July 2014 Archives

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The Vanderbilts’ lavish homes, opulent parties and colorful characters made them the Gilded Age’s poster family. At one time some of America’s richest thanks to a booming railroad business, they have seen their dollars turn to dust. So where did it all go?


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My children are both now working (ages 22 and 24), and every few days they come by and we talk about their jobs. There is always a conversation about how much fun they're having, what great achievements they have, and then of course... a discussion about their boss.


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Japan’s Aoshima Island is tiny: only about 44,000 meters^2 (that’s about 0.017 square miles) in total land area, but it’s a nice enough place. The island, located off Japan’s southern shore, is a subtropical botanical garden enveloped on all sides by a ring of white, sandy beaches.


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Andrea Angella is a Software Engineer in Red Gate Software. His peers describe him as really enthusiastic, motivated with an infinite passion for software development, a relentless desire to keep learning and an amazing ability to involve others in his pursuit of excellence.


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At 8’3″ (2.51 m), Sultan Kosen of Turkey is, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the tallest man alive. He took the title on September 17, 2009, from a Mongolian man named Bao Xishun, who towered over everyone else on Earth at 7’9″ (2.36 m).


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There are 26 letters to the English alphabet, with two of the letters — “A” and “I” — themselves also constituting words. But as seen above, another character — the ampersand (&) — also, at times, was included among the current 26.


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In April of 2006, the Wakayama Electric Railway in Japan was on the verge of an economic collapse. That often leads to layoffs and this was no exception.


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The new website and app will make all 552 episodes of the series searchable. It is basically, if you are a Simpsons fan, like finding a coupon for a hundred free Krusty Burgers, and then finding out that they'll be served to you by Krusty himself.


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In his 1978 album Apostrophe (‘), the late Frank Zappa took to verse to give us a bizarre health warning: “Watch out where the Huskies go, and don’t you eat that yellow snow.” That’s good advice, for sure. But what about reddish snow which smells like watermelon? Yes, watermelon snow.


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Public-private partnerships are a long-standing way for corporations to reach consumers while the public coffers find some economic relief.


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The medical world is full of acronyms. A patient who is “DNR” has a directive demanding that doctors not use certain means to potentially prolong the patient’s life.


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In 1997, many countries in Asia’s Pacific Rim suffered from a massive financial crisis which threatened to spread across the world. Foreign debt to GDP ratios exceeded 180% at the peak of the crisis.


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Are you packing your smartphone this vacation season? Make the most of your time off with an occasional assist from these travel-themed apps. There are apps for hotel and airline reservations, packing your suitcase, and finding the perfect pet sitter to look after your dog.


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Jimmy Mcintyre is a travel photographer and educator. His photos have been published in local and national magazines, including the BBC. His online courses on digital blending and post-processing can be found in his official website.


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If you want to succeed as a programmer, you need to immerse yourself in the programming culture. This is more true if you’re still a pupil. The field of programming is so broad and there’s so much information to absorb that you’ll never come out on top if you participate from a distance.


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MacDown is an open source Markdown editor for OS X, released under the MIT License. It is heavily influenced by Chen Luo’s Mou.


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Fly into Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport and, if you do what most people do after a long flight, you are probably headed to the lavatory.  If you’re a guy, you’ll see that Schiphol’s bathrooms sports a feature many do not — urinals, with flies on them, as pictured right.


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He was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on July 2, 1932, to an unwed mother. She gave him up for adoption when he was just six weeks old.


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Not Jason.  Ansel. Back in the 1850s, Ansel Bourne was a carpenter in Rhode Island.  In 1857, for reasons unknown, he seemingly spontaneously became blind, deaf, and mute — but 18 days later, recovered with only a case of partial amnesia as a lingering after effect.


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The running joke is that the lottery is a tax on those who can’t do math. But on occasion, we see the opposite — people who are very, very strong in math not only play the lottery (or as jokingly noted in this cartoon, gamble), but walk away with their pockets flush with newfound money.


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Remember walkie-talkies? When some of us were kids, we had actual handheld voice radios. They sent signals over the air that were picked up directly by their mates. There was no middleman technology: No cell towers. No infrastructure to get overloaded. Nothing extra to pay for.


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It’s time to hack your commute. The average commute in the United States is about 25 minutes according to the US census bureau. That’s 50 minutes a day that can be potentially leveraged to move you forward. And 8% of Americans travel over an hour each way to get to work!


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I have saved a bit of Isshinryu History with this article on Sunsu Kata.


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When Americans think of traitors, Benedict Arnold springs to mind.  But seventy years later, a much larger group of soldiers defected to the enemy.  Meet Saint Patrick’s Battalion. In 1835, Texas was still part of Mexico.


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Unfortunately, you can advertise in all the right places, have a fantastic internship program, and interview all you want, but if the great programmers don’t want to work for you, they ain’t gonna come work for you.


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This year, Daniel Day-Lewis (there’s a hyphen) became the first person to win the Academy Award for Best Actor three times.


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Those words were fashioned by Benjamin Franklin in a 1789 letter to Jean-Baptiste Le Roy, a French physicist.  He was talking about the uncertainty faced by the United States, having just instituted its Constitution yet still in its nascent stages.


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In the third chapter, "High Finance, or the Point of Vanishing Interest", Parkinson writes about a finance committee meeting with a three-item agenda.


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Ten years ago, the northeastern part of the United States and much of the Canadian province of Ontario lost power in what is still one of the largest prolonged power outages in history. Over 50 million people lost power for at least six hours, with some not regaining access for a few days.


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There are more than 20,000 Starbucks around the world, and almost all of them have a familiar menu — tall, grande, and venti drinks of various flavors and varieties, scones and other stuff like that, and the occasional artisanal cheese plate in a plastic container.


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DiskWave is a free disk usage utility for Mac OS X. It helps you determine what files and folders consume most of your disk space. Thanks, expensivepuppy!


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Adobe has created the “Experience Manager” solution by combining Adobe CQ and Adobe Scene7.  Experience Manager is one of five “solutions” in the Adobe Marketing Cloud.  It is one of Adobe’s two clouds - the other being the Adobe Creative Cloud.


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We were told that college would be all about making choices. This has held true, as we've chosen everything from our class schedules, our roommates, our study habits and even our attendance at the University of Tennessee.


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A simple, powerful SQLite manager for Mac OS X


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Envoy helps you to manage ssh keys in similar fashion to keychain, but done in c, takes advantage of cgroups and systemd.


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Yasu is a Macintosh application which allows users to easily run many of the system level Unix shell scripts that perform maintenance routines as well as clearing many of the cache files used by OS X. Via Lifehacker.


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It’s the early 1800s. You’re a British subject, sailing around the world, bouncing around the Empire. While your job has its perks — you get to see places that others can’t even dream of — it also has a few major downsides.


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Bill Cosby and his fictional family dominated the sitcom world in the 1980s. Their 202 episodes of The Cosby Show ran for eight seasons. The show’s impact on American culture is hard to overstate. TV Guide credited the show with reviving the sitcom genre.


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Brussels sprouts are little buds from a type of cabbage which, themselves, resemble miniature cabbages. They’re edible, but if you are like millions of children worldwide, you’d probably not admit to that fact. There’s a reason for this.


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The video above runs for three minutes. It’s repetitive and rather boring — there’s no need to watch most of it. It shows a cardinal — the bird, to avoid any confusion for you non-watchers — flying into a set of windows, over and over again. Five times in the first thirty seconds.


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Spend enough time in a bath tub or a pool, and without fail, your fingers will start to resemble raisins — pruney, wrinkled, etc.  We have all had it happen, many times over.  But why does this happen?  What makes our fingers wrinkle when wet?


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The Ericsson Globe seats 13,850 hockey fans, and at 110 meters in diameter, the large white ball is also the largest hemispherical building in the world.   It is also the Sun — in a country-wide scale model of the Solar System.


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Corny jokes and bad puns are a calling card of many people, even if their sense of humor induces more groans than laughs. But by and large, those who employ such repartees can, if they so choose (and as we all know, they rarely do), refrain from doing so.


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