fleury's blog about how he's investing his JBoss millions, and well, trying to learn as he goes along...not that I have my own millions to invest or anything, but I have started to wonder what the hell is really going on with the current global economic picture a.k.a the credit crisis.

Well, first of, I've had to learn a thing or two about a lot of the terms Marc throws around, like M4, M1, etc. What is this M# thing? It's simply a reporting mechanism to measure just how much "money" (and the term is really used loosely by governments) is available in the "system" at any given point in time. To read and learn more on this, head on over to Wikipedia for a great article as usual.

Next, head on over to this article which describe what the US Federal Reserve did in 2006 when it stopped reporting on the M3 numbers. Why did they do it? The author has his theories of course, and they sound pretty bang on to my uneducated ears. A followup article picks up the story once more and the implications are not good. Depression, really?

Up till now i've only been skimming the financial news, as what most affects my daily life are things like the price of oil, and the US exchange rate. But as you start to dig a little deeper into things, it would seem to me that the economic outlook is pretty dire. I even began asking a friend of mine who was a former head economist at a major bank what he thought about what was going on. His reply was scary: "expect to see a lot of dead by the side of the road before this is all said and done". He means banks, investment houses, and even economic systems... the worst is yet to come basically is what i'm reading from the tea leaves.

In Canada things don't seem to be quite as dire as in the US right now. We have several things going for us:

much tighter credit lending policies. Canada has never been a big fan of giving out consumer credit unless you could *really* prove you were worthy of it. We don't have many people with huge mortgages (there are some surely) but not as many as in the US.

Oil. We're floating in it. The reserves in the Alberta tar sand fields are massive, and with the high price of oil these days Canada is reaping the rewards in jobs, direct money to provincial and federal coffers, etc. We also have large off-shore oil projects in NFLD. Check out the oil reserves table here.

No housing collapse. We just have not seen the house price drops seen in other places, not yet anyways.

There are signs that events occurring in the USA and elsewhere are starting to impact things here in Canada. Isolated economies don't exist anymore, so what happens in China, USA, or elsewhere, ultimately ends up causing an effect where you live. I'm sure there are hard times ahead even for Canada regardless of how good things "seem" to be now.Daniel Brumhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://dbrum.blogspot.com/2008/09/what-is-money-supply.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11346390.post-10212329173832822972008-09-08T08:25:00.001-07:002008-09-08T08:34:24.967-07:00Outsourcing to the USA?
Now here's something you don't see a lot written about - manufacturing jobs being outsourced to the USA, from of all places, the EU! In this article by the Financial Times, it's pointed out that many states are now offering such lucrative terms to open up shop in the US locations, that as one exec. put it "you would be stupid to turn them down at the moment. It is one of the low-cost locations to be in at the moment."

Now, if only these states would offer incentives for US based firms to STAY in the US instead of moving operations to Mexico or Asia. In fact, why not remove all tax incentives for any firm which chooses to relocate outside of the USA?

Anyhow, it was very interesting to read that the USA is now being considered a cheap place to manufacture, along with traditional third-world locations in Asia and LATAM.
Daniel Brumhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://dbrum.blogspot.com/2008/09/outsourcing-to-usa.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11346390.post-12488432472801955932008-09-05T17:59:00.000-07:002008-09-05T18:11:51.394-07:00FireFox keeps moving - someone mentioned Chrome?

Many people (myself included) and news organizations have been writing about Google's new Chrome browser - I for one can't even test it since I run OSX. Luckily for us, the guys over @ Mozilla haven't stopped their hectic pace of release for FireFox. The latest Alpha for the 3.1 release promises some pretty exciting and interesting features. Check it out here.

For all the 'promise' and hype surrounding Chrome, i doubt they could release anything to compell me to move from FireFox fulltime. The AdBlock Plus addon (I haven't seen ad's in 18 months now i think) makes my web surfing painless without the silly banner ads distracting web pages. I use maybe 5 or 6 other addons which I find very useful. FireFox 2 was painfully slow compared to the new 3 platform. Performance might be the only reason I look at another browser in the near future.

If FireFox and the large community behind it keep plugging away and improving it like they seem to consistently do, I see no reason why FireFox can't reach even higher usage then IE.Daniel Brumhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://dbrum.blogspot.com/2008/09/firefox-keeps-moving-someone-mentioned.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11346390.post-57277660483786011612008-09-02T10:26:00.001-07:002008-09-02T10:35:41.139-07:00blogging constellationsJonathan Marsh of WSO2 just posted a mashup that as he describes it

provides a visualization of a set of feeds

providing an intuitive sense of activity in a set of blogs

frequency and size of posts,

cross-links between the feeds

highlighting links to "domains of interest"

WSO2 Mashup server is the latest product in our SOA stack allowing you to create, compose, and connect your SOA artifacts.

Check out the Mashup here, and try adding your set of blogs to see how they all relate and reference one another.Daniel Brumhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://dbrum.blogspot.com/2008/09/blogging-constellations.html


text:
To be added to JAXPORT's news release distribution list,
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Find Your Pot of Gold with the Batch Fee Update Tool
Make sure you're getting your pot of gold—the full compensation that you have earned—with the Batch Fee Update tool in CaseLink Web! The Batch Fee Update tool allows you to easily manage your payments so that you can make sure that you are getting the full compensation you've earned on every case.
Some trustees have reported that their local UST office has missed payments due to them on cases. Keeping track of the payments through CaseLink Web will help you mitigate these losses.
The Batch Fee Update tool has recently been expanded so you can work with partial fees across multiple cases, allowing you to view both full and partial payment statuses when searching through your cases. Plus, you can also export payment reports to CSV or PDF formats from the Batch Fee Update screen.
Though you are still able to view your fee payment status information on your case home screen, all updates to the fees must be made through the Batch Fee Update tool. To utilize the Batch Fee Update tool, select 'Tools > Batch Fee Update' from the global menu at the top of the screen. You can search for cases by Criteria or Case, and filter further by Case Type, Paid Status, and Date Range. This will help you more easily find the cases you wish to update.
In addition, the column headers are sortable so you can scroll through by case number to capture all the cases paid on your statement. The filters and drop-down menu options in the Batch Fee Update tool now include "Partially paid" and "IFP" (Informa Pauperis) checkboxes as search criteria.
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If you have any questions, please contact the BMS Support Center via email, chat or by calling 800-634-7734. You can also reach out to your BMS Account Manager.


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The raw food movement has been around for a while, but is quickly growing in popularity and curiosity. Celebrities like Woody Harrelson and Demi Moore are advocates for its nutritional and anti-aging benefits. Raw foodists believe that eating unheated, unprocessed foods in their natural state optimizes one's health by keeping alive all nutrients and enzymes. For a recent grad who was used to eating pizza and burgers, changing how I ate took some effort, as processed and heated foods are far cheaper and more common than their raw counterparts. I decided to eat more raw food after watching the documentary Hungry for Change. After giving it a skeptical 30 days I noticed my skin looked better than it ever had, I was more energetic, my ravenous appetite no longer plagued me, and I had a greater knowledge of what I was putting into my body. It's been a year and half now and I've also managed to save money in the process. Here's how to eat raw on a budget:
- 60-80% Rule: Going 100% raw, while impressive, isn't realistic for most people. Keeping your diet above at least 60% raw will help you enjoy the benefits of a raw diet and without completely transforming your kitchen.
- Salad-IFY: Produce can be inexpensive–stick to buying organic for the Dirty Dozen only. Buying produce at the farmers market might be more expensive than Trader Joe's, but it will last up to 7 days longer. Fill your fridge with fruits and vegetables for varied, multi-colored and delicious meals.
- Go Nuts: Nuts and seeds are a staple in a raw food diet. They make great snacks on their own or made into nut butters, nut milks, "cheeses" or "meats". Sunflower, pumpkin and flax seeds are inexpensive options and packed with protein, essential fatty acids and other nutritional benefits. Although most nuts aren't cheap, when you compare them to the cost of meat–it balances out.
- Hungry No More: Raw food is extremely dense, fibrous and filling. Think about how many more roasted almonds you can eat in a sitting as opposed to raw. You'll end up consuming less, feeling more full and saving money.
- Finding Your Go-To's: When I started to eat raw, I found it helpful to find a few recipes with inexpensive ingredients and minimal prep that I could always fall back on. These turned out to be a lot less foreign than I expected. Breakfasts, lunches and snacks turned out to be the easiest. Now, I like to make a big portion of my favorites and eat them over the course of the week. Salads, smoothies, juices, cold soups, chia pudding, zucchini noodles, are all great options.
- Invest In The Staples: Some items (chia seeds, cacao, nuts, raw honey, coconut, cardamom, goji berries) are a bit pricey but absolutely worth the money. In addition to being nutritional powerhouses, they make eating raw delicious. Choose a few that you use often or treat yourself from time to time. A blender, food processor, dehydrator and spiralizer are also really helpful if you want to experiment with raw recipes. Although, I'll be honest, I've lasted so far without them.
- Buy In Bulk: Once you've found what you like to eat, stock up on ingredients you use over and over again. The bulk sections of the health food stores are great ways to save money on nuts, seeds, cacao nibs, dried fruit, etc. I'd probably be at Pizza Hut without it.


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So many times this month, I have found myself drifting into thought about the virtues of an active life. The events of the Boston Marathon impacted so many people directly and indirectly.
The ability to overcome the loss and fear is remarkable. Of all the potential targets, the distance runner may just be the most resilient. I have been impressed everyday with the stories and reactions and have really begun to admire and notice the active-minded person.
I was touched to realize that Quivvers ran along in the Boston Marathon on more than a few runners. It was even referenced as a "life-saver" as it allowed a quick call after the bombings to family because their mobile was right with them.
An active lifestyle really does give you super powers to overcome obstacles and loss. I salute all the active persons and hope to join them in their mindset and lifestyle. Grab your Quivver, get out there & be resilient!