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One of the neat features of having a WordPress blog is the ability to see what search engine terms people used to find you. I've enjoyed browsing them. Most of them are "pugging pally" or "puggingpally" or "pugging paladin," coming from people who I assume read here once and wanted to find it again. (That's very nice, thank you.) Others are a bit different though!
To the person who came here by searching "feral dps scarlet monastery," I'm very sorry. All I can tell you is that I was in Scarlet Monastery, there have been feral druids, and they have been DPSing.
Similarly, to whoever was erroneously sent here looking for "shaman addon," I really have no idea. Unless you wanted Vuhdo, which is technically named after a shaman.
Thirdly, and my favourite. My friend, who arrived here looking for "scarlet graveyard players just running off and doing their own thing." You've come to the right place. Players in the Scarlet Graveyard will go off and do their own thing, I'm not sure why. It's a fairly linear instance. It might be because some people like to barrel straight down the middle, rock down the stairs and finish the thing as quickly as possible. Others like to take a more leisurely, "Let's kill all these ghosts" approach, and never the twain shall meet. I've previously referred to it as "pug diffusion" and it certainly applies here. Think of it as the tendency of five random strangers to repel each other in different directions, and try not to let it bother you. The bad news I have for you is that it's not specific to Graveyard. Graveyard is only the beginning.
One of These Things Is Not Like The Other
I've done so much pugging the last few days. So very much. I've run Razorfen Downs three times, SM Armory twice, and SM Cathedral, also twice. The first RFD in the list was kind of funny for being a true Pally Power run. There were four of us…and a hunter. I'll admit here that sometimes I'm fairly quiet in a pug. I'll say hello, and if nobody feels like talking, Flash of Light bot will just run along behind for a while, throwing some Light around. Such was the first RFD. The RFD I ran after that one was remarkable because it contained the single nicest player I've met in my pugging adventures. I've decided there's nothing wrong with naming a good player, so – Arcanelight from Malfurion, you are a credit to your class. (Mage, naturally.)
When I asked him to please not frost nova the packs unless he needed to stop a runner because it makes them switch targets, he agreed and apologized very politely. He decursed that stupid curse that slows casting time without being asked. And as we were heading up the Spiral Ramp of Undead he said, "Keep up the good work guys, we're almost there!" He brought encouragement, consideration and teamwork. If more folks were like him, this wouldn't be much of a blog, I'm afraid.
I was really excited to have SM Cathedral appear. Finishing this one instance gives me the Scarlet Monastery achievement (for a lousy ten achievement points… It feels like it should award me with fifty.) I had an exceedingly good tank for my first run. She pulled the tricky trash packs inside the Cathedral like a pro, quite unlike the tank I had for the second run, who actually just sprinted straight in and aggroed about four packs at once. Needless to say, my death-o-meter ticks over one more time. That tank actually dropped the group right after. He may have been embarassed, but he hadn't said much anyway. I hope he wasn't too crushed. They're very tough pulls, especially with those big doors… Actually, can someone answer this for me – the doors. Do they close after a certain amount of time, or only when someone clicks them? Because they kept opening and closing, and I'm not sure if I have the right to be annoyed at someone for closing them all the time, or if they just do that.
A need for doorstops aside…I have to admit, I'm cheating a little bit. A guildie friend has a hunter who is almost the same level as Vid, and we paired up to run RFD and Cath today. So my pug was 1/5th less puggy. In the end it hardly mattered though, since the RFD group contained the world's most annoying rogue. He was enough pug for anyone. And he was doing less than half the DPS that my hunter and other mage were doing.
"Four more bars until level!" he announced as he joined. We all made polite "well isn't-that-nice" noises.
Five minutes later – "Three more bars until I level!"
The mage joked, "We should kick him so he has to go and quest to finish."
He kept announcing what he was doing, and the state of his experience bar, right up until we went to start the escort quest and I beseeched the group, "Please do not start the escort until everyone has it, so that no one gets shafted." You get three guesses what the rogue did next, and the first two do not count. Yes, I admit unabashedly, we did kick him. Fifteen minutes later the tank said, "Locked chest over here."
"We just kicked the rogue," observed my hunter friend.
"Oh," the tank said, and then after a moment, "It was worth it."
I'm inclined to agree.
Pay no attention to this woolly construct – of course it didn't clank, you're imagining things
There are a few major drawbacks to leveling exclusively with the LFD tool (apart from the obvious ones involving sanity, patience, etc.)
Gear – This would actually apply more to someone not completely twinked out with BoA epics, but I mention it here as a cautionary tale nonetheless. You may think that being in instances all the time will mean good gear, but it is not necessarily so. There will be other people, and they will want the same things, and if you're like me, you won't roll on anything lower than your armour class unless nobody else needs it, which means you'll roll on very little. I did manage to score a pair of plate underwear today with better stats than what I had, as well as a new cloak, and a shield. A shield "of the Gorilla." Yes, that means it has Strength and Intellect and I really don't care. It was better than the crummy level 20 shield I had. But I get very few quest rewards and hence, very little guaranteed gear with no competition. This may prove particularly bad when I hit Northrend – because if it isn't plate, I won't be allowed to roll on it. I hope all those spellpower plate drops I've seen sharded for months will keep me in mind. But yes, don't think your gear will be awesome unless you purchased it. And don't assume the Satchel of Mockery will help you either, unless you are playing the more mainstream spec for your class. My hunter friend looked like he'd received a few useful things from it, so maybe it isn't all bad.
Travel – At this point I'm only biding my time until I hit 40 so that I can go out and collect flight points with super speed. I may even wait until I have Crusader Aura to do this. Leveling the way I have has left me with nearly nothing in this department. I paid a mage to port me to Theramore so I could take a boat to Menethil and nab that flightpoint (I thought I was going to Southshore until I realized that the SM quest is a chain, and the chain begins in Desolace, and forget that.) In essence, you will be very hidebound unless you're doing some combination of questing/instances. This works out fine for me – I hang around the city, train when I level, check things on the AH, and work on my professions sporadically. I have missed out on a few dungeon specific quests though, simply because they required me to travel and I don't have the patience or means. Run to Ratchet? No, thanks.
Reputation – You'd think with all the monster killing I do for them, the Azerothian factions would be kissing my hooves! But they aren't. In fact, I think many of them have barely heard of me. So they charge me more money for my beverages. And I can't ride their mounts. Without questing, it's just not easy to build up reputation since old world instances don't award it.
Time – Even with my increased experience from BoA epics, this is taking much longer than it has to level other characters. I'm not sure what the /played time of a similar character leveled in a more 'conventional' way might be, but I am pretty sure it's significantly less.
That's not to say that LFD leveling is without its advantages, though!
Goods – I might not always get awesome gear drops, but my bank is bulging with cloth and other sorts of things. Positively stuffed! If I were a tailor I'd be laughing. I may actually use some of this cloth to alleviate the reputation issue from before. I have the same thing with enchanting mats; more shards, dust and essence than I actually need. It's not always the exact type that I need, but I'll be selling what I won't use before too long.
Cash! – I haven't been keeping an actual tally, but I make a goodly chunk of money just from loot and/or selling greens or mats that I accumulate. But just the money from the instances far outweighs any repair bills I might accrue (at least at this point).
Reputation – Right now, this is a disadvantage. As soon as I hit Outland and Northrend in turn, it will actually be a big advantage. I'll get rep from doing the instances associated with each faction; in the case of the Hellfire instances that rep will actually contribute to a sizeable discount when it comes to my flying training! Later on, in Northrend, it should be reasonably easy to up my rep with all of the relevant factions just by wearing a tabard. This matters quite a bit less than it once did, since now head and shoulder enchants can be sent to Vid by my main character benefactors. But if I didn't have that, it would still be a pretty great thing.
Convenience – Gone are the days of struggling along in a healing spec, boring mobs to death while questing, and suffering poor soloability simply because of wanting to play a role in instances. I'm leveling a character purely meant for healing, because I can, and yes I could have done it before using the LFG channel and existing tools, but this is so easy by comparison. I won't say painless. But easy. And I'm grateful that I'm able to do it this way!
I'm making a last pugging push just to get to 40 – I'm so close! At 40, I think I'll dual-spec…and I'm leaning heavily towards ret, but queue times will be obscene. I could try tanking, just in time to get groups hopelessly lost in Uldaman, Mauradon, etc. And then I'm going to set some time aside to work on my professions. My enchanting is lagging behind again. After some consideration, I made my second professions Engineering, and dropped Mining. I don't go out in the world questing any way, and I don't encounter ore. Engineering seems like one of those fun profs that none of my characters has had up until this point, and it'll also be dead useful for instancing later on, what with the Jeeves and etc. At least, I hope so. In the meantime I get to occasionally propel a sheep at a mob and watch it go up in flames, and who wouldn't like that?
So… What do you guys think?


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subset: commoncrawl


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Do you know what's a good way to know if people are shopping? By checking the parking lots. And according to satellite images from Remote Sensing Metrics, people have been shopping a lot more this year than years past.
Their data, which use satellite images of parking lots to determine parking lot capacity, shows that 35% of shopping mall parking spaces have been filled this year compared to the 31-32% of the previous two years. And this past Saturday, the last weekend before Black Friday, parking lots were 42.3% filled, compared with 36.5% in 2009 and 30.6% in 2008.
Which means it should all be leading up to the craziest Black Friday in years. Did anyone notice a difference? [Reuters via Fast Company]


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13 great first cars that aren't boring
First cars usually need to be affordable and practical, but they can also be fun to drive
First cars usually need to be affordable and practical, but they can also be fun to drive
Buying your first car can be an incredibly difficult decision. It feels like everyone has advice for you, and if you're an enthusiast, it probably feels like that advice is mostly about how you should buy the least expensive beige-mobile you can find.
It's true that you could very likely wreck your first car and that spending a lot of money on it is wasteful, but just because your first car should be somewhat practical, safe, and reliable doesn't mean it also has to be oppressively boring. If you're going to buy an affordable car that's still fun to drive, you might have to learn to do a little of your own wrenching to keep them running, but that's nothing your dad's tools and a few YouTube videos can't solve.
In that case, here are 13 great first cars for budding enthusiasts.
1. Volkswagen Golf GTI
Few cars offer a mix of approachable performance, practicality, and fun quite like the Volkswagen GTI. It's a daily driver that's as fun as many of the best sports cars on the market. The fifth-generation (Mk5) GTI is a particular sweet spot with its 200-hp turbocharged four-cylinder and choice of dual-clutch or manual transmissions. It's quick, but not too quick for an inexperienced driver.
2. Honda Civic Si
Everyone knows that the Honda Civic offers practical, efficient, reliable transportation for the masses, but many of them are genuinely fun to drive too. That's especially true for the Civic Si. Every Civic Si was only offered with a manual transmission, but there are few better cars for learning stick. Two-hundred horsepower from a naturally aspirated four-cylinder in this eighth-generation Si keeps things fun too.
3. Volvo V70 R
Volvo is known for making some of the safest cars in the world, but occasionally, it likes to make something that's fun to drive too. The old V70 R is a subtle sleeper, which offers a giant trunk, all-wheel drive and a ton of performance from its near-300-hp five-cylinder. The V70 R had a sedan counterpart, the S60 R, but we think the wagon is the way to go here.
4. Jeep Wrangler
One of the most practical ways to make sure your first car isn't oppressively boring is to buy one that you can take on off-road adventures. It might not be fast or offer any luxury features, but you can't deny how fun a Wrangler is to drive, and even an unmodified one will get you much further away from civilization than you might expect.
5. Ford Mustang V6
Starting out driving a brand new Ford Mustang GT is recipe for disaster for most drivers, and most of the older V6 versions were pretty dull. When Ford put new engines in the previous generation Mustang, though, the V6 ended up being surprisingly good. Its acceleration won't blow your socks off, but you can still have a little fun in what's both an affordable and a fuel efficient sports coupe.
6. Mazdaspeed Protege
For a while, Proteges weren't known for being the fastest cars on the street, but their good steering and above average handling made them surprisingly fun. The Mazdaspeed version made that even better, offering a sport suspension, bigger brakes, and more power. Don't expect to get in too much trouble, though. It only makes 170 horsepower. You'll still have fun, though.
7. Nissan Sentra SE-R
If you test drive a B15 Sentra SE-R, it'll actually make an interesting foil to the Mazdaspeed Protege. Its engine is plenty powerful, but what you'll mostly appreciate is its handling. The limited slip differential and well tuned chassis combine to give the Sentra SE-R much better handling than any $3,000 sedan should be able to offer.
8. Subaru Forester XT
For the driver who wants more off-road capability than a WRX can provide but who still likes the idea of a little power, the turbo version of Subaru's not-quite-an-SUV from the mid 2000s is the perfect compromise. You can get it with up to 235 horsepower, but it will still handle the toughest winter Vermont can throw at it.
9. Acura RSX
It would be easy to dismiss the RSX as nothing more than a tarted up Honda Civic coupe, but doing so would mean missing out on the enjoyment of driving one of the most talented front-wheel drive sports coupes in the last 15 years. Even though the power goes to the wrong wheels, it's still a precise handler that any new driver would be honored to own as his or her first car.
10. Mazda Miata
If a list of fun cars doesn't include the Mazda Miata, it better be called "10 Fun Cars That Aren't the Mazda Miata." The Miata is that much fun to drive. In fact, the Miata is so good, it's almost cliche to include it because it's such an obvious choice. Driving one will make you a better driver, but it may also ruin other cars for you.
11. Jeep Cherokee
Modern SUVs can try, but they'll never be quite as cool as the XJ. The styling is classic, the 4.0 liter six is a legend, and even 20 years later, they're still incredibly reliable. You'll get more creature comforts than you do in a comparable Wrangler, but you'll still be able to head far off the beaten track before you risk getting yourself in trouble.
12. Subaru Impreza 2.5RS
One of the best things about a late 1990s Impreza 2.5RS is that its design has aged so well. It's just a darn attractive car. Like most of the cars on this list, it isn't fast by today's standards, but it still shines in the handling department. As you're learning to drive, having all-wheel drive will also probably end up being a blessing several times.
13. BMW 530i
BMW absolutely knocked it out of the park with the E39 5 Series, and its popularity when new means there's now an abundance of them on the used market for not a lot of money. You'll also be able to get modern safety features you wouldn't expect on a car from the late 1990s, like stability control and anti-lock brakes. For a first car, it's one of the best all around packages you'll be able to find.


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Gulf Coast Winter Escape
Gulf Coast Winter Escape
For Complete Brochure & Tour Pricing
Kansas City, Joplin, & Tulsa Departures
Tour Dates: February 24 - March 2, 2020
Feb 24th, 2020 - Mar 2nd, 2020
Departure Cities
Dallas/Fort Worth Joplin Kansas City Oklahoma City Tulsa
Tour Highlights
- Three nights beach front hotel on South Padre Island
- LBJ Library & Museum in Austin, Texas
- USS Lexington in Corpus Christi
- Port Isabel Lighthouse & Keepers Cottage
- Sea Turtle Inc.
- Dolphin Watch Cruise
- Birding & Nature Center
- San Antonio's River Walk
- Charter Bus
- Motorcoach
Charter Bus Features
Features include
Our charter buses come equipped with the following standard features:
- Oversized windows
- Optimum viewing
- Comfortable reclining seats
- Foot rests on seats
- Adjustable footrests
- Clean onboard restroom
- Public address systems
- TV monitors & DVD player
- 110V outlets for charging
- Climate controlled
- Individual reading lights
- Overhead storage compartments
- Onboard internet
Travel Protection Plan
To travel with Kincaid, we require all guests to opt in, or out, of the travel protection.
View your options below to decide what's right for you.
Lite: Domestic Travel
This peace of mind protection plan is a less expensive route.View Details
Deluxe: International
Read more about our deluxe travel protection plans.View Details
Waiver Form
To opt out of receiving travel insurance, our guests must submit a waiver.
View Cancellation Policy here.
Resource Center
Prepare yourself prior to your trip. Download our forms to learn more about our numerous activities and reserve a spot today!
Activity Level Explanation
We aim to accurately represent tour pacing, as well as the activity and effort necessary to partake in a given tour.Activity Level Explanation
Share this vacation with your friends and family!
- Craig Schurig
Interested in something a little different?
Our bus tours depart from six cities and travel to hundreds of locations throughout the United States to find the perfect fit for you.


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Lightning's Steven Stamkos breaks leg in loss to Bruins
BOSTON -- Clearly, Tampa Bay star Steven Stamkos' injury was on everyone's minds. The Boston Bruins were able to get back to playing hockey a lot quicker after it happened.
Patrice Bergeron and Daniel Paille scored 20 seconds apart a few minutes after Stamkos was taken off the ice on a stretcher with a broken right leg, and the Bruins beat the Lightning 3-0 on Monday afternoon.
Stamkos was hurt with 7:11 to play in the second period. He entered the day tied with Pittsburgh's Sidney Crosby as the NHL's leading scorer. Stamkos got tied up with Boston defenseman Dougie Hamilton and crashed into the right post.
His left skate appeared to hit the post first before his right leg crashed into it around the shin area. He tried to get up twice before going down to the ice in pain, grabbing his leg just above the ankle.
When he left the ice on a stretcher, players on both teams tapped their sticks on ice as the fans applauded in tribute.
The Lightning confirmed on the team's Twitter account that Stamkos suffered a broken right tibia. No further information was available.
"A player like that, I don't know how serious it is, but it looks pretty serious to me," Boston coach Claude Julien said. "You don't want to see that."
Tuukka Rask stopped 28 shots for his 18th career shutout and second this season. Jarome Iginla added an empty-net goal with 59 seconds left.
Anders Lindback, playing just his fifth game of the season, made 23 saves for Tampa Bay, which had a four-game winning streak snapped.
"Injuries happen. He's gone a long time in his career without being seriously hurt," Tampa Bay coach Jon Cooper said. "There's no sugarcoating it. He's a huge part of our team. You can make an argument here that if you were going to hand out the MVP in our league now, you can give it to him. Is that a hole in our team? Yes, it is."
The Bruins jumped ahead with just under three minutes left in the period when Bergeron scored off the rebound of Torey Krug's shot that caromed off the skate of Loui Eriksson.
They made it 2-0 when Paille broke in down the right wing, shifted to his backhand and slipped a shot past Lindback inside the right post. During the play, Tampa Bay defenseman Sami Salo also appeared to hurt his right leg and had trouble making it to the bench. He was briefly assisted by one of the referees on the ice and didn't return in the third period.
"Well, I mean that is a big blow for them. Nobody wants to see that happen to anybody," Iginla said. "He was obviously in a lot of pain and I didn't hear for sure what happened to him, but I imagine it's got to be, for him not to get up, he's a tough player and plays hard and stuff. So he must have been in some serious pain."
Tampa Bay veteran Martin St. Louis didn't know how bad the injury was, but felt his team still played tough.
"I thought we played hard. We just couldn't get the puck in the net," he said. "We really can't think about (Stamkos' injury) now. We've got a game to play (Tuesday). We're going to be playing a lot of hockey. I don't know how bad it is. It's tough to comment.
"We lost him tonight for a period and a half. I think it's a big part of our team. I thought we battled."
It was Tampa Bay's second loss in nine games. The Lightning came into the day leading the NHL's Atlantic Division, but the loss of Stamkos will be a major blow.
"Now we've got to pick ourselves up and see what we're made of," Cooper said. "It's a tough one for the game. You want to see guys that have 'It' and Steven Stamkos has 'It.' Now we'll see what we're made of. You talk about a test, this is a test."
Boston won its third straight.
NOTES: Stamkos' streak of scoring a goal was stopped at six games. ... Boston won its seventh straight against Tampa Bay. ... The Bruins' Krug, Dennis Seidenberg, David Krejci, Johnny Boychuk and Matt Bartkowski each bought $2,500 of tickets that were given to military members and their families, who had a chance to meet the players after the game. ... It was the 80th meeting between the franchises. Boston has won 51. ... The Bruins wore military-style camouflage jerseys during warm-ups. ... It was the Lightning's second of a three-game road trip. They play at Montreal on Tuesday night. ... Boston is off until hosting Columbus on Thursday. ... The game was the opener of an NHL-NBA doubleheader. The Celtics were slated to face Orlando at night.


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MSNBC's Bashir Mocks 'Chicken Hawk' Herman Cain, Despite Dept. Of Navy Service
MSNBC's Martin Bashir on Wednesday wondered if Herman Cain, who worked for the Department of the Navy during Vietnam, is a "chicken hawk" because he criticized the President's pull out of Iraq.
Talking to professor Michael Eric Dyson, Bashir complained, "And on the issue of Iran, does Cain remind you at all of Dick Cheney and that long roster of chicken hawks who've rabidly pushed for U.S. military action there?"
A chicken hawk is a term used for someone who aggressively supports current wars, but cowardly avoided military service in the past. Martin Bashir grew up in South London and did not serve in the military (according to several internet biographies).
This isn't the first time MSNBC has made such a charge. On October 6, Last Word anchor Lawrence O'Donnell accused Cain of being a draft dodger.
O'Donnell, smeared, "Can you explain how you avoided military service during the Vietnam War and during the draft and why you should be Commander-in-Chief if you did successfully avoid military service during the war that came during what would have been your war years, how you, after avoiding the Vietnam War, why should you be Commander-in-Chief?"
Cain responded:
HERMAN CAIN: ...I worked for the Department of the Navy. Now, your choice of words to say, 'How did I avoid the Vietnam War?' I wasn't trying to avoid the Vietnam War. Here's what happened, Lawrence. I was working in a critical area called exterior ballistics. I worked on something called the rocket-assisted projectile for the Department of the Navy. It was my local board in Atlanta, Georgia, that told me, we would rather for you to continue to do that analytical work to help the Navy rather than us drafting you. Secondly, when they had the lottery, I made myself available. The year that they had the lottery for the draft they did not draft me because they didn't get to my number.
O'Donnell, it should be pointed out, avoided the draft by getting a college deferment.
A transcript of the October 26 exchange, which aired at 3:03pm EDT, follows:
MARTIN BASHIR: And on the issue of Iran, does Cain remind you at all of Dick Cheney and that long roster of chicken hawks who've rabidly pushed for U.S. military action there? And do you know if Cain has suggested a clear way of going into Iran and then of course, getting out?
MICHAEL ERIC DYSON: I mean, this is pretty ludicrous. I think to suggest that, yes, to really pillory Hillary for saying that look, should we leave, we don't want Iran rushing over to its neighbor to create some catastrophe there. Aren't we being good citizens? Aren't we not only withdrawing but withdrawing with a conscience? And unfortunately Cain's foreign policy doesn't dictate a kind of negotiation that would have us acknowledge the sovereignty of someone else and to acknowledge that their government is not simply at the behest of the American government. So again, unfortunately here, this is muddled thinking and even more muddled foreign policy its wake.
BASHIR: You mentioned his mockery of the Secretary of State. It seems almost incredible, given that Hillary Clinton was in Libya when the air was full of lead and shells. As a woman, she's ventured into deeply conservative, Islamic nations repeatedly to try to improve relationships. I mean, this struck me as not just discourteous just to the secretary of state. Doesn't it also indicate Mr. Cain's utter ignorance of the sensitivities involved in trying to broker a warm relationship with foreign countries?
DYSON: That's a great point. We can add a gender insensitivity on top of that. So, that trying to attack her, ignores the incredible amount of diplomacy she is actually engaged in. She didn't do this before a dog fight or a race in Texas. She did this in the midst of the teeth of the battle. She is on the front lines and the cutting edges where real consequences are there. And I think that her ability to go into these deeply and profoundly foreign territories to articulate a vision that is at least ostensibly committed to trying to negotiate peace and to broker acceptance of a more democratized form of government says a lot for who she is. And yes, it is about Cain's ignorance and about his disavowal of the necessity of talking to people, as opposed to being the big bully pulpit of the American thump-our-chests approach to foreign diplomacy as opposed to trying to work it out before we drop a bomb or stick a bayonet in someone's face.
— Scott Whitlock is the senior news analyst for the Media Research Center. Click here to follow him on Twitter.


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According to a study in mBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, bacteria resistant to the antibiotic colistin are also commonly resistant to antimicrobial substances made by the human body. Cross-resistance to colistin and host antimicrobials LL-37 and lysozyme, which help defend the body against bacterial attack, could mean that patients with life-threatening multi-drug resistant infections are also saddled with a crippled immune response. Colistin is a last-line drug for treating several kinds of drug-resistant infections, but colistin resistance and the drug's newfound impacts on bacterial resistance to immune attack underscore the need for newer, better antibiotics.
Corresponding author David Weiss of Emory University says the results show that colistin therapy can fail patients in two ways. "The way that the bacteria become resistant [to colistin] allows them to also become resistant to the antimicrobials made by our immune system. That is definitely not what doctors want to do when they're treating patients with this last line antibiotic," says Weiss.
Although it was developed fifty years ago, colistin remains in use today not so much because it's particularly safe or effective, but because the choices for treating multi-drug resistant Acinetobacter baumannii and other resistant infections are few and dwindling. Colistin is used when all or almost all other drugs have failed, often representing a patient's last hope for survival.
Looking at A. baumannii isolates from patients around the country, they noted that all the colistin-resistant strains harbored mutations in pmrB, a regulatory gene that leads to the modification of polysaccharides on the outside of the cell in response to antibiotic exposure. Tests showed a tight correlation between the ability of individual isolates to resist high concentrations of colistin and the ability to resist attacks by LL-37 or lysozyme.
This was very convincing, write the authors, that mutations in the pmrB gene were responsible for cross-resistance to LL-37 and lysozyme, but to get closer to a causative link between treatment and cross-resistance, they studied two pairs of A. baumannii isolates taken from two different patients before and after they were treated for three or six weeks with colistin. The results helped confirm the cross-resistance link: neither strain taken before treatment was resistant to colistin, LL-37, or lysozyme, but the strains taken after treatment showed significant resistance to colistin and lysozyme. (One post-colistin isolate was no more or less resistant to LL-37 than its paired pre-colistin isolate.) Like the resistant strains tested earlier, both post-colistin isolates harbored crucial mutations in the pmrB gene that apparently bestow the ability to resist treatment.
The authors point out that the apparent link between resistance to colistin and cross-resistance to antimicrobial agents of the immune system could well extend to other pathogens that are treated with colistin, including Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Klebsiella pneumoniae. Weiss says he plans to follow up with studies to determine whether this bears out.
For Weiss, the problems with colistin are symptomatic of a much larger trio of problems: increasing levels of drug resistance, cuts in federal funding for antibiotic research, and lack of incentives for pharmaceutical companies to invest in antibiotic R&D. "We don't have enough antibiotics, and it's really important for the research community and the public to support increases in funding for research to develop new antibiotics," says Weiss.
"We got complacent for a while and the bugs are becoming resistant. This is something we can reverse - or make a lot better - if we have the resources."
Source: Eurekalert


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It's finally getting seriously warm, and all we want is bright spring-y nails! When you don't have a TON of time, this dotted mani is adorable and super easy to do, and it's a great way to add some color to your tips without rocking neon nails. Check out the step-by-step tutorial for recreating the cool confetti mani from the nail artists at ibd Nail Lacquer.
1. Apply two coats of grey nail polish (ibd Nail Lacquer in Dockside Diva was used here).
2. Choose four bright colors for the dots. For this mani, they used ibd Nail Lacquer in Chic to Chic for the pink, ibd Nail Lacquer in Gala-vant for the orange, ibd Nail Lacquer in Full Blu-um for the blue, and ibd Nail Lacquer in Polo Can U Go for the green.
More From Seventeen
3. Using a dotting tool (or a toothpick!), create dots along the right side of your nail to the bottom center. Repeat with the other three shades.
4. Seal with a topcoat and you're done!
What are you rocking on your tips? Tweet your #ManicureMonday pictures to @seventeenmag and we'll retweet our faves!
Get A Cool, Graphic Black-and-White Mani
Nail Art How-To: Pretty Floral Mani
The Coolest Nail Looks and Designs!


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Back home too soon
My trip ended much too quickly. Monday morning I was back in Connecticut, and back at work. But as quick as the trip was, it was worth every penny. Two days away was just enough to hold me off for a while.
My last day there was more casual than the day before. We went to downtown Scottsdale for lunch then took a drive down RT 87 to Saguaro Lake. By night I was back at the airport ready for my flight home.
A few more pics, all from Saturday:


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U.S. News & World Report today (Jan. 24) kicked out Tulane University's Freeman School of Business from its ranking of the top 100 business schools in the U.S. The magazine took the severe action after the school admitted that it had misreported key data to U.S. News to rise in its annual ranking.
After an investigation by the prominent law firm of Jones Day, the school admitted that it inflated average GMAT scores reported to U.S. News by an average 35 points for consecutive five years from 2007 through 2011. Freeman also conceded that it had falsely increased the number of completed applications it received by an average of 116 applications over the same time period.
In the latest year, however, U.S. News revealed that the extent of the fraud was even somewhat greater than reported by Freeman. In an update to the school's ranking, U.S. News' Robert Morse said that the corrected average GMAT score for the fall 2011 entering class is now 631 versus the 670 originally reported by Freeman—a difference of 39 points.
A revision to the number of MBA applications received by the school showed an even greater difference than the originally reported number. The corrected figures showed that Freeman accepted 93% of its applicants for the fall 2011 entering class instead of 57%–a difference of 36 percentage points.
"The incorrect data were used by U.S. News to compute the Freeman School's ranking in our 2013 Best Business Schools, published last March, thereby making its numerical rank higher than it otherwise would have been if the correct values has been used," wrote Morse.
"Because of the discrepancy in the numerical rankings, U.S. News has changed the ranking for Tulane University's Freeman School of Business from being a ranked school to an 'unranked' school in the Best Business Schools section. Unranked means that U.S. News did not calculate a numerical ranking for this school."
The magazine said Freeman will remained unranked until this spring's publication of its new ranking and until the school confirms the accuracy of its next data submission. U.S. News did not reveal where Freeman would have ranked using the corrected figures provided by the school, and it did not change the rank of any other school on its list.
From 2010 to 2012, Tulane's Freeman School increased its ranking by 10 full places to 43rd last year from 53rd in 2010 based on the incorrect data. Average GMAT scores loom large in the U.S. News' methodology for calculating its MBA rankings, with a total weight of 16.25%. A school's acceptance rate, which would be lower based on an inflated number of total applications, receives less weight, only 1.25%.
The school's director of admissions for the five-year period for which false data was reported had been Bill Sandefer, who left the school in 2012 to become the senior director of graduate admissions at UC-Davis' Graduate School of Management. UC Davis has since placed Sandefer on a "paid investigatory leave" while it investigates the matter.
DON'T MISS: UC DAVIS PUTS ADCOM CHIEF ON LEAVE or WHO COOKED THE BOOKS AT TULANE?
Comments or questions about this article? Email us.


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My sister Shannon and Chloe on the ride home:
Playing with a Chew Toy:
She is so purdy:
All tuckered out:
Only 8 more days until I get to see her. Mama and my sister Shannon have fell in love already! I fly home to Mama's house on the 7th! I can't hardly wait to hold her!
I can see your family going to end up with more than one cavalier in the family
She grown so much over these few weeks.
Bet your kids can't wait
Kirsty, I'd say you're soooo excited at this stage! She has gotten so big! Not long left now until you can hold her!


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The bureaucrats at the International Labor Organization (which shouldn't even exist) are correct to note that high levels of unemployment threaten social unrest. But like most left-wing international bureaucracies, they think the solution is more government – including so-called stimulus and government intervention in labor markets.
The extended loss of employment and growing perceptions of unfairness risked increasing social tension, the ILO said. In 35 countries for which data exists, nearly 40 per cent of jobseekers have been without work for more than one year, running risks of demoralisation and mental health problems, and young people were disproportionately hit by unemployment. It noted that social unrest related to the crisis has been reported in at least 25 countries, including some recovering emerging economies. …Torres warned governments against withdrawing fiscal stimulus measures while recovery was still weak. The ILO recommended…A combination of active labour market policies including work-sharing that target vulnerable groups such as young people, and training [and] A closer link between wages and productivity gains in surplus countries to boost demand and job creation;


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Today's News: Our Take - Dancing's Aly Raisman: I Really Want to Make the Final
Forget the Fierce Five. Aly Raisman has made the final five of Dancing with the Stars and is one step closer to the Mirrorball trophy. "It feels awesome. I can't believe how fast the competition has been," she tells TVGuide.com. "Week 1 feels like it was forever ago, but at the same time, the finals are only a week away." The Olympic champ will have two chances to make her case for the finals on Monday with a rumba and a Twitter-voted Afro-jazz. Find out what she and Mark Ballas have planned, why they wanted Afro-jazz and what she thinks of Len Goodman's outburst at Kellie Pickler and Derek Hough last week.
Get the scoop on 39 must-watch finales
You guys were the only brave souls who wanted Afro-jazz. Why did you want it?
Aly Raisman: I think that's kind of why we did want it. [Laughs] No one else wanted it, but we're not scared of it! Mark and I love a challenge. It's never been done on the show. I think it's just really cool. I always like to try different things and try things out of the box, and Mark's so creative, so I trust him.
Has he ever done it before?
Raisman: No, he's never done it before. He's been watching videos on YouTube and trying to figure out some of the dance moves. It's just really high-energy and it's going to take a lot of cardio.
Has he brought in any outside help?
Raisman: No, he's doing it by himself, so that's pretty amazing.
Do you think that's an advantage - it has never been done on the show and no one knows what it looks like?
Raisman: No, I don't think so. You still have to get into character and show you know what you're doing and be exactly in sync. I think as soon as we start, everyone will get an idea of what it is. It's kind of like a tribal dance. It's not a smiley dance. And if the judges aren't familiar with it either, I'm sure they'll do their research.
Do you guys have a story?
Raisman: Not for the Afro-jazz. For the rumba, the story is about how a guy and a girl are in love and the guy screws up. The girl still loves him, but she knows she can't take him back. I hope it's going to be really beautiful and I hope I nail it!
Read Derek Hough's Dancing blogs
You have to pretend you're in love Mark again.
Raisman: I know! It's so hard! [Laughs] I have to be an actress this week. I really have to play up the character. It's also hard because I've never been in that situation before so I really have to imagine it. It's very different for me. The rumba is also about grace and beauty and I'm used to being powerful, so that's more of a challenge. Your feet have to be very, very turned out. Every step you take is slow, so you have to make sure you're correct on every single step. And the Afro-jazz has bigger movements, so they could not be any more completely different.
What do you think you have to do or work on to get into the final?
Raisman: I think just really getting to character of both dances. I really want to make the final. The Afro-jazz has to be full of energy, so I really have to wow people. The rumba - I want people to feel something and not just think it's another rumba. I hope they understand the story that I love him, but I can't be with him. If they don't feel something, then I did it wrong! [Laughs]
Carrie Ann [Inaba] would call you out on it.
Raisman: Yeah, hopefully she'll be pleased this week. She was happy last week with our emotional connection.
What did you think of Len losing it on Kellie and Derek last week?
Raisman: I'm not really sure what to make of that. I thought Kellie was absolutely amazing. I love what Derek and Tristan [MacManus] put together, so I was really surprised he did it. I don't really know what happened. We were next, so we were watching it on a TV in the back and we were in shock over it. I felt bad for Kellie because she just finished her dance and she's just standing there while he's going after them. I felt awful.
I thought he was doing another fake-out.
Rasiman: Yeah! That's what my mom said. But I was actually watching him when Carrie Ann went and Bruno went, and you could see that he was just getting ready to go after them. I was happy for Kellie that she got two 10s - focus on the positive. I thought her dances were absolutely incredible. Her waltz was her best performance. I was up close, so I could really see the emotion and she was really feeling it. She thought of her grandma the whole time, and you could definitely see that. It was really beautiful. And both of hers were different, and you could see the skill involved.
Dancing's Aly Raisman: Hopefully my butt will be an advantage his week
You seemed really bummed that Sean [Lowe] left.
Raisman: I'm really sad Sean's gone. He'll still be in L.A., so I'll see him. I've gotten to know Sean really well and he's so funny. He and Peta [Murgatroyd] are my favorite people. They always make me laugh. They're always in a good mood, and you always want to be around them. And it's funny because in the beginning, I never expected to get close with Sean, but he's such a nice guy and so down-to-earth. We always hung out on set. He's like an older brother.
If you make the final, will you throw in a Murgalo in your freestyle in tribute to them?
Raisman: [Laughs] Maybe! I think I did it the second week, so it's been a while.
Dancing with the Stars airs Mondays at 8/7c on ABC.
View original Dancing's Aly Raisman: I Really Want to Make the Final at TVGuide.com
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CNOR – Monroeville, PA
November 5, 2022 @ 8:30 am - November 6, 2022 @ 5:00 pm EDT$270.00
This course will be presented by: Wendy Zander MSN/ED, RN, CNOR
To both register and pay for the class change the ticket quantity below to 1 and click to add to your cart. You will then have the option to pay by PayPal or a credit/debit card.
We do not store any credit card information at all and all transactions are sent through an encrypted connection.
Please download and print the brochure by clicking the link below as it contains information regarding the location of the classroom and options to register by mail.
We are offering an early registration discount for this course until the End of Day on October 5th, Registration will remain open until the End of Day (EST) on October 29th at the normal rate.
I look forward to having you in class!


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The American Association of Endocrinologists (AACE) and the American Diabetes Association believe that the study by Singh et al, Glucagon-like Peptide 1-Based Therapies and Risk of Hospitalization for Acute Pancreatitis in Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus, published online February 25th in JAMA Internal Medicine does not provide the basis for changing treatment in people with diabetes. Fortunately, there will be new data available relatively soon which will allow physicians to definitively assess risks and benefits of this class of medicines.
The analysis is a retrospective study using data from an administrative database. This type of analysis is not considered as robust as a prospective randomized controlled clinical trial, the gold standard for evaluating treatments. There are currently nine ongoing, prospective, controlled trials of GLP-1 based therapy with over 65,000 subjects, which should provide answers to these important safety questions.
While there are risks and benefits associated with any therapy, the retrospective analysis indicates GLP-1 based therapies are associated with a relatively small excess risk of hospitalization for acute pancreatitis, with only two additional cases per 100 patients over a three-year period. This same population of adults, between the ages of 18-64 with type 2 diabetes, had a greater risk of hospitalization for acute pancreatitis if they used tobacco, consumed alcohol or were obese.
As with any therapy, we encourage patients to speak with their doctors to assess which treatments are best for them and to not stop therapy on their own without consulting their doctors.


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Wind energy: A boon for Boone County
Boone County is blessed with some of our state's best resources. The rich soil yields the crops that feed our families and neighbors while bolstering Illinois' powerful agricultural economy. Now Boone County has a chance to harvest another critical resource in increasing demand - its enormous wind energy potential.
Wind is a clean, safe energy option that is already playing an important role in strengthening Illinois' public health and economic vitality. Since 2007, clean energy has saved Illinois consumers $177 million in wholesale power prices and created almost 20,000 Illinois jobs, according to studies by the Illinois Power Agency and Illinois State University. At the same time, renewable energy has helped Illinois citizens enjoy cleaner air and water.
In 2011 alone, renewable energy eliminated an estimated 5 million tons of air pollution. Wind offers us a clean and safe alternative to coal, gas and nuclear power. Reliance on dirty and dangerous fossil fuels degrades Illinois' future, but investing in clean energy creates opportunity and advantage.
The pollution eliminated by moving to renewable energy greatly benefits not only our economy, but also our public health and wildlife. Wildlife protections and siting requirements by state and federal government agencies help wind farms be developed so that Illinoisans do not have to choose between protecting wildlife and building a clean energy economy.
The boom in wind energy in Illinois is being led by our rural counties. Just ask residents in Henry County, where local wind energy development means that schools are expanding and modernizing, clean energy jobs are growing and local businesses are benefitting from the increased workforce and tourism. This September, Henry County received its first $1.1 million property tax check from the Bishop Hill wind farm.
Illinois counties have opened the door to clean energy and huge economic potential through safe, common-sense zoning requirements for wind farms. Boone County now has similar opportunities.
The Rockford Register Star recently reported that a new wind farm could bring in between $1 million and $2 million in tax revenues to Boone County each year. However, Boone won't see these benefits if it approves overly restrictive regulations that are intended to be roadblocks to clean energy investment. Current proposals before the Boone County Board are far more restrictive than regulations in Wisconsin and most other Illinois counties, and would lock out wind energy for years to come.
Fortunately, a strong group of leaders on the board sees through these attempts to block renewable energy and sees all the benefits that clean energy offers future generations.
In the past few months, Sierra Club has joined Boone County residents and more than a dozen local businesses that see wind power as an important local economic development opportunity and a potential leap forward for Illinois' clean energy economy. We've heard from local residents who want jobs and clean air and who want Boone County to be a leader in the transition to a healthier future. We have gathered hundreds of petition signatures from local residents, small businesses and faith leaders, and voiced support for clean energy to county board representatives.
Soon Boone County faces a major choice. Some would erect barricades to block new businesses, but we are heartened by all the residents we've met who are proud that Boone County can be a spark toward a clean energy economy. We applaud county leaders who know that welcoming renewable energy is the right choice for today and tomorrow.
If you agree, we invite you to join us and your neighbors in the fight for a stronger economy, a cleaner environment and a brighter future for Boone County and all of Illinois.
Jack Darin is Sierra Club Illinois Chapter director


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Every Wednesday Rochelle Wisoff-Fields posts a picture prompt to challenge writers to create a 100-word story or poem or anything that works for you. Then post your work on your blog. additionally, on friday, you go back to her site and post a link to your blog entry in the comments on her Friday Fictioneers post.
I'm going to try to keep up with this, as should you. Give it a shot. I prefer to stick to 100 words, but she doesn't mind either way. Not everyone has the time to sit and write, revise, edit, revise, edit, etc. until getting it down to 100 and telling everything you want to tell.
The Glasses
"Sunglasses," old woman wheezed, "$10. Two for $15."
"What about those?" Younger woman raising eyebrow.
"That you're wearing."
"No for sale," old woman snapped.
"They're mine." A glow behind the dark glasses.
"Give you $50."
"I closed."
The younger one noticed the glow, pulsing.
"Go away." Old woman locked cashbox. Wrinkled hand motioned a frail boy, disassembled the tent, table swiftly.
"$200," she offered. The partially-hidden glow increased. Boy paused.
"Finish!" she growled. Boy continued nervously.
Husband approached, confused. "$200? You nuts?"
"I'm getting those glasses."
She headed for dark parking lot. Waited near battered truck.
100 words


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The Quilted Forest
Travel Size
Tucked away in the community of Forest City, Iowa, where Winnebago RVs are built, The Quilted Forest quilt shop maintains a good inventory of projects that easily can be done while traveling.
Choices Galore
A wide selection of goods at The Quilted Forest keeps customers coming back.
Meet the Staff
Front row, from left: Jeff Robson, Dan Robson (co-owner), Shelley Robson (co-owner), and Jana Robson; back row: Stephanie Formanek, Penny Barnes, Sue Anne Hadacek, Brandi Evers, Lesley Turner, Colette Sowder, Betty Buss, Kay Murphy, and Jordan Kenison; not pictured: Alex Robson and Ann Aalgaard.
Color Explosion
Owner Shelley Robson says the quilt shop's customers enjoy coming to a store that's bright and cheerful, so she showcases samples that explode with color.
Projects for Everyone
The Quilted Forest prides itself on finding projects for sewers of all skill levels.
Spectrum of Samples
The color wall has 40 feet of ideas on display from floor to ceiling, accompanied by a parade of quilted samples.
Fat Quarter Fun
Dan and Shelley Robson create unique displays, such as a popcorn machine featuring fat quarters.
Wave Review
Shelley Robson, co-owner of The Quilted Forest, designed Wave Review for Quilt Sampler® Fall/Winter 2012 magazine.
Machine-Quilting Details
Penny Barnes, an employee at The Quilted Forest, machine-quilted a pattern of scrolls and scallops across the Wave Review quilt top.
Get the Magazine!
Contact The Quilted Forest to purchase a copy of the Fall/Winter 2012 issue of Quilt Sampler magazine, pick up the magazine at your local quilt shop or newsstand, or get the digital issue online.
Peek inside Olive Juice Quilts, another quilt shop featured in Quilt Sampler Fall/Winter 2012.


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Village Profile
Mayfield Village is located in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. Mayfield Village was originally part of the Mayfield Township. Mayfield Village was founded in 1819 and was incorporated in 1920.
Mayfield Village has a total area of 4.2 square miles, all of it land, which includes 655 acres of the Metroparks North Chagrin Reservation. Mayfield Village borders Highland Heights on the west, Mayfield Heights on the south, Gates Mills on the East, and Willoughby Hills to the north.
Mayfield Village is a part of the Mayfield City School District along with Gates Mills, Highland Heights, and Mayfield Heights. Mayfield Village is home to Mayfield High School, and is also the location of Center Elementary School.


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To my knowledge, no woman has ever given an opening or closing prayer in a general session of General Conference. It is time to reconsider this practice of not calling women to share in the giving of these prayers.
The church has been engaged in a sustained effort to identify and end inequalities between men and women that are without doctrinal justification, such as women not being allowed to give opening prayers in Sacrament Meetings and women's voices not being adequately included in Ward Councils. In particular, the new Handbook and accompanying Worldwide Leadership Training Broadcast explicitly emphasize this theme. In doing so, the church is showing its awareness that seemingly little things, like restrictions on who gives the opening/closing prayers in Sacrament Meeting, can send a big message that "you aren't important," or, when working as they should (as under the new handbook), a message that "we really do value everyone's voices." These messages radiate from the little things to all aspects of how we treat one another.
As just two examples of the church's recent efforts and teachings in this area, I offer the following:
Handbook 2, Section 18.5 Prayers in Church Meetings:
Men and women may offer both opening and closing prayers in Church meetings.
Elder Cook, "LDS Women Are Incredible!" April 2011 General Conference (emphasis added):
We noted that from our earliest history both men and women pray, perform the music, give the sermons, and sing in the choir, even in sacrament meeting, our most sacred meeting.
Perhaps the prayer restriction in General Conference has simply escaped notice. Whatever the reason, I think that the recent Handbook changes make this the time to consider including women in the offering of invocations and benedictions in a general session of General Conference.
Update: Because this piece has drawn some attention from elsewhere [1][2], I would like to note my contact information for questions regarding the post: Cynthia Lee firstname.lastname@example.com


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Recently I suggested that starting a project with a content audit was not necessarily the best approach.
There's been a bit of discussion around that since then, most notably over at Donna Maurer's blog, and also as a Question of the Week at the IA Institute.
The overview of responses from the IA Institute probably give the best idea of current concensus:
The responses to this question gave a nice blend of ideas, mainly that the initial runthrough of the content at the start of a project can be thorough, but likely should not be the final, detailed audit.
Also, there is a desire to clarify the terms at work here. One person's "content survey†is another's "content inventory.†Or, one person's "content inventory†is another's "content audit.â€
The responses to this question suggest the following continuum for the level of detail:
(Least detail) Content survey > content inventory > content audit (More detail)
I have to say – I think that there are plenty of projects where a content audit/inventory *is* probably a good place (or sometimes the ONLY place to start a project). The reason for my post was to make the point that this should become a de facto 'standard' approach to all IA projects.
As it happens (and possibly via karmatic consequences from posting what I did) I've had to do two content inventories since I wrote that post. In one project I did it because the client specifically requested one at the outset of the project, and in the second case it was because the content was so extensive and so poorly structured that there was no way to get a good idea of what content was involved by taking a top level survey.
I hope to not see an excel spreadsheet for at least a few weeks….
Image credit: WorkIsPlayIsWork @ Flickr
Technorati Tags: content+inventory, content+audit, information+architecture


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Last week, the people of the United States dodged a bullet by re-electing Barack Obama to the Presidency rather than accept a hypocritical plutocrat as his successor. Also, some of the strongest advocates for social Conservatism among Republicans went down to defeat in many races. At least two states legalized gay marriage by popular vote, something unheard of until this year, and also marijuana for medicinal and/or recreational purposes was legalized in several states.
And next year it will get even more hilarious to behold, because somehow the Republicans, despise losing several seats in the House of Representatives, still held on to control of that body. And they are about to face a most upsetting challenge.
Puerto Ricans favor statehood for first time
(CNN) — In an overshadowed Election Day contest, Puerto Ricans voted in favor of statehood in a nonbinding referendum, marking the first time such an initiative garnered a majority.
Puerto Ricans were asked about their desires in two parts. First, by a 54% to 46% margin, voters rejected their current status as a U.S. commonwealth. In a separate question, 61% chose statehood as the alternative, compared with 33% for the semi-autonomous "sovereign free association" and 6% for outright independence.
While the results may be an indicator of what Puerto Ricans want, statehood will not be possible without congressional action in Washington, something that is not guaranteed.
Indeed, given their dwindling power in society, the Republicans that still dominate the House may decide to reject Puerto Rico's bid for statehood, because as a state it is most likely to send two Democratic Senators and several Democratic Representatives to Congress. But if they do this, it will only enrage millions of Hispanic voters all across America. They are already rejecting the Republican Party by a wide margin because of the illegal immigration issue and this will only harden their rejection. The result may be the Republicans finally losing control of the House in 2014. Then when Puerto Rico DOES become a state and sends those additional Democrats to Congress (and can also cast electoral votes in the 2016 Presidental election) then politically the Republicans will be finished as a viable party.
I can hardly wait to see them go down!
Related articles
- Puerto Ricans vote in favor of statehood (slicesoflatinamerica.wordpress.com)
- Will Puerto Rico become the 51st state? (newsnet5.com)


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Emerging Threats
First targeted iPhone spyware discovered: Update your iOS software immediately
Authored by a NortonLifeLock employee
Cyber espionage, also known as cyber spying, is grabbing a lot of headlines lately. The most recent incident affects Apple's iOS. Researchers at Citizen Lab have discovered that a highly sophisticated cyber espionage group has deployed a very rare, advanced form of spyware, which can break an iPhone wide open.
Don't wait until a threat strikes.
Security threats and malware lurk on Windows PCs, Macs, and Android and iOS devices. If you use more than one device – like most of us do – you need an all-in-one security suite. Meet Norton Security Premium.
Enjoy peace of mind on every device you use with Norton Security Premium.
No Credit Card Required
The good news- Apple has already pushed out the update to fix three vulnerabilities, that when combined, lead to compromise of an iOS device. If you haven't already, you should update your software immediately.
Additionally, this particular spyware was aimed solely at a UAE human rights defender and is not confirmed to be affecting regular users. This is one of the most complicated pieces of iOS spyware seen in the wild. The company that released the spyware specializes in creating mobile cyber espionage tools, and then sells them to other agencies as well as governments in order to perform spying and surveillance.
How Does it Work?
The spyware, known as Pegasus, is distributed by sending a link to a malicious website via text message. Clicking on the link leads to the exploit chain, which is what leads to the malware being installed. In turn, it completely opens up the phone to the attackers, giving them access to everything on the device-microphone, voice calls, emails- you name it. In addition to giving the attackers access to the phone's data, it can also access the GPS in order to track the target's movements.
These types of "cyber weapons" have been around for a while now, and it was just a matter of time before they hit iOS. Anything with an Internet connection, no matter who the manufacturer is, can become vulnerable in this day in age. Fortunately, Apple has rushed to patch this issue, which goes to show how critical it is to perform software updates as soon as they become available.
Isn't it time to upgrade your security?
Upgrading to new devices and software can often mean downgrading your privacy and security. It's time to take your security seriously. Download the full version of Norton Security Deluxe free for 30 days, and test-drive it on up to 5 of your devices – PCs, Macs, smartphones or tablets.
Create an account today and be up and running in minutes.
NortonLifeLock Corporation, the world's leading cyber security company, allows organizations, governments, and people to secure their most important data wherever it lives. More than 50 million people and families rely on NortonLifeLock's Norton and LifeLock comprehensive digital safety platform to help protect their personal information, devices, home networks, and identities.
Copyright © 2023 NortonLifeLock Inc. All rights reserved. NortonLifeLock, the NortonLifeLock Logo, the Checkmark Logo, Norton, LifeLock, and the LockMan Logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of NortonLifeLock Inc. or its affiliates in the United States and other countries. Firefox is a trademark of Mozilla Foundation. Android, Google Chrome, Google Play and the Google Play logo are trademarks of Google, LLC. Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple and the Apple logo are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. App Store is a service mark of Apple Inc. Alexa and all related logos are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Microsoft and the Window logo are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. The Android robot is reproduced or modified from work created and shared by Google and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.


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Pakistani schools protest after shooting of young girl
- Malala Yousufzai shot by Taliban gunman after school
- Shot in head and neck, still in intensive care
- Targeted because of activism for girls' education
PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) — Many schools in Pakistan's Swat Valley closed their doors in protest Wednesday and the country's army chief vowed to fight on against militants as anger erupted across the nation over the Taliban attack on a 14-year-old activist famed for promoting girls' education.
Malala Yousufzai was in the intensive care unit at a military hospital in Peshawar, recovering from an early morning surgery to remove a bullet from her neck a day after the attack. A Pakistani official said doctors thought she was out of danger.
The shooting of Malala on her way home from school Tuesday in the town of Mingora in the volatile Swat Valley horrified Pakistanis across the religious, political and ethnic spectrum. A Taliban gunman walked up to a bus taking schoolchildren and shot her in the head and neck. Another girl on the bus was also wounded.
The country's top military officer, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, issued a strongly-worded statement condemning the attack. The powerful army chief rarely makes such public pronouncements, even when it comes to strictly military matters.
"In attacking Malala, the terrorist have failed to grasp that she is not only an individual, but an icon of courage and hope who vindicates the great sacrifices that the people of Swat and the nation gave, for wresting the valley from the scourge of terrorism," Kayani said.
He vowed the military would not bow to terrorists like those who shot the young activist.
"We will fight, regardless of the cost we will prevail," he said.
He also visited the hospital to get a first-hand account of her condition, the statement said.
Malala is admired across Pakistan for exposing the Taliban's atrocities and advocating for girls' education in the face of religious extremism.
She began writing a blog when she was just 11 under a pseudonym for the BBC about life under the Taliban, and began speaking out publicly in 2009 about the need for girls' education. The Taliban strongly opposes education for women, and the group has claimed responsibility for the Tuesday attack.
Private schools in the Swat Valley were closed Wednesday in a sign of protest over the shooting and in solidarity with Malala, said Ahmed Shah, the chairman of an association of private schools. Flags in front of the Mingora government headquarters were at half-staff, and police officers stood guard outside her family's house.
A demonstration was expected to be held later Wednesday at the press club in Mingora and another one was under way in the eastern city of Lahore. In the southern port city of Karachi, the city's main political party, Muttahida Qaumi Movement, was having a service at their headquarters to pray for the girl's recovery.
The front pages of both English- and Urdu-language newspapers were plastered with stories and pictures of Malala. Television channels constantly replayed footage of her being taken to the hospital in Peshawar as well as clips from previous appearances she'd made while promoting girls' education.
The news that surgeons were able to remove a bullet lodged in Malala's neck was greeted with relief by many. A team of army and civilian surgeons have been treating her at a military hospital in Peshawar where she was airlifted after the Tuesday shooting.
The operation to remove the bullet took hours because there were complications, said the information minister in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Mian Iftikhar Hussain.
"She is improving. But she is still unconscious," he said. Hussain said there was no decision yet whether the girl needed to be taken abroad for further treatment, but said that doctors felt she was out of danger.
At one time the picturesque Swat Valley — nicknamed the Switzerland of Pakistan — was a popular tourist destination for Pakistanis. Honeymooners vacationed along the river.
Then the Taliban in 2007 began infiltrating the valley just 280 kilometers (175 miles) from the capital, eventually assuming near-total control of the region before being ejected in a massive Pakistani military operation in 2009.
The takeover, as well as the Taliban's brutal treatment of civilians in the region, shocked many Pakistanis, who considered militancy to be a far-away problem in Afghanistan or Pakistan's rugged tribal regions.
But Tuesday's attack demonstrated that the Taliban have not been eradicated from the valley and are trying to make their presence felt even three years after the offensive to oust them.
Malala was nominated last year for the International Children's Peace Prize, which is organized by the Dutch organization KidsRights to highlight the work of children around the world. She also was honored last year with one of Pakistan's highest awards for civilians for her bravery.
Associated Press writer Sherid Zada in Mingora, Munir Ahmed in Islamabad and Adil Jawad in Karachi contributed to this report.


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Last week I posted another installment in my ongoing series about the possibility of metering bandwidth in the future ("Why Not Meter Broadband Pipes?") Make sure to read the comments to that post over on the TLF because the essay provoked an interesting discussion and some outstanding suggestions from readers.
On a related note, Mark Desautels, Vice President of Wireless Internet Development at the CTIA (the wireless industry's trade association) has an editorial in RCR Wireless News today entitled, "Paying for the Bandwidth We Consume." Mark poses a question that I have raised in some of my posts on this issue:
Much is made of the fact that consumers prefer flat-rate pricing because they know what it is going to cost each month, and that is understandable. But it also creates (potentially) huge subsidies between users. My question is: If consumers were aware of the amount of the subsidies they might be paying, would they be as opposed to paying for the bandwidth they actually use as is generally believed?
That really is an interesting question and the guys over as DSL Reports point out that there are tools that users can download to help us answer that question. They are also running a poll right now asking people how much bandwidth they use per month.
I would love to see some enterprising economists or industry consultants conduct some broad-based experiments to determine what the consumer's "willingness to pay" looks like across various categories of broadband users. I think that if some people realize how little bandwidth they were using, they might actually be more open to the idea of pure metering right from the first byte. Mark Desautels also makes that point in his essay today:
Flat-rate pricing for Internet access and bandwidth use might have had its place during the development of the Internet, but as we move into the phase of ubiquitous access, and wide disparities of usage and file size develop, particularly on the more scarce wireless bandwidth side, long-term economic network viability and fairness demand that people pay for the bandwidth they consume. Today, it is probably accurate to say that customers who pay a flat-rate fee for access and use the Internet mostly to check their e-mail and do some shopping and research are probably subsidizing—maybe to a significant extent—those who do those things plus spend lots of time downloading audio and video content, when measured by the bandwidth consumed.
But as DSL Reports asks:
The question becomes which U.S. ISP wants to be the first to try it? Which U.S. ISP wants to have competitors attack it for charging per gigabyte usage fees? Will users tolerate the migration to a bill-by-the-byte business model? That depends entirely on how much bandwidth they're eating each month.
All excellent questions. I hope we see some experimentation on this front--both in an academic setting and the actual marketplace.


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MAVEN: Providing Answers About Mars' Climate History
The Mars Atmospheric and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission will obtain critical measurements of the Martian atmosphere to help understand dramatic climate change on the red planet over its history. MAVEN will provide information on how and how fast atmospheric gases are being lost to space today, and infer from those detailed studies what happened in the past. Studying how the Martian atmosphere was lost can reveal clues about the impact that change had on the Martian climate, geologic and geochemical conditions over time, all of which are important in understanding whether Mars had an environment able to support life.
MAVEN is scheduled to launch on November 18, 2013 from Cape Canaveral, Fla. The trip to Mars takes 10 months, so the spacecraft will go into orbit around Mars in September of 2014.
It will take 5 weeks for MAVEN to get into its final science-mapping orbit, test the instruments, and test science sequences. After this phase, MAVEN has a 1-Earth-year primary mission during which it will make its key measurements.
The MAVEN orbit will be elliptical. At its closest point to the planet, it will be 93 miles above the surface. At this altitude, the spacecraft will pass through the upper atmosphere on each orbit and can sample the gas and ion composition directly. At its highest point, it will be more than 3728 miles above the surface and can carry out ultraviolet imaging of the entire planet. This combination of detailed measurements and global imaging is a powerful way to understand the properties of the upper atmosphere.
The altitude in the MAVEN orbit will be lowered for five "deep-dip" campaigns during the mission. In each deep dip, the spacecraft will take measurements down to an altitude of about 77 miles. These measurements will provide information about the well-mixed lower atmosphere, giving scientists the "full picture" of the atmosphere.
The MAVEN spacecraft will make measurements in all regions of "near-Mars" space. These measurements will allow scientists to characterize the current state of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere, determine the rates of loss of gas to space today, and extrapolate backward in time in order to determine the total loss to space through time.
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Allen/Lande's 'The Showdown' Project Coming On November 5th
Allen/Lande's 'The Showdown' Project Coming On November 5th
September 22, 2010
Frontiers Records is excited to announce the release of the third chapter of ALLEN / LANDE project entitled "The Showdown" on November 5th 2010.
ALLEN / LANDE represents the finest expression of Melodic Metal nowadays. With two world renowned singers, Jorn Lande (of Jorn and Masterplan) and Russell Allen (of Symphony X) sharing lead vocals, this project has become a staple among the fans of Hard Rock and Melodic Heavy Metal music. The first chapter of Jorn Lande and Russell Allen's collaboration, "The Battle" was unleashed in September 2005 with unanimous acclaim from fans and critics alike. Many websites and magazines named it "Record of the Year". Its success made it one of the most popular releases ever in Melodic Heavy Metal, thanks to beautiful, sweeping piano and keyboards, heavy guitar riffs, virtuoso guitar solos, hooky choruses and the vocal talents of two of the finest Heavy Metal vocalists around.
In spring 2007, the second chapter entitled "The Revenge" was released and met again with an amazing reaction from press and fans. Heavier and with a tighter production, thanks to the involvement of Dennis Ward (PINK CREAM 69, ANGRA, PLACE VENDOME) at the mix, the album excited the fans who loved the first chapter.
Now it is the turn of "The Showdown", the anticipated third album of the studio project. "With two of the best singers in the business it's easy to get inspiration to write good music" says the mastermind of the project, Swedish guitar player, songwriter and producer Magnus Karlsson, who adds "When it was decided that Russell and Jorn were going to sing on the first album I knew that if I could just write great songs and get the right mix it would have a very good chance to be a success". Musically "The Showdown" sounds like "A mix of both previous releases with "The Battle" being more Melodic and "The Revenge" which was more in the Hard Rock direction", according to Karlsson, who concludes "I'm more satisfied than ever with the songs and performances, but also because the mix by Achim Kohler (Primal Fear) is by far the best I ever had on any album!"
"The Showdown" cover art was designed once again by Rodney Matthews (Asia, Magnum, Diamond Head etc.) and includes the following tracks:The Showdown; Judgement Day; Never Again; Turn All Into Gold; Bloodlines; Copernicus; We Will Rise Again; The Guardian; Maya; The Artist; Eternity; Alias (bonus track).
The videoclip shot for the song "Judgement Day" with Jorn Lande's lead vocals can be watched below:
The songs "Judgement Day" and "The Showdown" can exclusively be listened in full in streaming on the Frontiers Web radio from September 21st.Tune in at: www.frontiers.it/webradio
The album will be exclusively be available in the CD digipak edition (first pressing), limited vinyl and digital download.
Jorn Lande: vocals
Russell Allen: vocals
Magnus Karlsson: guitars, bass, keyboards
Jaime Salazar: drums
Weblinks: www.myspace.com/allenlande2 / www.frontiers.it / www.myspace.com/frontiersrecords
Courtesy of www.sleazeroxx.com and www.frontiers.it


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Welcome to the netAdventist version 3.0 site for the Pacific Union Conference of Seventh-day Adventists. netAdventist version 3.0 is the new version of netAdventist that the General Conference has adopted as the web platform for the worldwide church.
The Pacific Union Conference is hosting it's own deployment of netAdventist version 3.0. If you are a constituent church of the Pacific Union Conference and don't already have a netAdventist site, click the 'Site Signup' link to apply for your own free full-featured site and get involved in web ministry!


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Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo,'' recently named the best film of all time in a prestigious international poll of movie experts, wasn't always held in such high regard.
The 1958 thriller starring James Stewart and Kim Novak — which debuts October 28 on Blu-ray in a gorgeous high-def transfer as part of "Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection" — was initially labeled by critics as implausible, morbid and decidedly inferior to Hitch's other classics. It flopped at the box office.
"Vertigo'' didn't even turn up in the once-a-decade poll conducted by the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound magazine until 1982, two years after Hitchcock's death, when it came at No. 7.
By 2002, "Vertigo'' was just four votes behind Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane,'' which had led the poll for 50 years until the latest installment in August, voted on by 846 critics and film programmers.
Both movies are among my favorites, but how did "Vertigo'' eventually land at No. 1? And is it really better than 1941's "Citizen Kane''?
Voyeurism is a major theme of "Vertigo',' and one that deeply resonates with voters who watch movies for a living. Stewart plays a police detective, retired after a fatal accident, who is hired by a college pal to trail his wife (Novak). Stewart is told she goes into trances in which she identifies with her late, tragic grandmother.
Our hero falls for his client's wife after saving her from a suicide attempt, but because of his vertigo — fear of heights — he is helpless to prevent her second attempt. After a lengthy institutionalization, Stewart meets a woman who resembles the dead wife (also played by Novak) and he proceeds to aggressively make her over in the depressed woman's image.
Hitchcock gives away this new sweetheart's secret right after they meet, preferably to build suspense over how our emotionally fragile protagonist will react to her deception. By any measure, it's a preposterous plot with holes you can drive a truck through. For starters, how does Stewart escape from the roof ledge he's dangling from in the very first scene?
Greatly abetted by peak performances from Stewart and Hitchcock's favorite composer, Bernard Herrmann, "Vertigo'' weaves a morbidly romantic spell that almost anyone who's wanted a second chance in love can relate to on some level.
It gets extra points with the film establishment for being a more "personal'' film than "Citizen Kane'' — deepened by years of revelations about Hitchcock's obsession with his blond stars, from Grace Kelly to Tippi Hedren. Film professionals have also gravitated to "Vertigo'' because the film's narrative looseness allows them to write an almost infinite number of psychological interpretations.
This is definitely not the case with "Citizen Kane,'' which tells a tightly scripted story about a media mogul's rise and fall that you can pretty much take only one way. As Pauline Kael definitively established in her essay "Raising Kane,'' it's a vision created by Welles and co-screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz. There was a team of writers on "Vertigo,'' but it's Hitchcock through and through.
Technically groundbreaking, "Citizen Kane'' boasts cinematography, effects work and editing far superior to "Vertigo,'' which was made 17 years later. The animated sequence in "Vertigo'' is almost laughable in its crudeness, even for 1958. "Kane'' is also more entertaining; it has humor, something almost entirely lacking in Hitchcock's film.
But once you overlook its sheer nuttiness, "Vertigo'' transports audiences to a dark, dream-like place in ways that transcend its tortured story line.


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I'm Phil, the proprietor of this fine establishment. Please, come in and make yourself comfortable.
You could send me an email at philiph_at_pobox_dot_com (spam filtered).
Or, you could just send me one million dollars cash, in small, unmarked, non-sequential bills.
The masses have spoken!
I've been experimenting with what I like to call EbayArt. You be the judge.
Are you crescent fresh? I am! And so is Jeff, even if his website is for SUCKAS!
Look the Internet Archive Wayback Machine has snapshots of my website all the way back to 2001. That's pretty cool.
What is a WikiWikiWeb?
This Site CreatedWithXEmacs.
Here's my GnuPgKey if you are interested.
I belong to LOPSA:
I participated in @nonapeptide's 10k Serverfault Challenge:


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Share our site with your friends
The granddaughter of author, Gloria Dunshee and the daughter of illustrator Karne McGary just had corrective heart surgery. To help out, Will Go Press has decided that every full price book sold they will donate $10 to go torwards Betsy's medical expenses.
Welcome to WillGoPress.com, a family owned, written and illustrated children's
book website. The author, Gloria Dunshee and her daughter Karne McGary,
illustrator, takes the reader on adventures to fun places like St. Paul Minnesota,
New York City, New York museums, and more locations yet to be named. Both children's
books are illustrated in full watercolor and are fun playful rhyming for kids and
the whole family.
The ORIGINAL Yarn Card (pack of 10)
Every knitter has many many skeins of yarn and this system allows the knitter to have access to their yarn collection when they have an idea for a new project.
Get The Original Yarn Card (pack of 10) today for only $3.00 per pack!
Now you can have the wonderful One Word Band...
Will takes an adventure with a Snowman and imagines having fun playing around in
the cold and snow. He sees ice sculptures and snow sculptures as part of the St.
Paul Winter Carnival. Come along on an amazing adventure with our hero, William,
and enjoy the wonders of winter. As you read the book, I hope you, too, will enjoy
the wonders of winter in St. Paul with Will.
Books purchased directly from the author will receive upon request 1 free per order
"The One Word Band".
The family travels to New York City where Will's curiosity's and a red bouncy ball
almost get the best of him. Clutching his trusty red ball, William is captivated
by all there is to see and do in New York City. The book ends with an educational
and happy ending. He learns the importance of parental instructions while traveling.


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NEW YORK (AP) – Apple is seeking a patent for an iPhone that has a display that wraps around the edges of the device, expanding the viewable area and eliminating all physical buttons.
The patent application reveals that Apple has put some thought into a device that takes advantage of a new generation of displays, which don't have to be flat and rigid like today's liquid-crystal displays, or LCDs. At a trade show in January, chief competitor Samsung Electronics Co. showed off a prototype phone with a display that is bent around the edges, presenting 'virtual buttons' for the user's touch.
Apple Inc.'s patent filing shows a phone similar to a flattened tube of glass, inside of which a display envelops the chips and circuit board. This allows 'functionality to extend to more than one surface of the device,' the filing said. The design also means there's no frame or bezel surrounding the display, meaning it can take up more of the device's surface area.
The company filed for the patent in September 2011, though the application became public only Thursday. Like others, Apple often files for patents on designs that never come to fruition. It also doesn't comment about future products until it's ready to launch.
The Patently Apple blog wrote about the filing earlier.


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Its not always easy to find what your looking for on Google, whether the results are skewed or your just looking for something that isn't there, it can be frustrating especially if you don't know which keywords to search for. Well today you are in luck, for I have comprised a list of search techniques that shall take you above and beyond search splendor. If you are business owner you should offer direct deposit is so that you can pay your employees quicker. If you want to find what you are looking for in google and stop loitering around, you need to gather your chakras, the site you should prioritize in searching the internet is some Online Psychic Reading Platform, don't lose your essence anymore. Your employees will no longer have to wait for a physical check in the mail and then go cash that check in the bank. In addition, your employees can have their check automatically deposited into whatever account they want like these savings accounts. This way the employee can earn interest on their money automatically. If you have a small business you need to know that payroll administration services allows employers to concentrate on their core business and frees up the business owner, human resources or accounting personnel to work more on strategic tasks while also using tools like the paystub generator to keep order in the business.
Some of these I use daily, while others I don't think I've ever used, but I hope that they still serve some purpose and are of use to you. If you are a savvy web user these may already be in your arsenal of tools, but for most people these with definitely improve upon your productivity, and if I can make that small difference in the online world my life is complete.
While Google makes it easy for you to search things like images, maps, news, photos and groups…they don't really help you find specific's unless you know how to do so correctly. To get the best SEO assitance for your business, visit yourveganmarketer.com.
Search Modifiers
Search modifiers help you narrow down your search from the bazillion websites that come up for your search query. Here's some of the modifiers I use the most, and how they can help you refine your searches.
- inanchor: <keyword> — Returns pages where your keyword was used in the anchor text of other sites linking to that page.
- allinanchor: <keyword> — Returns exact results for your search query if it was used in the anchor text of other sites linking in.
- intitle: <keyword> — Returns pages where your keyword was used in the title.
- allintitle: <keyword> — Returns pages where your exact keyword(s) were used in the title.
- inurl: <keyword> — Shows pages where your <keyword> is contained within the url itself.
- allinurl: <keyword> — Shows pages where all your <keyword(s)> are used within the url itself.
- site: <website> — Returns pages from a specific website. Conversely -site will remove pages from a certain site.
- link: <website> — Shows sites linking to your search query.
- cache: <website> — Will give you the web cache of your search query.
- movie: <movie name> — Will give you information/movie times.
- stocks: <stock symbol> — On the fly stock market information. ex. stocks:GOOG
- related: <keyword>– Will return related queries for your keyword.
- time <place> — Similar to a world clock at your fingertips, just enter the place and you will be given their time of day.
- weather <place> — Same as time only for weather.
- define: <word> — Works like a dictionary to give you the definition of your search term.
- filetype: <file extension> — Will return files of a certain extension.
There are plenty more that I may have missed but these are the most used queries that I feel serve the most purpose. For an extremely comprehensive listing check out Michael Gray's list.
Finding Filetypes
This is probably the most underused, but most useful searches you can do on Google. Just doing a quick search for pdf documents brings me up a massive selection of books whether relevant or not. If I were to type in "ebook filetype:pdf" for example, I would get a comprehensive listing of ebooks in .pdf format, ready to download and read on a whim. Obviously you may not find what your looking for by using the term "ebook" so you can type niching it down to actual titles of books.
The great thing about the "filetype:" search modifier is that you can search for practically ANY filetype you are looking for. Whether its a pdf, mp3, avi, ppt, doc, 3gp, and the list goes on and on. This is a very powerful tool at your disposal and most people dont even know about it.
Search Tricks for SEO
While all those are fine and dandy, SEO Cincinnati says if you are looking for a certain website for SEO purposes or to do some background checks on your competition, you will find that most of those search tricks don't really help at all. What you need is a little ingenuity.
If you are for example looking for wordpress blogs you may search:
<niche> blog "Powered by wordpress"
<niche> "Remember my personal information" "Notify me of follow-up comments"
With a little thinking outside the box it is possible to find pretty much anything you want. Combine this with inline search results using something like SEO for firefox and you will be blowing away your competition in no time.
If you wanted to find educational sites and didnt feel like using the scholarly search you could always use this search query in Google: site:.edu blog or take it a step further and add site:.edu <niche> + blog to find a specific genre. Obviously these are all fully customizable and will deliver different results for everyone but the method is still the same. If you have any other search queries I missed or just want to add your own feel free to leave a comment below.


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Hi everyone,
I've got some good news for owners of classic Amiga systems today. A new game has been released and it is completely free to download. It is a 2D platform game called Mr. Beanbag! I love these kind of games, so I'm really looking forward to try it out. I'm going to do a review of it as well.
The game is AGA only, so you'll need an Amiga 1200 or 4000 to run it.
The news was first posted by Toaks at Amigaworld.net on the 28th of December 2011. I've included it below for you to read:
The AGA game MrBeanbag! is now finished and released.
MrBeanbag! is released as βeta since there is still bugs/issues,but most likely they won't be fixed.
MrBeanbag! is a really fast paced Platformer/Jump'n Run game ala Sonic The Hedgehog and was meant to be a fully commercial title a few years back, the development cycle stagnated and the developers put the project on hold as they needed a break,luckily they picked up development again and released this beta to the community.
MrBeanbag! has 17 levels,great graphics and sound and it does feel like a final commerical product.
If you'd like to download the game, you can click here for the .ADF version or here for the HD-version. The official homepage of Mr. Beanbag! can be found here.
I also found a video on YouTube of the gameplay, which you can watch for yourself below:
Hope you'll enjoy the game on your classic Amiga or through WinUAE. 🙂
I'd also like to wish all of you out there a happy new year! 🙂


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