#hosting and cloud support in gilbert

[sagehostings]

Gilbert's Top Managed IT & Cloud Hosting Services for Business Growth

As businesses in Gilbert continue embracing digital transformation, having the right managed IT services and cloud hosting solutions has become essential for success. Whether you're a startup looking for affordable cloud infrastructure or an established enterprise needing robust IT management, Gilbert offers excellent local and global options.

managed it services gilbert

This comprehensive guide will help you: ✔ Understand the benefits of managed IT and cloud services ✔ Compare top providers serving Gilbert businesses ✔ Get answers to key questions about cloud adoption

Why Gilbert Businesses Need Professional IT & Cloud Services

1. Managed IT Services in Gilbert

Local IT services in Gilbert provide crucial support including:

Proactive network monitoring (preventing downtime before it happens)

Cybersecurity protection (firewalls, threat detection, compliance)

Data backup & disaster recovery (protecting against ransomware and outages)

Help desk support (quick resolution of employee tech issues)

2. Cloud Hosting Advantages

Modern hosting and cloud support in Gilbert offers:

Flexible scaling (instantly adjust resources as needed)

Cost efficiency (pay only for what you use)

Business continuity (access data from anywhere, anytime)

Automatic updates (always running the latest secure software)

Top Cloud & IT Service Providers for Gilbert Companies

Enterprise-Grade Solutions

ProviderBest ForStarting PriceGilbert-Friendly FeatureAWSLarge-scale operationsPay-as-you-goPhoenix data center for low latencyAzureMicrosoft ecosystem$13+/monthSeamless Office 365 integrationGoogle CloudData analytics$12+/monthAI/ML tools for future-proofing

SMB & Startup Specialists

ProviderBest ForStarting PriceGilbert-Friendly FeatureDigitalOceanSimple cloud hosting$4/monthDeveloper-friendly interfaceLinodeBudget-conscious$5/monthTransparent pricingPhoenixNAPLocal Arizona supportCustom quotePhoenix-based data center

Local Gilbert IT Management

Several managed cloud services in Gilbert providers offer:

Onsite and remote support

Hybrid cloud solutions

Compliance expertise (HIPAA, PCI, etc.)

White-glove migration assistance

FAQs: Cloud & IT Services Explained

1. What's the difference between cloud and traditional hosting?

Traditional hosting uses physical servers with fixed resources, while cloud hosting provides virtual, scalable resources across multiple servers for better reliability and flexibility.

2. How do I choose between AWS, Azure and Google Cloud?

AWS offers the most services and global reach

Azure works best with Microsoft products

Google Cloud excels in data analytics and AI

3. What does "managed" cloud service include?

Managed cloud support services in Gilbert typically cover: ✅ 24/7 monitoring ✅ Security patching ✅ Performance optimization ✅ Backup management ✅ Cost management

4. What's the typical cost for small business cloud hosting?

Most SMBs spend $50-$300/month depending on:

Number of users

Storage needs

Required applications

Support level

5. Can I get local support for cloud services?

Yes! Many IT services in Gilbert offer:

Local account managers

Faster response times

Onsite assistance when needed

Knowledge of Arizona compliance needs

6. How quickly can I scale cloud resources?

With most providers, you can:

Upgrade instantly (within minutes)

Downgrade after 30 days (to prevent billing games)

Set auto-scaling rules for traffic spikes

Next Steps for Gilbert Businesses

Assess your needs - Consider users, apps, and growth plans

Compare providers - Match features to your priorities

Consult local experts - Get tailored recommendations

Start with a pilot - Test before full migration

Pro Tip: Many managed IT services in Gilbert offer free initial consultations to analyze your current setup and suggest improvements.

Need Personalized Advice?

Every Gilbert business has unique tech requirements. For help finding your ideal cloud hosting and IT support solution:

📞 Call local Gilbert IT providers for quotes 📧 Request consultations from cloud specialists 💻 Test free tiers from AWS, Azure or Google Cloud

Investing in the right managed cloud services in Gilbert today will position your business for efficient growth tomorrow.

Which aspect of cloud hosting is most important for your business? [ ] Cost savings [ ] Local support [ ] Enterprise features [ ] Easy scalability

Let us know in the comments!

[viatagrinner]

Silvio Ricci.

Chapter 13.

The auction went through. The manager took Silvio and MC with him.

Rio stayed, but Gilbert joined him.

Rio immediately refused to listen to Gilbert's "special story".

Gilbert: I haven't said anything yet, have I?

Gilbert: But it's okay. My misdeeds are good news for you.

_________________________________________

[Gilbert began to brainwash Rio].

1. Rio loves Miss Bunny as a man, not as a butler and friend... Suffering from amnesia, he began to "rejoice" thanks to little Miss Bunny.

2. Rio used to be a "sassy little dog," like Silvio.

Gilbert: To fall in love and even change your own way of being.... Hehe, I envy you!

The butler is surprised by the prince's awareness. Someone close to MC and Rio told it... Gilbert didn't deny it.

Gilbert: All your life, you've been a loyal dog, disciplined, but in your heart you've always wanted...

Gilbert: "I want you to look at me, I want you to like me," with a clear face and a greedy...

Gilbert: But you've been in trouble lately, haven't you?

Rio: You mean Lord Silvio?

Gilbert talks about how little Bunny might be taken away from Rio.

Gilbert: You are afraid that your most precious treasure will "again" be taken from you.

Gilbert: You've decided that if Miss Bunny is happy, that's enough for you.

Gilbert: But then again, you want to be happy too.

Rio:....No!

Gilbert: I hate lies.

Gilbert says that Silvio will continue to torment Rio. To this end, for example:

Gilbert: He's working to entangle little Miss Bunny's heart and make it his own.

[🚬🤤 I love tsundere, but I love well-written, manipulative, adorable villains even more. I'm easy to buy.... Not like Rio...]

The metaphor in this game :

As Gilbert spoke, the sun hid behind the clouds. But "like a ray of light scattering the clouds," there was "no hesitation" in Rio's words.

Rio: I have no interest in interfering in my Lady's social life.

Rio: There is nothing wrong with getting to know each other.

_________________________________________

And Chevalier, of course, already knows everything.

_________________________________________

[😐🧐 A very important moment for the plot... Gilbert eats sweets.]

Gilbert suddenly turns his attention to the cakes prepared in the middle of the room and reaches for them.

Even though he chewed defenselessly (with his cheeks?) [I imagine a hamster or chipmunk], he somehow looked as if it was no accident.

After swallowing the cake, Gilbert licks the edge of his lips with his tongue.

[🚬🤤]

_________________________________________

Keith did not know that the auction would include Obsidian goods.

Gilbert: Oh, he's not involved, is he? Really, it was just a gesture of goodwill.

Gilbert: I'm not sure if it was a "thank you for the gem" or a "denunciation of Rodolite.

Gilbert: I learned of the good intentions and took a little advantage of them.

_________________________________________

Gilbert will support him in his "love way".

Gilbert: Silvio has been too attached to little Miss Bunny lately.

Gilbert: I want to wake Silvio up by bringing you and the little rabbit together.

Gilbert: Silvio will definitely take the most important thing from you.

Gilbert: By the time you regret it, it will be too late.

Gilbert: You'll find me when you want me.

Gilbert: I don't dislike people with a pure heart like yours.

Gilbert left.

Rio: I've been spotted by this guy.

_________________________________________

The office of the Diplomatic Faction.

They know that the auction sells goods from Obsidian and that the host is from Benitoite, but it is not Silvio.

There are 2 factions in Benitoite: "an alliance with Obsidian" and "a friendly" faction .

But the princes know that Silvio is neutral.

But the auction manager had a letter with Benitoite's coat of arms, a whale. Chevalier thinks it means the current king is in favor of an alliance with Obsidian.

[In general, the "diplomats" understand, and they don't even need Chevalier for that, that they will be fucked if Benitoite and Obsidian make an alliance.]

Сlavis: Your prediction is too broad. It's probably the worst possible scenario.

Chevalier distributed who does what:

Nokto aka "The Clown" watches over the auction.

Clavis aka "Silly Brother" and Knight aka Cyril will watch Gilbert's movements. 

And MC and Rio keep an eye on Silvio.

_________________________________________

The heroine senses that something is wrong with Rio.

Rio says that after listening to Chevalier, he realized something.

Rio: Yes, Lord Silvio is right. I'm a coward.

Rio: I just want to be with you all the time, and I'm... afraid to remember the past.

MC used to try to find out the truth about Rio's past, but she enjoyed life with him so much that she gave up trying to find out anything.

But now Benitoite wants an alliance with Obsidian...

Rio: For the sake of the country you love, I have to face the past.

He already knows who he is.

_________________________________________

Silvio appeared and pushed the heroine away from Rio, saying that a noble woman should not flirt with a butler.

(What bad timing!...)

Silvio: Huh? What's with the cheeky look?

Rio asks Silvio not to hold MC. And in the heat of the argument, he calls the prince a "damn big brother."

He's also not a butler to Silvio anymore.

MC is obviously shocked.

Well, it's not hard to tell from Silvio's face the degree of joy at his brother's return.

Silvio's Masterlist

[laydownmyvirtue]

𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐟𝐞𝐥𝐭 𝐛𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐝𝐢𝐞𝐝.

The cover of nightfall brought with it many paths, each one wrapped in its own kind of shadow.

The shadows that would cause my parents to overlook a dip that hadn’t been on the bridge before that night, one that would leave a gaping hole in my life.

The shadows that she requested filled the hotel room from wall to wall, as I sank to my knees and chased after every sound she had to give. The shadows that cast her in shame and ecstasy as my tongue curled and drove her over the edge. I could follow her over the brink, to plummet beneath the icy waters of a life long gone, my breath robbed by nothing as pleasurable as what she lived through in these sheets. 

The world was nothing but shadows, ones that could cling and distort, until there wasn’t a familiar face or place to find.

“A pleasure, as always, darling.” 

Claudia’s hair tickled its way along my face, as she took my chin between her fingers, and lured me in for a kiss that only came with an added expense. Some days, she didn’t speak a word, using only her eyes and a long earned trust to communicate exactly where she wanted me. Those were the days when she sunk beneath the waves of shame, though it was unclear where the feeling stemmed from. She’d never spoken the words, leaving the answer to my assuming mind. Was the shame in another woman burying herself between her thighs, or was the shame in the cost that came along with every exchange? The assumption changed, from week to week, and on nights like this — when she sought what affection she could before heading for the door, I guessed that this was the only place she could allow herself to exist in peace.

As the door clicked and announced her departure, I was left to the darkness that seemed to have a love of pulling us under, each in our own way. Left to my own pondering on the idea of peace, to the vivid colors that would seep from my memory to fill a room that was entirely devoid, they would pull me under like a current I knew too well. 

The first, the shade of chocolate brown that my mother was kind enough to bestow upon me. The warmth of her eyes, passed down to her only daughter, so that the world would never be deprived of such a comfort. She’d shared her life’s blood, and as my teenage years rolled in, she shared her wishes that some day I would follow her down that road. She hoped that every ounce of compassion she could see reflecting from doting doe eyes, would one day find another host, that this family filled with such love would never end.

The second, an unforgettable shade of grey that painted my parents as people I no longer recognised, on the night when this family filled with such love met its demise. Grey was rarely a color considered remarkable, though it had a kind of brightness to it, one that flushed out every other trace of life from those you held dearest. It would do its job in taking away the traits you loved most about them, and once it was done, it would make a new home in you. It would take the brightness you once knew it for, and cast your days with lifeless clouds, ones that cared nothing for the safety of roof tiles, or the protection of a patchwork blanket your mother had sewn. They would blind you to the daylight, exist with free rein of when they might drop their showers upon you, they would follow you from one side of the world to the other — taunting you for just how impossible it was to escape their silent wrath. Whether you sat within the walls of your childhood home, or upon the floor of some luxury hotel named in a language you didn’t know, they would find you.

The last, a splash of red that would seem startling in comparison to the ways your life was painted these days. The red that wanted to declare a thrill, to sharpen the edges of the plane ticket that Jenna had pressed into my grasp, as if to outline just how exciting any such trip should be. The red that shone over the district where I would one day have to make my start, where palms left no handprints upon flesh that had known the touch of many, where fingerprints felt bloodied by the cost they came with, and the price I paid for these sins. I wasn’t sure that the world would ever exist without the crimson tint that seemed to follow me, an ever present reminder of what had been spilled by my mistakes, of the only path that could patch the holes left within the fabric of mine and my brother’s life.

I had no trouble recalling the day this had truly been set into motion, and it wasn’t the one that even I would expect it to be. It wasn’t the night when my drunken phone call had ended in my parents crossing over a bridge that they never should have been on, when they met an end they never should have known, even in their cruellest of nightmares. On the days when they were forced to imagine a world where they would never be there to shed tears at my high school graduation, when the papers demanded their names be signed to this twisted reality, they’d chosen a person. A person who would be tasked with ensuring Jeremy and I would be safe, as safe as we could be in the grips of grief — Jenna. Jenna Sommers. Aunt Jenna. Whichever way we would come to know her as more than the lovable hurricane who only passed through on Christmas Day, she was the plan for how we would survive.

Once the funerals had passed, once the guests and their homemade meals started to fizzle out, once there was nothing but silent agony to sit between the three of us, the cracks began to show. She was nothing but a kid herself, however justified that status may or may not be for a woman in her mid-twenties, it was the truth of who Jenna was. She wasn’t built for a life of intense structure and responsibility, one where she had to worry more about food on the table, than which of her friends had the most reliable stash of pot. There was something else there, something that I never could get close enough to touch, that frightened her to her very core. It was beyond this role that she never truly believed she would be given, something about this life, this town, this family that shook her faith in more than herself. At times, I wanted to believe that it was nothing more than an intense case of commitment phobia at play, but I had always been cursed with a sense for when there was more beneath the surface. Of a person, of a thing, of a story that didn’t sound just right — the intricacies of a piece that didn’t quite fit, they would trouble my mind, and sink to set my stomach into a frenzy. There was something more, something Jenna didn’t say aloud, and it was bigger than any fear she had of accidentally killing the kids her sister had left behind.

I couldn’t say whether it was that fear, my prying about it, or perhaps a combination of both, that set her on the course she chose. The one that led to her crashing through the front door on a Tuesday afternoon, freshly purchased luggage in one hand, an envelope containing two passes to Amsterdam airport in the other. At first, I was entirely sure that this was some form of mental break, that she had decided the only cure to the clouds that hung over us was to rush to a country famous for its tolerant drug policies. Then came the revelation that someone was being left behind, and it wasn’t Jeremy or myself. We had cousins abroad, Jenna would go on to announce, with her very best game show host impression. This was the prize we had won for being orphaned, a one way journey to the home of people whose names we hadn’t so much as heard before the grand plan had been revealed to us. These strangers who were to be treated as family, would take us in, and be so kind as to grant us the clean break that Jenna insisted was needed. It would be the only way to truly heal — away from the home whose bones were built by our parents, away from the never ending questioning about how we were doing, away from a place that now knew us as broken creatures. Away from her, away from our friends, away from any support system that we knew, away from any happy memory that we’d ever made.

That was the day, the one that led to this, that left me a shell of the person I had once known. Nothing more than a crumpled up piece of paper, fallen to my knees with no client in sight, with no escape within these hollow halls. The in-between was a blur at times, and if asked I couldn’t say if it was my mind’s attempt at self defense, or if the frenzied nature of our downward spiral was simply too close to Chaos to comprehend. A promised land of reprieve would turn to something far more sinister as the years ticked by, as age turned the page into adulthood and asked more of me than I ever thought I could give, as letters of demand piled high and someone had to break. This life of mine would find avenues anew to shatter my mind and the dreams it contained, my heart and the purity of love I’d once known, it would crawl into the depths of my core as another found their Nirvana within the wasteland that had been made of this body.

Regardless of how lost I became, in my own mind or the streets that claimed me, the burden of finding my way out still fell upon me. I couldn’t afford to succumb to the shadows, no matter how warm they could paint their welcomes, there was purpose to this sacrifice and it did not lay with me on these finely carpeted floors. I would always have to pull strength from places that didn’t exist, to land back on my feet, to make quick work of dipping beneath the heat of a shower’s spray. To return to a reflection I would pass on my way out, to an image of someone who might be mistaken for Elena Gilbert in a world outside of this. I would carry the visions gifted by the shadows home with me, I would allow for the memories of happier times to float along the canals that accompanied me on my stroll back to reality.

[chuckprophet]

The RubinoosThe Rubinoos

...

Save

The Rubinoos are an American power pop band that formed in 1970 in Berkeley, California. They are perhaps best known for their singles "I Think We're Alone Now" (1977, a cover of the hit by Tommy James & the Shondells), "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend" (1979), and for the theme song to the 1984 film Revenge of the Nerds. Although "I Think We're Alone Now," reaching No. 45 in 1977, has been their only charting hit, the group has a significant enduring cult following among fans of the power-pop genre.[1]

History

In November, 1970 Tommy Dunbar and Jon Rubin formed the Rubinoos to play at a dance for Bay High School in Berkeley, California. Other founding members included Greg 'Curly' Keranen, Alex Carlin, Ralph Granich and Danny Wood. Inspired by siblings' 45s and the Cruisin' vintage radio recreations LP series, Jon Rubin and the Rubinoos played rock and roll oldies, including covers of songs by Chubby Checker, Bill Haley and the Comets, the Dovells, the Troggs, Little Eva, the Chiffons, and others.

Soon after the performance at Bay High School, where Rubin and Dunbar were enrolled, the original band dissolved. In May 1971, they shortened the name to the Rubinoos and reformed as a quartet with Donn Spindt on drums and Tom Carpender on bass. The group now focused on original material by Dunbar, in association with Rubin and others.

The band's early development was assisted and inspired by the success of Earth Quake, whose lead guitarist and principal songwriter was Tommy Dunbar's older brother, Robbie Dunbar. The Rubinoos often appeared as an opening act for Earth Quake in clubs such as the Longbranch Saloon and the Keystone, in Berkeley.

After the expiration of their contract with A&M Records, Earth Quake along with their manager, Matthew King Kaufman, founded Beserkley Recordsand started recruiting additional talent. This included Greg Kihn, Jonathan Richman and the Rubinoos.

In June, 1973, Greg 'Curly' Keranen re-joined the group. In September, 1974, they recorded a cover of the DeFranco Family's "Gorilla", released as a single and included on the Beserkley Chartbusters compilation album. The group also provided accompaniment for Jonathan Richman on two Chartbuster cuts, "The New Teller" and "Government Center." Shortly after the release of "Chartbusters" Keranen left the Rubinoos to join Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers. He was replaced by Royse Ader.

Several 'high points' of the band's early career included: A performance at Bill Graham's Winterland Auditorium, September 24, 1974, on a bill with the Jefferson Starship. At this concert, the Rubinoos were joined on stage by Jonathan Richman, who danced to their version of The Archies' "Sugar, Sugar". This was greeted with intense booing and a pelting of unripe bananas by members of the audience.[2] Having a number one single in Modesto, California, for 13 weeks. Having one of their concerts raffled off to a high school by Burger King. Appearing in Tiger Beat and 16 Magazine many times.

In 1977, Beserkley released The Rubinoos, the group's eponymous debut album. It was well-reviewed and New York Rocker called it "The Best Pop Album of the Decade." The single, a cover of Tommy James' "I Think We're Alone Now," reached No. 45 on the Billboard Hot 100 becoming Beserkley's first hit. The group appeared on American Bandstand (live), So It Goes (by video) and Rolling Stone Magazine: The 10th Anniversary television special in which they were cast as a garage band, performed a tribute to the newly deceased Elvis Presley and morphed into claymationfigures.

The group's next album, Back to the Drawing Board (1979), featured the single "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend," which had been released in 1978 and received heavy airplay in England and Europe. In support of this album, the Rubinoos appeared on Rock Goes To College, The Old Grey Whistle Test, Top Pop and opened 56 shows for Elvis Costello on the U.S. portion of his 1979 Armed Funk tour.

In 1980 Royse Ader was replaced by Al Chan. The Rubinoos then recorded the demos for a third album which never came to fruition. These demos, released in the 1990s as Basement Tapes, engineered by well known audio guru, Dan Alexander, is still thought to be one of their best efforts. Spindt and Chan left the group in 1982 when Tommy and Jon decided to move to Los Angeles. In 1983, the group, now consisting of just Rubin and Dunbar, signed with Warner Bros. Records and released the Mini LP Party of Two, produced by Todd Rundgren. Party of Two yielded the single and cult classic music video "If I Had You Back," which has been in continuous rotation on MTV and VH1 for over 25 years. In 1984, they recorded the title song "Revenge of the Nerds" and "Breakdown" for the film Revenge of the Nerds.

The Rubinoos playing in Barcelona, Spain, in 2010

The Rubinoos began a long sabbatical in 1985. In 1989, Dunbar, Spindt, Chan, and John Seabury formed the group Vox Pop and recorded an album of material, co produced by Dunbar and Dan Alexander at Alexanders Coast Recorders. Also in 1989, Jon Rubin joined the noted Los Angeles a cappella Doo Wop group The Mighty Echoes. During the 1990s, two compilation CDs, Basement Tapes and Garage Sale were released. Their success led to the end of The Rubinoos sabbatical and a new album, Paleophonic (1999), produced by Kevin Gilbert. This album did not see the light of day until The Rubinoos' performance, their first in seven years, at the 1999 International Pop Overthrow Festival in Los Angeles. The lineup at IPO featured Rubin, Dunbar, Chan and Spindt. In 2000 Tommy and Jon were hired to sing the Flo and Eddie parts of Frank Zappa's 200 Motels at three concerts with the Netherlands' Philharmonic. In 2002 The Rubinoos toured Spain and Japan, released the all-covers Crimes Against Music (2002) and recorded the album Live in Japan (2004). In 2005 the group reunited with their original producer, Gary Phillips, to record Twist Pop Sin (2006). In 2007, Castle Communications issued the 63-song retrospective Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Rubinoos. Also in 2007, The Rubinoos toured Japan and released a two CD compilation titled One Two That's It. In 2009 the band toured Spain and released the compilation CD HodgePodge which featured one newly recorded track, a cover of The Hollies' classic, "Bus Stop."

Music critic John M. Borack called Paleophonic No. 36 in his list of the best power pop albums of all time, praising its "trademark pitch-perfect harmonies".[1]

In January 2010, The Rubinoos played their first kids show in support of their first all ages CD Biff-Boff-Boing. The CD is a mix of covers and new originals.

In May 2010, to coincide with their Spain/Italy tour, the Rubinoos released their first new original album in five years - Automatic Toaster, produced by Robbie Rist.

More recently, the group was in the news after filing a plagiarism lawsuit in mid-2007 against Canadian pop-punk musician Avril Lavigne claiming that her song "Girlfriend" had too much in common with "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend". The parties confidentially settled out of court in early 2008.[3]The conflict led to a re-interest in the Rubinoos' music, particularly on YouTube.[4]

Lawsuit

In 2007, Dunbar and co-writer James Gangwer sued Canadian pop-rock singer Avril Lavigne, claiming that her hit song "Girlfriend" had too much in common with "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend".

Filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, the case also named Avril Lavigne Publishing, her songwriting partner Dr. Luke, RCA Records, and Apple Inc. as defendants.[5] Lavigne's manager, Terry McBride, as well as Lavigne herself, denied that "Girlfriend" was copied from "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend," and pointed out that "Boyfriend" itself was similar to the Rolling Stones' "Get Off of My Cloud". The two parties reached a confidential settlement in January 2008.

Members

Current lineup

Jon Rubin - vocals, guitar (1970-1985, 1999–present)

Tommy Dunbar - guitar, vocals (1970-1985, 1999–present)

Donn "Donno" Spindt - drums, vocals (1971-1985, 1999–present)

Al Chan - bass, vocals (1980-1985, 1999–present)

Touring musicians

Susie Davis - keyboards, vocals (2002–present)

David Rokeach - drums (2007–present)

Former members

Greg 'Curly' Keranen - bass, vocals (1970–1971, 1973–1975)

Alex Carlin - organ (1970–1971)

Ralph Granich - drums (1970–1971)

Danny Woods - saxophone (1970–1971)

Tom Carpender - bass, vocals (1971–1973)

Royse Ader - bass, vocals (1975–1980)

Michael Boyd - keyboards, vocals (1981–1982)

Discography

Studio albums

The Rubinoos (1977)

Back to the Drawing Board (1979)

Party of Two EP (1983)

Paleophonic (1998)

Crimes Against Music (2003)

Twist Pop Sin (2006)

Biff-Boff-Boing (children's CD) (2010)

Automatic Toaster (2010)

45 (2015)

Compilations

Bezerk Times (1978)

The Basement Tapes (1993)

Garage Sale (1994)

The Basement Tapes Plus (1999)

Anthology (2002)

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Rubinoos (2007) (3-CD box set)

One Two That's It (2008)

HodgePodge (2009)

The Best of The Rubinoos (2014?)

Live album

Live in Japan (2004)

A Night Of All Covers -Live At Koenji High, Tokyo (2018)

References

John M. Borack (2007). Shake some action: the ultimate power pop guide. Not Lame Recordings. pp. 17, 64. ISBN 978-0-9797714-0-8.

"Jojoblog backstage : Interview #15 : Greg "Curly" Keranen". Jojofiles2.blogspot.com. 2007-04-12. Retrieved 2014-04-25.

"Avril Lavigne "Girlfriend" Lawsuit Settlement; Rubinoos Avril Lavigne". popcrunch.com. January 10, 2008. Retrieved July 3, 2010.

James Montgomery (July 9, 2007). "Avril Lavigne Responds To Lawsuit, Says She's Been 'Falsely Accused'". MTV.com. Retrieved July 3, 2010.

"Apple sued for duping Apple TV image, hosting iTunes track". Appleinsider.com. Retrieved 2014-04-26.

External links

Official site

The Rubinoos facebook

The Rubinoos Automatic Toaster Review

The Rubinoos at AllMusic

Review of The Rubinoos Live In Madrid Feb. 7, 2009 at solo-rock.com (in Spanish)

Review of One, Two, That's It at Buhdge.com

December 2007 article from The East Bay Express

Review of Paleophonic at thenightowl.com

[workfromhomeyoutuber]

SpinupWP: Full Stack Laravel Developer (Vue.js)

Headquarters: Remote URL: https://spinupwp.com/

Hi, my name is Brad Touesnard. I’m the founder of Delicious Brains Inc. We make high quality products for WordPress. 

The “we” is currently a small team of six developers, one designer, one marketer, and myself. I’m very proud to say that our little crew has been managing to delight thousands of customers for years. 

In addition to this position, I’m currently in the process of hiring a Developer Writer and a WordPress Developer with plans for more soon. We have big plans for 2020. Exciting times! 

The Job 

Back in November 2018, we launched a new SaaS product called SpinupWP (a modern cloud-based server control panel designed for WordPress). We launched out of beta in May last year and have been growing steadily ever since. We’ve helped thousands of customers spin up over 8,000 sites, perform over 62,000 site backups, and perform over 660,000 tasks! 

Currently, Gilbert and Ash work full-time on SpinupWP developing and maintaining the app as well as supporting all of our customers. Lewis, our in-house designer helps with all things design as well. 

I’m looking for a talented Laravel developer to join Gilbert and Ash to help build new features for SpinupWP as well as help out with support and documentation. 

The app is built using Laravel (PHP) and the front-end is built using Vue.js, so lots of experience with both frameworks and their associated tooling is essential. You’ll also be using Ansible to make sure SpinupWP provisions servers and creates and maintains sites using our LEMP stack (Nginx, PHP, MySQL, Redis, etc) so sysadmin experience of hosting sites/web apps is also essential. 

We currently work in eight-week cycles with a two-week cooldown period where you can work on whatever you want from the SpinupWP backlog. All of our code is committed to GitHub and your code will be reviewed by Gilbert or Ash using GitHub pull requests. You’ll also be reviewing Gilbert and Ash’s code. 

Responsibilities 

Help plan and define the scope of new features

Build new features using modern PHP (Laravel), JavaScript (Vue) and Ansible

Work on bug fixes and improvements during each cycle

Maintain and write new unit and acceptance tests

Write documentation and in-app copy

Support our customers via email

Write articles and tutorials for our blog

Attend company retreats (see details below)

Requirements

Expert PHP & JavaScript development skills

10,000+ hours (6+ years working full-time) of advanced PHP development

10,000+ hours of HTML & CSS development

10,000+ hours of advanced JavaScript development

8,000+ hours (5+ years working full-time) of project work with Laravel

5,000+ hours (3+ years working full-time) of project work with Vue.js

1,600+ hours (1+ years working full-time) of project work with git as source control

Sysadmin experience hosting sites/web apps on Nginx, PHP, MySQL, Redis

Experience writing automated tests

Excellent English communication skills (spoken and written)

Work hours in a North America time zone

Self-motivated and work well independently

Comfortable working remotely (we don’t have an office)

Nice-to-Have 

Experience with WordPress

Experience with Ansible

Experience building and using REST APIs

UX and design skills

Open source contributions

Computer Science degree or equivalent

About You 

You’re excited about the prospect of working on the full spectrum of tasks that are required to build a successful SaaS app. From backend and frontend development, sysadmin, design and UX to documentation and support. You don’t mind wearing multiple hats on any given day. 

You’re curious and love to learn. You embrace the opportunity to level up, learn something new and really dig into it. You’re a disciplined worker and have no trouble getting work done at home on any given day. 

You value consistency above preference and will adopt new coding styles, standards, and tools to that end. You are stellar at identifying the simple, elegant solution in a sea of over-engineering possibilities. 

Although you often need people to help you generate ideas and formulate a plan of attack on a project, you do your best work in isolation without interruption. You’re proactive in tackling things that need to be done without direction. 

You’re exceptional at communicating in writing via instant message, email, etc. You’re ok on the phone and video chat too. You understand that clear, concise written communication is how remote teams thrive. Putting a pull request up for review without explaining its context is unheard of for you. 

You own both successes and failures. When a project you’re leading turns into a disaster, you own it and you learn from it. You never point the finger at others. 

You invite criticism and genuinely want to grow as a professional. You’re onboard with pushing each other to be better and are not afraid to give constructive criticism in addition to receiving it. 

Perks 

Location Independent. Work from wherever you’re happiest, as long as you can make scheduled meetings.

Choose Your Schedule. Most companies claim to have flexible hours, but the reality is often very different. We flex our hours for real. 💪As long you’re hitting 30-37.5 hours per week on average and you do what you say you’ll do, we’re good.

Company Retreats. As a remote company, it’s super important to get some face time. Last year we met up in Berlin and we’re headed to Portugal in June. Will you be joining us?

Personal Development. If there’s a conference or event that will help you level up, the company will cover your expenses. You’re also allotted 3 hours per month to learn something new, participate in community discussions, and/or contribute to an open source project.

Profit Sharing. I present a Profit & Loss report to the team quarterly so everyone knows how the company is doing. And when the company does well, the team does well.

Company Holidays. Things get pretty quiet in late December / early January, so we always treat ourselves to a couple of weeks off to reboot during this time.

Paid Leave. For the birth or adoption of a child, the company offers 8 weeks of 100% paid leave for primary caregivers and 3 weeks for secondary caregivers. We also offer 5 paid sick days and 3 days of paid bereavement leave.

Competitive Salaries. The company pays salaries that are competitive with the market in which you reside. We don’t use the benefits of remote as leverage to negotiate lower salaries.

Apply 

Fill out the application form: https://deliciousbrains.com/laravel-developer-apply 

We are an equal opportunity employer. Application information that is prone to unconscious biases is hidden during the review process whenever possible. We judge the content of the applications on their own without knowledge of the applicant’s race, color, gender, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, physical or mental disability, or age. We support workplace diversity, but not at the expense of equal opportunity and meritocracy. We’re looking for talented and empathetic people no matter their other attributes. 

I look forward to reviewing your application. 

Best of luck, 

Brad Touesnard Founder & CEO Delicious Brains Inc. 

To apply: https://deliciousbrains.com/laravel-developer-apply

from We Work Remotely: Remote jobs in design, programming, marketing and more https://ift.tt/38s5SKk from Work From Home YouTuber Job Board Blog https://ift.tt/38AAtp2

[biofunmy]

‘Jeopardy’ stars ask fans to play along for pancreatic cancer research

CLOSE

“Jeopardy!” contestant Dhruv Gaur got to tell Alex Trebek “what everybody at the tournament was thinking.” USA TODAY

“Jeopardy!” stars are asking fans to play along during the Tournament of Champions Finals – for a good cause. 

It’s been an emotional year for the game show. In January, the 2018 Teachers Tournament winner Larry Martin died of pancreatic cancer. In March, host Alex Trebek revealed he, too, was battling the disease, and this fall shared he had entered a second round of chemotherapy.

Now “Jeopardy!” alumni are organizing a fundraiser for the cause, encouraging viewers to play along at home during Thursday and Friday’s finals episodes and donate $1 for each correct response they come up with to the Lustgarten Foundation for pancreatic cancer research.

And hey, if folks want to double down, so be it. “Some folks are doing variations on (giving) extra money for the Daily Doubles or for Final Jeopardy. Some people jokingly said they’re going to do $1 for every incorrect answer they get because they’re not very good at the show,” chuckles Tournament player Steven Grade, who lost to James Holzhauer in Tuesday’s episode.

On Thursday morning, a target goal of $10,000 was set by the foundation. Fans can pledge donations here. 

“Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek with Tournament of Champions player Steven Grade. (Photo: Jeopardy Productions, Inc)

‘I’m not afraid of dying’: ‘Jeopardy!’ host Alex Trebek opens up about cancer diagnosis

As the tournament – among  the most-watched “Jeopardy!” shows of the year – ends, fans can share their donations with the hashtag #WeLoveYouAlex, which went viral this week after contestant Dhruv Gaur wrote a heartfelt message to Trebek instead of a Final Jeopardy answer on Monday’s show.

The contestant-led charitable play-along came together on a group chat among a group of “Jeopardy!” champions, Grade says.

It’s the same outlet five-time champion Gilbert Collins first approached his “Jeopardy!” pals with the idea of wearing purple ribbons on the show in support of pancreatic cancer awareness. 

The #Jeopardy Tournament of Champions competitors are organizing a charitable play along to help fight pancreatic cancer. See below for details, play along, spread the word, and let’s do what we can to help win this fight. pic.twitter.com/tP9CG49paP

— Steven Grade (@ask_Steven) November 5, 2019

This year’s “Jeopardy!” tournament players Lindsey Schulz, Gaur, Kyle Jones, Josh Hill, Eric R. Backes, and Anneke Garcia and Holzhauer have been promoting the fundraiser on Twitter, along with support from former champs Buzzy Cohen and Brad Rutter.

Grade recalls his experience with Trebek taping the finals two months ago in Culver City, Calif.

More: Teen ‘Jeopardy!’ champ donates $10,000 to cancer research in honor of Alex Trebek

“He was still the same old Alex. He’s the best at what he does,” says the Atlanta-based sports industry consultant. “But we all knew that there was this cloud hanging over our heads. The day before the tournament started (Trebek) told us what he announced the next day, which was that he was going to need to undergo a second round of chemotherapy because his numbers had gone back up following the completion of his first round. So the importance and the gravity of the occasion, if it wasn’t already there, it was certainly there after that.” 

And sure, Grade has a few regrets about his loss on Tuesday’s show.

“I would have liked for it to have gone a little bit differently,” he admits. “There’s a couple of clues I’ve been beating myself over the head over for the past couple of months. But going back and looking at it, I think I played better than I thought.”

Overall, Grade says this season of “Jeopardy!” has become more meaningful than trivia wins and cash prizes.

“My memory of (this tournament) isn’t going to be losing on ‘Jeopardy,'” he says. “It’s going to be all of the stuff that we as a group are able to do to hopefully help end pancreatic cancer.”

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[blackkudos]

Marshall Taylor

Marshall Walter "Major" Taylor (26 November 1878 – 21 June 1932) was an American cyclist who won the world 1 mile (1.6 km) track cycling championship in 1899 after setting numerous world records and overcoming racial discrimination. Taylor was the first African-American cyclist to achieve the level of world champion and only the second black man to win a world championship in any sport, after Canadian boxer George Dixon.

Early life

Taylor was the son of Gilbert Taylor, a Civil War veteran, and Saphronia Kelter, who had migrated from Louisville, Kentucky, with their large family to a farm in rural Indiana. He was one of eight children: five girls and three boys. Taylor's father was employed in the household of a wealthy Indianapolis family, the Southards, as a coachman, where Taylor was also raised and educated. When Taylor was a child, his father would bring him to work. The employer had a son, Dan Southard, who was the same age and the two boys became close friends. Taylor later moved in with the family and was able to live a more advantaged life than his parents could provide.

This period of living and learning at the Southard house lasted from the time he was eight until he was 12, when the Southards moved to Chicago and Taylor "was soon thrust into the real world."

At 12, Taylor received his first bicycle from the Southards and became such an expert trick rider that a local bike shop owner, Tom Hay, hired him to stage exhibitions and perform cycling stunts outside his bicycle shop. The name of the shop was Hay and Willits. The compensation was $6 a week, plus a free bike worth $35. Taylor performed the stunts wearing a soldier's uniform, hence the nickname "Major."

When he was 13 in 1891, Taylor won his first race, an amateur event in Indianapolis. Two years later, in 1893 at age 15, Taylor beat the 1 mile (1.6 km) amateur track record where he was "hooted" and then barred from the track because of his color.

Racing career

Amateur racing

Major Taylor won his first significant race in 1895 at age 16. The 75 miles (121 km) road race, near his hometown of Indianapolis, Indiana, "came amid the racial threats of his white competitors." Shortly afterward, he relocated to Massachusetts with the help of his benefactor, Louis D. "Birdie" Munger, who was to become his lifelong friend and mentor, to a more tolerant area of the country.

As an African-American, Taylor was banned from bicycle racing in Indiana once he started winning and made a reputation as "The Black Cyclone." In 1896, he moved from Indianapolis to Worcester, Mass., then a center of the United States bicycle industry with half a dozen factories and 30 bicycle shops, to work as a bicycle mechanic in the Worcester Cycle Manufacturing Company factory, owned by Louis D. "Birdie" Munger where he was a racer for Munger's team. Taylor first worked for Munger in Indianapolis and along the line, Munger "made up his mind to make Taylor a champion."

Taylor's first east coast race was in a League of American Wheelmen 1 mile (1.6 km) race in New Haven, where he started in last place but won.

The first time his name is mentioned in The New York Times occurred on September 26, 1895, He participated in a 10 miles (16 km) event in Brooklyn, New York, on Ocean Parkway; the race was called the Citizen Handicap. Major Taylor listed his address as Worcester, Massachusetts, and rode with a 1:30 handicap in a field of 200. There were nine scratch riders.

Professional racing

Taylor turned professional in 1896 at the age of 18 and soon emerged as the "most formidable racer in America." One of his biggest supporters was President Theodore Roosevelt who kept track of Taylor throughout his 17-year racing career.

Beginning on December 5, 1896, and ending on December 12, Taylor participated in a six-day cycle race in Madison Square Garden where 5,000 people attended. The event was an indoor cycle meet and Taylor had achieved enough notoriety to be listed among the "American contestants" which included A. A. Hansen, the Minneapolis "rainmaker" and Teddy Goodman. Many "experts from abroad" participated such as Albert Schock of Switzerland, Frank J. Waller, Frank Forster and Ed von Hoeg of Germany, and B. W. Pierce of Canada. Several countries were represented including Scotland, Wales, France, England and Denmark.

The main feature of the meet was the six-day race, however, several other events were of "full interest" such as the .5 miles (0.80 km) race between Jay Eaton and Teddy Goodman. Also, of interest, the .5 miles (0.80 km) scratch and the .5 miles (0.80 km) handicap for professionals. Additionally, there were .5 miles (0.80 km) scratch and handicap for amateurs.

Taylor entered the race and listed his address as South Brooklyn, New York. It was his first professional race and he won the final heat by 105 feet (32 m) over A. C. Meixwell of Philadelphia and E. C. Bald, scratch rider representing Syracuse, New York, and riding a Barnes bicycle. Taylor lapped the entire field during the .5 miles (0.80 km) handicap race.

At the Blue Ribbon Meet of the Bostonian Cycle Club hosted on May 19, 1897, Taylor won first place in the 1 mile (1.6 km) open professional on a Comet bicycle.

Although he is listed in the Middletown town directory in 1896, it is not known how long he still resided there after he became a professional racer. He eventually settled in Worcester, Massachusetts, (where the newspapers called him "The Worcester Whirlwind"), marrying there and having a daughter, although his career required him to spend a large amount of time traveling in America, Australia, and Europe.

By 1898, he held seven world records at distances from .25 miles (0.40 km) to 2 miles (3.2 km) and he placed first in 29 of 49 races in which he competed. No one else came close to that record. Taylor was entitled to recognition as national champion but formation of a new cycling league that year "clouded" his claim to the title.

During 1899 he won the world championship, preceded only by boxing bantamweight George Dixon as a black world champion in any sport.

In one six-week period in 1899, Taylor established seven world records. These included the .25 miles (0.40 km), .33 miles (0.53 km), .5 miles (0.80 km), .66 miles (1.06 km), .75 miles (1.21 km), 1 mile (1.6 km) and the 2 miles (3.2 km). He did the mile from a standing start in 1:41, a record that stood for 28 years.

Stearns racing

Taylor went to Syracuse, New York, for the 1899 season with his friend, mentor and manager, Louis "Birdie" Munger to sign a contract with E. C. Stearns Company. Taylor, Munger and sponsor, Harry Sager had arrived in the city to enter into negotiations with the Olive Wheel Company, however, they were able to work out a more lucrative contract with Stearns who agreed to build Taylor's bicycles using the Sager gear chainless mechanism designed by Harry Sager. The bikes only weighed about 20 pounds (9.1 kg) and had an 88-inch (2,200 mm) gear for sprinting and a 120-inch (3,000 mm) gear for longer, paced runs.

Stearns also agreed to build Taylor a "revolutionary" steam-powered pacing tandem "behind which he could attack world records and challenge the leading exponents of paced racing." Although the pacing tandem was temperamental, Taylor easily broke the world record of 1 mile (1.6 km) in 01:19 at a speed of 45.56 miles per hour (73.32 km/h) and beat his competitor, Eddie McDuffie on November 15, 1899.

After the 1899 world championship, many claims were made that the whole thing was a farce because Taylor had "not competed with the strongest riders." The world records, however, showed the record and were impossible to dismiss. No other rider that year had come close to his fast performances and the "range and variety" of his victories which included 22 first places in major championship races around the country, the League of American Wheelmen Championship which he won on points, world champion in Montreal, and the defense of his own world record in two "strenuous record-breaking campaigns."

Iver Johnson colors

In late 1899, Taylor raced under the colors of the Iver Johnson Arms and Cycle Company in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, and won the 1 mile (1.6 km) sprint world championship by a lead of one wheel in a "thrilling" race at Montreal, Canada. He placed second in the 2 miles (3.2 km) sprint and won the .5 miles (0.80 km) championship.

World sprint champion

Earl Kiser, who was nicknamed the "Little Dayton Demon," raced for the Stearns "Yellow Fellow" team during the same period as Taylor. Kiser became a two-time world cycling champion and competed all across Europe in the late 1890s. Kiser gave support to Taylor after he was barred from most national races. Kiser petitioned to have him included.

Taylor won the world championship in the 1-mile sprint in 1899 in Montreal. He was the second African-American athlete to win a world championship in any sport, after Canadian-born bantamweight boxer George Dixon of Boston won a world title in a series of bouts in 1890-91. He did not compete in the world championships again until 1909 in Copenhagen, and he did not win there.

Foreign racing

Taylor participated in a European tour in 1902 where he entered 57 races and won 40 of them, defeating the champions of Germany, England and France.

Besides racing in Europe, Taylor also competed in Australia and New Zealand, although because he was very religious, never on Sunday. He always carried a catechism and began each race with a silent prayer and refused to compete on the Sabbath.

During February 1903, Taylor was competing in the Sydney (New South Wales) handicap for a $5,000 prize and the headline flashed worldwide was "Rich Cycle Race."

Nitroglycerine

The fascination with six-day bicycle races spread across the Atlantic and the same appeal to base instincts brought in the crowds in America as well. And the more spectators paid at the gate, the higher the prizes could be and the greater was the incentive of riders to stay awake - or be kept awake - to ride the greatest distance. Their exhaustion was countered by soigneurs (the French word for "carers"), helpers akin to seconds in boxing. Among the treatments they supplied was nitroglycerine, a drug used to stimulate the heart after cardiac attacks and which was credited with improving riders' breathing.

Riders suffered hallucinations from the exhaustion and perhaps the drugs. Taylor refused to continue one New York race, saying: "I cannot go on with safety, for there is a man chasing me around the ring with a knife in his hand."

Racism in the field

Although he was greatly celebrated abroad, particularly in France, Taylor's career was still held back by racism, particularly in the Southern states where he was not permitted to compete against Caucasians. The League of American Wheelmen for a time excluded blacks from membership. Other prominent bicycle racers of the era, such as Tom Cooper and Eddie Bald, often cooperated to ensure Taylor's defeat. During his career he had ice water thrown at him during races, and nails scattered in front of his wheels, and was often boxed in by other riders, preventing the sprints to the front of the pack at which he was so successful.

In his autobiography, he reports actually being tackled on the race track by another rider, who choked him into unconsciousness but received only a $50 fine as punishment. Nevertheless, he does not dwell on such events in the book; rather it is evident that he means it to serve as an inspiration to other African-Americans trying to overcome similar treatment. Taylor retired at age 32 in 1910, saying he was tired of the racism. His advice to African-American youths wishing to emulate him was that while bicycle racing was the appropriate route to success for him, he would not recommend it in general; and that individuals must find their own best talent.

Personal life

Taylor married Daisy V. Morris in Ansonia, Connecticut, on March 21, 1902. While in Australia in 1904, Taylor and his wife had a daughter whom they named Sydney, in honor of the city in which she was born.

Later life and death

Taylor was still breaking records in 1908 but age was starting to "creep up on him." He finally quit the track in 1910 at the age of 32.

While Taylor was reported to have earned between $25,000 and $30,000 a year when he returned to Worcester at the end of his career, by the time of his death he had lost everything to bad investments (including self-publishing his autobiography), persistent illness, and the stock market crash. His marriage over, he died at age 53 on June 21, 1932—a pauper in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood, in the charity ward of Cook County Hospital—to be buried in an unmarked grave. He was survived by his daughter.

In 1948, a group of former pro bike racers, with money donated by Schwinn Bicycle Co. (then) owner Frank W. Schwinn, organized the exhumation and relocation of Taylor's remains to a more prominent part of Mount Glenwood Cemetery in Thornton Township, Illinois, near Chicago. A monument to his memory stands in front of the Worcester Public Library in Worcester, and Indianapolis named the city's bicycle track after Taylor. Worcester has also named a high-traffic street after Taylor.

"Dedicated to the memory of Marshall W. 'Major' Taylor, 1878-1932. World's champion bicycle racer who came up the hard way without hatred in his heart, an honest, courageous and god-fearing, clean-living, gentlemanly athlete. A credit to the race who always gave out his best. Gone but not forgotten." Inscription on bronze marker on gravestone paid for by Frank W. Schwinn.

Taylor's daughter, Sydney Taylor Brown, died in 2005 at age 101; her survivors include a son and his five children. In 1984, Ms. Brown donated an extensive scrapbook collection on her father to the University of Pittsburgh Archives.

Major Taylor's gravesite: 41.554497°N 87.61436°W / 41.554497; -87.61436

Quotes

"It is my thought that clean living and a strict observance of the golden rule of true sportsmanship are foundation stones without which a championship structure cannot be built."—Marshall Taylor in The Fastest Bicycle Rider in the World

"Life is too short for any man to hold bitterness in his heart."—Marshall Taylor

"I cannot go on with safety, for there is a man chasing me around the ring with a knife in his hand." Said allegedly under the influence of nitroglycerin, a popular performance enhancer at the time

"There are positively no mental, physical or moral attainments too lofty for the Negro to accomplish if granted a fair and equal opportunity."—Marshall Taylor

"I trust they will use that terrible prejudice as an inspiration to struggle on to the heights in their chosen vocations."—Marshall Taylor

“A real honest-to-goodness champion can always win on the merits."—Marshall Taylor

Honors and awards

Taylor was posthumously inducted into the United States Bicycling Hall of Fame in 1989.

In popular culture

The Major Taylor Velodrome in Indianapolis, Indiana, and a bicycle trail in Chicago are named in Taylor's honor.

On July 24, 2006, the city of Worcester, Massachusetts, changed the name of part of Worcester Center Boulevard to Major Taylor Boulevard — where his memory is honored for his athletic feats as well as his character.

The Major Taylor monument, a sculpture by Antonio Tobias Mendez, was commissioned by the Major Taylor Association and installed in Worcester, Massachusetts, in May 2008.

A bicycle, of unproven provenance was donated by Worcester resident Sy Farnsworth to the Worcester Historical Museum — with the understanding the bicycle may have belonged to Taylor.

The song "He Never Raced on Sunday" on the 2004 album "Double V" by blues musician Otis Taylor (no relation) is about Major Taylor.

The band Oh Yeah! performed a tribute song describing Major Taylor's Iver Johnson bicycle and the racism he encountered, entitled "Major Taylor's Grave".

The first African-American cycling club named in honor of Major Taylor was organized in Columbus, Ohio, in 1979.

In East Palo Alto, California, a racially mixed community that was until recently mostly black, hosts a Major Taylor Cycling Club.

Other cycling clubs dedicated to Major Taylor include the 'Major Motion' Cycling club in Los Angeles, the Major Taylor Cycling Club in Minnesota, the Major Taylor Cycling Club Chicago in Chicago, IL and the Major Taylor Cycling Club of New Jersey.

Nike markets a sports shoe named after Major Taylor.

The company Soma Fabrications makes a set of bicycle handlebars called the Major Taylor Track Bar, a replica of Major Taylor's 1930s bike handlebar.

The city of Columbus, Ohio renamed the Alum Creek Trail bicycle path as the 'Major Taylor Bikeway' on September 3, 2010.

In South Los Angeles between the intersection of Century Boulevard and Central Avenue to the east and 98th Street and Figueroa Street to the west is a route designated by officially installed city signs as the Marshall W. "Major" Taylor Bike Route.

Taylor was portrayed by actor Philip Morris in the Australian mini-series Tracks of Glory.

Wikipedia

[scienceblogtumbler]

What does 6G technology hold in store?

Picture a world in which doctors, using robotic technology, can operate on patients from hundreds of miles away. Or one where robots rescue wounded soldiers, detect and neutralize mines, and search for dirty bombs.

Imagine being able to call your loved ones from thousands of miles away and not just catch a glimpse, but become a part of their surroundings.

This is the world that the sixth-generation wireless network can unlock, says Tommaso Melodia, Northeastern’s William Lincoln Smith chair professor of electrical and computer engineering.

“But to be able to do that,” he says, “we need to be able to reliably, securely, and in a time-critical manner transfer wirelessly massive amounts of data that our current networks cannot.”

Melodia is the director of the Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things at Northeastern. This fall, the institute, in partnership with Interdigital, a company that specializes in the research and development of mobile systems and video technology—and a strategic member of the institute—will host a two-day virtual conference. The program will convene leaders from industry, academia, and government to consider the possibilities of the successor to the 5G mobile network, which cellphone companies began deploying worldwide in 2019, and develop a roadmap for its research and development.

“Right now with the deployment of 5G it is time to start thinking about research for 6G,” says Melodia. “What will 6G look like? What will be the applications? What will be use cases and drivers for next generational systems?”

The interest in 6G is driven by the growing need for increased wireless capacity and support of more connected devices.

Increased bandwidth will allow new networks to serve not only cellphones but also be used as general internet service providers for laptops, desktop computers, and objects in our surroundings, enabling new applications in the Internet of Things area.

“After observing the evolution of 5G technology as a critical national infrastructure need, we decided that now was the right time to develop a new 6G platform to respond better to future industry, societal, and policy needs,” says Abhimanyu (Manu) Gosain, technical program director for the Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research Program and director of industry engagement for the Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things. “This forum will be the focal point for national and global information exchange among technologists, policy makers and futurists.”

Increased wireless capacity is essential for maintaining economic productivity, health, and safety, Melodia says. It can also enable innovative technologies and solutions to address a need before it even arises.

“Forecasts show that by 2030, there will be 500 billion devices connected to the network—that’s more than 50 times the number of people that are forecasted to be alive by then,” Melodia says. “That’s something that the networks of today don’t have the—I’m going to say responsiveness—to be able to enable seamless interaction between devices and human users that can be physically distant from one another.”

As 6G begins to enter society’s consciousness, the symposium couldn’t be more timely.

“A collaborative, yet competitive, ecosystem of diverse innovation is crucial for driving future wireless technologies like 6G,” says Doug Castor, senior director at InterDigital.  “The goal of the symposium is to spark a discussion that features key global players—the innovators, enablers, and disruptors of technology—to begin the process of defining a clear vision for 6G.”

Slated for Oct. 20-21, the symposium will feature two keynote speakers and six thematic panels. The keynotes will address the vision for 6G, and discuss key players, timelines, and challenges the telecommunications industry is likely to face in the development of the network. A second keynote will explore the role of spectrum and the regulatory and policy considerations for new networks.

In the first panel, leaders at leading wireless companies will discuss the applications that will be enabled by the sixth-generation of mobile networks, including volumetric media streaming, connected industries and automation, multi-sensory extended reality, and health insurance marketplace eHealth.

The second panel will feature a discussion of different ways to reimagine wireless network architecture to support new performance measurements and encourage the evolution of the architecture to support 6G.

Kaushik Chowdhury, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern, will moderate a panel that will explore the role of artificial intelligence and machine learning in 6G technologies as well as the key enablers that support those innovations in wireless.

Chowdhury’s colleague, Josep Jornet, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, will moderate a discussion about the innovative research and techniques driving the search to unveil untapped spectrum and the role of governments and spectrum policy makers in enabling spectrum access.

The fifth panel will explore the advancement in enabling spectrum sharing, and how the use of a software solution and artificial intelligence will affect spectrum sharing in future wireless systems. Panelists will outline the challenges and opportunities of transitioning future cell networks to a cloud-native, end-to-end programmable, and fully virtualized paradigm.

The final panel, moderated by Gosain, will investigate approaches to advance the cloud platform services model for testbeds used by researchers toward the advancement of wireless communications, and develop approaches to creating an infrastructure platform for any application.

The program will include keynote talks by Mazin Gilbert, vice president for advanced technology and head of research at AT&T and Thyaga Nandagopal, head of the computing and communication foundations division at the National Science Foundation. The conference will also include the participation of Monisha Ghosh, chief technology officer of the Federal Communications Commission, and other leaders from industry, academia, and technology alliances, forums, and networks.

For media inquiries, please contact media@northeastern.edu.

source https://scienceblog.com/518345/what-does-6g-technology-hold-in-store/

[holytheoristtastemaker]

Healthcare companies, insurers, government agencies and big tech companies have used technology from Pegasystems to develop apps to manage the disruption caused by coronavirus

Pegasystems (Pega), which provides technology to some of the world’s largest companies, has used its expertise to help businesses reorganise at lightning speed in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The company, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has worked with governments, healthcare companies and insurers to build apps that will help the organisations continue to communicate with their customers during lockdown.

Pegasystems may not be a household name in big tech, but the company, which made revenues of $900m last year, supplies sophisticated IT systems to some of the world’s biggest organisations, including Centrica, Ford, Coca-Cola and Cisco, and most recently the US Internal Revenue Service.

The company specialises in case management tools, cloud software, artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics technology, and customer relationship management (CRM) software. It offers “low-code” application development which allows businesses to build and develop apps quickly.

When the pandemic struck, Pega worked with businesses to develop apps to manage the problems of Covid-19, including technology to process insurance claims from their customers, manage the safety of their employees and make social distancing possible at work.

Google deploys app to reduce Covid-19 risks for network engineers

Google used Pega’s technology to change the way it manages the deployment of network engineers to minimise the risks of catching and spreading Covid-19.

The company saw unprecedented demand for Google Meet, an online conferencing system similar to Zoom, following the coronavirus outbreak.

Between January 2020 and the end of May, demand for the service rose by a factor of 30, and three million people were joining the service daily.

The normal peaks and troughs in demand for Google Meet have been replaced by a steady upward demand, said James Stravoprolous, global lead for network deployment operations at Google.

“That has caused us to change quite a bit of how we operate across the globe. The build [rate] and urgency of how we built the network has increased, even as we have more strict safety requirements,” he told an online conference.

Google, which has operations in 50 countries across thousands of locations, which it calls “points of presence” (Pops), is using Pega’s technology to allocate job tickets to network engineers, contractors and staff in independent datacentres which host Google servers.

The software, known as “dispatch logic”, allocates job tickets, based on skills, the quality of work required and cost, to the most appropriate person or team. It schedules the work and requests access to third-party colocation datacentres that host Google’s servers.

Once the work is complete, Google uses its data warehousing platform, Big Query, to analyse the work and plan the growth of its networks.

“We have two main priorities. The first is to keep people safe, and this is of most importance to us. The next is to ensure that all our customers have the best quality of service possible,” said Vidhya Shankar Govindarajan, operations manager at Google.

Companies roll out technology to respond to Covid-19

For Virgin Media, which has four million subscribers, the coronavirus outbreak meant the sudden closure of its offshore contact centres. It used its Pega-developed customer service technology to provide online support to customers and to allow 400 volunteers from across the company to step in and provide telephone support.

An Asia-Pacific airline, which was forced to suspend its flights because of the pandemic, has agreed a contract with Pega to help it use technology to reach its customers more effectively and win them back once it is safe to open for business.

Banks and governments are using a small business lending application developed by Pega that can be configured in a few days to manage loan programmes.

A US state government is using Pega’s technology to manage a flood of unemployment claims. It was able to develop a mobile app with a chatbot to process the claims in three weeks. By April 2020, it had processed 750,000 applications.

Google came up with what it called its “Metro partition plan” to minimise the risk of Covid-19 infections spreading throughout the workforce.

In the past, a Google engineer working in a city such as New York or San Francisco could be allocated a ticket to work on the network at any Google location in the city.

Google developed software to segregate the workforce by ensuring that individuals or groups of staff only carry out work at a limited range of Google locations.

The company was able to create the application from scratch in less than a week.

“From concept to final deployment, we did it in about five business days, which was very important for a system like this because we are reacting to a health care crisis,” said Govindarajan, speaking at an online conference organised by Pega.

Google has also created a reporting system using the Google Chat service to alert people if they go to the wrong location.

The company plans to develop the app to trace workers’ contacts if they are exposed to the coronavirus to limit the spread of infection.

“We want the system to trace all the points of presence that have been contaminated, and who went to those specific locations,” he said.

Insurance company rushes out chatbots to speed claims

Insurance company Aflac, which provides critical illness, life and accident insurance to 50 million people, had developed apps to make it easier for people to make claims before the pandemic struck.

Aflac, which provides insurance mainly to people in the US and Japan, discovered before the pandemic that its customers were having trouble logging into the company’s website and mobile app whenever they need to make a claim.

They could not remember their user IDs or passwords, Rich Gilbert, Aflac’s chief digital and information officer, told conference viewers.

Aflac redeveloped its mobile app and the website to allow people to file claims based on the information they could remember. The system is able to use information they can recall to identify the right insurance policy.

“Now, policyholders don’t have to know their user ID, their password or their policy number to file a claim. When they log in and they come to our system, all they have to do is be able to provide a few pieces of information,” said Gilbert.

“Take the time to train your employees in the new technologies. Don’t assume immediate adoption, especially if you’re going from a legacy platform and process to a new process. It takes time to adapt and become proficient”

Rich Gilbert, Aflac

The company has also created a claims tracker which allows customers to keep track of the progress of their claims as they go through the assessment process.

Behind the scenes, Aflac used Pega to automate steps in the claims process, making it easier for staff to process payments.

These technologies may not be revolutionary in themselves, but applying them in insurance – which is frequently a late adopter of technology – was “transformative” said Gilbert.

Aflac was in the process of developing a live chat service for its customers when Covid-19 struck.

The company moved quickly to extend the service across the organisation. “We were able to scale that chat across all lines of our business in just a few weeks,” said Gilbert.

The company has gone on to create intelligent chatbots that can answer the top 15 queries that customers make. Aflac has found the bots are able to resolve 86% of these requests without human intervention.

The insurer has turned its Northern Ireland site into a centre of expertise for Pega, where it has hired and trained 32 Pega specialists.

Rolling out the technology was not completely smooth, and employees found it difficult to master at first. “Even when we implemented new technologies, even though they’re better, quicker, easier technologies, they had difficulty learning those new technologies,” said Gilbert.

“One lesson is, make sure you take the time to train your employees in the new technologies. Don’t assume immediate adoption, especially if you’re going from a legacy platform and process to a new process. It takes time to adapt and become proficient.”

Hospital group develops tech to monitor staff sick leave

HCA Healthcare, which runs 180 hospitals in the US and six hospitals and medical facilities in the UK, used Pega’s technology to develop an application to track how many of its staff were reporting in sick during the coronavirus pandemic.

The healthcare group found that a third of its hospital workforce, some 12,000 staff, were not registered on the scheduling system used across the rest of the group to monitor staff sickness.

HCA started mapping out ideas on a whiteboard to solve the problem and had a working prototype within three days, Barbara Coughlin, assistant vice-president of case management operations at the healthcare company, told the conference. By the following week, HCA had a fully working app that employees could use to report in sick.

The care group started a second project to help with discharging patients who had been treated for acute conditions into other areas of care more quickly.

Covid-19 had significantly affected discharges of acute patents, so HCA needed to develop a way of identifying the reasons for delays in discharging them.

HCA’s case management team started with an online polling tool, Survey Monkey, to gather data and to identify issues and trends. The technology required manual intervention, including downloading the results from Survey Monkey into an Excel spreadsheet twice a day.

HCA’s teams across project management, information technology, case management, and analytics and data worked with Pega to develop an application to automate the task.

The app, which went live on 17 April, pushes the discharge data from 185 in-patient units into HCA’s enterprise data warehouse, allowing the case management team to analyse the data and to identify the problems that are preventing patients from being discharged.

“It provides a high-level view of patients with barriers and those that have not been resolved with patients remaining in the hospital,” said Coughlin.

Bavarian government creates emergency aid app

Pega has also worked with the Bavarian government in Germany to develop an app to provide emergency financial aid to farmers, self-employed workers and small businesses during lockdown.

“They had a set of outdated and not really attached systems that they needed to be able to use to handle this enormous surge of people who needed financial support and financial aid,” Pegasystems founder and CEO Alan Trefler told the conference.

Pega, the government and cloud service provider T-Systems developed the app in five days. It allows people to apply for financial aid without having to manually fill in forms and email them to contact centres.

Some 500 clerks at the Bavarian Ministry of Economic Affairs can now review and approve applications for financial assistance from home – a task that would have been difficult and time-consuming using the previous document-heavy processes.

The unexpected benefits of lockdown

Pegasystems’ Trefler said his own business, which supplies technology to many of the Fortune 500 companies, is well positioned to weather the Covid-19 storm.

“It is very fortunate that the preponderance of our revenue and the preponderance of our sales is very much tied to companies which are clearly going to make it through this,” Trefler told Computer Weekly.

Since 2017, the company has shifted its business model from selling one-off software licences to subscriptions and cloud services, providing it with a steady flow of revenue.

In February, the company raised half a billion dollars in cash, just before the Covid-19 crisis became clear, putting Pega in a strong financial position.

The company has money in the bank, said Trefler, and might make acquisitions should opportunities arise to acquire technology companies that fit with Pega.

In May 2019, the company bought digital messaging platform In The Chat, which it is using to build chat services into its own products.

“When we do something like that, we’re always doing it with an eye of really weaving it into our platform, as opposed to leaving it as some standalone piece of software,” said Trefler. “We think that leads to what we sometimes refer to as a ‘Frankenstack’ which is lots of little dead software companies glued together, which ultimately is just not good for clients over time.”

“I think we’re going to see much more distributed workforces, much more digital engagement with customers and much higher standards inside businesses for how their technology and business architecture should work”

Alan Trefler, Pegasystems

And Pega is still hiring. Most recently it poached Hayden Stafford from Microsoft – where he was responsible for growing sales Microsoft Dynamics 365 cloud CRM service – as Pega’s president of global client engagement.

One unexpected benefit of widespread lockdowns is that Trefler and other Pega executives have been able to speak with the CEOs and CIOs of its clients far more frequently.

“A lot of the senior people we’ve wanted to talk to have been incredibly accessible. If anything, I think Covid has tripled or quadrupled our ability to have those right conversations,” he said.

Pega’s strategy is to link applications from different suppliers – such as Salesforce, an online service for managing sales leads, HR systems, email systems and robotic process automation (RPA) services – with Pega’s own technology so they work together.

The company has developed a technology it calls process fabric, which will, for example, allow employees to manage their work from a single page, even when it is held in multiple software systems.

Pega’s chief technology officer (CTO), Don Schuerman, said: “Business leaders [will be able] to see and understand where that work is flowing and where it’s being done, so that they can see where the potential bottlenecks and gaps in the process are. And they have visibility into work no matter where it lives.”

Pega’s clients have quickly rolled out the apps and technology they need to survive the next two or three months and are now focusing on what they need in the longer term.

“We’re going to see much more openness to people being able to work in a distributed fashion, much more of a need for the applications that interface with customers to be smarter,” Trefler told Computer Weekly.

“I think you’re going to see much more distributed workforces, much more digital engagement with customers and, to be honest, much higher standards inside businesses for how their technology and business architecture should work.”

Read more about the development of Pegasystems

Why Pegasystems’ CEO, Alan Trefler, has learned to think smaller.

From chess to ping pong: How Pegasystems is capturing the Fortune 500.

Pegasystems CEO Alan Trefler plans his next move for the $500m software company.

[victoriagloverstuff]

Life on a Moving Skyscraper, Crossing the Great Lakes

The room was moving when I woke. The propeller’s rotation shook the toilet, chipboard closets, desk, bed, couch, doors. Lakers are less rigid than oceangoing freighters because they don’t have to withstand the same conditions. The 740-foot Algoma Equinox was built on the Yangtze River in China. Builders welded additional steel supports into it so that the ship wouldn’t break in half during the journey back to the Great Lakes. The supports have since been removed, Captain Ross said. You can see the hull bend when the Equinox hits a big wave.

Living on a moving skyscraper is a strange feeling. I had no idea where we were or what time it was most of the day. The ship’s interior is lit with fluorescent light and smells a bit like a hospital. The crew wanders in and out of the mess hall all day and usually eats silently.

Some of the men I sat next to I never saw again. The cook, Mike Newell, was a constant presence in the mess hall. He would come out while I was eating and talk for an hour or more. One day he told me a story about another writer who had ridden on the ship. Mike had spoken with him extensively as well, but the reporter hadn’t mentioned him in the piece he later published. “What is that?” he asked me. I said I didn’t know. “I’d like to find that guy,” he said, swatting the towel. “I’d like to show him a few things.” We stared at each other for a moment, then he walked back into the kitchen. He didn’t talk to me for two days after that.

The sky looked hazy blue from the wheelhouse, which stands 75 feet above the deck. A thick band of clouds blocked the sun. Mustard-yellow exhaust fell from the smokestack and hovered a few feet above the water. The deck was painted rust red, with white handles on cargo covers and bright-yellow safety instructions. Trees glided by at ten miles an hour. The ship crossed the border into Ontario last night, Captain Ross said. We were passing Cornwall Island when I walked into the wheelhouse. The border enters the Saint Lawrence River there and zigzags 200 miles to Lake Ontario.

The helmsman steered while Captain Ross told me stories about shipping on the lakes. He rarely looked away from the windshield when he spoke. If he needed to give a command, he spoke over whoever was talking. If an important announcement sounded on the radio, he tuned everything out and listened. When Tony called from the cruise room to say that the internet was down, Captain Ross hung up on him and gave another order: “Line up the buoys to starboard. Two degrees port. No. Two more.”

*

Captain Ross had spent the last 33 years on freighters. He was 60 years old, with receding sandy-brown hair and a graying goatee. He squinted constantly. Crow’s feet reached to his sideburns, and his stocky build easily filled his T-shirt. In Algoma company photos, he dons a navy-blue reefer jacket and a captain’s hat. In the wheelhouse, he wore jeans, a polo shirt, and sandals.

Ross was 27 years old when his father, a lifetime Great Lakes captain, called him from Quebec City and asked if he wanted to be a deckhand. It was December 2nd and he was working as a data entry clerk for the Hudson’s Bay Company—the same company that was formed by a royal charter in 1670 and that now operates a chain of department stores with Lord & Taylor and Saks Fifth Avenue. He was married and had a newborn son. His father said the money was good, so Ross packed his things and moved onto the 600-foot George M. Carl.

He watched his father break up a knife fight his first day on the canaller and spent the next two weeks scraping and painting the bridge, cleaning and prepping cargo holds, and tending mooring cables. Captain Ross’s father had been at sea for half of his childhood, and Ross had never considered being a sailor. After he got his check for two weeks’ work—$700—he told his wife he was joining the fleet full-time.

It took Ross just four years to work his way up from deckhand to wheelsman to mate to captain. He attended marine school winter sessions, when the seaway is closed, then logged required ship hours during the warm months. In 1986 he captained his first boat, John A. France, out of port. “The first time you’re out there on your own, you realize there is nobody else to ask what to do,” he said. “My second and first mate were 60 and I was 30, and they were calling me ‘Old Man.’”

The first trip went without incident. The next 30 freighters he captained were not as easy. Gangs operated on the ships, and many of the deckhands were ex-cons who couldn’t get work elsewhere. The industry needed men so badly that if Captain Ross fired someone one day, he saw him on a competitor’s ship the next. Ross watched men get crushed by machines, mooring cables, and cargo hatches. He went looking for mates when they were late for a shift, only to find out that they had thrown themselves off the stern in the middle of the night.

“The Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum in Paradise, Michigan, estimates that 6,000 ships and 30,000 lives have been lost on the lakes.”

Regulations were looser back then. The crew made swimming pools by spreading tarps between cargo hatches during lake crossings and drank beer poolside all afternoon. They gambled and partied deep into the night and, sometimes, while waiting to get into a lock, they jumped overboard to cool off. “All we had was one TV in the cruise room,” he said. “Going past Cleveland we could see an hour of a baseball game until we lost reception. Everyone congregated then; no one stayed in their cabin. We’d have 30 people in the galley playing cribbage, guitar, and cards. It made for a tighter-knit crew.”

*

The 300-square-mile Great Lakes basin spans about a quarter of America’s northland. The coastlines of all five lakes combined add up to just under 11,000 miles, almost half the distance around the world. An average of 200,000 cubic feet of precipitation falls somewhere on the lakes every second.

Water and latitude determine what lives or dies in the basin. In the north, the central Canadian Shield forest of fir, spruce, pine, quaking aspen, and paper birch is so dense that you can barely walk through it. Ridges and spires of gneiss and granite rise above the canopy.

Move south and east, and sugar maple, yellow birch, white pine, and beech take over the land. All the way south, near the mouth of Lake Ontario, the Great Lakes–Saint Lawrence forest is mostly red maple and oak, with elm, cottonwood, and eastern white cedar at lower elevations.

You think about these things when you have nothing to do but stare for hours at an unimaginable mass of water. You think about the natural border that the lakes and the Saint Lawrence create and how it helped shape political boundaries. You think about the seasons, the intricacy of biospheres, water cycles, heat cycles, the planet’s orbit, and its wobbly spin that makes night and day.

Two wood ducks swam away from the bow. The ship missed them by ten feet.

*

Thousands of mayflies swarmed the smokestack. They came from the water as nymphs, rose to the surface, grew wings, and flew. They are ancient insects. Aristotle wrote about their incredibly brief life span. There are other prehistoric creatures around here. The oldest known footprints on the planet were discovered in a Kingston, Ontario, sandstone quarry a hundred miles upstream. Scientists say they were made by foot-long insects called euthycarcinoids 500 million years ago. They were among the first creatures to migrate from water to land. Before the discovery, the quarry owner used the fossils as lawn ornaments.

Isolation and boredom aren’t the only danger on the lakes, Ross said. He pointed to a chart on the wall and showed me locations of a few shipwrecks. Superior and Michigan are the most dangerous because they are the longest—giving storms enough fetch to create two-story waves. Fronts flowing west to east in the fall are particularly rough. The lakes sit in a lowland between the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians. Cold, dry air flows down from the north and meets warm, moist air coming up from the south. Add prevailing westerlies rolling off the Rockies and you get a vortex of constant and dangerously unstable weather. Winds can blow 40 to 50 miles an hour and whip up waves 25 feet tall, Captain Ross said.

The Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum in Paradise, Michigan, estimates that 6,000 ships and 30,000 lives have been lost on the lakes. The gale of November 11, 1835, sank 11 ships on Lake Erie alone. The Mataafa Storm of 1905 sank or damaged 29 freighters, killed 36 seamen, and caused $3.5 million in damages. Storm losses in 1868 and 1869 led to the first national weather-forecasting system in the US, initially managed by the US Army Signal Corps using telegraphs in Great Lakes port cities. The most famous wreck, the Edmund Fitzgerald, which sank in a November gale in 1975 with all 29 crew, went down a few hundred miles ahead on our route.

A few miles upstream, the river widened to five miles across. We passed Chippewa Bay and entered Thousand Islands, New York—summer home to millionaires for a century and a half. There are 1,864 islands along the 50-mile stretch. Most have mansions or sleek, modern houses on them. Many were retreats for business moguls and movie stars in the Gilded Age.

Back then, a short train ride from New York City to Clayton, New York, left visitors a few steps from a ferry or private launch that would take them to their house or hotel.

I stepped onto the wheelhouse deck to see Singer Castle. Sixty-foot stone walls and terra-cotta roof tiles glowed in the late-afternoon light. The water around Dark Island, which the castle sits on, was deep azure. Frederick Gilbert Bourne of the Singer Sewing Machine Company built the fortress. It is a medieval revival structure with 28 rooms, armored knights guarding a marble fireplace, a walnut-paneled library, and secret passageways from which hosts can spy on their guests. A few miles farther, on Heart Island, was another castle, built by George Boldt, proprietor of New York City’s original Waldorf Astoria. Boldt built it for his wife and had hearts inlaid in the masonry. When she died (or ran off with the chauffeur—stories conflict), construction stopped.

“It was interesting to watch people gazing at the ship. I wasn’t sure what solace it would give onlookers to know that the three men driving it were wearing Crocs and sweatshirts and laughing hysterically about their in-laws.”

Every island has a story. Thousand Island salad dressing was born when actress May Irwin tried it on a fishing trip there. Irwin shared the recipe with Boldt, who added it to the menu at the Waldorf. On a nearby island, a cabin burned down in 1865. In the ashes, a man was found with his throat slit and a knife stuck in his chest. It was allegedly John Payne, a hit man hired by John Wilkes Booth to kill Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state, William H. Seward. When Payne didn’t complete the job, and ran off with Booth’s money, Booth’s associates tracked him down.

A few houses on the North Shore looked like French châteaux with steep, peaked roofs and arched windows. Turreted homes and gingerbread-style cabins had replaced a 19th-century Methodist camp in Butternut Bay. Cattail marshes and lush reed beds edged the shoreline, and antique boats spanning a century circled the Equinox: split-cockpit runabouts, hard-chine sedan commuters, Nathanael Herreshoff steamers, sailboats, and Jet Skis.

The first mate pointed out an old steam-powered dory chugging toward shore as an SOS message was broadcast on the radio. A sailboat had lost power and was floating a few hundred yards dead ahead of the Equinox. Luckily, someone was close by to tow it home. I asked the mate how long it would take the Equinox to stop if something was in the way. “It doesn’t stop,” he said. “You should see this place at night. Or in the fog.”

Beneath the boathouses and million-dollar yachts, the Canadian Shield runs south across the Saint Lawrence and joins the Adirondacks. Twenty-five feet offshore, the water is 200 feet deep. Just behind the signal buoys, granite shoals are only two feet deep. Many of the islands here are perched on the edge of the seam. To be counted as part of the archipelago, an island has to have at least one square foot of land above water level year-round and support at least two living trees.

It was interesting to watch people gazing at the ship. I wasn’t sure what solace it would give onlookers to know that the three men driving it were wearing Crocs and sweatshirts and laughing hysterically about their in-laws. That is not to say the Equinox crew is not highly professional. They are. It’s just that enough time on the water makes people a little kooky.

We passed Wolfe Island and broke into a deep-blue plane. The shores fell away to port and starboard, and the Erie-Ontario lowlands on the southern shore of Lake Ontario appeared as a green streak. Behind us I could see the sweep of Tug Hill Plateau, which divides the Lake Ontario and Hudson River watersheds. Due west was flat calm—liquid silver etched by puffs of wind and three ducks skittering away from the Equinox’s wake.

It took ten minutes to walk from the wheelhouse to the bow of the ship. It felt more like a boat up there. Wake peeled away from the bow. The air smelled like pond water. The sun was a bonfire three fingers off the lake. An exact image of the sky stretched across the surface of the water, and the horizon arced with the curvature of the earth.

The first mate throttled up to 17 miles an hour, and the bow of the Equinox plowed forward. The hard part was over. Captain Ross went to bed, and Second Mate Charles Chouinard took the helm. The only sign of land was a smokestack miles away on the western shore. When Brûlé and Champlain first arrived, they would have seen only water. There is no reason they would have thought the lakes were not an ocean, until they tasted them. There was no reason they would have thought they could cross them either, or that there would be more lakes on the other side.

Some historians believe that Champlain and his truchement were not chasing a dream.

*

The elusive Northwest Passage they heard about from Indian tribes might have been a sixth Great Lake. Thousands of years ago, Lake Agassiz contained more water than all the other Great Lakes combined. It reached west and north of Lake Superior. When the ice dams holding it in place melted about 8,000 years ago, a cataclysmic flood raged through the Mississippi Valley, into Lake Superior and up the Mackenzie River to the Arctic Ocean. Scientists theorize that the magnitude of the flood was so great that it might have disrupted ocean currents, cooled the climate, helped spread agriculture west across Europe, and been the source of several flood narratives, like the one in the Bible.

Ancestors of western tribes lived around the shores of Agassiz before it drained, and they passed on stories of the flood through the generations. The Huron may well have drawn the lake on birchbark at Lachine Rapids, leading Champlain to assume it was still there. By the time Brûlé made it to Huron Country, there was nothing left of it. Today, the remains of Agassiz can be seen 400 miles northwest in Lake Winnipeg.

__________________________________

Good read found on the Lithub

[workfromhomeyoutuber]

SpinupWP: Laravel Developer

Headquarters: Remote URL: https://spinupwp.com/

Hi, my name is Brad Touesnard. I’m the founder of Delicious Brains Inc. We make high quality products for WordPress. 

The “we” is currently a small team of six developers, one designer, one marketer, and myself. I’m very proud to say that our little crew has been managing to delight thousands of customers for years. 

In addition to this position, I’m currently in the process of hiring a Developer Writer and a WordPress Developer with plans for more soon. We have big plans for 2020. Exciting times! 

The Job 

Back in November 2018, we launched a new SaaS product called SpinupWP (a modern cloud-based server control panel designed for WordPress). We launched out of beta in May last year and have been growing steadily ever since. We’ve helped thousands of customers spin up over 8,000 sites, perform over 62,000 site backups, and perform over 660,000 tasks! 

Currently, Gilbert and Ash work full-time on SpinupWP developing and maintaining the app as well as supporting all of our customers. Lewis, our in-house designer helps with all things design as well. 

I’m looking for a talented Laravel developer to join Gilbert and Ash to help build new features for SpinupWP as well as help out with support and documentation. 

The app is built using Laravel (PHP) and the front-end is built using Vue.js, so lots of experience with both frameworks and their associated tooling is essential. You’ll also be using Ansible to make sure SpinupWP provisions servers and creates and maintains sites using our LEMP stack (Nginx, PHP, MySQL, Redis, etc) so sysadmin experience of hosting sites/web apps is also essential. 

We currently work in eight-week cycles with a two-week cooldown period where you can work on whatever you want from the SpinupWP backlog. All of our code is committed to GitHub and your code will be reviewed by Gilbert or Ash using GitHub pull requests. You’ll also be reviewing Gilbert and Ash’s code. 

Responsibilities 

Help plan and define the scope of new features

Build new features using modern PHP (Laravel), JavaScript (Vue) and Ansible

Work on bug fixes and improvements during each cycle

Maintain and write new unit and acceptance tests

Write documentation and in-app copy

Support our customers via email

Write articles and tutorials for our blog

Attend company retreats (see details below)

Requirements

Expert PHP & JavaScript development skills

10,000+ hours (6+ years working full-time) of advanced PHP development

10,000+ hours of HTML & CSS development

10,000+ hours of advanced JavaScript development

8,000+ hours (5+ years working full-time) of project work with Laravel

5,000+ hours (3+ years working full-time) of project work with Vue.js

1,600+ hours (1+ years working full-time) of project work with git as source control

Sysadmin experience hosting sites/web apps on Nginx, PHP, MySQL, Redis

Experience writing automated tests

Excellent English communication skills (spoken and written)

Work hours in a North America time zone

Self-motivated and work well independently

Comfortable working remotely (we don’t have an office)

Nice-to-Have 

Experience with WordPress

Experience with Ansible

Experience building and using REST APIs

UX and design skills

Open source contributions

Computer Science degree or equivalent

About You 

You’re excited about the prospect of working on the full spectrum of tasks that are required to build a successful SaaS app. From backend and frontend development, sysadmin, design and UX to documentation and support. You don’t mind wearing multiple hats on any given day. 

You’re curious and love to learn. You embrace the opportunity to level up, learn something new and really dig into it. You’re a disciplined worker and have no trouble getting work done at home on any given day. 

You value consistency above preference and will adopt new coding styles, standards, and tools to that end. You are stellar at identifying the simple, elegant solution in a sea of over-engineering possibilities. 

Although you often need people to help you generate ideas and formulate a plan of attack on a project, you do your best work in isolation without interruption. You’re proactive in tackling things that need to be done without direction. 

You’re exceptional at communicating in writing via instant message, email, etc. You’re ok on the phone and video chat too. You understand that clear, concise written communication is how remote teams thrive. Putting a pull request up for review without explaining its context is unheard of for you. 

You own both successes and failures. When a project you’re leading turns into a disaster, you own it and you learn from it. You never point the finger at others. 

You invite criticism and genuinely want to grow as a professional. You’re onboard with pushing each other to be better and are not afraid to give constructive criticism in addition to receiving it. 

Perks 

Location Independent. Work from wherever you’re happiest, as long as you can make scheduled meetings.

Choose Your Schedule. Most companies claim to have flexible hours, but the reality is often very different. We flex our hours for real. 💪As long you’re hitting 30-37.5 hours per week on average and you do what you say you’ll do, we’re good.

Company Retreats. As a remote company, it’s super important to get some face time. Last year we met up in Berlin and we’re headed to Portugal in June. Will you be joining us?

Personal Development. If there’s a conference or event that will help you level up, the company will cover your expenses. You’re also allotted 3 hours per month to learn something new, participate in community discussions, and/or contribute to an open source project.

Profit Sharing. I present a Profit & Loss report to the team quarterly so everyone knows how the company is doing. And when the company does well, the team does well.

Company Holidays. Things get pretty quiet in late December / early January, so we always treat ourselves to a couple of weeks off to reboot during this time.

Paid Leave. For the birth or adoption of a child, the company offers 8 weeks of 100% paid leave for primary caregivers and 3 weeks for secondary caregivers. We also offer 5 paid sick days and 3 days of paid bereavement leave.

Competitive Salaries. The company pays salaries that are competitive with the market in which you reside. We don’t use the benefits of remote as leverage to negotiate lower salaries.

Apply 

Fill out the application form: https://deliciousbrains.com/laravel-developer-apply 

We are an equal opportunity employer. Application information that is prone to unconscious biases is hidden during the review process whenever possible. We judge the content of the applications on their own without knowledge of the applicant’s race, color, gender, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, physical or mental disability, or age. We support workplace diversity, but not at the expense of equal opportunity and meritocracy. We’re looking for talented and empathetic people no matter their other attributes. 

I look forward to reviewing your application. 

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[victoriagloverstuff]

Life on a Moving Skyscraper, Crossing the Great Lakes

The room was moving when I woke. The propeller’s rotation shook the toilet, chipboard closets, desk, bed, couch, doors. Lakers are less rigid than oceangoing freighters because they don’t have to withstand the same conditions. The 740-foot Algoma Equinox was built on the Yangtze River in China. Builders welded additional steel supports into it so that the ship wouldn’t break in half during the journey back to the Great Lakes. The supports have since been removed, Captain Ross said. You can see the hull bend when the Equinox hits a big wave.

Living on a moving skyscraper is a strange feeling. I had no idea where we were or what time it was most of the day. The ship’s interior is lit with fluorescent light and smells a bit like a hospital. The crew wanders in and out of the mess hall all day and usually eats silently.

Some of the men I sat next to I never saw again. The cook, Mike Newell, was a constant presence in the mess hall. He would come out while I was eating and talk for an hour or more. One day he told me a story about another writer who had ridden on the ship. Mike had spoken with him extensively as well, but the reporter hadn’t mentioned him in the piece he later published. “What is that?” he asked me. I said I didn’t know. “I’d like to find that guy,” he said, swatting the towel. “I’d like to show him a few things.” We stared at each other for a moment, then he walked back into the kitchen. He didn’t talk to me for two days after that.

The sky looked hazy blue from the wheelhouse, which stands 75 feet above the deck. A thick band of clouds blocked the sun. Mustard-yellow exhaust fell from the smokestack and hovered a few feet above the water. The deck was painted rust red, with white handles on cargo covers and bright-yellow safety instructions. Trees glided by at ten miles an hour. The ship crossed the border into Ontario last night, Captain Ross said. We were passing Cornwall Island when I walked into the wheelhouse. The border enters the Saint Lawrence River there and zigzags 200 miles to Lake Ontario.

The helmsman steered while Captain Ross told me stories about shipping on the lakes. He rarely looked away from the windshield when he spoke. If he needed to give a command, he spoke over whoever was talking. If an important announcement sounded on the radio, he tuned everything out and listened. When Tony called from the cruise room to say that the internet was down, Captain Ross hung up on him and gave another order: “Line up the buoys to starboard. Two degrees port. No. Two more.”

*

Captain Ross had spent the last 33 years on freighters. He was 60 years old, with receding sandy-brown hair and a graying goatee. He squinted constantly. Crow’s feet reached to his sideburns, and his stocky build easily filled his T-shirt. In Algoma company photos, he dons a navy-blue reefer jacket and a captain’s hat. In the wheelhouse, he wore jeans, a polo shirt, and sandals.

Ross was 27 years old when his father, a lifetime Great Lakes captain, called him from Quebec City and asked if he wanted to be a deckhand. It was December 2nd and he was working as a data entry clerk for the Hudson’s Bay Company—the same company that was formed by a royal charter in 1670 and that now operates a chain of department stores with Lord & Taylor and Saks Fifth Avenue. He was married and had a newborn son. His father said the money was good, so Ross packed his things and moved onto the 600-foot George M. Carl.

He watched his father break up a knife fight his first day on the canaller and spent the next two weeks scraping and painting the bridge, cleaning and prepping cargo holds, and tending mooring cables. Captain Ross’s father had been at sea for half of his childhood, and Ross had never considered being a sailor. After he got his check for two weeks’ work—$700—he told his wife he was joining the fleet full-time.

It took Ross just four years to work his way up from deckhand to wheelsman to mate to captain. He attended marine school winter sessions, when the seaway is closed, then logged required ship hours during the warm months. In 1986 he captained his first boat, John A. France, out of port. “The first time you’re out there on your own, you realize there is nobody else to ask what to do,” he said. “My second and first mate were 60 and I was 30, and they were calling me ‘Old Man.’”

The first trip went without incident. The next 30 freighters he captained were not as easy. Gangs operated on the ships, and many of the deckhands were ex-cons who couldn’t get work elsewhere. The industry needed men so badly that if Captain Ross fired someone one day, he saw him on a competitor’s ship the next. Ross watched men get crushed by machines, mooring cables, and cargo hatches. He went looking for mates when they were late for a shift, only to find out that they had thrown themselves off the stern in the middle of the night.

“The Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum in Paradise, Michigan, estimates that 6,000 ships and 30,000 lives have been lost on the lakes.”

Regulations were looser back then. The crew made swimming pools by spreading tarps between cargo hatches during lake crossings and drank beer poolside all afternoon. They gambled and partied deep into the night and, sometimes, while waiting to get into a lock, they jumped overboard to cool off. “All we had was one TV in the cruise room,” he said. “Going past Cleveland we could see an hour of a baseball game until we lost reception. Everyone congregated then; no one stayed in their cabin. We’d have 30 people in the galley playing cribbage, guitar, and cards. It made for a tighter-knit crew.”

*

The 300-square-mile Great Lakes basin spans about a quarter of America’s northland. The coastlines of all five lakes combined add up to just under 11,000 miles, almost half the distance around the world. An average of 200,000 cubic feet of precipitation falls somewhere on the lakes every second.

Water and latitude determine what lives or dies in the basin. In the north, the central Canadian Shield forest of fir, spruce, pine, quaking aspen, and paper birch is so dense that you can barely walk through it. Ridges and spires of gneiss and granite rise above the canopy.

Move south and east, and sugar maple, yellow birch, white pine, and beech take over the land. All the way south, near the mouth of Lake Ontario, the Great Lakes–Saint Lawrence forest is mostly red maple and oak, with elm, cottonwood, and eastern white cedar at lower elevations.

You think about these things when you have nothing to do but stare for hours at an unimaginable mass of water. You think about the natural border that the lakes and the Saint Lawrence create and how it helped shape political boundaries. You think about the seasons, the intricacy of biospheres, water cycles, heat cycles, the planet’s orbit, and its wobbly spin that makes night and day.

Two wood ducks swam away from the bow. The ship missed them by ten feet.

*

Thousands of mayflies swarmed the smokestack. They came from the water as nymphs, rose to the surface, grew wings, and flew. They are ancient insects. Aristotle wrote about their incredibly brief life span. There are other prehistoric creatures around here. The oldest known footprints on the planet were discovered in a Kingston, Ontario, sandstone quarry a hundred miles upstream. Scientists say they were made by foot-long insects called euthycarcinoids 500 million years ago. They were among the first creatures to migrate from water to land. Before the discovery, the quarry owner used the fossils as lawn ornaments.

Isolation and boredom aren’t the only danger on the lakes, Ross said. He pointed to a chart on the wall and showed me locations of a few shipwrecks. Superior and Michigan are the most dangerous because they are the longest—giving storms enough fetch to create two-story waves. Fronts flowing west to east in the fall are particularly rough. The lakes sit in a lowland between the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians. Cold, dry air flows down from the north and meets warm, moist air coming up from the south. Add prevailing westerlies rolling off the Rockies and you get a vortex of constant and dangerously unstable weather. Winds can blow 40 to 50 miles an hour and whip up waves 25 feet tall, Captain Ross said.

The Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum in Paradise, Michigan, estimates that 6,000 ships and 30,000 lives have been lost on the lakes. The gale of November 11, 1835, sank 11 ships on Lake Erie alone. The Mataafa Storm of 1905 sank or damaged 29 freighters, killed 36 seamen, and caused $3.5 million in damages. Storm losses in 1868 and 1869 led to the first national weather-forecasting system in the US, initially managed by the US Army Signal Corps using telegraphs in Great Lakes port cities. The most famous wreck, the Edmund Fitzgerald, which sank in a November gale in 1975 with all 29 crew, went down a few hundred miles ahead on our route.

A few miles upstream, the river widened to five miles across. We passed Chippewa Bay and entered Thousand Islands, New York—summer home to millionaires for a century and a half. There are 1,864 islands along the 50-mile stretch. Most have mansions or sleek, modern houses on them. Many were retreats for business moguls and movie stars in the Gilded Age.

Back then, a short train ride from New York City to Clayton, New York, left visitors a few steps from a ferry or private launch that would take them to their house or hotel.

I stepped onto the wheelhouse deck to see Singer Castle. Sixty-foot stone walls and terra-cotta roof tiles glowed in the late-afternoon light. The water around Dark Island, which the castle sits on, was deep azure. Frederick Gilbert Bourne of the Singer Sewing Machine Company built the fortress. It is a medieval revival structure with 28 rooms, armored knights guarding a marble fireplace, a walnut-paneled library, and secret passageways from which hosts can spy on their guests. A few miles farther, on Heart Island, was another castle, built by George Boldt, proprietor of New York City’s original Waldorf Astoria. Boldt built it for his wife and had hearts inlaid in the masonry. When she died (or ran off with the chauffeur—stories conflict), construction stopped.

“It was interesting to watch people gazing at the ship. I wasn’t sure what solace it would give onlookers to know that the three men driving it were wearing Crocs and sweatshirts and laughing hysterically about their in-laws.”

Every island has a story. Thousand Island salad dressing was born when actress May Irwin tried it on a fishing trip there. Irwin shared the recipe with Boldt, who added it to the menu at the Waldorf. On a nearby island, a cabin burned down in 1865. In the ashes, a man was found with his throat slit and a knife stuck in his chest. It was allegedly John Payne, a hit man hired by John Wilkes Booth to kill Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state, William H. Seward. When Payne didn’t complete the job, and ran off with Booth’s money, Booth’s associates tracked him down.

A few houses on the North Shore looked like French châteaux with steep, peaked roofs and arched windows. Turreted homes and gingerbread-style cabins had replaced a 19th-century Methodist camp in Butternut Bay. Cattail marshes and lush reed beds edged the shoreline, and antique boats spanning a century circled the Equinox: split-cockpit runabouts, hard-chine sedan commuters, Nathanael Herreshoff steamers, sailboats, and Jet Skis.

The first mate pointed out an old steam-powered dory chugging toward shore as an SOS message was broadcast on the radio. A sailboat had lost power and was floating a few hundred yards dead ahead of the Equinox. Luckily, someone was close by to tow it home. I asked the mate how long it would take the Equinox to stop if something was in the way. “It doesn’t stop,” he said. “You should see this place at night. Or in the fog.”

Beneath the boathouses and million-dollar yachts, the Canadian Shield runs south across the Saint Lawrence and joins the Adirondacks. Twenty-five feet offshore, the water is 200 feet deep. Just behind the signal buoys, granite shoals are only two feet deep. Many of the islands here are perched on the edge of the seam. To be counted as part of the archipelago, an island has to have at least one square foot of land above water level year-round and support at least two living trees.

It was interesting to watch people gazing at the ship. I wasn’t sure what solace it would give onlookers to know that the three men driving it were wearing Crocs and sweatshirts and laughing hysterically about their in-laws. That is not to say the Equinox crew is not highly professional. They are. It’s just that enough time on the water makes people a little kooky.

We passed Wolfe Island and broke into a deep-blue plane. The shores fell away to port and starboard, and the Erie-Ontario lowlands on the southern shore of Lake Ontario appeared as a green streak. Behind us I could see the sweep of Tug Hill Plateau, which divides the Lake Ontario and Hudson River watersheds. Due west was flat calm—liquid silver etched by puffs of wind and three ducks skittering away from the Equinox’s wake.

It took ten minutes to walk from the wheelhouse to the bow of the ship. It felt more like a boat up there. Wake peeled away from the bow. The air smelled like pond water. The sun was a bonfire three fingers off the lake. An exact image of the sky stretched across the surface of the water, and the horizon arced with the curvature of the earth.

The first mate throttled up to 17 miles an hour, and the bow of the Equinox plowed forward. The hard part was over. Captain Ross went to bed, and Second Mate Charles Chouinard took the helm. The only sign of land was a smokestack miles away on the western shore. When Brûlé and Champlain first arrived, they would have seen only water. There is no reason they would have thought the lakes were not an ocean, until they tasted them. There was no reason they would have thought they could cross them either, or that there would be more lakes on the other side.

Some historians believe that Champlain and his truchement were not chasing a dream.

*

The elusive Northwest Passage they heard about from Indian tribes might have been a sixth Great Lake. Thousands of years ago, Lake Agassiz contained more water than all the other Great Lakes combined. It reached west and north of Lake Superior. When the ice dams holding it in place melted about 8,000 years ago, a cataclysmic flood raged through the Mississippi Valley, into Lake Superior and up the Mackenzie River to the Arctic Ocean. Scientists theorize that the magnitude of the flood was so great that it might have disrupted ocean currents, cooled the climate, helped spread agriculture west across Europe, and been the source of several flood narratives, like the one in the Bible.

Ancestors of western tribes lived around the shores of Agassiz before it drained, and they passed on stories of the flood through the generations. The Huron may well have drawn the lake on birchbark at Lachine Rapids, leading Champlain to assume it was still there. By the time Brûlé made it to Huron Country, there was nothing left of it. Today, the remains of Agassiz can be seen 400 miles northwest in Lake Winnipeg.

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