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An Elkmont man gets Miami Heat-approval with Noah basketball product

ELKMONT, Alabama - In an almost empty gym in northern Limestone County, a 19-year-old man is making jump shot after jump shot.

The machine on the wall keeps blurting out the same number after each shot.

"45...45...45," the computerized voice says.

As Michael Carter makes another jump shot, his father, John, says, "That's what the Miami Heat has."

That's the Miami Heat of the National Basketball Association - the newly crowned world champions. That's the LeBron James, Dwyane Wade-led Miami Heat.

That's the Miami Heat, the first NBA team to purchase and install the product that's on the wall of the Elkmont High School gym.

The product is known as the Noah Instant. It's a black box that tracks the arc of a player's shot.

The computerized voice announces the degree of the arc, along with the depth of the shot.

In the case of Michael Carter, he's shooting at the perfect arc - 45 degrees.

"Who built the perfect arc (ark)?" said John Carter, explaining the company's name. "Noah."

It's an unlikely story, to be sure, someone from Elkmont doing business with the Miami Heat.

But John Carter, 47, has developed strong ties to high school, college and professional basketball since he became the CEO of Noah Basketball in 2005.

Among his customers are some of the biggest names in college basketball - the University of Connecticut, the University of Kentucky, the University of Louisville, the University of Tennessee women and Gonzaga University, among them.

He counts Auburn, Georgia, the University of North Carolina women among others who have purchased Noah products. His local clients include Albertville High School.

For star power, though, the Miami Heat is unsurpassed.

"LeBron and Dwyane Wade - it gets no bigger than that," John Carter said.

Wade's endorsement of the Noah Instant was the subject of an article in February.

"Dwyane Wade's number is 45 and LeBron James won't let him forget it," the article began. "As a friendly reminder, LeBron yells the number at him every time Wade steps to the free throw line."

Wade had been a line-drive free throw shooter. His free throw percentage had dropped to 71 percent, down from his career percentage of 77.

His percentage increased to 82 percent after working with Noah Instant, according to the article.

"That machine in great," Wade said in the article. "It's great for me and it's great for other guys to hear when you're making shots what number you're at.

"You can feel it. I've been feeling better at the line because of it."

Gary Boren, the free-throwing shooting coach for the Dallas Mavericks, the NBA champions last season, says the Noah products are "getting traction" in professional basketball.

"If you think about basketball through the years, you've seen every dreamed-up thing in the world," he said. "The only piece of equipment worth two cents is the thing that saves you having you from rebounding. (The player) can catch it and get shots."

The Noah Instant is better, in Boren's estimation.

"This deal is way beyond that," he said. "It is far and away the most sophisticated and most important equipment for someone serious about shooting the basketball. The arc is everything.

"This is a combination camera and computer and speaker doing all that instantly - and telling you what you are doing instantly. It is a nice piece of equipment and it is here to stay."

Carter's work with Noah started around 2004, after he read an article in USA Today about the development of the company's products.

Alan Marty was the inventor. He played basketball for North Central College in Illinois before becoming a physics professor and an executive for some companies in the Silicon Valley.

Marty and others, including Dr. Thomas Edwards, a NASA executive, developed the Noah products. Their efforts began with Marty's desire to help his daughter improve the arc on her shot.

Carter's background was similar to Marty's. He was a former basketball player with an interest in helping his children become better basketball players.

"We hit it off," Carter said. "Over time, it made sense for me to come on as CEO and move everything (to Alabama)."

How did Noah executives determine that 45 degrees was the perfect arc? A machine in a former tractor shed on Carter's farm is part of the answer.

The machine simulates a player of various skill levels. Carter calls it "an automated shooter."

"It's a one-of-a-kind product," he said. "There is no product like it in the world."

Carter punches a key pad on the side of the machine. The buttons on the key pad cue up the skill level of the player he wants to simulate, along with the type of shot he want to shoot.

With the tension of the springs adjusted, the machine lifts a shot.

"In every instance," Carter said, "the machine made the most shots with a 45-degree arc."

Near the bottom of the machine, there are some dollar signs, stenciled by a Gonzaga University basketball coach who saw the machine recently.

"He couldn't believe what (the machine) could do," Carter said. "That's why he said it's money."

It is money, for sure.

The Noah Instant, which works with an iPhone or iPod Touch, is $3,999. The Noah Select, which has handles, wheels, a laptop and pre-loaded software, is $5,599.

Patrick Harding, the head basketball coach at Albertville High, purchased one of the products after a parent in his program saw a Noah presentation in Huntsville and volunteered to pay half of the cost.

"We can do 50 percent," Harding said. "I can sell that to the Tipoff Club.

"It is an easy sell. The parents light up."

Volleyball teams are now starting to buy Noah products, too. But basketball remains Noah's core market.

"It's really taken off," Carter said. "People are seeing the value now. They're saying they've got to have one on every hoop."


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House passes bill to shift some Baldwin County revenues from fire departments to economic development

Mike Cason | By Mike Cason |
Email the author | Follow on Twitter
on April 30, 2013 at 2:33 PM, updated April 30, 2013 at 2:36 PM
Steve McMillanRep. Steve McMillan

MONTGOMERY, Alabama -- The Alabama House of Representatives today approved a proposed constitutional amendment that would shift some ad valorem tax revenues from Baldwin County volunteer fire departments to a nonprofit economic development organization.

Rep. Steve McMillan, R-Gulf Shores, the bill's sponsor, said an ad valorem tax enacted in 1990 on real property and vehicles provides about $4.5 million a year to about 40 volunteer fire departments in the county.

McMillan said about 90 percent of that revenue comes from the tax on real property.

His proposed amendment would direct the portion of the tax revenue from vehicles to the Baldwin Community and Economic Development Foundation, Inc.

McMillan said the tax is raising more money that it was expected to when enacted, and that the portion from the real property is sufficient to fund the fire departments.

To become law, the bill would also have to pass the Senate and be approved by voters.

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Today marks The Huffington Post UK launch of a new digital marketing campaign to showcase the huge variety of opinions and voices across the site and its blogs.

The brand new content-led campaign, created with Gravity Road, will feature opinions and views on a range of topics from some well-known faces. Celebrity bloggers and opinion-formers leading the charge include Alice Cooper, Cherie Blair, Rugby player Will Carling and TV presenter Cherry Healey, with many more lined up to take part over the coming months. The ads will also promote original content from the HuffPost's in-house editorial team and will run across a wide selection of digital media outlets and formats until the end of the year.

Kickstarting the rolling campaign in style, the first set of creative features close-up photography and video of each blogger, with provocative quotes from their blog intimately scrawled across their face. It also sees the UK launch of HuffPost's global strapline "Conversations Start Here". Alice Cooper will be lending his writing skills to the topic of Reality TV, Cherry Healey will be blogging on the pill industry and Cherie Blair will focus on female entrepreneurship. Other blog topics being supported in September include religion & politics, the beauty industry, comedy, sport and celebrity culture.

Watch the video here:


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Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Cape Cod Bed and Breakfast Offers Relaxing Massage Retreat

Ashley Manor, a Cape Cod Bed and Breakfast Inn, is offering a wonderful Relax and  Rejuvenate Massage Package through April, 2011. Package includes three days/two nights in a select King or Queen Luxury Suite.  The beautiful accommodations offer private bath, romantic wood burning fireplace, two-person jetted tub, spa robes, TV/DVD/CD.  Indulge in a  60 minute side by side couples' massage ensuite by licensed massage therapists.  Rest well in the comfortable suite, then enjoy a gourmet breakfast each morning

Imagine a special welcome treat of romantic goodies that are the perfect accompaniment when staying in one of our Jacuzzi tub suites... consisting of bath crystals, lotions and other delights, along with a split of champagne on arrival.

This specialPackage includes:
Two night stay in a luxury suite
Two person side by side massage in the privacy of your room
Full gourmet breakfast each morning
Jacuzzi goodies
Split of Champagne

For details, please see our Specials and Packages Page.

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Home » Summer Photo Contest: Enter And Vote For Your Favorite Dog Photo » Sneaky Tips To Help Win The 2012 Summer Dog Photo Contest

Sneaky Tips To Help Win The 2012 Summer Dog Photo Contest

With less than three weeks to go in the BARF World Summer Photo contest, there’s still some time left to rack up those votes and win an awesome prize from our sponsor, Etta Says! Remember, the photo with the most votes wins!

Next, to help you in the final stretch, here are three sneaky ways to get more votes:

1. Share directly to your wall newsfeed. Visit the BARF World Summer Dog Photo Contest page and click the “Share” button on your entry. Write a creative status update asking your friends to help you win by voting for your dog, then share to your newsfeed wall. You AND your friends can share your entry, so ask them to do the same as well.

2. Encourage your friends to upload their own dog photo and receive 25 extra votes. First, click the “Share” button from the contest page. Then on the Post To Wall prompt, click the little icon in the lower left hand corner. You can customize who will see your status update or you can leave to just friends or public. When anyone uploads from this referral link, you’ll automatically receive 25 extra votes!

3. Promote on other social network platforms. When you submit your dog photo to the contest, you may remember a pop-up with a link in it as seen in the example screenshot below. This is your unique referral link. If you saved this link, remember you can share it on Twitter, in emails, your own blog, or any other social media platform. Why? Because this link is unique just to YOU, and if a friend uploads a photo after clicking on this link, you will be awarded with 25 extra votes.

Don’t worry if you do not have the link anymore, you can still retrieve your unique referral ID. Just simply go to our contest page, click on your uploaded image and then find the seven digit number (as highlighted in the second image below) in your browser’s address bar, and then place it at the end of this URL:

How cool is that?!

There you have it. Our sneaky tips for helping you get more votes. Remember, submissions and voting ends on August 31, 2012 at 11:59 PM PDT. (Winner will be notified between September 1-3 via email, so be sure to place @barfworld.com in your email provider’s safe email list.)

Good Luck! We’re rooting for you!

- The BARF World Team

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Most of us are probably thinking more about gravy boats than boating today. If you're looking for a fun boat-related craft project that you can share with the younger generation while waiting for dinner to cook, try making a Mayflower-type boat out of coffee sleeves and other items you probably thought should head for the trash. You can even use them as place markers for the dinner table.

Thanksgiving boat

Make a cute Thanksgiving boat with the kids today.

(We first spotted this on the Boat Trader Facebook page.)

Happy Thanksgiving, from all of us here at!


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Incorporating Crowdfunding Feedback Into Product Development

Four strategies for successfully harnessing customer insights to build a better product.

When you crowdfund a product, you invite anyone and everyone to give you their unbridled opinions and ideas. You invite them to tell you what they love, what they hate, what you should change, remove, and add to the product. Essentially, you open up the feedback floodgates.

This sudden influx of opinions might be a little overwhelming.

After all, you just buttoned everything up, right? You fine-tuned your prototype. You articulated your messaging (draft after draft). You filmed a killer promo video. And now, as soon as you exhale, you get hit with a wave of feedback and feature requests. But don’t worry — it’s not as scary as it sounds. Feedback is your lifeblood. It will help you build something that your future users will love. You just need to learn how to harness the feedback, and not be crushed by it.

Below are 4 strategies we’ve implemented at Canary for successfully gathering and incorporating feedback into our product development process.

1) Know the core of your product (and protect it).

Before you can begin reacting and responding to feedback, you must really understand the core of your product. You need to identify what the essential ingredients are. What things will you bet on? What feature(s) will you protect? Ask yourself: If we start stripping features away (or adding them), at what point does our product cease to deliver the value that we promised? Know what that breaking point is so that if you do iterate, you will not inadvertently find yourself building a swiss army knife when you set out to build a spoon.

Some feedback you receive might run contrary to your vision. Listen. Consider. Allow your assumptions to be challenged. But stay true to your vision. Don’t rashly pivot away from what it is you set out to build. Ultimately your vision must remain aligned with what your users need. Identifying what the core of your product is will help you as you begin considering how to integrate the massive influx of customer feedback you will receive.

2) Divide feedback into categories.

It’s important to understand the context of the feedback as it comes in. In a broad sense, feedback can be grouped into two main buckets: experiential and cerebral.

We define experiential feedback as any feedback that comes from someone who is actively interacting with our product. A beta tester who has been using your product for a week or a month can give you very significant experiential feedback. Simply handing someone your phone and asking them to play with your app for a few minutes — even if it’s still in progress — will also give you some quick experiential feedback. The key is that an individual needs to experience your product in a physical way to give this type of feedback. Whether that experience lasts for 2 minutes or 2 weeks, it can provide actionable insights that will help you identify user pain points and guide where to focus your efforts.

Equally important (but fundamentally unique), is cerebral feedback. This comes from someone who has yet to interact with your product physically. Their experience with your product (so far) has taken place solely in their minds. But wait! Don’t make the mistake of thinking this type of feedback is any less valid. It’s just different. As a matter of fact, cerebral feedback can yield critical insights — especially early on. How do people react to your story and messaging? What resonates? Which features generate the most interest? Which features prompt questions or require more clarity?

As you divide feedback into categories (even just having the mental framework to recognize the different implications of each) it puts you in a better position to listen and react appropriately.

3) Recognize patterns.

Tweets, emails, comments, conversations — there will always be many channels through which feedback comes to you. After categorizing, you need to look for patterns and themes. Identify areas that will have the highest impact, rather than being swayed by every solitary suggestion.

Within the experiential feedback are there particular points where users are consistently confused or frustrated? Are there feature requests that keep popping up? Are there features that aren’t being used?

Among the cerebral feedback, what are customers most excited about? Recognizing this will help you know which part of your messaging is worth emphasizing. Are there common concerns? If so, perhaps you aren’t explaining something clearly or maybe you need to go back and rethink some of your assumptions.

By identifying patterns you can channel your efforts in a strategic way.

4) Ask, don’t guess.

The best thing about crowdfunding is the community. After completing your campaign, you now have a community of people who care about and are invested in your product. They want it to succeed. Use them. Learn from them. Don’t just sit back and wait for feedback to come to you — be proactive and solicit feedback that will help you make a product they will love.

We employ a number of methods for this. We run segmented surveys to better understand our customers’ needs, use cases, and expectations. There are a lot of tools out there for conducting surveys, but our favorite is a beautiful little service called Typeform (What can I say — we like nicely designed things!). We also do in-person interviews — where we actually sit down face-to-face with customers in their homes. Interviews are a great way to better understand the context in which your product will live, and to see the world through the eyes of those who will be using it. If you’re new to conducting customer interviews, I recommend watching this great presentation by Michael Margolis where he shares some helpful interview tips.

Feedback can seem daunting at first — and sometimes it might even be hard to hear — but embrace it! Be empathetic. Listen sincerely. After all, the success of your product hinges on your ability to meet the needs (and wants) of the people you are building it for.


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« Introducing: Retro Tuesday! CWRU Then and Now photographs | Main | Retro Tuesday- Harkness Chapel »

July 18, 2013

Research Showcase 2013 posters

There is a new collection recently loaded into Digital Case of some of the posters presented at the 2013 Research Showcase, held on April 13, 2013. Research Showcase is a free public exhibit and is held in Veale Convocation Center on the campus of Case Western Reserve University.

Exhibits of real-world applications, critical insights, and creative and intellectual activities will be on view for students, faculty, staff, alumni, business and industry leaders and the community, highlighting the full range of faculty, postdoctoral, and graduate research at CWRU.

Research ShowCASE provides evidence of how research brings value to CWRU, our community and the world.

Posted by vad17 at July 18, 2013 10:45 AM

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Archive for September, 2013

Understanding Your Traffic Sources, Part 1: an Introduction

September 30th, 2013 by Josh

It goes without saying that thoroughly understanding how traffic arrives at your site is critical for audience development efforts – certain traffic sources are ideal for reaching new readers, others may put your content in front of your existing audience and encourage them to visit more often, and still others may send traffic that will never be seen again.

Today, we’re kicking off a five-part series that takes a detailed look at how your audience’s behavior differs across traffic sources. Over the coming posts, we’ll go through homepage/direct traffic, traffic from external links and social sources, and search traffic. To start, though, I want to talk about how we classify referrers and define some basic metrics through which we compare their traffic.

Know your referrer types

At Chartbeat, we divide visitors’ traffic sources into four buckets:

  • Direct: people who get to your site by entering your site’s name in a browser, typically landing on your homepage

  • Social: people who arrive at your site from links provided by friends or others they follow on social media (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest) or on email/IM

  • External: those who arrive via links from external sites (e.g. Drudge Report, Google News)

  • Search: visitors who come from search engines

The distribution of traffic across these buckets varies widely between sites – we see some sites with over 90% of traffic coming direct and others with over 90% of traffic from search. There’s no correct breakdown, but it’s important to keep your goals in mind when considering where to optimize: external sources typically send the most new visitors, while your most loyal audience is likely to come directly to your homepage.

Measuring audience engagement

As we’ve talked about before, Engaged Time is a good measure of fit between your content and your audience. So, one of the first questions we ask when trying to assess the quality of a given traffic source for a site is: how visitors are engaging with the pages they land on?

Below we see visitors’ Average Engaged Time on article pages when coming from seven of the most common referrers:

Notably, visitors from Facebook and Google News spend more than 50% more time than those who come from other sources (Tweet this fact). One possible explanation, which we’ll delve into more in Part 3, is that these are the only two sources on the list that typically show the first lines of a story when they present a link, so visitors from these sources are more likely to be committed to actually reading the story they end up on.

Understanding audience retention

Of course, we don’t simply care about how people behave when they land on your site — we want to know whether people who come to a site will choose to come back again. This turns out to be a question whose answer varies dramatically by traffic source. Below is a figure showing the fraction of visitors from a given referrer (the seven referrers from above, plus those who come direct to a site’s homepage) who come back sometime in the next week.

While the vast majority of people who come directly do come back, less than 50% of people from all other sources return. Amongst the set of non-direct traffic sources there’s also wide variance, with visitors from Twitter, Google search, and “dark social” almost 50% more likely to return than those from Google News and twice as likely to return as those from Reddit.

Amongst those visitors who do come back, how do they return the next time? That is, do people who come to your site from Twitter — for instance — always come from Twitter, or do they also come from other referrers or directly? The graphic below shows how frequently visitors who come from one source also come from another.

Rows of this figure represent a visitor’s traffic source on one visit and columns represent where they come from the next time. Redder cells in each row represent combinations that occur more frequently, while whiter cells represent less frequent combinations.

The thing that stands out most in this figure is that people who visit your site from a given referrer are far more likely to come to your site again from the same referrer than they are to come from any other source. We term this phenomenon referrer loyalty, and it tells us that we can’t rely on traffic from an outside source returning without a steady stream of links on that source.

Cells in the direct column that are bright represent what is perhaps an ideal traffic relationship — referrers that send traffic that is likely to come directly to your site the next time they visit.

More to come

This post, I hope, raised more questions than it answered. Why do rates of engagement and retention vary so much by traffic source? And, more importantly, what can we do to affect these rates over time? We’ll start answering these questions next time by looking at your most core audience, your homepage direct traffic.

If you have questions about this data or things you’d like to see in the posts to come, I’d love to see your comments below. And please share this blog series with friends and coworkers.

Did You Know: What Makes Chartbeat Publishing Different?

September 26th, 2013 by Clara

We know you have many products in your analytics tool box. And we know that you’re looking for data you can trust when it comes to editorial decisions. As a Chartcorps member who educates and works with clients every day, I am often asked how Chartbeat differs from other analytics and why our data doesn’t match the numbers you might be seeing from another analytics service. Here’s a brief overview and I’ve throw in a nifty cheat sheet too.

First things first: Let’s talk about roots.

Similar to the blazers+jeans career look, Chartbeat Publishing was born and bred in the newsroom. (Tweet this) While several peers offer great options to cover a wide range of clients, these tools are often developed to be one-size-fits-all analytics solutions. In our case, we’ve collaborated with our editorial partners to offer products and features designed to surface data specific to the online publishing workflow.

Beyond-the-basics data

Like any service, Chartbeat does give you standard, bread-and-butter insights on traffic sources and top pages. But it’s our additional data, researched and curated by our data science team, that’s specifically relevant to digital publishers. We integrate this data into many products and features so that you have what you need at your fingertips 24/7, such as social data on trending content or customized data science power tools like Spike Alerts that identify your potential viral content.

We’re always iterating on tools that integrate into the various roles within your team, like the Chartbeat app, the Heads Up Display and all the useful stuff you can access on the Chartbeat Labs site. However you work and no matter what your responsibilities are, there’s data-driven feature or tool that can help you out.

Real-time measuring that matters

We’ve always shirked popular conventions around click or view-based metrics. Instead, we focus on measuring the data that truly gives you a sense of your live, real-time audience. Chartbeat, like an obsessive host, is constantly checking in – pinging your site every fifteen seconds to be exact – taking attendance and tracking how long, on average, your users tend to stick around. This means our metrics typically aren’t going to match what your other analytics are saying. To see specifically how our numbers vary from Google Analytics figures, go to this infographic.

Measuring your audience’s interest, not their clicks

From what we understand, working in online publishing is sort of like running as fast as you can whilst juggling, i.e., tons to do in a very short time frame. Thus you need the most accurate stats on real-time traffic moment to moment, quantitatively and qualitatively. It’s not enough to show you how many folks are visiting a page –  those stats need life and context. (Tweet this) Enter, Engaged Time. We measure engaged visitor activity by tracking scrolling, mouse movements or keystrokes –  so you know how many people are actively consuming your content and for how long.

Because a reader’s Engaged Time correlates with his or her likelihood to return to your site, you need engagement insights no matter what you’re working on. Thus, we’ve integrated our signature metric Engaged Time into many of our features and products.

Get the whole story

Overall, we see value in using Chartbeat as a complementary product with other analytics services. You should always to take a 360-degree view of your site. A bunch of publishers – big and small – find our metrics and tools pretty damn useful for informing a significant part of that 360-degree view when it comes to taking action and making decisions.

No need to memorize – here’s a cheat sheet

Cheat Sheet

My Experiences Visiting Online Publishers in Latin America

September 23rd, 2013 by Ben M.

Fidgeting in the waiting room of the Brazilian Consulate in NYC, I could barely contain my excitement for my upcoming trip. After discussing my outlook on the future of publishing in South America (on this very blog) I was challenged by Chart-leadership to put my projections to the test.

It made sense – while my beliefs were grounded in a largely myopic view of the region based on our local partners and my own research, I had little experience on the ground. Meeting with the folks creating content, talking to the people who were building their brand around a specific, local audience – this was what I needed. So off I went.

My first stop was in Lima, Peru – for a publisher’s conference hosted by INMA. INMA is an organization built for news media organizations around the world – established to share ideas and sustain growth in the uncertain publishing market. Nearly all major local publishers were in attendance for two days of seminars, lunches, and a couple cocktails here and there.

At a very high-level, the conference focused on how publishers can build a brand targeted at a specific audience and develop that brand through print, digital and e-comm verticals. Yes, I said print. Print circulation is actually growing in Latin America. There were a wide range of stimulating talks, but two that stood out to me were:

  • Carlos Ruiz of Reset: Agencia de Medios spoke about “los nuevos paradigmas” or the different mediums through which a publisher can capture the attention of their audience. Yet the various mediums, according to him, made no difference. Creating content based on how readers consume your content, he reasoned, is more important than focusing on print over digital, or vice versa.

  • Maria Eugenia Castaneda, a consultant from Guatemala talked about intelligent market analysis and the increased importance of understanding who your audience is and how they consume your content. Once you understand the audience and have your “message” the task at hand is to figure out which product or medium you use to deliver that message.

The importance of connecting with an audience and building content around that audience became abundantly clear – an issue I focus on in American and European markets today.

Yet digital in South America is a candle in the sun (when it comes to revenue) compared with print (Tweet this) – meaning that editors and product managers can take more risks. Digital can showcase what might work in print (as it’s not core to the business) making it the perfect breeding ground for radical innovation when it comes to online publishing.

Editors and PM’s can find new ways to reach their audience and to create their content, experimenting with different mediums and hyper-targeted branding. As digital moves into the H1 position (see what I did there?) audience-focused workflows will be longstanding, sustaining the growth beget by print. Whoa.

After Lima, I went to Sao Paulo for a few meetings with local publishers. The conversations I had there only furthered signs of encouragement for future market growth in the years to come. I picked up some interesting facts along the way, namely that the country-wide ad spend on Facebook Advertising is equivalent to that of Google Adwords. After working as an Adwords consultant a few years ago, I was blown away by that stat.

40% of people in Brazil share news stories on Facebook (Tweet this) , making it ever-more important for publishers to understand how those readers coming over from Facebook are consuming their content in the hopes of converting those users into long-term and returning readers. The amount of activity on Facebook, in general, is outstanding. The growth in new Brazilian Facebook users is nearly double that of the next leading country, India. With more people coming through Facebook to these news sites, it’s going to become even more important to understand that audience and how to build upon it – something we at Chartbeat might be able to help out with!

Over the next few years we’ll see a multitude of innovations in the publishing space as more people come online around South America. The sustainable growth of print will buoy this innovation and allow people to experiment widely and often. Would love to get some of your feedback – hit me up!

Links We Like: Frontend Development and Design

September 20th, 2013 by Harry

Hello and welcome back to another fun roundup of new trends and technologies in the world of frontend development!

In this fast-paced field things are always in motion. I’m here to help you stay on top of what’s new and what you need to know.

To start things off let’s jump into a nice article that explores the what are the top languages used on GitHub in 2013 (so far). Compiled using Google BigQuery the results are in line with what you would expect of GitHub developers: JavaScript and Ruby take the top spots (first and second respective). What does surprise me is that Java is way up on the list at number 3. I suppose that should be expected given Android is built in Java.

Taking a detour into more tech-heavy articles, I came across this article which shared a tip on how to ignore library code while debugging in Chrome. Why is this cool? Well if you’ve ever been neck-deep in a call-stack trying to figure out a bug’s origin you can sometimes get lost in the libraries you’re using on the page (e.g. jQuery, Backbone, Angular). What this trick allows you to do is have these libraries excluded when debugging, allowing you to focus only on your code! Pretty handy!

Another handy trick is this break-on-access repository on GitHub. If you want to spy on when a property of an object is accessed or modified this library will allow you to enter the debugger at that point. Very handy for situations where you may not know when an object is being modified, but you know that it is being modified.

A fun Tumblr blog popped up over the past week, highlighting what applications could look like if they were designed for iOS 7. With iOS 7 released on September 18th you can bet you’ll see its design ethos echoed across the internet. This is a nice way to prepare yourself.

Along with finding inspiration for how to design for iOS 7, take a look at this very comprehensive post about how to create a web app that looks like an iOS 7 native app. Especially useful if you’re looking to create a Phonegap hybrid application. There are many tips, tricks, and nuanced details in this blog post that will prepare you for developing iOS 7-like web apps.

And there you have it! This week’s roundup of what’s new and what’s being talked about on the world wide web. As you can tell, Apple still has quite the influence – punditry aside. The release of iOS 7 is only the start of ripples that will grow.

As always, keep learning and looking for what’s new. I’ll be here doing the same.

Harry also maintains a personal blog at

Experimenting in Loyalty Conversion with WNYC: The Power of Complementary Content and The Big Mobile Question

September 19th, 2013 by Kyle

A couple weeks ago, we kicked off our experiment in loyalty conversion with our good friends at WNYC’s On the Media. Inarguably, the show is one of WNYC’s crown jewels; the Peabody Award-winning program is broadcasted weekly on more than 300 stations across the country, and its podcast receives more than a half-million downloads every month. But WNYC producers have only recently started rounding out the show’s online content.

Where On the Media’s website was previously a repository for just-aired episodes, it now also hosts a newly launched blog called TLDR, which is helmed by producer PJ Vogt. The blog stays true to its moniker, providing readers with short and sweet takes on the day’s journalism and technology news. And clearly by design, Vogt’s epigrammatic tone and point of view are well-suited to connect with an audience that values added perspective.

tldr-screenshot, wnyc, on the media

Though TLDR has only been up for a couple weeks, its impact is already clear: In TLDR’s first week of existence, September 3 to 9, saw a whopping 73% increase in visits. That’s compared to the previous week, from August 27 to September 2. It was hardly surprising to learn that the huge increase was largely driven by two excellent TLDR blog posts: “The Hilarious Face of Canadian Propaganda” and “Why is Syria Flummoxing American Satirists?

Satisfying Audience Appetite

So what can we learn from the successful debut of On the Media’s TLDR blog? If your audience has an appetite for additional content, look for any way to deliver it to them. (Tweet this) If you have a great brand with a highly engaged audience, as is the case with On the Media, extend your reach by developing supplementary content and tapping into new channels. TLDR may be riding coattails, but the blog is adding real value to the WNYC ecosystem.

There’s something else worth noting, too: The September 6 episode of On the Media took a look at “the media’s cautious coverage of Syria,” and the start of the episode features a clip from Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show.” It’s meant to give lighthearted introductory context to a serious topic. But what’s interesting is that PJ’s blog post (“Why is Syria Flummoxing American Satirists?”) was able to extend the segment in a way that was complementary.

If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. The audience listening to an episode about Syria will likely have some propensity to engage with other contextually relevant content about Syria. It’s basically the editorial equivalent of Amazon’s “If you like this, you might also like…”. Now, the idea is hardly revolutionary, but it’s low-hanging fruit that not every publisher reaches for. But by doing so, you can keep visitors on your website for longer.

Why is that important? Well, as we outlined in a blog post a few months ago, high levels of visitor engagement correlate strongly with visitors’ propensity to return in the near future. In our research, we found that visitors who read an article for three minutes returned twice as often as those who read for one minute. So, if you’re a publisher looking to build a loyal and returning audience, time is one of the best metrics and leading indicators out there.

The Big Mobile Question

So, now that we know TLDR has the capacity to engage On the Media’s listenership in a different format, producers now want to understand how their audience interacts with content using different devices. At any given moment, roughly 80% of’s visitors are using desktop computers—and 20% of visitors are using mobile devices. From our observations of other publishing sites, that’s a fairly typical desktop-to-mobile split.

Essentially, we want to find out: What’s the average Engaged Time for users who visit TLDR on a desktop computer versus a mobile device? How do visitors using different devices interact with content? Are scrolling patterns notably different? How do visitors move from page to page? If there are significant differences in average Engaged Time between desktop and mobile users, we might deduce that WNYC needs to optimize for mobile.

Josh Schwartz, one of Chartbeat’s data scientists, is digging into the data to find out. I’ll report back with the answers and other findings in our next post, due in a couple weeks. Things are starting to get interesting…


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The area of Tulancingo holds great history from the ancient Toltec and Otomi cultures. Although the inhabitants are mostly dedicated to farming and agriculture, a few other industries are also in the community. Their major products are dairy, meat, maize, barley and vegetables.

Tulancingo is the community where Proyecto Hormiga has worked with the support of Compassion México for more than 10 years now. They serve nearly 170 children from the community and have raised many children in their classrooms.

Most of the children here come from families with single moms or with parents who work either on the farm, as masons or in the nearby fields. The salaries are too small and the money earned to support the families is not enough.

The Compassion program has been a real blessing in the lives of these children; for most of them it means the opportunity to study beyond elementary school.

In the last year the student center graduated 15 teenagers in two different ceremonies where all families, children and staff recognized the success of these youngsters who have been considered “the pride of the program.”

We interviewed and visited some of them in their new activities. Most are studying for a high school education with a vocational orientation to graduate with a technician degree in the different areas of study they have chosen. Some others are in high school or even at the state university.

These youngsters prove the Compassion development model through sponsorship and the church works here!

Zeydi is one of the most outstanding graduates from the program. She is 18 years old and got into the technological institute from Pachuca, the capital city of the state of Hidalgo. The school she chose is one of the best in the state. Many students apply there but only a fraction get selected.

Zeydi is studying civil engineering. She has already faced challenges with her teachers and professors who do not follow the values she has learned, and she is committed to her studies.

She dreams about building great bridges, tunnels and other great construction projects for the city, state or even for the country, but she knows it will not be easy for her. She is very much interested in physics and mechanics.

Zeydi had to move to a rented place she shares with her cousin and a friend to be able to attend school. The school is actually far from her home and she needed to relocate.

Maria, best known as Lupita, is 17 and is already in her second year of high school in nursing studies. She always dreamed of being a nurse.

She dreams about getting a good job in obstetrics helping mothers deliver or taking care of newborns because she thinks babies are the most wonderful creations.

Her favorite class has been studying all about pregnancy because she is fascinated by it.

“I love seeing babies and learning about their growth in the womb,” she says.

Lupita lives with three older siblings, two sisters and a male brother who works as a mason, and her mother who was left single some years ago.

Keny is 18 and is not in school but is saving all she can to get into school next year. She and her mother were abandoned by her father when she was a little girl. Now they sell homemade tamales to live on and to start saving for her future education.

She would like to become a physical education teacher because she once had severe health problems that were overcome with lots of exercise and by keeping a strict diet. Then she decided to do something to share what she now knows to help others.

Denisse is currently 17 and in high school. She likes to practice tae kwon do and she likes science. She enjoys biology, math and chemistry classes the best, and dreams about opening a cosmetology shop.

When not at school, Denisse can be found practicing tae kwon do or at the Internet café talking online with friends.

She lives with her mom and dad and has an older brother who had to leave the family to find a better life opportunity.

Omar is 17 years old now and works with his older brother as a mason. He wants to study electricity to get a better job. School starts next December.

As a younger student in junior high, he always enjoyed the electricity workshop, and ever since he decided that was going to be his path.

Omar lives with his family — his father, mother and two other siblings — an older brother and a younger sister who attends the student center.

he used to think about not attending school any further than elementary school, but his teachers and leaders at the student center challenged him to finish high school, and he did.

“If it wasn’t for them I wouldn’t be the same I am now. I know for sure I would have dropped school.”

Jorge is 18 and very happy because he just got his registration for college to study a career in administration and entrepreneurship. He wants to start a small business. His favorite class is math, and he also likes to play sports, especially football.

He lives with his parents and six siblings. His father is a mason and his mother runs the home.

“If it wasn’t for the student center program I could not get to be what I am or what I aspire to be,” he says.

Once, in high school, he was about to quit because he did not have enough money to pay for his studies. The student center provided the resources to cover his education fees.

Before attending the student center, Jorge used to spend entire days on video games. He only needed two pesos to start his game and would not end it until the shop closed.

“Many times I had to sneak home at night, I did not go to school or eat because I spent all many days there,” he say. “But the pastor would make me come to church and would make me come to the program. But now I graduated and I am proud of it.”

Esmeralda is 19 and starting her university studies in agro-industrial engineering. She is studying at the state university and dreams about starting a dairy business to sell yogurt and cheese internationally.

From school she specially enjoys chemistry because she likes the formulas and the reactions the elements make together. Besides school, she likes to read, listen to music and get together with all her friends.

Enedina is a 17-year-old girl who aspires to become a nurse. She is studying in her third semester, and although she still has a long way to go in terms of her studies, she has found the support of an older cousin who is already a nurse and has committed herself to helping her complete her studies.

Her dream is to become a forensic investigator nurse, and she loves the computer classes. Her siblings are all older than her, and her mother is currently working as a cook at a small restaurant.

Elizabeth is a 17-year-old who studies at the vocational high school. She just started a couple of weeks ago, but she dreams of becoming a professional nurse just as her former sponsor from Canada is.

Elizabeth dreams of working at the pediatric hospital in Tulancingo, which treats children from all the surrounding communities.

During the time she was registered at the student center, she was very happy to hear about the work her sponsor did as a nurse and that inspired her to pursue this career.

She got into a high school that offers vocational training on nursing, and although she has to travel 40 minutes by public transportation every afternoon to school, she won’t waste this opportunity.

Her father works as a mason and is highly committed to work hard and make enough for her to go to school and to pay for her school materials.

As a hobby, she enjoys playing with her younger brother and caring for him. She is part of the youth group at church and enjoys talking to her friends. Her favorite class is reading.

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14 Comments Add a Comment
  1. Pat D.
    Oct 8, 2009
    at 5:17 pm

    I was sad to learn many children lost their sponsors, often more than once. I decided to sponsor older children because at 71 years old I wanted to see them through to graduation and to encourage children who lost sponsors. It turns out that their loving messages to me probably gives me more of a blessing than I am to them. I hope I can continue to help them after graduation if possible.

  2. Mike Stephens
    Oct 8, 2009
    at 7:06 pm

    Great to hear of their perseverence!!!!!!! A man named Don gave me a ride home today b/c I was riding my bicycle in snow. He said “God is with YOU!!!!” It was very encouraging to say the least.

  3. Sara Benson
    Oct 9, 2009
    at 1:51 pm

    Thank you for showing us what these students are doing after they graduate! We often hear about the LDP but it is nice to see what happens with some of the students who do not do the program.

    I was supprised to see the ages of some of these students who had graduated. What is the graduation age for the Copmassion program in Mexico?

  4. Amy Wallace
    Oct 10, 2009
    at 6:36 am

    It was so ecnouraging to read all of these teenagers’ stories – keep up the good work!

  5. Jeanette
    Oct 13, 2009
    at 7:40 pm

    I had a child who graduated from the program.. I do not know what she is doing now but I know she became a preschool teacher. She wanted to be a nurse but her academics were not high enough. I appreciate the fact that Compassion works with those unable to go further in school and helps them find a good vocation.

  6. Oct 16, 2009
    at 10:05 am

    I am also surprised that these students had graduated from the program, already. Some of them are not even 18 years old, and most have not completed high school; some haven’t even begun it. So can you provide answers to these questions, pretty please?

    Why are the students deemed ready to graduate before they complete high school?

    Approximately what percentage are not able to go on to high school, because they have graduated from the program?

    What skills have they been able to learn before they finish high school that will provide for them and their families?

  7. Oct 16, 2009
    at 10:42 am

    Vicki and Sara,

    I’ve asked Cesiah to answer your questions.

  8. Oct 16, 2009
    at 11:32 am

    Ahem. A simple “Thanks, Chris” is too short for this program. I guess I could have just repeated it. :o)

  9. Sherry
    Oct 19, 2009
    at 12:48 pm

    I have become a member of Compassion’s new website called our compassion. I found 4 other children and their sponsors who are at my child’s Child Center. It is a great website. Check it out:

  10. Oct 20, 2009
    at 4:54 pm

    Vicki and Sara –

    The maximum completion age for the sponsorship program in Mexico is 18.

    The leadership of the program at each development center has a close relationship with all the children registered with them and monitors children completing their program. All the children in this group were candidates to graduate because they completed the requirements of the program.

    The youngsters were interviewed to ensure they have reached the outcomes appropriate to their age and the goals set for the children registered in our programs. Then the church planned a graduation ceremony and since they were grouped together most were only 17 and the oldest was then about to become 18.

    Although it seems sad not all sponsorship program graduates get into high school. Depending on their circumstances some might just start working before they finish high school and Compassion ensures they have the skills to earn a living.

    According to the organization for economic co operation and development (OECD) only 50% of youngsters in Mexico between the ages of 16 and 18 have access to education. Half of them are not able to make it into high school some due to economic situation, some due to lack of opportunities like not having a high school close in their town and some because they just look for job opportunities instead of education.

    Although Compassion Mexico does not have an exact percentage of youngsters attending high school we estimate 30% of our registered children have the opportunity to make it.

    Although the reality is not all of our graduates complete high school, they are still considered successful if they are able to:

    1 Demonstrate commitment to the lordship of Christ

    2 Choose good health practices and is physically healthy

    3 Exhibit the motivation and skills to be economically self-supporting

    4 Interact with other people in a healthy and compassionate manner

    Finally in regards to the vocational skills students learn, it depends on the development center they are registered in, because each center designs the workshops according to the area of opportunities they have in their community and according to their possibilities.

    The most popular activities we know are carpentry, woodcarving, bakery, hairdressing, cooking, dressmaking, blacksmithing, electricity, handcrafts local to the area like hammock making, pottery or others, etc.

  11. Oct 20, 2009
    at 5:03 pm

    Thank you for the information, Chris. I’ll be armed, should any sponsor or potential sponsor ask about Mexico.

  12. Linda
    Nov 1, 2009
    at 3:39 pm

    I have a question:

    I have just started sponsoring a 4 yr old girl so I don’t know anything about life in/out of college. It seems that the only ones who get any attention are the ones in the scientific fields. All of them can’t go on to become engineers or doctors, etc. What about the ones (and I am sure there are some) who don’t go on to school or aspire to be something that “grand”. Are only a certain class of people given the attention and the others looked down on?

  13. Nov 2, 2009
    at 9:13 am

    Linda, I have seen stories, both here and in other Compassion publications, of other formerly-sponsored children who have been released from poverty through Compassion’s ministry and are making a difference in their communities–without going on to college. Some use the skills and knowledge they have gained in a trade to start their own businesses. Of those businesses, at least some of them do so well that employees are added–helping others to get out of poverty.

    We hear a lot about LDP students and graduates, and no, not all of them go into the areas you mentioned. One thing I really like about LDP is that it is not limited to students going into a narrow range of fields.

    The fact is that the program works, both for the few who go on to university and for those who do not. Stick around–or go into the archives of this blog and read some of the posts about graduates of the sponsorship program. They’re so uplifting!

  14. Feb 23, 2011
    at 9:52 am

    wow, even though many of these kids do not make it to high school, it sounds like they are far better prepared for “the real world” than American students. I was 16 when I completed high school and I was not formally taught any vocational skills. Almost everything I know about domestic duties (which are my current vocation [nanny] and my aspiration [to stay home once I have kids]) was due to my extracurricular activities, time with family, and practice in my jobs. I believe life skills are more important than a certificate/diploma, etc. That is not to say education is without value, but it is not the most important thing

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Tag Archives: Read It And Return

Calling All Bookworms!

by Country Inns & Suites
Monday, December 19, 2011

Next time you stay at a participating Country Inns & Suites By Carlson, in the U.S. or Canada check out the complimentary lending library! Through the Read It & Return program, guests are invited to choose a book from the lobby bookshelf and return it at any Country Inns & Suites hotel once they’re done […]

Continue reading: Calling All Bookworms!


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Connecticut High School Football

High School Football news, analysis, commentary and features from the reporters of the Hearst Connecticut Media Group.

Super Tuesday: State Football Quarterfinal Primer & Live Blog

Welcome to Super Tuesday. 32 teams enter. 16 leave. Tonight, the CIAC football state quarterfinals kick off across the state at 6:30. Regionally, we have nine (or so) lucky qualifiers — shown above — Brookfield takes on Lyman Hall in Class M; St. Joseph hosts Woodland at Ludlowe,  Ansonia hosts Hyde in Class S; New […] [Read More]

Brave New World: CIAC Quarterfinal Previews (Class M & S)

We press on with the final two classes of the CIAC state quarterfinal draw. In Class M, which has strengthened considerably in recent weeks, we have a defending state champ vs. a young but talented SCC Division II power. We have a pair of playoff babies in Plainville and Gilbert/Northwestern, who have played in a […] [Read More]

Brave New World: CIAC Quarterfinal Previews (Class LL & L)

Yes! Finally, we have ourselves, in my humble estimation, a legit playoff season in Connecticut high school football. The pairings have been set, the hype is just starting to boil to the surface. It’s time to see who the best teams in the state really are. It’s time to start the new and improved CIAC […] [Read More]

Extra! Extra! Get all your live scoring updates, and playoff point updates, right here. It’s all hands on deck for the staff of Hearst-Connecticut Newspapers — the Connecticut Post, the Danbury News-Times, the Stamford Advocate and Greenwich Time. We’ll be at nearly every single game in the Southwest Connecticut region for our biggest live scoring […] [Read More]

CIAC fines Southington, puts football team on probation

The CIAC board of control has spoken. The CIAC has fined Southington High School $1,000 and placed the football team on a year’s probation for head coach D.J. Hernandez‘s use of a Manchester playlist against that team in a 28-14 Southington victory on October 22. In addition, Hernandez will be required to take the Sportsmanship/Ethics […] [Read More]

High School Football Polls – Week 10

By virtue of its 15-13 victory over Staples Saturday, Trumbull is on the move, all the way up to No. 6. in one of the two media polls. It’s up to No. 8 in the CSWA and only 9 in the coaches. Staples drops to a unanimous 10 in all three. Xavier is back to […] [Read More]
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BtrFS as ongoing project

BtrFS is still an ongoing project for me, but if it will become a production platform for me soon is the question. Also playing with mirroring on BtrFS level made me wonder even more as it does the calculating about storage usage a little bit differently. Normally with mirroring you see the storage you can allocate and has been allocated. With BtrFS you see the total amount of data available on all disks combined as show in the example below.

$ sudo btrfs filesystem df /mnt
Data, RAID1: total=5.98GB, used=5.36GB
System, RAID1: total=8.00MB, used=4.00KB
System: total=4.00MB, used=0.00
Metadata, RAID1: total=256.00MB, used=6.01MB
$ df -h /mnt
Filesystem                Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg01-btrfsm1   16G   11G  4.8G  70% /mnt

I really like ZFS, but I really wonder if BtrFS could replace it. For now I see too many drawbacks in how BtrFS has been implemented and how distributions may use it. Maybe when Debian 8 is in testing it may be a better time to give BtrFS another chance, but swap space and encrypted file systems are still problems that need to be tackled.

Switching from VirtualBox to KVM (maybe)

I have been a VirtualBox user for a long time, but since I’m now looking more closely at BtrFS I also took a closer look at what is in $HOME. VirtualBox harddisks and ISO-images are a large chunk of it and maybe the time has come to look at a different solution. One of the plans is to move virtual machines to a dedicated machine instead of running some on my workstation when I need them. This could give me more options for longer experiments as then my personal data doesn’t has to share the same encrypted volume with the virtual machines.

As VirtualBox is mainly a desktop solution, then the other options are Xen and KVM for now. I picked KVM as it is shipped with RHEL6 and part of the vanilla Linux kernel since 2007. Also there is a nice (remote) management solution and closer integration in GNOME 3.4 in the form of GNOME Boxes. So the time has come to give it a go and first we create a line in /etc/fstab to mount the BtrFS subvolume.

LABEL=datavol	/var/lib/libvirt	btrfs	defaults,relatime,nodiratime,subvol=libvirt	0	0

Now we create the BtrFS subvolume and mount it. Afterward we install all required software and make a user member of the right group. It is important to note that one needs to logout and login afterwards. These right are only needed when doing local maintenance.

$ sudo btrfs subvolume create libvirt /media/btrfs-datavol
$ sudo mount /var/lib/libvirt
$ sudo apt-get install qemu-kvm virt-manager virt-viewer virtinst
$ sudo usermod -a -G libvirt <username>

The machine is now able to run virtual machines if it has an CPU with Intel-VT or AMD-V technology. And the first tests with Debian 6.0, Solaris 11 and Windows 7 looked very promising. The management interface is very clean and people who have worked with Solaris Container the commandline tool virsh is also a good option. One thing that seems to be missing is a storage snapshot option as in VirtualBox, but if it is a real miss I doubt as most images are on BtrFS and BtrFS supports snapshots on subvolume level.

For now KVM appears to be a good and free alternative for VirtualBox and VMWare. It may need some more love in the future, but for now it deserves some more testing from my side together with SELinux for stronger separation of virtual machines. Maybe I can say goodbye to DKMS for recompiling VirtualBox modules with every release and the Qt-toolkit as dependency for VirtualBox and switching back on the default GTK toolkit on my machine.

No smooth transition in Debian

Bugreport 638019 appears to be very straight forward, until the code finally hit Debian Testing last weekend. A simple relocation of a FIFO-buffer from /dev to /run caused direct trouble for machines with systemd and a normal shutdown wasn’t possible anymore. Both bugs 657979 and 657990 are a results of the modification. Seeing the overview of effected files and made me go back to the previous working release of source package sysvinit with the following commands

$ cd `xdg-user-dir DOWNLOAD`
$ wget
$ wget
$ wget
$ wget
$ wget
$ dpkg -i bootlogd_2.88dsf-18_amd64.deb initscripts_2.88dsf-18_amd64.deb sysvinit_2.88dsf-18_amd64.deb sysvinit-utils_2.88dsf-18_amd64.deb sysv-rc_2.88dsf-18_all.deb

And as there is no solution for now except a dependency change for systemd the package are being placed on hold like the last time they broke systemd.

$ echo "bootlogd hold" | sudo dpkg --set-selections
$ echo "initscripts hold" | sudo dpkg --set-selections
$ echo "sysvinit hold" | sudo dpkg --set-selections
$ echo "sysvinit-utils hold" | sudo dpkg --set-selections
$ echo "sysv-rc hold" | sudo dpkg --set-selections

It sounds strange for Linux-people, but I really wished I had an alternative boot environment like Solaris has. Maybe this is the reason for me to invest more time in read-write within BtrFS.

BtrFS and readonly snapshots

In a previous posting I started with BtrFS and as mentioned BtrFS supports snapshotting. With this you can create a point in time copy of a subvolume and even create a clone that can be used as a new working subvolume. To start we first need the BtrFS volume which can and must always be identified as subvolid 0. This as the default volume to be mounted can be altered to a subvolume instead of the real root of a BtrFS volume. We start with updating /etc/fstab so we can mount the BtrFS volume.

LABEL=datavol	/home	btrfs	defaults,subvol=home	0	0
LABEL=datavol	/media/btrfs-datavol	btrfs	defaults,noauto,subvolid=0	0	0

As /media is a temporary file system, meaning it is being recreated with every reboot, we need to create a mountpoint for the BtrFS volume before mounting. After that we create two read-only snapshots with a small delay in between. As there is currently no naming guide for how to call snapshots, I adopted the ZFS naming schema with the @-sign as separator between the subvolume name and timestamp.

$ sudo mkdir -m 0755 /media/btrfs-datavol
$ sudo mount /media/btrfs-datavol
$ cd /media/btrfs-datavol
$ sudo btrfs subvolume snapshot -r home home\@`date "+%Y%M%d-%H%m%S-%Z"`
Create a readonly snapshot of 'home' in './home@20124721-080109-CET
$ sudo btrfs subvolume snapshot -r home home\@`date "+%Y%M%d-%H%m%S-%Z"`
Create a readonly snapshot of 'home' in './home@20124721-080131-CET'
$ ls -l
totaal 0
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 52 nov 21  2010 home
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 52 nov 21  2010 home@20124721-080109-CET
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 52 nov 21  2010 home@20124721-080131-CET

We now have two read-only snapshots and lets test to see if they are real read-only subvolumes. The creation a new file shouldn’t be possible.

$sudo touch home@20124721-080109-CET/test.txt
touch: cannot touch `home@20124721-080109-CET/test.txt': Read-only file system

Creating snapshots is fun and handy for migrations or as on disk backup solution, but they do consume space as the delta’s between snapshots is being kept on disk. Meaning that changes between the snapshots are being keept on disk even when you remove them. Freeing diskspace will not only be removing them from the current snapshot, but also removing previous snapshots that include the removed data.

$ sudo btrfs subvolume delete home@20124721-080109-CET
Delete subvolume '/media/btrfs-datavol/home@20124721-080109-CET'
$ ls -l
totaal 0
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 52 nov 21  2010 home
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 52 nov 21  2010 home@20124721-080131-CET

As last step we unmount the BtrFS volume again. This is where ZFS and BtrFS differ too much for my taste. To create and access snapshots on ZFS the zpool doesn’t needs to be mounted, but then again with the first few release of ZFS the zpool needed to mounted as well. So there is still hope as BtrFS is still under development.

$ sudo umount /media/btrfs-datavol

Seeing what is possible with BtrFS, Sun’s TimeSlider becomes an option. Also the option of Live Upgrades with rollbacks as is possible with Solaris 11, but for that BtrFS with read-write snapshots needs to be tested in the near future.

First steps with BtrFS

After using ZFS on Solaris, I missed the ZFS features on Linux and with no chance of ZFS coming to Linux I had to do with MD and LVM. Or at least until BtrFS became mature enough and since the Linux 3.0 that time slowly has come. With Linux 3.0 BtrFS supports autodefragmentation and scrubbing of volumes. The second is maybe the most important feature of both ZFS and BtrFS as it can be used to actively scan data on disk for errors.

The first tests with BtrFS where in a virtual machine already a longtime ago, but the userland tools where still in development. Now the command btrfs follows the path set by Sun Microsystems and basically combines the commands zfs and zpool for ZFS. But nothing compares to a test in the real world and so I broke a mirror and created a BtrFS volume with the name datavol:

$ sudo mkfs.btrfs -L 'datavol' /dev/sdb2

Now we can mount the volume and create a subvolume on it which we are going to be using as our new home volume for users homedirectories.

$ sudo mount /dev/sdb2 /mnt
$ sudo btrfs subvolume create /mnt/home
$ sudo umount /dev/sdb2

When updating /etc/fstab we can tell mount to use the volumename instead of a physical path to a device or some obscure UUID number. Also you can tell which subvolume you want to mount.

LABEL=datavol	/home	btrfs	defaults,subvol=home	0	0

After unmounting and disabling the original volume for /home we can mount everything and copy all the data with rsync for example to see how BtrFS is working in the real world.

$ sudo mount -a

As hinted before scrubbing is important as you can verify that all your data and metadata on disk is still correct. You can do a read-write test by default or only read test to see if all data can be accessed. There is even an option to read parts of the volume that are still unused. In the example below the subvolume for /home is being scrubbed and with success.

$ sudo btrfs scrub status /home
scrub status for afed6685-315d-4c4d-bac2-865388b28fd2
	scrub started at Sat Jan 17 15:11:58 2012, running for 106 seconds
	total bytes scrubbed: 5.77GB with 0 errors
$ sudo btrfs scrub status /mnt
scrub status for afed6685-315d-4c4d-bac2-865388b28fd2
	scrub started at Sat Jan 17 15:11:58 2012 and finished after 11125 seconds
	total bytes scrubbed: 792.82GB with 0 errors

The first glances of BtrFS in the real world are a lot better with kernel 3.1 then somewhere with kernel 2.6.30 and I’m slowly starting to say it becomes ready to be included in RHEL 7 of Debian 8 for example as default storage solution. The same as ZFS became in Solaris 11. But it is not all glory as still a lot of work needs to be done.

The first is encryption as the LUKS era ends with BtrFS as it is not smart to put it between your disks and BtrFS. You lose the advantage of balancing data between disks when you do mirroring for example. But then again LVM has the same issue where you then also first need to setup software raid with MD with LUKS on top of it and LVM on top of that. For home directories EncFS maybe an option, but it still leaves a lot of area’s uncovered that would be covered by LUKS out of the box.

The second issue is the integration of BtrFS in distributions and the handling of snapshots. As for now you first need to mount the volume before you can make a snapshot of a subvolume. The same for access a snapshot and for that I think ZFS still has an advantage with the .zfs directory accessible for everyone who has access to the filesystem. But time will tell and for now the first tests look great.


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Wednesday, October 02, 2013

MyHeritage Webinar: Interviewing Relatives 16 Oct 2013

As we gather around harvest and holiday tables in the northern hemisphere during the coming months, we have opportunities to visit with family members. My Google+ stream brought the following to Ol' Myrt's attention:

Meeting Name: MyHeritage - Tips for interviewing relatives: Discovering your family heritage
Start Time: Wed, Oct 16 2013 1:00 pm
End Time: Wed, Oct 16 2013 2:00 pm
Conflicts in the Next Year: None

Interviewing family members is a great way to learn about earlier generations and discover more about your family heritage. Join Laurence Harris, Head of Genealogy (UK), who will give tips on interviewing your relatives to help with your family history research.

Registration Page:

Thanks for the heads up +Mark Olsen!

Happy family tree climbing!
Myrt     :)
Your friend in genealogy.

G+ DearMYRTLE Community
Twitter: @DearMYRTLE
Second Life: Clarise Beaumont


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How to Build Your PLN Using DEN Trading Cards

Are you looking to connect with other STAR Discovery Educators? Are you looking to grow your Professional Learning Network?  I have an easy way for you to do this.  Introducing the 2013 DEN STAR Trading Card set.  You can find about 250 DEN STARs and DEN Team members in the set and connect with them through Twitter, Facebook, and/or LinkedIn.  Connecting with so many like minded educators couldn’t be easier.

I’m a big Twitter using so I plan on going through the entire list and following anyone I’m not already following.  Here’s my plan:

1. I’m going to go to the Pinterest page where I can find all of the cards.  Don’t worry if you don’t have a Pinterest account, you don’t need one to view the page.

2.  I’ll then open another tab in my browser and head to  If you’re not a Twitter user, this might be a good time to start.

3.  I’ll look over each of the cards and look for the Twitter ID and then flip to my other tab where Twitter is open.  At this point, I have two options.  I can either use the search box on the Twitter page to find their account or I can just add their Twitter ID after the part in the URL.  This will pull up their twitter page and I can click Follow.

4.  I’ll do this over and over until everyone in the Trading Card set has been added to my PLN.

5.  There may be some people who are on Twitter, but don’t have their Twitter ID listed in the upper right hand corner of the card.  To find these people, I’ll look for the grey circle with the T on it, indicating they are a Twitter user.   Then, I’ll click on the little link in the bottom left corner of the card.  This will take me to the person’s contact page.

5.  When I get to their contact page, I can click on any of the social media icons listed below their quote to connect with them.  For me, I’ll connect via Twitter.  You can choose to connect however you’d like.

You may find that narrowing down who you choose to connect with based on what you teach or other interests will suit your needs better than adding everyone.  You might also decide that you want to connect with people via Facebook or LinkedIn.  For me, connecting with as many DEN STARs via Twitter is my plan.  How you connect is totally up to you.

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DIY Beeswax Lip Balm

DIY lip balm

Soothing lip balm is easier to make that you may think, and it makes a great stocking stuffer. You can even make it in a slow cooker! Here’s how.

Every year around this time, as the temperature drops and the wind picks up, I get chapped lips. I know you do, too. And then I start scrounging around in the bottom of my purse and my bathroom cabinets to find the myriad tins of lip balm I’ve bought over the years. You know, the amazing-smelling stuff that costs $10 a pop? This year, I found that I’d run out, and instead of buying more, I decided to make my own instead. I was amazed at how easy it was, and more importantly, that I could use a slow cooker to do it. Yes, a slow cooker! As part of my foray into the world of slow cooker crafts, I found out that a slow cooker is the perfect vessel for melting the wax needed for DIY beeswax lip balm.

This recipe for lip balm uses beeswax, coconut oil, almond oil and peppermint oil. You could change up the recipe by using apricot kernel oil instead of almond oil, and lavender or orange oil instead of peppermint, but I think this recipe makes a nice, cooling lip balm for winter. I really like the consistency and texture, too. It’s not goopy or gloppy like some gel balms, but instead gives your lips a thin, smooth protective layer that actually stays put during the day.

In the interest of fully tested projects, I gave containers to some fellow bloggers and here’s what they had to say about it. Hannah said, “It’s not as a soft (oily?) as other lip balms, but feels great once it’s on.” And Deanne loves that “It smells like Christmas.” Michele gave a winning recommendation: “I like it. I’m a freak and I put my lips IN the container. How about that for a review?”

So go ahead, try making your own beeswax lip balm. And check stocking stuffers for your friends, coworkers, mom, mother-in-law, sisters and sisters-in-law off your list.

Step 1

 Open GalleryDIY lip balm beeswax block for craftsFind some beeswax. I had a large, locally purchased chunk left over from previous candle-making adventures. Look for someone selling honey at your local farmers market and ask them about buying beeswax. Or you can buy a block at some natural foods stores; I found this one on the shelves in the Health and Beauty department at Earth Fare. You can also order beeswax pearls (also called pastilles or beads) online, and these may be easier to work with. I warmed my beeswax in the microwave for a minute so that it would be easier to cut off a few pieces.

Step 2

 Open GalleryDIY lip balm weigh beeswax

Using a kitchen scale, weigh your wax until you have about 3 ounces. Measuring would be easier with the beeswax pearls.

Step 3

 Open GalleryDIY lip balm melting beeswax

Melt beeswax in the slow cooker over low to medium heat. After the wax has melted, add the coconut oil and almond oil. Use your metal spoon to mix the oils together or pick up the pot (wearing oven mitts) and swirl them together.

Step 4

 Open GalleryDIY lip balm add peppermint oilAdd drops of peppermint oil to the mixture and mix or swirl again. Now you’re ready to transfer the mixture to containers where it will cool and harden into a balm.

Step 5

 Open GalleryDIY lip balm glass containers

I used tiny glass containers found at a craft store. Next time, I’d like to find or order smaller metal tins, but I do like the hexagonal shape of these glass ones, which is reminiscent of a honeycomb.

Step 6

 Open GalleryDIY lip balm containersCarefully fill each container with the melted mixture. I used a small metal spoon to dip and fill. The wax will coat the spoon, but it’s better to use metal than a porous material like wood. You could also try pouring it through a small funnel, but you might need a helper for that method. The mixture will start to harden up quickly.

Step 7

 Open GalleryDIY lip balm waxMy filling wasn’t perfect and yours probably won’t be either. See the drips? Just let them harden and then remove them later after the containers are cool.

Step 8

 Open GalleryDIY lip balm containersAfter they’re cool, close up the containers and add decorative labels if desired. I wanted labels I could write on, but as I planned on giving the balms away for holiday presents, these festive ones were just too good to pass up.

  • 3 ounces beeswax
  • 4 tablespoons coconut oil
  • 2 teaspoons sweet almond oil
  • 12 drops peppermint oil
  • glass or metal containers with lids

  • kitchen scale
  • slow cooker for crafts
  • small metal spoon or funnel
About Kelly Smith Trimble

I grow vegetables wherever I can find enough sunlight and forage roadsides and hiking trails for plants that can be used to make natural dyes. You can find both vintage ...

More About Kelly Smith Trimble

18 Responses

  1. Nicole says:

    I don't want to sound silly or anything but does it have an expiration date? :)

  2. Great idea Kelly. I published this in my post regarding 10+ mothers day slow cooker gift ideas.

  3. Diane says:

    Is the measurement for the coconut oil for it's solid or melted state?

  4. analohrmann says:

    The pictures make the balm look just delicious. Is it more hygenic to use tubes or pots? I've been using tubes from where do you get the pots?

  5. Lora says:

    1/2 cup of oil (sweet almond, grape seed, olive oil, apricot, jojoba oil, herbal infused olive oil….either/or.) if you are allergic to peanuts do not use sweet almond oil

    1oz of beeswax ( 4 tablespoons)

    20 drops of pure essential oils

    You can add some Shea butter, mango or cocoa butter remember you might have to add some more wax..

    At the very end add the pure essential oils…if you add to mixture when hot the essential oils will evaporate

    You can test the balm consistency by taking a spoon and taking a little bit of the liquid and put it in the fridge for a few minutes…if you don't like the texture fix to your own liking…if you don't have patience you can drop some on your hand it will harden within seconds remember the liquid is hot :)

    Add your lip balm to containers of your choice, you can use a Pyrex cup with a spout to carefully pour the liquid or use a pipette..

    This will make around 30 lip balm tubes….my favorite sites to order from or

    Hope thus helps

  6. Patti says:

    For the flavouring part, could you use different flavoured EXTRACTS instead of the Peppermint OIL? Or, do you have to use only OILS? I'm wondering if the Extract would affect the consistency in any way.Thanks!

  7. Rainy says:

    Could you use Shea butter instead of either oil?

  8. Tyler says:

    My batch isn't very easy to apply… It seems mostly wax still. Maybe more coconut oil?

  9. Nancy says:

    How do you clean your slow cooker afterwards?

  10. Jula says:

    The materials are on the right side of the picture 'bee wax'. They tell how much to use.

  11. Kimberly says:

    How much coconut oil and almond oil do you use with 3 oz of beeswax? How many total ounces produced?

  12. Jenn Pierson says:

    What a great idea!!! Thank you for sharing! I was wondering if you
    Can you use the chap stick holders the tube style with the wheel at the bottom?

  13. Melanie says:

    How much coconut oil and almond oil do you use with the 3 ounces of beeswax?

  14. rebeccaw053 says:

    I love making lip balm. My daughters and I made a bunch last year. They gave them to their friends as gifts. I used usually add food colors… to Vaseline. Have to give that a go this year!

  15. Leah says:

    Love this, it seems so easy to do, or at least easier than I imagined. Thanks for posting!

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earthegy Turns 3! Secrets Revealed…

   Posted by: earthegy   in All Posts

That's me...Chrisy Bossie

That’s me…Chrisy Bossie

Today is the day. earthegy turns 3!  Three years of learning, laughing, limping occasionally, and loving all of you who helped make it happen.

Some of you know a lot about me and have been with me since the beginning. Some of you are new, just getting to know me.

Secrets are getting spilled today. I want you to know me, and believe me, I want to know each of you better.

There’s no big corporation, no giant warehouse, no call center taking orders 24 hours a day. Just me, some pliers, a big work table and a spiffy website. Please, come get to know me better.

earthegy Secrets…

~earthegy started as a fluke. I had a girlfriend that showed me her pouch of rocks over drinks one night and told me all about them. They were exquisite. I fell in love with rocks right then and there. My friend also wore them in her bra to keep them closer to her. She didn’t show me that part….

~Three years ago today I put my first bracelets up for sale on etsy. My first sale didn’t happen until a full two months later, in October…

~Which was just in time because a few days earlier I was laid off from my full time job as a controller, along with other upper management staff…

~Which made me cry for exactly 2 minutes…

~It took me two solid weeks of messing with word generators to come up with the name “earthegy.” It hit me as I was falling asleep one night in bed…

~My parents told me earthegy was a nice idea but it would probably take me two years to make a living from it. It’s taken three…

~I never thought I would be cut out for self- employment. I couldn’t imagine having the initiative to get up each morning and work for myself. Now I get up every day, work non-stop for a few hours in my pajamas, and have to tear myself away from my work table to put normal clothes on…

~I picked up accounting consulting jobs on the side to pay the bills…

~It wasn’t until April, 2011 that earthegy had its first profitable month…my net profit was $94.75. I immediately called my parents to share my joy…

~My house is only 950 square feet. earthegy has taken over my dining room, laundry area, and now it’s steadily seeped into my living room and kitchen. Zip lock bags are stashed in my coffee table/ottoman, and cases of bubble mailers are stacked under and on top of my piano…

~I measure my success by how often I go through a 150 foot roll of bubble wrap and I do the Happy Dance when I need to buy a new roll…

~Now I only do accounting work to barter for getting my hair done at a nice salon…

~My long term dreams include an addition to my house with a dedicated work space so I can reclaim the rest of my house … (ok, so it’s a big dream, but why the hell not?)

I would not have been able to do any of this without people that believed in me, including my family, friends, and all of you who shop and send me more customers. Your support and your referrals have helped me grow from “starving artist” to independent business owner…

I could never thank you enough. Ever.

-Chrisy Bossie

Please join me on the earthegy facebook page or my personal page!  Or, if you want, just head on over to the shop…

The home of earthegy, Kents Store, Virginia

The home of earthegy, Kents Store, Virginia

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 1st, 2013 at 12:35 pm and is filed under All Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

5 comments so far

Great story. Thanks for sharing your everyday life, your dream, and success. I wish you many more to come! :)

August 1st, 2013 at 12:59 pm

What a beautiful story!

August 1st, 2013 at 1:10 pm

I’m a big admirer of Earthegy and found your story comforting and inspiring since I’m just starting out with my own jewelry hobby-turned-business venture. Taking my artistic skills and turning it into a career has always been my dream, your FB posts/site/stories over the past few months have really helped me overcome my fears, just a few days ago I sketched out my business name/logo and I made an appt at my local women’s bureau for help and guidance with all the start-up mumbo jumbo. Thank you for your post today, and all other days, I am happy knowing there’s a successful kindred spirit over in Virginia while I’m starting out here in Indiana.

August 1st, 2013 at 1:32 pm

I have been watching tutorials online on how to make jewelry since i cant work at the moment and i have relocated to another state and i know noone. I recently found your site. Your products are absolutely beautiful. I hope to make a business of it and other things. I look foward to more from your site.

August 1st, 2013 at 2:43 pm

While I’ve only had the chance to order once from you I pass on everything to anyone I think would be interested. I love my quartz and was even wearing it the weekend I got to finally meet Bruce Campbell in person.

Thank you for all the beautiful things you make! You inspired me many months ago to try my own hand at it. I look forward to your posts every day!

August 1st, 2013 at 4:53 pm

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Tag Archives: weight loss
Cayenne Pepper

Fat-Burning Food!

If you find yourself struggling to maintain a healthy weight or simply looking to lose those last few pounds, it might be time to consider adding some specific functional foods to your diet. Although very different in taste, shape, and texture, these three “fitness foods” can contribute to health by boosting your metabolism and satisfying […]

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Two Women Eating

5 Must-Know Diet Tricks

Losing weight isn’t easy, especially when you’re craving snacks and trying to break old habits. So here are five easy strategies that will help keep you focused on your weight-loss goals and curb your cravings. Try my water trick. If you are used to eating until you are full (more likely stuffed), drink three glasses […]

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Get Fit – Eat Right & Work Out

New Year, New You: Drop Holiday Pounds

Got a New Year’s resolution? Great. Want to eat better? Wonderful. Carrying a little post-holiday heft? Think a fad diet will be the solution? Think again. Most of these diets don’t work. The few that are any good tend to be impractical for many to apply or follow for very long. This time of year […]

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Boiled Quinoa

New Year, New You: 15 Must-Have Foods

It’s that time of year when we all set health goals for ourselves, and stress ourselves out with overzealous plans. The resolutions are great, but instead of overwhelming yourself with impractical expectations, take small steps every day to successfully meet your goals, and those steps can start with incorporating these 15 health foods into your […]

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Bye, Bye Thanksgiving Bloat

Everyone has experienced it at least once, and for most of us, it is part of the holiday experience that we have come to expect. I am talking about that sleepy, bloated, stuffed feeling that you get after engorging yourself on your Thanksgiving dinner. So why do we get bloated and how can we avoid […]

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Candice Gaukel Andrews by Candice Gaukel Andrews | November 15th, 2012 | 7 Comments
topic: Eco Travel, Green Living

Zion National Park

Our national parks are our soul-restoring places; the spots we run to when we need to escape the constant clatter of civilization. They are where we go to see the last vestiges of wild America. And each of our national parks seems to have at least one iconic image that lives in our consciousness, whether we’ve actually seen it in person or not: landmarks such as El Capitan in Yosemite, the bubbling hot springs in Yellowstone, or the hoodoos in Bryce Canyon.

Now picture yourself standing on the rim of one of our national parks’ stunning canyons, looking out on nature’s beauty. You’re awed and inspired by the scene in front of you, until your eyes begin to register a structure that doesn’t seem to belong. Then you suddenly recognize what it is: a huge trophy home, with windows from floor to ceiling and a wraparound deck.

That could never happen, right? It could, and it almost did last month in one of our most treasured natural spaces.

Homes in a holy place

Imagine standing on the rim of one of our national park’s stunning canyons and seeing a huge trophy home in the distance. ©Steve Morello

On October 11, 2012, the Salt Lake Tribune reported that a parcel of land in Zion National Park came close to being sold to a developer whose intent was to build a tract of private homes at the base of Tabernacle Dome. Luckily for all of us, an anonymous donor put up the $825,000 to buy this critical piece of private land. The donor then gifted it to the National Park Service.

If you’ve been following this column, you’ve already debated whether the wealthy should buy up wild lands to create preserves in the face of government budget cuts. But what about privately owned lands that are already in conserved areas? Should those landowners have the right to sell or transfer their properties to anyone they wish, just as other private landowners do?

In 1964, Congress established the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which was to receive $900 million a year, paid for with offshore drilling royalties from oil companies. That money has historically been used to buy up private lands in national parks when landowners decided to sell. Today, however, Congress routinely spends two-thirds of this oil money on other programs, leaving the parks unable to compete with wealthy, private buyers.

In 2012, in fact, Congress allocated only $161 million to the parks for buying land as it comes up for sale. But according to the National Park Service, the price tag of the priority properties it is trying to protect is more than $2 billion. In the case of Zion National Park, there’s still a lot of private land that never got absorbed. There are homesteads on roughly 3,400 acres that were surrounded by 147,000 acres of parklands when Congress acquired the Kolob Canyon section in 1956 and annexed it to Zion. Over time, it was hoped, the park would eventually acquire those homesteads.

Currently, inside all U.S. national parks, there are 11,640 pieces of private land. With public monies dwindling, it is feared that someday soon you could hike into a protected valley and come upon a strip mall or a whole neighborhood of homes.

A standard worth striving for

Others would point out, however, that those more than 11,000 pieces of privately owned land represent just 3 percent of the total area of our national parks. Fortunately, most of our treasured places are still vast, open spaces. Some members of Congress even blame the park service for wasting money expanding park boundaries, instead of buying up the land inside them.

The Wilderness Act defines wilderness as the place “where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” ©Henry H. Holdsworth

There is much sympathy for the property owners themselves, too. Some of these lands have been in their families for decades, long before a park may have been established or before the land they own became a part of the park. Would you, as a landowner, want someone to dictate what you can and cannot do with your property and to whom it may be sold?

I think it’s timely to note that in 2014, the Wilderness Act will turn fifty. That act defines wilderness as the place “where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

Perhaps there is a message or a goal to aspire to in that.

Do you think private landowners in national parks should be allowed to sell their properties to anyone they wish, even developers? Or should such lands only be transferred to the National Park Service?

Happy trails,

Feature photo: There are 3,400 privately owned acres inside Zion National Park. Hopefully, this won’t result in sprawling subdivisions within the borders of one of our nation’s busiest natural treasures. ©Candice Gaukel Andrews

  1. Just a comment that not all National Parks exist for the sole purpose of allowing people a place to experience scenic & natural beauty. Some parks, such as “Kalaupapa National Historical Park” on the island of Molokai in Hawaii, were established in order to preserve the history of the PEOPLE who lived there. Activities such as camping, hiking, fishing are not the focus at Kalaupapa. The NPS (National Park Service) does not own any land at Kalaupapa, except for a small 5 acre parcel. The rest is owned by public & semi-public entities such as the the Department of Hawaiian Homelands & the Department of Land & Natural Resources of the State of.Hawaii

    MB | November 16th, 2012 | Comment Permalink
  2. (sorry my post inadvertently posted before I was finished). The Department of Hawaiian Homelands (DHHL) and the Department of Land & Natural Resources (DLNR) of the State of Hawaii–these 2 entities are the landowners at Kalaupapa. How those entities acquired the lands at Kalaupapa is another thing (at one point there were private landowners at Kalaupapa). In any case, the NPS serves as a leaseholder & land manager at Kalaupapa National Historical Park, and my opinion is it is best for it to remain that way. There is NO need for the Federal government to own lands there. The DHHL & DLNR are not in the business of building strip malls & likely will never do so. And according to the article, considering the strapped budgets of the Fed government, they wouldn’t have enough money to purchase Kalaupapa anyway.

    MB | November 16th, 2012 | Comment Permalink
  3. The land belong to the owners. As such they should be able to move on at some point when that time comes and receive the financial benefits or donate the land to the people. It should not be a government decision, unless the current owners were given a life lease, in exchange for granting the government the land at some time in the past.

    As for development of strip malls or residential gated communities, that should be avoided at all costs. But as the previous posted noted, with the current $16 Trillion debt (as of this date and rising), the government should not purchase the land outright, but rather work with people who are able to fund the purchase, again as noted in the above post was the case in Hawaii.

    It would be good to have all land in the control of the government. However, private ownership is provided in our founding documents and should be honored. That the original borders were drawn around these parcels suggests that there was a reason. Whether the government didn’t have the funds, as is now the case, or the people were not forced to donate, the lands have remained private.

    We need to respect the rights of the people, over the demands of government, whenever possible. If the government was not in “bankruptcy level debt” they could buy it. But as with anyone else who is in extreme debt, they have no right to force others to give up the land, when the owners decide to move on.

    We don’t have the funds to maintain many of our existing national park lands. Adding without budget considerations is not in the interest of the people.

    Mark Fuge | November 20th, 2012 | Comment Permalink
  4. Since the world’s first National Park was established segments of the American community has found it part of their agenda to proclaim these parks simply as a means for states and individuals to prosper financially. Forgetting – as Roosevelt said – they are for the people. Today we continue to see parkland held up as collateral while blackmailing politicians. It is very simple – as long as the very attitudes that sent us into this great recession are allowed to float to the top our “Public Lands” and the greatness found there are in jeopardy.

    Brock Haley | November 20th, 2012 | Comment Permalink
  5. National Parks are the needed peace in a busy world. The National Parks System brings families together and educates them. Private individuals living inside National Park boundaries wishing to sell their properties should receive an accurate offer of the land’s value from the government. Commercialization of the land should be avoided at all costs.

    Victoria Marie Lees | November 21st, 2012 | Comment Permalink
  6. I’ve seen some of that in Big Sur. It didn’t bother me that much, but I found it distracting.

    Travis | November 21st, 2012 | Comment Permalink
  7. Private property in and around parks when they’re formed should remain private until the owner decides to sell. At that time the government should have the option to purchase at fair market value or at least be given the right of first refusal. If that fails, areas that are single residence, no matter how large, should remain a single parcel, not to be divided.

    Art Hardy | November 24th, 2012 | Comment Permalink

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