#I know that kind of service probably has a crazy output of work | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

heartofholland · 4 years

Text

bitter - p.p.

summary: you worked your whole life for this, and peter parker took it away without a single second thought.

word count: 2.5k

warnings: a bit of swearing but for comedic effect i swear

authors note: this is my first (and most likely last) time writing. if its not good blame my C in english <3. this idea randomly came to me in the middle of the night and i though i’d give it a shot. shoutout @hollanderheart for not only motivating me to write and post this but also being my own personal hype woman at all times. enjoy!!

---

You had never had a solid reason to hate Peter Parker. He was smart, quiet, and always kind to you and everyone around him. You thought he was a nice boy, and never had a problem with him. Until now.

Until Peter fucking Parker stole your internship.

The news was initially broken to you through hallway gossip. Not believing the story, you went straight to the only person who you knew wouldn’t feed you bullshit, MJ.

“Did Peter get the Stark internship?” You practically screamed. MJ turned, stunned from your sudden close proximity and your wide, questioning eyes. Closing her locker after grabbing the books she needed for her next class, she answered, “Yeah, he’s had it for like a week, why?”

“And you didn’t think to tell me?” Your back hit the lockers and you rubbed your face in frustration.

“Well, I didn’t know you were so invested in Peter’s business all the sudden,” she quipped, not realizing you weren’t in the mood based on the death glare you returned.

“You realize I’ve been working on getting that internship for like, my whole life right?” You scoffed and let your head fall back and hit the locker.

“It must’ve slipped my mind, my bad.” she replied coolly.

You groaned, “I can’t believe Peter Parker just destroyed my future.”

“I’m gonna sit this breakdown out, I have to study for my Calc test.” She gave you a sympathetic pat on the shoulder before making her way to the library.

There you stayed, leaning on the lockers frozen with solitude, or was it anger? You couldn’t quite tell.

The rest of the morning passes with a breeze, just going through the motions of your daily routine without even thinking. Everything just felt numb. The final bell rang, allowing you to get away from the possibility of making any contact with Peter. The hatred you held for that boy was unimaginable.

The internship at hand was a once in a lifetime experience. The September Foundation Internship. One high school junior, hand picked by Tony Stark himself, was hired to work alongside the mastermind for an entire year. Rumors claim that if you’re cool enough, he lets you try on the suit. Others claim that if you stay late enough, you can see the Avengers in their daily lives. But no one has ever been able to verify them. Now meeting the Avengers would be cool and all but that's not why you wanted this internship. By featuring this on your applications, it was basically one way ticket to acceptance.

To any school. Anywhere.

Though your resume may be long winded, having the internship on there puts you ahead of any other student there. And if you were trying to get into MIT, it definitely wouldn’t hurt to be friends with an alumni. A very prevalent alumni who donates large sums of money each year.

What irked you the most was that you didn’t even get a letter of rejection. You had to find out through gossip. Like really? How long does it take to write an email?

Hey sorry you sucked so much that you didn’t get the internship. Better luck next time!

XOXO Iron Man :)

Sure, Peter Parker was a hard worker with a big brain but there was no way he was more qualified for that job. You had hundreds of hours of community service, a spotless report card, professional relationships with many prominent authoritative figures, and you participated in extracurriculars that Peter hadn’t even heard of. So how did he get in over you? Sure he has marching band, academic decathlon and robotics but in no way could that ever put you a step above him. It’s not like he’s some sort of superhero saving lives.

The fact that you couldn’t come up with a single thing that could make him stand out over you annoyed you to no end. The internal conflict occupied your brain for almost a week until you decided to confront Peter.

You spotted him in the cafeteria, laughing with Ned acting like he did absolutely nothing wrong.

Oh boy did he have it coming.

“So how’d you do it?” you accused, slamming your lunch tray down and sitting down across from him. Ned scootched away suddenly uncomfortable with your closeness and accusatory voice. Since becoming official with Betty, he knew how women’s emotions worked (to an extent) and he knew that tone did not mean sunshine and rainbows.

“W-What are you talking about?” he squeaked, confusion written all over his face. His eyes bouncing all over your features as if it would help predict what you were going to say to him.

“The September Foundation Internship,” you started with a calmer tone, “How’d you beat out all 5000 candidates, including yours truly?” You smiled innocently, but Peter knew that look meant anything but.

He looked around for a second, coming up with absolutely any excuse to satisfy your jealousy, “I did- I didn’t ask Mr. Stark so- so I really don’t know.” He turned to Ned widening his eyes as if sending a telepathic call for help. Ned frantically shook his head, not wanting any part of his problem. He deals with enough angry teenage girls as it is, he wouldn’t voluntarily put up with any more than he needed.

Peter panicked, spouting out the first thing that came to mind, “Well in my application I-I mentioned that I like to build LEGOS, so I guess Mr. Stark assumed I’m good with my hands?” uncertainty prevalent in his voice. He visibly winced at that poor excuse of reasoning.

You were surprised, “Oh, ok. Thanks Peter,” getting up to move towards your typical spot in the cafeteria.

“Real smooth, bet you really fooled her there,” Ned teased his friend, noticing the concern on his face, “What was I supposed to do? Just casually mention I’m Spider-man? She wouldn’t believe me!” Peter weighed.

LEGOs.

A toy that was meant for children beat you out. Embarrassed was an understatement. You played with Barbies and Polly Pockets! You even played with the sexist “girly” version of LEGOs! Granted you probably haven’t picked up a toy in maybe 10 years but still! That just isn’t fair.

---

“Mr. S-Stark could I have some advice?” Peter was quite literally shitting his pants with nervousness.

Tony looked up from his blasters he was tinkering with, “I mean you can ask but I can’t guarantee I can be your Dalai Lama” he taunted.

“Um okay well,” Peter gulped, “This really pretty girl at my school is mad at me and I don’t know what to do”

Tony was stunned, “Girls talk to you? And you hold a conversation? Congrats kid you’re growing up!”

Peter was embarrassed, “Well, not exactly. You know that internship you host every year?” His hands were shaking from nervousness, so he dropped his web shooters and clasped them in his lap so Tony wouldn’t notice. But of course he did, setting down his blasters and turning his chair to put his complete focus on Peter.

Well that totally makes this conversation easier!

“Of course. But I’m not giving it to you. I spend enough time with you already as it is.”

That helped ease his stress, “Well to cover for Spider-Man I just tell everyone I do the Stark internship, forgetting that there is a real internship. So this girl applied for the September Foundation Internship and is mad because she thinks I took it from her. But that's crazy because she's like the nicest person and worked so hard for this internship and there is no one I know that is more deserving of the spot and-,” Tony cuts him off, knowing the boy could ramble for days.

“What’s her name?” He questions, “Y/N Y/L/N, But I’m not asking you to like give it to her because that’s not fair, just give her a tour of the tower or something for her to finally realize I’m not that important around here,” Peter justifies.

“I’ll see what I can do.” With that, he walked out of the lab.

---

You’ve accepted the fact that you didn’t get the position and have continued to build your resume, filling in the space you left for the internship.

“Mr. Harrington? Flash isn’t here today so do you want me to do the lab alone?” You asked, grateful your annoying lab partner isn’t there attempting every pick up line in existence on you. Each one followed up with a denial and you completed the lab on your own.

“No,” Mr. Harrington said. “Ned’s partner isn’t here either so you can pair up with him.”

Begrudgingly, you stood up to join Ned at his lab table. Curious you ask, “Who is your partner?”, Ned hesitates in his answer, “Oh, Peter is busy with the Stark internship.”

Nevermind. Any progress of acceptance you thought you’d made was gone.

“Oh, okay.” You ended the conversation knowing you couldn’t handle dwelling on your failures any longer.

You would’ve been able to juggle the internship and school. Peter can’t even stay a whole day of school without leaving. This was just another reason why you were more qualified than him.

Peter was just arriving at Avengers tower to talk to Mr. Stark about how he altered his web shooters to increase the output of webs. He took the elevator up, assuming he would just be in the lab like he always is. And he was there, just not alone. He catches their attention when walking in, embarrassed to be seen so caught off guard.

“Ah Peter! So good to see you! I want you to meet our newest intern, Y/N Y/L/N!” Tony smirks at the boy whose eyes are blown wide staring at the girl in front of her.

“H-Hi Y/N. C-congrats on the internship.”

“Thank you Peter.”

“Well I have to go check on Cap, he gets angry when he doesn’t have his green smoothie. You guys get comfortable with each other! But not too comfortable, I don’t need to see any angsty teenager lovers in my presence.” Tony winked at Peter before he left the lab.

“Well that's awkward,” the girl begins, “I think I just stole your job.”

“Wh-what?” his eyebrows knitted together.

“Well you’re always gone for the Stark Internship so I just assumed it was the September Foundation Internship?” Now they’re both confused, clearly Mr. Stark wasn’t clear on Peter’s affiliation with him.

“N-no I just do a different intern job for Mr. Stark. I-I just clean up the lab.”

He has really gotta pick up his excuse game.

“So you’re a janitor?” She frowns.

“N-no I just make sure it’s tidy for Mr. Stark, organize the supplies and order more when he needs,” Peter stuttered.”

Ok now he's improving with his justification skills.

“Oh ok? Well I have to go, I have a charity thing.” You made a solid attempt at cutting the tension between you both..

---

“I didn’t ask you to do that.”

Tony spins his chair, spotting Peter at the entrance. “Well I reviewed her application and you were right, she does deserve it. Plus, I know how you struggle with the ladies, so in a way I was throwing you a bone, whilst still getting a prodigy by my side.”

His jaw set, “I’ll have you know I am perfectly good with the ladies and don’t need your help,” Peter stormed out of the lab like a toddler.

“That’s not what you said in the lab the other day!” He calls after him, knowing full well he was out of earshot.

---

Peter has never felt so relieved than when the quinjet touched down on the top of the building. The mission was a complete disaster. If he had to explain the definition of “abort mission” he’d probably start with that.

After stepping off the quinjet, Peter made a beeline for the kitchen. His throat scratched every time he swallowed, probably from yelling into the coms trying to navigate through the pure chaos.

Passing by Wanda, he could tell by her facial expression he wasn’t in good shape. He could feel the dried blood stuck to his skin and the smell of sweat was unavoidable from even 10 feet away.

After his five minute walk, which would be better described as a limp, he made it to just get a glass of water. Finally, the rush of moisture runs through his whole body. Whilst peacefully chugging his entire cup of water he hears the sound of glass shattering, followed by the words,

“What. The. Fuck.”

He knows the voice from anywhere. Hell, he hears it on the morning announcements with Betty every goddamn morning. Frozen, he doesn’t know what his next move is. Does he run and act like it never happened? Does he just accept it and brush it off like no big deal? His rough draft of an explanation is slowly being put together in his head when you move in front of him.

“You’re not an intern. You’re fucking Spider-man.”

“O-oh hey Y/N, didn’t see you there”

Real smooth Parker. Why don’t you talk about your LEGO skills again. Just try and see if you can make this conversation any more awkward than it needs to be.

“Cut the bullshit. Why didn’t you tell me?”

She always knows how to get straight to the point. Something he always admired about her.

“I-I-I didn’t think it was important?” The apprehension isn’t helping his persuasion skills in the slightest.

“Oh being an Avenger is just a common occurrence nowadays?” You push, determined to get a real answer and not a half assed excuse.

“I mean if you live around here yeah everyone is some kind of super hu-”

“Peter.” You cut him off, annoyance obvious in your tone.

He sighed, “Yes. I am Spider-man. The only people who know are Ned, Aunt May, and the rest of the Avengers. And now you.” Distress was obvious on his face

You began to feel guilty once you saw the panic on his face, “I won’t tell anyone,” you squeak, the first drop of sympathy Peter has ever received from you.

“Thank you, I’m sorry for not telling you. You’re part of the team and deserve a real confession, not finding out by accident.”

The guilt train is on a two way track tonight!

“No, it was your secret. You deserve your privacy.” A small smile tugged at the edges of your lips.

“Thank you for being so understanding. Now that the secret is out maybe we could work together on my suit sometime?”

Peter is nervous. Why is he nervous? Did he just accidentally ask her on a date. Oh god what if she isn’t interested?

“I’d love to Peter! It's a date!” Your smile beaming gave Peter a surge of confidence, and he reached around your waist to pull you into a hug. You were both ecstatic to have finally started to see each other as friends, and even a little more than that.

Your trances were broken when you finally spoke up, “Maybe you should take a shower first,” as you finally realized the stench in your close proximity.

A flush creeping up his face when he realized. “Let me go shower then we can continue this,” he beams.

“See you then Spider-man!”

#peter parker #peter parker x reader #peter parker fic #peter parker fanfic #spider-man #spider-man fic #peter parker imagine

64 notes · View notes

mobilemechanicsabq · 3 years

Link

Best Automotive In-Car Bluetooth Speakerphone Setup Service and Cost in McAllen TX |Mobile Mechanics Of McAllen

More information is at:

http://24hourmobileautorepairmcallen.org/automotive-in-car-bluetooth-speakerphone-setup-near-me/

Are you looking for the Best Automotive In-Car Bluetooth Speakerphone Setup Service near McAllen TX ?Mobile Mechanics Of McAllen, we can help you stay safe and connected. Drop by and see what we have. Our knowledgeable and professional sales team will answer your questions and set you up with the perfect Bluetooth system for your needs, your car, your lifestyle. Cost? Free estimates! Send us a message or call us today. Best Automotive In-Car Bluetooth Speakerphone Setup Service around McAllen TX. We serve McAllen TXand other areas. Get a Free Quote Now!

BEST AUTOMOTIVE IN-CAR BLUETOOTH SPEAKERPHONE SETUP SERVICE IN MCALLEN TX

MCALLENAUTOMOTIVE IN-CAR BLUETOOTH SPEAKERPHONE SETUP

Things To Know About Bluetooth Speakers For Car

What Are Bluetooth Speakers For Cars?

Automotive In-Car Bluetooth Speakerphone Setup Service near McAllen TX: It is a wireless loudspeaker that receives audio signals using the Bluetooth connection to transmit audio in the car. These speakers allow drivers to comfortably use their phones hands-free. In addition to that, you can comfortably entertain yourself with your favorite music audios. With a great device, expect nothing less of excellent services.

When it comes to purchasing a nice Bluetooth speaker for your car a lot of people are in a dilemma of what exactly to purchase. Why is that? The main reason why purchasing this speaker is a bit tricky is because of the many available types in the market today. And the varieties can be confusing for the buyers. That’s where this article comes in. This piece highlights all the important details you need to know about the Bluetooth speakers for the car. Read on!

What To Consider Before Buying Bluetooth Speakers For A Car?

Automotive In-Car Bluetooth Speakerphone Setup Service near McAllen TX: When it comes to purchasing a great Bluetooth speaker for your car, they are some considerations you should take into account. In this section, we go into details about the important specifications for the best Bluetooth speakers for your car.

● Price

When leaving the house to go shopping, it is important to have a budget. The same rule applies when it comes to getting these speakers. Determine your budget to prevent any kind of frustration and adjust it accordingly in case of anything.

● The Sensitivity Of The Speakers

The car stereo system may be high-powered or low-powered. Low-powered speakers RMS power runs below 15 watts. The high-powered stereo system works best with low sensitivity speakers while low-powered systems work best with high sensitivity speakers.

● Sound Quality

This specification is an essential feature to consider. Its frequency runs between 20,000 Hertz and 100 Hertz. A wide range means better sound output.

● Enhanced Features

Gone are the days when Bluetooth speakers were only useful for streaming music. Nowadays, things are a little different. Settle for a Bluetooth speaker for a car that supports other features such as Google Assistant.

● Power Handling

When it comes to this consideration, it is important to understand the power handling of your car stereo. A powerful stereo system works best with a Bluetooth speaker whose power handling is close to the stereo system power handling.

All the important specifications above will help you settle for a worthy purchase of purchasing the item. Consider the guidelines and guarantee yourself high-quality Bluetooth speakers for cars.

How To Connect Your Device To Your Bluetooth Speaker For A Car?

In this section, the piece will explain how you can easily connect these Bluetooth speakers for your car. With these skills, you can save up the few dollars for something much more deserving. These are simple steps you need to follow to connect your phone to your car’s Bluetooth speakers.

5 Benefits Of Bluetooth Hands-free Connectivity In Your Car

Automotive In-Car Bluetooth Speakerphone Setup Service near McAllen TX:If you’re not already driving with a hands-free bluetooth connection to your smartphone, you should be. California is one of 14 states in which it’s prohibited to use a hand-held cell phone while driving. In some of the more rural parts of California, it might make sense to ignore all calls and text messages until you get to where you’re going or can at least pull over, but in San Diego, that’s just not happening. So, rather than risk the wrath of the law, stay legit and connected with Bluetooth technology.

Bluetooth Allows For Easy Phone Calls And More

You probably already know that with hands-free technology, you can safely converse with callers through your car’s speaker system while driving. But with a Bluetooth Phone Book Access Profile (PBAP), you can also view your contacts, appointments, and call logs on your car’s display. Just think: no more scrolling through your phonebook while heading up to Moonlight Beach. With voice command, all you need to do is say, Call Mom, and boom. Done.

Stream Audio From Apple Music, Spotify, Pandora & More With Bluetooth

Statistics show that the average San Diegan spends approximately 40 hours per year in traffic. Ugh! That’s a full workweek. Music or audiobooks streaming via Bluetooth through your car’s speakers can make the difference between losing your mind and keeping your cool in the morning slog on northbound 805 at Claremont Mesa Boulevard.

Hands-free Texting With A Bluetooth Integrated Stereo System

Bluetooth technology plus your phone’s bi-directional text access means you can hear your girlfriend’s racy texts through your car’s speakers and dictate the appropriate response. All while navigating through the Mission Valley Mall parking lot. In other words, Bluetooth promotes safe…texting.

Gps Navigation Is Easier With A Hands-free Car Stereo

While the State of California does allow the use of a cell phone’s map features without a hands-free device, using Bluetooth is just plain better. You’ll hear the directions from a GPS Navigation System more clearly when they’re coming from your car’s speakers than you will if they’re coming from your phone. And you certainly wouldn’t want to risk missing an exit when you’re already running late to your boss’s kid’s quinceañera.

Use Siri In The Car Hands-free With Bluetooth

If you’re one of those people who can’t remember what life was like before Siri, it should put you at ease knowing that with Bluetooth, she remains as close as ever. Even while you’re flying up the I-5, you can ask her to tell you what’s playing at, or to play songs by Katy Perry (no one has to know). Who cares what life was like before Siri? The key is that it never has to be that way again.

Contact Mobile Mechanics Of McAllen For A Hands-free Bluetooth Stereo System

At Mobile Mechanics Of McAllen, we can help you stay safe and connected. Drop by and see what we have. Our knowledgeable and professional sales team will answer your questions and set you up with the perfect Bluetooth system for your needs, your car, your lifestyle.

TIPS

Automotive In-Car Bluetooth Speakerphone Setup Service near McAllen TX:

● Replace your car's speakers

In most cases, the speakers are just about the last thing a manufacturer thinks about when designing and building your car. Factory audio systems have gotten better over the last few years, but many so-called "premium" systems still use relatively inexpensive amps and speakers that don't deliver top-notch sound.

● Select higher quality for your music files

Yes, you can store more music files in your music player if you use greater compression, and they'll sound okay when you're listening through earbuds. But you lose some high- and low-frequency information when you compress your music, along with some of the details that make your music interesting. And, on a good car audio system, you can really tell that something's missing.

● Bypass your music player's built-in digital-to-analog converter

A digital-to-analog converter, or DAC, has the job of converting digital information 0's and 1's into analog music signals. In most cases, your music player is probably your smartphone. Its built-in DAC usually does a good enough job for casual listening with earbuds, but it doesn't deliver the same level of performance you can get from the more advanced DACs found in many of today's better car stereos.

● Use sound deadening material

● Add a car amplifier

● Add a signal processor or an equalizer

The interior of a car presents some serious problems when it comes to sound quality. Glass and plastic surfaces reflect sound like crazy, while carpet, seat covers, and other absorbent materials soak it up. Add poorly placed speakers to the mix, and you wind up with significant frequency response peaks in most car interiors.

● Build a better sub box. Or buy one.

If you're building a sealed subwoofer box, make sure it's sealed properly. Air leaks can really hurt your sub's performance. If you're using a ported box, make sure you've got the right sub in there. You can destroy a sub that's designed for sealed box use by driving it hard in a ported enclosure. Also, it's important to build a box with the correct interior volume for the sub you've picked out. A mismatch can result in poor performance or a sub fatality.

● Your crossover can really improve the sound of your system

Many in-dash receivers now include frequency filters that'll work with your preamp and speaker outputs. If you have a sub, use the high-pass filter to remove the low bass from your car's full-range speakers. You'll get more clean volume out of them, particularly if you're driving them with the receiver's built-in power.

● Set your amp gains properly

Our Tech Support people field calls every day from customers who can't understand why their new car audio system sounds so bad. The #1 problem? Most people think the gain control on their new amplifier controls the volume level. Naturally, they turn it all the way up, which causes bad things to happen. The gain control actually adjusts the amount of input signal coming into the amplifier.

● Don't max out your tone controls

Like a guitar, all the best car sound systems perform better when they're properly tuned. Boosting your factory radio's tone controls all the way up might make your system sound better in your driveway, but it just creates distortion when you turn it up on the highway. A heavy low-frequency boost, in particular, will put a big strain on your factory system. If you want to fatten up your sound, try using a smaller boost in the bass, lower the highs and mids a touch, and then turn up your overall level a little more.

● Add a subwoofer and hear what you've been missing

● Use a capacitor if you're going to push your subs hard

The people who designed your car probably didn't have subwoofers in mind when they built your vehicle. Big bass sucks up a lot of power, and most car electrical systems aren't equipped to deal with it.

COST

Automotive In-Car Bluetooth Speakerphone Setup Service near McAllen TX: There are a few universal devices that will wire into your head unit and can add music streaming to the list of functionalities, but that makes the installation process a bit more complicated. These devices usually range in price from $15 to $30.

Many electronics stores offer installation for around $100. There's a broad range of replacement stereo systems on the market. Fortunately, even the most affordable units feature Bluetooth integration for hands-free calling.

Replacing your vehicle’s head unit is a great option for those who want the greatest range of audio functionality. This process does require some labor, and you’ll need to embrace the aftermarket look of your new system, but most devices come with easy-to-follow instructions. With patience, common tools, and a couple of hours, most people can replace their stereo system. Don’t want the hassle? Many electronics stores offer installation for around $100.

Installation time and difficulty will depend on the manufacturer, but most systems require you to remove the factory stereo, wire in the adapter, and route a wired microphone to the back of the head unit. When all is said and done, you’ll be able to make and answer calls via Bluetooth through your factory system. In addition to maintaining the stock aesthetic, these adapters are usually pretty cheap, with the average setup costing less than $100. Luxury automakers generally charge more for their devices, but hey, what else is new.

Replacing your vehicle’s head unit is a great option for those who want the greatest range of audio functionality. This process does require some labor, and you’ll need to embrace the aftermarket look of your new system, but most devices come with easy-to-follow instructions. With patience, common tools, and a couple of hours, most people can replace their stereo system. Don’t want the hassle. Many electronics stores offer installation for around $100.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Can I use a Bluetooth speaker in the car?

With Bluetooth technology, you can comfortably connect your device to the speakers in the car and listen to your favorite music at all times. Some of these speakers have modern features such as automatic wake and pair, 100% high-quality sound output and many more.

I Can't Connect My Laptop To My Bluetooth Speaker. What Do I Do?

Most laptops do include some sort of Bluetooth functionality, however, this is often a type of Bluetooth intended solely for mice and keyboards; not for streaming audio. In order to stream audio via Bluetooth, your laptop will need to be compatible with the A2DP Bluetooth profile which is common in most phones and tablets, but not as popular in laptops or other computers.

It's possible that your laptop could connect to a Bluetooth speaker even without the A2DP profile, but you will very likely experience playback issues (no sound or drop-outs) or you will be unable to use the speaker as an audio output device. If you're experiencing issues playing back audio from a laptop, try your speaker with a smartphone or tablet before assuming something is wrong with the speaker. Also, be wary of inexpensive USB Bluetooth dongles which promise to add Bluetooth to older computers that don't already have wireless capabilities.

What About Trouble Pairing My Two Bluetooth Speakers Together?

Some Bluetooth speakers like the ION Cornerstone, Solar Stone Multi, and Tiki Sounds allow you to pair two or more units together for stereo playback. When pairing multiple speakers together in stereo, they’ll need to be within line-of-sight of each other, and less than 30 feet from each other. The closer they are, the stronger the signal will be.

The Sound Drops Out When I Walk Away From The Speaker? What Do I Do?

Most ION Audio portable speakers have a Bluetooth range of about 100 feet, so drop-outs may start to occur as you reach the top of this range. Keep in mind that the range and effectiveness of the Bluetooth signal from your phone or tablet will be affected by other factors in your environment, including walls, other people, and other wireless signals. See our section at the top for minimizing interference for your Bluetooth speaker.

The Sound Is Cutting Out Even Though My Phone/Tablet Is Right Next To The Speaker. What Do I Do?

The volume level for your phone or tablet can affect the Bluetooth signal strength. In other words, if the volume is too low you may find that the sound cuts periodically, probably at lower points in the music or audio signal. For instance, you may notice the very beginning of some songs are cut off, or the podcast host's voice is cutting out at the beginning of a sentence.

To remedy this, simply turn up the volume on your phone or tablet. In general, setting your phone or tablet's audio output level to about 80% - 90% will ensure a strong signal with no distortion. With this set, use the speakers master volume controls to set the overall output for the speaker.

I Can Connect To The Speaker But The Sound Is Distorted. What Do I Do?

The volume level for your phone or tablet will affect the overall output of the signal from the speaker. In other words, the volume may be too high on your phone or tablet.

Although it may be hard to notice, different apps on your phone or tablet will play music in different formats and with their own pre-set internal volume levels. In general, setting your phone or tablet's audio output level to about 80% - 90% will ensure a strong signal with no distortion. With this set, use the speakers master volume controls to set the overall output for the speaker.

What Kind Of Portable Bluetooth Speakers Does Ion Offer?

Audio offers a wide variety of top-selling portable Bluetooth speakers for a variety of occasions from tailgating, backyard BBQ, or just hanging by the pool. We offer speakers in a range of portability, power, and weather-resistant options. Be sure to visit our website to browse our selection and find the model that's right for you!

Call For Us:

● Automotive In-Car Bluetooth Speakerphone Setup Service Near McAllen TX

● How To Add Bluetooth To Car Factory Stereo

● How To Find Bluetooth Pin For Car

● How To Connect Phone To Car With Aux

● How To Connect Phone To Car Without Bluetooth

● How To Use Bluetooth Device In Car

● How To Connect Phone To Car Bluetooth

● How To Play Music From Phone To Car Bluetooth Near McAllen TX

● How To Connect Phone To Car With Usb

● Car Music System With Bluetooth

● Car Music System With Bluetooth And Navigation

● Car Bluetooth Handsfree Kit

● Second Hand Car Music System

● Best Car Bluetooth Receiver

● Car Bluetooth Device With Audio Receiver

● Car Stereo With Bluetooth

● Car Bluetooth Price Near McAllen TX

BEST AUTOMOTIVE IN-CAR BLUETOOTH SPEAKERPHONE SETUP SERVICE IN MCALLEN TX

MOBILE MECHANICS OF MCALLEN

REQUEST MORE INFORMATION. CONTACT US NOW!

Mobile Mechanics of McAllen

24-hour mobile mechanic roadside assistance services in McAllen, TX!

CALL (956) 278-8017 MOBILE MECHANIC

CALL (956) 278-8258 MOBILE AUTO MECHANIC

CALL (956) 278-8619 MOBILE TRUCK MECHANIC

CALL (956) 587-3435 TOWING & RAODSIDE ASSISTANCE

WEBISTE:

www.24hourmobileautorepairmcallen.org

http://www.mobilemechanicmcallentx.com/

SERVICE AREA:

33 Cities within 30 miles of McAllen, TX

Starr County | Hidalgo County | Willacy County | Cameron County | 78504 | 78539 | 78540 | 78541 | 78542 | 78501 | 78503| 78505 | 78557 | 88540 |78502 | 78504 | 78539 | 78572

#mobilemechanic #CarDoorHandleReplacement #CarLightAssemblyInstallation

#FuelFilterReplacement #HeadlightReplacement #MirrorReplacement

#BatteryChangeService #BicycleServices #BikeTrainerAssemblyAndSetup

#roadsideassitance

#towing

Mobiletruckmechanic

#mobileautorepair

#McAllen

#texas

0 notes

antoine-roquentin · 7 years

Link

But Democrats' problems didn't begin when the Kremlin started taking an interest in American agitprop. In a paper out this month from the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), UMass-Boston professor emeritus Thomas Ferguson and two colleagues, Paul Jorgensen and Jie Chen, offer lots of evidence for new ideas about how Trump pulled off the upset of the century. Among other things, they assembled a massive database documenting a late, possibly pivotal infusion of shadowy, barely legal campaign cash—a.k.a. dark money—and detailed the candidate's own willingness to invest his personal wealth in a desperate final push. They also found he received a higher percentage of small-donor donations than Barack Obama did in 2012. They emphasized how much better American alt-right media operations seem to be at reaching Americans than Russians. And they bemoaned a long-term trend away from unionization in some of key swing states, where the emergence of a debt-fueled economy that didn't work for the middle class helped put Trump over the top.

For some perspective on just how little the onset of the Trump era may ultimately have to do with the political machinations of Vladimir Putin—and how much of it was about entrenched corporate interests going all-in on Trump—I called up Ferguson for a chat. Here's what we talked about.

VICE: If a late wave of dark money, along with Trump's own donations, was so important in the election, why aren't more people paying attention to it? Thomas Ferguson: I don't claim to know what's in the minds of reporters. The truth is the press is terrible on money issues. You've got website after website that claim to do all kinds of detailed voting statistical analysis, and there's nothing equivalent to that on political money. My take is it's a hard subject, and the truth is the publishers of most mainstream publications would just as soon not have it heavily discussed.

It took us almost a year to process this stuff. These [donors] don't give you their real names or they give you seven versions of them. And it's all legal. Somebody should have looked, long ago, at the money coming in after [Steve] Bannon and [Kellyanne] Conway took over [the campaign].

What did that infusion of cash you spotted late in the race actually look like? Where did it come from and where did it go? Some of it is through super PACs and other parts of it are through the campaign. But it's pretty obvious what they did. The day after Bannon and Conway took over, the Washington Post printed what they were going to do, which was focus on a few industrial states and other states where they thought they could get white working-class voters. And they did exactly that. They stayed focused on it.

They were much better targeted than the Clinton campaign. We all know that.

You point out Trump actually did very well with smaller-dollar donors. How do you explain that? Just his populist rhetoric? And how much did it matter? Nobody wins on small-donor cash. As late as May, he's telling reporters he doesn't need big money. And then they quickly found out as they make the transition to [the general election] that they do need the money. At that point, Reince Priebus and [Paul] Manafort go out and start, with the tin cup, getting a bunch of money. They get a lot of folks. But nothing like what they need, and it stops and they get stuck again. And then this last wave comes in.

With the small-donor stuff, in the very last stages of the race, that tailed off a bit. But it still added up to a tremendous sum that was just jaw-dropping. [A colleague] and I have been looking at the American National Election Studies. And you can just see how angry people were—they weren't buying into this We should be grateful because the recession is over, and Barack Obama has brought us back. So when a guy comes along and says, "I'll spend my own money," they just went for it. It's bait and switch. It's that simple.

Who were these people taking a chance on Trump when he looked doomed in the polls? That infusion of money, even after re-reading your report, is hard for me to make sense of. I think it's one of the greatest out-of-the-money options in world history, basically, and they thought they could pick it up cheap. And they'd at least take a flier on it. By comparison, Silicon Valley looks almost sedate next to some of the private-equity guys.

Leaving aside, as you do, the possibility that some kind of deal was struck with Russians—which is probably not going to show up in data—can you explain your beef with how little we know about Russian internet targeting and trolling? Why are you so skeptical Russian internet trickery played a big role in this outcome? Everybody has been remarkably unforthcoming about [the] data [here]. I'm not sure I believe Facebook and everyone else. I don't understand why Congress has not held them to much harder standards on that, although I in fact quite well understand it and suspect you do, too. We're looking here at murky evidence, and I wouldn't be surprised to find that some more might pop out. But on the face of it, we're talking about $100,000 in Facebook, some Twitter stuff, a bunch of trolls in Macedonia, and then a bunch of other stuff spread around. It's a very tiny amount. Our big point, is the obvious one, it's not original: This stuff is mostly made in America. That stuff is nearly all coming from homegrown right-wing sources.

How do we know we even have a full accounting of the internet mayhem here, though? We don't, and we say that. But Breitbart and all these other [domestic] sources [of right-wing propaganda] were up for years. They were way practiced. And it just doesn't matter if some Kremlin folks... are bouncing back off Steve Bannon's [output] when Bannon and company are doing 24/7 for three years in advance.

You talk a good bit about voter suppression in your paper. Even if we purged the internet of "fake news" and prevented outside interference of any kind, this would still be a problem and maybe even get worse over time, right? I think voter suppression needs more attention. We are way over-invested in what I call, technically, "overdetermined models of voting" [as opposed to] undetermined stuff that actually affects it, including money. There's an imbalance here that is deeply troubling to me.

Is the imbalance that the basic obvious thing that we have always known—how hard it is to vote on one hand, the money spent on the other—determines outcomes more than outside events like collusion? We quoted it in the paper—there was talk about how it was really the Russians who turned down voter turnout in North Carolina. I know a lot about that case. The notion that that was the Russians was crazy. You can't possibly compete with local election officials who are determined to push down African American turnout. That just struck me as so crazy I could hardly believe it.

When Trump goes into a place, he talks jobs, and prosperity, and [Hillary Clinton] comes in with 40-point plan for this, that, and everything else. Other people who did the measurements say this was the campaign that had the lowest level of pure issue discussions ever since the time they started measuring, which was 2000. [Bernie] Sanders showed you what you could bring out when you talked like that. It's obvious that the basic issue in the US is not financial reform or telecom monopoly or something like that—those are important issues. But the basic issue is what are you going to do with this vast low-wage economy and the collapse of public services. Democrats need to address that if they want to have people vote for 'em. They can't just sort of cut corners on stuff and offer, "We'll give you marginal differences from Republicans."

And they can't just blame their problems on Russian hacking or Russian interference. Oh for God's sake, yes. Yeah.

19 notes · View notes

islandpcosjourney · 4 years

Text

Hindsight

29th December 2020

3 years ago, after a lovely family Christmas and a crazy few weeks beforehand redecorating the kitchen & dining room, I was enjoying some down-time. Facebook reminded me today that we were removing my fireplace in town – a big job involving big hammers and lots of sweat, on hubby’s part anyway ;) I had also just said goodbye to my Dad for the last time, although I didn’t know that. My final words to him were “Please go see a doctor” as we had noticed that he wasn’t himself while he was with us Christmas week. If I’d known in hindsight that I’d never see or speak to him again, I’d have never let him go. For the last 3 years I’ve punished myself for that. But in all honesty, I’m glad I didn’t know, despite the shock of his untimely passing, as I spent no time trying to cling onto something I wouldn’t have. He was just my Dad, it was just an ordinary Christmas, we were just hammering concrete out of a fireplace, as per usual and it was his time to go.

This year. The year of COVID. The year of cancellations. The year of worry. The year of unknowns. The year of excess screen time. The year of FOOD! This was the year of a fresh start. A chance to really sit down and think, quietly about anything and everything. In a year where our health has been debated so much in the press and in the community, I chose this year to sort it out, head on. Or rather, this was the year that my body chose, to WANT to sort itself out.

Many of you will have read before of the trials and tribulations that my PCOS gives me daily. It’s a vicious circle of physical and mental symptoms caused by external and internal factors. But before this year, although I’d done tons of research and I knew everything I could about my difficulties, I still couldn’t solve them. Something was always stopping me and that was indeed me.

We are what we eat. I truly believe this and always did but mentally I was always being drawn to the wrong foods. I still am, I am human after all but while most people had a kill switch to stop themselves from eating junk, my switch was broken, or so I thought. I understood the theory behind what foods would be good for me but putting it into practice is always the hard part and I’m sure many of you will have faced this before yourselves!

During lockdown, like many others, I was forced online to work. It wasn’t long after that I started noticing daily headaches, getting worse and worse. After a while, it was debilitating, and I was at the point (when in normal circumstances) where I’d have run to the GP for some stronger pills! But this wasn’t really an option this time and it forced me to think alternatively. I was convinced it was screen time to blame so I took a wee break and combined my teaching days/hours to make sure I had a long weekend away from the computer to recover each week. Around the same time, I was also experiencing buzzing in my ears – one Sunday thinking I was going insane hearing somebody strimming in their garden, when of course nobody would do that up here on a Sunday! Kevin definitely thought I’d gone mad and I was certainly believing I was! We figured out it was tinnitus or something similar and deduced I’d just have to ignore it, along-with my headaches. Fast forward to June when I finally decided to move a huge pile of recipe books from the landing upstairs. I can’t remember why they ended up there in the first place but rather than putting them back downstairs again, they’d just sat there in a tall pile for months. It was at this stage that I came across Jason Vale’s Turbo Charge Your Life in 14 Days book. A book I’d had at college and had used to lose weight before my degree’s final recital in 2009. I remembered losing 7lbs in 7 days. I sifted through all the pages and got swept back through memory lane and my tastebuds started to remember the taste of some of the juices. Mmmmmmmm yummy. Especially the Turbo charge smoothie – Pineapple, apple, lime, spinach, cucumber, celery & avocado. The ONLY form of avocado I would eat as I hated its taste but seemed to love its creaminess in a smoothie! Avocado being an essential fat that I KNEW I should be eating with my PCOS…… So, the next shopping trip I decided the buy the ingredients, dig out my juicer and before I knew it, while planning a week away to see my Mum & brother, I also planned a detox! AND it timed in perfectly with Jason’s BIG juice challenge between 6th – 12th July! Perfect, all meant to be.

So now, let’s cut a long story very short. I returned a week later totally rejuvenated, hadn’t eaten a single morsel of chewable food in 8 days and I’d lost 8lbs – here, something was working! I felt amazing, my headaches had gone, my skin was glowing, my teeth were whiter, I had tons of energy and I no longer had any ringing in my ears – all after just one week. Ok, so let’s continue! Nearly 6 months later incorporating juicing into my daily diet and I’m 30lbs down (It was at 33lbs, but Christmas was far too good hahahaha). I’ve set myself a target of 100lbs but the biggest reason for this dietary change is not to lose all the excess weight I’m carrying, although of course that will help, its to always put my health first and live the healthiest life I can. In a year where health has never been more important, I am finally on top of mine. I have finally found a way to control my symptoms and my cravings, naturally. I know it probably all sounds ridiculously obvious, but we are what we eat. My body was consuming junk therefore I was junk – I was overweight, chronically fatigued, had oily/acne skin, excess hair, moody, depressive, stressed, dull, no fun – the list is endless. I will now consume, in an average juicy week: 7 pineapples, 56 apples, 7 limes, 28 celery sticks, 28 asparagus spears, 7 courgettes, 2 bags of spinach, 1.5 bags of kale, 3.5 cucumbers, 3 broccoli stems, a few bananas, massive handfuls of mixed berries, beetroot, 7 pears, 7 avocados. Safe to say I am now bright, bubbly, happy, positive, glowing, full of energy, no back pain or headaches, smooth skin everywhere and best of all, I am reducing my PCOS symptoms massively. I’ve been at this weight before; I remember how I felt at this weight before. My weight has nothing to do with this feeling. The food I am eating is directly responsible. Finally, an answer to all my troubles. I know it sounds obvious but how many of us will turn to medications or look for other factors to blame for our chronic conditions? I did! As soon as I was diagnosed, I continuously went running back to the GP/consultant for more and more pills. One to sort that, one to sort this, another one to counteract the last one etc etc. I KNOW categorically that the medications were intoxicating me and that the fuel I put into my body causes the relevant energy output whether strong or weak. I know that if I wake up in the morning and feel tired, a juice will sort me out, not caffeine. I know that if I’m tired at night it is because of the incorrect fuel I’ve put into my body earlier that day, for whatever reason I decided to consume it. I am seeing a direct long-term result of it all too.

From previous blogs, you will know that I DID NOT have a menstrual cycle without medical intervention. As of Boxing Day this year, that is no longer true. It may have taken since July to regulate my hormones naturally, but it has worked. Obviously, time will tell if I’m going to restore any kind of regularity to it but in all honesty, that’s not a concern right now as I can’t remember having a regular cycle since I was a teenager, so we’re talking around 20 years of hormonal disruption to be reversed and Rome wasn’t built in a day! Interestingly the last “natural” cycle I had after stopping years of medication also appeared on Boxing Day, in 2016 ;) In August this year, I was convinced “mother nature” had come to visit but she only said a very brief hello in a socially distanced way for a day so this time with the COVID restrictions lifted a little she was able to come to stay with gifts of stomach cramps, carb cravings & headaches as a way of getting us reacquainted again. Needless to say, she was made very welcome and I’ve never been happier, especially by hugging a hot water bottle.

Not everything is quite sorted but as you can imagine, its well on track! I now choose my food wisely, looking for naturally wholesome options as is humanly possible and just being more conscious of what I am eating (of course I eat treats ocassionally but I’m doing it consciously). Would you put dirty fuel in a car? Of course not. Would you put dirty oil in during an oil change? Of course not. That’s what I believe medications do to chronic conditions – they throw dirty oil into an already dirty engine. Our cars need servicing each year where they get an oil change, where the filters are cleaned, where essential maintenance is done, so why don’t we do that when we’re chronically sick? Why do we turn to pills to sort a condition we’ve developed rather than look to what we’re fuelling our body with and give it a good clean out? Of course we need medicines for acute conditions but chronic ones can be reversed if we clean out the “filter” and do an “oil change”. I’ve seen tons of documentaries recently where I’ve learned of people curing their Asthma, Eczema, Psoriasis, Diabetes etc I’ve even seen a documentary where cancers have gone into remission for dozens of years through eating raw food alone. I know it’ll sound very “out there” for some people and it would’ve done for me too had I not gone looking for Functional Medicine (using food to heal) research after years of understanding the theory behind it but not finding the right way to put it into practice. But, never in my whole life and in spite of a worldwide Pandemic, have I felt more alive or healthier than I do right now. I may have turned the clock back 3 years on my weight but energy-wise I feel about 15 years younger which is far more important than any number on the bathroom scales.

In hindsight, do I wish that I’d reached these dietary conclusions earlier? Not at all. It wasn’t the right time. In hindsight, I can see that all of the information that I have been armed with over the years, are the tools that have set me up for the success I now have. Like a fine wine, I needed time to breathe, time to mature to become the best I can be. No point in opening it early, you’ll just be disappointed. A good teacher is somebody who’s struggled themselves and I’m a better, stronger person for having had my major struggles. There’s probably many still to come. Life is never boring!

Now that I’ve written this, I logged into Tumblr to copy this blog across and to see when I last posted and to my amazement it was Boxing day last year! I love coincidences of dates & Boxing Day seems to have cropped up a number of times. I said that my goal was to increase my energy levels as I really struggled this time last year. I had said regarding Christmas day:

“I want to be able to, one day, wake up early to make the breakfast, open stocking presents, get dressed inc. make up, cook a Christmas dinner, watch a bit of Christmas TV, play some board games, do the washing up and still feel like a proper woman – not some shadow of one who can only do one or two tasks a day.”

Well I did all those things! I’d totally forgotten that I’d even set that goal (for one day!) but I reached it a year later and more. I never thought I’d be sizes smaller than a previous year as my pattern has always been to be one size bigger each year ;) I recently ordered a few jumpers for the harsh winter, one a size 16-18 and one a size 14 for the future. Well, although a stretchy material, I’m in the size 14 jumper and had to send back the other as it just hung off me! Considering I was a size 20 last year, ballooned to a size 22 by the middle of the year and now I’m back to the size I was 3 years ago, I’m delighted. I also don’t get the violently ill episodes when I eat gluten/dairy now that I did before when I religiously followed a PCOS diet and ocassionally slipped up. I honestly think fruit & veg is healing my gut, my hormones, my skin, every organ in my body! There’s a lot to say for eating a plant-based diet, not only for my health but also the purse-strings but there’s also lots to say for eating balanced nutrition and listening to one’s body for what it really needs. My ears are wide open now.

0 notes

waqasblog2 · 5 years

Text

What Happens to SEO When You Stop Blogging?

I’ve been blogging for longer than ten years.

Ten years! And I haven’t quit.

That’s a long time.

I’m not trying to toot my own horn here. I simply want to make a point.

Why haven’t I stopped blogging? After all, I get tons of traffic from old blog posts that I wrote two, four, and even eight years ago.

Why do I keep at it? Writing is punishing work. It’s tough, and it takes a long time. Don’t I have better stuff to do like binge-watching Netflix or just relaxing?

Why am I so devoted to blogging?

I’ll let you in on a secret. I actually love what I do. That’s one reason. I blog because I like to do it.

But there’s another reason. It’s a business reason. And it’s built on data.

If you know anything about SEO, you know that Google values fresh content. Fresh content is a significant factor in positively influencing ratings. The logic here is that the more frequently you update your site, the more frequently Googlebot (Google’s crawling bot) visits your site.

In turn, this gives you the opportunity to achieve better rankings.

Although you can update your site in several different ways (not to mention all the different types of content you can create), writing new blog posts tends to be the simplest way to generate fresh content.

So let’s go back to my question: why do I keep blogging? Why are you blogging? Should you quit? Should I quit? Are there better ways to do marketing, gain traffic, and grow conversions?

Is blogging truly all it’s cracked up to be? More specifically, just how big of an impact does it have on SEO?

In this article, I’m going to do away with niceties, guesses, and “best practice” advice. Instead, I’m going to dish up the data so you can get the cold, hard facts on what happens if you decide to stop blogging.

Some key stats

First, here are just a few statistics from Kapost to put blogging in perspective:

1.26 billion live websites exist right now. The number only continues to grow.

Blogs give websites 434 percent more indexed pages and 97 percent more indexed links.

Nearly 50 percent of B2B buyers read between three and five blog posts before they reach out to sales.

B2B companies that blog generate 67 percent more leads per month than those that do not blog.

These are some legit numbers. They show just how monumental of an impact blogging can have.

But what would happen if you stopped blogging?

You pull the plug. You quit. You’re done. No more publishing.

What would happen?

Would it have any catastrophic consequences, or would it merely be a mild impediment?

Download this cheat sheet to learn the key takeaways from this post.

Let’s take a look at a study that put this to the test.

251 days of no blogging

WordPress developer/social media manager/SEO expert Robert Ryan conducted a simple yet enlightening experiment.

In 2015, he refrained from posting any new content on his blog for 251 days. That’s eight months and seven days.

Here are some of his key findings:

Overall traffic to the site saw a major decline as it fell by 32 percent.

Organic traffic dropped by a massive 42 percent.

Traffic to the contact page was down by 15 percent.

Overall site conversions fell by 28 percent.

What can we take away from these stats?

Blogging affects overall traffic

When Ryan quit blogging, his traffic rapidly fell by 32%.

The image quality is low, but here’s the chart that he posted:

The fact that Ryan’s overall traffic dropped by nearly a third during this time is tangible evidence that there’s a correlation between your blog output and your overall traffic volume.

Quite frankly, I find it a bit alarming to see such a dramatic drop just because of not blogging.

Of course, we should keep in mind that his experiment lasted for over eight months.

If you stopped blogging for only a month or two, the consequences probably wouldn’t be this extreme.

However, it still wouldn’t do you any favors.

This brings up a good point. What if your business runs into trouble, you get sick, or something else happens that prevents you from blogging for a time?

I suggest having a backlog of articles to publish at all times. I like to have several posts scheduled ahead of time. If something unexpected comes up, at least I know my posts will go live according to the schedule.

Organic traffic can take a massive hit

A 42 percent drop in organic traffic is colossal.

For some businesses, that kind of drop could make the difference between making money and losing money.

An organic traffic loss of that magnitude is similar to receiving an algorithmic penalty.

Most websites earn most of their traffic organically.

If you’re in the “business services” industry, you earn a disproportionate amount of organic traffic.

Where does all this organic traffic come from?

Organic traffic is nothing to wink at. This is the lifeline of your business. This is your audience.

It’s hard to dispute that Google does indeed show preference to sites with consistently fresh content.

As Moz explains,

“Websites that add new pages at a higher rate may earn a higher freshness score than sites that add content less frequently.”

It’s all theoretical, of course. No one knows exactly how Google’s algorithm works.

But we can’t dispute the fact that quitting a blog leads to an organic traffic nosedive.

By having a dynamic site (publishing content) as opposed to a static one (not publishing new content), you provide Google with new content to crawl and index. In turn, this keeps you on Google’s radar in a positive way.

You also have to consider the fact that each new blog post presents an opportunity to generate more backlinks and rank for additional keywords.

I imagine that you want to see an uptick in traffic like this:

The fact is, you can’t get traffic like that unless you blog like you mean it.

When you stop blogging for an extended period of time, your stream of organic traffic can dry up, which can obviously have some undesirable consequences.

The stat from Kapost, stating that brands with 15 blog posts per month average 1,200 new leads per month, and Ryan’s stat—stating that traffic to his contact page fell by 15 percent—show us just how intertwined blogging and lead generation really are.

This makes sense when you think about it.

No blogging means much less organic and overall traffic. In turn, fewer visitors are landing on your website, which means fewer leads.

Blogging, quite obviously, leads to more leads.

Notice this data from MarketingCharts.com. Their data shows that a higher blogging frequency is positively correlated with higher customer acquisition rates.

Quitting blogging is a conversion killer

The final and perhaps most alarming of Ryan’s findings was the drop in overall site conversions (28 percent).

I can connect the dots to see how this could happen.

Few people blog just for the heck of it. We blog because it makes a significant difference.

We blog because it builds conversions.

But how does this work? How is blogging so inextricably linked to conversions?

From my experience, I’ve found blogging to be an incredibly effective way to build rapport with my audience and get them comfortable with the idea of buying.

For example, before a prospect would want to go ahead and purchase Crazy Egg, there’s a good chance that they would first want to explore “The Daily Egg,” which is the accompanying blog.

I don’t sell anything on that blog. I just provide value, value, value.

In fact, two stats from Aabaco found that “60 percent of consumers feel more positive about a company after reading custom content on its site.”

It’s about fostering positive feelings, as vague as that sounds.

Furthermore, “78 percent of consumers believe that companies behind content are interested in building good relationships.”

Good relationships are built one blog post at a time.

Basically, blogging builds trust.

If you blog the right way, you can demonstrate transparency.

Transparency, in turn, creates trust.

There’s no secret here. If you want to truly influence purchases (conversions), you should be blogging.

Customers look to content to grow and sustain positivity and goodwill towards the brand.

This positivity and goodwill influences conversions. You’ll earn more conversions because you are blogging. It’s that simple.

I would also make the point that stopping blogging out of the blue can make you look a little flaky in the eyes of customers. Some may even wonder if you’re still in business.

No one wants to do business with a place that seems quiet and untended. You might still be in business, but if your blog isn’t buzzing with new content and activity, users might get the idea that you’re not around to serve them.

This will kill your conversions.

For these reasons, you can see how a lack of blogging can slowly trickle down to hurt conversions and eventually result in a considerable decline in customers.

Jeff Bullas provides an excellent explanation of how blogging builds credibility in this infographic:

These aren’t just random stats. These are concrete data-driven signals that your blog builds your credibility.

And your credibility as a business influences whether or not people will buy from you.

The takeaway

While I can’t say for sure that you would experience the same level of backlash that Ryan did, it’s fair to say that quitting blogging for an extended period of time isn’t going to help you.

Even going a single month without an update could throw a wrench in your SEO.

For this reason, I can’t stress enough just how important it is to be consistent with publishing blogs.

Everyone has their own opinion on what the bare minimum is, but most bloggers would agree that you should strive for at least one per week.

But to determine the ideal frequency, I would suggest checking out this post I wrote about determining how often you need to blog.

A blog such as the Huffington Post (yes, it’s a blog) publishes an article a minute. They can do that because they have a ton of semi-free and syndicated content being pushed out.

If you’re Forbes, you might publish more than 1,000 articles a month.

Obviously, you won’t be able to keep pace with Forbes or Huffpo, especially if you’re blogging for your personal brand.

Instead, you should focus on consistency. As this article shows, when you quit blogging, your traffic and conversions tank.

If you stay consistent, you’ll win.

Conclusion

Blogging accomplishes much more than simply demonstrating your expertise and building trust.

It plays a major role in SEO, and the frequency of your blogging can determine how much traffic you bring in, how many leads you generate, and ultimately how many conversions you make.

If you want to win at the game of online marketing, you’ve got to be publishing content.

And you can’t stop.

Internet marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. As a ten-year veteran of this sprint, I can attest to the fact that it gets ugly and tiring, and there are times when you want to quit.

But I can also attest to the fact that your hard work pays off.

Sure, at times you might feel like you’re banging your head against a wall, but all that work is doing something. It’s growing your audience. It’s building trust. It’s pushing up conversions bit by bit, day by day, month by month.

Don’t quit.

Have you ever tried a similar experiment, and if so, what were the results?

This content was originally published here.

0 notes

mobilemechanicsabq · 3 years

Link

Best Automotive In-Car Bluetooth Speakerphone Setup Service and Cost in Albuquerque NM |Mobile Mechanics of Albuquerque

More information is at: http://mobilemechanicalbuquerque.org/automotive-in-car-bluetooth-speakerphone-setup-near-me/

Automotive In-Car Bluetooth Speakerphone Setup Service near Albuquerque NM: Are you looking for the Best Automotive In-Car Bluetooth Speakerphone Setup Service near Albuquerque NM ? Mobile Mechanics of Albuquerque, we can help you stay safe and connected. Drop by and see what we have. Our knowledgeable and professional sales team will answer your questions and set you up with the perfect Bluetooth system for your needs, your car, your lifestyle. Cost? Free estimates! Send us a message or call us today. Best Automotive In-Car Bluetooth Speakerphone Setup Service around Albuquerque NM. We serve Albuquerque NM and other areas. Get a Free Quote Now!

BEST AUTOMOTIVE IN-CAR BLUETOOTH SPEAKERPHONE SETUP SERVICE IN ALBUQUERQUE NM ALBUQUERQUE AUTOMOTIVE IN-CAR BLUETOOTH SPEAKERPHONE SETUP

Things To Know About Bluetooth Speakers For Car What Are Bluetooth Speakers For Cars? Automotive In-Car Bluetooth Speakerphone Setup Service near Albuquerque NM: It is a wireless loudspeaker that receives audio signals using the Bluetooth connection to transmit audio in the car. These speakers allow drivers to comfortably use their phones hands-free. In addition to that, you can comfortably entertain yourself with your favorite music audios. With a great device, expect nothing less of excellent services. When it comes to purchasing a nice Bluetooth speaker for your car a lot of people are in a dilemma of what exactly to purchase. Why is that? The main reason why purchasing this speaker is a bit tricky is because of the many available types in the market today. And the varieties can be confusing for the buyers. That’s where this article comes in. This piece highlights all the important details you need to know about the Bluetooth speakers for the car. Read on!

What To Consider Before Buying Bluetooth Speakers For A Car? Automotive In-Car Bluetooth Speakerphone Setup Service near Albuquerque NM: When it comes to purchasing a great Bluetooth speaker for your car, they are some considerations you should take into account. In this section, we go into details about the important specifications for the best Bluetooth speakers for your car. ● Price When leaving the house to go shopping, it is important to have a budget. The same rule applies when it comes to getting these speakers. Determine your budget to prevent any kind of frustration and adjust it accordingly in case of anything. ● The Sensitivity Of The Speakers The car stereo system may be high-powered or low-powered. Low-powered speakers RMS power runs below 15 watts. The high-powered stereo system works best with low sensitivity speakers while low-powered systems work best with high sensitivity speakers. ● Sound Quality This specification is an essential feature to consider. Its frequency runs between 20,000 Hertz and 100 Hertz. A wide range means better sound output. ● Enhanced Features Gone are the days when Bluetooth speakers were only useful for streaming music. Nowadays, things are a little different. Settle for a Bluetooth speaker for a car that supports other features such as Google Assistant. ● Power Handling When it comes to this consideration, it is important to understand the power handling of your car stereo. A powerful stereo system works best with a Bluetooth speaker whose power handling is close to the stereo system power handling. All the important specifications above will help you settle for a worthy purchase of purchasing the item. Consider the guidelines and guarantee yourself high-quality Bluetooth speakers for cars. How To Connect Your Device To Your Bluetooth Speaker For A Car? In this section, the piece will explain how you can easily connect these Bluetooth speakers for your car. With these skills, you can save up the few dollars for something much more deserving. These are simple steps you need to follow to connect your phone to your car’s Bluetooth speakers.

5 Benefits Of Bluetooth Hands-free Connectivity In Your Car Automotive In-Car Bluetooth Speakerphone Setup Service near Albuquerque NM:If you’re not already driving with a hands-free bluetooth connection to your smartphone, you should be. California is one of 14 states in which it’s prohibited to use a hand-held cell phone while driving. In some of the more rural parts of California, it might make sense to ignore all calls and text messages until you get to where you’re going or can at least pull over, but in San Diego, that’s just not happening. So, rather than risk the wrath of the law, stay legit and connected with Bluetooth technology. Bluetooth Allows For Easy Phone Calls And More You probably already know that with hands-free technology, you can safely converse with callers through your car’s speaker system while driving. But with a Bluetooth Phone Book Access Profile (PBAP), you can also view your contacts, appointments, and call logs on your car’s display. Just think: no more scrolling through your phonebook while heading up to Moonlight Beach. With voice command, all you need to do is say, Call Mom, and boom. Done. Stream Audio From Apple Music, Spotify, Pandora & More With Bluetooth Statistics show that the average San Diegan spends approximately 40 hours per year in traffic. Ugh! That’s a full workweek. Music or audiobooks streaming via Bluetooth through your car’s speakers can make the difference between losing your mind and keeping your cool in the morning slog on northbound 805 at Claremont Mesa Boulevard. Hands-free Texting With A Bluetooth Integrated Stereo System Bluetooth technology plus your phone’s bi-directional text access means you can hear your girlfriend’s racy texts through your car’s speakers and dictate the appropriate response. All while navigating through the Mission Valley Mall parking lot. In other words, Bluetooth promotes safe…texting. Gps Navigation Is Easier With A Hands-free Car Stereo While the State of California does allow the use of a cell phone’s map features without a hands-free device, using Bluetooth is just plain better. You’ll hear the directions from a GPS Navigation System more clearly when they’re coming from your car’s speakers than you will if they’re coming from your phone. And you certainly wouldn’t want to risk missing an exit when you’re already running late to your boss’s kid’s quinceañera. Use Siri In The Car Hands-free With Bluetooth If you’re one of those people who can’t remember what life was like before Siri, it should put you at ease knowing that with Bluetooth, she remains as close as ever. Even while you’re flying up the I-5, you can ask her to tell you what’s playing at, or to play songs by Katy Perry (no one has to know). Who cares what life was like before Siri? The key is that it never has to be that way again. Contact Mobile Mechanics of Albuquerque For A Hands-free Bluetooth Stereo System At Mobile Mechanics of Albuquerque, we can help you stay safe and connected. Drop by and see what we have. Our knowledgeable and professional sales team will answer your questions and set you up with the perfect Bluetooth system for your needs, your car, your lifestyle.

TIPS Automotive In-Car Bluetooth Speakerphone Setup Service near Albuquerque NM: ● Replace your car's speakers In most cases, the speakers are just about the last thing a manufacturer thinks about when designing and building your car. Factory audio systems have gotten better over the last few years, but many so-called "premium" systems still use relatively inexpensive amps and speakers that don't deliver top-notch sound. ● Select higher quality for your music files Yes, you can store more music files in your music player if you use greater compression, and they'll sound okay when you're listening through earbuds. But you lose some high- and low-frequency information when you compress your music, along with some of the details that make your music interesting. And, on a good car audio system, you can really tell that something's missing. ● Bypass your music player's built-in digital-to-analog converter A digital-to-analog converter, or DAC, has the job of converting digital information 0's and 1's into analog music signals. In most cases, your music player is probably your smartphone. Its built-in DAC usually does a good enough job for casual listening with earbuds, but it doesn't deliver the same level of performance you can get from the more advanced DACs found in many of today's better car stereos. ● Use sound deadening material ● Add a car amplifier ● Add a signal processor or an equalizer The interior of a car presents some serious problems when it comes to sound quality. Glass and plastic surfaces reflect sound like crazy, while carpet, seat covers, and other absorbent materials soak it up. Add poorly placed speakers to the mix, and you wind up with significant frequency response peaks in most car interiors. ● Build a better sub box. Or buy one. If you're building a sealed subwoofer box, make sure it's sealed properly. Air leaks can really hurt your sub's performance. If you're using a ported box, make sure you've got the right sub in there. You can destroy a sub that's designed for sealed box use by driving it hard in a ported enclosure. Also, it's important to build a box with the correct interior volume for the sub you've picked out. A mismatch can result in poor performance or a sub fatality. ● Your crossover can really improve the sound of your system Many in-dash receivers now include frequency filters that'll work with your preamp and speaker outputs. If you have a sub, use the high-pass filter to remove the low bass from your car's full-range speakers. You'll get more clean volume out of them, particularly if you're driving them with the receiver's built-in power. ● Set your amp gains properly Our Tech Support people field calls every day from customers who can't understand why their new car audio system sounds so bad. The #1 problem? Most people think the gain control on their new amplifier controls the volume level. Naturally, they turn it all the way up, which causes bad things to happen. The gain control actually adjusts the amount of input signal coming into the amplifier. ● Don't max out your tone controls Like a guitar, all the best car sound systems perform better when they're properly tuned. Boosting your factory radio's tone controls all the way up might make your system sound better in your driveway, but it just creates distortion when you turn it up on the highway. A heavy low-frequency boost, in particular, will put a big strain on your factory system. If you want to fatten up your sound, try using a smaller boost in the bass, lower the highs and mids a touch, and then turn up your overall level a little more. ● Add a subwoofer and hear what you've been missing ● Use a capacitor if you're going to push your subs hard The people who designed your car probably didn't have subwoofers in mind when they built your vehicle. Big bass sucks up a lot of power, and most car electrical systems aren't equipped to deal with it.

COST Automotive In-Car Bluetooth Speakerphone Setup Service near Albuquerque NM: There are a few universal devices that will wire into your head unit and can add music streaming to the list of functionalities, but that makes the installation process a bit more complicated. These devices usually range in price from $15 to $30. Many electronics stores offer installation for around $100. There's a broad range of replacement stereo systems on the market. Fortunately, even the most affordable units feature Bluetooth integration for hands-free calling. Replacing your vehicle’s head unit is a great option for those who want the greatest range of audio functionality. This process does require some labor, and you’ll need to embrace the aftermarket look of your new system, but most devices come with easy-to-follow instructions. With patience, common tools, and a couple of hours, most people can replace their stereo system. Don’t want the hassle? Many electronics stores offer installation for around $100. Installation time and difficulty will depend on the manufacturer, but most systems require you to remove the factory stereo, wire in the adapter, and route a wired microphone to the back of the head unit. When all is said and done, you’ll be able to make and answer calls via Bluetooth through your factory system. In addition to maintaining the stock aesthetic, these adapters are usually pretty cheap, with the average setup costing less than $100. Luxury automakers generally charge more for their devices, but hey, what else is new. Replacing your vehicle’s head unit is a great option for those who want the greatest range of audio functionality. This process does require some labor, and you’ll need to embrace the aftermarket look of your new system, but most devices come with easy-to-follow instructions. With patience, common tools, and a couple of hours, most people can replace their stereo system. Don’t want the hassle. Many electronics stores offer installation for around $100.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS Can I use a Bluetooth speaker in the car? With Bluetooth technology, you can comfortably connect your device to the speakers in the car and listen to your favorite music at all times. Some of these speakers have modern features such as automatic wake and pair, 100% high-quality sound output and many more.

I Can't Connect My Laptop To My Bluetooth Speaker. What Do I Do? Most laptops do include some sort of Bluetooth functionality, however, this is often a type of Bluetooth intended solely for mice and keyboards; not for streaming audio. In order to stream audio via Bluetooth, your laptop will need to be compatible with the A2DP Bluetooth profile which is common in most phones and tablets, but not as popular in laptops or other computers. It's possible that your laptop could connect to a Bluetooth speaker even without the A2DP profile, but you will very likely experience playback issues (no sound or drop-outs) or you will be unable to use the speaker as an audio output device. If you're experiencing issues playing back audio from a laptop, try your speaker with a smartphone or tablet before assuming something is wrong with the speaker. Also, be wary of inexpensive USB Bluetooth dongles which promise to add Bluetooth to older computers that don't already have wireless capabilities.

What About Trouble Pairing My Two Bluetooth Speakers Together? Some Bluetooth speakers like the ION Cornerstone, Solar Stone Multi, and Tiki Sounds allow you to pair two or more units together for stereo playback. When pairing multiple speakers together in stereo, they’ll need to be within line-of-sight of each other, and less than 30 feet from each other. The closer they are, the stronger the signal will be.

The Sound Drops Out When I Walk Away From The Speaker? What Do I Do? Most ION Audio portable speakers have a Bluetooth range of about 100 feet, so drop-outs may start to occur as you reach the top of this range. Keep in mind that the range and effectiveness of the Bluetooth signal from your phone or tablet will be affected by other factors in your environment, including walls, other people, and other wireless signals. See our section at the top for minimizing interference for your Bluetooth speaker.

The Sound Is Cutting Out Even Though My Phone/Tablet Is Right Next To The Speaker. What Do I Do? The volume level for your phone or tablet can affect the Bluetooth signal strength. In other words, if the volume is too low you may find that the sound cuts periodically, probably at lower points in the music or audio signal. For instance, you may notice the very beginning of some songs are cut off, or the podcast host's voice is cutting out at the beginning of a sentence. To remedy this, simply turn up the volume on your phone or tablet. In general, setting your phone or tablet's audio output level to about 80% - 90% will ensure a strong signal with no distortion. With this set, use the speakers master volume controls to set the overall output for the speaker.

I Can Connect To The Speaker But The Sound Is Distorted. What Do I Do? The volume level for your phone or tablet will affect the overall output of the signal from the speaker. In other words, the volume may be too high on your phone or tablet. Although it may be hard to notice, different apps on your phone or tablet will play music in different formats and with their own pre-set internal volume levels. In general, setting your phone or tablet's audio output level to about 80% - 90% will ensure a strong signal with no distortion. With this set, use the speakers master volume controls to set the overall output for the speaker.

What Kind Of Portable Bluetooth Speakers Does Ion Offer? Audio offers a wide variety of top-selling portable Bluetooth speakers for a variety of occasions from tailgating, backyard BBQ, or just hanging by the pool. We offer speakers in a range of portability, power, and weather-resistant options. Be sure to visit our website to browse our selection and find the model that's right for you!

Call For Us: ● Automotive In-Car Bluetooth Speakerphone Setup Service Near Albuquerque NM ● How To Add Bluetooth To Car Factory Stereo ● How To Find Bluetooth Pin For Car ● How To Connect Phone To Car With Aux ● How To Connect Phone To Car Without Bluetooth ● How To Use Bluetooth Device In Car ● How To Connect Phone To Car Bluetooth ● How To Play Music From Phone To Car Bluetooth Near Albuquerque NM ● How To Connect Phone To Car With Usb ● Car Music System With Bluetooth ● Car Music System With Bluetooth And Navigation ● Car Bluetooth Handsfree Kit ● Second Hand Car Music System ● Best Car Bluetooth Receiver ● Car Bluetooth Device With Audio Receiver ● Car Stereo With Bluetooth ● Car Bluetooth Price Near Albuquerque NM

BEST AUTOMOTIVE IN-CAR BLUETOOTH SPEAKERPHONE SETUP SERVICE IN ALBUQUERQUE NM MOBILE MECHANICS OF ALBUQUERQUE REQUEST MORE INFORMATION. CONTACT US NOW!

0 notes

ratherhavetheblues · 5 years

Text

Claire Denis’ ’35 Shots of Rum’ “I feel like…I have wings…”

These days, an old black and white film about God will find few takers. However, there is a still-practicing filmmaker, namely, Claire Denis, who pulls out all the stops to revisit such a vehicle. Is she a nun? Nope. Is she a God-fearing militant in favor of aid to the distressed? Nope. Is she a social scientist, tracking religious consequences through the ages? No, no, no. What Denis’ excitement pertains to, is the work of that mostly shunned movie, called, The Seventh Seal (1957), created by notable-no-longer filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007), whose output engages the intrinsic disaster of piety and smarts. (The word, “intrinsic,” is crucial here. And as such, her perspective is problematic, not formulaic.) In addition to piety and smarts, that film spotlights a young couple of itinerant circus performers in the 12th century, the husband, Jof, agog with the possibility that their baby boy could become a dazzling acrobat, or a juggler, pulling off an “impossible” trick, the kind of trick only an oracle would imagine.

Intrinsic in the travelling folks’ itinerary, is the sentence of being left out of the lives who, if not making the world go round, making the world theirs. 35 Shots of Rum (2008) contemplates the hopes of Jof, almost a millennium shot forward. As such, our film today carries the special bonus of catching up to, once again, the bittersweet world of Jacques Demy and the musical muse of Demy’s soulmate, Michel Legrand (setting out the latter master’s magical transcendence by way of those deft swallows, the Tindersticks).

Diminutive Jof comes a cropper with the salt of the earth in a medieval beer hall, and, by way of putting a less embarrassing story in the mix, he tells a gathering at his caravan that he “roared like a lion” against the mob. Our protagonist today, Lionel, a Paris commuter train driver (far from Jof’s open road), is an African immigrant-widower who dotes on his adult daughter, Josephine, still living with him. The action here is pensive in a puzzling way. Whereas Jof and Marie are on the hook to circumvent various substantial evils (the plague, for instance), Lionel and Jo seem to lead a rather uneventful, mundane existence. Their reticence to speak (a less extreme strategy of the vow to silence, in Bergman’s, Persona [1966]), counting upon face and body language, becomes a form of poetry you could study for years.

Such a peculiar, elusive narrative presents a daunting task of identifying and structuring the artistry being given to us. One readily manageable gift, however, in this connection, is the opening scene and its riches of rail lines and bustle and a high-pitched, low-textured accordion motif, keening for something misplaced and yet with an abundance of lift, rather like the music of a carousel. The first visual incident involves a set of shining rail tracks plunging forward from the driver’s smudged window. Soon we’re presented with multiplicity of tracks near a railroad station, resolving to one line describing a gentle curve as against the standard fast forward, a departure redolent of both poetry and prose. Even more palpable, however, is the jumble of wiring (a sort of Black Forest or snowstorm) and its masts maintaining electrical power and its dynamics, along with mechanical devices being a force of stasis. Constituting a form of synthesis with those visuals, there is the musical motif, filling out the progressions in such a way that we are transformed as part of the doing of a sorcerer’s apprentice. That formidable protagonist, Lionel, comes into view in close-up profile at twilight with his shift nearly over. Lighting a cigarette and gazing at a more substantial and impressive long-distance train passing by, the set of his face is far from easy. Tindersticks add a flute component, lightening the load somewhat. We see the back of the last coach, touching the black void with two sharp red stoplights near the wheels, and a more diffuse green field of action near the structure’s top. An elicitation to accentuate the positive.

Then we see Josephine (the play of her two forms of name being a bit like the red/ green just mentioned) patient in a Metro car squashed like livestock. She stops at a kitchen store to consider a presser cooker/ rice preparer; and, presto, Lionel comes home to the flat with one, scarlet and shiny, making a statement. What with her doing the laundry and his carefully undressing and having a shower before dinner from that new appliance—she smiling on hearing him come in, and he pleased to be the bearer of good tidings—all the connection involves their silence within a sanctuary of their own perceptual making. This low-key activity allows us to salute the savvy with which they have designed their little nest—choosing paneling in very effective blacks and greys, with subtle yellow floor tiles, and with uncluttered spaces. When they’re close enough for a welcome little kiss, she tells him, “You smell of cigarettes,” a case of maintaining a pristine society. (Another of the audacious compositional touches is the virtual disappearance of Caucasians in the City of Light—Josephine’s subway, for instance, entirely filled with blacks—as if this enclave represents the best hope of clear thinking.) Seated quietly, they eat with gusto. She puts on some lively music—far less lively than what we heard along the tracks—and Lionel picks up two apples for their continued health. Sanguine, for sure; but not successfully addressing those minutes, probably frequent, in the dark engine.

Upping the ante, the only black in sight not serene, namely, Rene, an old friend of Lionel, has come to his retirement day at the commuter system. Lionel watches the man of the hour about to clean out his locker, and he is apprehensive that his friend has dangerously lost the company grip. (At his suicide, our protagonist being confronted with the horror of Rene having chosen a place on the rails where the calm one would encounter him, the latter holds a difficult silence, culminating in, “Fuck, Rene!” [you’ve overreached].) Certainly, our careful one, would never place on his locker wall a photo of a pretty sharp acrobat, spinning many plates by way of a multiplicity of long sticks. To ponder such sensuous acuity is to be on the hook to see and feel things in a very different light. Lionel, on that special, presumably happy day, comes upon that aficionado as he trembles. And being a rock of some endurance, urges, “You can’t fall apart now. Not in front of everyone…” On to the retirement party, and Rene can’t manage a smile. From the girls, there is a beautifully designed, rather rakish, leather jacket. From the “brothers,” a scepter (ravishing in its mosaic details), the likes of which a jungle king would have close-by when presiding. Still glum, Rene manages a brief speech: “My friends, thank you for being here. I’ve waited so long for this. It’s a deliverance, you know. [His troubled manner has all of them on edge.] Tonight I feel like… I have wings…” On the Metro, with Lionel, his scepter wildly incongruous, he tells his friend, “Surrendering… Surrendering to this condition, is what’s so hard. I’d liked to have died young. But I’m at the age I’m at. And healthy as an ox. I’ll die at 100 at this rate… I don’t have this life in me. The subway and all that. It hit me unarmed and unprepared…” A few days later, they meet coincidentally in a bar. Lionel asks, “Got any plans?”/ “Tons,” Rene ironically replies. (Another gift, during the festivities where the lucky man spends most of the time with head bowed, is an iPod. Someone tells him, “All your music at your fingertips!” Music, again, but bulk; and Rene, the acrobat manqué, feels the pain without a plan to beat it. Lionel had for years been staging special events, dear to his heart, in the form of a drinking binge of 35 shots of rum in quick succession—his sense, for what it’s worth, of regal acrobatics. “Down the hatch,” a woman in the company [all black, of course] is cheered on. She ends her run at 16. The natural follow-up would be for Lionel to run a row of slam-dunks. But, to the surprise of all, he says, “Not tonight…” The vision of Rene’s horror has induced that current of self-criticism in our protagonist, rarely elicited; and soon it’s back to the tune of, “Fuck, Rene!” Oodles of charm, a go-to friend, to many. But.)

Jo, within the aura of Marie (a 12th century pragmatist), is enrolled in a college program of Economics, where she can practice utopian possibilities. The first sustained action in the world at large where we see her is to go jogging with a young mulatto man, Noe, who occupies the penthouse of their building; and joins Rene in distraction—not due to lack of understanding but lack of devouring. (That would introduce, though, the third member of Jof’s troupe, namely, Scat, who sleeps in a hammock near the ceiling of their caravan, and sleeps with as many women as he can.) They’re in cool apparel as they cruise along the industrial service road where their building stands. She begins to outpace him, and, true to form, he jumps into the Seine (far from the Seine of tourists and billionaires). “You’re crazy!” she laughs, when he regains the service road and the upper hand. (The little acrobatic, of the jog which suits her, being eclipsed by jagged face-saving and latent hostility.)

While Josephine wends her way to oblivion, there is a woman, Gabrielle, the unofficial manager of the easily managed centre, who shows to us, if not the virtues of wide variety of mood, their capacity to put into play juggling initiatives, come what may. One thing she does have up her sleeve, however operative, is the tangled history of films about taxi drivers (she being one), particularly, Jim Jarmusch’s film, Night on Earth (1991) and Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten (2002). She begins her tenure on the pavement with the complaint, “This is not my day…” A young dude, needing to move only a few blocks, counsels her to practice “flexibility;” but, in fact she’s already on the case. She maintains that she knows very well how fortunate she is, in finding every day to be unique. And, “No boss breathing down my neck.” In addition to her being a queen of the road, she’s frequently sitting in the dark, on her balcony or even in the stairwells of her home. Jo, rather obtuse for a closet mystic, teases her that she’s still carrying a torch for Lionel, who lived with her for some time before and after Jo’s German mother died, necessitating the young girl to come to Paris and her bemusing father. Despite the misalliance, all the players in this relationship have generally found ways to pleasurably intermingle. But the ways of volatile Gabrielle are not the ways of muted Lionel and Josephine. She also visits that bar where Rene needs the alcohol, and gives him a sunny smile (during the interregnum of Lionel’s patriarchy Rene would have been a frequent guest). After a quick espresso, she’s out the door to get back to work. And from the suicidal one’s perspective, and its remarkably dirty windows, she’s been transformed from incandescence to a blizzard of grey deadness. Such a fate dogs her to the end, a veritable sentence of solitary confinement. But it is her resilience, notwithstanding (like the taxi/Mom in Ten), which matters. (A “Fuck, Rene!” [and all the other cripples]; but in being disappointed for him and the rest, not pissed off that a lame clique had been abandoned.) She undertakes posting a thankless note about the by-law there, about someone leaving a bike in the hall. (Noe trips over it in a dark passage; and all he does is yell, “Shit!”) More thankless care comprises how often she invites Josephine to her suite and is given excuses that her studies come first. The four of them are excited to have tickets for a popular band. Off they go in Gabrielle’s car in a rainstorm—she, knowing Lionel only too well, asks, “Got your wallet?”—and the car breaks down (Gabrielle, as so often, no doubt, succumbs to, “I can’t believe this!) due to transmission problems. The concert never happens for them, how could it? But they’re within walking distance to a Jamaican restaurant they know, insisting, “We didn’t feel like going home like this.” (Remarkably, though, the place had already closed; but, in the current of the fantasy easiness here, the woman-proprietor welcomes them, and happily prepares suppers on her own. On the other hand, that generosity and sanguinity is something else.) The sound system comes to life, and Lionel and Gabrielle enjoy dancing together. Jo smiles at this, and soon she and Noe are the night’s special event, the passion of their embrace becoming a concern for her dad and a reflection for Gabrielle. The food arrives, and the host’s black and white dress is like a bit of outer space, a bit of a silent concert. Noe, while dancing with Jo, exclaims, “You’re something else!” He got the wrong girl. (During the inevitable wedding, Jo tells Gabrielle, “You’re not going to cry?” When the latter tries to help with the bride’s outfit, Lionel tells her, “Jo can do it herself.” We last see her sitting alone in a shadowy stairwell.)

The sequel of that calypso meal finds three of the four at Noe’s apartment. His cat has died, and he disposes of it with not a moment of care. Dumping the body into a garbage bag, he brags, “No frills, he’s dead and gone for.” This finds Josephine covering her nose and mouth, and saying nothing. Gabrielle’s asking for an aspirin at least reflects being distraught. (Here the axiom, stemming from Jarmusch, of abusing a pet, means the abuser has metaphorically become roadkill.) With this he announces his interest in moving to Gabon (“pays well”); and Jo goes through the motions of dissolving what was supposed to be elevated performance. Wouldn’t you know he’d couch his departure with, “Now that my cat’s dead, I’ll like it” [the offer]—more fake acrobatics. But this shake-up involves depths and shallows, to savor, racing back to the lyrical and ambiguous curve of the tracks in the first scene.

Jo protests, “You’ll ditch us and go away?”/ “Why not?” the TV poker gamer bluffs. “You always tell me how it’s ugly and old here” [a list of her surprising immaturity including being unmindful of the historical and advanced possibilities of Paris]. In this context, a cut to Lionel, who for various reasons might have preferred sleeping to remaining in that company, finds him walking along a sidewalk eating a croissant—to him a non-ugly factor. On arriving home, he finds Jo in a frenzy to clean their flat. (While still on the sidewalk he notices her putting finishing touches to cleaning Noe’s balcony window—forcing her to stretch in a precarious way. [Acrobatic, sort of.]) Lionel’s confusion about the cleaning blitz extending to his place displaces his placing out more croissants, and messes up his reading the newspaper designed for flat-earth fanatics. “Why are you doing housework?” the sort of poet asks. “Isn’t it clean enough?” When Noe yelled, “Shit!” was he in error? Does Gabrielle’s client/stranger’s demand for “flexibility” start biting here? Jo moves on to rifling through old photos, including one showing her German mother and Josephine as a baby, and proposes throwing all of them out. Lionel is far from happy about this frenzy, so foreign to his learning. She counters that, “It’s filthy here! We need to empty it all out.” Her recruitment by Noe has no heart for a mosaic on the wall, traces of her father’s rather pathetic poetry. In the confusion he calls out, “This makes no sense! Think of yourself.” To which she counters, “Noe’s leaving!… I’m leaving, too” [the clean-up in the service of giving her father a clean home to be alone with]. “Don’t be silly. We’ll do as we please. As we always have. Nothing will change…” is the desperate hope. Jo yells to him, “Yes! Everything will!” Finding among those keepsakes a letter written by her mother to Lionel living in Paris and living with Gabrielle, we are taken up by a facsimile of one of those enthralling dramatic dialogues which Bergman had become a master in delivering, to deepen our understanding of the principal’s dilemma. “Lionel, I miss you. I miss you so much. Josephine finally fell asleep. She looks like you when she sleeps. It makes me love her even more. Please let me live by your side every day. She’ll be my daughter, too. My love, my rascal…” On the heels of that discovery, Josephine knocks on Noe’s door. When he opens it, she finds his arrogance: “You have something to tell me?”

Coinciding with that Road to Gabon, Lionel, “the rascal,” has lost Rene, but in the course of a rhapsody/daydream on the job, he conjures a horse and a wagon on the tracks as far back as the heights of Jof and Marie. Somehow the image of Jo also appears, for a fraction of a second—this being an apparition for the ages, regardless of stiffs like Noe. And thereby they take off the tarp from their long-dormant Volkswagen van in the underground of the facility (close to where Gabrielle parks, with the little touch of pedantry masking her roof-light to offset rascals), to play one last (confused) victory lap, to Germany (where Jo learned to speak German before reaching Paris after her mother’s early demise). In a cast generally mustering understated performance from blacks and their secret hideaway to transcend a terminally polluted mainstream presumptuously claiming to be viable, the home stretch unveils an elderly German lady (Jo’s grandmother), who takes over—a bit of a scandal in an era of race obsession—as a Bergman oracle, typically smothered by a roster of fakes. “We don’t see you enough. That’s the way it is now. We all live such withdrawn lives [Jo, if only she were alert enough to grasp the outrage being alluded to]. Everyone in his corner. Every man for himself. Would you like some coffee?” (Jo’s capitulation coming across subliminally, as in, “Yes, I would Ma’am.” The hostess retorts, “You don’t have to be so formal” [largely mundane, Jo, having succumbed to formulaic piety and smarts]. You must have been driving all night [as with Jof and Marie, on that long night when “formal” Death commanded nearly everything in sight]. You can stay for lunch, or even spend the night.” Jo replies, in German, “Thanks, but we want to get back on the road [brave words, but here the usual subterfuge; and masking, I’ve got a wedding to bring off, with a fake acrobat]. Maybe some other time” [when hell freezes over]. Does this obtuse connectivity derive from Denis’ background in Africa?) The old gal, disappointed with her prim relative, subtly mocks, “Some other time…” She swings past this transmission problem, however, by recalling a (very) brief joy. “Your mother said she fell in love with a guy in Paris. I asked her, ‘Is he cute?’ [oracles not likely to pose such questions in a straightforward way]. She looked me straight in the eyes and said, ‘You’re going to like him’” [the speaker has a troubled face and she looks downward]. Rallying once again, in face of this semi-invasion, or Death, she finds something lively. “I taught her to swim. She was scared of the water. We’re all scared of it. I’m also scared of that [nearby, North] Sea. So vast, so wide. And when you scream, no one hears you… Lionel, do you remember that time when we all went swimming together? We basked in the sun. Lost in the dunes [ring a bell?]… Good wine [she smiles]. Not always that good” [when Lionel was buying; the volatility raining down, and needing to be met]. Though he would not follow the verbal language, there was, in the body language of this transaction a delivery of that day. A delivery the steady and gentle “cute” “rascal” chooses to ignore. “You don’t remember?” she asks him. Her hurt, from this lie, is short lived. “Why don’t we drink some wine? A little glass of wine, now. Why not?” (There is a cut to a wall in that room, showing Jo as a baby held in her mother’s arms; and a dark print of a nude woman seen from behind, treading into the sea at night with a moon casting moonlight on the sea. Iconic matter, to someone, anyway.) “A little glass,” she perseveres. Then they are all drinking that wine. Lionel silent, in a dilemma, unsheltered by his usual comrades. The oracle has more to say. “Sometimes it seems the whole world is scared of suffering. Everyone wants either total stress or some peace in their happy little lives. But not us, not us! We’re strong, aren’t we? Aren’t we Lionel?” The latter minor poet, gracing so many rigors, comes up empty here, very well understanding that he is hated. “I’m glad Josephine gets by in German. It makes me happy” [dipping into the “happy little, prosaic lives” so potent in Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander]. “Just like your dad” [to be a stiff], the lady, clearly fluent in French, skewers a surprising target.

After a short stop to the grave, pouring some water on the flowers, while golden leaves waft down in lieu of almost total neglect, the van reaches the shore, recalling the embarkation of buttoned-down Block and his squire (the aristocrat who fails, and the salt of the earth, who also fails), coming ashore from a crusade centuries ago. It’s All Saints Night, and a group of children, carrying lights and singing, goes by their caravan, etched vividly in the twilight as they negotiate a ridge. Peering out of their home away from home, they fail to pierce the urgency of that full-hearted dash for the sake of a lively life, so long ago and remaining to be fulfilled.

How dare, then, Lionel’s wedding gift of a rice-cooker (“Living Tech” brand), snow-white with a few sissy images at the base—as if to look down upon Jo’s retreat? The slight fails to register with Jo, but it had better register with us. There are many enclaves on this planet sworn to never hear a discouraging word; and some—like that of the club we’ve just taken the depths of—actually being overachievers. But thanks to that oracle, our love affair of the sweet (musical) suite and the sweet apprehensions (as in the small handful of great Demy films) must unequivocally demand more. As the wedding reception rolls on, with a pianist a bit less sweet and a bit more bitter, Lionel climbs the rum shots game, to perhaps reach something to quieten his malaise. “A moment like this only happens once,” he overstates. Neither a consummate acrobat with his rum, nor a consummate juggler with cronies, Lionel—harkening to that siren call having endowed those falling short in Demy films remaining lovable (and a lovable longshot for reaching the strictures Jof had in mind a thousand years ago)—settles in to enjoy the party. But his miasma (far more potent than the ton of rum he’s feeling as we leave him while never forgetting him) is the real concern of this masterful film.

As if a divided homage to this rather secret society—and especially the secret society that was Lionel and Josephine—Denis has planted several factors in her film which amount to a possible blossoming of a long-overdue being “strong,” and not being “scared of suffering.” Some we have already encountered—for instance, Lionel and Jo on a long-ago horse, implying proof against the fear of the likes of Rene. And yet a mark of shame, due to that shining, though flawed, accomplishment of Rene, so more honest. This touches upon the pedantry of Josephine, in action during her college preparations, to become what many others insist she settle for. She mouths, like so many others before her, that “the Global South has not been handed the credits to thrive. “It is neither right nor wrong. Rules, used to manage international debt-loads, impose trouble upon countries in debt. I don’t think we can ignore (Joseph) Stiglitz” [American Nobel Prize winner, in the field of “Economic Sciences”]. (The Prof notes, “You say it as if it’s totally self-evident. It’s a little pedantic…” [pedantry eliciting fear, as in Wild Strawberries]. Another student—coinciding with flawed but somewhat cogent, Rene—argues, “When we revolt, it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many sources, we can no longer breathe…” More bookishness surfaces during Rene’s finally returning a book he borrowed from Lionel. The latter admits that he had forgotten all about it. The subject was about the evils of being “educated to death,” which, it transpires, had become a joke amidst the cognoscenti. The title was Mars [War]. We can well understand why he, so scared of suffering, forgot about it. But that he touched it at all, is a revelation!) On Noe’s wall is a poster, titled, ODISSEA 2001. Flashy optics. No Mars. Their marriage won’t last a year. Then, what?

Many viewers, with a didactic bent, have inferred that 35 Shots of Rum is patterned on the Yasujiro Ozu classic, Late Spring (1949). They claim to have strong evidence by way of the Denis documentary, Talking with Ozu (1993). A few narrative steps do coincide; and the rather precious disinterestedness of the Japanese protagonist does (vaguely) show that area of musicality here. Could the contrasts between the films be urgent here—Denis’ film being modern cool, while Romantic Ozu fumes about the cruel frozenness of Japanese action? Another aspect of Talking with Ozu, is her warning that she “dislikes auteurism and the cult of cinephilia.” The pros read this, and proceed nevertheless—a move like stepping off the observation deck of the Empire State Building. The bona fide involvements here, with Bergman and Demy/Legrand, have very little to do with the movie industry, as it has chosen to fool with.

#claire denis

0 notes

t-baba · 6 years

Photo

How User Research Turned a Good App into a Great One

Firstly, the backstory. In 2013 the popular Cook app was launched, and it’s great to reflect on the journey it’s been through.

I love to cook. This is probably not surprising for someone who created a cooking app. As a child, some of my earliest memories are of sitting on the kitchen bench watching my mother cook amazing food for all manner of social events, and getting to help stir or participate in other small ways was a highlight for me.

I really think food holds many memories. The smell of food, or the type of dish you’re eating, can take you back in time — in much the same way music has the ability to trigger memories of different times in your life, reminding you of people and places from your past.

It was the memories of the past that led me to think of a digital recipe book being a good idea for an app.

I was chatting with my mother one day and asked her where my grandmother’s baked custard recipe was. She responded, “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think she ever wrote it down. She just did it from memory.”

I was horrified. It was a simple recipe. But at the time I asked the question, my grandmother had been dead for ten years. That meant the recipes I recalled from my past — simple though they were — had now been lost with her. My grandmother isn’t any different from many home cooks who have an array of recipes they cook so often they know how to do them from memory, and so never write them down.

Recipes can represent your heritage in many ways. My grandmother’s was a simple recipe, and I could probably easily recreate it from a web search. But this particular recipe held special memories of baked dinners and times spent with my grandmother. Because she didn’t write it down, it was lost now — never to be recovered.

So Cook was first imagined as a way to preserve the heritage of family recipes — helping to overcome the loss of handwritten recipes over time, assisting to preserve recipes from generations of family cooks. By digitizing the old world of index cards, tatty old recipe books, or other random means, my hope was to enable family recipes to be captured and shared with future generations. Digital meant that recipes could be handed down more easily and not lost to a time gone by.

The Opportunity to Do Something Knocks

Like many people who have a killer idea for an app, I did nothing with this idea for ages. I was just another person that imagined a “great idea” for an app and bored people with that idea at dinner parties.

Then, in 2011, SitePoint approached me to write a book on UX.

SitePoint is a publication mainly aimed toward the developer community, so they suggested that a case study would be useful in bringing the value of UX to life for their readers in a more tangible way.

UX has often been viewed with skepticism in terms of tangible, measurable benefit. In those days, it was still kind of new to consider “the user” of a product as you developed it — as crazy as that sounds. So I discussed with my editor Simon the idea for the app, and that we could incorporate the story of it into the UX book.

We imagined that each chapter could talk about the key methods to follow, and that the app would be the living and breathing example of how we put the methods to work in order to bring the app idea to life. In this sense, Cook became the case study for taking a “human-centered design” approach to product design.

So, by writing the book we were able to mature the idea of a recipe app a bit further, taking an educational approach.

The UX Rules of Product Development

Whenever creating a product, you should ask yourself three simple questions:

What problem needs solving?

Who are you solving it for?

How are you going to measure success?

What Problem Needs Solving?

Quite often this gets answered as a product is imagined, and Cook was no different. I was a passionate home cook that thought there was potentially was a gap in the market, based on a pain I had encountered. Although it’s wise to never think you are your users, this is the way many ideas start. And this thought spurred on the idea for a digital recipe book. Exploration of that idea comes next.

As part of the process of exploration, we needed to scan the landscape. What else was out there? Were we the only ones with this idea? How could we be inspired by the competing and complimentary offerings that existed? Had someone else beaten us to it?

This task proved to be a scary one, as we discovered the cooking app landscape was littered with famous celebrity chefs. Jamie and Nigella were everywhere. I was a passionate home chef, but I was no MasterChef. Eeep! However, regardless of the talent in the space, the design gap still remained. There was no app we could find that presented people with a stupidly simple means of creating recipes and storing them digitally. There were many complex ones that were hard to use. And therefore, not only was there a gap, but there was an area that we could easily differentiate — simply by being easy to use.

Who Are We Solving It For?

The problem we were solving for was, to my mind, home cooks. Passionate, average, everyday cooks, the type of people that had their own recipe scrapbook full of favorite recipes from times past. Collected from family and friends over the years.

This focus is why we initially named the app “Family Favorites”. It said what we intended — but it was a bit lame in selling the dream from a marketing perspective, and also tended to pigeonhole the target audience in a way we didn’t want. That is, it seemed to say “families only”.

We knew we had work to do on the name and on giving it a broader appeal. Nevertheless, the placeholder name held for a while as we got on with the business of researching and creating the app. We’d think about the name later.

Measuring Success

Obviously, the easiest measure of success was going to be people downloading it and using it. Actually, creating recipes within the app was going to be the main measure of success at this stage. This measure would change over time as the design and concept evolved, but, at a basic level, if you’re downloading an app and using it, it’s a good basic success metric.

We agonized over whether to charge for the app or not, and we eventually decided we needed eyeballs in the early days. So the app would be free, so that there was no barrier to people downloading it.

What Taking a “UX” Approach Means in Practice

We ate our own dog food and followed a “human-centered design approach” (HCD), or “UX” approach. This approach is more commonly understood and accepted nowadays as a beneficial approach to product development. But what does it mean in practice?

HCD, UX, even service design (SD), are all very similar in their philosophy: that is, to design by putting the human at the center of your design process — considering their needs upfront and throughout the product development process, being prototype-driven (that is, experimental), and iterative (that is, changing your mind and updating the design, based on what you learn from exploration and validation with people). It’s stupidly simple. We did all these things developing Cook. It works.

I’ve often told the story of how I recruited people to take part in some concept exploration research before we started designing the app. I did this across a weekend — the only time I could fit it in around work. I told participants I was going to come over to their house, and I wanted them to prepare and cook for me one of their favorite recipe dishes of all time.

Everyone I tell this story to laughs and says the same thing. “Nice one! You just wanted to be fed!”

Without doubt, it was one of the most enjoyable sessions I’ve ever run, and I certainly loved the many and varied outputs. But that was part of the real trick — to ensure they didn’t really know what I was exploring.

From a process perspective, I sent them a homework activity to complete before I got there, so we could talk about it. The homework task was to create a poster that combined words and images to show how they feel about cooking (this helped prime them to the topic). They knew I was going to arrive and chat to them while they prepared the dish, but they didn’t really know what it was I was researching beyond that.

As they prepared the food, I asked them questions about the dish they’d chosen, and watched to see if they used a recipe, and where they had the recipe as a reference. (Was it in a recipe scrap book? Was it in a book? Index cards? From memory? Other?)

I intentionally didn’t talk about storage or recipe management too much. That part I observed. I talked to them mainly about their love of cooking, how they came to find this recipe and how it ended up being a family favorite. I talked about how they came across new ideas for cooking dishes and where they kept things stored. But we didn’t ever talk about whether they thought a “digital recipe app” was a good idea or not.

The trick to good research is to explore around the edges of what you’re looking at, and not let the people you’re talking to necessarily know what you’re actually researching.

You gain real insights from observing people’s true habits and behaviors, rather than by asking direct questions about their habits — which just puts people in a position of making up an answer if they don’t know why they do what they do. Most of the time we don’t know why we do things. We just do them automatically. It’s a habit we’ve formed for some reason, and it serves a particular purpose for us. Exploring the purpose around what we do, and why, is the job of a design researcher.

This comes to another thing about design research: we explore the way users work and live in a more contextual manner, and from that we gain inspiration for design. People often forget the little details of routine, so going into their environment helps us make connections that they might not think to articulate. Design research is intended to explore the design gaps and facilitate a better understanding for how users’ needs can be met — so that we can design better solutions for them.

One of the central tenets of HCD is to go to the extremes. Don’t just engage with people you think you’re creating the product for. Go to the edges and get inspiration from the types of users who might never want to buy your product. The anti-users and the experts often give you the best hints for how your product can differentiate itself and appeal to a broader market.

The people I recruited to participate included passionate home cooks, people who couldn’t cook, people who hated cooking, and professional chefs.

What I Learned that Changed My Thinking

The idea we went into research to create was quite different from what we came out with. We went into concept research absolutely sure we had an opportunity to create a digital recipe cookbook that people could store their recipes within. The ability to be digital meant cherished recipes would never be lost, and you could keep adding to your digital cookbook indefinitely.

What we missed with this perspective, however, was the gap for sharing and swapping recipes. And we also totally underestimated people’s voyeuristic, idle curiosity about what other people cook and eat from day to day.

It’s funny. I’m a passionate home cook. But I was so focused on what I thought the product needed to be that I totally overlooked many things that user research helped me open my eyes to and refocus on. In this sense, my own bias about the product made me overlook critical product features that would help make the app really special.

This points to a few things about research.

As a human, you have a lot of biases and self-fulfilling tendencies when creating a product you’ve been personally invested in. You really need to watch that. It’s part of being human, and hard to control. Being aware of it and testing your assumptions with real people other than you is critical.

As a design researcher, you have to be open to changing your mind about what you think you know to be true. This is product design, not art. The purpose of design is to ensure it’s as good as it possibly can be for the eventual end users. You need to accept that your initial wonderful idea might not have it all covered. You need to change your mind, and your design approach, based on what you learn. Otherwise, you’re just creating art.

This self-reflective moment is essential for design researchers. Your humble attitude to being open to new ideas, and changing your design accordingly, is not only essential, it’s critical to your success.

The Critical Aha Moments

People who love to cook often are friends with other people who love to cook. Swapping and sharing recipes is something they do. But as we learned, it’s a difficult and messy process.

This was the first aha moment. When we unpacked the research, we realized we needed to make Cook more than just a digital recipe book. We needed to facilitate sharing. It needed to be a social network for recipe sharing — enabling you to connect with friends and family and access each other’s recipes.

Another aha moment was discovering that people were fascinated by what other people cooked and ate. Not the exotic or highly skilled cheffy stuff, but the everyday meals that were quick and easy were interesting to people. Ultimately, they wanted inspiration for their everyday. But it had to be quick and simple — things that didn’t take too long. They were curious about what other people were doing in the kitchen on week nights, when they were pushed for time and were preparing for the week ahead.

Another critical aha moment was that people’s voyeuristic food tendencies weren’t limited to the banality of the local day-to-day. They were interested in the day-to-day food from other cultures. We discovered that many people attend cooking courses and buy recipe books from countries they visit. And while they’re interested in the exotic and higher-brow stuff, they’re also interested in the day-to-day. This opened our eyes to the prospect of a global recipe sharing network, which would facilitate users seeing what everyday cooks in other countries cooked regularly.

This led to two things: we launched the app globally, rather than just in Australia, and we partly focused recipe browsing on where recipes were submitted from. So one of the main navigation features was the “world books”, which allowed you to see what the everyday cooks in the UK, or USA, or Singapore were cooking.

This may seem like a little thing, but to me this really was one of the coolest features of Cook. Yes, people in the USA have an inordinate amount of Oreo Cookie recipes to share, and people in Italy have an amazing stash of pasta dishes.

Another aha moment was considering how to assist users to “fill up” their recipe book without having to actually write out recipes. People who had recipe scrap books had been adding to them for years — and still they might not have had many recipes within them. This was a concern for us. For Cook to be successful, you needed to be able to have it all, and it needed to be super simple.

We knew that searching the Web was a common way to find recipes. So the need to search the Web for recipes and add them to your book was clear, but another way to help build out your book was to be able to add recipes you found within Cook, from across the global selection. This helped to save the things you loved as your own, and also helped to fill out your book quickly and easily.

These things may not appear to be much. But they were a fundamentally different way to design and build out the app. And we were able to then do these things because we did this research up-front, before we had started to build or lay down foundations that were going to be hard (or impossible) to change. We were letting what we’d learned reshape our thoughts of the Cook app, which was a great position to be in.

Where We Are Now

Cook launched in 2013, a year after the launch of the book Killer UX Design, and I’m pleased to say we’re still rated one of the top 20 best apps for the food and drink category.

We’ve had 1.5 million downloads to date, and there have been 800 thousand recipes shared through the app worldwide.

Cook is featured on iPads in the Apple store around the world. In fact, I’ll never forget going into the Apple store in NYC and seeing Cook on the iPads on display. Wow! What a thrill that was.

The app has many dedicated users who love and cherish their digital cookbook. I don’t think I could have dreamed of a happier ending.

Like all start-ups, we always managed Cook on the side of our day jobs. And it’s the same right now. We’ve never received any funding and have been keeping the dream alive through our dedicated community of Cooks, who create and share content via the app daily.

We never did change the charging model, so to date, Cook has brought us lots of grateful moments, but no money. As we mentioned, we decided to remove all barriers for download and therefore not to charge for the app. To this day the app is free — an expensive decision, but the right one at that time.

The funniest thing about apps is that you ask someone to go to a different bank ATM and pay $3 to extract money and no one batts an eyelid. You ask someone to pay $3 for an app and they’re up in arms! And so not charging for Cook is something we’re going to reconsider.

It’s certainly hard sometimes for people who use Cook to understand that there are only about two people overseeing that app. So right now I’m looking for funding to keep Cook going into the future — a true labor of love.

Working with Cook has been a design experience of a lifetime, and one that totally validates the HCD approach we set out to prove.

The post How User Research Turned a Good App into a Great One appeared first on SitePoint.

by Jodie Moule via SitePoint https://ift.tt/2CaCbzp

#CSS3 #HTML5 Branding #HTML5 Weekly #HTMLl5 demos #Javascript Branding #Javascript Weekly #Mobile #Mo

0 notes

itbeatsbookmarks · 4 years

Link

(Via: Hacker News)

The log/event processing pipeline you can't have

Let me tell you about the still-not-defunct real-time log processing pipeline we built at my now-defunct last job. It handled logs from a large number of embedded devices that our ISP operated on behalf of residential customers. (I wrote and presented previously about some of the cool wifi diagnostics that were possible with this data set.)

Lately, I've had a surprisingly large number of conversations about logs processing pipelines. I can find probably 10+ already-funded, seemingly successful startups processing logs, and the Big Name Cloud providers all have some kind of logs thingy, but still, people are not satisfied. It's expensive and slow. And if you complain, you mostly get told that you shouldn't be using unstructured logs anyway, you should be using event streams.

That advice is not wrong, but it's incomplete.

Instead of doing a survey of the whole unhappy landscape, let's just ignore what other people suffer with and talk about what does work. You can probably find, somewhere, something similar to each of the components I'm going to talk about, but you probably can't find a single solution that combines it all with good performance and super-low latency for a reasonable price. At least, I haven't found it. I was a little surprised by this, because I didn't think we were doing anything all that innovative. Apparently I was incorrect.

The big picture

Let's get started. Here's a handy diagram of all the parts we're going to talk about:

The ISP where I worked has a bunch of embedded Linux devices (routers, firewalls, wifi access points, and so on) that we wanted to monitor. The number increased rapidly over time, but let's talk about a nice round number, like 100,000 of them. Initially there were zero, then maybe 10 in our development lab, and eventually we hit 100,000, and later there were many more than that. Whatever. Let's work with 100,000. But keep in mind that this architecture works pretty much the same with any number of devices.

(It's a "distributed system" in the sense of scalability, but it's also the simplest thing that really works for any number of devices more than a handful, which makes it different from many "distributed systems" where you could have solved the problem much more simply if you didn't care about scaling. Since our logs are coming from multiple sources, we can't make it non-distributed, but we can try to minimize the number of parts that have to deal with the extra complexity.)

Now, these are devices we were monitoring, not apps or services or containers or whatever. That means two things: we had to deal with lots of weird problems (like compiler/kernel bugs and hardware failures), and most of the software was off-the-shelf OS stuff we couldn't easily control (or didn't want to rewrite).

(Here's the good news: because embedded devices have all the problems from top to bottom, any solution that works for my masses of embedded devices will work for any other log-pipeline problem you might have. If you're lucky, you can leave out some parts.)

That means the debate about "events" vs "logs" was kind of moot. We didn't control all the parts in our system, so telling us to forget logs and use only structured events doesn't help. udhcpd produces messages the way it wants to produce messages, and that's life. Sometimes the kernel panics and prints whatever it wants to print, and that's life. Move on.

Of course, we also had our own apps, which means we could also produce our own structured events when it was relevant to our own apps. Our team had whole never-ending debates about which is better, logs or events, structured or unstructured. In fact, in a move only overfunded megacorporations can afford, we actually implemented both and ran them both for a long time.

Thus, I can now tell you the final true answer, once and for all: you want structured events in your database.

...but you need to be able to produce them from unstructured logs. And once you can do that, exactly how those structured events are produced (either from logs or directly from structured trace output) turns out to be unimportant.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves a bit. Let's take our flow diagram, one part at a time, from left to right.

Userspace and kernel messages, in a single stream

Some people who have been hacking on Linux for a while may know about /proc/kmsg: that's the file good old (pre-systemd) klogd reads kernel messages from, and pumps them to syslogd, which saves them to a file. Nowadays systemd does roughly the same thing but with more d-bus and more corrupted binary log files. Ahem. Anyway. When you run the dmesg command, it reads the same kernel messages (in a slightly different way).

What you might not know is that you can go the other direction. There's a file called /dev/kmsg (note: /dev and not /proc) which, if you write to it, produces messages into the kernel's buffer. Let's do that! For all our messages!

Wait, what? Am I crazy? Why do that?

Because we want strict sequencing of log messages between programs. And we want that even if your kernel panics.

Imagine you have, say, a TV DVR running on an embedded Linux system, and whenever you go to play a particular recorded video, the kernel panics because your chipset vendor hates you. Hypothetically. (The feeling is, hypothetically, mutual.) Ideally, you would like your logs to contain a note that the user requested the video, the video is about to start playing, we've opened the file, we're about to start streaming the file to the proprietary and very buggy (hypothetical) video decoder... boom. Panic.

What now? Well, if you're writing the log messages to disk, the joke's on you, because I bet you didn't fsync() after each one. (Once upon a time, syslogd actually did fsync() after each one. It was insanely disk-grindy and had very low throughput. Those days are gone.) Moreover, a kernel panic kills the disk driver, so you have no chance to fsync() it after the panic, unless you engage one of the more terrifying hacks like, after a panic, booting into a secondary kernel whose only job is to stream the message buffer into a file, hoping desperately that the disk driver isn't the thing that panicked, that the disk itself hasn't fried, and that even if you do manage to write to some disk blocks, they are the right ones because your filesystem data structure is reasonably intact.

(I suddenly feel a lot of pity for myself after reading that paragraph. I think I am more scars than person at this point.)

ANYWAY

The kernel log buffer is in a fixed-size memory buffer in RAM. It defaults to being kinda small (tens or hundreds of kBytes), but you can make it bigger if you want. I suggest you do so.

By itself, this won't solve your kernel panic problems, because RAM is even more volatile than disk, and you have to reboot after a kernel panic. So the RAM is gone, right?

Well, no. Sort of. Not exactly.

Once upon a time, your PC BIOS would go through all your RAM at boot time and run a memory test. I remember my ancient 386DX PC used to do this with my amazingly robust and life-changing 4MB of RAM. It took quite a while. You could press ESC to skip it if you were a valiant risk-taking rebel like myself.

Now, memory is a lot faster than it used to be, but unfortunately it has gotten bigger more quickly than it has gotten faster, especially if you disable memory caching, which you certainly must do at boot time in order to write the very specific patterns needed to see if there are any bit errors.

So... we don't do the boot-time memory test. That ended years ago. If you reboot your system, the memory mostly will contain the stuff it contained before you rebooted. The OS kernel has to know that and zero out pages as they get used. (Sometimes the kernel gets fancy and pre-zeroes some extra pages when it's not busy, so it can hand out zero pages more quickly on demand. But it always has to zero them.)

So, the pages are still around when the system reboots. What we want to happen is:

The system reboots automatically after a kernel panic. You can do this by giving your kernel a boot parameter like "panic=1", which reboots it after one second. (This is not nearly enough time for an end user to read and contemplate the panic message. That's fine, because a) on a desktop PC, X11 will have crashed in graphics mode so you can't see the panic message anyway, and b) on an embedded system there is usually no display to put the message on. End users don't care about panic messages. Our job is to reboot, ASAP, so they don't try to "help" by power cycling the device, which really does lose your memory.) (Advanced users will make it reboot after zero seconds. I think panic=0 disables the reboot feature rather than doing that, so you might have to patch the kernel. I forget. We did it, whatever it was.)

The kernel always initializes the dmesg buffer in the same spot in RAM.

The kernel notices that a previous dmesg buffer is already in that spot in RAM (because of a valid signature or checksum or whatever) and decides to append to that buffer instead of starting fresh.

In userspace, we pick up log processing where we left off. We can capture the log messages starting before (and therefore including) the panic!

And because we redirected userspace logs to the kernel message buffer, we have also preserved the exact sequence of events that led up to the panic.

If you want all this to happen, I have good news and bad news. The good news is we open sourced all our code; the bad news is it didn't get upstreamed anywhere so there are no batteries included and no documentation and it probably doesn't quite work for your use case. Sorry.

Open source code:

logos tool for sending userspace logs to /dev/klogd. (It's logs... for the OS.. and it's logical... and it brings your logs back from the dead after a reboot... get it? No? Oh well.) This includes two per-app token buckets (burst and long-term) so that an out-of-control app won't overfill the limited amount of dmesg space.

PRINTK_PERSIST patch to make Linux reuse the dmesg buffer across reboots.

Even if you don't do any of the rest of this, everybody should use PRINTK_PERSIST on every computer, virtual or physical. Seriously. It's so good.

(Note: room for improvement: it would be better if we could just redirect app stdout/stderr directly to /dev/kmsg, but that doesn't work as well as we want. First, it doesn't auto-prefix incoming messages with the app name. Second, libc functions like printf() actually write a few bytes at a time, not one message per write() call, so they would end up producing more than one dmesg entry per line. Third, /dev/kmsg doesn't support the token bucket rate control that logos does, which turns out to be essential, because sometimes apps go crazy. So we'd have to further extend the kernel API to make it work. It would be worthwhile, though, because the extra userspace process causes an unavoidable delay between when a userspace program prints something and when it actually gets into the kernel log. That delay is enough time for a kernel to panic, and the userspace message gets lost. Writing directly to /dev/kmsg would take less CPU, leave userspace latency unchanged, and ensure the message is safely written before continuing. Someday!)

(In related news, this makes all of syslogd kinda extraneous. Similarly for whatever systemd does. Why do we make everything so complicated? Just write directly to files or the kernel log buffer. It's cheap and easy.)

Uploading the logs

Next, we need to get the messages out of the kernel log buffer and into our log processing server, wherever that might be.

(Note: if we do the above trick - writing userspace messages to the kernel buffer - then we can't also use klogd to read them back into syslogd. That would create an infinite loop, and would end badly. Ask me how I know.)

So, no klogd -> syslogd -> file. Instead, we have something like syslogd -> kmsg -> uploader or app -> kmsg -> uploader.

What is a log uploader? Well, it's a thing that reads messages from the kernel kmsg buffer as they arrive, and uploads them to a server, perhaps over https. It might be almost as simple as "dmesg | curl", like my original prototype, but we can get a bit fancier:

Figure out which messages we've already uploaded (eg. from the persistent buffer before we rebooted) and don't upload those again.

Log the current wall-clock time before uploading, giving us sync points between monotonic time (/dev/kmsg logs "microseconds since boot" by default, which is very useful, but we also want to be able to correlate that with "real" time so we can match messages between related machines).

Compress the file on the way out.

Somehow authenticate with the log server.

Bonus: if the log server is unavailable because of a network partition, try to keep around the last few messages from before the partition, as well as the recent messages once the partition is restored. If the network partition was caused by the client - not too rare if you, like us, were in the business of making routers and wifi access points - you really would like to see the messages from right before the connectivity loss.

Luckily for you, we also open sourced our code for this. It's in C so it's very small and low-overhead. We never quite got the code for the "bonus" feature working quite right, though; we kinda got interrupted at the last minute.

Open source code:

loguploader C client, including an rsyslog plugin for Debian in case you don't want to use the /dev/kmsg trick.

devcert, a tool (and Debian package) which auto-generates a self signed "device certificate" wherever it's installed. The device certificate is used by a device (or VM, container, whatever) to identify itself to the log server, which can then decide how to classify and store (or reject) its logs.

One thing we unfortunately didn't get around to doing was modifying the logupload client to stream logs to the server. This is possible using HTTP POST and Chunked encoding, but our server at the time was unable to accept streaming POST requests due to (I think now fixed) infrastructure limitations.

(Note: if you write load balancing proxy servers or HTTP server frameworks, make sure they can start processing a POST request as soon as all the headers have arrived, rather than waiting for the entire blob to be complete! Then a log upload server can just stream the bytes straight to the next stage even before the whole request has finished.)

Because we lacked streaming in the client, we had to upload chunks of log periodically, which leads to a tradeoff about what makes a good upload period. We eventually settled on about 60 seconds, which ended up accounting for almost all the end-to-end latency from message generation to our monitoring console.

Most people probably think 60 seconds is not too bad. But some of the awesome people on our team managed to squeeze all the other pipeline phases down to tens of milliseconds in total. So the remaining 60 seconds (technically: anywhere from 0 to 60 seconds after a message was produced) was kinda embarrassing. Streaming live from device to server would be better.

The log receiver

So okay, we're uploading the logs from client to some kind of server. What does the server do?

This part is both the easiest and the most reliability-critical. The job is this: receive an HTTP POST request, write the POST data to a file, and return HTTP 200 OK. Anybody who has any server-side experience at all can write this in their preferred language in about 10 minutes.

We intentionally want to make this phase as absolutely simplistic as possible. This is the phase that accepts logs from the limited-size kmsg buffer on the client and puts them somewhere persistent. It's nice to have real-time alerts, but if I have to choose between somewhat delayed alerts or randomly losing log messages when things get ugly, I'll have to accept the delayed alerts. Don't lose log messages! You'll regret it.

The best way to not lose messages is to minimize the work done by your log receiver. So we did. It receives the uploaded log file chunk and appends it to a file, and that's it. The "file" is actually in a cloud storage system that's more-or-less like S3. When I explained this to someone, they asked why we didn't put it in a Bigtable-like thing or some other database, because isn't a filesystem kinda cheesy? No, it's not cheesy, it's simple. Simple things don't break. Our friends on the "let's use structured events to make metrics" team streamed those events straight into a database, and it broke all the time, because databases have configuration options and you inevitably set those options wrong, and it'll fall over under heavy load, and you won't find out until you're right in the middle of an emergency and you really want to see those logs. Or events.

Of course, the file storage service we used was encrypted-at-rest, heavily audited, and auto-deleted files after N days. When you're a megacorporation, you have whole teams of people dedicated to making sure you don't screw this up. They will find you. Best not to annoy them.

We had to add one extra feature, which was authentication. It's not okay for random people on the Internet to be able to impersonate your devices and spam your logs - at least without putting some work into it. For device authentication, we used the rarely-used HTTP client-side certificates option and the devcert program (linked above) so that the client and server could mutually authenticate each other. The server didn't check the certificates against a certification authority (CA), like web clients usually do; instead, it had a database with a whitelist of exactly which certs we're allowing today. So in case someone stole a device cert and started screwing around, we could remove their cert from the whitelist and not worry about CRL bugs and latencies and whatnot.

Unfortunately, because our log receiver was an internal app relying on internal infrastructure, it wasn't open sourced. But there really wasn't much there, honest. The first one was written in maybe 150 lines of python, and the replacement was rewritten in slightly more lines of Go. No problem.

Retries and floods

Of course, things don't always go smoothly. If you're an ISP, the least easy thing is dealing with cases where a whole neighbourhood gets disconnected, either because of a power loss or because someone cut the fiber Internet feed to the neighbourhood.

Now, disconnections are not such a big deal for logs processing - you don't have any. But reconnection is a really big deal. Now you have tens or hundreds of thousands of your devices coming back online at once, and a) they have accumulated a lot more log messages than they usually do, since they couldn't upload them, and b) they all want to talk to your server at the same time. Uh oh.

Luckily, our system was designed carefully (uh... eventually it was), so it could handle these situations pretty smoothly:

The log uploader uses a backoff timer so that if it's been trying to upload for a while, it uploads less often. (However, the backoff timer was limited to no more than the usual inter-upload interval. I don't know why more people don't do this. It's rather silly for your system to wait longer between uploads in a failure situation than it would in a success situation. This is especially true with logs, where when things come back online, you want a status update now. And clearly your servers have enough capacity to handle uploads at the usual rate, because they usually don't crash. Sorry if I sound defensive here, but I had to have this argument a few times with a few SREs. I understand why limiting the backoff period isn't always the right move. It's the right move here.)

Less obviously, even under normal conditions, the log uploader uses a randomized interval between uploads. This avoids traffic spikes where, after the Internet comes back online, everybody uploads again exactly 60 seconds later, and so on.

The log upload client understands the idea that the server can't accept its request right now. It has to, anyway, because if the Internet goes down, there's no server. So it treats server errors exactly like it treats lack of connectivity. And luckily, log uploading is not really an "interactive" priority task, so it's okay to sacrifice latency when things get bad. Users won't notice. And apparently our network is down, so the admins already noticed.

The /dev/kmsg buffer was configured for the longest reasonable outage we could expect, so that it wouldn't overflow during "typical" downtime. Of course, there's a judgement call here. But the truth is, if you're having system-wide downtime, what the individual devices were doing during that downtime is not usually what you care about. So you only need to handle, say, the 90th percentile of downtime. Safely ignore the black swans for once.

The log receiver aggressively rejects requests that come faster than its ability to write files to disk. Since the clients know how to retry with a delay, this allows us to smooth out bursty traffic without needing to either over-provision the servers or lose log messages.

(Pro tip, learned the hard way: if you're writing a log receiver in Go, don't do the obvious thing and fire off a goroutine for every incoming request. You'll run out of memory. Define a maximum number of threads you're willing to handle at once, and limit your request handling to that. It's okay to set this value low, just to be safe: remember, the uploader clients will come back later.)

Okay! Now our (unstructured) logs from all our 100,000 devices are sitting safely in a big distributed filesystem. We have a little load-balanced, multi-homed cluster of log receivers accepting the uploads, and they're so simple that they should pretty much never die, and even if they do because we did something dumb (treacherous, treacherous goroutines!), the clients will try again.

What might not be obvious is this: our reliability, persistence, and scaling problems are solved. Or rather, as long as we have enough log receiver instances to handle all our devices, and enough disk quota to store all our logs, we will never again lose a log message.

That means the rest of our pipeline can be best-effort, complicated, and frequently exploding. And that's a good thing, because we're going to start using more off-the-shelf stuff, we're going to let random developers reconfigure the filtering rules, and we're not going to bother to configure it with any redundancy.

Grinding the logs

The next step is to take our unstructured logs and try to understand them. In other words, we want to add some structure. Basically we want to look for lines that are "interesting" and parse out the "interesting" data and produce a stream of events, each with a set of labels describing what categories they apply to.

Note that, other than this phase, there is little difference between how you'd design a structured event reporting pipeline and a log pipeline. You still need to collect the events. You still (if you're like me) need to persist your events across kernel panics. You still need to retry uploading them if your network gets partitioned. You still need the receivers to handle overloading, burstiness, and retries. You still would like to stream them (if your infrastructure can handle it) rather than uploading every 60 seconds. You still want to be able to handle a high volume of them. You're just uploading a structured blob instead of an unstructured blob.

Okay. Fine. If you want to upload structured blobs, go for it. It's just an HTTP POST that appends to a file. Nobody's stopping you. Just please try to follow my advice when designing the parts of the pipeline before and after this phase, because otherwise I guarantee you'll be sad eventually.

Anyway, if you're staying with me, now we have to parse our unstructured logs. What's really cool - what makes this a killer design compared to starting with structured events in the first place - is that we can, at any time, change our minds about how to parse the logs, without redeploying all the software that produces them.

This turns out to be amazingly handy. It's so amazingly handy that nobody believes me. Even I didn't believe me until I experienced it; I was sure, in the beginning, that the unstructured logs were only temporary and we'd initially use them to figure out what structured events we wanted to record, and then modify the software to send those, then phase out the logs over time. This never happened. We never settled down. Every week, or at least every month, there was some new problem which the existing "structured" events weren't configured to catch, but which, upon investigating, we realized we could diagnose and measure from the existing log message stream. And so we did!

Now, I have to put this in perspective. Someone probably told you that log messages are too slow, or too big, or too hard to read, or too hard to use, or you should use them while debugging and then delete them. All those people were living in the past and they didn't have a fancy log pipeline. Computers are really, really fast now. Storage is really, really cheap.

So we let it all out. Our devices produced an average of 50 MB of (uncompressed) logs per day, each. For the baseline 100,000 devices that we discussed above, that's about 5TB of logs per day. Ignoring compression, how much does it cost to store, say, 60 days of logs in S3 at 5TB per day? "Who cares," that's how much. You're amortizing it over 100,000 devices. Heck, a lot of those devices were DVRs, each with 2TB of storage. With 100,000 DVRs, that's 200,000 TB of storage. Another 300 is literally a rounding error (like, smaller than if I can't remember if it's really 2TB or 2TiB or what).

Our systems barfed up logs vigorously and continuously, like a non-drunken non-sailor with seasickness. And it was beautiful.

(By the way, now would be a good time to mention some things we didn't log: personally identifiable information or information about people's Internet usage habits. These were diagnostic logs for running the network and detecting hardware/software failures. We didn't track what you did with the network. That was an intentional decision from day 1.)

(Also, this is why I think all those log processing services are so badly overpriced. I wanna store 50 MB per device, for lots of devices. I need to pay S3 rates for that, not a million dollars a gigabyte. If I have to overpay for storage, I'll have to start writing fewer logs. I love my logs. I need my logs. I know you're just storing it in S3 anyway. You probably get a volume discount! Let's be realistic.)

But the grinding, though

Oh right. So the big box labeled "Grinder" in my diagram was, in fact, just one single virtual machine, for a long time. It lasted like that for much longer than we expected.

Whoa, how is that possible, you ask?

Well, at 5TB per day per 100,000 devices, that's an average of 57 MBytes per second. And remember, burstiness has already been absorbed by our carefully written log receivers and clients, so we'll just grind these logs as fast as they arrive or as fast as we can, and if there are fluctuations, they'll average out. Admittedly, some parts of the day are busier than others. Let's say 80 MBytes per second at peak.

80 MBytes per second? My laptop can do that on its spinning disk. I don't even need an SSD! 80 MBytes per second is a toy.

And of course, it's not just one spinning disk. The data itself is stored on some fancy heavily-engineered distributed filesystem that I didn't have to design. Assuming there are no, er, collossal, failures in provisioning (no comment), there's no reason we shouldn't be able to read files at a rate that saturates the network interface available to our machine. Surely that's at least 10 Gbps (~1 GByte/sec) nowadays, which is 12.5 of those. 1.25 million devices, all processed by a single grinder.

Of course you'll probably need to use a few CPU cores. And the more work you do per log entry, the slower it'll get. But these estimates aren't too far off what we could handle.

And yeah, sometimes that VM gets randomly killed by the cluster's Star Trek-esque hive mind for no reason. It doesn't matter, because the input data was already persisted by the log receivers. Just start a new grinder and pick up where you left off. You'll have to be able to handle process restarts no matter what. And that's a lot easier than trying to make a distributed system you didn't need.

As for what the grinder actually does? Anything you want. But it's basically the "map" phase in a mapreduce. It reads the data in one side, does some stuff to it, and writes out postprocessed stuff on the other side. Use your imagination. And if you want to write more kinds of mappers, you can run them, either alongside the original Grinder or downstream from it.

Our Grinder mostly just ran regexes and put out structures (technically protobufs) that were basically sets of key-value pairs.

(For some reason, when I search the Internet for "streaming mapreduce," I don't get programs that do this real-time processing of lots of files as they get written. Instead, I seem to get batch-oriented mapreduce clones that happen to read from stdin, which is a stream. I guess. But... well, now you've wasted some perfectly good words that could have meant something. So okay, too bad, it's a Grinder. Sue me.)

Reducers and Indexers

Once you have a bunch of structured events... well, I'm not going to explain that in a lot of detail, because it's been written about a lot.

You probably want to aggregate them a bit - eg. to count up reboots across multiple devices, rather than storing each event for each device separately - and dump them into a time-series database. Perhaps you want to save and postprocess the results in a monitoring system named after Queen Elizabeth or her pet butterfly. Whatever. Plug in your favourite.

What you probably think you want to do, but it turns out you rarely need, is full-text indexing. People just don't grep the logs across 100,000 devices all that often. I mean, it's kinda nice to have. But it doesn't have to be instantaneous. You can plug in your favourite full text indexer if you like. But most of the time, just an occasional big parallel grep (perhaps using your favourite mapreduce clone or something more modern... or possibly just using grep) of a subset of the logs is sufficient.

(If you don't have too many devices, even a serial grep can be fine. Remember, a decent cloud computer should be able to read through ~1 GByte/sec, no problem. How much are you paying for someone to run some bloaty full-text indexer on all your logs, to save a few milliseconds per grep?)

I mean, run a full text indexer if you want. The files are right there. Don't let me stop you.

On the other hand, being able to retrieve the exact series of logs - let's call it the "narrative" - from a particular time period across a subset of devices turns out to be super useful. A mini-indexer that just remembers which logs from which devices ended up in which files at which offsets is nice to have. Someone else on our team built one of those eventually (once we grew so much that our parallel grep started taking minutes instead of seconds), and it was very nice.

And then you can build your dashboards

Once you've reduced, aggregated, and indexed your events into your favourite output files and databases, you can read those databases to build very fast-running dashboards. They're fast because the data has been preprocessed in mostly-real time.

As I mentioned above, we had our pipeline reading the input files as fast as they could come in, so the receive+grind+reduce+index phase only took a few tens of milliseconds. If your pipeline isn't that fast, ask somebody why. I bet their program is written in java and/or has a lot of sleep() statements or batch cron jobs with intervals measured in minutes.

Again here, I'm not going to recommend a dashboard tool. There are millions of articles and blog posts about that. Pick one, or many.

In conclusion

Please, please, steal these ideas. Make your log and event processing as stable as our small team made our log processing. Don't fight over structured vs unstructured; if you can't agree, just log them both.

Don't put up with weird lags and limits in your infrastructure. We made 50MB/day/device work for a lot of devices, and real-time mapreduced them all on a single VM. If we can do that, then you can make it work for a few hundreds, or a few thousands, of container instances. Don't let anyone tell you you can't. Do the math: of course you can.

Epilogue

Eventually our team's log processing system evolved to become the primary monitoring and alerting infrastructure for our ISP. Rather than alerting on behaviour of individual core routers, it turned out that the end-to-end behaviour observed by devices in the field were a better way to detect virtually any problem. Alert on symptoms, not causes, as the SREs like to say. Who has the symptoms? End users.

We had our devices ping different internal servers periodically and log the round trip times; in aggregate, we had an amazing view of overloading, packet loss, bufferbloat, and poor backbone routing decisions, across the entire fleet, across every port of every switch. We could tell which was better, IPv4 or IPv6. (It's always IPv4. Almost everyone spends more time optimizing their IPv4 routes and peering. Sorry, but it's true.)

We detected some weird configuration problems with the DNS servers in one city by comparing the 90th percentile latency of DNS lookups across all the devices in every city.

We diagnosed a manufacturing defect in a particular batch of devices, just based on their CPU temperature curves and fan speeds.

We worked with our CPU vendor to find and work around a bug in their cache coherency, because we spotted a kernel panic that would happen randomly every 10,000 CPU-hours, but for every 100,000 devices, that's still 10 times per hour of potential clues.

...and it sure was good for detecting power failures.

Anyway. Log more stuff. Collect those logs. Let it flow. Trust me.

Update 2019-04-26: So, uh, I might have lied in the title when I said you can't have this logs pipeline. Based on a lot of positive feedback from people who read this blog post, I ended up starting a company that might be able to help you with your logs problems. We're building pipelines that are very similar to what's described here. If you're interested in being an early user and helping us shape the product direction, email me!

#IFTTT #Feedly

0 notes

nickarmstrongfilm · 6 years

Text

OCTOBER 2018: AN EXERCISE IN EXCESS & A HORROR DIARY

Carrie (dir. Brian De Palma, 1976)*

The Rage: Carrie 2 (dir. Katt Shea, 1999)

Duel (dir. Steven Spielberg, 1971)

Pulse (dir. Jim Sonzero, 2006)* For all intents and purposes, I don’t think this movie was at all necessary — what Kurosawa pulled off with the original Pulse was nothing short of miraculous in its terror, melancholy and study of society… but I must admit that the idea of a group of people watching that film and translating it into a mid-2000s American tech-horror movie (aesthetic and all) is highly appealing to me. It’s fun! It’s dumb! Kiyoshi already mastered it so I can’t really get mad at this.

Daphne & Velma (dir. Suzi Yoonessi, 2018) Wholesome live-action Scooby-Doo spinoff with women at the helm, and is about as fun and nostalgic as anything I’ve seen related to Scooby-Doo. Lots of Halloween-y fun!

Captain Voyeur (dir. John Carpenter, 1969) Had been dying to get my hands on this for a long time, so it was lots of fun to finally see it (and complete Carpenter’s filmography!). It’s short and slight and very noticeably Carpenter. He improves on all aspects of this in his amazing career, but this is an inspiring artifact nonetheless.

The Crazies (dir. George A. Romero, 1973)

Something Evil (dir. Steven Spielberg, 1972)

Tales from the Hood (dir. Rusty Cundieff, 1995)*

Uncle Sam (dir. William Lustig, 1996) Anti-American slasher where the villain is a zombie soldier named Sam who dresses up as *the* Uncle Sam. I think that is praise enough.

Hell Fest (dir. Gregory Plotkin, 2018) This one has really grown on me over the month, especially as it inspired me to rewatch The Funhouse, which in turn inspired me the finally read the novelization of The Funhouse by Dean Koontz. As much as I was initially underwhelmed and annoyed by certain aspects of the film, the concept is terrific and it really plays into the uncertainty of the theme park’s dangers for impressively long stretches of time. Mostly dumb but also very fun.

Tales from the Hood 2 (dir. Rusty Cundieff & Darin Scott, 2018) Not even close to as impactful or consistent as the original, and my fear that this was co-directed by Cundieff and co-writer of the original Darin Scott actually turned out to be reasonable, because the two segments he directed are noticeably worse, but it remains passionate and blunt in its manipulation of genre tropes to suit the subject matter. Keith David murders it in the wraparound, and the closing short “The Sacrifice” is deeply powerful.

Stay Alive (dir. William Brent Bell, 2006)

Slice (dir. Austin Vesely, 2018)

Drag Me to Hell (dir. Sam Raimi, 2009)*

The Vagrant (dir. Chris Walas, 1992)

Venom (dir. Ruben Fleischer, 2018)

Dracula 3D (dir. Dario Argento, 2012) Argento’s rendition of the age-old Dracula tale is the umpteenth adaptation of the story, and while it doesn’t appear to make many changes to the narrative, I have to give credit to his formal experimentation — it strikes me as an admirable case of retrofuturism, as he uses the most modern digital filmmaking (I would love to see this in actual 3D) to tell one of the oldest tales imaginable. Lots to discover here, I think, but I really liked it!

Sleepwalkers (dir. Mick Garris, 1992)

The Black Cat (dir. Edward G. Ulmer, 1934)

Parasomnia (dir. William Malone, 2008) William Malone is one of the most underrated figures in horror, and while I can’t fully get behind this one — frankly, I’m unsure of whether it criticizes or endorses its imbecilic male character, who fetishizes a “sleeping beauty” — but his highly unique, Kiyoshi Kurosawa-esque aesthetic shines through in many moments, notably its dream sequences.

Hellraiser (dir. Clive Barker, 1987)*

Crazy As Hell (dir. Eriq La Salle, 2002) Kind of overlong, but cut down it could be a very serviceable series of predictable twists and turns that examine ethics in journalism and hospital institutions.

Hellbound: Hellraiser II (dir. Tony Randel, 1988)

Sorority House Massacre (dir. Carol Frank, 1986) Understandable to be deemed a Halloween ripoff, but it places a deeper focus on friendships and beats the rest of the Halloween series to a sense of psychic kinship which pushes this above being a fairly standard slasher. This is fun!

Soft for Digging (dir. J.T. Petty, 2001) I often think about, from experience, how making your student film silent is a smart but played-out trick to make it feel less cheap… nothing about this really sticks with me, but its lead performance is compelling and the atmosphere is strong at times.

Ganja & Hess (dir. Bill Gunn, 1973)* Just one of the greatest American films of all time, such a layered and nuanced take on the vampire subgenre. I don’t know what else to write except that Bill Gunn was one of the great filmmakers of all time.

Scary Movie 5 (dir. Malcolm D. Lee, 2013) Inarguably the least offensive of the series (a flawed series that I happen to love) and a very pure, frequently funny parody that director Malcolm D. Lee brings a whole lot to — and is as quietly incisive about the genre as some of the best entries are. The best one since the Wayans left.

Bones (dir. Ernest R. Dickerson, 2001)*

J.D.’s Revenge (dir. Arthur Marks, 1976)

We’re Going to Eat You (dir. Tsui Hark, 1980)

Ghost in the Machine (dir. Rachel Talalay, 1993) Incredible technology-focused Nightmare on Elm Street/Shocker hybrid made by the woman responsible for one of the very best Elm Streets. The effects, both practical and digital, are stunning in their own ways, and it’s just so much fun!

Aftershock (dir. Nicolás López, 2012) This feels like exactly how people see Roth’s Hostel, which makes me wonder why he’d take part in this. It is essentially a dumb version of the very smart film he made — which people consistently said was dumb — and he plays one of the assholes in it. This movie is unbearable.

The Funhouse (dir. Tobe Hooper, 1981)* Such an incredible extension of what Hooper examines in his essential Texas Chain Saw Massacre, replacing stumbling into backwoods America with a travelling version of the same horrors. Watching this made me miss writing about Hooper, because each of his works perfects and furthers everything he’s once done. An incredible film that is perhaps the ultimate in self-reflexivity within horror, and one of Hooper’s absolute best.

My Left Eye Sees Ghosts (dir. Johnnie To & Wai Ka-Fai, 2002)

Cat People (dir. Paul Schrader, 1982)* To my mind, this and Tourneur’s original are hard to compare because they perfectly fill each other in — Schrader’s lurid remake dares to show all that Tourneur couldn’t and wouldn’t 40 years later, which makes this a pretty ideal remake!

The Ambulance (dir. Larry Cohen, 1990) Another excellent entry in Cohen’s endeavor to turn the familiar into the horrifying, which I always appreciate as an attempt to alter the public’s perception of basic institutions. Very fun and intelligent.

Gothika (dir. Mathieu Kassovitz, 2003) Not unlike this year’s terrific Unsane in its examination of how all institutions are run by the amoral, and how innocent people are manipulated, victimized and gaslit. Has that ‘00s horror aesthetic I love (this comes from Dark Castle Entertainment, whose horror output I find thoroughly underrated) complete with Limp Bizkit’s cover of Behind Blue Eyes playing over the credits. Underrated and relevant.

Dark Angel: The Ascent (dir. Linda Hassani, 1994) At once a wholesome rom-com, righteous horror picture and an intelligent take on theology.

Love Massacre (dir. Patrick Tam, 1981) This is deliberately barren visually, making the splashes of blue and red all the more powerful when they come — its constant manipulation of genre and colour mesh perfectly with its narrative of violence and entitlement. The only cut that exists has hardcoded white subtitles — in an already very white movie — but for the time being, it actually tends to add to its mystery and minimalism. A masterpiece.

Urban Menace (dir. Albert Pyun, 1999) I’ve never ever ever seen a movie that looks like this — it starts with our narrator (Ice-T, of course) ranting about Urban Renewal and warning our viewers that if you’re easily offended, this movie is decidedly *not for you*. It is not a particularly offensive movie though I would not argue if someone called it a visual atrocity. For argument’s sake, it is not exactly a horror movie, but its intense exposure gives it a very dreamy quality that actually makes it a lot scarier to watch. This movie is probably not good but I fucking love Albert Pyun and I can’t say that I wasn’t in awe of how this was made. Plus it is 1 hour long!

The Card Player (dir. Dario Argento, 2004) Argento’s most blatant satire, this feels like a lampoon of both typical procedurals, as well as the desensitization of the internet age. There aren’t many images in Argento’s oeuvre I like more than a group of police officers cheering and laughing at a game of blackjack with a video of a woman being tortured superimposed over it.

Halloween (dir. David Gordon Green, 2018)* This didn’t work as well for me on a rewatch outside of my first experience at TIFF (full of excitement and yelling) but many of my favorite aspects remain: Laurie’s turn to the typical American defense against trauma (which also manifests in a cat-and-mouse chase in a slasher-proof booby-trapped housed), as well as its use of the sequel’s timing to explore multi-generational trauma, but all of its best ideas are explored with far more character in both Carpenter and Zombie’s iterations.

Lisa, Lisa (dir. Frederick R. Friedel, 1974)

Leprechaun 4: In Space (dir. Brian Trenchard-Smith, 1996) Just the most incredibly off-the-hinges horror franchise there is, especially because the antagonist is anything but scary. I think that the “in space” moniker is the quintessential jump-the-shark move for a franchise, so as stupid and offensive as this movie gets, it truly feels like it is just out of the viewer’s hands and the only responsible thing to do is enjoy the increasingly absurd nature of the films (though I can’t imagine it gets wilder than this).

Leprechaun in the Hood (dir. Rob Spera, 2000) Not only not wild enough to distract me from its horrid nature, but deeply offensive and unexpectedly transphobic (as a major plot point). Not even worth recommending for Ice-T or the Leprechaun smoking weed and rapping.

Hotel (dir. Jessica Hausner, 2004)

Spontaneous Combustion (dir. Tobe Hooper, 1990)* Both Tobe’s superhero movie and his Sirk picture, filled to the brim with bright colors and melodrama that also functions as both a parody and indictment of 50′s paranoia. Another masterpiece from Hooper.

The Return of Swamp Thing (dir. Jim Wynorski, 1989) I love Swamp Thing!! I don’t like this quite as much as Craven’s comic-book gothic romance, but it does lean further into comic-book stylings, and is filled with color and explosions and melodrama!

Chiller (dir. Wes Craven, 1985)

Kaun? (dir. Ram Gopal Varma, 1999) Varma’s use of setting here is so major, eliciting fear and obscurity almost exclusively through camera movements and narrative control. One of the spookiest, most subversive home invasion films I’ve seen (particularly in its exploration of power within the genre). I need to see more Varma.

Fright House (dir. Len Anthony, 1989) Makes absolutely no sense but Ernest Dickerson shoots the heck out of it and in terms of October vibes, it really does the trick.

Faust (dir. F.W. Murnau, 1926)

Reflections of Evil (dir. Damon Packard, 2002) One of the most disgusting and confounding films I’ve ever seen, but how Packard explores the political climates of several different decades, pop culture and capitalism almost exclusively through one man’s foul-mouthed adventures walking through L.A. selling watches is inspiring, especially in its dazzling final sequence. It also explores Spielberg’s immeasurable effect on culture in a way similar to house Spielberg does himself in Ready Player One.

Christine (dir. John Carpenter, 1983)*

Torso (dir. Sergio Martino, 1973)

Scream (dir. Wes Craven, 1996)*

Dracula (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1992)*

Nightmare Detective (dir. Shinya Tsukamoto, 2006)

Student Bodies (dir. Mickey Rose, 1981)

Giallo (dir. Dario Argento, 2009) I’m so consistently amazed with how self-reflexive horror auteurs get later on in their careers, as well as by how unwilling audiences who praise their early work are to buy into said work. To hyper-focus on this film’s aesthetic as generic and its violence gratuitous (and the same goes for 2004’s THE CARD PLAYER) is ignoring how painstakingly Argento wrestles with a genre he revolutionized. I mean, our antagonist here is a entitled man who sexualizes violence and whose skin has gone yellow in order to justify his namesake being that of said genre, how much more does he have to spell it out before he can be given credit (instead of using this as an opportunity to, say, jab at Argento for a negative review of the film by saying he is “yellowing with age”, Fangoria…….). Of course, I don’t mean to discredit the film by simplifying it in such a way but that Argento was this obvious in his attempt to self-reflect, it becomes especially evident that he, nor the genre, are taken seriously. I particularly think that this progresses the genre in its equal pathologizing of both parties of its cat-and-mouse game (both portrayed by Brody), ultimately sparing its victim in the end but leaving the originator of her trauma relatively ambiguous. At once, it is obvious that the character Giallo is to blame for his horrific violence, but it never takes the magnifying glass off of the detective character either, nor off of the giallo genre itself. I need to revisit some early Argento because I remember appreciating them for their craft and innovation, but that was much easier to do in the 70s (with regards to the subject matter of other films, at least). What he experiments with in his post-2000 work, however, is even more fascinating to me and will need to be examined.

#horror #october #2018

1 note · View note

thepapermixtape · 6 years

Text

X Lovers: On Finding Themselves, Authenticity, and a New Sound

By: Lexi Julien

When you ask alt-pop duo X Lovers about their origin story, the response you get is more than just a simple answer about two musicians coming together to make music—it’s a story of two lives impossibly intertwined with music and each other, of a vision that two 11 year olds with a drum set and guitar had in the attic of their childhood home, of a dream to make music and, in the words of X Lovers themselves, to “take over the fucking world.”

After spending almost half of their twenty-something years of life in the music industry, X Lovers’ London Jackson and Jake Ames have grown from scrawny preteens playing punk music in Nevada City to a full fledged musical duo that is taking the Los Angeles music scene by a steady, brooding storm. With Ames’s long blonde hair, Jackson’s iconic flame-covered pants, and a bond that is more of a brotherhood than a friendship, X Lovers has made it clear that they are no longer playing by anyone else’s rules—they're ready to leave their mark on an industry that is historically resistant to change, and they’re ready to do it on their own terms.

In a follow-up to our interview with X Lovers in 2017, TPM caught up with one half of the band, London, to chat about the past year, the band’s new music, and the power of being young, independent artists in the 21st century.

When TPM sat down with X Lovers last spring, you had recently moved to LA from your hometown in NorCal. Walk us through what the past year has been like for X Lovers—what have you been up to?

London: This past year has been completely centered around our own growth and development. We actually spent a lot of last year away from our own music, instead focusing on producing projects for other people. Producing has opened up an entirely new world for us here in LA in terms of learning about the industry and making connections, but it’s also been a crazy experience. A lot of the stuff we worked on seven, eight months ago is just now starting to be released. That’s one of the strangest things about producing—it takes so much patience, you put so much work in, and then the output of that hard work isn’t visible to the outside world until so much later. It’s weird when we go home and people ask us what the fuck we’ve been up to down in LA, because they haven’t seen an output of what we’ve been doing yet. Our reality for the past year has been literally working all day every day, but we’re only just now getting to the point where everything we’ve been working on, we’ll have actual shit to show for it. It’s been a strange journey in that way—it takes so much inner confidence to know that you are getting shit done and that you are finding success when no one else can see that yet.

About five or six months ago, we decided that it was time for us to get back to our own music. We wanted to get back to where our passion really lies—in playing live music, in making music that we love for ourselves. Taking some time away from our music to produce for other people opened our eyes to what we want to be doing for ourselves, and we got to a point where we just said fuck it—let’s use the money we’ve saved up from producing to dive back into making our own music.

Tell us about that—what was it like to get back into making your own music? Did you fall back into the process pretty easily, or were there some challenges to it?

L: The first few months of us working our own music again were kind of horrible; it was a big stab to the ego. For months we had been producing big artists and working with the best people, and that created a constant flow of dope music that we were making with others. But when it was back to just me and Jake in our apartment, making music with just us two, it was immensely frustrating. It took about three months for us to push through that frustration and tap into something that inspired us—but once we caught that inspiration, we found ourselves producing music that we were stoked about. In the past, I’ve always hated listening to our music—I’m constantly criticizing it as I listen. But with this new music we are making, it’s all I want to listen to—we’ve finally tapped into a sound that is what we actually want to hear, and that is the sickest chapter for us to finally be on as artists.

Between your experiences with producing for other artists and just being immersed in the music scene here in LA, you’ve probably learned so much about the industry and how to move yourselves forward as you start releasing music.

L: Absolutely. I think the biggest thing we’ve learned is the importance of tapping into something you believe in. We’re twenty year olds, and the demographic we’re marketing and selling our music to is the same age group as us. So if I actually love something, I should have a heavy trust in that and believe other people my age will love it too. It’s honestly been such a life changing realization for us in our music—we’ve learned to trust ourselves more, and to trust those big labels and brands in the industry less. Because frankly, I don’t trust a forty year old dude in his office as much as I trust myself or my little brother or sister about the music people are going to love. We’ve watched friends of ours who had less than eight thousand followers on Instagram a year ago trust their instincts and release songs that they love, and now they have a following of over five million and are selling out tours around the world. And then on the opposite hand, we have projects that we’ve worked on that have had three million dollar budgets and have done nothing. I think right now in music, authenticity in artists is so key. There aren’t any gatekeepers in music anymore thanks to social media and streaming services, so people are going to like what they like and listen to what they like—listeners are going to find and connect with the artists and music they love, without the bullshit of big labels and marketing schemes. That’s something we’ve definitely learned through working with and meeting other artists over the past year.

So you’re starting to release music on September 7th...wow. It’s been a long time coming for X Lovers—how does it feel to finally be releasing music again?

L: It feels fucking awesome. I fucking love all our songs, I’m obsessed with everything we are releasing, and I don’t care if one particular song blows up or does badly. What I care about is a year from now being able to look back and see how much we have grown. Constant growth is the goal; I don’t care what pops off or when it pops off, what I care about is that we continue to work our asses off and release music we love. Jake and I, we’ve been playing music together since we were eleven, and I think a lot of this new music we’re going to be releasing has been about going back to that honesty and “don’t give a shit” mentality that we had when we were eleven. Back then, we didn’t give a fuck—we just had so much cockiness and confidence that we genuinely didn’t care if people liked our music or listened to it, we were making music just to make music. I think that as shit hypothetically started taking off for us in terms of how the music industry thinks about it—like when we got our first manager or when labels started to work with us—we lost that part of ourselves that loved making music that we ourselves loved. We put too much trust in those fucking guys sitting behind desks in big LA offices, and we lost a little bit of who we were in following what other people were saying rather than our own inclinations. This past year we hit a point where we decided we just had to trust ourselves completely, period. We committed to sticking to our vision for ourselves through and through. And literally two months after we committed to that, we got our first huge check for writing one song. Things started happening and our actual careers started happening, and that gave us the confidence to continue with this new mentality towards our work. I finally don’t have doubts about our music because we are trusting ourselves, and that’s a damn good feeling.

Right now we’re just chatting with you, but of course Jake is the other half of the X Lovers duo— let’s talk about the partnership you two have. Obviously you are incredibly close—you’re basically brothers at this point—but you are also professionals who are engaged in a business partnership with one another. How has being in business together impacted your relationship?

L: I’ve never had a relationship like the one I have with Jake—it honestly feels like some other universe type of shit. I think our friendship is as close as it is because of our professional relationship, not in spite of it—we’ve been through every monumental moment in our lives together since we were eleven, sharing all our experiences with music and the industry with one another. I don’t think I’ll ever have a relationship again in my life like the one I have with Jake; we do everything together, and we never get sick of each other. Our relationship is what continues to make me believe that we can make any dream of ours come true; we knew from those first moments of playing music together that we were going to do this together and take over the world, and that sentiment has never left us. Our friendship and our professional relationship feed one another, and I think working together has only brought us closer.

We talked earlier about social media and its role in how artists build a following and connect with fans. You two obviously seem to understand how critical social media is in branding yourselves and building a fan base, as is made clear by your personal Instagram accounts (@saintdaddi and @saintmommi). Can we talk about these personas, Saint Daddi and Saint Mommi, that you and Jake have built for yourselves on the ‘gram? Give us the backstory here.

L: I’m so glad you asked about this [laughs]—it started as a joke, but now it’s kind of half joke, half serious. We don’t need to get into the full story, but basically the whole thing started because someone was calling me “daddy,” and I thought it was fucking funny. I wanted to make a funny Instagram handle for myself, so I decided to totally troll and came up with “Saint Daddi”—and now I can’t shake it. People started calling me Saint Daddi at shows, our friend group in LA picked it up…so I just started owning that character [laughs]. After a month or two we were at a show with some friends, and they asked why Jake wasn’t called “Saint Mommi”...which of course made us immediately change his name on Insta to that. It’s such a joke, but also the brand we’ve chosen for ourselves; it shows that we don’t take ourselves too seriously. I’m really excited to actually have this “Saint” brand now and to take it to cool places, but it is also kind of a troll [laughs]. It’s hilarious how much people have picked it up though, and not just our fans. Literally whenever we go out people will call us “Mommi” and “Daddi,” and even our family and friends back home have started calling us that too.

If TPM continues this yearly tradition of catching up with X Lovers, where do you see yourselves being come next year? What’s the goal for these next 365 days?

L: We have our goals, but we are also just open to whatever is going to happen. A big but tangible goal for us is definitely just releasing music consistently, and then selling out small tours around the US, maybe in Europe too. But ultimately, our goal is to build a massive following—we want people to not just connect with our music, but to connect with who we are, to connect with me and Jake as people. We are the most normal guys who go through the most normal shit that everyone else does—this year has been the first year of my life where I’ve experienced the highest of highs and lowest of lows, one after the other. This year has made me want our music more than ever to be a safe haven for others, something people can turn to when they are experiencing those highs and lows. We want to be there for our listeners when times are tough, and we want to be there for those moments when they want to celebrate and act like normal teenagers. We want our music to touch people in the same way it touches us to our core—that’s our goal, always.

X Lovers’ new single, “Novocaine,” is out on September 7th, and can be found wherever you listen to your music. You can stay up with X Lovers and their new releases by following their journey on Instagram, Facebook, and their website.

Photos courtesy of X Lovers

0 notes

the-fitsquad · 7 years

Text

Career Development Articles

Steve Jobs Did not Have To Die Of Pancreatic Cancer

Dave Evans develops Linux NTP Server synchronisation systems to make certain precise time on PC’s and personal computer networks. Possessing a larger finish GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) indicates that your CPU will have to do much less perform processing the screen output. From the initial space organizing of a layout to the actual installation of an office workstation technique, our experienced and highly educated salespeople and service technicians can support you each and every step of the way. This time-frame doesn’t count, of course, the time it requires to decide on the right sort of workplace partitions for your organization as nicely as the style and manufacture stages. You will probably currently have an World wide web Service Provider from when you had been using a challenging line connection, and you will be in a position to continue with this ISP if you so pick to. Additional wireless protection computer software is recommended.

And such modules have got application in workstations, private computersand servers. To detect no matter whether there are reflections from the desk surface, hold the book above the surface and assess the adjust in reflected glare from the screen. HP EliteBook 8560w, the newest mobile workstation from HP appears to be a ideal option for professionals hunting for a potent laptop coupled with desirable style. This question is understandable, given that the workstation version of a distinct GPU may expense four times as significantly when compared to the desktop card. No matter no matter if you use this to your business, college as well as workplace function or basically with regard to connection, enjoyable and discretion, a pc can be an important portion of contemporary day peoples’ everyday routine.

A workstation computer should” execute really effectively on any 1080p monitor and ought to have the power to help several displays. Nvidia applies the Quadro” name to its M1000M GPU, which is, according to the SPECviewperf benchmark, double the functionality of HP’s previous range. There are really particular rules for HP Z Series Workstations’ memory configuration. The copy offload read operation is not supported for the file. These high worth assets need to be protected against both direct internet threats as effectively as attacks mounted from other workstations, servers, and devices in the environment. Unfortunately, Nvidia only provides the new Pascal-based Quadro graphics card for the leading functionality class. Modern day writing desks generally have space for a laptop computer, leaving sufficient room for the user to be comfy and keep organized whilst deep in concentration.

Universal apps are an integral portion of Windows ten. As the name suggests, these are apps that are compatible with all Windows 10 devices, which includes smartphones and tablets, as well as conventional laptops and desktops. The approach of backing up your data can be done remotely via a file server, or locally employing tapes, discs, DVDs, external difficult drive, or the regional drive. I feel it is secure to say that the functionality increases right here are due completely to the Z820’s 4 extra CPU cores and new CPU architecture, not the reality that it has a lot more RAM: none of the mental ray tests exceeded 5GB of RAM usage, and even taking Windows and other application into account, total usage stayed nicely below the 18GB of the Z800.

youtube

From rectangular to corner workstations and much more, we can customize a solution to meet your certain needs so double desk layouts and six pod workstation formations can simply be achieved. A crazy-looking ergonomic device that appears like a dentist’s chair, the Nethrone is a uniquely engineered environment designed for comfy gaming, net surfing and personal computer use. There are no shortcuts if you want the energy and efficiency of a multimedia workstation no matter whether it be an iMac Pro or high variety multimedia Computer e.g. you get the functionality you spend for. Our PCs and Workstations have been winning awards in the UK press for over 18 years, showing constant good quality, functionality and leadership in delivering new technologies. As evidenced in preceding benchmarks, the iPhone 8 is a mobile computing beast but that is not going to be the end of it as the most current series of scores show that the phone is a formidable piece of technologies even against a MacBook Pro and a Windows 10-powered notebook.

Purist programmers would argue that this is led to poor programming practices and bloated programs which is vital accurate but this argument is pretty significantly invalid offered today’s computing energy. For instance, an account would require to be adjusted if the front desk agent mistakenly posted a lower than regular room price for a specific guest space. The most common kinds of office workstations you will uncover are linear or straight workstations, cluster or L shaped workstations, single pentagon, single seater, four pentagon or seater, cubicle and F3 and F2 screen systems. HP Z Workstations aid you manage more, do a lot more, and give you limitless creative possibilities. CAD systems allow designers to view objects under a wide selection of representations and to test these objects by simulating true-globe conditions.

Spacify gives wide range of Personal computer Workstations for your modern office. The Struggle is out there, outside the Internet, Internet, Social Media, Twitter’s Facebook’s and the like, that we numerous of us here imagine it to be. Developed by The Blender Foundation, Blender is a free of charge and open-source 3D design system. Little corner pc desks for residence has turn into an vital little bit of technologies in every single residence today. The user interface of VMware Workstation has been made to a workspace related with clear menus, live thumbnails and a library of robust virtual machine. A variety of desks which permit you to totally utlize space. In many organizations, current “legacy systems” like mainframes, Novell networks, minicomputers, and different databases, are getting integrated into an intranet.

Skylake X has landed with a bang, bringing substantial functionality improvement to an currently over-reaching CPU loved ones. The advantage to utilizing this workstation app as opposed to operating on your regional machine is that in the workstation, you will be able capable to access information stored on DNAnexus with no downloading the files to your local machine and being constrained by your nearby world wide web bandwidth. If it really is delivered even though you happen to be not home contact the courier and tell them you have a package you wanted to refuse and they’ll come back by your residence to pick it up. Now if you happen to be getting a difficulty with the shipper, you can constantly try contacting amazon ( I would honestly say contact, never email due to the response, and the response time) and occasionally the consumer service agents are capable to call the shipper and get some results.

Our support even so, is a distinctive lifetime service. But with HP, you’ll buy self-assurance, knowing that these high-powered machines will outperform anything you’ve observed but. It also features built in AC and USB energy ports to connect and power your devices. Huge information sets, simulations, MATLAB to Wafer Fab are no dilemma with 44 cores and up to 1TB of 2400MHz ECC memory. The D-class are tower servers with up to two microprocessors and are architecturally related to the K-class. If you need fundamental workstation-class functionality for makes use of like CAD or financial evaluation, the Z2 Mini packs that power into a surprisingly tiny package that’s nicely worth the cost. As considerably as I do not like employing Group Policy to deploy application packages, I have worked in environments that provides me no decision but to use it as a way deploy the VMware View Client since there are basically as well a lot of workstations to manually install it.

To open your file, you have to bring your sponsor with you,either right here or at any police station beneath EDC’s my sponsor came with me to Baniyas Police station and completed the formalities.I came back to EDC with the produced me eye checking and a coaching card and direct road test date has given.There was 14 days gap for the these days I went for a training with a private trainer for eight hours. The assorted look is trending in quite a few modern day office spaces that consist of startups, co-working spaces and Web businesses. That’s not the top configuration, however, as you can equip the Z2 Mini with a bigger SSD ($499 for 512GB, $779 for 1TB), 32GB of ECC unbuffered memory (an further $200), and up to an Intel Xeon E3-1200 v5 or v6 processor (price tag varies by CPU model).

This higher stylish,simplicity and practical desk is a excellent workstation for either the house study or office workplace. A single of the 3 new HP Zbook 15 models now includes a dual-core two.4 GHz Intel Core i7 Broadwell processor with 16GB of non-ECC DDR3 1600 MHz RAM, a 512GB Turbo Drive M2, and an AMD FirePro M4170 GPU with 1GB of RAM (no optical drive is integrated with this unit). Business Computer makers may possibly have specialized tech-assistance lines to support you troubleshoot your QuickBooks dilemma. Furnishings products such as reception desks, reception sofas, laptop workstation, executive chairs, conference area tables, bookcases, filing cabinets, and so on. Windows 10 MM14 battery life will differ based on different aspects such as item model, configuration, loaded applications, characteristics, use, wireless functionality, and energy management settings.

Look, a laptop, with a 10 bit IPS screen (DreamColor is the HP name), plus a huge video card, plus a fast i7 CPU, is not going to be in a position to run Photoshop or Solidworks for numerous hours on just an internal battery. Working in tandem with the CPU, GPU-accelerated computing supplies for increased overall performance and is supported by the most recent operating systems. This guidance is straight primarily based on the Privileged Access Workstation (PAW) reference architecture deployed by our cybersecurity skilled services teams to protect consumers against cybersecurity attacks. A standard workplace worker operating regular office applications such as word processing, e-mail, and presentation software program will get all the efficiency needed from a common enterprise Computer.

HP has certainly paid a lot of interest to the styling of its mini workstation, but the corner detail is in fact derived from functional specifications. In a industrial setting, a number of desks can be arranged collectively to produce a unified and functional office. We’ve place with each other five killer workstations that deliver a tremendous combination of efficiency, reliability and stability for video editors of each and every level and budget. To recognize CAD it is also helpful to realize what CAD can’t do. CAD systems have no indicates of comprehending genuine-globe ideas, such as the nature of the object becoming developed or the function that object will serve. Some of the buyer critiques speak that the Rectangular Beech Desk – H leg Style, Cable Ports – Office Pc are splendid luggage.

Our advised Revit Workstation specification ensures you have the power and stability needed at a sensible value point for heavy computational tasks, whilst possessing a number of cores to take advantage of Autodesk Revit’s multithreaded capabilities such as opening and saving Revit files, loading elements into memory for the very first time, point cloud information show and so on. Primarily based on this testing, we have come up with our personal list of recommended hardware for AutoCAD. It is created to empower productivity among mobile creatives. Display size is critical when wooing clients or displaying your function, so HP redesigned its ZBook 15 line, which consists of a 15.6″ show and Intel Core i5 and Core i7 quad-core processors. Think about how significantly much more you could do. Genuine-time processing at lightning speeds as you watch each your images and webpages transform proper in front of your eyes.

Get pleasure from workstation efficiency in a low cost, compact package with HP’s ZBook workstation Ultrabooks3 presented in each a 14” or 15.6” diagonal screen size. The Application Licensing Service reported that the license is tampered. It characteristics ample workspace with out overpowering a area, and it has a modern day and edgy look, a keyboard drawer, and a platform for your pc tower. The safety processor reported that the entry essential already exists in the trusted data retailer. It seems that a product page for the HP Z640 workstation was prematurely visible displaying that these HP workstations will assistance the new processors. Restricted GPU (video card) efficiency. CPU Dual Xeon 4x Core E5440 2.83Ghz. A high end graphics card will not be capable to run effectively if paired with an entry level CPU.

You could add addresses or subnets which need to attain the PAW with unsolicited traffic at this point (e.g. safety scanning or management application. Moving up to a far more expensive pre-built method may supply greater graphics performance, but you’ll also have to shell out for features you could not demand. Anyway, the most cores I’ve personally tested Sonar with on one particular machine is just eight as pointed out – both 8 actual cores (two quad xeons) and the eight not-genuine cores in the i7. Both systems perform fantastic. If the monitor is effectively away from windows, there are no other sources of vibrant light and prolonged desk-function is the norm, use a low level of service light of 300 lux. The organization has existed for over seventy-five years, but will be most famous amongst film and Television individuals for its current line of Z-series workstations and laptops.

Powered by Intel’s newest Sandy Bridge-primarily based XEON processor family, the E5-2600, HP’s new Z series machines benefit from the CPU’s integrated memory controllers, Hyper-Threading and Turbo Enhance technology. The weekest CAD-capable graphics card is around 400+ USD. The software marketplace is plush with a broad variety of expert 3D applications – such as SOLIDWORKS , 3ds MAX , Cinema 4D , AutoCAD , and a lot of other people – that require a lot far more than your common throwaway consumer PCs can provide, each with its personal distinct elements to think about. Client server networks offer centralized backup where data can be stored in a single server. If you fancy yourself a energy user, HP’s got a “world’s first” trick up its sleeve that may well lure you in. Earlier these days, the Palo Alto outfit took the wraps off its newest all-in-one , the HP Z1. This workstation is a mere distant cousin to HP’s customer-focused Omni and TouchSmart lines – not that that is a negative thing.

We advocate NVIDIA Quadro skilled graphics cards with our systems, as these support a number of displays for elevated productivity and have ISV certified drivers for hundreds of major applications. Inside this mammoth of a Pc you will discover dual Intel Xeon CPUs with up to 56 processing cores, which are running your genuine-time 8K video editing session off of up to 3 terabytes of RAM. Both PCIe x16 slots can be occupied by dual-slot cards. They also have the selection for NVIDIA’s quickest mobile QUADRO card, the K5100M, generating them the most effective mobile workstation in the planet. Following four years with Arch Linux in my workstation laptop, I switched back to Ubuntu desktop (for 1 far more time). The system’s Xeon E3-1245 processor is based on the same “Sandy Bridge” architecture as other current-generation Intel Core processors.

We’ve got you covered with a excellent range of workstations and Pc trolleys to suit any house office and personal computer. The PowerSwap Nucleus Lithium Power System is the prime industrial-goal battery that can energy all devices on your workstation (laptop, tablet, printer, scanner and more) for 8+ hours at a time AND outlasts all competitors for cycles and durability. This spending budget create requires advantage of the great performance in the low-finish of Intel’s new Kaby Lake processors and a spending budget case choice to save funds. It’s also vital that employers concentrate on the overall health and wellbeing of their group members who devote a lot of time sitting down at their office desks. SD card reader to add an additional SD card to add much more storage for your music, videos and images.

HP is a technologies organization that operates in far more than 170 countries about the world. After upon a time (read: the 1990s), the difference among a correct workstation Pc and a desktop or customer method had been impossible to miss. Hutch-style credenza desks have shelves and stow spaces above and beneath the tabletop in conjunction with grommets for cable management, and a drawer-like shelf to shop the keyboard. Generate beautiful styles navigate to this site and increase collaboration with innovative productivity tools in AutoCAD® software program. Korg nevertheless provides outstanding functionality from its keypad and is capable to do an astounding quantity with the samples offered, but there are far better workstations if you intend to layer tracks and voices on top of one particular an additional.

Featuring Quadro, the HP xw9400 meets the combined wants for computational and visualization power and performance. Give it a cohesive look with our cost-effective house office furniture packages Featuring traditional types as nicely as modern, funky designs, we have a package that will tick all the boxes for you. Graphics Card: It is the second most critical hardware piece right after CPU and is responsible for displaying the 3D models on screen. Every box came with a board, a case, a wireless keyboard for typing commands, a speaker for sound, an SD card for storing projects and all of the cables you may well need for power and connectivity. Pro graphic workstations are professionally assembled in our state of the art factory in Bolton and are protected by a 3 year warranty with the first year supplying onsite cover.

However, the inflexibility and prohibitive cost of these systems restricted their availability in health-related imaging applications. Balance your develop between income put toward a CPU and money place toward a graphics card, with the prioritized weight of that pair leaning slightly toward the graphics card. The Virtual Office Mobile Auto Desk is a lot more than a notebook tray, it is a true functioning mobile workstation which offers the identical crucial functions as a stationary workplace desk. The File Server Resource Manager service could not send e-mail due to an error. The ring topology is 1 which the network is a loop exactly where information is passed from a single workstation to another. Even so, if you’re merely intrigued by the thought of a tiny desktop Pc for the office, think about the compact HP Elite Slice, which gives more than enough productivity even though also supplying a customizable modular design and style.

The M6600 is made for the most demanding customers hunting for a bigger display, greater scaling graphics possibilities and further storage with up to 3 alternatives like an optional 2nd HDD and 128GB2 strong state drive (SSD) mini card with RAID 5 assistance. They crucial right here is stability and functionality with Solidworks which is why you want anything like the Quadro K4000 Workstations graphics cards are basically glorified gaming cards but they have extremely steady drivers. A report showing every group in the hotel, the quantity of rooms occupied by each and every group, the quantity of guests for each group, and the income generated by each group is typical. Microsoft is drafting a list of Skylake -based processors that it’ll assistance with Windows 7 and 8.1, but that system will only last until July 17th, 2017.

from KelsusIT.com – Refurbished laptops, desktop computers , servers http://bit.ly/2EFxBIn via IFTTT

#KelsusIT.com – Refurbished laptops #desktop computers #servers

0 notes

sadpvp · 7 years

Text

15 Great Lessons You Can Learn From Car Recovery.

A vehicle that is bought with a lot of care would surely need that care and concern all times in its life. This is why it is necessary to get regular servicing done on your vehicle and for that you would have to drive it to the service center. But then, in Los Angeles Towing is done by many companies that would take the responsibility of taking your vehicle to the service center and then bring it back. After having that kind of car, you need to consider the use of SUV car cover that will protect your car very well. Log in or Create Account to post a comment. Publisher: Ronald Firquain Many people buy hybrid cars hoping to save money in the long run by spending less on gas. The latest generation will be blessed with revolutionary fuel cells. Publisher: bethany collins As we continue to become a more environmentally conscious society, many of us are starting to drive hybrid cars.

Check if the rates are 100 per cent transparent

Decreasing compaction in the root zone of the lawn

Connect the brakes and lights wiring

Trailer registration is a must

Ball mount - The ball of metal atop the trailer hitch receiver

Know the towing capacity of your vehicle in addition to the weight you are towing

Many things are constantly being sold across the internet. One website that is probably the most popular for selling things on the internet is eBay. You can find almost anything being sold on eBay. Some of those items are even questionable - such as a cave. However, one thing that is sold a lot on eBay is cars. Most things that are sold on eBay are packages and shipped without any trouble. A car is a different story. When someone sells a car on eBay, they most often specify that it is for local pick up only. More advanced sellers have learned that they can offer shipping on the cars and gain a competitive advantage. The sellers that offer shipping are doing so because they have discovered the benefits of an auto transport company. These companies haul cars all over America every day. You could also have to take an individual loan or break your savings to put cash down. If you or your employers are driving a car company vehicles, it is essential that you are included just in case one of these gets into an accident. When on the hunt for automobile insurance, remove the center gentleman to save money. Shopping on the web, immediately throughout the organization web site, is probably going to save you as much as possible. Insurance companies that permit you to buy online are relatively reputable which is cheaper as you will not be using an broker. You could also have to take an individual loan or break your savings to put cash down. This is not ideal for a bad credit buyer. It is considering that he could use the same money in paying off debts and boosting his credit score. You could prevent this scenario by opting for relatively less costly pre-owned cars. CAR CREDIT LIVERPOOL Managing Depreciation Many brand-new cars diminish between 20 % -30 % of their price as soon as you take them from the dealer’s whole lot. People have been increasingly sharing their love by sending valuable gifts across borders with such an ease that it seems as if that they are sending it to a person who lives in the same country. International shipping businesses have allowed people to come in sync with the global trend of transportation which has no limits with respect to their shipping needs, even if it is in the many different continents and oceans across the globe. International Auto Shippers (IAS) is an international shipment specialist that moves cars, motor-homes, motorcycles, boats and other household goods. We offer 24 hours online quotes, and door to door transport service at low cost (including full insurance). There are times when you might wish to take your car along and then realize that it has to be serviced and cannot be even moved out of the garage without assistance. Well, if you are seeking assistance, how about some professional one in that case then? It is quite easy to get towing companies to come to your assistance these days and they will be able to offer you some superfast towing service and take your car to its scheduled servicing. Tongue weight is one of the most important factors for a safe towing. It is the weight that the trailer will press down on the hitch. Insufficient tongue weight causes the trailer to sway when towed. The capacity is a trailer measurement that describes the limit of weight that the vehicle will tow. Kilograms is the measurement unit used. It is suggested in other countries that the heaviest trailers should occupy the place closest to the coupling object. The capacity of towing can either be braked or unbraked capacity. These services can be sought at any time of the day and yes, the hotline works! click to find out more Why top South Pasadena towing companies flourish? Merely towing your cars or trucks is not what makes the top South Pasadena towing companies thrive in today’s market. These services can be sought at any time of the day and yes, the hotline works! Suppose your car gets stuck in snow or needs to be dragged out of a pit on to the level road then you cannot simply pull it out without a towing company. This kind of emergency might need help at any time of the day, and so, just save the 24-hour helpline number in your phone and just in times like these make the call. The towing company would send in their most trusted and certified truck drivers to the spot in time and even do all kinds of roadside assistance along with towing your car to safety. If in your family there are more than four members then you should choose the used Mahindra Scorpio car. It is the most spacious, strongest and powerful car by Mahindra and Mahindra. Publisher: R Govindan If you are tossing up between buying a new car or automobile spare parts for your present car and the price is an issue, then you can opt for second hand cars. Publisher: Sriram Gurumurthy There is a huge market for second hand cars in India.Selling your vehicle in India is made easy with the arrival of internet.

Log in or Create Account to post a comment. This will allow you to get the sizes of your tyres, windows and general body parts correct in comparison to the rest of your drawing. It will also make your job later on easier when you start shading your car, because you can concentrate on shading one square at a time and concentrating on getting the details right. Once you've got your grid set up, take your time and make sure you get the lines of the car smooth and sharp. This can take a while to teach your crazy little hands how to do their jobs, but stick at it they will learn! Make sure you don't give up on a drawing too quickly, the only way you can fail at drawing is by stopping. Don't stop and you can't lose. It is expected that you'll like the information in this article. Log in or Create Account to post a comment. Publisher: Alisha North Mazda enginesare of varied size and different types. However, they all have akin auto parts; it is just that they differ in design and output. Publisher: mikey With a radio control system (indicates by a radio), the model car constitutes endowed blend lengths. This costs essentially how a radio control car acts upon. Know the limits of the equipment - Only use a rope specifically designed for towing road cars, and only tether it to the towing eyelets specified by the manufacturer. Take the strain - The tow rope's tension should be built up slowly to avoid vehicle damage. When towing, pulling away in second gear in your Subaru can often help minimise any loss of grip. Stay loose - Ensure that the steering in the towed vehicle is not locked, and that the wheels are pointing in the right direction before towing begins. Publisher: SuperStore Webmaster Green tea has never been so popular as it is now. Green tea has benefited a lot of people's interest. In fact, for a number of, green tea is covered within their diets. Publisher: isabella pospisil Many towing services offer flatbed towing to transport several cars in one region to their destinations. Flatbed towing involves using a specialized truck with a flat bed in the rear. Publisher: agnescelina Towing is the procedure of dragging or illustration after a chain, line, bar or particular additional form of connections. Towing is most visibly achieved by road automobiles, but whatever from aquatic containers to tractors to people can tow freight. In case you liked this post and you want to acquire more info concerning Good (simply click the up coming web site www.good-event.nl) i implore you to visit our web-site.

0 notes

flauntpage · 7 years

Text

Your Monday Morning Roundup

This feeling will never get old.

After another day at the office for the Eagles, the fans can proudly say that the Birds are the best team in the NFL after a dominating 51-23 victory for Philly over Denver at the Linc on Sunday afternoon. The Birds are now 8-1 heading into their bye week.

In the win, the Eagles ran all over what was the top-ranked defense in football. New kid on the block, Jay Ajayi, made an immediate impact with 77 rushing yards and one touchdown. Zach Ertz didn’t play, but no problem as Trey Burton and Brent Celek stepped up and also we saw a glimpse of vintage Alshon Jeffery, who finished with 84 receiving yards and two touchdowns.

Re-live the win and see some great content from our game live thread. See what us here at CB predicted for Sunday’s game.

Pre-game, Celek and LeGarrette Blount created a special moment:

@BrentCelek @LG_Blount made the day for #Eagles🦅fan Jose Martinez who lost his legs and arm fighting for our country #EaglesSalute http://pic.twitter.com/VLYsipOfiK

— John Clark NBCPhilly (@JClarkNBCS) November 5, 2017

With the Eagles off to this great start, it is reminiscent of 2004, the last time the birds went to the Super Bowl. The numbers back up the parallels too.

Keep it locked to CB all day today for great day-after content.

Let’s go.

But first, a word from our sponsors:

Legal. Check out Krasno, Krasno and Onwudinjo when you need a workers’ compensation or social security attorney.

Process. You know what to do. Shop now.

Fresh. The best meal delivery service, without question. Sign up for Hello Fresh now and get $40 off your first two boxes.

Amazon. If you shop Amazon, support your favorite website and use our link.

The Roundup:

Around the NFC East, the Cowboys did something the Eagles couldn’t and defeated the Chiefs. The Redskins went into Seattle and took down the Seahawks. In New Jersey, the Giants sunk deeper than before and gave up 51 to the Los Angeles Rams in their 7th loss of the year.

The Birds face the Cowboys on Sunday Night Football in two weeks after the bye. It will be a big showdown for the NFC East.

Elsewhere in the NFL, the Raiders held on to beat the Dolphins, the Panthers edged the Falcons, and the Saints are starting to march again as they took down the Bucs, 30-10.

Also, the AJ Green took out his frustration of this season on the Jaguars:

A.J. Green has had ENOUGH http://pic.twitter.com/0osVyPWnBE

— Barstool Sports (@barstooltweetss) November 5, 2017

Think that was rough? Mike Evans may have it topped.

—

Before the trade deadline, the 49ers got Jimm Garoppolo from the Patriots, however, San Francisco GM John Lynch tried to pry Tom Brady away from New England.

—

Earlier in the weekend, the Sixers toppled the Pacers thanks in large part to the clutch shooting of J.J. Redick down the stretch. The team now has a winning record for the first time in four years.

Redick’s three-point shot had Marc Zumoff going bananas:

25 yrs Ive worked around or with @marczumoff. Great announcer & even better guy. We’re having fun w Alaa, Molly & #Sixers (NBCSports Philly) http://pic.twitter.com/fyVr8hZCSy

— Nick M (@SportsDirectTV) November 4, 2017

Although the first-year Sixer took over late, the ball was distributed pretty well throughout. From our Kevin Kinkead’s takeaways from the win:

For all of the talk of Redick’s performance, I think the most impressive thing was the spread of the offensive output.

All five starters finished in double figures on a combined 53.7 field goal percentage (37-69).

Redick, Dario Saric, and Robert Covington all shot above 50% from three-point range:

Redick – 8/12

Covington – 5/9

Saric – 3/5

That’s 16-26 for a 61.5% average. Those are ridiculous numbers. The only thing bringing down the average is the 0-5 combined number put up by Joel Embiid, Jerryd Bayless, and Richaun Holmes. Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot finished 2-5 behind the arc, but hit his threes in the second quarter, when the team was really struggling.

The Sixers start a west coast swing off with a game at the Utah Jazz on Tuesday night at 9pm.

Meanwhile, the Sixers are still trying to trade Jahlil Okafor, however, probably the most interested team, the Boston Celtics, don’t want to trade first round picks for the big man, according to The Boston Globe:

The 76ers are trying to trade former No. 3 overall pick Jahlil Okafor after determining he is no longer in their plans. Okafor was considered a future NBA star during his high school days and lone season at Duke, but the league’s uptempo style along with Okafor’s inability to shoot from the perimeter has left him essentially useless for the 76ers. Okafor has been a good trooper but wants a change. Philadelphia does not want to buy out his contract and then watch him sign with a conference rival with no compensation. The Celtics have long held interest in Okafor, but as more of a project than an immediate contributor. Boston is also not willing to part with a first-round pick for Okafor. The 76ers have done a poor job of showcasing Okafor and maintaining his market value. He has played just one game this season, scoring 10 points in 22 minutes in a blowout loss to Toronto on Oct. 21. Okafor has gotten into premium shape and has the ability to run the floor, but he hasn’t attempted a 3-pointer since his rookie season. The question for interested teams is whether Okafor can serve as a consistent post presence. There are plenty of teams willing to give a 21-year-old former top prospect an opportunity. But the 76ers aren’t giving him away for free.

—

The Flyers lost 5-4 to the Avalanche on Saturday night in a shootout, dropping the team to 7-6-2. The team has a few days off until it returns to the ice on Thursday night against the Chicago Blackhawks at the Wells Fargo Center. Puck drops at 7pm.

Sean Couturier used the time off to take in that Eagles game on Sunday.

—

Saturday was a CRAZY day in college football with Michigan State upsetting Penn State, and Iowa toppling Ohio State. Plus, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State were entrenched in an old fashioned shootout.

Penn State’s loss essentially eliminates the Nittany Lions from contention for the College Football Playoff. It dropped them from 7th to 16th in the latest AP Top 25. Here is the latest top 10:

Alabama

Georgia

Notre Dame

Clemson

Oklahoma

Wisconsin

Miami

TCU

Washington

Auburn

The second edition of the CFB rankings will be released on Tuesday night.

PSU may have lost, but James Franklin wanted to make sure his players shook hands with the Spartans:

James Franklin sprints off field to tell player to “GO SHAKE HANDS!” after #24 Michigan State upsets #7 Penn State #MSUvsPSU http://pic.twitter.com/DnI8pFcvY9

— High&OutsideSports (@HighandOutside_) November 4, 2017

—

The Houston Astros held their World Series championship parade late last week and this act of kindness will warm your heart and take you on an emotional roller coaster:

This lady dropped her hat, and Houston came in clutch to get it back up to her #earnedhistory http://pic.twitter.com/1thxzO7B6i

— enokez (@AlanEnokian) November 3, 2017

—

Some say Saturday night’s card was a historic night for UFC. Our own Kevin Kinkead has a great piece on it.

—

In some surprising news…an American won the NYC marathon. First time, long time for the women’s race too.

—

In non sports news, it was a big non-sports weekend…

A gunman killed 26 people at a church in Texas on Sunday morning. Dozens of others are injured.

Senator Rand Paul was attacked at his home this weekend, has fractured ribs, among other injuries.

A Florida woman got a DUI while riding a horse.

Jimmy Fallon’s mom passed away.

Netflix may kill off Frank Underwood from House of Cards.

—

It was a jam-packed weekend, enjoy your Monday!

Your Monday Morning Roundup published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

0 notes