“Change someone’s perception of reality, and they will act how you want.” Ranboo, in a post-game debrief Over sixty years ago the filmmaker William Castle released Mr. Sardonicus in theaters, telling the tale of a horrid wretch of a man whose face was frozen in a rictus grin. Over the course of the movie, audiences […]

The post This Horror Film Was Livestreamed: One More Round With Generation Loss first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

“Hello. My name is Gregory Daniels. I’m twelve years old. I live at 3251 Spring Lake Drive, and I’ve been kidnapped!” Not exactly what you’d expect to hear when loading up a lofi beats YouTube channel. Then again, MatPat’s newest alternate reality game LoreFi isn’t only focused on creating a playlist of over eight hours […]

The post Unpacking MatPat’s New LoreFi ARG first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

Starting in 2012, Disney started airing a new animated series called Gravity Falls following the adventures of twins Dipper and Mabel Pines as the twins spent the summer at their “Grunkle” Stan’s roadside attraction The Mystery Shack, nestled in a small town in Oregon. And while the show was targeted towards kids, the show also […]

The post Gravity Falls and a Decade Long Education in (Bill) Ciphering first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

I have a confession to make: I misplace things all the time. That copy of Ship of Theseus I bought that I was saving for a rainy day? Gone. The transparent lock I used for lockpicking practice? Haven’t seen it in years. My Flynn Lives pin, from the Tron Legacy ARG? Fell off my lanyard […]

The post The Ministry of Lost Things Takes PostCurious in an Episodic Direction first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

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Posted on Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Posted on Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Posted on Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Posted on Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Posted on Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Posted on Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Posted on Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Posted on Tuesday, March 24, 2015

The FZ20 gives you the freedom to shoot the way you want. Manually adjust the focus with the focus ring to create a particular effect.

The lives of most African children are snuffed out before they can even begin to grow. Their futures grow dim with each passing day as Africa’s gardens slip away. Why can’t these precious seeds grow and prosper? Aren’t they just as important as a flower garden or a vegetable garden?

Leaving Needles in our rearview mirror, although seemingly in a pocket of far off mountains, the headlights shown on what was nothing but bleak desert, endless, flat, miles of sand. Although Billy was speeding along about 60 mph, I felt as if the car was standing still since there was nothing to see, not even trees outside the window that at least gave one a sense of motion.

General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan was at a barber shop for a haircut. The barber asked him when he would hold elections. Musharraf was evasive and said, "Later, not right now, the country is not ripe for them."

We had to turn the car in on Thursday, and we had thought that we would do some ‘touring’ beforehand, but without air-conditioning, we were virtually prisoners in this small, but cool, room.

Almost a whole year had gone by since both Priscilla Black and Monique Bateleur had passed within the gates as first-year students although, in that short space of time, they had had several adventures that most people would never encounter throughout their entire life. After all, not every one had the perplexing experience of encountering extra-terrestrial creatures from somewhere far off in deep space beyond Canis Minor, The Dog Star.

'Buster has found your target and is waiting. You go tomorrow around midnight. Four hours maximum to get the goodies. And don't forget, I'll be right there with you all the way.'

In Stalin's Moscow, a man shouted in public, "The whole world is suffering because of one man!"

Getting a job was as difficult as securing the old one. It was another experience entirely after working as Sales Executive in a bookselling firm and wanting to become an editor for a publishing firm. Actually Claude had a flair for editorials, so he had to experiment first as freelance editor while working as salesman. It was actually difficult to determine whether book editing could be taught (perhaps a B.A honors in editing would have gone a long way) or a matter of talent and experience could help, but Claude had this weird interest and inordinate desire to be called writer and editor

Friday morning we all slept late, exhausted after our long day at Disneyland. I thought that as tired as we were at our youthful age, then Uncle Charles must be practically comatose today! Although I had to use the bathroom, I lay in the bed until I could not stand it a moment longer, afraid that my movements would waken the children, but finally I had no choice, and I quickly tiptoed into the bathroom and closed the door.

In a concentration camp in Siberia during Stalin's reign of terror, a Russian and a Jew were sentenced to death. The commissar told them, "Each of you can have one last wish before you die."

BlackEagle Girls The first grey streaks of dawn were staining the east as the Black Eagle settled outside a ground-floor bedroom window of Monique's new home and the five girls drifted from the old tree house and slipped silently within. Gently Belinda and Narenda guided a nodding Surban to her bed and, after getting her into her night attire, settled her under the covers. In a matter of moments she was breathing deeply, her eyes shut fast, the bag that contained her secret treasure, still clutched firmly to her chest.

I dreamt that I was in the middle of the ocean in a rowboat that was tossing and turning on a rough sea. The wind howled, lightning split the sky, the rain fell in buckets and the tiny boat spun around and around until all of a sudden, just as the waves began to swell higher and higher, the rowboat turned into one of those flat saucers that I had seen towed slowly behind ski-boats with children riding on them.

In the beginning when there was no time, our land was in total ruin and desolated for full disobedience and condemnation. For the line between the living and the spirit was thing and transparent, but soon rivalry emerged and the contest was bent on destroying man- the most visible, the most articulate.

It happened during the World War at a small village in Dogon, Mali, about fifty kilometers to Timbuktu. Those years, Timbuktu witnessed a boom in salt trade, it was the major export via the river and the desert merchants coming from Niamey and Djibouti have had to reconsider their route, because export was faster using the river than Sahara desert. People came far and wide to trade in salt and millet.

A wanderer arrived at a river that was too deep to wade through. Since he could not swim, he built a raft and crossed the river on it. He thought the raft was useful, he might need it again some day.

I had no idea that circumstances had just begun to spiral out of control and lead to tragedy, and even if I had, I am not sure what I could have done, but I certainly would have done something! Anything to avoid what would soon become my worst nightmare!

Wedding photographer in Queenstown, New Zealand. I like natural wedding photography with a focus on capturing real moments and raw emotions candidly and artistically.

Cajun Fried Photography does head shot photography and more based out of Alexandria, Louisiana.

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Have you ever wondered what famous people get each other for the Christmas? Now you can find out and the list is extraordinary and very tongue in cheek.

Alianza, Inc.amp;nbsp;today introduced Alianza for Microsoft Teams, a new and powerful solution that gives service providers a robust cloud PBX voice solution for Microsoft Teams.

JupiterOne, the leading cyber asset visibility and management company, today announced the release of its second annual State of Cyber Assets Report (SCAR). The report analyzed more than 291amp;nbsp;million assets, findings, and policies to establish the current state of enterprise cloud assets, including cloud and physical environments of devices, networks, apps, data,amp;nbsp;and users.amp;nbsp;

CloudWyze, a homegrown North Carolina internet and managed service provider and GREAT Grant recipient, is expanding service inNash County, N.C. in their continued efforts to close the digital divide.

Cloud computing has driven, and continues to drive, a paradigm shift for enterprise IT. Mastering the cloud has become essential for businesses amp;hellip; but what does that mean, and how can it be achieved? In a recent report titled 'From Taming Cloud Complexity to Achieving Cloud Mastery,'amp;nbsp;EPAM Continuum, the integrated business, technology and experience consulting practice of EPAM Systems, Inc. (NYSE: EPAM),amp;nbsp;answers the most pressing questions on the topic and reveals how to achieve the ultimate goal, mastering cloud complexity.

Today, SAP SE and Google Cloud announced an extensive expansion of their partnership, introducing a comprehensive open data offering designed to simplify data landscapes and unleash the power of business data. The offering enables customers to build an end-to-end data cloud that brings data from across the enterprise landscape using the SAPamp;reg; Datasphere solution together with Google's data cloud, so businesses can view their entire data estates in real time and maximize value from their Google Cloud and SAP software investments.

Gotomyerp, a leading cloud hosting provider for QuickBooks, SAP, Sage Cloud applications, and other third-party ERP (enterprise resource planning) business applications across the United States, Canada, and Mexico is celebrating its 16th year of offering secure and reliable enterprise cloud hosting solutions for businesses with a special offer for new clientele.

Today, SAP SE announced the next step in its long-standing partnership with Microsoft, using the latest in enterprise-ready generative AI innovation to help solve customers' most fundamental business challenges. The companies will collaborate on integrating SAPamp;reg;SuccessFactorsamp;reg; solutions with Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot in Viva Learning, as well as Microsoft's AzureOpenAI Service to access powerful language models that analyze and generate natural language. The integrations will enable new experiences designed to improve how organizations attract, retain and skill their people.

Sam saw my post from yesterday. He asked: "Why are the reports separate?" He suggested that instead of using the Log File, I display the warning messages in the Everything Report with the related data. For printing, Behold can have a toolbar item to toggle them on and off. He said this would eliminate the need to look at the error log and then search for the error in the main report.

That's a great idea! Basically, I can get rid of the log file completely by including that info in the Everything Report. I never really did like having to create the log file in the first place. But Sam pointed out the obvious that I might never have seen. Thank you, Sam.

The retooling the two parts of Behold was tricky, but its going well.

Moving the CONC tag to the input stage led to a few other simplifications. My large test file of 33,000 people that I use for timings takes about 35 seconds. This improvement actually cut a half a second off that.

But changing the storage of each record's data lines from a linked list into a single long string had me worried. You can't get much faster than a linked list, but I already needed citations in a string and didn't want to continue to process data lines in two separate ways. I was relieved when it only added about a second of time on, or only about 3%. But it did reduce the RAM requirement by about 30MB down to 650MB for that file, or about 5%.

For most programmers, the recommendation is to always use more memory if you can save time. But Behold is a bit different in this regard. For very large GEDCOM files, it is often the memory that is Behold's limitation, so anything I can reduce from that is worth it.

Over the weekend, hopefully I'll finish this as I merge the display algorithms together and eliminate many inconsistencies and bugs during the process.

For years I've only put the date as the title of each of my blog entries. A bit boring, wouldn't you say? The date doesn't do much to help figure out what the post is about. So from now on I've decided to put something to better identify each Blog post.

Here's a site I never saw before. Put up by Intel, it's called "Cool Software" at: http://coolsw.intel.com. If you search there for "genealogy", there are two entries, one for Geni, and one for MyHeritage.

Exciting times for any genealogist are defined as what I'm about to be going through very soon. On one of the 9 ancestral lines I've descended from, this one tracing back to Romania, I soon may be working with a researcher in Romania to "get the goods" for me. Early indications look like there may be a lot of info available.

Not only that, over the last 5 years, I've been in contact with 3rd cousins I've never met who are in other branches of the same line. They have added their own research to what I have, and what we've all accumulated together now makes it possible for the next step. They surely will be joining this journey to enjoy finding out more about our common ancestral origins.

If only I had Behold version 2 ready so I can record all this as it comes. But since I don't, I'm going to do the next best thing. I'm going to create a webpage of our family in Romania that will look's just like Behold's HTML output. This page will serve as our group's master data sheet. But it will also serve as a model for Behold. It will also include pictures with descriptions that will be a prototype for pictures in Behold.

Here's the nice thing. Once Behold Version 2 is ready, that data won't be lost. I'll be able to enter almost all of it into Behold simply by copying and pasting from the webpage. Then it should just be a matter of linking spouses together and assigning them their children.

If I can make the process that simple, then editing in Behold will be amazing!

The last thing to do before I issue the next release is to eliminate the log file and move the messages that were reported in the log file into the File Information section of the Everything Report.

In doing so, I am revisiting all the error and warning messages that Behold produced. I'm rewriting them and making their text customizable (so different languages can be supported) and making them selectable (so they can be turned off if you don't want them).

I see that I can classify them into two types: Possible GEDCOM problems and possible data errors.

GEDCOM standards have changed over time, and every program outputs its data into GEDCOM in slightly different forms, often not conforming to the latest GEDCOM standard. I've made Behold to be very forgiving so that it reads everything possible. But when Behold reads files that may be GEDCOM but seem to have something wrong with them, Behold will report these to let you know. Maybe the file was truncated or maybe the character set was wrong. But Behold will still read as much data as possible from the file and try to continue processing. Often you can just ignore these GEDCOM errors knowing that Behold will read everything it can.

But you will want to look at the problems reported as possible data errors. These will tell you where you might need to fix your data. For example, there might be duplicate IDs, multiple husbands, missing links or undefined sources. To fix these, you'll need to go into your genealogy program that created the GEDCOM and update your data. When version 2 of Behold is out, you'll be able to fix your data right in Behold.

The messages up to now were are real hodge-podge. I added them as I developed. They are inconsistent in form and style. So I am now turning each into one of the two types: GEDCOM problems and data problems, improving their default text and getting them to work in a consistent way. There are over 50 of these messages, and I'm going through them one by one. This should take a couple of days and then the new release will be out.