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One thing about starting my first online journal on my birthday back in 1997 is it makes it pretty easy to keep my blogiversary straight.
Archive for October, 2005
Eight years before the blogOctober 30, 2005
Alternatives to MeetupOctober 28, 2005
I meant to post a link to Free Alternatives to Meetup back in September:
Meetup is a Ghost Town
I checked out the list of largest vegan meetups on Meetup.com and over half of the once active groups are now inactive for lack of an organizer. Meetup seems to recognize this as a problem. I have received several emails from them asking me to step up as organizer to the groups I once belonged to or organized for "just $19/month". They are even offering a 30-day money back guarantee. Hmmm. Let me think about it. No!
I suspect some groups are staying because they don't want to lose members in a transition or spend time setting up a new site for their group that may have fewer features. I hope they will reconsider after Gatheroo.com and CityCita.net launch. Collectively, they are spending thousands of dollars that could be going to much better things.
Whatever they decide, I am confident that new groups will choose to organize their local interest groups on Gatheroo.com and CityCita.net. After they launch, I will be posting information about how you can spread the word about them, so people everywhere can get together to learn, share, organize and support one another in their local communities. With our support early on, these sites are more likely to be able to offer their valuable services to people for many years to come, so stay tuned!
(I posted this with Flock, so I'll have to add a category later I guess. It wants me to put on tags, but I'm not sure how that translates for this blog.)
Blogging from FlockOctober 27, 2005
This is a test post from Flock. So far, so cool.
The inquiring enquirer asksOctober 18, 2005
When, exactly, did 'nads become nards?
I've been taggedOctober 16, 2005
Reader Nicolai wrote a comment on the blog telling me that I've been tagged (by name) for the first time, adding "how's that for digital identity?" His comment led me back to a review of this book (in Danish) on his blog.
He kindly translated it into English for me:
The power of many
The story about the 1960 American election tells that JFK and Nixon debated on shows broadcasted on both radio and television. The story also tells that Kennedy lost the debate in the ears of the radio listeners. The convincing winner in the eyes of the voters who followed the debate on television was on the other hand Kennedy. Kennedy read and understood how to use the new media – television. He lnew that the media demands other playing rules than those that work on radio.
According to Christian Crumlish the Internet took on the role as the new media during the in 2003-4. And with a purpose of writing a book about some of the new methods and techniques that people use to create virtual communities Crumlish writes among others things about his participation on the Howard Dean campaign.
In The Power of Many Crumlish writes lively and engagingly about the Dean campaign and how they untraditionally took use of the new opportunities given by the Internet in a political context. Their mission was to get voters. And these voters should generate even more voters.
He also writes about different forms of social networks and relationships across geography and generation. And he writes about weblogs. A phenomenon, that floats through the entire book.
…the strange new word "blog" wasn't coined until 1999, the buzz didn't start till 2000, and the first big wave of political bloggers didn't get traction until late 2001 in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. (Crumlish 2004:8)
It is with this phenomenon (the weblog) that the challenges for future democracy will find its strengths. And with Crumlish' comparisons with the Gutenberg invention of the print press he describes the power that indispensably arises when people are given the opportunity to express themselves. And the Internet technology has opened a new dimension for freedom of expression – it has made it independent of both time and geography.
But it is not all about American election campaigns. Crumlish also airs other tendencies that are possible because of the Internet. Subject such as dating, locality – virtuality, environment, eBay, and pop cultural communities where you jointly can love and listen to The Grateful Dead or read Kurt Vonnegut.
And in continuing the pop cultural talk we are also presented to net marketing/ viral marketing/ WOM. And who other than Seth Godin with his publications on ideavirus among other things is representing this business.
I think Crumlish touches too much in this book. A focus solely on for example the use of the Internet and blogs in the Dean campaign would have been more than worthy of reading. This is also the subject on which Crumlish seems to show the greatest engagement in his writing.
Crumlish still blogs at thepowerofmany.com.
Crumlish, Christian (2004) The Power of Many: How the Living Web Is
Transforming Politics, Business, and Everyday Life. London: Sybex.
Chris Nolan's 'Spot-On'October 16, 2005
I meant to blog about this as soon as I heard, but better late than never. Chris Nolan has rebranded and relaunched her journalistic group weblog (time to update those RSS feeds…). It's now called Spot-On. The new design is polished and handles the ads much more gracefully.
Chris Nolan is the site's editor (and still the lead columnist) and the contributing staff has been expanded to include Josh ("Tacitus") Trevino (who'd already been contributing to ChrisNolan.net – the original Chris Nolan blog), also reporting from San Francisco; Christopher Brauchli, reporting from Boulder; and Deborah Klosky, reporting from San Diego.
A media empire is born.
Go see Cecil next week!October 14, 2005
Next Tuesday night (October 18th), Cecil aka Dan aka Cecil will be reading various poems and poem-like shtick at C'era Una Volta, located in the heart of The Island City (aka Alameda).
Says Dan^H^H^HCecil:
They're even being nice enough to provide free appetizers, for reasons I can't quite figure out. So maybe I just dreamt that.
Starts at 7. I think it'll be wrapped by 8:30 or so. John Wright, a good pal of mine and an outstanding musician, will start the night off with some fab guitar.
If it happens to fit in with your schedule, we would love to see ya there. I will say this: if you're only going to hear me read poetry once in your life, this is probably the best time to do it. Because they'll have free appetizers.
Unless I dreamt that.
– Dan (aka Cecil [aka Dan] )
Date and time: Tuesday, October 18th, 7 pm
Place: C'era Una Volta
Address: 1332 Park St., Alameda (510.769.4828)
Admission: Free as the day is long. And the day is long.
I gada be meOctober 10, 2005
Chris Pirillo and his Lockergnome cohorts launch yet another social meta crawler-y tag search engine site. This one's called gada.be. I first looked at it a week or so ago when Chris was showing it around in beta. I guess it's still in beta. So was that alpha? Pre-launch stealth beta? Whatever.
The main cleverness thing seemed to be its handheld friendliness, from the easy-to-tap url to the way a search is coded as a subhost of the gada.be url. The thing also eats and excretes RSS and OPML, so it's jiggy like that.
I haven't really plumbed the depths though, so I'm mostly going on faith here that when Chris puts his energy into something it's usually fairly cool, at least until the bills come due…. (kidding).
Update: One skeptic currently commenting over on Pirillo's blog suggests that the page results are going to look and behave like pay-per-click page spammers, because of their unique URLs. The advice is to have a robots.txt file block bots from the search engine results page. This is probably a good idea, assuming the goal isn't to "have thousands of 'sites' with scraped content and text ads."
Verisign acquires the Weblogs.Com ping serverOctober 10, 2005
Confusingly, the news about Verisign buying weblogs.com from Dave Winer hit the wires at about the same time as the news about AOL buying the WeblogsInc.com blog network (referred to in the Times simply as "Weblogs") from Jason Calacanis. I hope this isn't Bubble 2.0!
Congratulations to Dave for finding a stable home for an essential piece of the blogosphere's infrastructure. Having invented it and nurtured its growth, Dave must be a proud papa to see yet another one of his inventions leave the nest.
I don't personally love Verisign, but at least they've got the bandwidth to maintain the service. Apparently they have "declared war on splogs." It will be interesting to see what directions they take it in.
Yahoo buys Upcoming.orgOctober 5, 2005
Congratulations to Andy Baio (and Gordon Luk and Leonard Lin): Waxy.org: Daily Log: Yahoo and Upcoming, Sitting In A Tree
I'm a day late and a dollar short here, but had to note this.
Yahoo is really getting aggressive about their whole Web 2.0 strategy. A lot of the big names are being gathered under one umbrella.
Speaking of Web 2.0, I'm not doing the O'Reilly conference (busy with work, can't afford it, not comped as press or a contributor, etc.) but I will be at the Web 2.0 Bash (sponsored by del.icio.us, WordPress, wink, Flock, SocialText, Technorati, Odeo, and Flickr) tomorrow night at Swig in San Francisco.
See you there?


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Aston Villa's latest signing Scott Sinclair claims his new teammate Fabian Delph made the right decision by rejecting a chance to join Liverpool.
The Merseyside club were keen on securing the services of the England international in the ongoing transfer window. Villa midfielder was set to be the long-term replacement for Reds star Steven Gerrard, who has already announced his decision to leave Anfield.
Delph ended speculations linking him with a move away from Villa Park and committed his future by signing a new four-and-a-half year deal with his current employers.
Sinclair joined Villa on-loan from Manchester City until the end of the season, with an option to make it permanent in the summer. The midfielder claims Delph was right to snub a chance to join bigger clubs for regular playing time.
"I think he [Delph] has made the right decision playing football every week and enjoying it and signing for the club. It is great for the club," Sinclair said, as quoted by the Mirror.
"I have gone to Man City and I hoped it would work and I would get a chance but I didn't get the chance that I wanted. I have gone for a long period of time of not playing football.
"But now this is a new challenge and chapter and hopefully I can get back to playing every week. The last couple of years my life has been on hold living in and out of suitcases. It is nice to finally get settled and be part of something going forward."
Meanwhile, Sinclair made only two league starts for the Citizens after joining them from Swansea City in 2012. He is desperate to set his repair his image and is raging to prove himself at Villa.
"If you're not playing football people have got something to say about you and criticise you," the former Swansea midfielder told the Telegraph.
"There is an image of you not caring about football, having money and the average footballer going, 'He's another one who's being paid and doesn't care'."
"But people who know me, my family, know that's not true. I still have the love of the game and want to be out there and prove myself," Sinclair concluded.

subset: commoncrawl


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Bejazzled plays jazz and popular music for all occasions, ranging
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What is your plan……for reaching out this Christmas?
As we approach Christmas, people we want to reach with the Gospel may often be more receptive to the Message simply because of the season. The challenge for us often is: how do we even begin to bring up spiritual issues? Here are four practical questions to consider that might help…...Keep Reading


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Texas and Wisconsin Libertarians are having their state conventions this weekend. If anyone in any of these states is able to provide live updates please do so in the comments here. Please also post links to any twitter feeds, photos, videos, livestreams, blogging or news coverage elsewhere, etc., in the comments. Some information about the conventions can be found at http://www.lp.org/blogs/staff/2014-state-conventions by clicking on each state's name.
I will be reporting in the comments from Temple, Texas, where I am right now.


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A while ago I started considering doing those 30-days challenges. The benefits are obvious, and the fact they're published gives motivation to actually stick to the plan.
So, I already have several such challenges in mind, and some were already started. For example, taking the stairs instead of the elevator in the building I'm living in. I'm on the 4th floor, so it is a "free exercise".
Another thing I had in mind for a while now, is using twitter. It happens to me every day: There's some new technology I want to blog about, but when I start thinking about the actual post, I realize it would take me no more than 2 lines. For example: I installed Firefox 5, and thinks it's great.
So instead, I opened a twitter account (@technomosh), and I'm planning to post those short musings there. Hopefully people will follow me, and discussions would develop.
What does this have to do with 30 days challenge? Simple. Basically, up until now, I wasn't a big believer in Twitter/Identi.ca/Buzz/etc. So my first instinct is to ditch the Twitter account a second after I opened it. Instead, I just installed the wonderful TwimGo on my N900, so it would be easier for me to post some tweets. Hopefully, in 30 days I'll know whether Twitter helped me in getting those musings off my head, or didn't.


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Slip is hosted by The Disclosure Project [JP Phillippe & Mr jones], the shows selection of artists is taken from the record label Disclosure Project Recordings. You will be hearing people like Office Gossip, Soul Minority, Satoshi Fumi, Craig Stewart, Jay West, Ross Couch in the coming months. The style of the show is deep house and tech house and might flirt with some other styles here and there throughout sets.
Tune in Tonight Thrusday and every 4ht week at http://www.ibizasonica.com/
Tune in Tonight Thrusday and every 4ht week at http://www.ibizasonica.com/
Hoy comienza un nuevo programa mensual en la programación de Ibiza Sonica Radio.
"Slip" desde "The Disclosure Project", sello discográfico que llega de Reino Unido, basado en la música electrónica y no específicamente dirigido a un género o estilo en particular, pero sí muy influido en el DEEP HOUSE y en el sonido TECH. oirás sesiones de Office Gossip, Soul Minority, Satoshi Fumi, Craig Stewart, Jay West, Ross Couch entre otros.
Escuchaló hoy jueves a partir de las 22:00h en el 95.2fm ó http://www.ibizasonica.com/
DJ Bio:
Paul created Disclosure Project Recordings, and co-runs it with fellow creator and director JP Phillippe.
Paul has work on labels such as Exquisite Music, Vivid Trax, Night Drive Music, Elevation, Body Rhythm, Deepology, Low Flow, 2600, Escada, Plastic City, Pesto, Acryl and has licensed tunes to Journeys by dj and EMI and much more. He has also recently been involved with remixes of Blaze - Lovely dae, Burnski - The flight remixes ep, Cloudsteppers - Make me shine and a whole load of others for some different artists and labels. All the current releases and remixes are readily available on beatport etc...Current works are underway via his own label with CBass & Mikobene, Daniel Kyo, Soul Minority, Da funk, Ross Couch, satoshi fumi, evren ulusoy, office gossip, frankman and alicenses to The Timewriters compilation on Plastic City. Look out for much more in the near future.


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Portable XM radio,LoJack and 4G Jammer Delivery is carried out international courier service DHL, free shipping (Check the list of countries for free shipping). You can pay by any convenient manner specified in the section "Payment"
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Powerful enough to sopport following system such as XM radio, LoJack, 4G, it is the show time of this Portable XM radio,LoJack and 4G Jammer. Rock with the whole world with this 4G jammer, you will enjoy the peaceful time ever since now.
this Portable XM radio,LoJack and 4G Jammer will surprise you with its widely usage: Bank, Conference room, auditoriums, law court, library, exam room, school, cinema, theater, and hospital etc. At places where using mobile phones is prohibited such as government, military, finance, security, police and command center etc.
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Jamming Frequencies: 2320 – 2345 MHz, 2345 – 2400 MHz, 167 – 175 MHz
Blocking Range: 1-10 meters(the Cellular signal must ≤-85dBm in the location, the jamming radius still depends on the strength signal in given area )
Note: Mobile signal jammers may not be permissible to import into certain countries due to licensing of broadcast signals or other restrictions. Please check your country's telecommunications regulations before placing your order. We will adjust the CDMA / GSM / DCS / PCS for you base on your country signal frequency.
Jamming range depends on the signal strength from various sources, as well as local environment conditions.
Important Notes for Jamming Distance: The jamming distances we mentioned on website are for customer's reference only. The actual jamming distance will be varied depending on the signal strength and the use location and if full charges, etc.
Important Notes for Portable Jammers with No Cooling Fan: Do not use the jammer when it is charging, or it will burn the jammer as it has no built-in fan. If because of this factor due to the broken of the jammer, the customer will lose the authority of free repairation.
Arabic - المحمولة راديو XM,لوجاك و 4G التشويش; Czech - Přenosné rádio XM,LoJack a 4G Jammer; Danish - Bærbare XM radio,LoJack og 4G Jammer; German - Tragbare XM radio,LoJack-und 4G-Jammer; Spanish - Portátil de la radio XM,LoJack y 4G Jammer; French - Portable radio XM,LoJack et 4G Brouilleur; Italian - Portatile XM radio,LoJack e 4G Jammer; Japanese - 携帯XMラジオ、LoJackおよび4Gジャマ; Korean - 휴대용 XM 라디오,LoJack 및 4G 방해기; Malay - Portabel siaran radio XM, "lo-jack" dan 4G Jammer; Dutch - Draagbare van de XM-radio,LoJack en 4G Jammer; Norwegian - Bærbar XM radio,LoJack og 4G Jammer; Portuguese - Portátil XM radio,LoJack e 4G Jammer; Romanian - Portabil radio XM,Лоджек și 4G toba de eșapament; Hebrew - נייד-XM,איתוראן ו-4G יאמר; Thai - แบบเคลื่อนย้ายได้ XM วิทยุติดเครื่องติดตามไว้และ 4G Jammer; Turkish - Taşınabilir XM radyo ve 4G GPS Jammer; Vietnamese - Di động đó XM radio,LoJack và 4G thiết bị nhiễu;


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Everyday garden variety injuries don't seem to be my cup of tea. I've done a few normal things like sprained an arm, broken some toes, gotten stung by a wasp and sustained vehicle air-bag injuries. It's my sister who has the very long and interesting list of broken bones. For some reason the things I've done are pretty wacky.
The list is as follows (not in age order):
-cut the cornea of my eye with my fingernail (serious pain)
-bent the cartilage of my nose with my knees while falling off of a playground trolley
-blood blister and deep cut in the palm of my left hand, from volleyball-net pole (nice scar)
-got hot battery acid in my eye (more serious pain)
-dropped a small knife which landed point down, sticking up out of my foot
-stepped on a large nail, lost quite a bit of blood
-stepped on a scorpion in my bedroom
-middle finger bitten badly by a horse
-forehead struck and cut by a canoe, under water after capsizing
-burned my stomach on the edge of my iron…twice
-spent 24 of my 72 hours in Berlin isolated in a nice fourth floor attic room with a nasty flu (Becca got it the next day, up-chucking just as we came out of Checkpoint Charlie)
-viral meningitis as an infant
-swine flu while house-sitting, all alone and no medicine 😦 until a week later when it was time to go home
What crazy things have happened to you?


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CAPOEIRA WEEK immerses campers in the music, movement, and culture of Brazil's national martial art. From the rhythmic ginga, to the vibrant rhoda, campers get an introduction to capoeira's unique approach to martial arts. Campers are invited to bring handheld instruments to play along with the berimbau!
MORE ABOUT CAMP: Focus Mixed Martial Arts Summer Camp is for kids ages 3 to 13, and runs from June 25th through August 31st. Drop-off runs from 8:30am-9:00am, with open mat time for the kids who arrive early. At 9:00am we begin the first of 3 martial arts classes for the day - class varies a bit from week to week as we focus on each week's theme, but every child who attends will have covered the basics of our mixed martial arts curriculum by the end of the week. After the first class we have snack, go to the park for some outdoor play time (on Tuesday and Thursday this includes sprinklers, water guns, and whatever water-appropriate toys the kids bring), followed by lunch. After lunch, the kids have some quiet free time to digest before we begin the second class. After class we have some organized games, then snack, then our third class of the day. Pick-up runs from 2:30-3:00pm, while kids have some quiet cool-down time. On Wednesdays, we go on a field trip, which departs around 10:30am and returns just in time for the start of pick-up. On Fridays we have our dojo day, when we play lots of indoor games, review what we've learned over the week, and then eat pizza and watch a movie before our last class of the week. Parents are invited to come in for the last class so they can see what the kids have worked on over the week.


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Finding my way through the fog
Looking for the answers to what is right and what is wrong
But for me the reality of these questions and the answers that followed became full of distorions
Nothing was as it seemed
It was the fog slowly closing in around me
A fog filled with fears, nightmares and paranioa
Feeling that your worst fears can become reality at any moment
A reality that is so terrible and painful that all I could do was run
Running from or running to… I could not tell the difference
No matter what direction I ran all I saw was fog
As the fog grew thicker and thicker I began to feel myself falling
As the fog began to finally disapear I found myself in a hole
A deep, dark hole
A hole filled with sadness, pain, hoplesness and dispare
As time went by these things consumed me
I did not know any other way to exist
Life in the hole was all I knew
I had no memories of life before it
The hole became my only comfort, my only friend
I didn't even think about leaving
I did not know how
I had no hope
I was in a deep, dark, hole lost in a sea of fog
And I did not think that anyone even knew I was there
I was doomed to live a life of fear, pain and such horrible sadness that at times I wished that the hole would just collapse in on me and end my pain
The pain had become more than I could bear
And at the moment that I could bear no more a faint ray of light hit my shoulders
How long had it been since I had seen a light such as this?
I did not know
My first reaction was of fear
So I dug deeper into my hole
Then I saw a hand slowly reaching down
Not knowing what to do I dug even deeper
What did the hand want?
Why was it there?
What did it want from me?
A fear of the hand grew intense
I sat weeping, not knowing what to do
Not knowing how to feel
I began to hear a comforting voice coming from the hand
A voice that I did not know for it had been many a year since I had heard such a voice
I was told that I would be helped out of the hole but I would have to make the first step alone
I would have to stand up and reach for the hand
I felt nothing but fear
My body trembled as I slowly reached for the hand
I felt a sense of warmth and comfort from the hand
It was an unfamiliar feeling
But the fear still dominated my emotions as I was slowly helped out of the hole
It was a very long and hard journey before I was finally free from the hole
And in days to come I would search long and hard for it again
For there were times that I again disired its comfort
But with all my searching I could not find it again even to this day
The struggles that came after were hard and challanging
I learned many new things and met with many comforting voices
The journey to freedom has been difficult and not without it's trips and stumbles
But it was a journey that was well worth taking and it continues to be so
Because the journey never really ends, it just changes shapes and colors
The way that the seasons come and go. Always changing
But changing for the good
For now I finally have hope that I will never return to the depths of the hole within the fog
I have the strength to keep them in my past
And the disire to never return
~Wendy Kay
Tagged: Anxiety, Depression, Poem, Wendy Kay


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Since GitHub integrated ChatOps into their operational strata, the concept has garnered a good deal of excitement. Essentially, ChatOps moves system operations into a group chat room, enabling developers to collaborate, initiate tests, deploy software, and build a company culture all from a single unified command line. Read more
Posts Tagged: plugins
Building a REST API in Java and Scala Using Play Framework – Part 1
In this two part series we explore Play Framework, and see how it can be used for rapidly developing RESTful APIs. In part one, we introduce Play, covering the main design decisions behind its architecture and potential reasons for choosing this framework over others. Read more


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Penny Dreadful
New photos from Showtime's psychosexual horror thriller series "Penny Dreadful" have arrived over at IGN along with some revealing character bios.
Halt and Catch Fire
AMC have announced a Sunday, June 1st 10pm ET/PT premiere date for their new series "Halt and Catch Fire". The ten-episode series explores the rise of the PC era in the early 1980s. It's in this period an unlikely trio take risks in the race to build a personal computer that will change the world as they know it.
The Fall
Production has begun on the second season of BBC Two's Northern Irish crime drama "The Fall". The network has tweeted a picture showcasing that filming had begun on the second episode in the last week of February.
Jamie Dornan wrapped filming the "Fifty Shades of Grey" film in mid-late February, so his shooting commitments on "The Fall" are unlikely to have been affected. [Source: Cinema Blend]


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Write a Review and share your opinions!
Friday, 27 June 2014 | Charlotte
Such a beautiful collar, my cat looks so pretty wearing it and she is happy to wear it. Service from Lovemydog was fantastic, the collar arrived after a couple of days.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.
Saturday, 23 February 2013 | Sally
I have bought the "Amberley liberty" cat collar for my little girl, and the "Tattersail" version for my liitle boy. The delivery went promptly, in a nice box with a very sweet personnal greeting... I was looking for collars that would be safe, comfy and elegant. They are all of that, and beyond as the quality of the finishes is almost surprising. My kitten are defintely so chic! A service and a product highly recommended!
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.


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The short answer? Terrible. The long answer is, as usual, somewhat complicated and nuanced — or that's what the media preaches. The other day I saw something on TV that had me playin' it back to ensure I'd heard it right the first time. In a nutshell, they said . . .
If a couple making around $75,000 a year manages to save about $800,000 — they'll be fine in retirement.
First off let's show how they're likely to be — fine. (Read: OK)
The Social Security website has a retirement benefit estimator. It says that a couple making that much will end up at 66 with roughly $23,300 (rounded) a year. (That figure will change a bit per tax payer history.) That's before taxes, which, if they live in a state like New York, Illinois, or Heaven forbid, California, will be more than a smidgeon. 'Course, their SS checks aren't their whole retirement, as they arrive at 66 (Yeah, I know, remember 65?) with $800,000 in their 401k. Like most Americans, that's where their 'savings' end up, their employer's qualified retirement plan. Since Moses' son died, the advisors for qualified plans have been telling their clients to transition to more and more risk averse positions as they approach retirement. Fair enough. Makes sense.
Once they pull the retirement trigger, they're then advised that they should expect their invested capital to generate, give or take, about a 4% annual pre-tax return. In this case that means roughly $32,000 a year. That brings their gross income at retirement to approximately $55,300 a year. If they live in California as I do their total tax bill (state/fed) could well be about $5,500 annually. We'll assume they own a home, and have successfully paid off any loans. This leaves 'em with real estate taxes and insurance, which we'll peg at about $5,000 a year. Add to that auto insurance, home repair and maintenance, utilities, and there's another $4,200 — and that's being generous. Let's fix groceries at $400 a month, then round up to $5,000 yearly. That's not including eating out. No entertainment. No travel. Oh, and the cost of gas wasn't included.
After state and federal taxes, and the modicum of normal living expenses mentioned above — clearly not an all inclusive list — they'll have just under $3,000 monthly for travel, hobbies, visiting far away family, clothing, and the acquisition of a replacement car when their 2005 sedan gives up the ghost. This doesn't account for health insurance, an expense somebody told me is goin' up, and might continue. 🙂 See what I mean? They're probably just . . . fine.
However, 4½ years later the feds notify them that they're 'not takin' enough out each year from their retirement plan'. They'll then be instructed to begin cannibalizing principle, which involuntarily puts them in the race they — and you — never wanted to enter. It's the race between the day you die and the day you run outa money. Still thinkin' $800,000 in your employer's retirement plan is 'fine'?
How to Purchase Real Estate With No (or Low) Money!
One of the biggest struggles that many new investors have is in coming up with the money to purchase their first real estate properties. Well, BiggerPockets can help with that too. The Book on Investing in Real Estate with No (and Low) Money Down can give you the tools you need to get started in real estate, even if you don't have tons of cash lying around.
An Alternative to Consider
Yeah, I know, this is a real estate investment site. It's a real mystery what I might be about to suggest. 🙂 I won't go through the whole script. However, the same $800,000 in equity would yield in the range of $4-6,000 monthly, much of it tax sheltered if well planned. Furthermore, you'd have a de facto 'bank' in that your property would be debt free. Need $100,000 quickly? Pick a property, pull it out tax free. But, what about the money you didn't put into your 401k every paycheck the last 15-40 years? I have a suggestion for that too. Call David Shafer about diverting that money into an EIUL. Those still in their 20s and 30s can generate an income at retirement of $5-15,000 and more — tax free — via an EIUL. Recently a client called me to thank me for bringin' EIULs into their plans. At 20-something they'll hit 60-something with about $200,000 a year in tax free income. That's over and above what they'll do in real estate. Oh, and don't forget the discounted notes they'll be acquiring in their Roth type self-administered plan.
By the time they hit retirement age the income they'll collect by the middle of February AFTER taxes will more than our example couple makes in a year BEFORE taxes. Now granted, they'll be benefitting from the decision to go this way in their 20s, a distinct advantage to be sure. Their current combined income now is more than many, fewer than some, but not spectacular. They live up to their kneecaps. They work hard and keep their noses clean. But the key factor separating them from the herd, is that they have a Plan and are executing it on Purpose. They're definitely not repeating the mistakes of the BoomerHerd. Those mistakes are now comin' home to roost in a very big way.
Don't follow the BoomerHerd to what is at best an OK retirement, and at worst a complete calamity. Learn from their mistakes. Boomers are fast becoming the generation that'll work themselves into their graves. The common denominator? They followed flawed plans, and then tried to remedy the unacceptable results with a Do-It-Yourself approach.
They're none to happy with the retirement most of 'em are facing.
Photo: Pedro Ribeiro Simões


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First of all I'd like you to take a moment and appreciate the beauty of this earth circling this sun. Look at that orange glow around the sun! Look at that greeny blur around the earth! Guess what. I made it. Thanks to a man called Mike at Code Academy I learnt how to use HTML to make this very simplified solar system. I had a bit of an epiphany which was that if you want to make projects happen, however they successfully they exist in real life they need to have an online presence. They kind of don't exist fully until they are online and it's how the project/company/initiative will be viewed by the vast majority of the public. Clearly this is not news to you as you have heard of this thing called the internet. In any case, I also went onto peopleperhour.com and loads of the jobs were for web design and they were worth a few hundred squids. The final revelation was that apparently kids are going to have coding as a core part of their curriculum soon, so unless we all want to be like our grandparents trying to find the Start button on the desktop I suggest we start figuring out what's what. All of these things culminated in a Eureka! moment in the shower, which looked considerably less dramatic than if I'd had an Archimedes in the bath. I decided to try a social experiment.
The experiment involved me going on Facebook and writing this quite sad sounding status:
Dear friends, family and friends of friends and family. I am looking for someone to teach me basic WEB DESIGN AND HTML, can you help me?
I have no money, but can offer my skills in any of the following:
Proofreading, piano lessons (beginners/intermediate), italian lessons (beginners/intermediate), a spoken word poem to promote whatever your venture is (!), English lit tutoring for any friend/family member doing GCSE/A level Eng lit, and if you're a non-native English speaker I can teach professional English language lessons (CELTA qualified.)
Please exchange any of my quite useless skills for your valuable one, and enjoy the modern twist on medieval bartering. PM me if you're interested.
Unfooooortunately nobody seemed to want any of my skillz (crying inside), but they did give me shed-loads of free information about web design which I am passing on to you all. The first thing I'll say is that I am writing this on WordPress. I almost don't want to tell people because then everyone will snatch up all these web designey jobs I have my eye on, BUT it's so easy. On a basic level you literally choose a template, fill in the gaps and have the option to by the domain name as a .com if it's available. Loads of the freelance work on peopleperhour were fine with using WordPress templates.
The above Galileo-inspiring illustration was the fruit of really quite a while spent on Code Academy (link above.) It has free tutorials on html and css and was fun to do. It would take a while to create anything really useful but it made the idea of code less scary and much more accessible.
This w3 online tutorial (html) and this css one are apparently 'less fun, but ultimately more useful in the long run, especially to look things up when you want to do something you know you can do, but you've forgotten how.' One of my friends said that she used it loads throughout university and swears by w3 schools: 'All you need to do is open a notepad, copy/modify the codes you get online and then save as HTML.'
If you're more serious about this then there's a programme called Dreamweaver (part of Adobe creative suite) which is apparently amazing but quite expensive. I will leave it to you to figure out how to get a copy, but I'm told that student copies are cheap (absolutely brilliant if you've graduated, ugh…) I was given this advice which I thought was very helpful: Dreamweaver's 'not too dissimilar from using Word or a basic design programme, but it creates the HTML for you without too much code entered manually. Most designers use it or similar suites exclusively or in combination with coding (depending on what you're making.) Bear in mind that HTML is only a front end language, website functionality is usually programmed using other languages (if you're looking to get into the industry.)
I hope this was useful and you now realise that you can learn to make beautiful web creations either as a means to an end to make money OR to bring another brain-child to life and to the attention of the world. I also encourage everyone to try a skill swap. Either you'll swap something you can do for something useful to you, or people will pity you and tell you stuff for free. Either way you're winning and, as one of my friends told me, you can 'save your barter goods for when you need food/clothes.' God.


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Part 'History of', part showcase, part bitch fest... a place for those interested in the fine art of the comp and storyboard - especially as they are used in advertising
Sunday, October 10, 2010
How about a little courtesy?
Generally speaking, most people have been great about sending a friendly note along with their request to be added to the list. But every once in a while I get an email like the one I received yesterday. The subject line read something like "Add my link" and contained nothing more than a URL.
Look, it takes maybe 5 minutes of my time to add an artist's name and website address to this blog's list. As I said, its a courtesy I extend to my fellow artists - I'm not a machine and I don't have any obligation to add you. If you can't take one minute to write a short, friendly note requesting to be added to the list, what makes you think I would feel like wasting 5 minutes of my busy day on you?
Show a little courtesy and you'll be welcomed here. Treat others the way you'd like to be treated. I shouldn't have to write about this... good 'netiquette' should be a given.
5 comments:
Amen. Leif does this out of the goodness of his heart, kids, for YOUR benefit. Please and thank you is common courtesy.ReplyDelete
'Good onyer' for speaking up Leif.ReplyDelete
You have done a grand job drawing (excuse pun) our international community of story board artists together and as such you deserve courtesy.
No response to your criticism, leads me to believe you have given us all the chance to consider our behaviour as we all may have been guilty at some time of taking someone elses endeavors for granted. I am sure whoever it was had a 'senior moment' and regrets the slip-up in 'netiquette'.
Keep up the good work Leif and as soon as I have something worthy enough to go along side the other fantastic contributors, I will be sure to get in touch....with good manners!
Post my stuff bitch!!!!!!!ReplyDelete
You know I love ya Leif!!..you handsome devil
Love from Palookaville
See what I mean? No respect, I tell ya. Yeesh! ;^)ReplyDelete
I've been a storyboard artist for many years and am now just discovering this site. It is truly a beautiful thing to see some people I know still out there doing it and finding some new artists that are just as dedicated. I can't thank you enough and I will be as polite as a southern gentleman can be to ask that I be entered onto the list!ReplyDelete


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County to move forward with $4M expansion of MCAD facility
After almost 30 years in the same location, officials with the Montgomery Central Appraisal District got the green light to move forward with a $4 million expansion of the existing building to better serve the residents.
According to Chief Appraiser Mark Castleshouldt, the appraisal staff moved into the building located at 109 Gladstell in 1986. At that time, the department had only 40 workers; however, he added, now the office has a payroll of 78 employees.
Castleshouldt said he would add more personnel in the future as well.
"The state requires us to do more and different type work than in the past that we wouldn't have had to perform," he said. "The county is growing."
Currently, the appraisal office has 285,000 accounts, 165,000 of those are single-family residences. Castleshouldt said there just isn't enough room for the public to sit in the current facility.
"We need more room for people coming in," he said.
Castleshouldt said, by law, his department is required to get approval from at least 75 percent of the taxing entities in the county as well as present options to handle the growth to those entities.
He presented the court with the option to add on to the existing facilities for about $4 million, build a new 35,000-square-foot facility for around $8 million or lease a facility which could cost up to $10 million.
"I think anybody who has been in your office would not question the fact that you need more room," said Precinct 1 Commissioner Mike Meador. "I don't know how you have been able to conduct your business with the space you have available right now."
Meador said he supported the expansion of the current facilities and added it would carry the county through the next 10 years.
"I certainly approve of the plan you have," he told Castleshouldt.
County Judge Alan B. Sadler echoed Meador and said it was an "excellent" plan to expand the current location.
Details of the expansion are not yet available.


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By SAVANNAH CUNNICK
I guess the last time we chatted, we pretty much went over the effects of the cold and icy weather that it had on all of us. Still chilly weather regardless and maybe more snow scheduled as we speak. It was predicted to be an abnormally cold winter this year, and for once they got it right! It was a different and exciting experience at first, but now cabin fever is setting in. Hopefully we can be open at the Short Mountain Trading Post again soon, so we can accommodate all of you and have a warm barn for you to explore and search for a unique treasure hidden in the craft booths or up in the Loft. Hang in there. We will be seeing you soon!
The big roar right now as I write this is the Academy Awards show last night! Everyone is chatting about it! I thought for some reason, it was a particularly special show this year. The movies that were nominated for awards were more on the sensitive side this year. Depicting issues that brought on different types of emotions, not only in the awards audience, but in the nation of viewers who happened to watch. From civil rights to boyhood to illnesses to aging to the results of war. Every issue was real and has been or will be experienced by many of us personally. The actors and actresses chosen to play these roles were perfect for the parts and definitely got the message across. There seemed more of a camaraderie within the Hollywood world this year. They were more interested in using their talents to express true and real issues that exist in our day to day existence. Many issues that we choose to ignore, cover-up or have fear of discussing openly. Well, it's about time reality hit the fan and these hidden or ignored issues slap us right in the face. And believe me, if anybody can do it, these talented appointed folks of the acting world certainly can. It's a messy job, but somebody has to do it.
Just remember that no matter what age we are, there is something in that particular era that we are experiencing related to just what these movies are trying to tell us. Inside every older person, there's a younger person wondering 'what happened'? Inside every younger person, there's that question 'why'. Life can be very deep, and most of us try to stay at the shallow end. We would rather have too much too soon, than too little too late.
Well, as we know, it doesn't always work that way. Just throw out a little compassion to our fellow neighbors who are going through some crummy issues...don't be so quick to judge and gossip, to turn your back and expect it to all go away. Take a moment out of your personal busy life and consider how lucky you are and if not so lucky, how to fix it. Drugs, drinking and suicide are NOT the answers. That's why there are these movies spotlighting every issue imaginable in our daily lives that are unbearable, but can be helped by realizing you are not alone and that someone has actually written a script exactly about our situations. Imagine that. Amen.
Uncle Festus merely states, please don't try to change my bad habits, they're all I've got! Martha pipes up and totally agrees with that one! She says that if men weren't so simple, women wouldn't have to be so complicated! Cousin Clyde tells his wife Annie that she brought something into his life that he never had before: her mother. She tells him to not catch a cold from the ice in his heart and to remember that a daughter becomes just like their mother so get ready for the double whammy! I don't know if they are warming up for our next family Thanksgiving or what. Hopefully they go out of town again!
Should we call this good for now, folks. I just know there will be much more food for thought by the time next week rolls around and we chat again! So I am signing off by saying: be safe, be happy, be loving, be thankful, be considerate and helpful to all those around you, Smile, Laugh Always.
Hugs, Savannah


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Ever feel like the world is terrible, but not quite terrible enough? Like many things on our glorious planet have taken a turn for the worst, but there's still room for things to get just a teeny bit more awful?
Well, panic over! 'Ladiators' is here. Yes, 'Ladiators', y'know, like 'Gladiators' but specifically for lads. Goodness... where do we start with this one?
So basically, The Sun has revealed that ITV2 is lining up the new show, which sees lads - not men, not blokes, not guys, strictly lads - competing to prove who is the 'Ultimate Lad', a title that is apparently highly coveted.
The publication reports that the "hunky lads" will be pitted against each other, with their girlfriends on the sidelines before separately "fighting it out", because there's nothing quite like a good ol' fashioned gender divide to really get things going.
A source has explained to the paper: "'Gladiators' was a huge hit back in the day so producers have constantly been finding ways they can bring it back in one form or another.
"Being a lad has almost become a bit of a business with reality TV stars like Joey Essex and Geordie Shore's Gaz Beadle hailed as the ultimate lads. So TV producers wanted a tongue-in-cheek series that embraces lad culture.
"'Ladiators' will be a funny entertainment series and is certainly going to appeal to the 'Love Island' fans as the couples appearing on the show will be very fit, sexy and have the stamina to take on the challenges."
We know it may sound like we're not giving it a chance but seriously, 'Ladiators'? Haven't we had enough to deal with in the past 12 months? Come on.
Naturally, as the news broke, TV fans began taking to Twitter.
ITV are yet to announce who is presenting the show, and an airdate is also yet to be revealed so watch this space (or, y'know, don't).


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We invite all Ministers of the Eucharist and Word of the parish, past present and future, to a celebration in the Westlodge Hotel on Wednesday, February 7th at 8.00pm.
This evening will be an opportunity to get together, to chat and be thanked by the parish for your vital contribution to the parish. Refreshments will be served.
We look forward to seeing you all there and please encourage anyone you know who might like to become a minister to come along.


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Contact Us
Hello there. Thanks for checking out Yumm.com, and for wanting to get in touch. We welcome all questions, comments and inquiries. You can find us at our social media handles – there are links in the header, or use the form below to send us a note. Thanks!
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We all know that hotel revenue management is a key factor to achieve success in the hospitality industry.
Unfortunately, Revenue Management softwares (RMS) are not democratized in the sector. The majority of independent, small hotels do not yet have access to reliable RMS solutions.
Up until recently, RMS had been too expensive or complex, thus the majority of the hotels either could not afford it and/or did not want to have someone solely dedicated to revenue management.
In the past, the hotel's accountant or General Manager evaluated all the hotel's data manually.
Over the years, revenue management solutions for hotels have evolved with the purpose of facilitating the process automatically and optimizing big data with integrated and complex algorithms that in turn assist the hotel in determining the best room rate for the season and targeted client.
However, this critical solution has not been available to independent and small hotels.
This is where we come in:
Climber offers an easy-to-use, smart and automated, 100% cloud-based software solution for independent, small to medium hotels.
For the first time,
independent hotels have access to the same tools that large hotel chains and groups have been utilizing for years.
This could be you once you start using Climber
"Revenue management has contributed in millions to the bottom line, and it has educated our people to manage their business more effectively. When you focus on the bottom line, your company grows."
Bill Marriott Jr., Chairman and CEO, Marriott International
We look forward to hearing how RMS has had a positive effect on your hotels bottom line.


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We currently use Softether with Virtual Nat and Secure Nat Virtual DHCP Server.
When trying to use the Mac address filter, the Virtual DHCP server creates virtual MAC addresses which makes it impossible to block connections based on MAC address.
If I was to disable the Virtual DHCP and an internal DHCP on the VPN VLAN to give out IP addresses, will this show to true MAC address of the Network adapter that is connecting via VPN?
SecureNat Virtual DHCP Question
Post your questions about SoftEther VPN software here. Please answer questions if you can afford.
Post Reply
2 posts • Page 1 of 1
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Re: SecureNat Virtual DHCP Question
DHCP doesn't assign MAC address.
You can configure virtual NIC MAC address from property.
You can configure virtual NIC MAC address from property.
Post Reply
2 posts • Page 1 of 1


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NHAI Recruitment 2017 – Latest Civil Jobs
NHAI Recruitment 2017: NHAI – National Highways Authority of India has released new recruitment notification for filling up the vacancies of 40 Deputy Manager. The candidates who are seeking in latest civil jobs now they can apply for Deputy Manager post in NHAI. The candidates who want to get central government job the they can… Read More »


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"Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that." (Mary Oliver)
Sunday, 9 December 2012
Pre-Raphaelites and Poetry at Tate Britain
This painting is Love Among the Ruins by my favourite Pre-Raphaelite painter, Edward Burne-Jones. It is based on the poem of the same title by Robert Browning, which can be found on the link below. The painting and the poem both set up a striking contrast between the monumental achievements of the powerful, now crumbling, and the inexorable strength of love and the "plenty and perfection" of natural life:
LOVE AMONG THE RUINS (Robert Browning)
I went this afternoon with a friend to the current exhibition at London's Tate Britain, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde, which included this painting among others. I've been to a few different Pre-Raphaelite exhibitions in the past ten years, and as much as I enjoyed this one, I think that my favourite is still the exhibition at the Royal Academy in 2003, which was based on Andrew Lloyd-Webber's personal collection...it was absolutely amazing. (I was living in Dublin at the time and was just visiting London, but it was more than worth flying over for.) I also especially liked the Waterhouse exhibition a few years ago, also at the Royal Academy.
The current exhibition grouped the works of art more or less by theme: Nature, History, Religion, Beauty, Mythology. My Pre-Raphaelite preference is very much for Mythology, so I wouldn't have minded seeing some more of those, especially as Burne-Jones is pre-eminent in such themes. It was especially exciting to see those that were new to me, though. I developed a love of Pre-Raphaelite art in large part because of Burne-Jones's affinity for Arthurian themes. This exhibition included two of Burne-Jones's tapestries on the Grail Quest - rather wonderfully, they were on loan from Jimmy Page's personal collection. Burne-Jones, Arthuriana and Led Zeppelin - it doesn't get much better.
Others have described the details and the unofficial membership of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood far better than I could, but I can say why I personally love the art. It is both romantic and formal, neither of which I would entirely want to do without. The women portrayed, while obviously highly idealised, are also powerful, sensual and intelligent. I can't help thinking that ideals of female beauty have gone backwards. These women are not childlike or androgynous, for example.
The movement was also very highly...integrated, if that is the right word. The Pre-Raphaelites were not only painters, or only visual artists; they had a whole design ethic, and some of the decorative material, furniture, etc associated with the movement appeared as well. There was a beautiful clavichord with an incredibly lovely painting by Burne-Jones inside.
From my current perspective, one of the most interesting points was the fact that poetry was so highly integrated into Pre-Raphaelite art. It genuinely seemed as though half the paintings had some poetic inspiration: Dante, Tennyson, poems by their own contemporaries and so forth. There was an early edition of Tennyson's Poems on display, open to the first lines of 'The Lady of Shalott', and an early edition of Christina Rossetti's poems as well. This was a time when poetic achievement was innate in the art of a nation.
I also discovered that I don't much like William Holman Hunt. Burne-Jones's remote and beautiful myths, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's remarkable women, carried the exhibition for me, and that was much as it should be.
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JPG: Can't Read File Header - Unknown File Format or File Not Found
I was looking at various JPGs. I noticed that a number of them produced this error message when I tried to view them in IrfanView. I had checked the box to activate IrfanView's Unicode plug-in as suggested, and anyway these were not exotic file names. So I didn't know what this error would mean for these JPGs.
A search indicated that numerous people had encountered this error. I decided to start by verifying that this was not just a quirk of IrfanView. It didn't seem to be; I also wasn't able to view these JPGs as icons in Windows Explorer, and when I tried to view them in Firefox, I got an error: "The image [filename] cannot be displayed because it contains errors." When I tried Internet Explorer, I got "Your web browser has blocked this site from using an ActiveX control in an unsafe manner." Windows Photo Viewer said, "Windows Photo Viewer can't open this picture because the file appears to be damaged, corrupted, or is too large." Chrome didn't show an error message; it just gave me a blank page. Photoshop said, "Could not complete your request because an unknown or invalid JPEG marker type is found." Microsoft Paint said, "Paint cannot read this file. This is not a valid bitmap file, or its format is not currently supported."
Eliminating the Easy Solutions
A search led to indications that some problems of this type could be due to the program, as I had feared in the case of IrfanView. For instance, one webpage indicated that a faulty Skype extension could produce the foregoing Firefox error. Presumably an attempt to open the JPG in some other program, as above, would help to clarify whether it was a program issue rather than a JPG issue. A discussion thread raised the prospect that this kind of thing could result from various kinds of file system or drive problems. Other webpage said that USB flash drives (especially improperly removed) or Picasa could be an issue.
In some cases, a backup could be a solution, possibly beginning with a DoubleKiller search for other files having the same filename (just in case there might be another copy of the same file somewhere on the computer). That discussion thread also suggested that it could be a machine-specific problem, but it wasn't in my case: same problem when trying to open on another computer.
As noted in a previous post, building on an earlier effort and leading to some additional refinements, it was possible to use IrfanView to detect corrupted JPGs scattered around the computer. The basic idea was to do a search for *.jpg (in e.g., a command window, or using a file finding program like Everything) and then run IrfanView (using either File > Batch or command line methods) to see which JPGs would fail to convert to another format (e.g., PDF).
I had previously reviewed commercial software for fixing JPGs. The prices were generally high and my confidence in them was not great. I only had a few dozen corrupted JPGs and wasn't eager to spend much money on fixing them. One commenter, responding to my post, said that she'd had generally good results with JPEG Recovery Pro ($50), but she still seemed to be looking for a better solution. Voters on CNET had given it less than two stars.
One reviewer on CNET (like others) said the demo version of Corel's Paint Shop Pro had been useful. On CNET, it got 3.5 stars from 466 users, though it didn't look like the dozen users who had rated the current version were quite as pleased with it. I downloaded the latest version from CNET. It was large (366MB) and it took a while. CNET said it would be a 30-day trial version, $60 purchase price after that. (I could also have downloaded from Corel's website. Oddly, when I started to do that, the download dialog said their version was only 282MB.) Unfortunately, when I tried to open a few of my corrupted files, Paint Shop said, "An error occurred while trying to read from the file." Same outcome with a half-dozen different corrupted files.
Digging into the Files
My efforts (above) suggested that I might or might not be able to find a program that would help to automate the repair of corrupted JPGs. Assuming I did find such a program, the next question would be whether it would work on all corrupted JPGs. I was not finding a clear, obvious solution.
In other words, it seemed that, sooner or later, I was going to find myself among those who were talking of manually editing JPGs to fix them. I hadn't done that before. I had no idea whether that sort of process could be even partially automated. But the next step seemed to be that I should see if I could fix at least some simple problems in JPGs.
In a thread cited above, someone said that I could open a JPG in Notepad and could tell, from its first few characters, what kind of file it was. A GIF would tend to begin with "GIF89," a JPG would begin with "ÿØÿà," and a PNG would start with "‰PNG." I looked at a couple of my JPGs. Sure enough, the uncorrupted ones did begin with with "ÿØÿà." But the corrupted ones I examined didn't have anything like any of these three options. I knew, anyway, that it wasn't a case of the file being saved with the wrong extension. If that had been the problem, IrfanView would have caught it (given the program options I had selected) and would have offered to change it to whatever the correct extension should be.
Another site offered a step-by-step guide to the process of editing the JPG. The editing required a hex editor. That site recommended Frhed, whose interface was far friendlier than that of HexEdit. I opened one of my corrupted JPGs in Frhed. It looked a lot less crazy than it had looked in Notepad. According to a user-friendly version of the step-by-step guide, the JPG consisted of two sections: header and image. Corruption resulted from having a bad header. Or so we hoped. The solution was to replace the bad header with a good one. So I made a backup of the files I would be working on, and set to work.
The user-friendly guide recommended xvi32 instead of Frhed. It was rated 4.2 out of 5 stars (Very Good) by 47 users (76,213 downloads) at Softpedia -- vastly more than Frhed -- so I downloaded and ran that instead. I had to bump up its font a bit -- 8-point type seemed unduly ascetic.
Now that I was getting organized, I looked at my first corrupt JPG. Unlike the other one I had just glanced at, it did not have anything except zeroes. This file was completely toast. The next one had data. The guide said I should look for "ff da" in the hexadecimal data, so I did a Ctrl-F and searched for FF DA. (For some reason, xvi32 insisted on entering capital letters.) My search seemed to think that it had succeeded: it stopped at something that read 9F FA. Call me crazy, but that did not look exactly like FF DA to me. I tried searching the same file in Frhed. A search for ff da found nothing, and a search for just ff didn't find much. Going for a trifecta, I tried in HexEdit -- and there, I did find ff da.
These hex editors, sounding an uncertain trumpet, inspired me to search for that funky string noted above -- ÿØÿà -- in Notepad. It wasn't there. I tried five other JPGs in Notepad. No ÿØÿà in any of them. I felt lost.
According to the user-friendly guide, a hex search for ff da in xvi32 should have had some luck. I searched a good JPG in Notepad for ÿØÿà and, sure enough, there it was, right at the start of the file. I took a look at that same good JPG in xvi32 and it, too, found ff da in a hex search -- and this time it really was ff da. So were we saying that my bad JPGs did not have the ÿØÿà or the ff da that would be necessary for a manual repair job? Was that why neither Paint Shop Pro nor IrfanView nor anything else had been able to do anything with these files -- were they all completely fubar? Were people using these hex editors, searching for ff da, when instead they could have achieved the same thing with IrfanView or PSP?
I had a folder full of JPGs. Some of them worked; some didn't. Having made a backup, I started at the beginning and viewed each of these files in IrfanView. I had set my IrfanView properties so that it would go immediately to the next JPG upon hitting an arrow key or upon deleting a file. In other words, I could just hold down the Del key until it came to an error, and then hit Enter and right-arrow to get to the next one. This would delete each good JPG, which was fine, since I didn't need to be editing this copy of it.
That left me with 159 apparently bad PDFs. Wow. More than I expected. This could take a lot of manual editing. IrfanView couldn't open them, which probably meant nothing else could either. Just to be sure, I tried opening several dozen of them in Paint Shop Pro. No dice.
I wondered if there was a fast way of searching all 159 of these files for ÿØÿà. Copernic Desktop Search didn't find anything like that. Well, what if I glued a bunch of them together with the COPY command and then viewed the one huge file in Notepad? To test this approach, I went into a command window and typed "COPY File1.jpg + File2.jpg Newfile.txt," where File1 and File2 were good JPGs. Notepad told me that File1.jpg and File2.jpg each had exactly one occurrence of ÿØÿà. How about Newfile.txt? Yes, indeed, it had two occurrences of ÿØÿà. So this approach seemed to work, at least for purposes of preserving occurrences of ÿØÿà in a concatenated file.
To run this little test, I needed a more powerful concatenator, unless I was willing to type out 159 filenames: COPY wouldn't use wildcards (e.g., COPY *.jpg Combined.txt) -- but I had forgotten that /b would fix that: COPY /b *.jpg Combined.txt. (I chose a .txt extension so that (a) Notepad would open it automatically and (b) Combined.jpg would not get mixed up in copying itself into itself with the *.jpg wildcard.) I ran that and then opened Combined.txt. It was a large file, of course, so Notepad took a while to open it. Once it was opened, I did a search for ÿØÿà. I found hundreds of occurrences -- far more than 159. Did this mean that my concatenation messed things up, or did it mean that some files had multiple occurrences of ÿØÿà? I tried concatenating just 10 bad JPGs: I had named them using sequential numbers, starting with ZZZ_0001.jpg, so I was able to use a wildcard to select ten: COPY /b ZZZ_003*.jpg Thirties.txt. The results were confusing. Eventually I wrote a batch file to open each file individually in Notepad. The batch file contained lines like these:
start notepad.exe ZZZ_0013.jpgI thought I might crash the system if I opened 159 sessions of Notepad at once, so I broke it into four parts of about 40 lines each. I ran the first one and did a Ctrl-F and then Ctrl-V in each one to paste ÿØÿà on the search line. Now I had my answer. Some of these files (e.g., ZZZ_0074.jpg) contained many iterations of ÿØÿà, while others contained none. I went through them all. After a while, it wasn't hard to guess that the ones that seemed to be filled with Chinese characters (and there were quite a few of them) would have no occurrences of ÿØÿà, while some but not all of the files containing more familiar if gibberishy characters (e.g., 1 Òhhh) would have at least one such occurrence. There might also have been a way of speeding up the process by doing spot checks, since it seemed that files near to one another (probably originating from the same folder) (e.g., ZZZ_0058.jpg and ZZZ_0059.jpg) tended to follow the same pattern of having or not having occurrences of ÿØÿà. In the end, 27 of the 159 had at least one occurrence of ÿØÿà, and 132 did not.
start notepad.exe ZZZ_0027.jpg
Fun with Hex Editors
These facts seemed to call for two separate approaches. For the 132 jpgs that had no occurrences of ÿØÿà, maybe the situation was that the front ends had gotten lopped off, and that's why Paint Shop Pro et al. couldn't make anything of them. What would happen if I just arbitrarily rammed a header onto each of these files, down to the ÿØÿà point? The answer to that might give me some clues for the minority of files that did have multiple occurrences of ÿØÿà.
In a survey of good JPGs, I noticed that most began with this:
ÿØÿà JFIF ÿThere seemed to be at least one invisible character in there, so the best approach (outside of a hex editor) seemed to be be to copy it from the start of a working JPG in Notepad (i.e., not from this webpage), and save it as header.txt. Then, starting with ZZZ_0013.jpg, the first of my bad JPGs, I typed this:
COPY /b header.txt + ZZZ_0013.jpg new0013.jpgand then I tried to open new0013.jpg. IrfanView gave me an error: "Decode error! JPEG datastream contains no image." Tried it with a couple other files; same result. A brief search suggested that this "decode error" problem could be just as bad as the original one. So it appeared that this COPY approach was not the answer.
Back at the user-friendly guide, I confirmed that, in their view, the new header approach required me to locate the hex string FF DA, which I had not been able to do in many files. Given the uncertainties I had encountered in the several hex editors (above), I wondered if there was a way to output the hex contents of a JPG in text form, so that I could do ordinary searches in Notepad (or whatever) to confirm that there was no FF DA in these files. The solution was easy enough: Frhed (but not HexEdit or xvi32) had an option, File > Export as hexdump, that gave me a text file displaying the hex data. So if I wanted to see a file's hex in a text file, I could use that; and if I wanted to see a file's ASCII in a text file, I could use Notepad. Xvi32 did have a File > Print option that gave me pretty printed pages (in e.g., PDF or hard copy), displaying both hex and ASCII, so I could have searched for either text or hex values in its PDF output.
But now, this was odd. When I searched ZZZ_0030.jpg for "ff da" in Frhed, it found nothing; but when I searched Frhed's hex dump text file for "ff da" in Notepad, it found multiple occurrences. Ah, but the problem seemed to be that Frhed was searching the ASCII side, not the hex. Frhed's search box told me to consult the online help for guidance, but the program contained no link to any webpage as far as I could tell. Xvi32's Find option let me search for either text or hex, but as noted above, it often led to 9F instead of FF. Back in Frhed's hex dump file, I searched for the first occurrence of ff da. It was on row 0050b8 (which the hex dump displayed as 0050b835, mistakenly running together the row number, it seemed, with the first column of data). I tried to locate row 50b8 in xvi32, but there was no such row. I guessed that 0050b8 must refer to a specific location (such as the "ff" in "ff da"), so what I was calling "rows" would actually have different numbers within the same file, according to how many data points were being displayed on a single row onscreen in the hex editor. Armed with that theory, I did now see an occurrence of FF DA in xvi32, near where location 0050b8 should be; and when I clicked on that occurrence, the status bars in both Frhed and xvi32 displayed indications that I was at "hex address" or "offset" 50CD.
OK, so what could I do with this information? There seemed to be some confusion here. Those webpages had said that I was looking for ÿØÿà. An ASCII code list told me that the ASCII code for ÿ was 152. (This meant that I could type ÿ by holding down Alt and hitting 152 on the keyboard's numeric keypad. It turned out that not all ASCII code lists agreed: some versions of the extended ASCII table (most, it seemed) would say that 152 would give me a tilde (~), but that wasn't the tale told by my keyboard.) According to my preferred ASCII list, the ÿ had a decimal value of 152 and a hex value of 0x98. A converter told me that 152 in decimal = 98 in hexadecimal, so that added up.
So, ahh, now I thought maybe I was figuring this out. Looking at ZZZ_0030.jpg in xvi32, I noticed that selecting FF in the hex area would highlight ÿ in the ASCII area. As far as xvi32 was concerned, ÿ = FF, not 152. I tried FF in my hex converter. It said FF in hex = 255. Well, and of course it did: FF was as high as hex would go. In hex, you don't count from 0 to 9; you count 0 to 9, and after 9 you continue on with a, b,c, d, e, and then f. What we call 16 in decimal is called F in hex. After F, you start over back at 0 in hex, just as you start back over at 0 after 9 in base-10 (decimal) counting. So FF in hex actually meant 0FF: it was similar to 099 in decimal. After 099 comes 100 in decimal; after FF comes 100 in hex. So never mind my keyboard: these hex programs were interpreting FF as 255, and that was the last possible number in the 256-character extended ASCII set (beginning with zero). In these ASCII code lists, 255 was not represented by ÿ or any other character. Apparently it had some special meaning. To clean up a loose end, I found an occurrence of hex 98 in xvi32, clicked on it, and saw that, sure enough, it was linked with the ASCII tilde.
I looked at a good JPG file in Frhed. It began, as shown above, with "ÿØÿà JFIF ÿ" -- that is, with this set of hex values:
ff d8 ff e0 00 10 4a 46 49 46 00 01 01 01 01 2c 01 2c 00 00 ffAfter that ending ff, the contents of the good JPGs seemed to diverge. That 17th character seemed to be where the image content began. Would I get a working file if, instead of pasting in that header.txt file (which, being represented in ASCII, was apparently not able to capture all of the hex nuances), I pasted these 17 (or maybe 16) codes at the start of a bad JPG? Or, wait. After the hex dump search experience (above), was I sure that this sequence, or part of it, was not already in those files? The Notepad search for ÿØÿà had produced mixed results, but maybe that wasn't the right way to go about it.
(Note that the second character, Ø, was represented by d8. There were apparently several different Ø-like characters in use in different languages. The hex calculator indicated that d8 in hex meant 216 in decimal. But when I typed Alt-216, I got ╪, not Ø. That seemed to be an error, according to indications of what I should have gotten in the Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) character set. The answer was that I should have been typing Alt-0216, not Alt-216.)
In Frhed, I opened one of those JPGs in which, using Notepad, I had found no occurrences of ÿØÿà. I did a search (Ctrl-F) for ÿØ, which I could either have pasted into the search box or entered via Alt-152, Alt-0216. I did find an occurrence of ÿØ. I noticed that it came shortly after a big section full of zeroes, which made me think that much of that particular file might be gone forever. I tried again, this time searching for the full ÿØÿà (Alt-152, Alt-0216, Alt-152, Alt-133). Nothing found. So Frhed seemed consistent with Notepad in that particular search, at least in this file.
By this point, I was a bit lost. It did occur to me that I might be able to automate the triage of potentially salvageable JPGs by doing a hex dump, counting the occurrences of 00 (nothing, empty space) as a percentage of the total number of hex values in the file, doing some sampling of partially zeroed but still readable JPGs, and identifying a threshold (10%? 20%) beyond which a JPG would not be worth saving. But I wasn't there yet, because my JPGs weren't readable at all, and they did have non-zero data. Most of them, that is; I had found a total of two that were completely empty.
A Bit of Clarity
I went back to the first of my bad JPGs that had no occurrences of ÿØÿà. My hex editors all seemed to have some way to insert characters or a whole file. The latter, offered by xvi32 and Frhed, seemed easier, so in xvi32 I went into File > Insert. I had not yet created the file that I wanted to insert, so now I went into Notepad, pasted my string of 17 hex characters (above), saved it as Header.txt, and proceeded to insert that into my bad JPG in xvi32. Oops: that pasted the hex codes (ff d8 ff e0 ...) as text, not as hex. Xvi32 also gave me an Edit > Insert > Hex string option, so I tried that. That worked. I saved the bad JPG and tried opening it in IrfanView. This gave me a new error: "Decode error! Bogus marker length." Unfortunately, a search led nowhere from that. Another search produced more, including a FileFormat.info webpage that said this:
The first two bytes of every JPEG stream are the Start Of Image (SOI) marker values FFh D8h. In a JFIF-compliant file there is a JFIF APP0 (Application) marker, immediately following the SOI, which consists of the marker code values FFh E0h and the characters JFIF in the marker data, as described in the next section. In addition to the JFIF marker segment, there may be one or more optional JFIF extension marker segments, followed by the actual image data.This was helpful. It seemed that all I really needed, after all, was the FF d8 bytes. The rest of "ÿØÿà JFIF" was perhaps related to JFIF compliance, but I didn't know if I needed that to produce a file that a program like IrfanView could read. So I went back into xvi32, went to the 17th byte (i.e., the last one I had just entered) and used the Edit > Delete to Cursor option to delete what I had just added, and then used Edit > Insert String to add back ff d8. I saved and tried again. Now we were back to the "Can't read file header" error in Irfanview. Another FileFormat webpage seemed to say that, to have a JPG file, all you needed was the first four bytes (ff d8 ff e0). In xvi32, I went into File > New, inserted those four bytes, and saved that file as Test.jpg. IrfanView gave me an error: "JPEG datastream contains no image." I inserted four empty bytes (i.e., eight zeroes) after those four header bytes but still got that error. I replaced those with bytes 5 through 8 from a good JPG and tried again. Still the same error.
Another search led to a webpage that seemed to explain something I had noticed in another FileInfo webpage: it seemed that a JPG file was (or at least could be) defined as one beginning with FF D8 and ending with FF D9. This page also explained that JFIF was an alternative to EXIF, but I wasn't sure whether I needed either of them. It seemed that I hadn't really added four data bytes, when I added bytes 5 through 8: I was just adding the JFIF part of the header. Assuming I had to have either EXIF or JFIF, in xvi32 I now modified Test.jpg so that it contained what appeared to be the standard JFIF header (ff d8 ff e0 00 10 4a 46), then added four bytes (90 60 1B 88), then added FF D9 at the end, saved, and tried again. Still "contains no image." I looked at Test.jpg in Notepad. Interestingly, it looked like I had made a start on one of those Chinese-looking files.
A more focused search tended to confirm the thought that I was getting in over my head and/or that there just might not be a solution. People were talking about serious programming, and they were also giving me the impression that, of course, the image data for a JPG would state, or be influenced by, its size, color, compression, and other factors. This was probably why the user-friendly webpage advised finding a header from a JPG of similar size, if possible, taken by the same camera and edited with the same software. I didn't have that kind of knowledge about these particular JPGs, so my chances of adding a good header were limited.
The user-friendly webpage hadn't actually been very clear, to me, so I returned to the original advice page that it was trying to present in more user-friendly terms. That page confirmed that there would typically be "several" occurrences of ff da in a JPG. This suggested that a file without any such occurrences, searched in a hex editor or dump rather than in Notepad, could be beyond saving. I had decided I wasn't going to make that determination today, though. If I couldn't save something now, I was going to zip it up and save it until maybe some better tool came along.
The advice here was to look for the *second* occurrence of ff da, occurring somewhere around 2000 to 4000 bytes into the file. I hadn't understood that from the other page. Everything up to that second occurrence was supposedly part of the header; everything after it was image data. So I would be replacing all of that header section with a similar section from a good JPG. If this was right, then my attempt to create Test.jpg (above) appaerently needed a second occurrence of ff d8, followed by something resembling image data, in order to work.
At about this point, I discovered that I might have been confusing ff d8 and ff da. Both appear in the foregoing paragraphs, and I was no longer sure which one I was supposed to be interested in. A look at a working JPG called Good.jpg indicated that the first two ASCII characters (ÿØ -- which, pronounced yo!, could be a great way to start a JPG) were represented by hex FF D8. But the original advice page was saying that the boundary between header and image data was marked by FF DA, not FF D8. So apparently I confused that. In Good.jpg, FF DA -- that is, ASCII characters ÿÚ, produced (as I now realized) by Alt-0255, Alt-0218 -- first appeared at location (would it be called "offset" or perhaps "byte number"?) 261. This was not nearly as far into the file as the advisor had suggested. Perhaps it varied with the contents of the file. But, no, again, this was the first occurrence of FF DA, not the second. In xvi32, I hit F3 to repeat the search. But xvi32 again took me to an instance of 9F DA, not FF DA. I tried the same thing in Fhred, finding once again that it searched for ASCII, not hex; so I searched Good.jpg, in Fhred, for ÿÚ. It said the offset or address of the first hit was at 609 or, in hex terms, 0x261. But it could not find any more occurrences. Was that why Fhred had taken me to the irrelevant 9F DA -- because there was only one FF DA? (Probably not, I decided later; probably it did that because it was accepting Ÿ as equivalent to ÿ, since I had not specified a case sensitive search.) HexEdit, too, appeared to be finding only one occurrence of FF DA in Good.jpg.
A Glimpse of Light
It seemed that I would have to try to make this work using the first rather than the second occurrence of FF DA in Good.jpg. In Fhred, with the cursor blinking on DA at offset 609, I went into Edit > Select Block. There, I typed x0 as the Start of Selection, and left the End of Selection at x262. I clicked OK. This selected everything from the start of the file to DA at offset 609. Then I realized I was doing this in the wrong file. But it was OK. There seemed to be another way to proceed. In xvi32, I went into File > Export as Hexdump. I left the same range (x0 to x262) and selected Export to File and Just Hex Digits on a Line. I saved it as Header.txt. Then I closed Good.jpg.
Hopefully that gave me a working header. In Fhred, I went into one of my bad JPGs and searched for FF DA. It found nothing. I double-checked, doing the same search in xvi32. It found an occurrence of FF DA. Plainly, I had still not quite gotten the hang of using these hex editors, or else maybe Fhred really was buggy, as the writer of the user-friendly webpage believed.
Viewing Bad.jpg in xvi32, the first occurrence of FF DA that xvi32 found was near the end of the file. That couldn't be an end-of-header marker, could it? The hex address was 4E6D4, indicating that there was a lot of data before this point. My guess was that this was one of the later occurrences of FF DA, not the early occurrence that would mark the header. Could I fix this bad JPG by just attaching Header.txt at the start of the file? In Fhred, I used Ctrl-Home to go to the start of Bad.jpg. There, I saw nothing that looked like ÿØ, which presumably would have appeared at the start of any good JPG. I went into File > Import from Hexdump. I named the newly created Header.txt as my source and clicked OK. I got a question: "Does this data have the same format as the Fhred display? This data contains only whitespace and hexdigits. (unlike Fhred display)." I assumed that a header would naturally get a question like this, so I clicked Yes to proceed. It said, "Unexpected end of data found. Cannot continue! Do you want to keep what has been found so far?" I clicked Yes. It gave me a blank screen. As you might have predicted, this did't fix Bad.jpg.
I tried again, this time following the instructions more closely, in case that made a difference. Specifically, in xvi32, I saved Good.jpg as Header.txt, searched it for FF DA (case sensitive), went to the byte immediately after DA, and then went into Edit > Delete from Cursor. Finally: Header.txt really did contain only the information up through FF DA. I saved it and opened Bad.jpg. Still in xvi32, and with the cursor located at the start of Bad.jpg, I went into Edit > Insert > Header.txt. This, I hoped, would prepend a good header to the image body of Bad.jpg and heal it. I saved Bad.jpg and tried opening it in IrfanView. Sadly, I got "Bogus marker length." Paint Shop Pro couldn't open it either.
I tried again with a different Bad.jpg. This was one of the files that I had identified (above) as having many instances of ÿØÿà, whereas the previous Bad.jpg (i.e., the one I had just been experimenting with) had none. I searched for the first instance of FF DA, used Ctrl-Shift-PgUp to mark everything up and through FF DA, pressed Del to delete it, and then inserted Header.txt at the start of the file. I saved it and tried opening it in IrfanView. Again, "Bogus marker length." I tried again, this time going to the second instance of FF DA. "Bogus marker length" once again.
I was out of time for this project. Perhaps some ideas would come to me later, or I would become aware of some new program or technique. As always, comments and suggestions were welcome. In the meantime, all I could do at this point was to archive these bad JPGs in a zip file and put them aside.


text:
One of the things we humans think sets us apart from (other) animals is that we can invent and use all sorts of nifty tools. While research has demonstrated that animals can use natural tools, and even artificial tools, there is still a dramatic difference in scale (in tool use) between humans and our closest competitor.
So, for the moment, lets assume that the essence of what we are is something very specific, like genes or a soul (call it the "self"), and everything else is a tool for advancing the "self's" agenda. In this thought-experiment, then, our body is just a tool for interacting with the world and our brain is just a tool for thinking about interacting with the world.
Our body, when thought of as a tool, can be described as having certain parameters. It is a certain size, uses a certain amount of energy, produces a certain amount of force, etc. The brain can also be thought of as using a certain amount of energy, providing a certain number of calculations at a certain speed, etc. So, if our "self" became aware of the possibility of gaining access to a broader range of capabilities than our brain and body naturally provide, why wouldn't it?
This process would appear to be a gradual improvement in the options our "self" has; specifically a better body and a better brain to control it. However, the brain and body can only be improved so much. For our "self" to keep getting more options it has to start incorporating things found outside the body. These things, like the wheel, a sharp stick, and fire, are just extensions of the body. Deer happened to be born with sharp sticks on their heads, we had to invent them, same capability.
Some of our newer inventions, like writting, GPS, and the internet are extensions of our brains. Rather than expanding mechanical capabilities they expand processing capabilities. We could spend a long time trying to puzzle through the problem of navigating to our destination, or we could build a circuit to do that thinking for us just like a GPS unit does. Pulley systems allow our body to do more work than before and personal computers allow our brain to do more thinking than before.
In this sense we started "merging" with machines a long time ago, when we started using spears. The process accelerated when we invented books, and is beginning to progress wildly faster than before due to little things like the Green Revolution and the Internet.
I don't know what we'll be able to do in the future, I just know that it will be more than we can do now.
EDIT (2009AUG1) Cognition Distributed: How cognitive technology extends our minds mentions in the introduction that: "Cognitive technology does, however, extend the scope and power of cognition, exactly as sensory and motor technology extends the scope and power of the bodily senses and movement...Both sensorimotor technology and cognitive technology extend our bodys' and brains' performance capabilities...as we increase our use and reliance on cognitive technologies, they effect and modify how we cognize, how we do things and what we do. Just as motor technology extended our physical ability and modified our physical life, cognitive technology extends our cognitive ability and modifies our mental life."
11 July 2009
Our "Self" Wants More (and More)
Posted by Matthew Maier at 21:12
Labels: animal, body, brain, cognition, distributed, evolution, human, id, improvement, innovation, kurzweil, machine, man, self, singularity, tools, transcendent
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text:
As Web logs proliferate — Technorati, which tracks 5 million blogs, estimates that 15,000 are added each day — the boundaries between public and private are being transformed. Unconstrained by journalistic conventions, bloggers are blurring the lines between public events and ordinary social interactions and changing the way we date, work, teach and live. And as blogs continue to proliferate, citizens will have to develop new understandings about what parts of our lives are on and off the record. —Jeffrey Rosen —Your Blog or Mine? (NY Times)
My boss, who is also a blogger, sent me this link. Thanks, John.


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The Olympics Get a Taste of Tanking
For some, the competitive Olympic ideal can be best analogized to a million diehard athletes streaking through a million cascading waterfalls: epic effort, epic beauty, epic competition, the triumph of the spirit, etc. It's wonderfully tailor-made for some unimagined Visa commercial, but it's an ideal that doesn't always play out in the actual Olympic Games.
Witness Wednesday's bizarre cheating scandal, in which eight members from the women's badminton competition were disqualified after allegedly throwing matches to achieve a favorable matchup in the next round. (In badminton, the round-robin format precedes an elimination tournament.) Two of those players were the sport's reigning champions, which means the medal results will likely change. Immediately after being disqualified, China's Yu Yang took to her microblog to defend her actions — and seemed to announce her retirement from the sport. "We were just injured, and only chose to take advantage of the rules to give up," she wrote. "You ruined our dream mercilessly. It's that simple. It's not that complicated, but it's unforgivable."


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Welcome to the Inn at World's Beginning. No, not World's End, that's next door... here we have only beginnings, one after another after another!
Monday, 15 December 2014
Myeri Marsh Demons- back in stock at Oakbound.co.uk
Latest batch of Marsh Demon and Fenfolk castings have arrived from the foundry- orders now being taken at Oakbound.co.uk and should still be time for them to arrive by Christmas. The rest of the Woods range should be on the site for purchasing with all your lovely Christmas money in late December!
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text:
She had started to get worried the moment her teacher announced that everybody was required to wear white frock for the function. She knew she doesn't have any and cannot afford to buy one. The function would be so much fun. She just hoped that by some sudden miracle she is able to discover one. She would have to ask her maa.
"Why is your mom so old?" Girls around would ask her. She knew the answer but would keep them at bay by saying something like
"She isn't that old, she just looks like she is"
She called her 'Maa ' even though she knew it wasn't that way. Her mother had died long back, she may have been 2 years old then. She somehow did not want to admit it to herself that the woman who loved her so much is not her mother. Her father is in Army and she didn't like him much. She would hide under the cot whenever he visited them which was once or sometimes twice a year. He was against her going to school but it was her maa, her mother's mother, who wanted her to study. There was barely any money coming in the house , just what her father would send which was just enough for her school fees and other basic needs.
After she went back home and helped her Grand mom prepare lunch and rummaging through every possible piece of cloth they had which also included the table cover, sofa cover she asked her Grand mom
"Maa do you have something in white that I could use as a frock?"
"Oh why don't you wear yours?"
"Which one?"
"The one that u bought last Diwali"
"That one is not white, it's yellow!"
"Oh my eyesight and I always thought it was white" chuckled her grand mom
"Why don't you get them checked?"
"What change would it make if I am able to see white as white? And somehow it makes me feel better to see things my way"
She wasn't in the mood to argue.
"I need a white frock for my school function" and then she saw her grand mom's face a few moments before feeling of helplessness and sadness escaped it.
She could no longer bear it so she ran out saying that she was going to play with her friends and that she hates functions and doesn't wish to go.
Even as the words came out of her mouth she knew how untrue they were, she really wanted to be there for the function, for the joy of it, for the song they will get to sing, for the clapping, for the free ladoos that they would be getting after the function. She decided to go even if she had to wear the yellow frock.
Even after making the decision of going for the function the next morning, she kept tossing and turning in her less than comfortable bed. What she was feeling was a mix of excitement and nervousness. Just then she felt a stir and she glanced at her maa who was sleeping by her side. She could not resist any longer her urge to put her doubts to rest and called out in a hush but urgent tone/
"maa? MAA?"
"hmmm…" came the sleepy reply.
"umm I was thinking…"
"It will be all good, you my dear will get lots of clapping. Haven't I told you that million times already? Now let me sleep."
"I love you" she said as her maa drifted back to sleep her jaws open and breathe heavy and noisy.
As she reached her school it seemed like it was flooded with girls, everyone of them wearing different types of white frocks. Some simple, some lacy, some over sized, some fancy. She could feel the stares creeping all over her, she felt like turning and making a dash for home but the mirth, the joy, happy giggles the celebration all together seized her from leaving. Nervously she approached her class teacher. Even before she could wish her a good morning, a slap landed on her cheek with a thud. Everything was a blur from then on. She just remembered a little discussion, sneering teachers as if she was an untouchable, girls giggling at her foolishness. She was made to stand at the far end of the ground – a punishment for her disobedience.
As it rained she sat at the bus stop letting tears roll down her burning cheek. She let the rain drench her. She wished that the rain would wash away the yellow of the frock and then may be hidden underneath it would be a spotless white frock.