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Beaune in the heart of Burgundy

September 29, 2011

Not all wine regions have a clear focal point, but in Burgundy, there is no doubt that all roads lead to Beaune, the historic capital of the region and today a vibrant small town devoted to wine and gastronomy. Buzzing under the summer sun, or silent under winter snows, at any season for many wine lovers Beaune has become a place of pilgrimage.

Produce market at Beaune, Burgundy

The food market in Beaune is a food lover's paradise ©Wink Lorch

There are two places I have always made my own pilgrimage to when visiting Beaune: the Hospices de Beaune has been in existence for over 550 years, and is correctly named l’Hôtel Dieu; and right opposite, Athenaeum, a quite amazing wine book shop, founded just 21 years ago, in 1989. On my last visit in December with World Wine Tour 2010 I was finally able to add a third legend to the list, Ma Cuisine, a tucked-away restaurant that is only open on four days a week, and requires booking well in advance.

Les Hospices de Beaune – a hospital for the poor
Wine lovers know the Hospices de Beaune in particular for its famous wine auction held each November. The auction sells the barrels of the latest vintage of wines from some of the Burgundy wine region’s best-known Grand and Premier Cru vineyards, which many years ago were donated to the Hospices to fund its good works.

The buildings of the Hospices, built in 1452 using Flemish-inspired architecture as a hospital for the poor, are stunningly beautiful with their distinctive and colourful tiled roofs, but venture inside and you discover a sense of peace, humility, history and unexpected treasures too. The buildings were used as a general hospital until 1971 and for the past 40 years have been a much admired tourist attraction, well worth a visit.

Hospices de Beaune kitchen

Invalid's rabbit stew - classic Burgundian cuisine ©Wink Lorch

It is so atmospheric walking through from the inner courtyard into the main hall lined with beautiful dark wood bed ‘stalls’ where the poor and sick were cared for. A mock up kitchen makes you believe they were well fed, and the beautiful pharmacy gives a hint of the sort of potions they were given to make them better.

The original funding for the beautiful Hopsices buildings and indeed the amazing furniture and works of art, came from Nicolas Rolin, chancellor for the Dukes of Burgundy, who decided to assuage his guilt of living a profligate life, by using some of his wealth in this way. The works of art in the Hospices have been regularly added to by legacies and donations and there are some wonderful pieces, including amazingly intricate tapestries.

If you can’t get there soon, then for a closer look at the Hospices take a look at the series of videos (in French) from the regional online magazine Bourgogne Live:

Making the most of Beaune’s gastronomic delights
The choice of restaurants in Beaune is large, and it definitely pays to plan in advance to make sure you eat at somewhere authentic, rather than at one of the overtly tourist restaurants that you will stumble across once you are in the town. Our Côte de Beaune guide includes four restaurants in Beaune itself, and one that had been recommended to me countless times by not only our writers, but by wine producers and UK Burgundy importers is Ma Cuisine.

Beaune Premier Cru 2006

When in Beaune ... ©Brett Jones

Having eaten at many restaurants in Beaune over the years, when I ate at Ma Cuisine, I realized what I had been missing. Small and simple, tucked along a quiet road just inside the old town walls, the emphasis here is on simple, tasty local food, designed to show off your choice of wine from the massive list. If you have money to spend and love Burgundy, you will have a hard time choosing the wine, but help is at hand, and even if you are on a relatively meagre budget, there is a Burgundy wine for everyone here. You simply have to go, but make sure you phone ahead and choose the right day. If Ma Cuisine is closed or full, then another original choice we have enjoyed recently is Le Comptoir des Tontons, with a delightfully laid-back atmosphere, good local, mainly organic food and a decent selection of Burgundy wines at fair prices.

Wine books and gifts galore
It’s best to put aside a good hour for a browse around the wonderful Athenaeum shop right opposite the Hospices and open all day every day, even through lunchtime and on Sundays. Athenaeum started life as a specialist wine book shop; today, much extended, it offers an unrivalled selection of wine books in French, English and other languages, not just covering Burgundy, but the world. As well as a very good French wine map section, the wine accessory department ranges from serious wine glasses and decanters, to greetings cards and a plethora of items you never knew you wanted. There is a fair kitchen department too and last year, I did my Christmas shopping there.

Pernand Vergelesses, Burgundy wine village

Pernand-Vergelesses, just outside Beaune ©Brett Jones

I’m taking it as read that you are unlikely, as a wine lover, to visit Beaune without setting aside some time to taste wine. Apart from Athenaeum that has a fine selection of wines, there are several decent wine shops in the town listed on our guide, and these are the places to go to buy old vintages. Even if Beaune is the heart of the Burgundy wine region, it is best to avoid the over-touristy tasting places in the town, instead arrange in advance to visit a few wine producers in the villages outside Beaune, in the heart of the vineyards. Be aware that more than anywhere, most wine producers in Burgundy require advanced appointments, and for the finest producers, a personal introduction from an importer or specialist wine retailer is often needed.

Much more information on other shops, restaurants, places to stay and recommended wine producers to visit can be found on our Côte de Beaune travel guide. All information on the website is free to view, there is a small charge to download the PDF versions of the guides.

Wine Travel Guides loves good Wine Photos

March 15, 2011

We are currently working on updates to our travel guides to wine regions in France, Tuscany and Rioja. Up to now, we have only included one stunning photo per guide, the majority supplied by Mick Rock of Cephas Picture Library, professional specialists in wine photos. Now we have the facility to add photos to individual entries on the guides.

Edmond Jacquin et Fils

Jean-François Jacquin in Savoie ©Brett Jones

Like the picture on the left, we are gradually adding photos to the producers recommended on our site, as well as the places to stay, eat and shop, and we thought you might like to help. Would you like to see a photo you have taken on Wine Travel Guides and receive a PDF travel guide of your choice as a thank you?

Here’s what you should do:
Look through the travel guides on our website – all content is free to view. Find the guides to the regions you’ve visited, and on each guide click through the list of Producers and the Places to Stay, Eat and Shop to see if we include a producer or place you’ve visited and photographed on your visit. If you find one and would like us to share your photo on our website, then if it’s suitable, we will upload it, make sure you are properly credited and we will send you a free PDF wine travel guide of your choice for each photo we use.

How to send photos and conditions:

  • Send us any in-focus, bright pictures that represent the wine producer or venue well.
  • Size should ideally be around 300 x 400 pixels and 200 – 500KB.
  • Provide a caption to explain what your picture represents.
  • It is ESSENTIAL that you own the copyright for the picture. Include your name and/or how you would like the copyright credited.
  • Email as an attachment to admin[at]winetravelguides[dot]com. (We will not download pictures from your site or 3rd party site).
  • In your message let us know which PDF(s) you would like to receive as a thank you. These will be emailed to you as soon as we’ve published your picture (and we’ll include a note with the link so you can see your photo on our website and share it).
  • We reserve the right to edit your picture and your caption.
  • We reserve the right to accept or refuse your pictures.

There is no time limit on this although we will gradually be adding more pictures that we find ourselves so you may miss certain slots. As you plan your wine travels over the next few months, bear our request in mind so that you can send us any relevant photos on your return.

Thank you so much in advance of your help! And, as this is the perfect time to plan your wine travels for the year we are delighted to offer all readers of this post a special 30% discount off our normal price for Annual membership that gives access to the latest version of all our 52 PDF guides ready to download and/or print. Simply go to the Join Here page or to the Gifts page if you want to offer this to someone else, and enter the promotional code D2BLG0311. Once you click enter, the usual price of £29 will reduce to £20 (approx. US$33 or €24). This offer is valid until 30th April 2011.

We look forward to seeing and posting your photos on the site, and in a few months, we’ll post some of the best ones here on the blog.

Postcript: UK readers may like to check out the special opportunity to bid for a Savoie evening with Wink Lorch presenting a special selection of Savoie wines. 100% of funds received will go straight to Wine Relief, the UK wine trade’s fundraiser that supports Comic Relief’s work in Africa and the UK. Hurry! Bids must be in by March 18th 2011.

Visiting the Quieter Part of Burgundy

August 17, 2010

By Brett Jones

I always enjoy visiting Chalon-sur-Saône, a bustling city in Southern Burgundy, with a calm centre that straddles the river, the Cathedral Square on one side and Rue de Strasbourg, a street replete with restaurants, on the other bank.

300093 PANORAMA Cathedral, Chalons sur Saone, Burgundy 25 Mar 10

We recently visited Burgundy during the Grands Jours de Bourgogne where wine tastings are organised in different regions of the area. After the giddy heights of the major appellations it was refreshing to reach this gentler area, the Côte Chalonnaise, where the vineyards are interspersed with fields of cows, chickens and other animals in La Bresse.

300095 Rotisserie St Vincent, Chalons sur Saone, Burgundy 25 Mar 10

There is a good choice of restaurants and bars. Near the cathedral is the Rotisserie St-Vincent offering a classic, local menu.

300145 120 Wine Bar, Chalons sur Saone, Burgundy 25 Mar 10

For simpler fare you can try 120 Vins wine bar (say it in French: Cent Vingt pronounced Son Vin…).

300152 120 Wine Bar, Chalons sur Saone, Burgundy 25 Mar 10

You choose from a blackboard wine list, which not only specialises in the wines of the Côte Chalonnaise but other parts of France. When we were there we stayed local, choosing a Givry Clos des Vignes Rondes, Domaine François Lumpp 2008. It went well with a plate of local ham and cheese which was a pleasant respite after all our serious meals of the previous days!

The Rue de Strasbourg, on the other side of the river, is lined with restaurants from quite grand to simple.

300110 Le Bistrot, Chalons sur Saone, Burgundy 25 Mar 10

We have enjoyed lunch a couple of times at Le Bistrot were the owner cooks and his wife looks after the restaurant. Small, very informal with short, but perfectly formed menus. In the summer you can eat outside on the car-free street.

300125 Chocolatier Allex, Chalons sur Saone, Burgundy 25 Mar 10

In the centre of town you can indulge yourself in chocolate heaven at Allex Pâtissier-Chocolatier, whose window displays entice you to buy even if you are full up after a good meal!

400084 Rully, Burgundy 26 Mar 10

The next day we travelled to the wine village of Rully where we were intrigued by the number of large, indeed very large houses in this village. Appararently in the late 19th century with the arrival of the railways, a branch line was built from Chalon, and a number of wealthy burghers built country houses in Rully, to enjoy its mild climate.

400037 Lunch, La Grange, Rully, Burgundy 26 Mar 10400039 Lunch, La Grange, Rully, Burgundy 26 Mar 10

We ‘discovered’ a new restaurant in the heart of the wine town of Rully, La Grange.

View La Grange

Here in the converted stables of the Château Saint Michel, chef Ludovic Briday, who was at the famous Lameloise restaurant in Chagny just to the north, offers a choice of menus as well as à la carte. The wine list, as one would expect in the heart of wine country, is focussed on good local wines with a few by the glass, selected to complement the food.

400065 Dom la Breliere, Rully, Burgundy 26 Mar 10

Although La Grange is bang opposite Domaine Anne and Jean-François Delorme we decided to visit Domaine Brelière as I had just met the ebullient owners, Jean-Claude and Anna, at the regional tasting a couple of days earlier.

They own seven hectares of vines producing a selection of wines organically, including Crémant de Bourgogne as well as Premiers Crus, all of which can be tried in their charming small tasting room.

We enjoyed this visit to the Côte Chalonnaise, appreciating the softer, calmer aspect of one of the classic wine regions of France, and Wink used our visit as the basis to update and refresh our Wine Travel Guide to this area.

400072 Dom la Breliere, Rully, Burgundy 26 Mar 10

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A Good Time to Plan a Wine Tour in the Euro Zone

June 14, 2010

It’s high time to plan that wine tour, and also high time that we gave you an update on what’s happening on our main Wine Travel Guides website. With the Euro sliding against the US dollar and to an extent against the UK pound  as well as several other currencies, travel in France, Italy, Spain and the rest of the Euro zone is suddenly less expensive than it was a few months ago.

Châteauneuf du Pape pebbles

Vines in the famous pebbles of Châteauneuf du Pape ©Mick Rock/Cephas

Our biggest news is the recent launch of tailor-made wine tour itineraries aimed at those who are time poor and in need of an extra helping hand with planning a few days or more in the wine regions. The itineraries are based on the information in our on-line travel guides, but are truly tailor-made after we’ve emailed and/or called you to discuss what help you need to make the most of your wine tour. We provide an Excel spreadsheet including distances, timings and map links along with a Word document highlighting how best to secure appointments and get the most out of each day.

Patrimonio in Corsica from Cephas

Patrimonio in Northern Corsica ©Mick Rock/Cephas

Corsica to complete our French Wine Region coverage
Our 50 on-line travel guides are soon to become 52. We already boast that our guides cover all the major French wine regions, but one region has not yet been included… and that’s off-shore, namely Corsica. I’m really excited to share with you that Tom Fiorina of The Vine Route, who has been visiting the island for many years, is currently writing two guides to address this gap and they should be live sometime next month – personally I can’t wait to visit Corsica as their wines are improving dramatically, in keeping with the dramatic landscape.

Media Recognition for Wine Travel Guides
Back in April, we were selected by the UK’s Daily Mail as Website of the Week; we were also mentioned in an article on best new travel technology in the UK Telegraph’s Travel section and appeared in several regional papers, notably by wine writer Liz Sagues in the Ham & High covering North-West London. Importantly, we’ve received some lovely comments from users of our guides and the new tailor-made itinerary service too.

Kaysersberg in Alsace

Kaysersberg in Alsace ©Mick Rock/Cephas

Keeping the on-line information accurate
The huge advantage of on-line guides is the ability to keep information up-to-date relatively simply, though I confess it’s time-consuming with 50 guides equating to over 1,500 recommendations (wineries to visit, places to stay, eat and shop plus attractions) and 400,000 words when you add in the general wine and tourism information. If you spot any errors in our guides, please do let us know.

The good news is that two-thirds of our micro-region guides have been updated in the past 6 months and we try to update each guide thoroughly every 12 – 16 months. The ‘last updated’ date you see on each of our guides relates to the last time we did a thorough update adding several new or replacement recommendations. By the way, at least one well-known guide book series I know that’s available to access on-line is an exact replica of the books, so no more up-to-date than the printed guide books are.

Saint Emilion

The town of St-Emilion ©Mick Rock/Cephas

Other Interesting Travel Planning Resources
Earlier this year NileGuide licensed some of our content as part of their travel planning resources they are building to help you plan your travels worldwide. Do take a look at their website: they have a tool to create your own travel guides which could be useful to link up your wine tours with the other destinations on your holiday itinerary.

Recently I became a Tripbod, one of a team of over 100 local experts who advise travellers through calls and emails on their forthcoming trips. Sometimes, an on-line travel guide or a guide book is simply not enough; on the other hand, our itinerary planning service may be too in depth for you. If you simply want some help with a few ideas of where to visit in the world of wine, especially France, or even some help in my part-time home area in the French Alps, then take a look at Tripbod. Direct access to a person with the inside track can be invaluable.

Vineyards near Cahors

Sunset near Cahors ©Mick Rock/Cephas

Following us on Facebook, Twitter and here on the Blog
Our Facebook Page is gaining a great following which encourages me to update it with interesting links and thoughts. Currently we are highlighting the Facebook pages of wineries listed in our guides in order to give them some support – it’s interesting how some of the most traditional European wineries are responding to the social media opportunity. On Twitter, I tweet about all things wine and travel, with plenty of links to interesting articles in these two related worlds. The next few posts we have planned for the Wine Travel Guides blog are from beyond the scope of our Guides …. out of Europe for once! I look forward to hearing your comments and thank you so much for following.

All the pictures in this post were taken by one of the world’s great wine landscape photographers, Mick Rock, who owns Cephas picture library, one of the major sources for high quality photos of wine, food and travel.

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News! All Wine Tour Content Now Free to View

October 30, 2009

We’ve made some major changes on the Wine Travel Guides website, which will benefit anyone planning a wine tour in France, Tuscany or Rioja and other regions we will add next year. All the contents of our 50 micro-region travel guides to wine regions can now be viewed free on the website.

There’s no catch here, but anyone who would like the convenience of downloading the guides as PDFs to plan their wine trip off-line and print pages as required, can purchase the guides at a very reasonable price of £5 (approximately US$8.50 or €5.50) with discounts for multiple guide purchases. A sample PDF guide can be downloaded on registration; for those of you who have already registered, do log in and take a look as we’ve changed the sample to the Southern Graves and Sauternes guide by Jane Anson.

We have also converted our former Gold Subscription to Gold Membership, which allows any of our guides to be downloaded for a full 12 months (meaning you get the latest, updated guide) including any we add in the future. The price has been reduced too – Gold Membership costs just £29 (approximately US$49 or €32). A package of member benefits is also planned, and these should include discounts on other valuable wine and travel related information.

In case you are not familiar with the content on our Guides, our micro-region guides are bite-sized chunks of major wine regions, for example, we have 8 guides to Bordeaux; 5 to the Rhône Valley; 2 to Tuscany (covering only central areas at present) and so on. Each guide (about 10 – 20 pages in PDF form) includes 8 – 12 recommended wine producers to visit; a few places to stay (ranging from top hotels to friendly Bed and Breakfasts); restaurants, shops and attractions, plus a useful aide-memoir of the regional wines including appellations, grape varieties and wine styles. A wealth of information in a small package.

Most importantly of all, our guides are written by a selection of top wine and travel writers, selected because they have the inside track on their regions – some you’ve already seen on this blog, others are also top-class, including three Masters of Wine and several published book authors. We also make a point of updating our guides regularly, once a year at a minimum with tweaks during the year as necessary.

There are no other travel guides to these wine regions which are as authoritative or comprehensive as ours available anywhere else on the web, so please visit the site and tell the rest of the world about our existence. The main idea of these changes is to open up our content to many more independent travellers who love wine. Increased visibility – and let’s be honest about it, revenue – will allow us to expand our guides to other countries and regions in the future.

Thank you for reading this blatant sales blog post.  I felt that it needed to be spelt out as going from 60 pages to over 1500 pages of quality content is pretty big news for a website! I hope you agree and look forward to your reactions to the changes. I promise you that interesting wine and travel posts will resume soon!

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Group Wine Tour vs Private Wine Tour: Pros and Cons

May 20, 2009

There are many differences between participating in a group wine tour and organising your own private wine tour whether you are a professional in the wine business or simply a wine lover. Recently I’ve had a few occasions to ponder on the pros and cons of the group wine tour versus your own private wine tour (by which I mean a tour for just yourself and partner/friends, say, up to 4 people without any professional guide for the trip) so here are some thoughts to share with you.

Note that the points below apply mainly to the choice for wine lovers rather than professionals though many apply to the latter too. I have presumed that this concerns a wine trip with a reputable wine tour specialist. Also, I should say that my thoughts apply particularly to trips in Europe and are not necessarily geared to buying wine. Please do add comments to this debate.

Group wine tour 2 - blogGroup Tours – The Pluses
• No advanced planning – just book and go.
• Someone to drive you around.
• Someone who speaks the local language and can interpret.
• Possibility of visiting certain difficult-to-visit wine producers who only accept visitors on a strict appointment and limited basis.
• Possibility of tasting older vintages or special wines that aren’t opened for individual visitors.
• The price is fixed in advance, often an all-in price.

Group Tours – The Minuses
• An enforced group situation possibly with strangers!
• Usually impossible to adapt or change the itinerary.
• Often slower visits, meals etc as there is a need to cater for everyone.
• Bus travel – not everyone enjoys this.
• Difficult to have access to speak directly with winery owners/winemakers.
• Often impossible to choose where and what you eat.
• Expense of the tour due to organisation/guide/transport.

Private Wine Tour - blogPrivate Tours – The Pluses
• Free to plan your own itinerary, often at the last minute.
• Complete freedom to adapt part way through.
• Travel at your own pace in your chosen form of transport.
• Travel with the people you know and like!
• Visit small wine producers that can’t accept groups.
• Can often chat directly with winery owners and winemakers.
• Eat in small restaurants that don’t take groups.
• Work to your own budget – choose whether to spend more on food or accommodation.

Private Tours – The Minuses
• Usually requires a lot of planning (but many enjoy this part!)
• One person nearly always has to drive a car.
• Can’t necessarily get access to visit very famous wine producers.
• Possible language issues if you don’t know a word of the language concerned and are not very confident.
• Budget is not so easy to control.

A few weeks ago I was a guest on the weekly wine podcast the New Wine Consumer where we debated this very subject – you might want to listen. The consensus was that private wine tours win in most cases providing that you have a willing driver (someone prepared to be rigorous at spitting out the tasting wines or abstain) and that you are confident enough to tackle just a few words of the local language of your chosen destination, however basic. With reference to the wine regions of France, we also talked about whether or not you need appointments to visit, something we note for all the wine producers recommended in Wine Travel Guides.

I look forward to your thoughts in the comments. Happy wine travels!

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Twitter Quiz No. 12 – Ysios in Rioja

April 22, 2009

The most famous wine region in Spain – Rioja – has become recognized in recent years not just for the quality of its wines, but for the number of architecturally spectacular wineries in the region – almost certainly more of note than in other wine regions of Europe. The region is dominated by fairly large wineries, typically more New World size, rather than the boutique, family-owned wineries characteristic of most French and Italian wine regions, so these larger companies are more able to fund these fantastical structures by famous architects.

Ysios winery in Rioja

Ysios winery and vineyards in Rioja with the Cantabrian mountains behind.

The best-known architect-designed project in Rioja is Marqués de Riscal’s new winery building and hotel, designed by Frank Gehry, who also designed Bilbao’s Guggenheim museum just a couple of hours up the road. But, before that was opened, an extraordinary building could not fail to catch your eye driving through the vineyards of Rioja, the winery of Ysios, near Laguardia and owned by the giant Domecq wine group.

Tom Perry, an American resident of Rioja, who writes our two detailed micro-region travel guides to the Rioja wine region explains about Ysios:

The inspiration for the name of this winery was Isis, the Egyptian goddess of magic, and it is truly magical when you see the place for the first time, with its undulating aluminium roof against the stark backdrop of the Cantabrian mountain range. When you approach the winery, the roof reflected in a pool looks like a row of casks. Inside, architect Santiago Calatrava has created a simple yet functional design to make winemaking as easy as possible, with the movement of wine directly from one end of the winery to the other.

Congratulations to Katie of Chicago who magically came up with the right answer and wins a PDF guide of her choice.

Do follow me on Twitter for random notes about wines I’ve tasted, places I’ve been and updates to the Wine Travel Guides website. You might also want to check out our Facebook page – especially if you haven’ t yet participated in our poll as to which country we should focus on for our next guides. Please do make a comment on this blog or join in the conversation on Twitter or on Facebook  to discuss anything about travel in wine regions. A bonus: all Facebook fans and Twitter followers are eligible for discounts on subscriptions to the guides. We’ll do another twitter quiz soon.

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The cost of software

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Why Choose Microsoft for your Portal?

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conversation over lunch

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Leveraging SharePoint dialogs in Apps for SharePoint

One of the creative ways Apps for SharePoint can be exposed in a site is through the SharePoint dialog.  In this way, apps can deliver contextual capabilities to a SharePoint site.  Dialogs will typically be launched from custom actions in the app.  In this post I will discuss how to launch an app through the SharePoint dialog, pass information into the app, and close the dialog from within the app.

Launching the Dialog

Launching an app page in the SharePoint dialog requires the use of a custom action.  Apps for SharePoint support Menu Item Custom Actions and Ribbon Custom Actions.  Both of these can be deployed to the Host Web or the App Web.  The wizard for adding these custom actions makes it very easy to scope custom actions appropriately as is shown in the table below:

  Ribbon Custom Action Menu Item Custom Action
List Template X X
List Instance X X
Content Type   X
File Extension   X

As you can see in the table above, Menu Item Custom Actions have additional flexibility to scope against specific Content Types or File Extensions.  Ribbon Custom Actions are unique because they scope to a specific ribbon tab and group, which a wizard will prompt you for when added to an app:

In additional to location, Ribbon Custom Actions typically have icons associated with them.  Ribbon icons are especially challenging when deploying the custom action to the host web.  An App for SharePoint can only deploy images to the app web (via module) or remote web, neither of which will render nicely in the ribbon of the host web.  The solution is to specify the image source as a Base64 encoded image as seen below:

    <CommandUIDefinition Location="Ribbon.Documents.New.Controls._children">
        <Button Id="Ribbon.Documents.New.UploadToAzureMediaSvcButton"
            Alt="Upload to Media Services"
            LabelText="Upload to Media Services"
            Image32by32="data:image/png;base64, iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAACAAAAAgCAYAAABzenr0AAAABGdBTUEAAK/...
            Image16by16="data:image/png;base64, iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAABAAAAAQCAYAAAAf8/9hAAAABGdBTUEAAK/...

I created a quick tool to Base64 encode images, which is provided at the end of this post.  Here is the UI of that tool:

A custom action can be converted to leverage the SharePoint dialog by adding the HostWebDialog, HostWebDialogHeight, and HostWebDialogWidth attributes to the CustomAction element in the Elements.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
    <CustomAction Id="a76f4430-c8b1-4317-b673-260429ca6dc1.UploadToAzureMediaSvc"
        Title="Upload to Azure Media Services"

Passing Context to the Dialog

App will generally get contextual information from URL parameters or information posted from SharePoint.  Custom actions have a number of dynamic URL parameters they can leverage for contextual information:

URL Parameter Action Type Description
HostUrl Both URL of the host web
SiteUrl Both URL of the host site collection
Source Both The absolute path of the page invoking the custom action
ListUrlDir Both Relative URL path for the contextual list
ListId Menu Item The ID of the contextual list
SelectedListId Ribbon The ID of the contextual list
ItemId Menu Item The ID of the contextual item
SelectedItemId Ribbon Comma-separated list IDs for selected items

Closing the Dialog

Autohosted and Provider-hosted Apps for SharePoint are hosted outside of SharePoint, and as such can’t leverage typical SharePoint scripts to close the dialog (ex: SP.UI.ModalDialog.commonModalDialogClose()).  Luckily, I have hunted through many lines of core.js to find you the solution!  Similar to resizing app parts (client web parts), we can use the HTML5 postMessage API to close the dialog from the app (and optionally refresh the parent page).  This shouldn’t come as a surprise, since the postMessage API was meant to provide cross-domain communication and is used in other app scenarios.  CloseCustomActionDialogRefresh and CloseCustomActionDialogNoRefresh are the two messages SharePoint is “listening” for to close the dialog.  I wrapped these in a simple function I can releverage across all my apps:

 function closeParentDialog(refresh) {
    var target = parent.postMessage ? parent : (parent.document.postMessage ? parent.document : undefined);
    if (refresh)
        target.postMessage('CloseCustomActionDialogRefresh', '*');
        target.postMessage('CloseCustomActionDialogNoRefresh', '*');

Final Thoughts

Leveraging custom actions with the SharePoint dialog makes an app feel even more integrated than with app parts.  They provide contextual integration and are the only mechanism for pushing a change in UI on the host web (remember an app part is optionally added by a user).  Below are links to a code sample and the Image Encoder tool mentioned above:

App for SharePoint with dialogs:  SharePointDialogs.zip

Image Encoder Tool: ImageEncoder.zip

Comments (9)

  1. Dave Smith says:

    Great find with the postMessage and CloseCustomActionDialogRefresh/CloseCustomActionDialogNoRefresh.  I often used the SharePoint dialog in 2010, so it is nice to know we can use it in similar ways for apps.  Thanks!

  2. Sarah says:

    This is absolutely great post, thanks

    browse for cloud

  3. Nagesh says:

    I am getting error The 'HostWebDialog' attribute is not declared. App deployment is failed with error "Is an Unexpected Token.

    Please help me..

  4. Nikolay says:

    Thanks. this was what I needed in order to close my dialog in Provider-Hosted App.

  5. Vince says:

    Thanks Richard…very useful & that tool is fab 🙂

  6. Ernst Wolthaus says:

    Just wondering: will postMessage and CloseCustomActionDialogRefresh/CloseCustomActionDialogNoRefresh work in IE8?

  7. Elena says:

    Hi Richard,

    Is there way to update HostWebDialog, HostWebDialogHeight, and HostWebDialogWidth properties using CSOM?

  8. Vamsi says:

    Is there a way to post context from the dialog to the host web list?

  9. Sean says:

    Is there a way to resize Modal Dialogs launched in this fashion? There doesn't appear to be a "message" handler to post to on the hostweb for resizing these as there is for app parts. None of the "classic" ways of resizing a modal dialog (when not dealing with apps) work.

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Blogs by

Hiroyuki Otaki

Overview Related to my NetWeaver BPM 7.20: Enhanced task notification, I asked the way to get timestamp as unique value in BPM. This blog shows how to get timestamp by using built-in mapping functions, hence

Overview In some cases, people like e-mail and prefer to see much information in it. However, NetWeaver BPM7.2 cannot permit editing content of task notification mail sent by Human Activity. Also it is not easy


WARC-Identified-Payload-Type: application/xhtml+xml

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Game On: Angry Birds Maker Coming to China

Posted October 28th, 2011 at 1:15 am (UTC+0)

Angry Birds (愤怒的小鸟), the infamous computer game, is coming to China.

The game, of course, is already here, with nearly 40 million downloads so far. But the company behind the game, Rovio, is now setting up a center for animation in Shanghai.  The company told the China Daily that it wants to focus on the neglected feature phone market. More than 85% of China’s one-billion mobile phone users have a feature phone, like the Nokia S 40 line, as opposed to smart phones like the iPhone.

The Wall Street Journal reports Beijing’s chairman of VoDone, also collaborating with Rovio, said:30 million new handsets every year will come with the game already installed after VoDone puts the game on its platform.”

As I said, the game has already become quite popular in China, sparking a flood of plush toys that look like the birds and pigs, as well as an unauthorized Angry Birds theme park in central Hunan Province (watch the video above).

Fruit Ninja is one of the more popular game apps in China.

Fruit Ninja is one of the more popular game apps in China.

Forums have been discussing various products on Angry Birds, such as this post on Sina’s games bbs about a new iPod stereo shaped like the famous animal.

Gaming forums have also devoted pages to the technique of playing Angry Birds on the phone as well as playing it online.

App games are big part of the mobile phone experience for many. China is already proving to have a huge market for games.

China Wangre asked some game enthusiasts and saw that their interests lay with lots of different games.

Bi Tao, Sales Manager, 30 said, “The APP games that I like are “Plant & Zombies,” “Let’s Golf,” “Angry Birds” and other simple and fun games with good looking graphics. The reason I like them is because it kills time, and it’s simple and fun. My favorite is “Plants Vs Zombies.”

Paddy, a 28-year-old engineer, 28 says he’s into games with a harder edge. “I like Call Of Duty6, because I like war games. I only play big games that is bigger than 10 Gig. I don’t play smaller games,” he said.

Whereas Ray Yu, Investment Analyst manager, says he’s more interested in soccer games. “I only like car racing games and role playing games. I also like soccer games, because it’s complex enough for me. This kind of game has mobile phone APP versions like 9mm, PES2011, Need for Speed. The smallest needs 500m,” he said.

Do you play? What games are your favorite? Let us know in the comments.

2 responses to “Game On: Angry Birds Maker Coming to China”

  1. This is awesome news… the Angry Birds monopoly is going to get a huge boost from China, how can it not! its a great game been given to one of the most popular gaming countries!

    You can also play the Angry Birds Rio version online for free now as well… and I’m still waiting to try find the Seasons version yet, hope one of the developers release it soon!

  2. Sonny says:

    I like PES more than other games

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China Wangre (中国网热) is a wide-ranging look at the latest digital news and trends from the world’s largest online population.

Beijing native Alice Liu follows what’s hot and how people in China are using mobile devices, traditional websites and social media to connect with each other and the rest of the world.

Fluent in Mandarin and English, Alice has written on technology issues in China for publications such as “The Guardian”, “The Huffington Post” and “”.

Wangre means “Net Hot” in Mandarin and was picked to convey our commitment to bring the latest developments from digital China.


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Treat Yourself and Your Hair

I was recently introduced to an incredible hair care line that I just HAD to tell you all about.  Ouai has quickly become one of my beauty shelf favorites.  The “Ouai” to great hair starts with the lines Volumizing Shampoo / Conditioner combo.  I have been using the two religiously and my hair has never looked nor felt better.

The combo utilizes Smart Technology Complex that helps to replenish hairs moisture while lifting strands thus creating volume.  I love how clean my hair feels after using the combo.  The floral/musky scent is almost similar to that of Daisy by Marc Jacobs – leaves your hair smelling great.  I have actually received numerous compliments about how wonderful my hair smells since using.

I am excited to test out the entire Ouai line, I have got my eyes on their Treatment Masque next.  You can find the full selection of Ouai products at Ouai online or a Sephora near you!

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Happiness has its own weight

It might have been different had I arrived in the summer.

The city is a different island in the summertime, open, clear-skied and brilliant blue to the edges. Even the mucky shore-water out at Rockaway lightens itself, can almost be seen through if you open your eyes before a wave breaks and pulls you into the swirl. Summer here is dresses and sleeves shorter, legs leaner, drinks clinking earlier in the day, the days themselves longer, stretching out like Amsterdam, an avenue of sunlight, headed toward whatever comes next. Had I arrived here in the summer, I might have walked that line for longer, gotten far enough away. But I arrived late in the fall. The season of contracted light, of colors leaching. I arrived tilted away from the sun, and by the time winter came I had forgotten what it felt like to be warm. Forgotten sun slicking down my shoulders, sweat pooling in the creases of my skin, that ribbon of salt and water to be washed off in cool showers, before it wraps around you all over again.

There is a girl in Sheep Meadow, she’s sitting on the edge of a checkered blanket, feet bare and tucked beneath her. She looks expectant, waiting. The group of young men she sits with talk fast, easy, conversations bouncing over invisible nets, a volley and return of words, punctuated by laughter and exclamation. She is part of this, but to the side, a decoration. Unknown, but invited. Knowing the boy in the middle the longest – three, four days now, since they started talking at the laundromat, she not knowing how to get the coins to load, and he, extracting her newness, offering a thin line of friendship and his number – Come! It’s just some friends and some food in the park. They’ll all love your accent, darling. His boyfriend duly playing the part, asking her to say particular words over and again. Clapping at her vowels, rolling off the picnic blanket in a kind of mocking kindness before pouring warm white wine into her plastic cup – Ching Ching, darling! –  and telling her his own stories of the day and his life. There can be such quick intimacy to strangers. She discovers he is a hairdresser for that famous actress, and no he can’t share any secrets, but yes, that rumor really is true – it’s always true, darling! and she sips at her warm wine, smiling at her life, here, right now, in this fading light. She brought cantaloupe, diced in a plastic cup, and purple grapes, and a oversize bag of potato chips. Someone made brownies, set them out in the middle of the blanket as an offer, the residue under her fingernails now, she picks at the chocolate with her teeth, unable to say, perhaps not even knowing, how much she craves the taste of something home-made. Someone turns up music through a tinny phone speaker, Stevie Wonder becomes their soundtrack as the group passes around a joint, the weed packed tight into a ceramic cigarette. Flimsy disguise, barely a nod, as the distinctive smell wafts to other blankets, other picnics in this dusky park.

She got lost on the way here, mixed up her lakes, but she knows she’ll find her way home. It’s always easier to find your way back, but there’s something thrilling about getting lost she thinks, as she stands up and begins to dance to the familiar music, joining her new friends in their loose-limbed celebration. She can taste the weed in the back of her throat, feel her tongue go thick with it, and she’s happier than she might have ever been, with her new friends whose names she can’t remember, and their stories, and her welcoming. She hitches her flowing dress into the seams of her underwear, exposes her thighs and dances the sun all the way down the sky, twirling with him, and him, and by herself, in all this open space that she could never have imagined existed until now.

When, one by one, her new friends peel themselves away, heading off to clubs and bars and other people’s parties, she kisses them on both cheeks with each farewell, laughs and promises to come see their show, or be there next Thursday or Wednesday for dinner. Soon, she will be the only one left, and the night is pushing down on her skin, so she says goodbye herself, hugs her oldest new friend and then hugs him again as Isn’t She Lovely serenades her out and away from the meadow. Once she’s out of site, she starts to run, arms open, pulling her dress free of where she has hitched it. As it comes loose, her finger slices through the fine fabric below her hip, causing a jagged hole that she will later paste with clear nail polish, trying to prevent the tear in her dress from spreading. She will come to love this flaw and this memory of running and the high sweetness of harmonicas chasing her home. It is a hot summer night, and she emerges from the park breathless and dizzy from the wine and the weed and the newness of her life. The sky is inky now, and it seems to make everything heavier, closer somehow. This is the first time she understands that happiness has its own weight, too. That you can be thick with it, no different from sadness. She stands on the liminal in this moment, as wide awake as she has ever been, and sure this feeling is endless, a wide open breach into possibility.

She makes it to her neighborhood, feels for the first time that she fits in this place. Belongs. And I think, perhaps, had I arrived in summer, this girl would have been me.

~ Alice, What We Have Left

I was saturated with wine and Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler when I wrote this.

The girl, of course, is me 😉

Central Park Summer Days


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Open source hardware bank: P2P lending for hardware hackers

A microcredit co-op bank has sprung up in Northern California, using money pooled from hardware hackers to fund other open source hardware hacking projects. They've found 70 lenders,
Two open source hardware enthusiasts, Justin Huynh and Matt Stack, have started the Open Source Hardware Bank to fund hardware projects such as the microcontroller board pictured above.

The fledgling bank is funding only open source hardware projects using capital raised from other hardware geeks. It's like a community of Facebook friends borrowing and lending among themselves – a peer-to-peer bank.

"This speaks to the rise of the do-it-yourselfer, someone who is not just a consumer but also a producer, inventor and investor," says Huynh. "But someone also ought to be thinking about the money problem when it comes to open source hardware and we are doing just that."

So, this is a major plot element of my science fiction novel Makers, coming from Tor next October: microcredit-funded open source hardware hackers laboring in dead malls (the first third of the book was syndicated on Salon as "Themepunks"). It's always a little weird when sf starts to leak into reality.

Open Source Hardware Hackers Start P2P Bank

Liquidware Antipasto: site for Open Source Hardware Bank


text:
by Author / JT Therrien

ISBN: 978-0-921473-34-3
Copyright (c) 2017 JT Therrien
Cover Art (c) 2017 by Fine Form Press

This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. The characters are products of the author's imagination and are used fictitiously.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and it may not be re-sold or given away. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.

Cover image(s) are from Flickr.com creative commons.
Creative Commons License link:

"Over Yonder" original image copyright (c) 2017 by chumlee10

Original image modified under Creative Commons license terms by Fine Form Press 2017.

"Summertime" was originally published in the Guppy Soup short story collection by JT Therrien (Fine Form Press, 2013).

JT Therrien

In the stifling sun-filled bedroom Eugenia lay silently dying, her small body racked by age and disease. She groaned with the effort of pressing her ear against the faded wallpaper. If she listened closely enough she could hear bits and snippets of Fred and Ethel Murtz's conversation. Something about plumbing but Eugenia was unable to make out exactly what.
"Fred and Ethel," she whispered, pushing stale air through parched lips.
"What's that, Mother Adams?" Fanny's high-pitched voice startled Eugenia and she groaned again as she pressed withered fingers against her greying temples in the hope of suppressing the steady pounding. Fred and Ethel's voices gradually faded away, overpowered by the unceasing throbbing in her Eugenia's head. Through a veil of white pain, she reluctantly let them go.
Even though Fanny had been married to Martin (Eugenia's fifty-seven year old accountant son) for twenty-one years and although she had made every effort, admittedly mostly in the beginning, Eugenia had never gotten used to Fanny's nasally, grating voice. Whenever she opened her mouth to speak Eugenia's skin would crawl, making her feel uncomfortably like a nervous, angry cat coiling itself, readying to pounce. Upon further consideration, she'd never taken much of a liking to her daughter-in-law's given name, either.
She sighed deeply, her chest straining to lift the layer of dry hot air that was smothering her. There was a time, a long, long time ago, she recalled painfully, when the hot summer weather had been much more enjoyable. "Round up my son for me, will you?" Eugenia softly asked Fanny without looking at her.
Long, thin motes of dust, like crumbling marble columns, swirled upward in search of sunlight as Fanny 'harrumphed' and then left on her errand.
Eugenia closed her heavy eyelids and waited for Martin. Slowly, tentatively at first, as if loitering near the frayed edges of her consciousness for their entrance cue, Fred and Ethel returned. The new subject under discussion had to do with a wedding. A fur coat. Yelling, threats and loud tin-can laughter that periodically drowned out the couple's voices.
Eugenia smiled.

* * *

A strong wind blew dust in Eugenia's eyes, making her eyes blink spasmodically. When she could open them again she squinted against a clear blue sky and a brilliant noonday sun. She'd been told more than once that her green eyes turned a shade greener, sparkling emeralds, when they reflected the sunshine, and that thought always made her happy to be outdoors.
The car, a shiny blue convertible with wide whitewalls, travelled swiftly down the bumpy country road, trailing pink billows of dried clay behind it. She inhaled deeply, offering her senses up to the heady potpourri fragrances which conspired with the colourful patchwork of wild summer flowers to overwhelm her.
Eugenia quickly glanced to her left, suddenly realizing, remembering. Her heart beat wildly and she lost her breath when she gazed at the man sitting next to her, confidently driving the car. Black, immobile hair, cut as if he had just come out of the army; a strong, square jaw and clean-shaven face that seemed both rugged and tender. Zach's big callused hands rested easily on the black steering wheel, guiding the car down the serpentine dirt road with ease. Yes, Zachary was there.
Of course, he would be.
"Zachary," Eugenia sighed, love filling her.
"What are you smiling at, sweetheart?" Zachary asked as he returned her glance. He grinned from ear to ear, looking like a kid who has finally got his hands around the biggest and best prize at the county fair.
"Nothing," Eugenia replied, smiling, feeling like a prize. "It's just that . . ." her voice dropped, became sombre, as she admitted, "I've missed you, Zachary." The rushing wind whipped strands of hair into her eyes and she was surprised at its length and colour; the dark henna of her youth. She marvelled at how Zachary's black crew-cut obstinately resisted the constant onrush of air. Eugenia took hold of her husband's free hand and squeezed it tenderly.
He glanced down, seeing her small fingers lost in his wide palm, and he smiled self-consciously.
She happily threw her head back against the seat and closed her eyes to the pressing wind.
As the car went over a small crest in the road she exclaimed, "Ooh . . . . That tickled my tummy!" and laughed easily.
Zachary smiled at her, white teeth, perfect smile.
"You still haven't told me where we're going." Eugenia's small voice was all but lost in the roar of the wind and the rumble of the Ford's powerful engine.
"Port," he replied, keeping his eyes fixed on the road.
"Port Colborne. To look at the boats," Zachary added after having covered a few more miles down the scorched dirt road.
"The boats!" Eugenia exclaimed. "Oh, I just love to watch those big ships going through the canal. It's been such a long time since we've seen them!" She smiled. "Remember the last time? We spent a whole afternoon just watching those huge, grey ships float by on their way to the east coast? Or was it the west coast?"
"It was both. They go both ways, Genie." Zach laughed at her confusion.
They rode in silence, happy to be in each other's company. Eugenia asked, "When are we stopping for lunch?" She glanced at her watch. "It's going on quarter of twelve and I'm getting a bit hungry. You?"
Zachary was about to reply when the black and white Holstein lumbered across the road, emerging from a break in the dust-covered brush. He quickly stepped on the brake pedal, but . . .
"Oh, Zachary," whispered Eugenia, feeling hot tears well up and roll down the craggy wrinkles etched in her face.
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Tag Archives: Matthias Helvar

  1. November Reading Wrap Up

    December 2, 2016 by Betty

    Guys, the months literally fly by. How is it even possible that November is already over? We are one month …
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  2. Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo (Six of Crows #2)

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    November 21, 2016 by Betty

    Title: Crooked Kingdom (Six of Crows #2) Author: Leigh Bardugo Publication Date: September 27, 2016 Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy Synopsis: …
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Finland: Open WiFi Access Point Owner Not Liable For Infringement 156

New submitter mjrauhal writes "In Finland, the operator of an open WiFi access point was found not guilty for copyright infringement allegedly committed over said access point. The operation of such access points would have become legally risky were this decided otherwise. Appeal by the Finnish Anti-Piracy Center is still possible for this district court ruling."

Global Payments Breach Led To Prepaid Card Fraud 50

tsu doh nimh writes "Global Payments, the Atlanta-based credit card processor that disclosed a major breach of its systems last month, has said that less than 1.5 million card numbers were stolen, and that customer names and addresses weren't included in the purloined data. But security reporter Brian Krebs carries a piece today highlighting how thieves were still able to use the data to clone debit cards, which were then used in shopping sprees in and around the Las Vegas area recently."

Solyndra's High-tech Plant To Be Sold 233

Velcroman1 writes, quoting Fox News: "For sale: manufacturing and office facility with 411,618 square feet, state of the art electrical, air, and power distribution systems — and a troubled past. As part of its bankruptcy proceedings, Solyndra is reportedly very close to landing a buyer for its mammoth, high-tech production plant in Fremont, Calif. The listing agent recently gave Fox News a tour of what the new owners will get for their multi-million dollar investment. Now the once-bustling offices, conference rooms, and cubicles are eerily quiet as the facility is 'decommissioned,' according to Greg Matter with Jones Lang LaSalle realty. One wonders about the conversations held, and emails written, in the corner office formerly occupied by CEO Brian Harrison."

LulzSec Member Pleads Not Guilty In Stratfor Leak Case 89

TheGift73 writes with an update on one of the many LulzSec court cases. From the article: "A former LulzSec member has pleaded not guilty to federal charges that he hacked into the servers of global intelligence company Stratfor and stole credit card data and personal details of 860,000 of its clients. Jeremy Hammond entered the plea on Monday during a brief hearing in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, the Associated Press reported. He's been held in federal custody since an initial court appearance in Chicago in early March, when federal prosecutors named him as a lieutenant of LulzSec ringleader Hector Xavier 'Sabu' Monsegur. There was no request for Hammond to be released on bail during Monday's hearing, according to the AP report."

Wireless Implants Promise Superior Vision Restoration 52

ananyo writes, quoting Nature: "The development of retinal implants has been dogged by problems of unwieldiness since the first implantable stimulator for vision restoration was developed in 1968. Now researchers have come up with a solution that overcomes many of the problems by the use of special glasses that fire infrared signals into the eye and onto an implanted array of silicon photodiodes. The system, tested in rats, simplifies what needs to be implanted and both transmits visual data and power directly to the implants, eliminating the need for any bulky external power source (abstract)."
United Kingdom

UK To Give Peer-Reviewed Science Libel Protection 101

scibri writes "England is finally getting around to updating its notoriously plaintiff-friendly libel laws, which have been extensively criticized for stifling scientific debate in the past few years, such as in the case of Simon Singh. The government introduced a defamation bill last week that would extend explicit protection to statements in scientific or academic journals — providing the work was properly peer reviewed. The protection would also extend to reports of academic and scientific conferences. The proposed legislation is popular among the UK's researchers and journalists, but a similar law on whistleblower protection has had mixed reviews in the U.S."

Plastic Logic Shows Off a Color ePaper Screen 50

Nate the greatest writes "I'm sure you've heard about the color E-ink screen which was rumored to be used on the next Kindle. As of today, E-ink no longer has that market niche to themselves. Plastic Logic held a press conference in Russia this morning where they unveiled a new color screen that uses their plastic-based screen tech. The resolution is low (75ppi), but if the video is any sign, then this might be a better screen than the 9.7" Triton color E-ink screen used on the Jetbook Color. And that's not all Plastic Logic showed off this morning; they also developed a frontlight for their screen, and they can play video at 12 frames per second. But best of all, they cut one of their screens in half just to show that it could still work."

Ron Paul Effectively Ending Presidential Campaign 745

New submitter Dainsanefh sends this quote from the LA Times: "Ron Paul, Mitt Romney's lone remaining rival for the Republican presidential nomination, announced Monday that he would stop spending money on the party's 11 remaining primaries, in effect suspending his campaign. ... Apart from President Obama and Romney, Paul has raised more money than any other White House contender this year – more than $36 million. His calls for strict adherence to the Constitution and his no-nonsense manner have spawned a vocal and well organized group of followers, but not enough to give him a realistic shot at the presidency."

GAME Australia Now Also In Administration 57

Fluffeh writes "Yesterday the Australian Division of GAME saw an email from their Marketing Manager confirming that the 95-store chain has gone into voluntary administration. PriceWaterhouseCoopers partner Kate Warwick said, 'Initially we will continue to trade all stores, operating these on as close to a "business as usual" mode as possible whilst we get a clearer understanding of the current state of the business and actively pursue options to secure its future.' It also seems that GAME is having a bit of a fire sale, with many titles, including quite a few new releases, now in a $5-$74 bargain bin. Ms. Warwick also noted that the company's customers hold various claims against the company under loyalty cards, gift cards and vouchers. She said, 'We are working on schemes aimed at giving customers some return on these claims if they are used to make additional purchases.'" This follows similar news from the UK in March.

Kodak Basement Lab Housed Small Nuclear Reactor 169

McGruber writes "The Rochester (NY) Democrat-Chronicle has the interesting story of the Eastman Kodak Co.'s Californium Neutron Flux Multiplier, which was housed in Building 82 of Kodak Park in Rochester, NY. The multiplier contained 3½ pounds of highly enriched (weapons-grade) uranium. Kodak used it to check chemicals and other materials for impurities, as well as for tests related to neutron radiography, an imaging technique. From the article: 'When Kodak decided six years ago to close down the device, still more scrutiny followed. Federal regulators made them submit detailed plans for removing the substance. When the highly enriched uranium was packaged into protective containers and spirited away in November 2007, armed guards were surely on hand. All of this — construction of a bunker with two-foot-thick concrete walls, decades of research and esoteric quality control work with a neutron beam, the safeguarding and ultimate removal of one of the more feared substances on earth — was done pretty much without anyone in the Rochester community having a clue.'"
Wireless Networking

LightSquared Files For Bankruptcy 138

fallen1 writes "Wireless broadband company LightSquared has filed for bankruptcy. In filings with U.S. Bankruptcy court, it was revealed that LightSquared had assets and debts of over $1 billion each. The decision followed a year-long fight between LightSqaured and GPS users — including some heavyweights like FedEx and UPS. Apparently Boeing and Alcatel-Lucent are heavily invested, but it would be interesting to see what the old Bell Labs could do with the technology."

Report Highlights 10 Sites Unfairly Blocked By UK Mobile Internet Censorship 94

Mark.JUK writes "The Open Rights Group (ORG), which works to raise awareness of digital rights and civil liberties issues, has published a new report that examines the impact of internet censorship on UK mobile networks and lists an example of 10 legitimate websites that often get unfairly blocked (PDF) by adult content filters (over-blocking). The study is important because similar measures could soon be forced upon fixed-line broadband ISP subscribers by the UK government. Some of the allegedly unfair blocks include censorship of the 'Tor' system, a privacy tool used by activists and campaigners across the globe, and the website of French 'digital rights' advocacy group 'La Quadrature du Net.'"

Windows RT Browser Restrictions Draw Antitrust Attention 375

An anonymous reader writes "Last week we heard complaints from Mozilla that Windows RT would restrict users' choice in web browsers, unfairly favoring Internet Explorer over alternatives like Firefox and Chrome. Unfortunately for Microsoft, the situation is now on the Senate Judiciary Committee's radar, and they will look into claims that Microsoft is engaging in anti-competitive behavior. That said, it could be a difficult case to make, since Windows RT is destined for ARM-based tablets, and Apple currently dominates that market. 'When it comes to proving abuse of monopoly power, an important question is determining the market in which a monopolist has power — the relevant market, in antitrust legal terms. In the [late '90s] DOJ case, U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's findings of fact concluded Microsoft had a monopoly in the market for "Intel-compatible PC operating systems." Windows on ARM doesn't run on x86 chips, so by Jackson's standards, Windows RT hasn't been judged to be part of Microsoft's monopoly.' Microsoft addressed some of these issues in a blog post in February."

Kickstarter Leaves Project Ideas Exposed 56

netbuzz writes "Crowd-funding startup Kickstarter is taking a public-relations hit today after it was reported that some 70,000 not-yet-public project ideas were left exposed on the company's Web site for more than two weeks. Kickstarter insists that no financial information was compromised and that only a few dozen of the projects were actually accessed. 'Obviously our users' data is incredibly important to us, the company said in a blog post. 'Even though limited information was made accessible through this bug, it is completely unacceptable.'"

Minneapolis Airport Gets $20 Million Hi-Tech Security Upgrade 104

New submitter bzzfzz writes "The Metropolitan Airports Commission (MAC) is beginning a $20 million upgrade of its surveillance system. The upgrade will include 1800 high-definition cameras, facial recognition systems, and digital archiving to replace the analog tape system in use since the 1980s. The system will serve both security and operational goals. The MAC asserts that improved camera technology yields improved security as though the connection between the two is so strong that no proof is required."

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Up until now, being a student with an admittedly large student loan debt, but no credit cards, mortgage or stocks and shares, the so-called ‘credit crunch’ has hardly affected me personally – indeed, part of me has been hopeful that the drop in house prices might mean I can actually afford to buy something in a few years time – provided I have a job with a salary that would allow me to get a mortgage.

Although I know other students who have recently graduated or, like me, are graduating in 2009, who were planning on careers in the financial sector and who are now having to think again, I also know people who have done exceptionally well on the hedge fund traineeships they were accepted onto, and the university Careers Service diary is still full of recruitment events for law firms, management consultancies and big financial companies such as Goldman Sachs and Pricewaterhouse Coopers.

Therefore I wasn’t unduly worried about my prospects; I know what industry I want to work for, and by all accounts publishing hasn’t been doing too badly recently.  Some publishers almost seem more worried about the effect the removal of Friday Night with Jonathon Ross will have on  sales, this being one of the main forums for plugging the Christmas blockbuster books, than on the effects of the credit crunch.  I have heard it said that more people are returning to books as a cheaper form of entertainment.

Reading here that HarperCollins are freezing recruitment until the start of 2009 at the earliest wasn’t the best of news for me, though I guess it is inevitable that the credit crunch caught up with publishing eventually.  I don’t pretend to know much about the economic ins and outs of it, but Neill Denny provides quite a good analysis here.  He seems to imply that it is the middle level earners that will lose out the most, as publishers turn to young interns willing to work for ‘pocket money’ in order to cut financial corners, but obviously this is not an ideal situation.  There would be a loss in skills, and no-one wants to work for a pittance long term – people like me are willing to do unpaid work experience because of the expectation that when we’ve done our time, there will be a full-time job at the end of it.  There do seem to be a few entry level assistants jobs advertised in the Bookseller every week, but there is a lot of competition for them and it is hard for me to judge whether there are fewer jobs being advertised than in previous years.

So I’m guessing that there won’t be a Graduate Scheme for me to apply to at Harper Collins this year; nor are Penguin running one.  I’ve applied for Macmillan’s and it would be fantastic to get it, but the MA Publishing is still looking like a very good option, despite the cost.  By the time I get an MA, perhaps the publishing recruitment market will have settled down a bit, and publishers will be keen to employ young, qualified and passionate people willing to work for a low-ish starting salary once again!


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sixteen − 7 =

seventeen − 10 =

The Late Bloomer [2016]

The Late Bloomer [2016] is the narrative debut for director Kevin Pollak. The story follows Peter Newmans, a sex therapist who goes through puberty at an accelerated rate after having a small tumor removed. The film is based on the memoir Man Made: A Memoir of My Body, which chronicles the real-life experience of journalist Ken Baker and his struggle with Prolactinoma.

Is it 2006 or 2016? This film could have worked well if it were released in the early millennia with all those teen raunchy flicks we love and know so well. The Late Bloomer is dated, clinging on to tired clichés and archaic notions of how sex is and what it means in its correlation to masculinity. Apparently, sex is very important to being a man. This film hinges on the fact that if a man is asexual he must be either a sociopath, gay or a giant freakazoid. Once Peter’s condition is revealed, everyone rejoices. YAY! I’m not a freak! My friend isn’t a weirdo! My son is a normal human being! In the end, you can see the clear attempt to make this film warm-hearted, but the lowbrow script just comes across as insensitive in terms of sex and sexuality in 2016.

TESTOSTERONE! It took five guys to pen this script. You’d think if you got that many men together, they’d be able to contribute some new material about puberty and/or manhood. Instead, we got a cornball movie with predictable sex jokes and a contrived ending about what it means to truly be a man. Is this film a raunchy sex comedy or romantic comedy? These guys have no idea hence the awkward tonal shift. There isn’t enough charm or emotional resonance for the former and, frankly, not enough penetration for the latter. The one thing these guys did agree on was that it’s some type of comedy, but was this film even funny? Nah, not really. There were a few short laughs, but they mostly come in the form of one-liners from an underutilized supporting cast.

We Need to Talk About Kevin. It’d be interesting to see what Pollak could have done with better material since he himself is a comedic genius. The improvisational freedom he grants the actors may be what saved the film from being a total disaster since The Late Bloomer relies heavily on its dialogue for comedy. Pollack was able to capture genuinely funny moments simply by letting his cast feed off of one another. Overall, The Late Bloomer isn’t a terrible film, but it isn’t a very good one either.

A unique premise that was wasted on this 90-minute penis joke.

The Late Bloomer [2016]
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Happy Birthday Basil Rathbone

HAPPY 122ND BIRTHDAY BASIL RATHBONE! “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Basil, happy birthday to you!!!!!!!!!!”

I will include here a small thing I wrote, something of a letter to my dear Basil. (Don’t make fun of me, okay!)

“Dear Sir,

I’m writing this to thank you, to thank you for everything. You’ve done so much for me, you have no idea. It may sound crazy to you that someone who’s never met you could be so profoundly impacted by you, but what can I say, I am a little crazy. I really do owe you so much. You have been an inspiration to me in more ways than I could count, sometimes even in little things like spring cleaning, picking tomatoes, reading Shakespeare, or going to get a blood test, and sometimes in big things, like my passion for the lost souls in Hollywood, a passion that started with you, and pretty much my life purpose and in general. You mean so much to me. Next to my Pappy and my Mom and Dad, you are my biggest role model. I respect you so much. You’re kind of like a father figure to me, in a strange, round about kind of way. I love you, and I always will. Happy birthday.

Thank you, so, so much,

Today we are going to have Basil’s favorite meal, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding (and my sister’s gonna make rice because she can’t eat the Yorkshire pudding,) and I’m going to bake a cake and decorate it and put candles on it. We’re also going to watch one of his movies tonight, I don’t know which, though.

One thought on “Happy Birthday Basil Rathbone

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68 Factors Arguing for Earth’s Design

Say what you want about the fine-tuning argument and the old earth viewpoint from which this is written, but this still gives me chills.

Of the 68 factors discussed here that are perfectly calibrated to bring life to earth, I was previously aware of only 17 of them. From the galactic to the elemental, all points to the God behind the cosmic curtain.

Thankd to Bruce Cooper for pointing this one out.

Easter Eggs in the Christmas Story

When it comes to storytelling, the writers of Lost have nothing on our Lord. He weaves hints, parallels, symbolism, foreshadowings, and callbacks throughout his narrative with the skill of a master. So exciting.

I have no words. Just watch.

Moon Landings, Conspiracies, and the Reliability of the Bible

A common strategy to watch for from Biblical skeptics.Did you know that some people don’t believe we landed on the moon?

Seriously. They think that NASA tried, couldn’t, and faked it on a TV soundstage to save face before Russia.

They’ll tell you there is “evidence” to prove it. They’ll pepper you with dozens of “facts” that will supposedly doom your beliefs about the Apollo program.

Some of these facts are actually intriguing and can catch the layman off guard. “Why aren’t there any stars in the lunar photographs?” “Why didn’t the lunar modules leave any craters?” “How could the astronauts’ air-conditioning work in the vacuum of space?” “Why is so much Apollo 11 telemetry missing?” “Why do the astronauts’ memories seem to contradict each other?”

Their strategy: to present an elephantine list of supposed problems with the Apollo accounts, and then hope you’re overwhelmed by the sheer length of the list.

And when you launch into a blow-by-blow rebuttal of each and every point, they spring their trap.

“OH, COME ON!!!” they say. “You look ridiculous. If there are this many holes, it can’t possibly be true!”

And yet…they’re still wrong.

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Totality: God’s Scientific Signature On Life

eclipse1I jaunted down to Idaho on Monday in a bid to catch the solar eclipse in totality.

Had to take a day off work to do it. 900 miles of driving in 28 hours. The same weekend as a 35-mile hike. I was too exhausted to stay awake on the drive back to town after the event (my aunt drove back), and I got a bit sick at work the following day.

Worth it.

Words suck to describe a total solar eclipse. The awe, the indescribable wrongness of a giant hole-like thing staring down like a glaring eye – it’s bizarre. Chilling. Powerful. The shadow rushed towards and over us from the western horizon. Everything got cold. The corona hung frozen around the moon’s edges like white fishnets (or Bernie Sanders’ hair). It looked – well, three-dimensional. Like real objects blow you away after you’ve only viewed the 2-D pictures.

But the most awe-inspiring part was the scientific articles I read beforehand.

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Reflections on “The Case for Christ”

“Stop blaming me, and the church, and God, and do your job!”

That exclamation from a Christian to the character of atheist Lee Strobel in Pure Flix’s The Case for Christ (based on the book of the same name) landed on my soul like an affirming balm. I wanted to fist-pump. Echoing in those words is the frustration and annoyance of Christians worldwide and down through the millennia.

It’s not that getting mocked for our faith surprises us (as long as we’ve read our Bible). What’s frustrating is how lazily it’s done.

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“God’s Only Excuse is Easter!”

flowersIn Disappointment with God, author Philip Yancey describes a series of conversations with a young friend named Richard, who has turned away from the faith.

One of Richard’s big beefs with the idea of God is the conundrum of suffering. This one gets us all. Why does a loving and powerful God allow suffering, and all that.

Over the last few years, I’ve felt a part of me becoming impatient with that question, as I’ve found too many skeptics to be merely hiding behind it rather than honestly seeking an answer. And there are answers. But I’ve tried to hold off my cynicism and remain understanding, for I know suffering weakens and disheartens. It’s especially true for the skeptic, as they have no hope of an “inexpressible and glorious joy” (1 Peter 1:8) to sustain them.

After lambasting God for his treatment of Job, his apparent detachment from mankind, and every other angle he can, Richard eventually rounds it out with an interesting phrase:

“God’s only excuse is Easter!”

It was one of those phrases that sums up everything you’ve ever suspected but never quite has the eloquence or brevity to say.

I wouldn’t say Richard is theologically correct in saying that. God has, off the top of my head, at least one other great excuse for allowing suffering: the chance to demonstrate his ability to sustain and empower us in the middle of it. It’s quite Scriptural to say that this is sometimes the sole reason for our suffering: creating an opportunity for him to make our hearts ironclad, untouchable by despair and brimming with joy even in jail or on the sickbed.

But you have to admit: even if Easter were God’s only excuse, it’s a whopper of an excuse.

If the claims of Christianity are true, an afterlife is available whose gladness far outweighs any pain we experience on this earth (Romans 8:18) – and for those who reject it, a penalty whose horror far outweighs any peace, prosperity, or good we achieve on this earth.

Which means that judging God by what happens on this earth is…well, you can hardly call it a worthy verdict.

The ideas of heaven and hell may feel like cheap cop-out and motivation, respectively, for a church trying to boost its numbers. It may feel ridiculously out of touch with our modern era’s respect for what can be seen, felt, and proven. It may feel like the last thing you want to hear in the midst of today’s suffering.

But how it feels has no bearing on whether its claims are true.

That is why the claims of Christianity are too great to ignore, or dismiss as good-for-you experiential truth. They demand examination.

And if the story of the resurrection of Christ truly happened, if it bears examination then it’s all true – making the Gospel a message of enormous generosity, and enormous warning.

Though God is bringing all things together for his own glory first and foremost, he is hardly callous enough to leave our groaning hearts out of the equation. He has promised us rewards. He has prepared a great many things for those who will believe; he asks only that we receive him.

I pray fervently that the unbeliever might examine these claims.

Nine Prophecies in Two Chapters

starI read Matthew’s Christmas story last night. It took no less than two chapters to blow me away.

Reading God’s word is never a chore, for we always uncover something fresh and unexpected. This time, for me, it was the sheer number of prophecies being fulfilled about Jesus before he could even walk. You can’t swing a dead cat in Matthew 2 without hitting a prophecy. These events were seemingly random, sometimes tragic, and it’s difficult to imagine that the prophets who described them even understood how they would unfold. In just the first two chapters, there are a whopping nine prophecies fulfilled, making the likelihood of fulfillment almost astronomical without even accounting for prophecies in other books.

Let’s get into it.

#1: The virgin birth fulfilling Isaiah 7:14

But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”

All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” (which means “God with us”). (1:20-23)

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Making Holiness Thrilling: What the Angels Longed to Look Into

peekOur youth group is currently in the midst of our annual “purity series”.

Our youth group sees fit to devote several weeks every February to the subject of purity with its many angles, and I can’t disagree with their choice. Given the escalating danger that sexual promiscuity poses to our young people in today’s bankrupt society, an emphatic approach seems right.

Last night’s message featured possibly the best possible angle on purity, the best reason to pursue purity.

It came, rather unexpectedly (for me), out of 1 Peter 1 – a passage that gives holiness the backdrop of a cosmic secret, withheld even from the angels.

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What an Unbelieving Air Force Sergeant Taught Me About Obeying God

f-16-66232_960_720During my time in the Air Force, I had a boss named Sergeant Carlson.

He was the kind of leader you talk about years later and would still gladly shake his hand. He had a gift for balancing the needs of the mission with genuine concern for the troops under his charge. We knew he really cared. We also knew he wouldn’t hesitate to snap us back in line if we needed it. (As with any young punk, there were days when I needed it.)

A season came in which I was not performing well. I got two Letters of Counseling (LOCs) in a short span, one from Sgt. Carlson, one from another sergeant in our office. My mistakes had grounded a couple jets from their scheduled sorties. I had earned both reprimands straight up, and thanks to God, I had enough maturity to accept them with humility.

But inside, the story was different: one reprimand was a lot easier to accept. You can probably guess that it was Sgt. Carlson’s.

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Just Around the Next Switchback

hikers“I don’t think I’m gonna make it,” I panted.

Below us sprawled the Flathead Valley in its pristine summer beauty, seemingly close enough to touch, the houses and trees like playthings from our vantage at 7,000 feet.

But I barely noticed the view. My friend and I were sitting, gasping for breath, on Columbia Mountain on Friday with 30-pound packs – an elevation gain of 4,500 feet in 6 miles – and I was more exhausted than ever in my life. Seriously. This beat even my black belt test.

I don’t know whether it was the altitude, being out of shape, or both, but my arms were going numb, my legs shaking, and a deep pain starting in my chest. The scorching sun beat down (seriously, moon, you couldn’t eclipse three days sooner?); sweat beaded and dripped off our necks. Everything was dust (the trees having long ago gotten smaller due to altitude).

It had become switchback, switchback, five minute rest, repeat. The summit was in view, but stubbornly refused to grow closer. Was the mountain growing as we hiked?

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2016 was a strange year: more refugees, Brexit, the US Election disaster, a coup d’état by the Government in Turkey, the destruction of Aleppo, Russian and Chinese hacking, the mainstream emergence of artificial intelligence, and self-driving cars are hitting the road. The environmental record is worse than predicted: mass extinction is under way, the oceans are rising, the cities are growing. We hope that more technology will save us, because going back is not an option. Many people are increasingly skeptical about the course of the world, and everybody seems to feel a deepening uncertainty about our future. I recently read on a wall in Berkeley: Your Utopia is my Dystopia.

Political Turmoil

One ray of hope is the new UN Secretary-General, António Guterres. He was a former Portuguese Prime Minister, and then he became the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in 2005. He understands the splits in our world probably better than anyone else, and he said: “Today’s paradox is that despite greater connectivity, societies are becoming more fragmented. More and more people live within their own bubbles, unable to appreciate their links with the whole human family,

Brexit is an example of the fragmentation of Europe, and the US election has increased the deep divisions within American society. It is the story of a stolen election, and of a sinister Russian puppeteer who skillfully exploits the weaknesses of open societies. Economic disenfranchisement merges with nationalist self-interest to form a toxic mix on the right side of the political spectrum, and these ideological formations insulate themselves against any reality checks.

All developed industrialized societies face the same problem: Economic and technological globalization has leveled the playing field between poor and rich countries, and as a result, the people in rich countries are getting poorer, while a small elite in these countries is getting much richer. This dynamic will spawn more political conflicts, and possibly even wars. 2017 will bring more turmoil and transformation. Turning against free trade and globalization is a popular but nevertheless a failing strategy. Many of the problems we face today cannot be solved by individual states anymore, even if they are as big as the United States. We need better systems of multi-national governance, and we need a deeper sense of global justice in politics.

Historical progress has always been uneven. The human rights discourse is still our best chance to move towards a better world, less dominated by power politics. Human rights include political participation and adequate representation. Free and fair elections are the cornerstone of this process. But authoritarian governments still rule in many countries: The Chinese never elected their leader or the Communist Party, Putin ignored term limits, manipulated the elections, and abolished the free press in Russia, Erdogan turns to a cult of personality and arrests hundreds of thousands of government workers and civil servants, including many academics. Countries like Iran, Saudi-Arabia, Egypt, are all failing miserably when it comes to basic democracy and the protection of human rights. None of these governments will transform quietly into better systems. Their mode of operation is corruption and a strange form of state-controlled capitalism. The case of China shows that corruption has become so systemic that it is now uncontrollable. What do you do as a citizen, when murderers and criminals have taken over the government, like in Russia? Nations need deep democracy, or else the state quickly becomes a violent institution.

Unfortunately, the recent American election has cast a shadow over the idea that democracy works in large and advanced societies. We recognize today that the public sphere, or the “will of the people,” can be manipulated too easily. America demonstrates for the second time in 20 years that it is not a democracy. Hillary won by 3 million votes, but Trump becomes President, due to an electoral system that was created to account for population numbers during the times of slavery. The election result was forged through a strangely distorted political discourse, driven by deprivation and anger, and often in opposition to the facts. Trump is a demagogue and a con-man, he does not have the character or credibility to unify the country. He is an illegitimate President, without a mandate to govern. The Republicans currently control all institutions of power, but they will face the opposition in the streets and in social media. America is at war with itself, and the end of American hegemony may be near. Who will step into this vacuum?

The problems with American leadership are also evident in the Middle East. 5000 people drowned in the Mediterranean Sea in 2016 alone, and the U.N. estimates that about 400,000 people have been killed in Syria since the war started in 2011. The US Government argues that it does not have the authority to intervene, and Syria has no strategic importance for the US. The “War Powers Act” from 1973 provides that the U.S. President can send U.S. Armed Forces into action abroad only by declaration of war by Congress. 1 At the same time, ISIS operates from within Syria and Iraq and has conducted a series of terror attacks in Western countries and Turkey. By refusing to intervene more strongly, Obama has created a very dangerous situation for Europe, and he is indirectly responsible for many of these deaths. Syria represents a failure of moral and political leadership in the United States and in Europe. The world is forced to witness helplessly how barbarous acts are committed every day: This is the failure of politics in our times.

Miscellaneous observations

  • We need to rethink our idea of politics with nature in mind: The ecological problems we face today cannot be solved by treating ecological destruction only as a management problem, or a business opportunity. A deeper acknowledgment of nature is necessary for our survival. This means that our systems of production and consumption have to change. For example, animals are not just food.
  • What worries me most in terms of future trends is the increasing release of genetically modified organisms into nature. This process permanently alters global ecosystems, and the consequences and systemic effects of these changes are unpredictable. In addition, antibiotic treatments are losing their effectiveness. One major flu epidemic could wipe out millions of people and demonstrate the limits of human control over nature.
  • One of the under-appreciated trends in the last hundred years is the rate of urbanization. Currently, 54% of total world population are city-dwellers. This rate increases by 2.05% annually; in 1950, the world urbanization rate was only 30%. Urbanization has deep implications for a wide range of issues including food, water, transportation, and energy consumption.
  • The ten largest urban agglomerations together hold more than 200 million people. They are: Tokyo (Japan) 38,001,000; New Delhi (India) 25,703,000; Shanghai (China) 23,741,000; Sao Paulo (Brazil) 21,066,000; Mumbai (India) 21,043,000; Mexico City 20,999,000; Beijing 20,384,000; Osaka (Japan) 20,238,000; Cairo (Egypt) – 18,772,000; New York-Newark (US) – 18,593,000. Mega-cities are now bigger than some countries, and they pose a new kind of challenge for human civilization. It is also noteworthy that the only city from the Western hemisphere included in this list is New York.
  • Incomes erode not only because jobs move overseas, but because many jobs are becoming obsolete due to technological automation. Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne wrote in a famous 2013 study that about 47 percent of work was in danger of disappearing in the United States by 2040. This trend is accelerating as well, and it is global.
  • One sign of the coming turmoil is the increasing irrelevance of job titles. They are becoming useless because people do jobs that are defined by an agglomeration of skills, not by a specific function.
  • Institutions like universities, hospitals, government agencies, and regular corporations, are getting more tightly integrated via their central information systems and websites. University libraries become data centers and communication hubs. This allows the quantification of almost every aspect of life and work, and puts everything we do into the context of “big data.”
  • The new business model is “disruption.” Nobody can be certain about the future anymore, and I wonder when and how my own profession of psychotherapy will be disrupted or transformed as well. The tendency to streamline psychotherapy by insurance companies is already a real challenge.
  • Many people I know are struggling to keep their lives focused on what is truly essential for them. Our environments are increasingly rich and complex; contemporary life easily becomes an overwhelming experience. Ideas that help me to stay focused are “absorption speed” and “simplicity.” How fast can I personally adjust to new technologies and practices? Also, staying focused today requires elimination and strong filtering. For this reason, I have entitled this post “the search for simplicity.” I aim to use approximately 20% of my working time for self-organization, and I try to stay focused on narrowly defined goals. Let’s see how this works in the coming year.

Statistics for this website

The traffic for this website continued to grow rapidly in 2016, according to the AWSTATS traffic analyzer. Here are some numbers:

  • The website had 115,194 unique visitors, with 1.44 visits per visitor. On average, each visitor calls up 6.6 pages. Compared to 2015, the number of visitors grew by 38,925, or more than 50%, over the total of 2015. If the trend holds, we will reach 150,000 visitors in 2017, which means that the traffic volume doubled in two years.
  • There were 165,449 total visits, 763,500 pages called, and 5.01 million hits.
  • I created 19 posts in 2016; the website now has 100 posts. Here is a sitemap.
  • I also added 35 pages (pages are different from posts, which are only written by me. Pages contain quotes from various authors as well as longer texts). Now the website has a total of 443 pages. You can find a list of popular posts and recent pages here.
  • The search phrase that brought the most traffic to Trialectics.com is still “characteristics of human rights,” which lands visitors on a post from January 2015 about Human Rights.
  • The website currently runs on WordPress version 4.7

Trip to Germany

During December 2016 I visited Germany to meet with friends and family. I was mainly in Berlin and Coburg, my hometown. I visited the major museums in Berlin, and here are some pictures from the trip:

  1. The President needs this “statutory authorization.” The President can also enter into armed conflict in the case of an emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces, but the War Powers Resolution Act requires the President to notify Congress within 48 hours of committing armed forces to military action, and forbids armed forces from remaining for more than 60 days, with a further 30-day withdrawal period, without a Congressional authorization for use of military force, or a declaration of war by the United States. The resolution was passed by two-thirds of Congress, overriding a presidential veto.

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